He does, he shoves her away, and she closes her eyes in failure. And shame, that she couldn’t take it, couldn’t begin to bear what he has had to. She hears him leave their bed. She hears the faucet blast violently in the bathroom, hears the splash of water and the slick, lathery rub of soap.
INTERESTING, WHAT HURTS and what doesn’t. Piercing the fleshy lobe of your ear is a dull crunch, there are no nerves there, really, no blood, no pain, or you misinterpret the sudden needle punch as pain when it’s really just something abrupt. Esther wants to get her ears pierced like her mother’s, but she’s told her she can’t until she’s thirteen. Esther hates her for that now, too. Five years old, and she’s lost the right to be her mother. Esther knows that, she wields it, and she’s right. She’s glad Justin is still too young, too innocent, to really understand. Maybe there’s still a chance for them, a chance for her little boy’s unadulterated love.
Ice helps. She bleeds, she swells, but the ice pack, clutched clumsily as she makes her way to the car afterward, numbs her out. It didn’t, doesn’t really hurt. Not like the hurt she’s caused him. Not like the hurt of knowing how what she’s done to him hurts.
Feel, she says to him a few weeks later. Here, feel. His back is to her, still, always, but the curve of it is less tight, as if his exhausted spine and muscles can no longer sustain such rigid guard. She slides her whole body toward him, carefully, and presses up behind. His hand is lying on his thigh, unclenched, the fingers limp as a child’s. The fingers tremble a bit. She puts her hands on his shoulder and gently tips him onto his back. He lets her. She lies carefully on top of him, careful not to crush, her head in the pillow above his shoulder so he doesn’t have to see her face, and after long, tense-relax, tense-relax moments, she feels his arms steal around her body, a hand caress her hair, his fingers pressing into her waist. She takes his hand, carefully places it between her legs.
Here, feel, she says. She feels before he does, though, she feels his fingers clutch at the heat, the damp, the hair, then stop. She feels the jolt in her nerves, and then she feels the confusion in his hand. His fingers fumble with the two tiny rings in her swollen flesh, the cold surgical steel chain. The links clink. A tiny metal lock, too, in the shape of a heart, like you’d find on a young girl’s diary, the kind that opens with a tiny medieval-looking key. She hands him the key.
No other man will ever touch me again, it vows.
She rolls onto her back and draws her legs apart. There are tremors all through him, but he’s growing hard; he grasps the key tight, determined, his eyes narrowed on it, and unlocks the tiny locked heart that seals her closed, unthreads the chain from the rings, and spreads her wide. He sits back on his knees, pulls her toward him from under her hips, his eyes still focused there, and enters her abruptly, good, an abrupt and tearing drive. She’s waited until she was mostly healed but not all healed, because she doesn’t have the right to be all healed before he is. Then, he does it harder.
You’re a whore, you know that? he says, moaning. You’re just a fucking whore to me now.
She hears a padded shuffle in the thick carpet pile outside their bedroom door, a hiccup, Justin’s sweet baby hiccup—Whore, cunt, he says, louder, and a crueler plunge — and she cringes at her little boy on the other side of their door, needing her and hearing this. She cringes, and then she hears a soft, hesitant pad of retreat. It’s too late, there’s nothing she can do but stay where she is, wide open, apart, and flat. Each deeper thrust he makes is both a splitting and a pact. She arches and spreads wider for him, the only way to show him she’s his, all his, that she’s willing to sacrifice. To exist with him wholly in a slick open pain, to become all wound.
No one will ever love you as much as I did, he groans, and now, she realizes, it is a curse.
THEY WERE GIVEN service for twelve: the Rosenthal china (“Eden” pattern: dinner, salad, bread and butter, coupe soup) and Baccarat crystal (wine goblet, champagne flute, tumbler) she’d cut from a magazine. She chooses a flute, sets it at a place for one. An ivory lace cloth on the dining room table, and the kids, his kids, gone to bed without protest, a brief hug from Justin, a cold, resigned peck from Esther. This is how it is now, how it will always be, as long as she lives in this house, his house. She sits, takes a deep breath, admires the silverwork on the polished handle of the sterling knife, steadies herself, then cuts with much care. She slowly fills the flute, and the crystal turns warm in her hand.
He comes home late, just as she expected, because she understands now that he will always come home late. But he will always come home.
She offers the glass to him with a shaky hand.
Is this what you want? she asks. Will this finally do it?
He takes the glass from her, looks at it; in the fading light its contents glow a thick, sanguine red. She feels her very marrow has begun, at last, not to regenerate but to seethe. Too late. She’s shaking, she’s limp and drained.
Will this be my life now? she asks. Will it?
Yes, he says, looking her dead in the eye. He raises the glass.
I’m sorry, he says, and drinks.
FISH
She is in town to dispose of her uncle, but she can’t do that until he dies. It is Any Time Now. She is eyeing the creeping analog clock hands on any wall, the digital display outside every savings and loan. She is tapping her foot, drumming fingers, chomping at the bit. And, she is organized: The local Neptune Society phone number is entered in her always-charged phone; the power of attorney document is in her datebook and the DNR form is on file, for if and when there’s any ugly hospital debate over invasive procedures or more tubes; she has gone to his dingy studio apartment, in a seniors’ complex smelling of Pine-Sol and fish bones and flakes of skin, selected his final clothes, and has them in a plastic grocery bag in the trunk of her rental car. Jeans and once-white cotton Henley, the kind she remembers him wearing when she was a child, gone now to a stale ivory. She figured that was the best choice, natural, biodegradable fibers. The Neptune Society had not offered explicit instructions on this, but she imagined polyester or rayon or viscose wouldn’t burn well. She had a terror of getting a call that a bad melt of synthetic fibers had ruined the crematory slab or emitted a toxic gas. She was concerned she’d get billed for it. That there would be a protracted legal dispute, all of it angry and ultimately pointless. She wonders why the body needs to be dressed at all — let’s just unhook the monitors and IV, strip the gown away, wheel it off to the oven. She pictures her uncle’s doughy naked body splayed on a big, wooden pizza paddle, a burly Neapolitan man giving it a quick jerk of a shove into flames. Afterward, the Neptune Society will throw the cremains in a body of water for her, if she wishes — the Mississippi, she assumes — or hand them over to dispose of herself. They’re sensitive to the family’s preference. She doesn’t want them. What would she do with them? Does anyone in real life keep ashes on the mantel, in an urn? She’s not buying an urn. She wishes the river, by all means. Let the ashes float like a tap of fish food, let the bone fragments and Levi’s rivets sink down to the silt. She will have him ready to go. That’s her job. She has already boxed up his meager belongings, has glanced at then thrown away the album’d and carefully framed family photos he’d kept all these years — everyone in outdated clothing and hairstyles, posing together with camera-false smiles — and donated the rest to Goodwill. She’d hesitated over the long-unused fishing rod and tackle, the hat with its dangling hooks, wondering if they might fetch a good eBay price, then tossed all of that in, too, not wanting anything prolonged. She’s already written deceased on a copy of his lease and sent it to the complex manager; it’s premature, but he certainly won’t be going back there. Which she’s glad of, it’s a blessing, no more need to imagine him banished to a lonely beige box of a room, watching an endless loop of cop-and-game-show TV, eating salmon from an individual serving can and munching on saltines from the pack. She’ll write deceased on his final round of bills, on any junk mail, on the stub she’ll send back from his final Social Security check. Which ought to cover the cost of the Neptune Society. She estimates, thanks to her organization, that roughly one more total hour of her time, no more, will be spent on all of this once he’s dead. She imagines herself getting a stopwatch, going click with it at the final rattle of his final breath, saying Go!, and timing it down to the second. She is not the true, technical next of kin — there is still her mother, the uncle’s blood sister, and her two own older siblings — she is merely the one who assumes this kind of job, the one everyone assumes will do it. And she is the one her uncle had chosen; it is her name, in what she assumes was a moment of perverse nostalgia, or punishment, or trust, that he had written on forms. No, no one will question her account of events this time, or get in the way. The family’s wishes are all hers to wish. She is happy to fulfill this obligation, to be the one in charge of closure. She is pawing at the ground, chewing her nails, twisting her hair. If she smoked, she’d be constantly lighting up, one eye squinting at the clock through a nostriled plume.