IT HAD ALMOST BEEN A GAME. Fuck up and see how quickly the news gets home. Fuck up and see if she’ll be waiting on the porch swing when you get there. Fuck up and see if the bedroom door is locked. But on the day Dixon had shoved Colburn off the barstool there had been none of this. He followed routine, leaving the bar and driving around until late at night and then coming home. No lights on in the living room. Going inside and she wasn’t sitting there. Going to the bedroom and the door was open and he waited for Sadie to say something but she didn’t. He had stripped down to his boxer shorts, trying not to make a sound. Trying to slide into bed without waking her. Lying down and pulling the sheet across his chest and then she reached over and took the sheet and moved it from him. Slid her hands into his boxers and worked them down his legs and off his feet and she was naked and she crawled over him. Straddled him. Leaned and put her mouth to his and their bodies that had been so long strange to one another found familiarity in the dark. Aggressive with one another and wrestling with one another and working into a sweat through the deep and humid night. Each of them collapsing on their own side of the bed when it was done and they both slept in an unbothered sleep.
The next day when he left work he drove to the bar but he did not stop. Instead he bought a twelve-pack at the gas station and then he went home and pulled two steaks from the freezer. He stopped the sink and ran warm water and then set the steaks down in the water to thaw. When Sadie came home an hour later she found him in the backyard sitting in the sunshine and sipping a beer and he told her to grab one and join him. She did. They kept on sipping while he lit the charcoal and grilled the steaks. Puffs of clouds passed across the sky in the evening breeze and the whir of a neighbor’s lawnmower filled the silence. They had eaten outside, finishing the steaks just as twilight slipped away and then they were back in the bedroom and doing the same thing as the night before. The fitted sheet coming off the bed and a lamp knocked from the bedside table and the exhilaration of rediscovery.
And then the twins disappeared. Dixon showed up at the church parking lot every morning when the volunteers were divided into teams and he always raised his hand to go into the valley because he knew it was going to be the toughest search. He knew you would have to wrestle against the vines and step high and duck down and crawl around and whatever else but he wanted to be part of it. He wanted to be there when the twins were found. He wanted to walk in the house like a man and say we did it because that’s what he was beginning to feel like again. He showed up every morning filled with hope. And he came home every night broken with disappointment. Another day gone and another night to pass and they hadn’t found anything. And he had expected that the anxiety that covered the town would set him and Sadie right back into the old and tired version of themselves but she kept on. Grabbing him in the kitchen when he returned from the search and rubbing her hands along the scrapes and scratches on his hands and arms and then pulling his sweaty t-shirt over his head and shoving him into the bedroom and sometimes not making it to the bedroom but instead the sofa or the hallway or wherever they could find some leverage. Later when they were done they would talk about the day spent in the valley. Talk about the twins. Lying together in the bedroom. On top of the covers. Passing a glass of tea back and forth. Then falling asleep with their legs touching.
He thought about her while he was in the vines. He thought about her in the days when the searching paused, when he returned to his office and watched the hours tick away. He thought about her when he stopped in the bar to see Celia. He wondered if he was missing something.
Dixon was sitting in his recliner in the living room before work and browsed yesterday’s newspaper with one leg crossed over the other. Sadie shuffled into the kitchen wearing slippers and a robe and she poured two cups of coffee. She then took the cups into the living room. Set his cup on the table next to the recliner and then she sat down on the end of the sofa. Thin curtains allowed the morning light in and her green eyes stared at the wobble in the surface of the coffee.
Dixon folded the newspaper and dropped it on the floor. He stretched his arms. Picked up the coffee cup. He smiled at her but she did not give it back. She wore a towel wrapped around her head and she set down her cup and removed the towel. Pushed at her wet hair with both hands, thick brown locks bunched together like whips. She crossed her legs and her robe opened and showed her thighs and he gave her legs a wolfish glance as he took his first sip. She watched him and she uncrossed her legs and left them open for an instant, his eyes up into the space between her thighs and he held still with the cup at his lips until she shifted on the sofa and draped the robe back across her legs.
“You know that I know,” she said.
He blew on the coffee. Leaned back in the recliner.
“You know I know,” she said again.
“Know what?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to just admit it.”
“I’ve been here with you, Sadie.”
“Before all this.”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“Before, Dixon.”
“Before what?”
He shook his head as if giving up on a puzzle. Sipped the coffee.
“Pam was there,” she said.
He looked out of the window. Sadie folded her arms. He had never been a talker and never would be. If she never asked him a question she wondered if he would utter any sound at all and in their coming apart in the last months and years she had tried this experiment during their morning coffee. Sitting there in silence, waiting for him to be the first to speak. The first to say good morning or I got to get to work or I have a headache or did you sleep good or something. But she waited and waited and he just sat there until she prompted him and then he would answer and maybe a fraction of a conversation would follow and then he would get up and set his cup in the sink on his way out the door.
If they hadn’t spent most of the waning hours of their first year together sitting in a bar she would have figured out earlier that he wasn’t going to talk unless he had a drink and moody light and a lit cigarette but she hadn’t put it all together in time and here they were. Sixteen years later. Barely past twenty when they married and different people living together now and two cars and a house that needed a new roof and a lawnmower that only sometimes cranked. And memories neither one of them wanted to talk about.
When Pam called weeks ago and told her she had seen Dixon knock Colburn from the barstool, Sadie was happy that she had something to talk about. Something to say that mattered. A fight to pick. But then she had decided to go about it a different way and instead of sitting in the living room with a bent brow she instead took off her clothes and lay down in the bed. And now a month later she was ready to put an end to the part of his life that kept her guessing. Believing she had brought him that far in their weeks of lovemaking and comradery.
“I want you to apologize,” she said.
He looked up at her.
“Today,” she said. “When you get off work. That man hasn’t done anything to you.”
Dixon coughed. Fidgeted in the recliner. And then he said I don’t know where he lives and even if I did there ain’t no way in hell I’m going to apologize. He didn’t get hurt.
“It’s a miracle,” she said.
“What?”
“That you know what I’m talking about now.”
“I never said I didn’t.”
“You’re going to find him and apologize.”
“No I’m not.”
“Oh yes. You are. And you want to know why?”
“I don’t need to know why cause I’m not doing it.”
“Yes you are.”
“I don’t even know where he lives.”
“Yes you do. He’s in that building with the big window for the whole world to see.”
“I still ain’t doing it.”
She uncrossed her arms and lifted her feet from the coffee table and stood. She moved in front of him. Opened her robe and dropped it from her shoulders and she stood there in her bra and panties. He looked into her belly button and then she touched her fingers to his chin and lifted. His head fell back and his eyes met hers.
“Do you like what we’ve been doing?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you like the way it’s been feeling around here? Like we’re people again?”
He nodded.
“You don’t have to love me,” she said. “Or even if you do, you don’t have to love me as much as you love her. I watched you staring at her at the bar until I couldn’t take it no more and then when I couldn’t take it no more I let you go down there by yourself, knowing the daydreams running around in your head. You won’t make a fool out of me no more. You won’t fight about her and you won’t talk about her. With nobody.”
She moved her hand from his chin. Reached down and took his hands and she opened his palms. Ran them up her legs. Across her stomach. And then she moved them around to her ass and held them there and said because if you ever do that shit to me again it will be the last time your hands touch me here or anywhere. I’ll find what I need somewhere else and then you’ll get to be the fool. So when you go to leave work today, don’t come home. You go find him. You know where he is. You apologize and then you forget about her. And then we can keep living.