GINGER’S VOICE, SWEET, DISTANT, SINGS:
Pack up all my care and woe—
—here I go
singing low.
Bye, bye, blackbird.
Jay is stretched out on the lumpen tweed sofa, with a leopard-print Snuggie as a comforter; he stares into the darkness and listens:
Where somebody waits for me
sugar’s sweet
so is she
bye, bye, blackbird.
She sings every night. The mental picture Jay has of Helen and Ginger in the high poster bed is borne of the glimpse he got into the bedroom as he shuffled down the hallway from the bathroom to his sofa: Helen clutching a well-worn, plush white stuffed mouse, curled small against the pillows, Ginger in an oversize blood-red Cal State Northridge T-shirt with socks still on her feet. Her face slick with tears.
No one here can love or understand me.
Her voice falters.
Oh what hard luck . . . stories . . .
She stops. The house is quiet for a while. Jay can hear his pulse in his ears, steady. Then, so softly her voice is a mere tracing on the darkness:
. . . light the light
I’ll arrive . . . late tonight . . .
Helen must be asleep. Jay pictures Ginger, motionless, afraid that if she moves she might wake the girl up. Her gaze is like nothing he’s ever seen in a woman, what he and Vaughn call quarterback eyes—in the zone: dead calm, scary focused, stripped of emotion despite the frequent unexplained spill of tears. Calculating and distant and confident and cold.
Is she crying now? Is she watching the up and down of her daughter’s breathing? Does she ever worry it will stop?
What does she not want to remember?
The light cast into the hallway from the bedroom snaps off.
The hush of night. Crickets. Distant roll of the ocean surf on the stoney beach.
Then, a child’s screaming.
He’s dreaming. His sister.
Cara?
No.
The lamplight behind the sofa flicks on, and Jay, squinting painfully, wonders how long he’s been asleep, or if he’s been asleep at all. A child’s screaming, not a dream. He stares stupidly at the luminous face of his watch, coiled on the coffee table. Little hand on the two. The screams are coming from the bedroom, staccato, hysterical. Jay gets up, his leg still asleep, and thumps down the hallway to the bedroom doorway, past which he can make out, in the ambient light from behind him, Helen, thrashing, screaming, still asleep but eyes wide open, mouth gaping, wild with a discarnate hysteria, and Ginger freaking out, trying to hold her and calm her with words:
“Babygirl, it’s okay, what’s wrong, I’m here, it’s okay, shhh, okay, I’m here, come on, it’s—”
Jay in the doorway, awkward, tentative, says something barely articulate that he means to be a question.
“Night terrors,” Ginger says.
Helen struggles and kicks: “No no no no—”
Jay’s head buzzes, anxious; he hasn’t felt this useless in a long time.
“Can you—” Ginger asks, her arms struggling to contain all Helen’s bad dreams, “can—”
“—What?”
“—hold her—just—while I—” Ginger looks up at him plaintively. Jay inadvertently takes a worried step back.
“You know, um, look, I’m not . . . really—”
Ginger barks. “I’m not asking you to fucking adopt her—”
“—kids aren’t my—” Cara had nightmares.
“—I just need some goddamn help for five fucking seconds so I can get a cold washcloth and—”
• • •
Helen shouts, kicks Ginger hard in the face, breaks away from her mother and darts for the doorway. And Jay is in it. He has no choice but to catch her up in his arms, grabs her, awkwardly, pulls her against his chest and holds her and she screams and her legs flail and her tiny hands slap against his shoulders with a torpid, halfhearted fury, and he’s never felt anything like it before, all that life in his arms.
“Okay,” Jay says, astonished, worried, “I got her. Here. Here—”
But Ginger powers past, veers around him, out of the bedroom and into the bathroom directly across the hallway.
“I got her,” Jay promises, although he’s not completely sure.
“It’s okay, honey, Helen”—Ginger calls back out at them, high-pitched, stressed, but as if sweetly—“it’s okay, it’s okay—”
Water running. Splashing in the basin. The rattle of a towel rack, the snap of fabric.
Helen screams.
Jay’s starting to lose his grip on her. “Um—”
A soft pink random kicking heel finally catches Jay in the groin and sinks him with a dull moan. But he holds on to the delirious little girl. It’s a test, he tells himself. He’s not going to fail it. And then Ginger is back with a cold, dripping washcloth that she gently draws across both sides of Helen’s face, and water runs down his arms, and he feels the static charge of Ginger next to him, impassioned, intense, and the little girl mumbles and squirms and winds down. Looming over them both, fragrant with perfume and soap, Ginger’s bare skin is cool when it brushes his, her eyes all in shadow, her cheek fiery where Helen smacked her. She helps Jay find his feet, and guides him, still holding on tightly to the little girl, back to the bed, where he eases Helen down in the soft rat’s nest of bedclothing and Ginger presses the washcloth to her forehead.
“It’s a dream, Helen,” she says softly. “Just a bad bad dream, babygirl, it’s okay,” and then, like a mantra: “Mommy’s here Mommy’s here Mommy’s here . . .”
Helen uncoils, limp. Still sleeping.
Ginger: “. . . shhhhhhhhhhh.”
Jay steps off, retreats to the doorway, looks once back over his shoulder, and leaves them alone.
• • •
Ginger finds him in the kitchen, hunched over the tiny breakfast table, steam from an Herbalife promotional coffee mug swirling like tiny ghosts, and two tea bags leaking puddles onto the Formica.
“Thank you.”
Jay looks up at her as if he’s seeing her for the first time: bare legs, wrinkled T-shirt, the gentle, awkward slope of her breasts, the nasty swelling on her face and ragged-weary cast of those eyes. Her fingers twist together with a kind of contrition.
“Look. I’m sorry, I . . . You know. What I said,” she adds.
Jay nods, noncommittal. “I made you some tea.”
“Thanks.”
But she doesn’t come into the kitchen, and Jay doesn’t make any move to hand her the other mug.
They allow the quiet that ensues. In the half a week they’ve been together, there’s been a lot of quiet, they’ve rarely talked, and Helen’s strange, fierce silence hasn’t required any pretense of token conversation.
Jay says it’s okay and they lapse into a second silence. He thinks about what Public told him was her crime—accessory to murder—and tries to reconcile it with the woman he’s been living with for the past three days. He’s not afraid of her. Should he be?
“There are buffalo here.”
Ginger nods. “From the movies. I read about it in a guidebook,” she says, “or supposedly. They brought fourteen here for a film shoot, and, typical, never bothered to take them back. Too expensive. Beefalo, actually. Part cow. Once there were as many as six hundred, but—” She fusses with her hair, abruptly self-conscious. Evidently she’s said way more than she intended, but wraps it up, anyway, subdued: “They had to put them on birth control.”
“What is going on, Ginger? Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know if I understand what you mean.”
“All this,” Jay says.
She’s frowning. “Okay.”
“This is weird. What we’re doing.”
“Witness program?”
“Yeah.”
“Weird.” Ginger hesitates, as if she suspects it’s a trick question. “Yes it is.” Careful: “But, seriously, what about the witness protection program is a surprise? You gotta sign about a million documents to get a new life.”
“What if I don’t want a new life?”
“Your old one was that good?”
This stops Jay short. He shakes his head, stares at the reflection of light in his tea mug. “I never thought it would be subject to comparison,” Jay says. “It was what it was.”
“Yeah, that was cheap. I’m sorry,” Ginger says, sad suddenly, then offers, gently, “Thanks for helping me with Helen. You’ve got a knack with kids.”
Jay looks up at her. “No, I don’t.”
Ginger nods. “Maybe not.” She takes a moment to try and find another compliment, can’t, so resorts to a hopeful: “But.” Then a sadder: “Well.”
“What was your old life like?” Jay asks her.
Ginger doesn’t have to think about it. “Hard,” she says quickly, and with an inflection that tells him she doesn’t want to be asked a follow-up.
But Jay can’t stop himself: “Public says you helped kill somebody.” If it’s outrage he wants to hear from her, he doesn’t get it.
She looks incredibly sad, then her eyes flash something savage that she veils quickly, countering curtly with, “Public says your name is James,” in a way that makes it clear she knows it’s not.
Point taken.
A third lapse of silence. It swells, fills the house, overcomes them. “So.” A soft exhale of breath and Ginger steps back from the doorway, slipping into darkness.
Jay calls after her, “I’m here by mistake.”
No response.
Her footsteps, the rustling of blankets, the sigh of the mattress.
Jay gets up and turns out the light, but returns to the table and stays in the kitchen for quite a while longer, to finish his tea.