14

Sunday night

They arrange the two cots perpendicular to the front wall of the bunker and sit on the cots facing each other. Her hands are pressed between her knees. She glances about the small space, cramped with the two open cots and two folded ones and the provisions they have brought from the house. Through the thick steel door, the sounds of the storm are muted. But it is still out there like an animal on the prowl, growling, circling.

“Why four cots?” she says. “There isn’t space for more than two when they are open.”

“Sometimes,” he says, “Uncle Hobart didn’t think things through so well. He had, as they say, an alcohol problem.”

Ace is hunched over, gripping the edge of the cot he’s seated on. “Truth is, he was a four-flushing drunk.”

“Are you OK?” she says.

“No. I can’t do this, sit here in this tight space. It’s like the bunkers we got shelled in in Vietnam. And these military style cots don’t help.”

“Back to the house?” she says.

“No.”

He puts on his rain gear with trembling fingers, adjusts the hood, and uses his foot to shove the metal door open a hand’s width. Rain drops spatter in. Outside, wind whistles, trees groan, limbs pop and break, unknown objects skitter and strike other objects. The ocean roars above the shriek of the storm.

Ace takes a seat on the concrete floor next to the door and faces out into the air lock between the bunker and front wall, with his arms draped over his knees. The tin roof shields him from the worst of the rain, but the wind whips through and blows out the candles. If the generator goes, they will be completely in the dark.

“Do you want to talk some more about Vietnam?” she says.

“No.”

He can feel her there behind him, not moving, her eyes on the back of his head.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s OK. I just want to help.”

“Do you want to talk some more about Seth and your daughter?”

“There’s not much else to say.”

“He sounds like a brave man.”

“Yes, he was very brave.”

The space between them fills with an empty silence.

“I slapped Anna once,” she says, “really hard. She was only fifteen and small for her age, and I didn’t know how strong I was. I’d been playing a lot of tennis, in sort of a compulsive way to take out my anger over her behavior and Seth’s increasing non-involvement with everything. She came in late one night drunk, probably on drugs as well, a good two hours past her curfew. She’d been pulling this sort of thing for months, and finally I’d had it. We got into a nasty argument. She had her share of teenage surliness, but I’d never seen her like that, fists at her side, hurling curses. At one point I thought she was going to spit. The slap was reflexive, like my whole body convulsed. I hit her so hard she fell backwards against a chair and then down on her knees. I stood over her daring her to get up. She kept her head down until I finally backed a few steps away. I continued to look down at her bowed head, and I remembered how it felt against my chest when she was a baby and Seth and I cuddled her for the first time at the adoption center. She was so tiny. Her eyes were closed, and on her squinched little face was the most heartbreaking mixture of obliviousness and hope. And her hands—baby hands with that look of not being quite formed, fingers crimped yet moving as if to grab onto something.

“I looked down at the hand I’d slapped her with. The hot sting in it radiated all over me. My muscles were tense, my wrist primed and ready to strike again. I began to shake all over. She started to get up, and I reached out to her, but she pulled away. My handprint glowed bright red on her pale face, so different from my complexion and Seth’s. There were tears in her eyes, but she would not let them spill. Her jaws were clinched, and she had that stomach-turning look of both the deepest kind of hurt and the hottest kind of hatred.

“She started toward the front door. I lunged and grabbed her arm, but she jerked it away, ran out the door, and slammed it behind her, right in my face. I threw it open and watched her as she ran down the street in front of our condo, down the middle of it, and out of sight. It was the first time she ran away. I finally found her living with a family in a rough part of town. I think the parents were using drugs. She was out of school and therefore away from friends she was close to, and she clearly was not getting enough to eat. I talked her into coming home. But it was never the same; it only got worse.”

He is about to say that being a parent is hard and that what she did is understandable, that he might have reacted similarly if his kids had gone on drugs and cursed him and Pam. Instead he says: “And you are not able to forgive yourself.”

“No. Every time I try, I hear that slap. I see her face as a baby when I lifted her from the crib at the adoption center. Except her baby eyes are wide open, staring at me.”

“I’m sorry, J’nelle.”

“Thanks,” she says, “me too.”

Ace listens as the storm lashes the nearby trees and the metal roof over the cubby between the protective wall and front door of the bunker. Rain through the crack in the door pops on the hood of his rain jacket and drips into a puddle forming around him on the floor. If he could bear to move away from the open door and back into the bunker, he would get up, sit next to her on the cot and hold her. Instead he reaches behind him and touches her ankle and squeezes it, then slowly lets it go and leans forward again, arms crooked over his knees.

“I had a case once,” he says, “that haunts me, especially late at night when I wake up and realize I’m alone. In the late 1980s, I represented a guy in Paxton County, up near the Virginia border, for assaulting his wife. He beat her so bad she spent two days in the hospital. This guy was a real piece of work: rich, arrogant mama’s boy without an ounce of pity or remorse. The criminal defense bar in Paxton County didn’t want anything to do with him, so his parents came all the way to Raleigh to hire me. I was working hard to build a reputation then and took the case. Plus, I believed and still do, that even an asshole like him deserves a fair trial.”

How long has it been, Ace thinks, since he heard himself say something as lofty as that?

“The victim, the young wife, was the opposite of my client: nice, pretty, and from a decidedly un-wealthy family. I couldn’t imagine why she married him until I met her mother, a pushy social climber who had bullied her daughter into trying to fulfill her own dreams of being haughty and rich.

“The first DA assigned to the case was a woman I knew in law school named LuAnne Butterfield. LuAnne was sharp, refused right off to negotiate a plea to a lesser charge. So I knew from the start the case had to be tried. And of course the problem was I had no defense. My client was twice the size of his wife, and he beat the hell out of her.”

Ace pauses. “J’nelle, tell me if you don’t want to hear any more of this. It’s not a very heartwarming story.”

“Go on,” she says. “I’m listening.”

“My client kept saying his wife was cheating on him. I didn’t believe him. She looked like the last person in the world who’d cheat on her husband. And what if she did? It was no excuse for the assault. But his family had money, so we hired an investigator. And to my amazement, it turned out she was having an affair and had been for over a year, with a married man.

“So there I was. Obnoxious client. No plea to a lesser offense possible. Horrible facts. And no defense. But Paxton County was a hotbed of Bible thumpers who weren’t going to like adultery. At the trial, I played the only card I had. I went after the wife about her affair. And I was lucky. By then, LuAnne had left the DA’s office, and they’d run in a second stringer named Wilmer Warlick, a good ole boy who didn’t care a damn about women’s rights. And Wilmer was a drinker. I saw him a couple of times nodding off at the counsel table. He put up the victim’s testimony in a half-assed way, no medical evidence, and rested his case. On cross examination, I started right in on her about the affair. Wilmer sat and picked his nose and shuffled papers.

“As I hoped, she denied the affair. Of course Wilmer hadn’t spent a minute preparing her, and he sat there while I hit her with the details, one-by-one, like Chinese water torture. She alternated between looking down at her hands knotted in her lap, and then up at her mother in the audience, who was giving her a look that dripped with anger. As tensely as those hands were knotted, I could see her arms shaking. But I was into it by then, doing my best work. When I sensed she was on the verge of tears, I stopped, thanked her very politely for her testimony, and let her go. Wilmer offered no redirect, just sat there like a frog in the road.”

Ace pauses. The noise of the storm seems far away. The overhead light bulb sways slightly on its cord and casts his hooded shadow on the inside of the bunker door.

“After that, it was easy. I called her boyfriend to impeach her testimony. He was almost as big a prick as my client, fancy dresser, slicked back hair, and dumb. By the time I was done with him, he’d blabbed everything, almost bragged about it. So there was Wilmer with his only witness exposed for all to see as a liar. The case could have gone to the jury, an all-white, mostly male group of hard-shell Baptists if I ever saw one, but the judge, who by then was thoroughly disgusted with Wilmer, took pity on the young wife and dismissed it.”

Ace pauses again. The shadow on the door sits there like a third person, listening, waiting. He draws a deep breath.

“I jammed an elbow into my client, and we left. I avoided looking at the wife on the way out, as she sat with her parents on the front row behind the counsel table. But with every step I took up that aisle, I left a bit of myself behind. My client shook my hand when we were outside in the hallway and gave his head an arrogant jerk I’d come to detest, throwing a curl of drooping bangs off his forehead. His mother beamed. His daddy clapped me on the back—hard—over and over, which gave me a hint of where his son’s violent nature might have come from.

“I drove back to my office in Raleigh, put away the file, and went back to what I thought of as my normal life. Three months later, my client killed her. He didn’t rely on his fists that time; he used a brass-handled poker. The officers who arrested him said her face was unrecognizable. They made a point of driving all the way from Paxtonville to the Raleigh courthouse to show me the pictures of her corpse and stood there waiting to hear what I had to say. Which was, of course, nothing.”

Ace draws another long breath that seems to levitate him in the thick air of the shelter.

“His parents tried to hire me to handle his murder case. No way. I forget who represented him, but he received a life sentence. Probably out by now. I’ve tried to hear as little as possible about him. But I cannot forget the utter defeat and shame on that young woman’s face when I had her on the stand. Everything she had tried to make of herself, every desperate hope for salvaging her life, everything she had tried to hold onto was destroyed. And I cannot forget the look in my client’s eyes as we stood with his parents in the hallway after the case’s dismissal. It was a look of glee, but there was something in it that was deadly, as if what he had done was condoned by the ease with which I destroyed her case and justified by the judge’s ruling. I had abused her myself, I’d joined in on the mayhem, so it was alright; it was legal. And when I think back on that moment, I knew even then: the beatings would go on, and sooner or later, one would very likely be fatal.”

Ace cups his palm, holds it to the crack in the steel door, and rubs the collected rainwater over his face.

“That’s the hardest story of my life,” he says, “worse than Vietnam, because I did everything I thought I was supposed to do. I exceeded myself, put every skill I had to work for my client, I followed every ethical rule. I took a case that other lawyers wouldn’t touch, and I won. But, the price! That case called into question my view of who I was; it challenged the myth of my moral self-esteem; it tore down the self-righteous scaffolding upon which I’d built my career.”

He pauses. “Upon which I’d built my life.”

His mind is emptied of words. His head seems to bow itself. He shakes it slowly back and forth.

She lowers herself from the cot onto the floor beside him, puts her arm around his shoulder, and holds him close.

The numbness in his mind stays until a shudder in his shoulders shakes it loose. He’s sure she feels it.

“I’m sitting in a big puddle,” he says. “You’re gonna get wet.”

“Yes,” she says, “I probably will.”

Somewhere in the distance, through the storm, a siren sounds. The lightbulb flickers as the electricity goes out and the generator kicks in.

“How long will that run?” she says.

“Until it runs out of gas or a limb crashes through the shed it’s in and crushes it.”

“Let’s turn it off now,” she says, “the light. Maybe it will help with your claustrophobia. There’s freedom in darkness.”

“It certainly turned out that way last night,” he says.

“And what if we move your cot closer to the door opening so you can lie with your head in the fresh air coming in through the crack—will that help?”

“Maybe—we can try.”

She gets to her feet and pushes his cot near the door, then switches off the light. Ace stretches out on the cot with his head as near the door opening as he can get it. The cot’s damp canvas gives off a moldy odor that reminds him of Vietnam. The comforters and pillow from the house are swollen with moisture. He wraps a blanket around him and breathes slowly, sucking in the air from the storm.

She speaks from her cot on the other side of the bunker.

“I feel like I’m in a dark corner a million miles away.”

“We can move your cot this way,” he says, “but you’ll get even wetter than you are.”

“I’m willing to take my chances, and if I’m going to get wet anyway, I may as well have it all.”

She throws off her blanket and moves to join him on his cot.

“Not sure this will hold us both,” he says.

“If it breaks, we’ve got three more.”

“I don’t think I can offer a repeat of last night,” he says.

“Just hold me,” she says, “and stop worrying about what you can and can’t do.”

They lie together as they did the night before, his arm over her, holding the blanket around them while the storm rages. Her body feels steamy to him under her clothes. Ace strains to hear the boom of the ocean over the howling wind. The waves, he thinks—the waves must be over the dunes and into the yard. Near the bunker, one of the live oaks splits and whumps the ground. Its branches crash against the top of bunker.

She flinches, scrunches closer against him.

“It’s as bad as they predicted,” he says.

“This shelter seems a shrunken place,” she says, “and everything out there so far away: cities, highways, airlines, schedules, medical tests, laptops. It’s hard to believe it ever existed.”

“It’s there,” he says, “and it’ll be there in the morning.”

She sighs and shrinks her body even closer to him. Under her ribs he can feel her heartbeat gradually slow its pace.

“I hope you know,” he says, “that I didn’t plan to seduce you when I invited you down.”

“You didn’t seduce me.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“Did you plan to seduce me?”

“I don’t think so. But anyway I didn’t seduce you either.”

“So, what? We seduced each other?”

She does not answer.

“We each seduced ourselves?” he says.

“Let’s not talk anymore,” she says. “Let’s just be.”