“Would you have heard if there is such a thing being tested?”
“Doubtful. No. Something that controversial would be cloaked in secrecy. I wouldn’t know about it until it hit the mainstream. And there’s nothing close to mainstream. I do keep up.”
It felt right to have her here. Comfortable. Easy. She drew down the beer, got up, and found her way through the kitchen drawers until she had what she needed to set the table. Dart enjoyed his moment off his feet.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked him, placing down a fork for his place.
“Kowalski,” he lied. He coughed.
“That cough sounds bad,” she said. “You live with that thing, don’t you?”
He didn’t feel like telling her about it. He had never told anyone and didn’t see why he should start now. He said, “It’s not the best story” and wondered how it was that his mouth had so purposely disobeyed his brain. “It’s a bad story, actually,” he added, wondering where that too had come from.
“You don’t have to tell me, you know.”
No, I don’t want to, his brain answered. “I had what you might call a reckless mother. A drinker. She was a drinker. And my father was nobody. I never knew him. At least I don’t think I did. But my mother was … her brother was a dealer. Big time. Lots of money. She was, I don’t know, confused. He took care of her. She was eighty miles of bad road is what she was. And I was on that road, at least at the beginning I was. The beginning for me. As a kid, you know. I ran errands. Cooked. Booze mostly, the errands. Bought her booze for her. I think about it now-this kid buying brown bags in the back alley. Jesus, what a time in my life that was.”
“Bad road?” she asked.
“An angry drunk,” he answered. He tried the beer. He didn’t want to talk about this, and he thought if he kept his mouth busy then maybe she would get the hint. Change the subject. It didn’t seem to work: She stared at him, waiting.
“She got confused about things. Money. The booze. Sometimes she would drink an entire bottle while I was at school, and by the time I got home she would think that I had never bought the bottle, that I had spent her money-as if it were hers anyway, the money. She got a check once a month. From the brother. Drug money, I later found out. Bad money.”
He felt a little more relaxed. It wasn’t as hard to talk about as he had imagined. She seemed interested, but not terribly upset. He had always thought that if he talked about it, the person would get upset-the way he felt about it. Mad. Real mad.
“So you got sick?” she asked. “The cough,” she reminded.
“No, no,” he said. “Not sick. I … she … when she got mad, when she mixed things up, she … she took it out on me. I was handy, I guess.”
“Hit you?” she asked, but in a way that sought to clarify, not accuse.
“Yeah,” he answered. “I guess so.” He thought about starting to eat the risotto. He was feeling nervous, not comfortable at all. “Yeah, she hit me,” he admitted. How many times had he lied to the school nurse about this? How many years had he covered for her? And on this particular night he suddenly unloads. What the hell is going on? he wondered. “Hit me all the time. And you can only take so much of that-I could only take so much of that-before you learn to run. It kind of trains you to be a coward,” he said. This came the hardest for him-that he had run. All these years later, and it still felt cheap to run from her. As if he didn’t measure up. He had always wanted to hit her back. He had never lifted a hand. Her face all bloated, her eyes unfocused. Who could hit that? he wondered.
“You don’t have to talk about this,” she repeated. A few minutes had passed. He realized he hadn’t touched his food. “But I want to hear, if you do want to talk about it.”
“I ran,” he said. He felt the stinging in his eyes, and he wondered if he should leave the table. “I ran,” he said again. He swallowed. It felt as if a chicken bone were stuck in there. “And I learned to hide until she settled down. Passed out is more like it. Used to find her on the floor. Like a beached whale. Lying there. I couldn’t move her. Thought she was dead. Wishful thinking, I suppose.” He felt tears running, and powerless to do anything about it. Abby didn’t seem fazed. She was still staring at him intensely, but he felt no judgment coming from her. She’s trained for this shit, he thought, suddenly understanding why he had picked this particular woman to unload on. She’s the one who could handle it.
He continued, “So I hid. The broom closet. The basement. There was a piece of furniture in the dining room that I could fit into. But she found me. Almost always. Until I discovered the dryer. The clothes dryer.”
Her face remained impassive, revealing no opinion, no sympathy, no pity, and yet he knew that she had heard him. He wondered if she could be so objective, so internally calm, or was this some kind of act that she had learned as a professional?
“She never thought to look in the clothes dryer,” he explained. “It became my first choice. And more than once I had been doing a load of laundry, and I would yank that laundry out of there as fast as I could and climb inside and pull the door closed.”
“The heat,” she said. “Your lungs.”
He nodded. His throat felt scratchy, but he didn’t want to cough in front of her, for it suddenly felt as if it would seem he had forced it. So he swallowed it away and said roughly, “Yeah. I figure I fried them hiding in there.”
He drank. Something to do. Keep his hands busy. Stop them from shaking. Somewhere to avert his eyes. He thought that maybe five minutes passed in complete silence. It felt more like an hour.
“Thank you,” she said.
He felt embarrassed all of a sudden. He had lowered his mask, and felt incredibly vulnerable.
“Is she still alive?”
“No, but she lasted a long time. I was eighteen. And I was still living with her. Don’t ask me why.” He hesitated. “She had control. I suppose that’s why.”
Abby came out of her chair and approached him. She bumped his chair and slipped a leg over him and sat down in his lap, facing him. She stroked his hair back at his temples and repeated, “Thank you.” She rubbed away the snail tracks left by his tears.
He experienced a kind of giddy high, flooded by the relief of having told someone. The kiss that followed was gentle but by no means innocent. He kissed his way across her chin and down her neck, and as he did she whispered, “Harder,” and he sucked the soft skin of her neck into his lips, and she shuddered and purred, “Umm.”
He leaned her back and kissed down into the loose neck of the sweater, as her hands slipped behind him and pulled his shirt free, and warm fingers scrambled over his back, sending flashes up his spine and gooseflesh head to toe.
Abby knew his secret, and knew his pleasure as well. Her back was hot to touch, and the more he kissed her neck the more excited she grew until she muffled a knowing laugh of pleasure signaling that they had crossed a line. In an explosion of energy, she got out of the chair and led him down the hall and into the bedroom, undressing herself as she went.
At that moment, the building’s hallway fire alarm sounded loudly. Dart smelled smoke. A curling fear ran down his spine. He had a great fear of fire, stemming from his drunken mother being a smoker.
Perhaps it was the clothes dryer as a child, or the memory of a range fire he had witnessed out west as a teenager-great sheets of bright orange sweeping the plains and spewing a thick charcoal gray into the blue, boundless sky-or perhaps, he thought, it was simply an intuitive response to something that could kill so quickly, but Dart felt a surge of panic, and though he saw Abby’s horrified expression and her mouth moving, he heard no words. She pulled on her clothes. She searched the apartment door for heat, dropped to her knees, and sniffed between the carpet and door.