NOS4A2(47)

She stumbled on the first step going up to the porch and almost fell. He caught her in his arms. She turned and looked at him, blinking at tears. Why was she crying? She didn’t know, only knew that she was—helplessly, sipping at the air in short, choked breaths.

Curiously, the fat boy, Louis Carmody, just twenty, a kid with a record of stupid crimes—vandalism, shoplifting, smoking underage—looked like he might start crying himself. She didn’t learn his name until later.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey. I won’t let anything bad happen to you. You’re all right now. I’ve got your back.”

She wanted to believe him. Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is that when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him. She wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t, so she decided to kiss him instead. Not now, but later—later she would kiss him the best kiss ever. He was chubby and had bad hair, and she suspected he had never been kissed by a pretty girl before. Vic was never going to be modeling in an underwear catalog, but she was pretty enough. She knew he thought so, too, from the reluctant way he let go of her waist.

“Let’s go in there and bring a whole mess of law down here,” he said. “How about that?”

“And fire trucks,” she said.

“That, too,” he said.

Lou walked her into a pine-floored country grocery. Pickled eggs floated like cow eyeballs in a jar of yellowing fluid on the counter.

A small line of customers led to the lone cash register. The man behind the counter had a corncob pipe in the corner of his mouth. With his pipe, squinty eyes, and bulging chin, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Popeye the Sailor Man.

A young man in military fatigues stood at the head of the line, holding a few bills in his hand. His wife waited beside him, baby in arms. His wife was, at most, only five years older than Vic herself, her blond hair held back in a ponytail by an elastic loop. The towheaded infant in her arms wore a Batman onesie with tomato-sauce stains down the front, evidence of a nutritious lunch by way of Chef Boyardee.

“Excuse me,” Lou said, raising his thin, piping voice.

No one so much as looked around.

“Didn’t you have a milk cow once, Sam?” said the young man in fatigues.

“It’s true,” said the guy who looked like Popeye, punching some keys on the register. “But you don’t want to hear about my ex-wife again.”

The old boys gathered around the counter erupted into laughter. The blonde with the baby smiled indulgently and looked around, and her gaze settled on Lou and Vic. Her brow furrowed with concern.

“Everyone listen to me!” Lou screamed, and this time they all heard and turned to stare. “We need to use your phone.”

“Hey, honey,” said the blonde with the infant, speaking directly to Vic. The way she said it, Vic knew she was a waitress and called everyone honey, or hon, or darling, or doll. “You okay? What happened? You have an accident?”

“She’s lucky to be alive,” Lou said. “There’s a man down the road had her locked up in his house. He tried to burn her to death. The house is still on fire. She only just got out of there. The f*cker still has some little kid with him.”

Vic shook her head. No—no, that was not exactly right. The little kid was not being held against his will. The little kid wasn’t even a little kid anymore. He was something else, something so cold it hurt to touch him. But she couldn’t figure out how to correct Lou, and so she said nothing.

The blonde looked at Lou Carmody while he was speaking, then back, and when her gaze returned to Vic, it was subtly altered. It was a look of calm, intense appraisal—a look Vic knew well from her own mother’s face. It was the way Linda sized up an injury, judging it on a scale of severity, settling on the appropriate treatment.

“What’s your name, darling?” the blonde asked.

“Victoria,” Vic said, something she never did, refer to herself by her whole first name.

“You’re okay now, Victoria,” said the blonde, and her voice was so kind that Vic began to sob.

The blonde took quiet command of the room and everyone in it then, all without raising her voice or ever setting down her toddler. Later, when Vic thought about what she liked best in women, she always thought of the soldier’s wife, of her certainty and her quiet decency. She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone. She wished for that certainty herself, that grounded awareness, that she saw in the soldier’s wife, and thought she would like to be a woman such as this: a mother, with the steady, sure, feminine awareness of what to do in a crisis. In some ways Vic’s own son, Bruce, was really conceived in that moment, although she would not be pregnant with him for another three years.

Vic sat on some boxes, to one side of the counter. The man who reminded her of Popeye was already on the phone, asking for an operator to give him the police. His voice was calm. No one was overreacting, because the blonde didn’t overreact, the others taking their emotional cues from her.

“Are you from around here?” the soldier’s wife asked.

“I’m from Haverhill.”

“Is that in Colorado?” asked the soldier, whose name was Tom Priest. He was on two weeks’ leave and was due to head back to Saudi Arabia by way of Fort Hood that evening.