The summer after Ray died all the kids from town gathered at the river to play on the rope swing. Claire took Paul out of the group home for dinner at their grandma’s, and after dinner she took him to the river. He was a good swimmer. All the summer kids were there — nameless batches of tan girls and boys who drove up from Connecticut to vacation for two weeks at a time, and the locals were there, too. They played a game called Crocodile Pit. You had to swing from one bank of the river to the other. When Paul took off his shirt, no one gawked, but she could sense their eyes on his belly, which sagged over the top of his swimming trunks. Everyone made it across the Crocodile Pit too quickly, within minutes it seemed, until there was only Paul and Claire alone on one side of the bank and the whole gang of kids on the other, watching and laughing and waiting. A boy swung the rope back to them.
“I got this,” Paul said and cracked his knuckles. From across the bank, someone yelled, “Yeah, man.”
“You sure?” Claire said. He nodded to her, “I’m sure,” and gripped the rope. He leaped off and swung gracefully out over the river, everyone cheering and hooting, but his momentum wasn’t strong enough to carry him all the way to the other side, or he was simply too heavy. He swung just inches short of the bank, and everyone let out a collective “Awww” as he swung back toward Claire, slower back and forth, until he hung clinging to the rope over the middle of the river.
“What do I do?” he shouted. The rope twisted him in one direction and then another.
“You’ll be OK, just let go,” Claire said.
“I’m too scared,” Paul shouted. “I can’t.” He was crying loudly, and the kids at the other side had gone silent.
“Here, on three, just let your hands go, ready? One, two, three,” said Claire. His swimming trunks were slipping down his hips, and his face turned red from the effort of holding on for so long. Still, she was surprised by his strength.
“I can’t do it,” he said. She watched as his hands lost their grip on the rope, inch by inch, and he yelped and cried. The rope spun him round and round until finally he fell into the water. He was screaming.
Paul resurfaced almost immediately. His body was always like that in water, effortlessly afloat. He could spend hours in the water when she took him to the pool, floating on his back like a pale, wide raft.
He crawled out on her side of the bank and pulled his trunks up. A boy from the other side of the river shouted across, “He’s cool, right? We’re going to go smoke,” and with that, the group crunched off into the woods.
Paul sat cross-legged on a rock. He was crying. It got dark and chilly, and his clothes were wet, and he wouldn’t talk to her. It was time to go. She took his hand and saw the red marks across his palms, slick and raw, from where the rope had burned him. They drove in silence, and she dropped him off like that, still crying, holding a tube of Neosporin. It was an unfair mess that Paul didn’t have his mom anymore, and that he had to take his ointment and go inside and go to bed in a house full of strangers with his hands the way they were. But Claire was only seventeen then. She owed something to Ray, to Paul too, but she didn’t know how to make good on it. So she started seeing him every Sunday. She’d only missed two Sundays in the past eleven years.
* * *
Paul has finished the pizza, all but the one slice Claire had taken for herself, which she picked at. She could confess her lie to Paul, but what would be the point? He doesn’t need her confession. She imagines that long-ago dinner when their grandma told him to stop jamming his face with food, and how as everyone yelled around him he hummed quietly to himself as he finished his spaghetti. She knows if she confesses now that he will say, “That’s OK,” and then ask her if she’s going to eat her crust.
Instead she says, “Would you like to come live with me and Hal?”
Paul shrugs. “I guess so. If you want.”
It’s settled between them as quickly as that. In the parking lot, Paul goes over to a streetlight, crouches down, and puts his hand on the pavement.
“Something happened here,” he says. He does this a lot, a sort of mystic ESP thing, as though he sees a movie of the past playing in front of him.
“What happened?” she says.
“It was a war,” he says. But that’s all he will say.
At home, she lies in bed next to Hal and looks at him. She has not told him about her invitation to Paul, and for all he knows about her, he doesn’t know the secrets of her face tonight: Paul, Werewolf, her darkness. Her thoughts from earlier about the werewolf feel distant and crazy, hard to parse if she were to try to repeat them now in bed, like a difficult math equation she cannot solve twice. What remains is the vague sense that what drives her to goodness is not purity, but rather some dark place that needs to mask itself, again and again.
“Hey,” Hal says, and reaches out to the necklace he gave her on their last anniversary, an inlaid emerald. “Your hair is all wound up in the chain.”
So it is — a dark snarl of hair knotted at the clasp — and though she picks and picks at it, the hair is wound too tightly to untangle tonight.
She turns on her side and Hal puts his arm around her. He is a good man, and he loves her, so that must be proof of something. She knows Hal will come to accept Paul’s move into their home, though maybe not immediately. But Paul is hers, and Hal is hers, and so in time it will work out. And between her mantra, she thinks about the healthy meals she’ll cook Paul once he moves in, and the room she’s always thought of as the nursery that could be his room instead, and what color she will paint it.
This Is Who She Was
There isn’t any good place to start.
I have a picture. In the picture two women share a kitchen. Checkered floor. Wire basket of lemons.
One of the women is Ruth. I am the other. The men, hers and mine, are not in the picture. Ruth squeezes lemon juice into a blue bowl. I remember her hands were covered with paper cuts. How could a person get so many paper cuts? I didn’t do anything when her hands started burning but watch her rinse them with cold water.
In my mind Ruth will always be wincing in the kitchen, squeezing lemons. I will always be watching.
* * *
The picture was taken on the night before our trip to Florida. Jay, Ruth’s husband, snapped it with my camera. Their son Luke was my boyfriend. We’d only been together a few months but he’d invited me to join their family vacation. The vacation was a reunion so that Ruth could see her sisters.
“Get good sleep,” Jay said. Luke’s childhood bed was short; our feet hung off the end. Luke made too much noise when he pushed himself inside me. The fitted sheet came loose and bunched under my back. My necklace clasp kept snagging on the pilled polyester of the mattress.
Afterward Luke fell asleep with his fingers strumming between my legs and I moved his hand away, spread the sheet over my lap and touched myself. My finger circled a flickering pleasure, but the pleasure kept coming and going.
When I opened my eyes Luke’s eyes were open and on me. Play dead. My pulse kicked in my ears. The sheet was a coil of heat in my lap, and the room was laced with the smell of our dirty sleep, like strawberry yogurt, I’ve always thought, never sure if it was his smell or mine. He closed his eyes again, went back to snoring. Ruth was pacing in the hallway. I knew it was Ruth because of her soft footfalls.
Later when I got up to pee she was a dark shape standing by the window at the top of the staircase. I tried to turn her into something else, coats on a coat rack or a curtain, a trick of the eye, but then her weight shifted. I hurried into the bathroom.