brains and vomit as well.
Ann showered and I washed up in the bathroom sink, feeling like Lady Macbeth struggling with her damn spot, even though there wasn’t a drop of blood on me.
Death in reality certainly wasn’t like television death.
It was nasty and it smelled and it clung to you like a bad disease.
Self-defense or not, I didn’t feel like Dirty Harry. I just felt bad, worse than I had ever felt in my life.
“Let’s go to bed,” Ann said. She was stepping out of the shower and she looked good. Thirty-five years had been kind to her. Her breasts sagged a little maybe, but the rest of her was nice and the breasts were nothing to run me off. She was my woman and I loved her, and I knew she was offering herself to me. I could tell by the way she moved as she pulled the shower cap off and let her long blond hair fall like a shower of light onto her shoulders, by the slightly exaggerated stretches and the way she slid the towel slowly up her long legs and moved it seductively over her damp pubic hair.
She smiled at me. “We can snuggle, you know?”
“I’m not really sleepy,” I said stupidly.
“So, we can snuggle a lot. Sleep later.”
“We can try that,” I said. “Go ahead, and I’ll be to bed in a moment. Got a few things to do yet.”
She finished drying, stepped into her panties, extending her legs through them nicely. It was almost enough to excite me, even after what had happened earlier. Almost.
She put on her robe, kissed me on the cheek and went out of there with her soft soap scent lingering in the air.
I took a leak, showered, and brushed my teeth. I put on my robe, went through the house testing locks on the doors leading outside. They were all fine except for the jimmied door, of course. I checked the windows too, and when I was finished in Jordan’s room, I stopped by his bed and put his teddy bear back under the covers and tucked them around him. I felt like dragging up a chair and watching him sleep, but I went out to the garage and got some wire and pliers and rigged a sort of latch on the door Freddy Russel had broken.
Then I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk. The house felt strange to me, like it wasn’t mine anymore. It was no longer sanctuary. It had been invaded. I felt like a rape victim. Violated. Our house was no longer private, full of our spirits, thoughts, even our arguments. It was nothing more than a thing of glass, wood and brick that any thug with a crowbar or a screwdriver could bust open.
The milk tasted like chalk and rested mercury-heavy in my stomach. I poured the rest down the drain and went to bed.
Ann was asleep, and I was grateful for that. I had feared she would insist on a mercy fuck; sexual first aid. She worked that way sometimes, and I hated it. She meant well by it, but that didn’t make me like it. Tonight I would have despised it, no matter how much I loved her or how enticing she might be.
I lay there looking at the ceiling, listening to Ann breathe. My stomach kept churning the milk around and around, and an instant replay of what had happened earlier was whirling endlessly through my head: swirls of shadow and muffled sounds, a flashlight, revolver steel, the wind from a bullet against my ear, the report of my own gun, the lights going on, the empty eye socket, blood and brains on the landscape painting and the very wall on which we taped our yearly Christmas cards.
It wasn’t until daylight that I felt like sleeping.
4
I could have slept in, but I didn’t. I got up, dressed for work and went into the kitchen to sit at the table with Ann and Jordan.
Jordan was playing with his food, as usual. Seldom did a morning pass without some sort of fight between me and the boy, or between the boy and his mother. Something to do with the way he ate, or playing at the table. The kid couldn’t get out of the house until he had spilled his milk. It was like a morning ritual that had to be observed.
And there were thousands of little things he did that made me climb the wall, and it was the same for Ann. She and I went through each day joyful for him and mad as hell at him, trying to figure if we were overly demanding of a four-year-old, or if he was a real life Dennis the Menace. Or worse, some sort of criminal in the making, created by us, seasoned by our impatience and anger, tempered by his genetics, having acquired all the things we hated about ourselves, and none of the things we prized.
I thought too, each night as I went to bed, that no matter how hard I tried, it wasn’t good enough. I never missed a day yelling at the little guy, or losing my temper in some way, and I certainly told him no more often than yes. Though I tried to listen to him describing what the Pink Panther and Woody Woodpecker and the Pokey Puppy did, there were times when his little voice was like chalk on a blackboard and I would tune out his enthusiasms, and I knew he could sense it.
Then too, there was the other child, the one I thought about more often than I ever expected. The one Ann had carried inside her for eight and a half months and I had felt move inside her and had heard gurgling around in there when I put my ear to her stomach. The same child that filled her with poison and sent her to the hospital for days and prompted the late-night phone call in which she told me, “Our baby is dead,” and then began to cry.
They used drugs to make her deliver, then offered us the body. A little girl. They said if we didn’t want her they would autopsy the body for research and dispose of it. Later, I found out if we had asked for her they would have handed her to us in a black garbage bag.
At times I thought we should have at least looked at her. Maybe given her a name and had her buried. Other times I felt we had done the right thing. But right or wrong, the face of the child I never saw came to me in my dreams; a cold, gray face with its eyes open, and the eyes were like Ann’s, bright, bright green. And I would awake. Sweating.
Sometimes I would drive by the hospital and see dark clouds, hanging over it, clouds that seemed full of storm. But I would know that it was smoke from the black incinerators out back; incinerators where placentas and lab experiments were disposed. And I wondered if my unnamed child had gone there after autopsy. Just so much ruined meat in a black garbage bag, cooked to past done, transformed to soot that would cling to the hospital roof and outside walls.
And when I dreamed or thought these things, I would always think of Jordan and wonder how he put up with my inadequacies as a father. Times like that, I felt like a bad actor masquerading as a parent in a school play.
I determined that this morning I would let nothing he did irritate me. It was the millionth time I had turned over that leaf in my mind. Each time I had failed to live up to it, but like some sort of Zen exercise, I thought repetition might make it easier for me eventually. And after what had happened last night, I saw the world in an entirely new and vulnerable light. It was just good to see the boy sitting there with his cereal, and as always, I took a secret pride in seeing my features on his little face. His hair was blond like his mother’s, but the almond shape of his eyes, the prominence of the lips, the cleft in his chin, were mine.
Looking at him now, I hop Kim e froed I was more of a presence in his life than my father had been in mine, and I hoped I wouldn’t haunt him the way my father haunted me. That when it was all said and done he would have more than some uncertain memories and that there would be more between us than Christmas cards from distant cities with “love” written at the bottom.
I leaned out of my chair, kissed and hugged the boy. “Good morning, big guy.”
“What was all that racket about last night, Daddy?” Racket was his new word. He used it every chance he got.
“Some people we had over.”
“Why?”
“We needed them.”
“Why?”
“Just for some things.”
“What things?”
“Nothing much. You like that cereal?”
