Valentine(8)

He doesn’t move. And I told you that I want a drink of water.

No.

He looks up at the sky and lays his hands on the back of his neck, fingers threaded. He whistles a few bars of music and though the song is familiar, I can’t name it. When he speaks, he is a man, not a boy.

I want you to give her to me. Okay?

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you go on back to town?

You step inside the house now, Mrs. Whitehead, and get my girlfriend. Try not to wake your husband, who is sleeping upstairs, except he’s not, is he.

It is not a question, and suddenly, Robert’s face rises wraithlike before me. You did all this for a stranger, Mary Rose? You risked our daughter’s life, our baby’s life, yourself, for a stranger. What the hell is wrong with you?

And he’d be right. Because who is this child to me, anyway? Maybe she got into his truck willingly. I might have done the same ten years earlier, especially for a man this pretty.

Lady, I don’t know you, he says. You don’t know me. You don’t know Gloria. Now I want you to be a good girl, and set down that gun and go inside that house, and you bring her out here.

I feel the tears on my cheeks before I’m aware that I have begun to weep. There I stand, with my rifle, that useless piece of beautifully carved wood, and why should I not do as he asks? Who is she to me? She is not my child. Aimee and this child whose feet and fists kick and flail, they are somebody to me. They are mine. This girl, Gloria, she is not mine.

When he speaks next, the young man is no longer interested in asking questions, or talking. Bitch, he says, you listen here—

I try to listen for something other than his voice—a phone ringing in the house, a truck coming up the road, even the wind would be a welcome noise, but everything on this particular piece of flat and lonely earth has gone silent. His is the only voice I can hear, and it roars. Do you hear me, you stupid bitch. You hear me?

Gently, I shake my head. No, I don’t hear you. Then I pick up the rifle and snug it against my shoulder, a right and familiar sensation, but now it feels like somebody has poured lead into the barrel. I am as weak as an old woman. Maybe it is loaded, I don’t know, but still I point it at his pretty, golden face—because he doesn’t know either.

I don’t have one word left in me, so I flick my thumb across the safety and sight him through the aperture, my vision blurred by tears and the sorrow of knowing what I will say if he asks even one more time. Well, come on then, mister. I will take you to the ground myself, or die trying, if it means standing between you and my daughter, but Gloria? Her you can have.

We hear the sirens at the same time. He is already turning around when I lift my gaze from the bead sight. We stand there and watch the sheriff’s car coming fast up the road. An ambulance is right behind him, kicking up enough dust to choke a herd of cows. Just this side of our mailbox, the driver overcorrects and slides off the road. The vehicle bounces off the barbed-wire fence and skids into the flock of sand hill cranes, who rise up shrieking. They take flight, all noise and thin legs and thwapping disorder, a hue and cry.

For a few seconds, the young man holds himself still as a frightened jackrabbit. Then his shoulders slump forward and he rubs his fingers against his closed eyes. Well, shit, he says. My daddy’s going to kill me.

A lot of years will pass before I think my daughter is old enough to hear it, but when I do, I will tell her the last thing I remember seeing before I leaned back against the doorframe and passed out cold on the front porch. Two little girls, faces pressed against the kitchen window, mouths agape and eyes wide open, only one of them mine.





Corrine

Well, it’s a murderous little shit, the skinny yellow stray with lime-colored eyes and balls the size of silver dollars. Somebody dumped it in the dirt lot behind the Shepards’ house at the end of December—a Christmas present that wore thin quick, a bad idea from the get-go, Corrine told Potter at the time—and no creature has been safe since. Songbirds have perished by the dozens. Finches, a family of cactus wrens nesting under the storage shed, too many sparrows and bats to count, even a large mockingbird. In four months, the stray has doubled in size. His pale fur glows like a chrysanthemum.

Corrine is kneeling in front of the toilet when she hears the panicked cry of another small animal in the backyard. The birds shriek and beat their wings against the ground, and the garter snakes and brown racers die quietly, their light bodies barely disturbing the hard-packed dirt in her empty flowerbeds. This is the sound made by a mouse or squirrel, maybe even a young prairie dog. Critters, she thinks, that’s what Potter used to call them. And her throat closes up.

Holding her thin brown hair with one hand, she finishes bringing up the contents of her stomach, then sits with her cheek pressed against the bathroom’s cool wall. The animal cries out again and in the silence that follows, she tries to piece together the details of last night. Did she have five drinks or six? What did she say, and to whom?

The ceiling fan rattles overhead. The meaty stink of salted peanuts and Scotch drifts toward the open window, and Corrine’s eyes are wet from the force of her sick. All this, and that bald spot on the crown of her head getting bigger by the day. Not that this particular detail has anything to do with how drunk she got last night, but still—it is part of the inventory. As is the small square of toilet paper dangling from her chin. She flicks it into the toilet bowl, closes the lid, and lays her forehead against the porcelain while she listens to the tank fill back up.