“You’ve taken up with Fairen.”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” she spat. “You wanted her all along.”
He felt his lip curl. “Who cares whether I did or not? And since when do you give a shit about what I want? I say no, and what do you do? You blockade the goddamn door.”
She pushed the heels of her hands across her cheeks. Shaking her head, blinking down at the ground, she said in a hopeless voice, “I ought to turn you in for what you did to me that day. I never… invited you to do anything that… violent.”
He bristled and felt something inside him turn. “You go ahead and do that,” he retorted. “You’re going to do—what? Accuse me of rape?”
“Maybe I will.”
Snorting a laugh, he recoiled, taking a step backward. “Go for it. Get right on it. Bet you they’ll find evidence for it all over the fucking place. Bet Russ is sleeping in some of it right now.” He shook his head. “Maybe I’ll turn myself in. Would that simplify it for you?”
She lifted her face in a delighted smile, as if he’d just told a great joke, her eyes bright. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
“Damn, you’re big with the threats all of a sudden. Why can’t you just let it frickin’ lie? It ran its course. Get over it, move on.”
Her shoulders heaved with an enormous sigh, and she took two steps forward to lean against a tree. She looked exhausted. He almost felt sorry for her.
“Couldn’t we just be together one more time,” she proposed in an even voice, “so the time in the den doesn’t have to be the last memory?”
When pushed, pull. He shook his head. “No.”
She shifted her gaze sideways, toward the line of cars. “Maybe we can drive someplace after school, just discuss it?”
“No.” She wanted to blow him, anybody could have guessed that. He wasn’t even the smallest bit tempted. It wasn’t out of the question that he’d find his orgasm interrupted by an icepick in his chest, like in the movies. Not a turn-on.
She nodded, resigned. “Can I hug you goodbye, at least?”
“No,” he said a third time, but she was already coming toward him, arms outstretched, and there hadn’t been a great distance between them to begin with. Stiffly he allowed him self to be hugged, and with a quick economy of movement she slipped her retreating hand into the front of his pants. He grabbed her by the wrist.
“I said no,” he told her.
Her smile was brittle. She’d only managed to get her hand between his jeans and boxers, and with his hand clenching the tendons in her wrist, her cold fingers flailed like a mouse caught by the tail.
“I hope she enjoys it,” she said. “It’s wonderful.”
She retreated and walked past him into the school, her body small beside the hulking frame of the workshop. Zach turned toward the building, looking around guardedly for faces in the windows; finding none, he ran a hand through his hair, the snowflakes melting at his touch into pinpoint cold. With a low grumble in his throat he made his way back toward the workshop, hiking his jeans higher on his hips, to face the forge.
Rhianne had said nothing further before she left me that morning. She didn’t need to. She had said enough.
After she left my classroom to tend to her three imaginary children I retreated to the bathroom, where I threw up three times. Coffee splattered on the rim of the toilet bowl, on the tile, on my jumper. I rested my forehead against the cool tile wall until I heard a knock and a small voice saying, “Mrs. McFarland, I have to go pee.”
I called in the music teacher to watch my children for the day. Then, except for a detour to the workshop, I went home, where I retired to the floor of a bathroom reserved for my own use. And there I stayed, my hands sweaty on the porcelain, staring into the water.
The water in the sink floated with my mother’s underwear, broad polyester panels that undulated like jellyfish between the dollops of Fels-Naptha foam. Next to it, shucked aside at a careless angle, sat the box of matches. The old wooden radio, elegant and well-dusted, blared out a melody at high volume: baby don’t leave me ooh please don’t leave me all by myself. The matches smelled of sulfur. The flame, in its small way, held the whole spectrum of color. It’s very, very wrong, you know, said the rhyme in my schoolbook, and even at ten my nerves tingled at the thought of it, perhaps because I was my father’s daughter.
Each doorknob was cold bronze. Turn, turn; and then again, turn. The irony: I knew before I opened it what I would see, and instead I saw nothing. But it burned into my mind anyway, skipping right over the part I could reach and embedding itself in the deepest recess, a stone falling into a pool so fast and so smoothly that the surface records barely a ripple. And now, having dived much too deep into that part of the water lately, I could brush against it without meaning to. There it was: two adults nude and sweating, Kirsten’s head hanging off the edge of the bed, her braids loosened and flopping against the mattress, a sloppy metronome. My mother’s pillow wedged beneath her back, my father’s face snarled like that of a barbarian from a warlike tribe, hideous and rude and dismal to behold. The smell of it was thick in the air, her arousal and his, entirely foreign to my senses. And if the language of that nation sounded to me like the original speech of humanity, then here was that which came before language—the voice at the core of every human in the world, when the breath moves in concert with the drive to continue the species.
Forget about it. Banish it. God help you that you should look upon such a scene and realize that someday you will want it, too.
I thought the horror was in what I saw, but I was wrong. The horror came as I realized that, for what he had done, the child in me was right to blame him entirely, and the adult in me blamed him not at all.
Russ stayed in his upstairs office the entire evening, and for once I did not resent his absence.
Once my stomach ran out of things to throw up I sat down at the table with a cup of weak chamomile tea dribbled with honey and Rescue Remedy. I thought about the day Zach and I had felted balls for the craft sale, standing at this same table, apart in body but our desires, no doubt, the same. I had felt powerful then, exalted by him, an object of mystery. I had the power to grant any wish he might dare to utter. Now I was garbage to him. The kind that smelled.
There was a hard knock on the door, and I rose to answer. I felt relatively sure of who it would be, and was not surprised.
She said, “I’m not done talking to you.”
I stepped aside to let her in.
She entered my kitchen and stood beside the stove, her arms crossed over the front of her overalls. Her russet hair was ponytailed back. I looked past her to the teakettle on the back burner and checked to see if the gas was on.
In an indignant voice she demanded, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I said nothing.
“How could you?” she snapped. “You. Princess Fairy Pixie-dust. Miss Wear Your Woolens So You Don’t Catch a Chill. Explain yourself.”
I wondered if Russ would hear her and come down to see what the commotion was, if it became a commotion, which seemed likely. I dearly hoped he would not. I felt competent to handle an angry midwife, especially in the kitchen, but less sure of how to manage Russ. Most likely he would turn up the Ken Burns Jazz Collection and think harder about fish.
Her face darkened with frustration at my silence. More loudly, she asked, “How could you fuck a sixteen-year-old boy?”