“This is not what I wanted.”
They sat on the beach, Heidi hugging her backpack, Johnson plunging his fist in the damp sand.
“It’s what I want,” Heidi said. “Calvin, I love you. I know you don’t love me, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t want you to be alone.”
“You’re too young to even know what you’re saying.” He was crying now, for Kate, or Heidi, he wasn’t sure. Both, maybe. Each cursed, all of them cursed. All of them the luckiest people in the world to have known each other, a day or forever. “Me and Ela—you’ve got to know how terrible it’s been for us. For her, especially. And we didn’t even ask for it. And you willingly did it. I don’t understand.”
“I love you, Calvin.” Her eyes were wet. He could not tell if it was the sting of the salt air, if she was upset. “Is it that hard to understand? Like you…and Kate.”
“That is not the same,” he spat. He grabbed her shoulder as she turned from him, to run away. “Don’t go. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just…you’re a kid. You don’t know what you’re feeling. When I was your age, I was going to marry this divorcée, Eva Darson. Then, I went into the Army and realized how stupid it was.”
“Don’t tell me my feelings are stupid.” She dug her pointy chin into the top of the backpack and squeezed her eyes. “If my feelings are stupid, then all of our feelings are stupid.”
“You don’t even know for sure…if it worked.”
“Don’t worry.” She pulled Stanley’s revolver out of her backpack. “We’ll know.”
He grabbed for the gun, falling on her, as it went off. Underneath him, she moaned. He cradled her head in his hand and rolled to the side, running his hand over her shoulders, chest, down her body until he found it, the blood pooling on the top of her foot.
“If it doesn’t heal, we just go to the emergency room,” she said, gritting her teeth, throwing the revolver into the surf. They watched the ocean spit it back. “We’ll just say we got mugged.”
“You…I can’t believe it.” He untied her sneaker and pulled it off. He pushed his finger in the wound and enlarged it with his finger, feeling the tip of the bullet lodged in the bone. In the backpack, he fumbled for the Swiss Army knife, pulling out the tweezers.
“Here.” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and pressed it against her lips. “Bite down. I don’t care if you bite a hole through it. Just don’t let go.”
He sat on top of her leg so that it was between his and plunged the tweezers into the hole, holding her foot still with his other hand. The bullet slipped once, twice, through the tweezers until he was able to get a grip, freeing it from the pulp of blood and flesh and bone shards.
“Jesus Christ!” She shouted behind him. “Why the hell did I throw my life away with you? What the hell am I doing? Oh hell, hell, hell!”
“You’re not biting my wallet, like you should,” he answered, and she responded by beating his back with her fists. He turned and held up the bullet to her.
“It’s out.” He dropped into her palm. “Not everyone gets a souvenir from Coney Island like this. I’m going to get some napkins. Don’t move.”
“Can you get me hot dog, too?” She pulled herself to a sitting position. “The pain is making me hungry as shit.”
They ate Nathan’s hot dogs and French fries and watched the moon on the water. He wrapped his arm around her and imagined a white sheet lying lightly over Kate’s body. He then imagined it in the morgue while her coffee mugs, her comforter, her slippers, her Krasner, lay in waiting, not knowing she had passed away. And then they would be taken from their rooms, discarded or sold, asked to hang on other people’s walls, touch other people’s lips, and they could not protest, not grieve that her hands, her eyes, would never caress and validate them. Quietly and efficiently, the evidence of her life would be disassembled, except for his memories, other memories that her sons and their wives and her coworkers and friends had, but to which he was not privy. He had only his version of Kate’s life, and it would have to do. If she had not loved him like he loved her, she loved him somehow, the way in which she was capable. The same way he would love Heidi.
“I’m sorry, Calvin,” Heidi wept into his shoulder.
“Shh—it just hurts, honey.” He had put the napkins, yellow ones with “Nathan’s Hot Dogs” printed in green on them, between her sock and foot and tied the shoe tightly, hoping to stem the bleeding. “Shh. Just try and get some sleep.”
“We can’t sleep on the beach.”
“If someone comes, I’ll just carry you somewhere.”
“Let’s go see Woody Guthrie’s house. I want to see where you lived.”
“Okay; that’s exactly what we’ll do tomorrow.” He pressed his hands around the slippery sneaker, splotches of blood appearing between his fingers. He could feel his heart in his throat. If she did not clot soon, she would slip into unconsciousness, hypothermia. He took the shoe off her good foot and rubbed the foot and her hands.
“I’m so sorry about Kate, Calvin. I didn’t mean to…to do this to upstage her.”
“I know you didn’t.” He did not know what to say. Heidi did it for him. She doomed herself to misery because, even if she was young and stupid, she loved him. Or thought she did. He continued to rub her foot. She still shivered, and he wrapped his jacket over her. He pulled out the napkins, drenched in blood, and wrapped new ones on her foot, pulling on her sock. An hour later, he did this again. Heidi’s eyelids drooped; he could not understand what she said to him.
“I’m taking you to the hospital.” He got to his feet and slid his arms underneath her. “This has gone on long enough.”
“No.” She struggled in his grasp. “I feel better. I can feel something happening in my foot. You have to believe me.”
“I don’t know.” He eyed the growing mound of bloody napkins beside him. “I was stupid enough to let you come along to New York and ruin your life; I might be stupid enough to let you die, too.”
“You didn’t ruin my life.” She shook her head drunkenly. “My life was terrible before I met you.”
She opened her eyes, clear and beautiful, like some alien currency, and he felt a little flush on his cheeks. He imagined Stanley loving her, loving her so much it made his chest hurt, and he felt the hurt as well, the mix of pride and bewilderment and he wasn’t sure what else. Something that had grown in his body like ivy. He wanted to know her better, share things with her. He kissed her on the ear and then her lips, warming them with his.
“Stop,” she giggled. “I don’t want your pity. Just look—look at it one more time.” She wriggled her foot slowly and grimaced as he peeled off the napkins, bright red with blood but not as bloody as the last.
“Well, I guess you don’t need to be carried, princess.” He held up her foot, a pale fish blanched with a red, now only weeping, wound. “Looks better.”
“Holy crap.” She smiled at him, and he laughed. What could go wrong? A lot, but right now, an ending, a beginning, was happening. A lighthouse, a buoy, a place for a night’s respite, as they lay entwined, before heading back into the storm.