SHE WALKED DOWN the hill in front of him, keeping her distance, the fog socking in and turning everything to cloud.
“I don’t want Emma to see me like this,” Rachel said when they got to the house. “Make an excuse for me. I need a little time.” Then she was in the car, driving down the road.
Inside the house, Emma had the table set with a couple of steaming Hungry-Man Salisbury steaks.
“What’s the breaking news with you guys?” Emma said, cutting into her meat. “Mom didn’t even say goodbye.”
“We had a discussion.”
“An argument.”
“No,” he said.
She squinted her eyes at him, chewing.
“The subject matter?” she said. “Yo?”
“No,” he said. “Not you.” He took a bite of the steak, but it tasted like shit, freezer-burned and syrupy with congealed sauce. “Comida es muy bien!”
“Who’re you kidding?” she said.
—
LATER THAT NIGHT, nearing ten, Rachel called. “I’ve been trying to catch you for an hour,” she said.
“I can’t get your daughter off the phone.”
“Set a time limit, Ben,” she said.
He was watching a cop show, Hill Street Blues. Somehow it got his mind off things, and he enjoyed, to his surprise, making fun of it.
“You called to offer constructive criticism?”
“I’m sorry about taking off like that,” she said. “I just”—a big intake of air—“I needed to think. You caught me off guard.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Couldn’t figure how to set the table for that one.”
“I’m sorry, Ben,” she said. He could hear her tearing up. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know.” Sympathy was fine, but the sound of it was tough on the ears.
“It explains some things for me, though, you know?” she said. “It wasn’t me. What happened to us.”
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t you.”
“I always thought it was me. All that time you spent in the barn. The nights you slept on the couch. I felt so guilty. I always felt guilty.”
“It was never you. Even after the history teacher.”
She let out a long breath.
“I drove by the pool after I left you tonight,” Rachel said, trailing off. “You know, I was jealous of that man when we were in school, all that time you spent with him. I should have known.”
“No,” he said. “You were a kid. Others should have known, but not you.”
Silence on the line.
“You know,” she said, “you’ve got to tell Emma, right?”
He knew, yes, he knew, but…
“Tonight, Ben,” she said. “Before this gets out. I’ll come over if it helps, all right? I’m coming over.”
And she did. She was there in fifteen minutes and they sat around the dinner table together, a situation that would have otherwise caused him joy, and the three of them had a long talk.
—
RACHEL STAYED THAT night, sleeping with Emma in her bed. When he told Emma—God. When he looked in his daughter’s eyes and said, “This is what happened to me,” she took his shaking hands in hers and kissed his knuckles. Emma touched him, without hesitation, without a moment to think about the disgusting things he’d done. Now she and Rachel were asleep in Emma’s room and Ben lay awake, replaying the moment in his mind: the grace of his daughter, the grace of their child. He lay awake, staring at the ceiling, unwilling to go out to the barn tonight. He and Rachel weren’t sharing a bed, and he knew they never would again, but tonight he wanted to be under the same roof with his daughter and the woman that bore her into his life.
INTO THE WILDERNESS
They had followed him into the canyon—the helicopters floating back and forth like metal wasps, the policemen on horses trotting a line down the canyon floor trail. The bandages had bled through, leaving trickles of his blood in the bleached dirt so they could track him. He took off his shirt, ripped it into shreds, and tied it around his arm just above the hole to make it stop. But ten minutes later, the knot came loose and he had to stop to retie it with his good hand and his teeth, his inside-self dripping rust-colored spots onto the dirt until the fabric was cinched tightly enough.
He heard the horses then, close this time, and he had to leave the trail, disappear into the underbrush with the snakes and jackrabbits and mule deer resting in the afternoon shade. The men on the horses stuck to the thin trail—their rifles strapped across their chests, their binoculars glinting in the sunlight—but he slipped along the edges of the canyon, where the cliff walls rose white in the desert sun. For a while, he stalked them stalking him, the need to take one of them blooming in his chest. The men’s bodies floated above the chaparral like brutal ghosts, the air around them tinged with sweat and leather, and he imagined what it would be to clench a fist around one of their necks, imagined the smell of their fear. But they had rifles, they had shotguns, they had clubs and snub-nosed revolvers, and his right hand wouldn’t work anymore, wouldn’t close into a fist without sending dizzying pain up his neck to explode in his head. So he snuck away, leaving them to the trail, crawling on his hands and knees through tunnels in the underbrush, dozing for a few moments among boulders when the clomp and scrape of the hooves receded down the canyon, his head whirling with cold sweat.
Two nights ago, he’d spun off the road, the car bottoming out in a rutted drainage. The engine rattled to silence, and he sat there in the dark, blood thrumming in his ears. He unwrapped the wet bandages from his arm and rewrapped it with the last of the fresh bandages and tape, keeping himself inside himself again. He lay down in the front seat then and watched the stars pulse the sky and talked to himself in his eleven-year-old language until his head spun into sleep.