19
THAT NIGHT, I find a body in the attic and it’s hard as diamonds and I look for more. The second body I find is a pile of soft bones and surprising shapes of teeth behind a panel in the basement. In the middle of the kitchen, the third body’s nails have screamed themselves out of the retreating fingers of collapsed flesh, a pile of rot that lies there as if it hasn’t been moved in decades. I go outside and find a cranium, a tibia, a phalanx, and a pubis scattered from an open grave, as though dropped out of gathering arms, and I assemble them into a skeleton, ablaze under that broad and bleeding moon. I dream these bodies as answers and then wake and stir at how close this nightmare felt to reality. I drift through them again at the breakfast table, these dreams shaped like memory.
I might tell James or I might not. I start to lose track of what I’ve shared with him and what I’ve kept to myself. I find myself starting to talk about the sounds in the night, an inconsistency in what the woman at the checkout told me, the new bruise on my hip that’s already starting to fade, and then I stop myself: Did I tell him about this already? If not, I worry he’ll think I’ve been keeping secrets. And then, because I don’t want to keep secrets, I keep more secrets.
I think James is peculiar for not being more curious, but then I wonder, What if he’s doing the same thing? What if he’s hiding his interest and confusion and unease for fear that I’ll want to leave? Perhaps he’s afraid of returning to the city, to old habits and temptations. It might be that we’re both curious, but we think the other isn’t.
If you put your eye to one side of a water glass, you have so many angles to navigate trying to see something on the other side. Four edges of curved glass. Water’s opinions: a lens. Most times, your gaze bounces right back to you.
I want time away to see how I feel apart from this place. I want to see what my mind turns up on different terrain.
“James, maybe we should go on vacation.”
He tells me he’s surprised I would suggest such a thing. “Wait, let me get this straight. Julie—the keeper of the finances, the planner of the futures—wants to go on vacation when we just bought a house? Even I know that’s a bad idea.”
“Well, we could have done both if we’d made a few different decisions leading up to this.”
James looks less angry than discouraged. “You mean that we could do both if I’d made different decisions, right?”
I had promised that I would let it go, that I would trust he could change, that it was a quirk, a setback we could get past, that people can fix themselves, that the rest of our lives wouldn’t stand the threat of being lost on a missed basket or a worn-out horse. He had promised it wouldn’t happen again, but I break my promise. “Well, I have enough money to do both. I can’t help that you traded your future for some dumb wish. That’s what a bet is, right? A wish?”
“I thought we weren’t going to do that. Is it that bad? Do you want to leave that badly?”
I backpedal, apologize by way of lying, hide my apprehension behind a white flag. “No, you’re right. I’m sorry.” I finger the rotten yellow spot edging my waistline. I think of the bodies in my dream and keep the deterioration to myself.
We’re missing each other.
20
MY TEAM SPENDS a day trying to figure out what’s broken with the program we’re working on. QA testers run through again and again and can’t reproduce the error. “Probably a connection issue then,” I say, but the project manager insists it couldn’t be.
She tries to explain: “James, we’re building this program to teach people customer service. If the program tells the user that a customer asks for a refund and the user chooses to tell her to take her business elsewhere, that should be an immediate fail, game over. Instead, the program delivered a message commending the user on a good choice and promoting them to shift supervisor. Something’s broken.”
“Customer service isn’t really my thing. That’s why I went into computers,” I joke, but she doesn’t laugh.
“Well, fix the computer then,” she says, her voice on edge.
Sam offers to lend a hand and finds the mistake right away. “You didn’t account for the possibility of someone looping back around to this screen after they’d already succeeded in similar situations.” He strokes a few keys. “I’ll let Kim know it’s fixed.”
He walks across the office and rests his arms on the top of her cubicle. Sam leans down and begins talking. When Kim responds, I see Sam shrug. Kim looks back at the programming room, but I turn away quickly.
“No biggie, man,” Sam says upon his return. “Even the best of us have to get used to the way content drives the programming.”
“It doesn’t make sense that someone would make the proper decision once but then make a mistake the second time,” I say.
“You’re thinking rationally, but not reasonably, man. We need to account for any possible outcome, and the result has to make sense. Sometimes people bomb these things for the fun of seeing how poorly they can do.”
I think of every bet I lost. And I think of the bets that followed.
21
JAMES AND I search for distraction. We invite my dad and stepmother for the weekend to show off the house and pick up all that’s dropped between us in the hustle of moving. “Where did you get these?” I ask. A small vase of flowers sits in the middle of the dining room table.
“I picked them on my walk through the woods this morning. And then some roses from the bush on the side of the house.”
“You can pick the flowers in the woods? You won’t get arrested?”
“Of course. This is milkweed and harebell and valerian, I think.” He reaches a hand around to pat himself on the back. “Nice work, James. I thought it might be a nice touch for Carol. I put a little jar up in the guest room, too.”
“I will keep you.” His charm can still make me blush.
My parents arrive, and the first thing my stepmother compliments is the flowers.
“That’s James’s doing. He picked them and arranged them,” I say.
“You hear that, Frank?” she says to my father. “James picked flowers! Take a cue. Anyway”—she turns back to me—“I’ve brought you a housewarming gift that might be a perfect way to showcase James’s talents.” From the entryway she fetches a gift bag that proclaims CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NEW ARRIVAL! beside a pale blue teddy bear. I take the bag from her and raise my eyebrows. “I know, but it was the only gift bag I had in the house, and you have experienced a new arrival of sorts.”
If it were only a case of Carol’s being stingy, I wouldn’t care, but I know the bag is also a wink that buying a house is the first step toward having a baby, making a proper family, a nod to our having told my parents we don’t want children. I pull the tissue out and find another piece of Pueblo pottery.