“Sorry about that,” he said.
Kelly rolled down the window and felt the wind. She could smell the water, salty and close. It was nice, actually, not to be going home right away, to avoid the certainty of her apartment and her bed and a magazine to read until she fell asleep. If she missed anything about dating, she thought, it might be this: a moment of precarious silence in a stranger's car, nighttime air, hands in your lap, waiting for the night to settle into itself. This was the moment before things got defined, before you had to decide what would happen, who you'd be, what you'd do. She took a deep breath and watched the telephone poles flip by.
“This okay?” Lone said, pulling over.
They were out by the docks in Ste. Anne's, at a bar that was what Manny wanted the Edgewater to be. Upscale. Nicer decor, fancier people, waitresses in black skirts serving mixed drinks. A terrace was strung with colored lights, and voices rippled in waves of rhythm and laughter. Words stood out in small, quick bursts like names being called.
“Fine,” she said.
As they approached the entrance, Lone jumped ahead of her, awkwardly, and opened the door.
“Thanks,” she said.
He pulled out her chair for her, too. Once they'd settled their drinks, he said, “So why'd you quit school? You know that's no good.”
“Did you finish school?”
“No,” he said. “That's how I know.”
“What do you do, anyway?”
He looked at her. His skin under the stubble was dotted with small craters. He was wearing an earring, she noticed, a thin, small gold band that looked like it was pinching the bottom of his ear.
“Not a lot,” he said. “You didn't answer my question.”
“I don't really know. I couldn't get into it, I guess.”
“Uh-huh. Was it the same thing with men?”
“Not really.”
“You don't talk much, do you?”
“I just met you,” Kelly said.
“True enough,” Lone said, then nodded and tipped his drink to his mouth. Ice rattled against his teeth. “That's a fact.” He smiled and looked at her again, just at her face, and it made her blush.
She remembered this, now. The part of sex that wasn't about touching someone else but about being touched, feeling your own skin warm under a man's eyes and hands, alive to your own body, inside and out of it. She didn't know which was stranger, feeling somebody else's body for the first time or feeling how your own self could change.
“You look pretty,” he said.
Kelly rolled her eyes a tiny bit.
Lone just smiled and shook his head. “Oh, you're a hard one,” he said, and laughed as if this were a quality that he in particular was well positioned to appreciate. “You are.”
When they got home, Marie-Claire let Luz watch cartoons with a book balanced on her lap so that when her father came home she could pretend to have been reading it. The TV room was dark and cool, and the bright sunlight that filtered occasionally through the curtains seemed incongruous and strange. Luz sat with her legs out in front of her on the couch: her own legs next to her new leg, all three of them pointing at the TV. During the commercial breaks she would look at the plastic one and sometimes put her hand on it, as if to keep it from walking off. Marie-Claire wandered around the house for a while — what was she doing, Luz wondered, was she going through the tin box? — and then came back downstairs and stood in the door of the TV room, pretending she was watching Luz, not the TV, but after a while they were just watching cartoons on the couch together. When Marie-Claire fell asleep, Luz got up on her knees and edged closer to look at her face. It was weird how you could see flecks of her makeup stuck to her skin. Mascara was glopped onto her eyelashes, and there were streaks underneath where it had rubbed off, little eyelash flutters that looked like the marks of a feather.
Marie-Claire opened her eyes. “What the fuck are you doing?” she said.
“Nothing,” Luz said, and scooted back to her side of the couch.
When Luz's father came home from school he found them silent on the couch, Luz with Nancy Drew #114 and Marie-Claire with a copy of Steal This Book that she must've found upstairs. He put his backpack down in the hallway and came into the room. “Hello, young women,” he said. “And how are we all today? Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I hope.”
“Fine,” said Marie-Claire. She put the book down on the coffee table. “The day was totally fine.”
“Great, great,” said Luz's father. “You taking care of my baby, Marie-Claire? Luz, is Marie-Claire taking good care of you?”
“Yeah,” said Luz.
“Good,” he said. Then his eyebrows came together sharply in the center of his forehead. “What is that?”
Luz cradled it protectively. “It's my leg,” she said.
“Um. Marie-Claire?”
She shrugged. “We found it by the lake. Luz wanted to bring it home.”
“It's filthy,” Luz's father said.
“You liked it too,” Luz pointed out to Marie-Claire.
“Yeah, I did like it,” she admitted. “Actually, Mr. Howard, I'm thinking, you know, I might want to take it home with me.”
“No!” said Luz.
Marie-Claire ignored her and turned to her father, sitting up straighter on the couch. She spoke fast and low, imitation enthusiasm bubbling out from under shyness. “I've been doing this sculpture? I'm trying to work on, like, people? This'll be perfect, because I'm very into humans, and, like, artificial parts, because it's like society, you know?” Her black-rimmed eyes opened wide, then aimed down at the ground before she looked back up at him through her long, mascara-thick eyelashes.
Luz thought, please. She knew this was all a lie. Marie-Claire didn't have any sculptures.
“I know exactly what you mean,” Luz's father said. “Why don't you take it home.”
“How come she gets to have it and not me?”
“Luz,” her father and Marie-Claire said at the same time.
“Dad,” Luz said, “it's my leg.”
“Another way of looking at this, Luz, is that I really don't want you to have that thing in the house anyway. It's too, I don't know, it's not a toy. It's not meant to be played with.”
“It's not fair,” Luz said. Her shoulders shook and she started to cry.
“I know,” Marie-Claire said, putting a hand on her shoulder while her father watched. “I know it's not.”
Lone told her about the accident. He was twenty-one, at the height of his Evel Knievel years, and was coming down a hill in the Laurentians high on cocaine, shrieking his head off out of pure joy, when he took a curve too fast and smashed sideways into a truck coming in the opposite direction. He woke up in the hospital, and the doctors told him there hadn't been anything below the knee for them to try to save.
“What happened to the guy driving the truck?”
“Goddamn it,” Lone said. “People always ask me that.” He slamed his beer down on the table.
They were in his motel room, a Days Inn off the Trans-Canada. He wasn't staying with Manny because his apartment was a third-floor walkup.
“And I say hey, you know, I've been stuck with this prosthetic fucking leg ever since, what about that?” He grabbed his leg with both hands just where, it looked like, the real part ended, and shook it a little bit, for emphasis.
“So what happened to him?”
“He was fine,” Lone said. “He walked away. Unlike some people I might mention.”
“Oh, you mean you.”
“Yes, I mean me. Very funny.”
“Ha ha,” Kelly said solemnly. She took a swig of her beer, swallowed and sighed. “Anyway.”