“Thank you,” Natasha said, and squeezed her wrist. “Thank you. So much. It’s — it’s all right now.”
“Mama,” the boy said. “I want to sit in the middle. I’m afraid.”
“We have to put your seat belt on, Teddy. We’ll move you to the middle after we take off. You want to see out the window, don’t you?”
Natasha watched him pout, folding his thin arms, his lower lip sticking out. His mother sighed. Natasha sat quite still, eyes fixed on the boy’s pinched face. Her heart was running, the air beginning to feel thick, and all of life seemed to bend toward the one moment, nothing else having any reality at all, not her life in Memphis or France or Washington, not the first good days on the island, not her future plans or hopes, not Constance or the bad winter, or even Michael Faulk. It was wiped out, everything, annulled by the criminal act she had suffered, and she looked at the little boy, thinking of him grown, thinking of him forcing someone to the ground, seeing it like part of the coloration in the downy flesh of his skinny freckled white arms; and the shaking commenced deep inside, her hands tight on the ends of the armrests, the freeze expanding behind her heart, and this was how it felt to go insane. The flight attendant went through the routine about the exit doors and the floor lighting, the seat belt and the oxygen masks and the cushions that, in the unlikely event of a water landing, could be used as flotation devices. The words knifed through her. Unlikely event. Unlikely event.
When the plane started down the runway, she gave a little cry, and the woman, Priscilla, leaned over and said, “It’s fine, honey. Really. You’ll see.”
9
The house on Swan Ridge was a small two-bedroom bungalow, with a good yard and a shed in the back that could be converted into a work space. Faulk gave Mr. Rainey a small deposit for it, an amount he could afford to lose if Natasha decided that she didn’t like it. But he felt sure she would. It was very close to Iris’s house on Bilders. Mr. Rainey let him have a key to the place and took the lockbox. The two men shook hands and agreed on a time to meet and finalize things. Mr. Rainey drove away, and Faulk took one more look around, moving through the rooms and imagining life there.
This was the one he would take her to.
After lunch he drove to East Memphis to see a friend in the employment services department of the parole board. The friend had left him a message to come see him. His office was in a small windowless annex behind the main building. Faulk had a little trouble finding the place, walking around in the hot sunlight for long minutes. The door was unmarked. It looked like a warehouse entrance. His friend, the supervisor, was a short, squat good-humored man named Lawrence Watson, who smelled of the unlit cigar he kept like a lollipop in the corner of his mouth and always wore a starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The cigar would be smoked in short breaks all day and then patted out and, as Watson cheerfully expressed it, worn for reassurance indoors. A man with a cigar in his mouth was a more confident, forward-going man, he would say. For him the phrase forward going was synonymous with phrases or words like strong willed, resolute, tough minded, progressive, confident, even stubborn. The shades of meaning in it were there in context when you listened to him holding forth. He liked Faulk, and the two men had spent time over the years working together, Faulk having served as a volunteer for some of the programs the board sponsored, including several halfway houses for paroled prisoners or mental patients, or for people who needed medical rehabilitation. Faulk had also been chaplain at the community center in Midtown. Lawrence Watson was a man whose working life had been spent attempting to have a direct effect doing beneficial things for individual people. His goodwill was both boundless and practical. He possessed an unspoken passionate concern for the less fortunate and the troubled, and about this concern he often made jokes, always undercutting the obvious fact that he was a good and loving man. You could not pin him down or get him to speak earnestly about any of it. It was just his work, the thing he was happy doing, and he had been doing it for thirty years.
A job had opened up in corrections, a position in employment counseling for men on parole. “It’s yours if you want it,” he said to Faulk, chewing on the dead cigar.
“I want it.”
“Doesn’t pay much.”
“I don’t need it to.”
“Can you start Monday?”
“If you want. My fiancée’s coming in from being stuck in Jamaica—”
Wilson gave him a look, grinning crookedly.
“I know. Stuck in Jamaica. Sounds crazy. Anyway, she’s arriving later today, and I was thinking we should take a little time.”
“When’s the wedding?”
“First week in October. That first Saturday. So, three weeks. You’re welcome to come.”
“Never met a wedding I didn’t want to miss.”
“You can miss this one, too — it’s going to be very quick and very small.”
“And Jamaica was where she was when the flights stopped?”
“Yes, and all she talked about was wanting to come home.”
“Well, under the circumstances.”
“I know.”
“Way I feel right now, they can nuke the whole goddamm region,” Watson said.
“Is this you talking?”
He smiled the crooked smile. “Don’t tell anybody I said that. Maybe just hoping for another flood in the general area. How would that be? Another forty days and forty nights of rain to cool them all off.”
“You need me to start Monday?”
“How ’bout Wednesday?”
“Wednesday, sure.”
“You know the drill. Look at the history and try to match it up with whatever’s available.”
“See you Wednesday,” Faulk told him.
He went back to his apartment and saw Mr. Baines sitting out on his front stoop. Mr. Baines waved him over.
“I don’t want to be unkind,” he said. “I think I was unkind earlier.”
“No,” Faulk said. “Not really.”
The other man had a beer and a plate of chicken wings on a small portable table. He held out a wing. “Want one?”
“No, thank you.”
“Settled on a place?”
“I think I’ve found something, yes.”
“Donald Baines never gets in the way of anybody’s happiness if he can help it. And you’re about to be married.”
Faulk thought he heard a note of sarcasm in the voice. Baines, chewing on a wing, gazed at him with a jovial expression and asked, through his chewing, if the younger man would like a cold beer. Barbecue sauce was smeared all over the wide mouth. He looked like a big kid in need of his mother to wipe his face.
“No, thanks anyway,” Faulk said, wanting to feel kindly toward him. “Of course I’ll pay the rent on the place until I can find someone to sublet.”
“Well,” said Baines, noisily slurping the beer. “Of course I’ll have to insist on that. Will you bring your bride here this evening?”
“That depends on how she feels.”
Baines seemed to urge him with a look, as if to say, Go on, there’s more to tell.
“Probably tomorrow,” Faulk said.
“Ah,” said Baines, leaning back. “Tomorrow your life begins.”