Swearing, he grabs her wrists and twists until she lets go. Her eyes blank and she snaps at his face with her teeth. He throws her off him, onto her back, and his fist is closed, poised over her face without conscious thought. But he sees her, eyes clenched shut, mouth gone shapeless, cowering in the too familiar cringe, waiting for him to hit her. As he freezes, a drop of blood from his split lip falls on her face, on her cheekbone, and dribbles down the length of her scar.
He draws back his fist and uses the back of his hand to wipe his mouth, fingers quivering with too suddenly slackened tension. He gropes his way to the edge of the bed and sits at the edge.
“I can’t do this,” he tells her. “You need some kind of help I can’t give you.”
When he looks back at her, she is face down in the pillows. Her back heaves painfully as if she were trying to breathe water.
He finds an old T-shirt, sweatpants and socks and dresses her. Finds pants for himself and leaves the room to fetch her a glass of water and aspirin and then feeds it to her, as he once gave her painkillers. She’s quiet by then, burnt out and limp. He is awake a long time after she goes to sleep. In her sleep, she hiccups and snuffles and draws long shaky breaths, just like Indy does after her tantrums.
His helplessness is like a wall he can’t see around. In the morning, he tells her he’s going to sleep on the daybed for a while. There is a stiff silence and then she insists she should be the one who sleeps there. It’s not worth arguing about, so long as she understands he’s not kicking her out, not out of his bedroom or his life, but when he tells her that, she crumples slowly into tears again.
It’s pathetic how quickly she agrees to talk to Dr. Spellman about seeing someone, some kind of therapist. He says he’ll go too, if she wants; they can work out the shit together. Anything to make her feel better.
No doubt with the ulterior motive of distracting Sam from Deanie’s depression, Reuben asks him to tune up the Eldorado and take it for a spring wake-up run. Dutifully, when the job is done, on the first Sunday in April Sam and Deanie take the sedan into Greenspark.
The amazing thing is it seems to work. Just being in the Caddie, with its big mill purring under the long sleek hood, is relaxing. Deanie cranks a home dub up to maximum volume, parks her sneakers on the dash and settles back to let the music of Grange Machine wash over her and out the open windows into the slipstream.
“Let’s go to the school,” Deanie suggests.
The tower of the Mill over the trees catches Sam’s eyes.
“There’s the Playground,” he says.
Snuggled up to him in the front seat, Deanie draws her scarf from around her throat and ties it around her head against the cold. Her fingertips flutter to the new chains that underline her scar. Sarah has given her a new earring that dangles from her right earlobe—two miniature gold basketballs on a silver chain. She wears a sweater of Sam’s that falls under her denim jacket to below her bottom; he wears his leather jacket open to the damp cold.
The big car glides down the incline of the access road to the Playground with the smoothness and power of a big jet landing. The ground is almost bare, with tattered patches of dreary old snow here and there, and the surface is slick where children’s boots have beat it into a loose slurry on top of the underlying freeze.
With an avuncular courtesy, Sam opens the car door for Deanie and helps her out. He tucks her hand between his arm and torso and they walk slowly away from the sedan.
Then he seizes Deanie by the armpits, whirls her around until she is dizzy. They stagger happily to the turrets and crenellations of the fortress-playground. It occurs to him the best times together are when they pretend they are still children. Except for sex—and now he thinks on it, the best of that was a kind of play. He misses it, he’s horny, but by unspoken, agreement they have been careful not to start anything. They still sleep together but only sleep.
The two meetings they have had with the therapist have been miserable exercises in which he has had to listen to Deanie tear herself apart. At least afterward she seems more peaceful. His own confusion and helplessness are greater than ever. Often he finds himself thinking it’s just never going to work and it might be better to hang it up. When she’s strong enough to be on her own, of course, he amends, and refuses to consider the possibility she never will be.
He boosts her to the top of a playhouse ell so she is sitting at the height of his shoulders and squeezes her knee. With a laugh, Deanie bends to slide her fingers under his hair, clasps her hands at the back of his neck and kisses him. It’s a sweet kiss, a little warmer than the quick peck they give each other at bedtime. She looks at him and does it again, not sisterly at all, and he’s so relieved. Tentatively, they neck a little, and Sam slips his hands under the sweater to cup her breasts and she shivers. He pushes her back a little and kisses the crotch of her jeans, his lips cooled by her new rigging
