“Tell me,” Iris said. “Come on. Tell me now.”
2
He woke with a start, hearing the sound outside of a motorcycle. His head hurt. He had a swooning sense of a thing he was failing to do and then fully realized all of it, sitting up, the muscles of his abdomen twisting and cramping, his heart pounding. He had fallen asleep in his clothes.
He got out of the cot and walked unsteadily to the door of the apartment, which was ajar. He saw the street in gray light. The sky was a flat cloud screen, and there were patches of fog in the road at the end of the block. Little pockets of mist clung to the lower branches of the trees. It was a gray, chilly morning. He went back to the cot and put on his shoes. Up the street, Mr. Baines was sitting on his little porch in a bomber jacket, eating. Faulk, in his agitation, thought of him as the fat landlord. The thought was not something he had known himself capable of having. He had come to a new region of his own being and it frightened him. He wanted to break something, tear something down. Baines waved for him to come over.
“Want some?” he said, as Faulk approached.
“What is it.”
“Lasagna from last night.”
“Not for breakfast.”
“Taking what might be my last morning outside for a while. It’s gonna get cold today.”
Faulk watched him eat.
“Cold front coming.”
He started to move off.
“I’ve got somebody who’ll sublet,” Baines said, “if you change your mind about keeping it. So you see, old Baines will even help someone find a sublet if he wants to marry a young woman and live elsewhere and changes his mind about keeping it.”
“Like I said, it’ll be used as a place to work.”
“Did you work all night? You don’t look good.” The smile didn’t change. But there was a sly glint in the eyes.
“In fact, that’s exactly what I did. I worked all night.”
“What kind of work does a former priest do?”
Faulk hesitated.
“You in the doghouse, old son?”
“I’m writing a book,” Faulk told him. “How about you? You writing one?”
The other man shoved a forkful of the lasagna into his mouth and spoke through chewing. “Baines likes to know how his tenants are doing.”
“I asked if you’re writing a book,” Faulk said.
“You ever taste cold lasagna?”
“No thanks.”
“You gonna be spending the night often?” Something smug about the little smile in that heavy face made Faulk want to batter him. It was the mood of this hour in the world.
“Maybe,” Faulk said.
“Well.” The other grinned at him. “Of course that’s your business.”
He walked back down the street to the car and got in and started it. And began to cry. Who had done it; why had she not told him?
Daylight had not yet cleared the trees at the horizon. Back up the street, the fat landlord was hunched over his repellent dawn meal.
At the house, he let himself in and walked through the rooms. He saw the broken door in its shocking crooked angle against the bathroom sink, and he turned slowly, looking at the windows, the furniture, all the facets of life as it was supposed to be. Then he faced again the destruction of the doorway into the bathroom. The frame, the baseboard, the lintel — crooked, splintered, and broken, bending into the space of the opening. All this had happened.
Feeling the lingering effects of the wine, he made his way into the living room and sat down on the sofa. His own rasping exhalations were the only sound. Without consciously deciding to, he began going over it all again, thinking it through, step by step, and then he remembered that she had been assaulted. She had been assaulted, and this was what she had been waiting to tell him. He saw an image of her sitting up in the bed, the book open on her knees. “Oh, God,” he said.
He could not imagine a way back to her; he believed she would never want to find a way.
She would have gone to Iris’s.
He drove there and then lost courage and drove by, looking at the place in the lawn where Adams had lain. Adams, the one with whom he had gotten drunk — the one whose trivial, silly descent into helplessness was one pass in a night that, if it had ended with simply going to sleep, would not even be something worth remembering. Though Adams was a man suffering, too, reliving the loss of his wife, five years ago, still afflicted with it, and Faulk had spent so much of his life trying to see into such suffering and also seeking to give help, seeking to understand it deeply enough to offer solace.
Kindness.
Through the living room window of Iris’s house, he saw that there was still a light on in the kitchen, though cloudy sun was coming through the tops of the trees now. He had an image of her sitting in that kitchen talking to her grandmother, telling her, if Iris did not already know everything, about what happened in Jamaica. The secret she had been keeping all this time. He saw again the look of pure unknowing on her face as he accused her. He wanted in this moment, more terribly than he would have believed possible, to die.
3
“Why didn’t you report it?” Iris said, crying. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell Michael?”
“Don’t,” Natasha said. “Please.”
They were at the kitchen table, facing each other. Iris reached across and took her hands. “Why didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t. Please.”
There was a slight pause.
“I talked to someone in Orlando, a policewoman. It — look, there’s nothing to be done.”
“Oh, God,” Iris burst out. “What am I saying?” She stood up and moved around the table and embraced her, holding her head against her abdomen, softly patting the side of her face.
Natasha wept, touching the back of the older woman’s hand.
A few moments later, her grandmother said, “God. I should’ve seen it. I knew there was something else. I should’ve pressed you until you told me.”
“It’s all right now. I feel better telling you.”
Iris sat down again. “You don’t think Michael — he’s not heading to Orlando—”
“We didn’t get as far as the name.”
Iris appeared to deliberate for a moment. “Honey, I’ve never seen two people more in love.”
Natasha waited, watching her begin to sniffle.
“God,” Iris went on, gaining control of herself. “I’m so sorry about it.”
“Don’t, please.”
They did not speak for a few moments.
Presently, she breathed the words out. “He’ll want to do something about it. He’ll be back and he’ll want to — you know he’ll — you’ll have to tell him all of it.”
“No. I can’t — I can’t have him know some of it.”
The other’s voice was steady now. “Tell me what you think he can’t know.”
“I let — I let the — let him kiss me. Oh, I want to get past it. I wish it never was.”
Iris waited for her to subside. “But that’s such a small thing, isn’t it? A moment’s failing. And you were afraid. You thought Michael was — you were alone and he was alone and everyone was suffering this terrible thing. You didn’t know.”
Natasha sat there crying softly into her fingers. “It was hard enough telling you all that. And look what he thought. Without my saying anything. No, I can’t. I can’t.”
“You think he went to his apartment?”
Natasha looked into her eyes but did not speak.
The old woman held the handkerchief to her mouth and then wiped her eyes and her forehead. “You’ll get past this, honey. There’s people — I’m sure there’s people you can talk to. And you’re pregnant.”