Carrie had always been a girl men looked at, but it had been a long time since men had locked eyes with her, half smiles on their lips, pretending to listen to their wives while they tried to get her attention. But she wasn’t that lovely kid anymore. Those days had faded, was it a fade or an acute stop? and she couldn’t remember exactly when. Becoming invisible was just as strange a process as being visible. So much so soon. She had more than her beautiful face to carry her in this life. Carrie had gone to the community college for two years and she had been a very good student, eager to please and more intelligent than people expected. She talked little in class and could see the faces of the professors change as they regarded her with renewed appreciation and a little amusement for the smarts they hadn’t considered that she possessed.
Henry had told her she was too beautiful to be serving platters of food. At the time it hadn’t sounded slick or like a practiced line, but she make the mistake of telling her sister, who had rolled her eyes, like she’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Carrie had to look around to see if he was talking to her. He was a handsome man, a respectable man, not a bum or a user-fool like most of the other men who hit on her at the restaurant. There was nothing nasty about the way he admired. He seemed to have been thinking out loud. He remembered her from high school he said, from class he said, but he couldn’t remember the class. She had not remembered him. Most of the black people, even the ones in her own graduating class, had been a mystery. She had not been friends with any of them.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” he’d asked.
“I probably do,” she’d said.
“I sat in the seat with your name carved in it. Some lovesick boy carved it.”
“Kids.” She laughed though she’d been flattered at the memory.
“Okay let me know if you need anything,” she’d said, but she was sure something had just started with the two of them.
HENRY WOULD SHOW. He always came eventually.
Her sister was afraid to believe. People are afraid to believe in their own hearts, Carrie thought. She couldn’t blame her for doubt. The fear, the judgment from those who always have the answers, those whose cynicism makes them fear faith in the sunrise, how much less will they believe in the power of transformation in the lives they were living. Carrie knew she was a little ridiculous, but she loved Henry. Was it so impossible that their situation might end well? That her faith in that love could be rewarded and everything turn out okay? She wasn’t gambling. Gamblers lose. They know they will lose and wait for things to come crashing in on them. She wasn’t gambling.
Of course the start of a day can be very different from the end. Carrie had started the day feeling all that hopefulness. She had seen Henry sad, she knew he was hurting. It couldn’t be long before their real lives could begin. After fourteen unanswered texts and the after the clock struck 9:00 P.M., then ten and now five past eleven, and, she couldn’t keep believing, her love, her hope which is love in action, had bled away from her body.
Henry’s key turned in the trailer door. He opened it slowly like he feared he might be too noisy. “Carrie, baby you awake?”
Carrie watched the television as if she had been struck deaf and hadn’t heard Henry enter.
“How are you?”
“Did you bring anything?” she said still staring at the television screen.
“What?”
“When you used to fuck up at least you’d bring a gift.”
“I’m here. I said I’d be here. What are you watching?”
“Television.” Carrie had seen that episode of the Twilight Zone many times. The newlyweds have car trouble and end up in a town where they find a machine that tells the future. Quickly the newlyweds became obsessed with the vague predictions from the toy in the diner. People looked for signs everywhere.
Henry sat at the edge of the couch and made sure that a full cushion separated him from Carrie. He had not wanted to hurt her or his baby. She knew that. She had to know it. He wasn’t sure how not to hurt them. Henry almost got up to look in on Zeke. The door to his room had a wooden sign with his name in different color letters. Carrie would go crazy if he woke up their son.
If you squinted and didn’t look up, you’d think you were in a condo. Once inside you wouldn’t know you weren’t living in a nice-looking apartment. and not a trailer at all. The only trailers Henry had ever seen before this one had been flimsy things with walls that looked and felt like corrugated cardboard and if a big man fell the whole works might tumble down after him. Not Carrie’s trailer. It was a nice one, a double-wide, nobody’s cheap. You might hear the word trailer and think extreme poverty, tin can living, and there is a reality to that, no question, but some of them are nice, built well, and only in some moments with some turn of thought do you remember the world under your feet could be hooked up to a truck or hoisted on a flat bed and taken anywhere. Carrie’s trailer felt permanent and open with good height ceilings. The walls solid, real-feeling, not like living in a gas station bathroom like Henry had assumed. Carrie’s parents had bought the whole thing for her, almost brand-new, gave to her the three acres of land that the house sat on. From her porch there was a beautiful view of a copse of trees and just beyond them, the surprise sparkle of a faraway neighbor’s pond. Nice if you liked that kind of thing or if you hadn’t spent the best part of your life trying to escape it. Carrie’s father and uncle had cleared the land for her and leveled the road to her door. They didn’t say it, but these kindnesses were their last acts to her, a generous good-bye that meant they wouldn’t have to feel guilty for never speaking to her again. She was invisible or worse, she never existed. They were the answer to the question, What kind of people buy off their own child? All Henry could think about were the underbrush, the small animals, the ticks that lived in those woods unheard and unseen except for the nasty discovery of them stuck to you eating you alive from the inside out.
On no day did Henry ever conceive of himself living in that trailer. Henry had never loved Carrie, though he liked her. He tried to love her, but it wouldn’t take. Years ago he had almost walked out on her and the relationship. They saw each other so little and nothing had happened that he couldn’t just walk from yet. He’d never planned on a relationship, but a casual thing, nothing serious, just a nothing to get him over the hump. She had not wanted more than that either. But she’d gotten pregnant. How does that even happen anymore? They were grown people with grown people’s choices. The fact that they were in this predicament was terrifying and ridiculous. But there was nothing to do. Henry tried to believe that he wanted a permanent life with Carrie, and there were moments over the years that he almost convinced himself that his future would include her. But that feeling never stuck for long.
“I didn’t know if you would let me in.”
“I didn’t asshole. You have a key.”
Henry didn’t push it. There had been days Carrie had put the chain on the door and he’d looked like Jack Nicholson from that horror movie. All work and no play, all work and no play.
“What are you doing here now?”
“I told you I was coming today.”
“You said you’d be here to see Zeke. It’s eleven o’clock. He’s been asleep for hours. I didn’t even believe you so I don’t know why I’m mad.”
Henry moved over on the couch to get closer to Carrie.