I walk toward them, all of our three breaths pluming in the air. I can see that Aurora knows right away what has happened, and that Jeff doesn't, because his brain won't admit to it, won't let him see it, even though there are simple explanations for most things. I know that this, as much as my future in news, explains why I couldn't ever marry him. He isn't unobservant; he just can't imagine that someone he loves could be so different from himself.
“He must be asleep,” I tell them. “I couldn't get him to come to the door.”
“Probably passed out,” Jeff says.
“Probably,” I agree.
He looks at me closely, and for a second I think he registers my hangover, my bleary eyes, my skin that Luther Hodges has touched with his doughy little hands. “You're up early,” he says.
“News never sleeps,” I say.
I head home and shower and check messages. There's only one and it's from Jeff, from last night. He's calling to tell me that the homeless man in Cranston has been identified by workers at a downtown shelter. So far as they know, the guy didn't have any family. He gets to the end of the message and then stops talking for a couple of seconds, as if he expects me, impossibly, to say something back. It's the moment of hope that gets me, that pause on the line before he hangs up.
The Swanger Blood
The kid was screaming, and Gayle's sister seemed helpless to stop him. He stood on the steps of the swimming pool in the backyard, its serene turquoise water shimmering in the afternoon sun, oblivious to his complaints. Gayle, watching, was tempted to cover her ears. It had been two years since she'd seen the kid, and in that time something had gone seriously wrong. To begin with, his head had grown way out of proportion to his body, although she couldn't quite tell if this was part of the problem or only some sorry accompaniment to it. More disturbingly, from the second she'd arrived at the house he'd been screaming his head off, almost literally: his wide, chubby face swollen and red, his enormous head flung back, wobbling above the tiny stem of his neck as if threatening to detach. All this because he wanted to eat macaroni and cheese and Gayle's sister, Erica, didn't have any in the house.
“Be soft, Max,” Erica kept saying. “Be soft.”
The kid did not want to be soft. Softness was last on his list of priorities.
“It's not fair!” he screamed, his face getting, impossibly, even redder. Twin streams of mucus ran out of his nose and down his chin. His little hands kept twisting the hem of his striped T-shirt in an anguished, strangely adult, Lady Macbeth — like gesture.
Erica knelt beside him, her face level with his, wheedling. “Why don't we go inside and have some bagel pizzas?”
“I hate bagel pizzas,” was the kid's response. “You said I could have mac and cheese, and I want mac and cheese! It's. Not. Fair!”
“I could run out to the store and get some, if you want,” Gayle said. At this her sister turned and stared as if she'd suggested capital punishment, or jail time, or selling the kid into slavery. It was not, apparently, the appropriate solution.
“What are you thinking?” Erica said. She always asked rhetorical questions when she was mad. “He needs to learn you can't always get what you want. Isn't that right, Max? Isn't that what you need to learn?”
“No, it's not. It's not what I need to learn at all!” He curled his hands into fists and beat them against Erica's chest. Gayle flinched. He was hitting hard.
“Okay, that's enough,” Erica said. “You're taking a time-out.” She scooped him up by the waist and carried him inside, his legs thrashing behind her like he was swimming. Gayle wondered what she'd do when he got too big for her to pick him up. The head alone would soon be too big, at the rate it was growing.
While her sister and the kid were waging the mac-and-cheese war inside — she could hear, through the sliding glass doors, the muted arias of his continuing screams — Gayle sat down in a lounger by the pool. A mountain laurel hung over a corner of the shallow end, its blue flowers bent down, as if drawn to the blue water. It was a brilliantly sunny day in early April, eighty-five degrees, the perfect season to be back in Texas. She always tried to line up sales conferences in sunny places this time of year: Florida, Arizona, southern California. There were conferences going on in every state, every weekend, at every hotel, and Gayle sometimes thought it wasn't sales that kept the economy going, wasn't in fact any particular industry or service, but the conferences themselves. She'd chosen this one so she could see her sister and family, a decision she knew she'd regret almost immediately but had made anyway, because her parents would have wanted her to.
The glass doors slid open, then closed, smooth on their runners. Erica's husband came outside, carrying two glasses, and handed her one.
“Henry Higginbottom,” Gayle said, and took it. “Hank.” In the eight years he and Erica had been married, Gayle had never gotten tired of saying his name. They hugged. Henry was wearing khaki shorts and a button-down shirt and he sat down in the lounger next to her. His legs were pasty white. He had a job teaching biology at the university. All the Higginbottoms were nerds: teachers, lab technicians, civil servants. They all wore glasses, too, and in the wedding photos — taken on a day as bright as today — their eyes were often hidden behind the lenses, which caught and reflected the Texas sun.
“So, how's the conference?” he said.
“Oh, you know.” Gayle sipped her drink, which was gin, and enjoyably strong. “Power Point slides, vendors, cocktails. The usual. It's nice to take the afternoon off.”
“Always be closing,” Hank said. “That's the extent of what I know.”
“That's pretty much the gist of it.”
“So have you been? Closing?”
“Sure.”
“I'd suck at it. Schmoozing and handshaking.”
Gayle shrugged. “It's easy if you don't take it personally. It's just your job, you know? It's just the things you sell. It's not you.”
“So basically you're saying you have no soul.”
“I leased it to the company,” she said, “in exchange for a thing called money.”
Hank laughed, and she smiled at him. The two of them had always gotten along.
In the distance, the kid kept on screaming. Then, in an instant, he stopped, and behind his glasses Hank raised his blond eyebrows.
“She used the secret weapon,” he said.
Moments later, Erica and Max came outside holding hands. Max had a pacifier in his mouth, and the redness of his face was paling to a moderate rose.
“I thought we were trying not to do the pacifier thing anymore,” Hank said.
“Were you in there just now?” Erica said.
“Okay,” he said.
“I'm going swimming,” the kid removed his pacifier to say. He ran to the other end of the pool, where the steps were, and sat down on the top one. He was still wearing his regular clothes, a T-shirt and shorts. He had Higginbottom coloring, light blond hair and alabaster skin. Without looking at them he started splashing quietly around the top step, humming to himself, seeming perfectly happy. It was as if Erica had given him a quickie lobotomy inside the house.
“Drink, honey?”
“No, thank you,” Erica said tightly. She pulled up a lawn chair and sat down next to her husband. She'd gained a solid fifteen pounds since the last time Gayle had seen her, and her dye job had grown out so her hair was now half blond, half dark brown: half Higginbottom, Gayle thought, and half Swanger. She wasn't working these days, and Gayle had hoped maybe she'd be more relaxed than usual, but this was not the case. She was staring gloomily at Max, who was making a boat capsize in the water, over and over again, and imitating, in his high, delicate voice, the siren wails of imaginary people being thrown overboard. He'd taken out the pacifier and set it on the cement amid a scattered rainbow of toys. Gayle waited for Erica to say something about this, but she didn't. The three of them just sat there watching the kid play, as Gayle had noticed parents often did: too exhausted to maintain their own conversations, they gazed at their children as if they were television.