Coach reins them in a little and they go out and do the job. For Sam, it’s the only time he’s able to forget about everything else.
In the locker room after the game, he gropes his T-shirt onehanded from his locker shelf. A scrap of paper floats from the shirt. The bit of paper seems to rise toward his hand as he reaches for it. It’s a homemade stamp, a flimsy little rectangle of paper the size of his thumbnail, with all the substance of rice paper. The words on it are drawn in balloon style: EAT ME. When he looks up, everything is normal—the locker room smells and sounds and feels like a locker room and his teammates are doing exactly what they should be doing. No one is watching his reaction to the note. Casually, he makes his way to the toilets, goes into a stall and flushes the square.
A dumb animal misery glazes her eye as she looks out of it at him and there is a weary tension in the way she raises her head when he crouches next to her and touches the corner of her mouth in greeting. During the day she has gotten cleaned up. In her own threadbare flannel pajamas, she smells of body-warmed almond oil and the fever of drugged sleep.
“How you doing?”
“Sucky.”
It’s difficult for her to speak, with the swollen tissue stiffened up. The way she sounds makes Sam think of trying to hold a conversation with the dentist while numbed with novocaine and with various arcane dental devices hooked over a lip or stuffed between cheek and gums.
“We won. Girls and boys.”
Smiling slightly, she relaxes against the pillows. “Good.”
“Pearl and Dad take good care of you?”
“Smell the oil? She gave me a bath. Rubbed me all over with it. Changed the—” She touches her dressing.
“Had your dope for the night?”
She nods.
He tucks her up and kisses her forehead and she turns onto her good side with a long sigh.
His mind wobbles wearily around the rim of sleep but refuses to drop through. After a long time of waiting, he hears Indy stir. She begins to talk earnestly to herself and then to whimper. The swish of Pearl’s robe and the pad of her bare feet hurry past his door.
He peeks into the nursery. Wide-eyed, Indy stares at him over Pearl’s shoulder. Her fist is crammed into her mouth. A floorboard creaks under his foot, bringing Pearl spinning around to face him. “Sammy!”
He rakes his hair back. “She okay?”
“It’s just her teeth, sugar. Go back to bed.” Instead he goes to the head of the stairs to listen for Deanie and hears a low, troubled cough. He finds her sitting up on the daybed, rubbing her good eye, reaching for her pills. Taking the plastic pill vial from her, he undoes the recalcitrant cap. “Brat wake you up?” she asks.
“No. She’s teething; she can’t help it.”
“I’m cold.” She lifts the edge of her quilts.
He slips in beside her and she tucks herself inside his arm, legs twined with his. He closes his eyes and visualizes the slow roll of the ball around the rim. This time, after several revolutions, it falls in softly.
30
Ice brocade scales the windowglass under the rough weave of the curtains. On the exposed skin of Sam’s face and neck there is a sensation of cold as if the frigid breath of an ice dragon is just beyond the glass.
He creeps away upstairs, through the threadbare dimness of predawn, to his own bed, where he stretches out because he can. The coolness of the sheets is unexpectedly pleasurable. It produces goosebumps and raised body hair. The chains around his neck feel like they are part of this same generalized reaction. Rolling onto his stomach, he masturbates slowly, no hands, stopping and starting, until he is in a kind of trance and coming is the dreamy jolt of a nocturnal emission. Very soon—while he is still drifting—he hears the bathroom door close firmly behind his father and he rolls over to turn off the clock-radio alarm before it can go off.
A quarter of an hour later, he crouches next to Deanie on the sunporch daybed. She lies on her side, knees tucked up, hugging herself for the extra warmth. The bruising that closed her left eye so it looked like an overripe black plum has a slit in it now, with a little bit of dark eye peeking out. Her right eyelid flutters and she licks her lips sleepily. A smile softens the exposed half of her face.
She has only the one pair of pajamas. From the clean laundry in the basket, he brings her Pearl’s longjohns. In her boy’s bathrobe and his socks for slippers, she may not be chic but at least she’ll be warm.
She summons him into the bathroom after her shower but not to show him how she looks in the borrowed duds. Perched on a stool, she clutches the hem of his shirt while he unwraps the bandage from her head. Her scalp, untouched by the razor for several days, is downy with black hair, silky as Indy’s.
Fixing her gaze on his face, Deanie’s fingers scrabble for his hand and strangle his fingers. He grasps that his face at that moment is her looking glass. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, how bad is it? What he shows is how she will always see herself. He makes himself relax, giving her fingers a reassuring squeeze back.
Exposed, the wound is only the central feature of the map of discolored swelling that is the whole left side of her face. In muddy and streaked hues, her ear appears to have been shaped by childish thick fingers from a lump of varicolored clay. From eyebrow to jawline, her skin is the color of an August thunderhead. The healing edges of the wound melt into each other unevenly.
