“Oh, shit,” she said when she reached the landing. “I left the broom.”
“I’ll get it,” I told her, folding the magazine shut.
“Shit,” she said again, putting the bucket down and holding her face with her hands. “Head rush.”
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” I offered. I wasn’t good around blood.
“I’m okay,” the girl said, bracing herself against the bookshelf. “Just dizzy.” She turned toward the wall, leaned into it, said, “Whew.”
I got up then, patting my pocket to make sure the ball of foil was safe inside. In the kitchen I let the tap run cold, got the ice from the freezer, took a glass from the drying rack.
“I’m really okay,” the girl said.
I plunked the ice in the glass. The cubes cracked as the water ran over them. “See,” the girl went on, “you’re not missing anything.”
“What?” I hollered back. But I’d heard her perfectly.
“You’re not missing anything,” she said again, louder. “My mom says a baby is a blessing, but I don’t know.” I suppose it unnerved me that she could be so naive. She had no idea what her life was going to do to her.
“That baby’s going to change your world,” I said, walking back into the den. She was bent over with her face in front of the fan. I snuck a look at the bloodstain widening down her thighs. “My sister has a daughter,” I said. “Gave up her career and everything.” I handed the girl the glass. She pushed herself upright, took a long sip, set the glass down on the TV, and sighed. “Boy or girl?”
“Boy,” she answered, blushing slightly.
“You sure you feel all right?”
She nodded.
I stood around watching her clean for a while, helping her here and there, moving furniture so she could mop. She seemed perfectly fine to me. “I love The Matrix,” she said, straightening my shelves of VHS tapes. “I love old movies.” She beat the sofa’s cushions with her fist. She stacked the magazines on the end table. She straightened my framed poster of Monet’s Water Lilies. Her eyes were clear and blue as ever under their thick, gleaming lids. I went upstairs to get the broom, then I retreated to the kitchen, put away the clean dishes, and did the dirty ones. I put the dinner half of my sub in the fridge and sponged off the counter. I took out the trash.
Outside my neighbors were filling a kiddie pool with water from their garden hose. I waved.
“Marvin died,” one of the women said glumly.
“Who’s Marvin?” I asked.
She turned to her sister, or mother—I couldn’t tell—and rolled her eyes.
Clark had chained the lids of my trash cans to the plastic handles on the barrels. For some reason, the people of Alna liked to steal the lids and throw them in the Omec. That was one of their summer recreations, he’d told me. As I stuffed the garbage down, the pregnant girl threw open the screen door and walked stiffly down the front steps. She held one hand down under her belly and the palm of her other hand up in front of her face. When she saw me and the neighbors, she turned her palm around. It was covered in blood.
“Oh, honey!” cried one of the women, dropping the hose.
“Something’s wrong,” the girl stammered, stunned.
“Well, honey, what happened? Did you fall? Did you hurt yourself?” the women were asking. The girl caught my eye as they surrounded her. I put the lid on the trash and watched as the women guided the girl across the muddy grass. They made her sit down in a lawn chair in the shade. One of them went inside to call for help. I went back into the house and got the girl’s flyers and twenty dollars from my wallet. When I got back outside, she was panting. I handed her the money, and she grabbed my forearm, smeared her blood all over it, squeezed it, shrieking, contracting her face in pain.
“Hang on, honey,” the neighbor said, frowning at me, her fat hands stroking the girl’s smooth, sweaty brow. “Help is on the way.”
? ? ?
When the ambulance left that afternoon, I took a walk down to the Omec. Squatting by the edge of the river, I washed the blood off my arm. I took the crystals out and let them plunk down into the rushing water, threw the crumpled foil at the wind, and watched it hit the surface and float away. I looked up at the pale, overcast sky, the crows circling then gliding down to a nest of rotting garbage on the opposite bank. I sat on a hot rock and let the sun warm my bones. My thighs splayed out; my white skin tightened and burned. It was nice there with the cool breeze, the sound of the traffic through the trees, the earthy stench of mud. An empty Coke can tinkled a rhythm against the rock, shaken by the current. A toad hopped across my foot.
Later that evening I dragged the sunlamp out onto the curb, thinking maybe the zombies would find it. The next morning it was still there, so I dragged it back inside. I walked up Riverside Road. I got what I wanted. I walked back home.
AN HONEST WOMAN
They met one summer day through the high chain-link fence between their backyards. His yard was just plain dry brown dirt. Hers was full of dusty bags of fertilizer andtools haphazardly scattered where she’d started planting flowers in the tough soil. The man had seen neighbors come and go over the many years he’d lived there, in the dark corner of the cul-de-sac. “Through seven presidents,” he told the girl, laughing nervously and swatting his neck as if to catch mosquitoes. He was only sixty but looked far older. Vitiligo had stripped his brittle hair of its color, made his face seem riddled with fat freckles. The girl was pretty, sturdy, in her early thirties. She had been living next door to the man for two months already. He had just been waiting for the proper moment to introduce himself.
“I’m Jeb,” the man said.
“That’s a long time, Jeb,” the girl said to him. “That many presidents.”