The next day I went to the house of a woman named Mrs. da Silva to walk her dog. I went there twice a week during the afternoon, before my evening shift began at the bar.
It was easy money, and Mrs. da Silva paid well.
Her house was just off Enansa Street, set back behind a tall row of palms. It was big and white and the front lawn was wide. All the houses on this street had wide front lawns. It was a slow area where rich people with kids liked to live. The sound and smell of the ocean drifted to their windows from the boulevard onto which the street fed at one end.
And the cars that drove down this street and parked outside its houses were slick and black and low. On this afternoon they were hot in the sun.
The gardener was working on Mrs. da Silva’s lawn, moving slowly around the beds at its edge. He wore a white T-shirt and he was sweating so that it clung to him in places and hung down in others.
Mrs. da Silva opened the door and said, “How are you?” emptily, the way she always did, while the big dog ran out, barking and flailing drool around the front lawn.
“This dog, this dog,” she said, and then called out, “Gunner! Gunner, come here! Oh, he always listened to Frank but not to me.”
I called, “Gunner!” He came over and dropped a plastic chicken on the grass beside my feet. Mrs. da Silva had never liked him much, I felt. He was her late husband’s dog and I don’t think she had ever really wanted him. I liked him and I think he liked me. Animals didn’t usually like me much. They could feel that I didn’t trust them or something like that, but not him, stupid lumbering dog.
Too big for himself.
The dog and I walked down the boulevard and over the concrete under the palms onto the sand, which was hot when I took my shoes off. Here and there people were lying on brightly colored towels, and kids were running about with plastic buckets, and girls in cheap swimsuits walked in twos along the fringes of the surf, looking surreptitiously at the people they passed.
And the water lay beyond them, blue and bright in the late sun, flecked with white reflected light, the lines of surf rolling in and crumpling on the sand.
I stood watching it for a long time and tried to follow the movements of the light on the surface of the ocean.
It stayed blue on the inside of my closed eyes.
Late that night I sat on the floor in the dark beside the refrigerator, leaning back against the kitchen cupboards. The lights in the apartment were off for once and the refrigerator drone had got into my head.
There was a bottle of whiskey on the floor beside me which was almost empty.
The place was an old peeling heap, an ugly dump, with the leak in the ceiling and the spiders in the corners and the stains on the walls and the hammering pipes. Two lousy years’ backdrop, two years of squalling sprawling drunks outside the window, of broken glass, of lights and wailing sirens, the sounds of the sea and late-night street laughter.
My phone buzzed in my pocket and I took it out and looked at the little blue light of its screen shining flatly on the skin of my hand. Tricia.
Tricia was the cousin I was raised with. She lived down south of La Maya now, with a husband and two sons. Those kids were crazy. I had been to visit her only once and the kids had charged around the house screaming and screaming and then the older boy had bitten my arm, hard. I had had to flush it out with iodine.
I put the phone on the floor beside me and let it ring out, watching the screen. She would be sitting at home now waiting for her husband to get back from work, and the kids were probably still running around out of bed even at this hour, screaming, breaking furniture, biting things. They loved to bite things. Tricia said that one of them had bitten a neighbor’s dog recently. The dog was now agoraphobic and would not go outside.
The phone kept ringing. I turned it off.
Cal was in my head tonight. He was there most nights but there were times when he was more there than others, more insistent.
It was all this bad thinking, it brought him out, made it hard to sleep.
When I married him I was nineteen and it was a burning day in the middle of August. The summer was hot and long. We had gone to a little wooden shack church down in Tana Beach. I’d worn a white sundress borrowed from a friend, and it was a little too big so one strap kept falling off my shoulder all through the ceremony, and I had seen myself in the reflection of the glass window behind the altar, standing in this dress which was slightly too big and holding these blue flowers which cost two livra from the shop on the corner, holding them a little awkwardly, and Cal standing there beside me also a little awkward and a little drunk, and I’d had the sudden urge to laugh.
Those words we said.
Even the old minister didn’t sound like he believed them. One other body to have and to hold until death do us part, one sweating, swearing, beautiful, clever, lazy, apathetic bunch of cells to keep you until the bitter end. And if you said the right words you got to walk out of that little church with a piece of paper to prove it, and then one day that piece of paper would become one of the pieces of paper that they stack together and put in a box when you die, all ready to give away to your family while they fight out the scraps left around the negative space that used to contain you.
Afterward on our wedding night, buzzed with beer and adrenaline, Cal and I broke into an old house just off Tana Beach.
It was an abandoned place, I think, or at least semi-abandoned, somebody must have still owned it because there had been a For Sale sign nailed to one of the front windows for as long as I could remember, and we were walking past it arm in arm or hand in hand or whatever we used to do back then. And there was this old place and I said to Cal, “I wonder who used to live there.”
He said, “Nobody for a long time.” Then he said, “Some bored housewife. Some bored husband.”
I looked at him. “You don’t know that. Maybe they were happy.”
He shrugged, said, “I posthumously wish them every happiness.” And he said it and there was evening light on his face and I remember the feeling of something I used to sense in him, a rawness under the surface.
At the time I mistook it for freedom.
So Cal went over and looked up and down the street and rattled at the bolt on the door, which was old and just a kind of sliding bolt and not a real lock, and he said, “It’s loose,” and he said, “Shall we go in?”
And I laughed and felt a little giddy and said, “Yes, quick, yes,” and he rattled about with that lock for a moment and put a plank against it and twisted and it came away from the wood of the frame, and the door swung open and he disappeared inside.
I followed him.
The place stank of must and dust. It was dark apart from a few long red slit shapes which were made by the last of the setting sunlight coming in through the gaps between window boards, and there was sand everywhere which must have come in over the years and heaped up in drifts, heaped up against the walls and the staircase and all the furniture.
Together we walked through old rooms full of red and dark.
Outside the sun went down into the sea.
Much later after it was completely gone we sat in the deep seat of an upstairs window and looked out over the ocean which was navy and the full night sky and the heavy moon which sat copper between the two, and the air was thick with the smell of old dust and the sounds of the settling house and the old roar of the waves.
I ran my fingertips over Cal’s hands and found the ridges of calluses over the tops of his palms and on the inside of his fingers, and found the small creases on the ball of his thumb and his bitten nails.
His hands were warm and dry and his skin was paper.
He left me a year after we married, a year to the day.
I woke up one morning and he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in bed. His jeans weren’t on the floor and his coat wasn’t on the door, but that was normal. At first I wasn’t worried. I thought he had gone down to the beach to smoke and watch the sun come up because he sometimes did that, and he always did it alone. He would leave the room and close the door behind him without making a sound and then come back an hour or so later and the cold on his skin would wake me in the hazed-out light after dawn.
Or he had gone to buy fried fish for breakfast from the stall on the street corner by the beach. I thought he would come back within the hour, and I sat on the end of the bed and watched the wall clock, and it got later and I had to go to work, and at work they saw that something was off and said everything all right, Anne Marie, and I said yes. And I held the empty cold somewhere away from my body, held it on the edge of my mind and didn’t let it in yet because he might still come back, I might still go home at the day’s end and find him there smelling of salt water and sweat, which were the things he smelled of.
And I didn’t.
I came home and he wasn’t there.
He had left almost all of his clothes behind and so one afternoon I went down to the beach and put them in an oil drum and burned them because someone had told me to do it. I think they had got the idea from a film or something; it was a concept much touted in pop culture. They said they had done it themselves once and it had made them feel better. It didn’t make me feel better. I watched the light die on the ocean through greasy black smog and got drunk and fell asleep on the sand.
Bent and broken pit of a man.
Cal. Jesus.
For a long time after he left I could remember his hands better than I could remember his face.
I leaned back against the kitchen cupboards and sank down into the smoke.