the middle of the Mississippi River. “If you want me to go, I’ll understand.”
He only stares at me, his eyes unreadable.
“I’ll get the tea,” he says finally.
I never got the tea. I never took the Lorcet either, but exhaustion gave me that most precious of gifts- dreamless sleep. When Michael woke me a few minutes ago, the clock beside the bed read 11:30 P.M. I felt neither rested nor tired.
I felt numb.
The room is all shadows now, cast by the spill from the bathroom light. Michael has pulled a chair up beside the bed. He’s watching me as he might a patient in the ICU. At least he hasn’t asked me how I feel.
“What do you want to do?” he says.
“I don’t know. What do you think I should do?”
“Go back to sleep. See how you feel in the morning. I’ll stay in one of the guest rooms upstairs. If you need me, you can call my cell phone.”
“I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even blink.
“I’m not trying to make a pass or anything,” I tell him. “I just don’t think I should be by myself right now. You know?”
He cocks one eyebrow at me. “That’s the first time a woman ever threatened to kill herself if I didn’t sleep with her.”
I’d like to laugh, but I can’t. There’s nothing left in me. I slide across the bed and pull back the comforter. Michael stares at the blank space in the bed, then gets up and walks into his closet. When he returns, he’s wearing a pair of blue gym shorts and an Emory University T-shirt. He sits on the edge of the bed and sets the alarm clock, then slides under the covers and pulls them up to his chest.
It seems a weird parody of married life, both of us lying on our backs, staring at the ceiling as though we’ve been together twenty years and said all there was to say long ago. I expect him to talk, to probe me with questions. But he doesn’t. What does he think of me? Does he regret the moment that he walked into his backyard and picked up the net to rescue me from the bottom of his swimming pool?
Tentatively, I slide my hand over the cool sheet and take his hand in mine. There’s nothing sexual in the touch. I’m holding his hand the way I must have held my father’s long ago-before he twisted our relationship into a perverted shadow of parental love. It takes a while, but Michael squeezes my hand in return. I may be mistaken, but it feels as though he’s shaking. I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to notice, so I say nothing.
After a time, another realization hits me. Michael is hard. I know this without feeling his erection against me. It’s something about the way he’s lying, a tension in his body. This knowledge does something to me. It always has. I feel not only desire, but a sense of compulsion, even obligation. In the same way a match exists to be struck or a loaded gun to be fired, the erect penis is a potential waiting to be released. I’ve seen a loaded rifle instantly transform a roomful of men from ennui to alertness. The moment a bullet enters the chamber, the inanimate weapon takes on an almost living presence, dangerous and impossible to ignore. For me, in this moment, Michael’s penis is the same.
“I can help you with that,” I say softly.
“What?”
I nudge his hip with mine. “That.”
“How did you know?”
“I just do.”
He keeps staring at the ceiling. “Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know. Because you need it. You can kiss me if you want.”
He’s silent for a time. Then he says, “I don’t want to kiss you right now. Not like this. I can’t help the other. I’ve had a thing for you for a really long time, but I don’t want to be what other men have been to you.”
I squeeze his hand. “We don’t have to make love. I can just use my hand. Or…whatever.”
Michael pulls his hand out of mine, and I hear his breathing stop. Then he turns on his side and looks at me. I can barely make out his eyes in the dark. “I don’t want that,” he says. “Okay? That’s not the way this is supposed to happen. You may not know that, but you need to learn. Now, go to sleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
I guess I know how he looks at me now. I suppose I should be embarrassed, but I’m not. I should probably feel regret. But I don’t. Here I lie, pregnant by a married man, sleeping next to the first nice guy I’ve come to know in a very long time.
And I feel nothing at all.
When you dream the same dream over and over, you begin to wonder whether, like a Hindu who has lived an immoral life, your punishment is to be reincarnated again and again in the same body, unable to rise up the chain of being until you learn the elusive lesson of your sin.
I’m back inside the rusted pickup truck, my grandfather behind the wheel. We’re rolling up the sloping hill of the old pasture. I hate the stink inside the truck. Sometimes a river breeze blows it out of the cab, but today the air hangs dead and still over the island, as though trapped under the overturned bowl of steel-gray clouds. My grandfather grits his teeth as he drives. He hasn’t spoken since we left the house. I might as well not be here. But I am. And soon we will crest the hill-crest it and sight the pond on the other side.
I don’t want to see the pond. I don’t want to see my father walk across the water like Jesus and pull open the bullet hole in his chest. I already know what he’s trying to tell me. I already know that I killed him. Why won’t he let me rest? If I could apologize to him, there might be some reason for this dream. But I can’t. I can’t speak at all.
“Goddamn rain,” Grandpapa mutters.
He downshifts and steps on the gas, and we trundle over the hill. The cows are waiting for us as they always are, their eyes glassy with indifference. Beyond them lies the pond, a perfect silver mirror reflecting only sky. To my right, the prize bull mounts the cow and begins lunging forward.
Grandpapa smiles.
Dreading the sight of my father in the water, I cover my eyes with my hands. But sooner or later I will have to look. I peer between my fingers and brace myself against the horror I know is to come.
But it doesn’t come. Today the pond is empty. My father isn’t floating on its surface, his arms splayed out like those of a man on a cross.
The perfect mirror remains undisturbed.
Grandpapa brakes as we roll toward the pond, then stops twenty yards from the water’s edge. I smell decay, rotting plants and fish. Where is my father? What’s happened to my dream? Even something terrible is more comforting than the unknown. I turn to Grandpapa to ask a question, but I don’t know what the question is. I couldn’t ask it anyway. Fear is clawing around in my chest like a trapped animal trying to get out.
A new smell cuts through the decay of the pond. Something man-made. It’s the tonic Grandpapa uses on his hair. Lucky Tiger.
“Goddamn rain,” he says again.
As I stare through the windshield, a curtain of rain sweeps across my field of vision like a great gray shadow, all the leaves trembling under its weight. In seconds the glassy surface of the pond is sizzling like water thrown into a hot skillet. Pearlie told me once that a person is like a raindrop, sent from heaven alone but destined to rejoin all the other drops at journey’s end. I can’t remember heaven, so I must have left it a long time ago…yet I still have such a long way to fall…
“All right, now,” Grandpapa says.
He reaches across the seat, takes hold of my knees, and turns me sideways like a man shifting a sack of seeds. When he moves toward me, I beseech him with my eyes. He hesitates like a man who has forgotten his car keys. Then he reaches under the seat, pulls out Lena the Leopardess, and shoves her into my hands. As I shut my eyes and press her soft fur against my cheek, a feeling like warm water spreads through my body. The rain sweeps over the truck as Grandpapa pushes me back on the seat, and the hard, percussive patter of raindrops on a tin roof fills my ears. When his big hands unsnap my jeans, I don’t feel them. When his leather belt creaks and jingles, I don’t hear it. Lena and I are a million miles away, padding through the jungle, listening to the endless music of the rain.
And it begins.
