An American Marriage(81)

“Please, Roy,” I said. “Please, please don’t make me call the police.”

“Do it,” Roy said. “Do I look like I care? Call them. Send me back. There’s nothing for me here. Send me back.”

“No,” Andre managed to say. His pupils, dark and wide, edged out light irises. “Celestial, you can’t send him back. Not after everything.”

“Do it,” Roy said.

“Celestial.” Andre’s voice was resolute but distant as an overseas call. “Put the phone down. Right now.”

Kneeling, I set it carefully on the lawn like I was surrendering a weapon. Roy released Andre, who rose only to his knees, his body at half-mast. I rushed over to him, but he sent me away. “I’m fine, Celestial,” he said, although he wasn’t. Wood chips clung to his clothes like mites.

“Let me look at your eye.”

“Stand down, Celestial,” he said softly, his teeth streaked pink.

Only a few yards away, Roy flexed his hands in time with his steps. “I didn’t kick him. When he was on the ground, I didn’t kick him. I could have. But I didn’t.”

“But look what you did do,” I said.

“What about you?” Roy was pacing now, back and forth over a short distance, like he was covering the floor of a narrow cell. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said. “I was just trying to come home. I wanted some time to talk to my wife and figure out what was what. Dre wasn’t supposed to have nothing to do with it.”

I didn’t call the police, but they came anyway, with strobing blue lights but no sirens. The officers, a black woman and a white man, acted put upon to be working on Christmas Eve. I wondered what they were thinking as they regarded us. Both men were bruised and bloody, and I was dressed like holiday cheer, whole and unhurt. I felt like a mother of newborn twins, hurrying from one man to the next, making sure neither was neglected, that both had a piece of me.

“Ma’am,” said the woman cop. “Is everything all right?”

I had not been this close to a police officer since the night at the Piney Woods when I had been pulled from my bed. My body memory smarted as I fingered the scar underneath my chin. Despite the December chill, I felt the spectral heat of that August night. Roy and I had been ordered through crosshairs not to speak and not to move, but my husband reached for me anyway, tangling our fingers for one desperate instant before a cop separated us with his black boot.

“Please don’t hurt him,” I said to the policewoman. “He’s been through a lot.”

“Who are these men?” the white cop asked me. His accent was thick and gooey, all Marietta, turn left at the Big Chicken. I tried to connect with the woman, but she fixed her eyes on the men.

With the voice I used on the telephone, I said, “This is my husband and my neighbor. We had a little bit of an accident, but everything is fine now.”

The woman looked to Andre. “Are you the husband?”

When he didn’t answer, Roy spoke. “I’m the husband. It’s me.”

She nodded at Andre for confirmation. “So you’re the neighbor?”

Rather than say yes, Andre recited his address, pointing at his own front door.

Once the police satisfied themselves, their Merry Christmases resonated like a dark omen. They left without blue lights, just the exhaust souring the air. Once they were gone, Roy sat heavily on the half-moon bench. He gestured toward the seat beside him, but I couldn’t go to him, not with Andre standing a few feet away, his face purpling around the eyes and his split lip showing red meat.

“Georgia,” Roy said, and then his body contracted dry heaving, his head between his knees. I went to him and rubbed his twitching back. “I’m hurting,” he said. “I’m hurting all over.”

“You need to go to the hospital?”

“I want to sleep in my own bed.” He stood up, like a man with somewhere to go. But he only turned toward Old Hickey. “It’s too much.” Then quickly—it must have been quickly—but I somehow took notice of each move, Roy tucked his lips against his teeth, gripped the tree like a brother, and then tipped his head back, presenting his face to the sky before driving his forehead against the ancient bark. The sound was muted, like the wet crack of an egg against the kitchen floor. He did it again, harder this time. I found my feet, and without thinking, I positioned myself between my husband and the tree. Roy craned his head back again, cocked and ready, but now if he chose to drive his skull forward, he would strike me instead.

He executed a little twitch of his knotted shoulders. Then he surveyed Old Hickey, the wood chips scattered in the grass, Andre, me, and lastly himself. “How did this happen?” Roy touched his forehead; the small cut leaked blood over his eyebrow.

Then he sat down on the grass, smoothly but with a sense of mission. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. He turned to Dre with the same curious tone. “Seriously. What do you think I should do?”

Andre sat himself gingerly on the round bench, tensing himself against his injuries. “We’ll help you get set up. If you want, you can stay in my house.”

“I’ll stay in your house and you will stay in my house with my wife? What kind of sense does that make?” Then he looked to me. “Celestial, you knew that wasn’t going to work. You know me. How could I go for that? What were you expecting?”