1.
The hospital lobby was chilly from the opening and closing automatic doors, so Sarah brought Wyatt’s wheelchair to a rest by the gift shop, where they still had a view of the front drive. Morris Houchens had gone to the parking lot to bring around his truck. Wyatt, to his surprise and deep embarrassment, was getting blubbery again.
“Oh, hush,” Sarah said. Her hands left the handles of the wheelchair and rested on his shoulders. “You’re supposed to be happy to leave the hospital. You’re going to sleep in your own bed tonight. You’re going to see your dog.”
“I know,” Wyatt said hoarsely.
“And you know I’m coming over to visit just as soon as my shift ends,” she said more softly. “You know that, too, right?”
Wyatt nodded hard and with his mouth pinched closed, as a child would.
“It’s the medication. It has your chemistry all out of whack.”
And that was probably true. But what Wyatt was feeling, on this threshold between his hospital room and the waiting world, was the terror of exposure. In the bed, plugged into machines and drips and watched over by Sarah, he had been protected—hidden. This homecoming was too much, too quick.
A red Chevy pulled up and stopped. A few seconds later, Morris crossed in front of it and opened the passenger-side door.
“Here we go,” Sarah said, rolling the wheelchair forward and out the hospital doors. Wyatt hastily wiped his eyes with his shirt cuff.
Wind was whipping hard through the cul-de-sac out front and whistling against the shelter roof above them as Sarah locked the wheels of the chair and gave him an encouraging, motherly thump on the back. “OK, do what God gave you legs for,” she said, and Wyatt placed his palms against the wheelchair arms and his feet between the footholds, then trembled to a stand. Morris was holding out an uncertain arm.
“You got it?” Sarah said in her bright, no-nonsense nurse’s voice.
Wyatt removed his steadying fingertips from the arms of the chair and took a small step forward. “Yeah,” he said.
He felt weak, and his joints ached from so many nights in that stiff bed, where the tubes and wires chained him from rolling over or making adjustments for comfort. But he was doing better now than he had expected to be. He had walked a few moments each day in the hospital, dragging the IV rack behind him, and now he was walking to Morris’s truck, and the process was still just putting one foot in front of the other. No more and no less than that. He was even stepping up, climbing into Morris’s elevated cab. Life went on.
Sarah leaned close to him as Morris was striding around to the driver’s seat, and Wyatt inhaled, as if he wouldn’t be able to again, her vanilla perfume. “I’ll see you before you know it. Keep a light on for me.”
“I will,” he said.
She stepped back and closed the door, then wiggled her fingers in good-bye. The cab of the truck was toasty warm, and Wyatt put his hands out in front of the vents, sighing a little at the small pleasure. They were pale hands, almost translucent, with blue and yellow bruises from the IV needles.
“She seems nice,” Morris said. “Seems like y’all know each other from sometime before.”
“A little bit,” Wyatt said. He hesitated, not wanting to mention Nancy’s Dance Hall.
“That’s good,” Morris said. “It’s good to have people when you’re going through a tough time.”
Wyatt watched the town unfurl outside his window, marveling at how alien it all seemed, as if he had been shut away for months rather than a bit less than a week. They passed the country club’s golf course, which was predictably empty on a day as cool and gray as this one, and the warehouse housing the aluminum recycling facility. A dump truck outside of it belched black smoke. They passed the town’s main cemetery, which stretched a few acres back on both sides of the road. They passed the Roma Dairy Dip, where Wyatt sometimes picked up a sack of burgers after getting off of work. He could smell, even through the closed window, its distinct fragrance of frying grease and grilled meat, and his stomach rumbled in a way that might have been hunger or nausea.
“What I figured,” Morris said, breaking the silence, “is that I could drop you off at home, then go back out to pick you up whatever groceries and things you think you need.” He was restating the plan they had already made, just trying to fill up dead air. Wyatt opened his mouth to agree, then closed it again. Then he said, “Can we run back to the Dairy Dip for a minute? I have a hankering for a milkshake.”
“Well, OK,” Morris said. “You sure you ought to have anything like that right now?”
“It won’t kill me,” Wyatt said wryly. “And I guess I just want to stretch my legs and get some air before being shut up again.” That much was true. He felt something like sorrow at the thought of handing Morris his shopping list with its doctor-approved choices of steel-cut oats and skinless chicken breasts and green vegetables that he wasn’t even sure how to cook if they didn’t go into a pot with a ham bone and a hunk of butter. He also felt a deep dread at the thought of his house and even of Boss. Of the prospect of hours alone.
Morris parked in a spot close to the order window. “You sure you don’t want me to get it for you?”
“Nah,” Wyatt said. “I’ll be all right.”
He climbed down carefully from the cab of the truck and walked to the order window, unfolding his wallet as he went. A teenage girl slid over a glass partition and spoke to him through the opening. “Help you?”
“Yes, please. I’d like a—” He scanned the menu. “A banana milkshake, please, miss. A small.”
He put a dollar and a quarter through the opening, and she handed him a nickel’s change. She turned her back to him and pressed a silver handle, measuring a ribbon of soft-serve ice cream, turning the RC Cup with brisk efficiency. Wyatt’s gaze wandered to his left, where business cards and advertisements had been taped to the inside of the glass.
What he saw almost immediately was his own face. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? spanned the top of the sheet of paper in bold print, and below the image, in smaller letters, it read, “Person of interest in the disappearance of Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Eastman. Seen together at Nancy’s Dance Hall in Sylvan and the Fill-Up gas station in Roma on October 23. Age: 50–60. Height: 5'8"–6'. Weight: 190–230 lbs. Wanted only for questioning.” An officer’s name and phone number followed.
Wyatt started shaking. The image—it wasn’t exactly right; even in his panic he could admit that. The person who had drawn it had exaggerated his receding hairline and elongated his face. His mustache was thicker than he normally kept it. But the artist had also captured something recognizable and true about Wyatt, and the sight of the face with its sad, haunted eyes and its pursed, self-pitying mouth made Wyatt want to rip the poster down, run, hide. The young woman came back with his milkshake and thrust it through the open partition at him. Her expression was blank, disinterested. When Wyatt did not at first take the cup, a flicker of irritation, evident in nothing more than a microsecond’s tightening of the brows, flashed across her face.
“Sir?” she said, shaking the cup a little, and he took it from her. Then she slammed the partition closed.
Think. Think.
He was home. Morris had already been to the store and back, and the groceries were stowed neatly in the cabinets and refrigerator. Boss was stretched out in the middle of the living room floor, napping, amiable enough—as if Wyatt were a roommate that he got along well with but wasn’t all that close to. Sarah had promised to walk him when she came over later. The milkshake, still mostly full, was sweating beads onto a coaster near Wyatt’s right hand. Any appetite he had was long gone.
Think, goddamn it.
But thinking was hard with the exhaustion and the meds. What he wanted to do was recline his chair, shut off the lamp, and nap until Sarah arrived. His brain was hostage to his body. What it registered was a panic that occasionally leveled into blurry anxiety as he momentarily forgot the source of his problem. Then the drawing of his face on that poster would come to him with full force, and he set back out on the same uncertain mental zigging and zagging, wondering if the time hadn’t come for him to simply get in his truck and drive out of town. But Sarah—what about Sarah? Any life without her, he decided, was not a life worth preserving.
He rose, walked as quickly as he could to the kitchen, and bent over the sink. He splashed cold water on his face. Without bothering to towel himself dry, he pulled a glass from the cabinet and found, in the back of his refrigerator, a half-full two-liter of Coca-Cola, probably already flat. He poured a couple of inches into his glass and knocked it back like whiskey, grimacing at the sweet blandness. Then he went to the window and shoved it up a couple of inches, so that some cold air could leak in. At last—perhaps as much for rousing himself with the motions as the actions themselves—Wyatt’s mind cleared a little. He remained standing by the window, legs trembling, and thought.
It was three P.M. now. Sarah had told him that she would come by at ten P.M., as soon as her shift at the hospital ended. Seven hours. Plenty of time.
He began to assemble the things he would need. There was a strange pleasure in these preparations, in this discovery of his instinct to survive. He had always thought himself weak, but here he was, scheming to protect himself, proceeding despite the risks. There was something manly about it, and he thought that he was perhaps no longer the person who had submitted to so many indignities at the hands of Sam Austen and his gang. That if Sam were to call him Tubs now, he might be in for a surprise.
3.
That night at Nancy’s, the woman who paid his tab had said, “Well, train’s leaving the station. Come on if you’re coming.”
He followed her outside, knees quivering, trying to avoid the bodies swaying around him. He scanned the crowd for Sam and Gene, still not quite believing that they would have deserted him. OK, Sam would have, but all of the rest of the guys? Both trucks? And it was early yet; even Wyatt could make that out. Not even midnight. They’d all been dancing, talking to pretty women, ordering shots—having a good time. Why would they all have left? Without him?
A prank, he realized.
“I’m this way,” the woman said. They were outside, and the cool air was clarifying. He felt now the suggestion of a headache, just a little twinge behind his eyes, and he focused on the wink of the woman’s light-colored shoes in the darkness. His senses were heightened unpleasantly; he could feel in the cup of his ear the rasp of her sneakers against the gravel, could make out the trail of her perfume, which was muskier than that of the woman he’d danced with. Where Sarah’s vanilla had suggested a kitchen table and oven-warm cookies, this woman’s cologne was wilder, spicier. There was something in it that reminded him of the way Boss smelled when he came in from exercising—not sweaty, but like he’d carried in some of the outdoors, the smell of damp earth and tree sap, the spirit of his own exertion.
Wyatt bent over double, hand pressed against a nearby truck for support, and vomited the hamburger he’d eaten earlier. Sweat popped against his neck and forehead, and his bowels felt loose.
The grind of gravel halted. “Better?”
He paused, assessing. His skin stopped prickling, and he took in a gulp of clean air. “Yeah.” He nodded, too, for emphasis, then stood, wiping his mouth with the cuff of his shirt. It was his good shirt, bought at Dillard’s for $25, marked down from $40. It was a deep blue, subtly pin-striped, with a nice, fine weave. He wore it tucked into a pair of khakis, with his old brown belt and his wingtip shoes, a pair he’d bought over thirty years ago for the high school graduation he would never attend and had carefully preserved with polish and a single resoling. He’d thought, assessing himself in the mirror earlier that night, that he looked good. He’d combed his thinning hair over, rubbed some pomade between his hands, patted the flyaways into place. He’d used a fresh Bic razor to carefully shave his cheeks and chin and neck, managing not to nick himself, and then he’d trimmed his mustache neatly with a little pair of scissors. He could still pluck the gray hairs from his mustache; the hair on his head he touched up every few weeks with a Just For Men kit.
“I ought to be ashamed,” he said. He didn’t want to make eye contact with the woman. But she came up to him, took his hand in hers, squeezed it, and he couldn’t help looking up at her. He tried to smile, bashful, and he noted with surprise how young she was, despite the raspy voice and the bravado. Her hair, which seemed to be brownish or dark blond in the dim lights outside the bar, was clipped short, boyish, but ruffled up in the front and hairsprayed, lending her a touch of femininity. She had wide, startled-looking eyes, the effect heightened by heavily applied mascara, and her full, painted lips anchored an otherwise absent chin, giving her an aspect of almost homely cuteness. She was pretty, but in a way that defied the individual parts that comprised her.
“Now stop that,” she said. “We’re all entitled to a little embarrassment. I’ve had my share tonight and then some.”
“You have?”
“Yeah.” She dropped his hand. “Do you want this ride or not?”
“Please,” Wyatt said.
“All right.” She pointed to a dark-colored Camaro. “If you think you’re going to puke again, though, you let me know in time to pull over. You puke in my car and I’ll kick you out right there and then.”
“OK.”
She drove with her window rolled down, the air biting but fresh, and Wyatt noticed the way she flew her left hand along outside, letting it roll in waves. She was propped on an extra cushion for lift, but even so she had to perch at the end of her seat to reach the wheel and the pedals and the stick shift, and she seemed to be constantly in motion, switching off hands on the steering wheel every time she had to put the car into a different gear, hips flexing as she pumped the brake and the clutch, eyes on the road, then her rearview mirror, then on Wyatt. She made the process of driving seem difficult, her own efforts heroic. They might have been riding in a time machine to Roma instead of a Camaro.
“Have you had this car long?” Wyatt asked after several minutes of silence.
“Little over two years.” She was pushing the car to seventy-five now, taking the little rises in the road too quickly for Wyatt’s nervous stomach. Headlights appeared in the distance and she dimmed her own. “Finally decided, fuck it. I’m never going to be a millionaire. If I want something nice, I’m just going to have to get it and enjoy it while I can.” She restored the brights. “It was used,” she added, as though she had to justify herself.
“I wish I’d spent more time thinking that way,” Wyatt said. He felt sweat popping on his forehead despite the cold. The security light on a distant farmhouse wavered in his vision like a shooting star. “You don’t want to be pushing sixty and realize that you always played it safe, you always planned ahead. Thing is, you’re just planning for some time that never comes. Or you’re planning for a day when you’ll be too old to enjoy it.”
“Hell yeah. Live in the now, that’s what I say.”
Wyatt closed his eyes, nodded into the cold air whipping through the car. He didn’t believe it for himself, but he believed it for this pretty young woman.
“I think about this stuff,” she said. “I think about, OK, I spend forty hours a week at this shitty factory job—”
“Which factory?”
“The sewing plant.”
“Huh,” Wyatt said. “I’m at Price.”
“You know what I mean, then.” She was now motioning with her free right hand, adding a step to the already complex dance. “I sew pockets into blue jeans. That’s all I do. This.” She lifted both hands off the wheel now, miming: she lowered them, as though she were putting a tray on a table, and then she flattened her hands and moved them around like a planchette on a Ouija board. She finished with a sweeping yank—the thread getting cut, Wyatt recognized. “Ta-da. Multiply times fifty.”
Wyatt was nodding.
“What’s funny is, I can’t really sew. My sister brought me a dress pattern for my niece one time, thinking I might be able to make it, and I just laughed. I can sew pockets into jeans. I can use that one sewing machine. I don’t know the first thing about making a little girl a dress.” She drove for a moment silently. “I heard one time that they used to have women making bombs in factories, and they gave each one a specific role so she wouldn’t know how to put the whole bomb together. ’Cause then what would she do? God knows I’d like to bomb the hell out of Sew-Rite some days.”
“I don’t even make anything,” Wyatt said. “I used to be in the winding room, and then I did die cast, but now I’m out in packaging. It’s better, in a way. It’s not as hot out there in the summer. But I can’t seem to move fast enough anymore.” He felt a little burn of anger at the thought. “I can’t do what these Bosnian kids do. They’re desperate. They come here and think it’s the greatest thing ever since we don’t have bombs going off outside. This Jusef guy—” He shook his head. He didn’t have the heart—or maybe the clarity—to complete the thought.
“I don’t know your name,” the woman said.
“Wyatt,” he told her. He held out his hand and she shook it briskly.
“Ronnie.”
He mouthed it silently. A man’s name.
“Wyatt,” she said. “I don’t think I’m in the mood to be alone yet. How’re you feeling?”
“Better,” he said truthfully. “The coffee helped.”
“So did yakking, I bet. Could you eat something? I always get hungry like this when I drink. I have this strange hankering for chicken livers. Nasty, right?”
Wyatt’s stomach, parted from its hamburger, actually rumbled. “Sounds good to me.”
“My treat,” Ronnie said. “Along with your drinks and half your buddies’, the fuckers.”
He flushed. He’d almost forgotten his humiliation. “I’ll pay you back. I promise.”
“It’s the principle, Wyatt. You can’t let people treat you like that. Get the money out of them or don’t bother.”
“I’ll try to,” he said.
She smirked, but she was kind enough not to say more on the subject. “The Fill-Up’ll be open. We can get the food there and just take it back to my place, and I’ll drive you home when you’re wore out. Or you can crash on my couch.” She added this last almost sheepishly, and Wyatt’s heart started thumping. He couldn’t read her. He couldn’t make a guess at her intentions. Was she a lesbian? That would explain her name, her hair, her lack of unease around him: a man, a stranger. But he didn’t think she was. Did she see him as a father type? He could be her father. He placed her at late twenties, early thirties. He would have already been working at Price when she was born.
“I feel like you get me,” Ronnie said. She was pulling into the gas station, and the red neon lettering of the sign made her skin look pink and raw in the dark. She shoved the gearshift home to first with finality, shut off the engine, looked at him. “I’ve had a rough night. Hell, I’ve had a rough life.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “I’m not some good Samaritan. But I saw what those guys were pulling on you, and I kept thinking that I should say something. No one else was going to do it. I watched them keep putting these shots in front of you, and you swallowing it like poison but like you wanted so bad to please them, and I thought, That’s a nice man over there. Too nice.” She leaned across him to pull a pack of cigarettes out of the glove box, hitting him again with a whiff of that spicy-smelling cologne. She tucked one between her lips, then raised her eyebrows and pointed the mouth of the pack toward him. He shook his head. The cooling engine ticked.
“Anyway,” she continued. “I could use a friend tonight.”
“So could I,” Wyatt said hoarsely.
She grinned. “Let’s pick out some grease, then.” Wyatt, a little drunk still, and dazed, followed. Was this happening to him? Was he about to go into this store with this young woman? With her?
He did. He watched her move: the purposeful stride, the muscular thighs, the fine, girlish hairs tickling the nape of her neck. The outline of her wallet against her swaying bottom. And he felt swell within him a desire so intense that he himself swayed a little, making Ronnie laugh and ask him if he needed to visit the bushes again.
There was an old black woman behind the counter—she tiredly donned plastic gloves as Ronnie placed their order—and Wyatt registered a pang of regret that the cashier wasn’t a man. He wanted a man to see him with Ronnie. At midnight, with their beer breath and their sudden, silly hunger and their exchanged looks of relief and hilarity, how else could a man see them as anything but a couple—as lovers? A man would notice, would be curious. This woman hardly saw him. She was tucking the wedges into a white paper sack, folding over the opening, reaching farther to her right to grasp a handful of livers, which would taste, Wyatt knew, of cooking fat and dirt. Look at me, he willed, moving in as close to Ronnie as he dared to, heart rat-a-tatting with the thrill. Look at me.
The black woman glanced up as if she’d heard him. Frowned. It was only a second, but Wyatt was satisfied, and he wandered to the front of the store to wait while Ronnie finished placing the order and ran quickly to the coolers to grab a twelve-pack for the road. He didn’t know what would happen after tonight. He didn’t know what Ronnie meant by “friend.” But he’d been seen with her, and that made everything real for him in a way it wouldn’t have been otherwise.
“Ready?” Ronnie said, handing Wyatt one of the grocery sacks and the twelve-pack.
“You bet,” he told her.
“Well, let’s go,” she said, and they went.
4.
Wyatt jolted awake with a gasp. His hands flew to his face, came away damp. He had been having a nightmare. It had started, like the bad dreams always did, with his beating a man, defending himself from some abstract harm; and, like usual, the man had turned into Boss, and it was the dog receiving his punches and his curses, and it was Boss howling with pain and confusion. But this time, his realization of the transformation hadn’t stopped Wyatt’s hand, the rain of rage-filled blows.
“Hello? Hello? Anyone home?”
“Here,” Wyatt called hoarsely from his recliner. He struggled to shift up to more of a sitting position, feeling blanched and limp. He had never been so tired.
Sarah was still wearing her pink scrubs, and she smelled faintly and reassuringly not just of her vanilla perfume but of the hospital: the alcoholic whiff of antiseptic, that lemony hand wash that she had to use so many times a day. She dropped her purse on the couch and rubbed Boss briskly on his head, setting his tail to thumping. “My goodness, you’re enormous,” she said, hunching over to pet his side, easy with the dog in a way that pleased Wyatt even in the fog of his discomfort. “We’ll go out in a minute, boy. Yes we will.”
This done, she came to the recliner, set her hip on the arm of the chair, and leaned in for a kiss. There was awkwardness—this was their first night together outside of the hospital, unobserved by nosy others—and she smiled in her brash way, not wanting to acknowledge it. Then her lips touched his, and it was as nice as it had always been—nicer—and some veil of formality lifted.
“Miss me?” Her face was still close to his. Unlined, cheeks bright with life.
“More than you could know,” Wyatt said.
Sarah frowned and put her hand on his cheeks, then his forehead. “You’re clammy as hell, Wyatt.” She felt his wrist. “Jeez, your heart’s just racing. What on earth have you been doing?”
“Just a little tidying up,” he said. “I didn’t want you coming over to a mess.”
“You must be looking to have another heart attack,” she said. She retrieved her purse and pulled out a blood pressure cuff. “Roll up your shirtsleeve.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, now—”
“You roll up that sleeve before I roll it up for you.”
Wyatt did as he was told. Sarah pulled the Velcro closure apart and fastened it around his upper arm, then pressed the cold stethoscope inside his elbow. She tucked the earpieces in and started squeezing the pump.
“Sarah—”
“Shh,” she hissed. And then the monitor hissed and the tension on his arm lessened. Sarah released some more air and looked at the dial. “One seventy-five over one hundred. That’s not good, cowboy. I find that really troubling, actually.”
“I think you might need to go back to the hospital.”
The idea wasn’t entirely unpleasant: the safety of his room and bed, the certainty of Sarah’s tender ministries. But he couldn’t stay there forever, and besides, now that he was out, now that he knew exactly what was at risk, he didn’t know if chaining himself to a bed again was a good idea.
“Let me stay the night here,” Wyatt said. “You can check me in the morning. If it’s no better then, I’ll go.”
She exhaled in an exasperated way. “Are you sure?”
He nodded and took her hand. “Will you stay with me? I could use the company.”
“All right,” she said with uncharacteristic softness.
So that was how, for the first time in his life, a woman slept the night next to him in his bed. He climbed under the covers in his drawstring pants and white undershirt; she borrowed one of his oversized flannel shirts and stripped otherwise to her underwear. Wyatt was too exhausted to be aroused but not so exhausted that he couldn’t appreciate the flash he saw of her pale thighs as she scooted quickly under the sheet. She was a big woman, the kind of woman whose nakedness Sam Austen and his like would express disgust at the sight of, but Sam was wrong, he and his like. This was beauty: a smooth-fleshed woman, wise and funny, her eyes filled with love. It was beauty, more beauty than he deserved, and he pulled her close with a confidence he had never before possessed, and her warm cheek rested against his collarbone, and her cool legs tangled with his.
“If I had my way,” Wyatt said, mouth against her hair, “this is what life would always be like.”
“Me too,” she said.
In few moments’ time, Sarah was breathing deeply enough that Wyatt knew she was sleeping. Still, his thoughts stirred. He wondered what would happen if Sarah saw one of the posters around town, if she put the image and the date and Nancy’s Dance Hall together and tried to make sense of it. He couldn’t kid himself any longer: someone was going to come to him with questions. It was just a matter of when.
In the meantime, he held Sarah tighter.