Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories Page 14

I don’t refer to my grandson’s death. It has only been one day since he toddled away from his mother and some damned drunken wagon-master crushed him in the road. It has only been one day since I saw his chest staved in, his little body opened by a scarlet groove where his ribs should have been. It is only one day since I heard Faith scream when she saw him, one day since I had to look into the eyes that had been laughing, just earlier that morning, now burst cherries in a darling face.

  All of that was terrible and all of that was like having all the joy torn from the world, but that is not what tears the ribbon of my life in twain and poisons everything that came after and came before. It cannot be. I have lived a long time. I have had people I love die before; parents, friends, and once before all that the baby sister I had to go along with my brothers, who drowned at seven and left a hole I still feel after a life of never mentioning her name. I know that life is what you live in between watching the people you care about die, and though it breaks my heart it is not the dagger that cuts my life in half and makes all our lives a lie.

  That happens later in the evening, when we are all gathered at Job’s home, offering what shallow comfort we can. Leah sits on the floor, her eyes staring, her hands shaking, her rider once again assuming the self-hating aspect it possessed when first we met. Faith sits by her side, whispering one empty reassurance after another. Miriam stays close to me, stunned by her first encounter with death in all its fullness. Noah and Eben stand silently by the wall, their hands folded before them, their shaggy heads turned toward a floor that fails to offer any clues as to what they can do to make the tragedy bearable, if not better. Job answers the many knocks at the door and accepts the condolences of neighbors who have heard about the tragedy and want us to know how sorry they are, kindly ushering away those who want to come in long after a lesser bereaved father might have gone mad.

  At one point I recognize the visitor at the door as one of Kenneth’s sons, a brute who I’ve always believed to have participated in Job’s beating, and though he comes hat in hand and delivers his condolences in the tone of a man who dearly wishes he could be anywhere else, I feel the fury rise in me and almost race to the door to lash him with all the hatred of a father and grandfather irate that this pig still breathes while Isaac waits at the gravedigger’s house for his new home beneath dirt. But Job takes his old tormentor by the hand and thanks him, with a sincerity that shames me, as so many of the examples he’s set have shamed me.

  The worst begins not long after that, as Leah starts talking about her fallen baby boy, the way he ran and played, the golden way he laughed. The memories wound her so much she starts to sob again. Job rushes to embrace her, to tell her that Isaac is not truly gone and all that nonsense. Faith holds her hand and murmurs sweet lies of her own, and all this might help, but I cannot tell, because we’re entering the worst of it, that horrid point in the shattering grief of the bereaved mother that only comes after the immediate shock of the tragedy passes and she finds herself seeing for the very first that this is now her world, the only world she’ll have.

  And there’s no way to get past this moment except by living it, and in another few seconds we might be able to, but my other son Paul, who at twelve is more than old enough to know better but who has been simmering throughout all of this with the impatience known only to those who need every moment to be about themselves, incredibly chooses this of all possible moments, this one, to start tugging Faith’s sleeve and start whining that he’s bored, that he’s hungry, that he wants to go home . . .

  Job curses him and shoves him away.

  It’s a light shove, even if it does leave Paul sitting on his rear end with a comical look on his face. It would be forgiven from any bereaved father, seeking a moment’s respite from a brother half his age who has never been anything but entitled brat. But from Job, who has never in his entire life lost his patience, it hits with the impact of a thunderclap.

  All sound in the room ceases.

  Job’s lips move without making sound. He peers down at Paul and then at Faith and then at me, and each time he bears the look of any man caught in a monstrous lie. For the very first time I am able to see beyond his placid and compassionate eyes to an infinite and stormy place beneath. His face contorts with what might be shame and might be rage, though it’s impossible to tell because he has never betrayed either.

  The shock is so great that it cuts through even Leah’s bottomless grief. She blinks up at him and says, Job?

  He flees past my gaping brothers and barrels out into the night. Noah and Eben make to go after him, but their hesitation allows me to beat them to the door, where I assert my responsibility as father. Eben relents, muttering about this being the first time he could be sure the boy was even human. I glare at him and he looks away, before I depart.

  It is not long before I find my son, kneeling in the meadow with his forehead pressed against a bare patch of dirt. He shakes and sobs as he pounds his fists against the ground. I can only approach and kneel beside him, allowing him to wail, thinking of how I might have acted if a catastrophe just as stupid had taken him, or Faith, or Paul, or Miriam. After a few seconds I say, “Come on, son. You need to be better than this.”

  Without looking up at me he murmurs, “Why?”

  “Because this isn’t you. Because your wife and your mother expect you to be strong . . . and when you’re not, it scares them.” I hesitate. “And me.”

  The sound that bubbles up from the ground strikes me first as chuckle and then as sob, and then as some terrible mixture of the two, celebrating and mourning all at the same time. He claws furrows in the ground with his fingers and mutters something I cannot hear, something followed by the long seconds of weeping and then by the same words, repeated in a voice as empty as the shell he must feel he’s become. “This is me, father. This has always been me. You just never really knew who I was.”

  I pull him upright and face him. “Yes, I did.”

  This, again, seems to strike him as hilarious. He giggles and weeps, the tears pouring from him in waves. “I thought I could be a good man. I thought I could live the life of a good son, a good husband, a good father. I thought I could do it and that nobody I loved would ever be hurt.”

  “It’s not your fault. These things happen.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know it, Job. You’re the best man I’ve ever known.”

  “Oh, Father.” He bows his head and lays his fists against my chest, pounding me with a frustration that, even now, he keeps in check. “I keep telling you. I’m no man at all.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, son. That’s just the likes of Kenneth talking—”

  He chokes on his snot and tears. “No, it’s true. I’m no man. I’ve sinned more than any true man could, every second of every day you’ve known me. I sinned by being liar and murderer and thief all at the same time, taking everything that belonged and ever would belong to another. Isaac’s death is just one of my punishments . . . and I’m afraid, so afraid, that the way you’ll look at me from now on is another.”

  I have no idea what he’s going on about, not right away, but my incomprehension shatters him further, and he falls back to hands and knees, clawing at the ground as if hoping to dig himself a home there. Knowing only that whatever’s bothering him, however foolish, is as real to him as Isaac’s death, I draw closer and wrap my arms around his back, lending him the strength that is all I have to offer.

  It is while I am doing this that the little creature on his back turns its little infant head to face me. Though it has made its own soul known once or twice in its many years among us, it has up until now always been the placid embodiment of innocence, the one quality we all remember from childhood that we all lose as we make the foul compromises required by life.

  But now, in the instant before it opens its eyes, it occurs to me that innocence is not always a measurement of virtue. It can also be the domain of fetuses or infants, those who have not yet known life, or ever been per
mitted it.

  The thing clinging to Job’s back opens its eyes and looks at me. I see through those eyes into a soul that should not be rider, but man: a soul trapped there by another, that now wakens after a lifetime of sleep.

  For the very first time, I know the true face of my eldest son . . . and understand what that makes Job.

  The Shallow End of the Pool

  I don’t know which one of us woke up first. I do know that when the light changed, illuminating a sky that the wire above us sectioned into little diamonds, I was curled like a wounded ball by the concrete steps, my skull pounding from the beating I’d taken, my arms numb from lack of circulation and my jaw aching like a dead thing attached to my skull with six-inch nails.

  You would have expected us to have collapsed in opposite corners, in the traditional manner of the gladiators we were, but when I opened my eyes I saw that we’d slept only a few feet apart. His eyes were already open, and though it was hard to tell, he seemed to be smiling.

  My Mom the Bitch lived in a desert fortress.

  At least that’s what my father had always told me, sometimes whispering the words, sometimes slurring them, sometimes growing so tired with the same old stories that he spoke in a monotone, making the words sound like a prayer from a faith he could no longer believe.

  She’d nursed me when I was born. But things had already gotten bad between my parents by then, so bad that after less than another full year of trying they split the kids between them. She took my twin brother Ethan, and Daddy took me, raising me to remember her as the Psycho Bitch she was.

  I didn’t lay eyes on her again until the summer of the year I turned sixteen.

  On that sweltering day in August my father and I flew to Vegas, rented a car, and drove four hours into the desert to a place where the local roads almost disappeared under the windswept sands. There we took an almost invisible turnoff, and navigated another forty minutes along an abandoned road to the skeleton of a sign that had, once upon a time, decades ago, advertised roadside cabins.

  The resort had never been prosperous. It was just a place for travelers on a budget to rest their heads for the night. Now, it was a wreck, hidden behind a natural outcropping of stacked boulders that God had arranged to look like praying hands. Once, the rocks had protected the guests from road noise. These days the barrier hid the blackened skeleton of the main office, the three cabins still standing out of the original eight, a swimming pool that hadn’t seen water in years, and the mobile home where the Bitch lived with Ethan. I don’t know if the cabins were still officially owned by anybody, nor do I have any idea how the Bitch had ever managed to find such an isolated place to live.

  We pulled up in a cloud of dust to find the Bitch on the mobile home steps, smoking a cigarette, dressed in faded jeans with torn knees, and a sleeveless white t-shirt. She’d aged since the last photograph I’d seen, which dated back to some months after my birth. She’d been young and pretty in that one. But her skin had leathered and her hair, once a shiny brown, had gone gray and stringy, with a long white lock that crossed her face in the shape of a question mark. When she grimaced at our arrival, she revealed a front tooth missing among others yellowed from tobacco and time.

  Leaving the rental’s A/C was a shock. The outside temperature had been edging into the high nineties in Vegas, but here it was more like a hundred, in air that seemed more dust than oxygen.

  Daddy said, “Hug your mother.”

  I crossed the seventeen steps between myself and the stranger on the mobile home steps. She put her arms around me and called me honey, even as her fingers probed my back, testing the bunched muscles there for any signs of flab. “My God, Jen. I remember when you were just a baby.”

  I cut the hug short. “I’m not a baby any more, Mom.”

  “No. You’re not.” She squeezed my upper arm, testing its solidity with strength I would not have expected from her. “She’s an Amazon, Joe. Better than her pictures.”

  And that was just hateful mockery, because I knew what an Amazon was, and what one wasn’t. An Amazon is tall: I was still three inches shorter than Daddy. An Amazon hacks off her right breast: I still had both of mine, and I daily cursed the hormones that had built them into a pair of fleshy curves softer by far than my bulging arms, my corded shoulders, and my granite abs. I was strong, and I was compact, I’d used diet and exercise to reduce those unwanted tits to the smallest size the genetic roll of the dice would allow, but I was still only a girl, the Amazon status we’d strived for a goal that would forever remain beyond my reach.

  Daddy must have been thinking the same thing. “Where’s the boy?”

  The Bitch raised the cigarette to her lips and took a drag so deep the paper sizzled. “Inside.”

  “Call him out.”

  The Bitch took another long, slow drag of her cigarette, just to demonstrate that she wouldn’t be hurried by the likes of us. “Ethan! Your father’s here!”

  Ethan emerged from the mobile home, screen door slamming.

  In all my life I’d seen less than thirty photographs of my brother. They were what Daddy gave me instead of birthday or Christmas presents. As per the agreement that had governed the relationship between parents since the day of their dissolution, the two of them provided each other with such updates twice a year, just to keep each side apprised of just how the other was developing. Our basement dojo has a wall, tracking Ethan’s metamorphosis from the chubby-cheeked toddler he was when last we saw each other, to the thick-jawed, iron-necked bruiser he was now. Watching that chest fill out, those arms swell, those muscles layer upon muscles, and those eyes grow dark as coals, in what amounted to time-lapse photography of a monster sprouting from a seed, had spurred me on more than any number of Daddy’s lectures or rewards or punishments. Nothing communicated the urgency of hard training more than those pictures. Nothing made my own situation look more and more hopeless, for while Ethan and I were twins, the nasty combination of gender and genetics had provided him with a body much more hospitable to muscular development than mine. His last measurements, sent with glee six months ago, had already declared him a foot taller and some fifty pounds heavier than myself, with less than one percent body fat.

  He was even bigger now. The last six months had provided him with another growth spurt. He was stripped to the shorts, by design I think, his hairless pectorals gleaming with the sheen left by his latest workout. His face, tanned to near blackness by the brutal desert sun, was so dark that the unpleasant white glow of his teeth stood out like a searchlight at the bottom of a deep well. His greasy shoulder-length black hair completed any resemblance he might have had to Tarzan. Next to him, the Bitch was a wisp in danger of being blown away by the next strong wind. He dwarfed her, and dwarfed me.

  If my father had raised an Amazon (a label I rejected), then the Bitch, with her exacting cruelty, had raised a Greek God.

  There were flaws. The enlarged jaw and forehead testified to the hormonal imbalance inflicted by steroid abuse. I had a touch of that myself, and had endured taunts about my face in most of the schools I’d briefly attended. Like mine, his chest was lined with hairline scars from training accidents and, I think, punishments. Unlike me, he was so very muscle-bound that his flexibility had suffered. He moved with the clumsy deliberation of a stop-motion dinosaur in a fifties monster flick. I moved better than that. And, like the Bitch, he couldn’t really smile, at least not at us: the closest he could manage was an uneasy grimace.

  “Hello,” I said.

  His voice was thick, his consonants guttural. “Hello.”

  Once upon a time, we had drifted together in the same womb, knowing nothing of the venom being passed between those who had brought us into this life.

  The Bitch said, “Hug your father.”

  My behemoth of a brother turned the head on his massive tree-trunk neck, and narrowed his eyes as he took in the figure of the man whose seed had provided half of him. Hatred burned in those eyes. He took two steps and enveloped
Daddy in an embrace so tight that I half-expected to hear the crunch of shattering vertebrae. Unlike the Bitch, who had made a big show of hugging me back, Daddy just let his arms hang motionless at his sides. It was a brief hug. After a second or two my brother stepped back, his social obligations fulfilled.

  Daddy said nothing.

  The Bitch’s eyes glittered. “Aren’t you going to say I’ve done well?”

  “I don’t have to say it. I can see it.”

  “Then aren’t you going to say I should be proud?”

  “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”

  “Bastard.” Her eyes turned to me: “I’m sure the two of you have a lot to talk about, after all these years. You can spend some time together this afternoon, if you’d like. Your father and I will need the rest of the day to finish work on the pool.”

  Daddy could not have been happy about this development, as private time between my brother and me had never been part of the family agenda. But the state of war between my parents had not gotten to where it was by either showing fear in the face of a challenge. “I have no problem with that. She’ll need a few minutes to get ready, but after that, they can have the rest of the day if they want.”

  I coughed. “No.”

  Her head swiveled. “What?”

  “This is just stupid. What are we fucking supposed to do, become friends now? That’s just psychological warfare. I want to get this bullshit over with.”

  Ethan’s eyes glittered, but not with the anger I might have expected. “You sure? There’s plenty of time for that.”

  Daddy said, “I suppose we could use your help setting up.”

  I said, “There’s that, too.”

  My mother and father let out a shared sigh.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Ethan.

  Damned if our parents didn’t look a little regretful too.

  “All right,” Daddy said. “Give us about half an hour to get settled and take stock, and we’ll meet on the patio.”