“Rebecca?” I said, then said it again, because my voice sounded funny, slurred and slow, as though I were speaking under water.
“Just a sec,” she told me.
“Rebecca, come on.”
“Might as well,” Ash murmured. “I’m almost there. No hope for you.”
My wife glanced up – slowly, smoothly – and caught my eye. “Hear that? You’d think he’d beaten me all his life. Or ever. At anything.”
“I think we should go,” I said, as Rebecca’s head sank down over the metal tabletop again and her hands drifted to the ball-lever and buttons. I said it again, and my words got tangled up in that tune, and I was almost singing them, and then I smashed my jaws together so hard I felt my two top front teeth pop in their sockets. “Rebecca,” I snapped.
And just like that, as though I’d doused her with ice water, my wife shivered upright, and there were shudders rippling all the way down her body. Her skin seemed to have come loose. I could almost see it billowing around her. Then she was weeping. “Fuck him, Elliot,” she said. “Oh, fuck him so fucking much. God, I miss my mom.”
For one moment more, I stood paralyzed, this time by the sight of my weeping wife, though I could feel that tune bubbling up again in the back of my mouth, as though my insides were boiling, threatening to stream out of me like steam. Finally, Rebecca’s fingers found mine. They felt reassuringly bony and hard. Familiar.
“Let’s go,” she whispered, still weeping.
“Come on come on come on Yah? Ash screeched, started to hurl his arms over his head and stopped, scowling as the board flashed the number of the winner and the American flag man closed his eyes and popped the sides of his machine with his palms once more. “I had it,” said Ash, already hunching forward. “I really thought I had it.”
“Time to go, bud,” I told him, pushing my fingers against Rebecca’s so both of us could feel the joints grinding together. She was still shuddering, head down, and the rollergirl glided up and swept a new quarter from Ash’s machine and reached for the top one on Rebecca’s stack and Rebecca swatted the whole roll to the floor. The rollergirl didn’t look up or break her hum as she passed.
“Right now,” Rebecca said, looking up, letting the tears stream down. “It’s got to be now, Elliot.”
“Come on, Ash,” I said. “Let’s go get tapas.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, and the big board flashed, and he was playing again. The kid in the headphones won in a matter of seconds.
“Ash. We need to leave.”
“Almost there,” he said. “Don’t you want to see what you win?”
“Elliot,” Rebecca said, voice tight, fingers like talons ripping at my wrist.
“Ash, come—”
“Elliot. Run.” She was staring up into the magician’s hat, then at the American flag man, who didn’t stare back, hadn’t ever seemed to notice we were there.
Another number on the board, another flurry of fingers and rattle of pinballs, another burst of laughter from the poodle-skirt women. Then we were gone, Rebecca yanking me behind her like a puppy on leash. Low humming sounds streamed from our mouths as we struggled through the white curtain and just kept going.
“Hey,” I said, trying to shake her fingers just a little looser on my arm, but she didn’t let go until we were through the outer canvas, standing in the biting air on the wet and rotting dock. Instantly, the tune was gone from my mouth and ears, as though someone had snapped shut the lid of a music box. I found myself trying to remember it, and was seized, suddenly, by a grief so all-engulfing I could barely breathe, and didn’t want to. Tears exploded onto my cheeks.
Rebecca stirred, let go of my arm, but turned to me. “Oh,” she said, reached up, stuck her finger in one of my teardrops and traced it all over my cheek, as though finger-painting with it.
“I don’t know why,” I said, and I didn’t. Butithad nothing to do with Ash, or Ash and Rebecca, or Rebecca’s dead mother, or our strange, loving, incomplete marriage. It had to do with our daughter. So new to the world.
“Come on,” she said.
“What about our friend in there?”
“He’ll follow.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“He knows where we live. He’s a big boy.”
“Rebecca,” I said, but realized I didn’t know what I was going to say. What came out was, “I don’t know. There’s something . . .”
Around us, the sea stirred, began to slap against the shore and the pilings beneath it. We could feel it through our feet. The reassuring beat of the blood of the earth. There was a mist now, too, and it left little wet spots on our exposed skin.
Rebecca shrugged. “It’s just where my dad is. Where he’ll always be. For me.”
Then we were walking. Again, our footsteps sounded strange, made almost no sound whatsoever. There was still no moon overhead, only grey-white clouds, lit from behind from millions of miles away. The fishermen had remained in their places, but they’d gone almost motionless, leaning over their lines into the night as though every single one of them had gone to sleep. I saw the guy who’d caught the ray, but the ray was no longer in his lap, and I wondered what he’d done with it. Looking up, I saw the blacked out buildings of old Long Beach, seemingly further from us than they should have been, wrapped in mist and scaffolding like mothballed furniture in an attic. By the time we reached our car, the feeling in my chest had eased a bit, and I was no longer crying and still couldn’t figure out why I had been. Rebecca was shivering again.
“Let’s wait here for him,” I said, and Rebecca shivered harder.
“No.”
She got in the car, and I climbed in beside her. I turned on the ignition but waited a while. When Rebecca looked at me next, she was wearing the expression I’d become so familiar with, this last, long, sweet year. Eyes still bright, but dazed somehow. Mouth pursed, but softly. “Take me home to see my girl,” she said.
I didn’t argue. I stopped thinking about Ash. I took my wife home to our tiny house.
That was Friday. Saturday we stayed in our neighborhood, took strolls with our child, went to bed very early and touched each other a while without making love. Sunday I got up and made eggs and wondered where Ash had gone and whether he was angry with us, and then we went hiking up the fire trail behind our subdivision into the hills, brown and strangled with drought. I didn’t worry, really. But I started calling Ash’s Oakland bungalow on Monday morning. I also called the hospital where he worked, and on Thursday, right when he’d apparently told Ms Paste he would return, he turned up as scheduled for his shift on the ward. I got him on the line, and he said he had rounds to do and would call me back. He didn’t, though. Then, or ever.
After that, I stopped thinking about him for awhile. Itwasn’t unusual for Ash to disappear from our lives for months or even years on end. I already understood that adult friendships operated differently from high school or college ones, were harbors to visit rather than places to live, no matter how sweet and safe the harbor. Rebecca never mentioned him. Our baby learned to walk. The next time I called the hospital, maybe six months ago, I was told Ash no longer worked there.
Last night, late, I climbed out of my bed, looked at my daughter lying sideways, arms akimbo, across the head of her crib-mattress like a game piece that had popped free of its box slot and rolled loose, and wandered into the living room to read the newspaper. I opened the Calendar section, stared at the photograph on the second page. My mouth went dry, as though every trace of saliva had been sucked from it, and my bones locked in place. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even think.