“Please, Todd!”
“Open this door, you slut!”
Fay was breathless. She heard a great thud against their bathroom door, then the crack and splintering. The girl’s terrified sobs. It was less than two minutes since she awakened. Stricken with guilt for not acting sooner, she ran to the telephone and called 911.
Within five minutes there was a loud rapping at her own door, and Fay opened it to the alert concern of a young police officer. As she was explaining, she heard another officer knocking repeatedly at unit 5, and already a second patrol car was pulling in, its red and blue lights pulsing.
A window shattered. The young officer whirled away from Fay, one hand guiding her back into her apartment, the other unlatching his holster. The second officer backed away from the doorway of number 5, gun already in hand.
“Oh, dear God,” Fay whispered, this time in earnest prayer.
chapter five
Returning every evening to the empty house, Peter is never sure which mood will greet him, but it’s often on the darker end of the scale. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday evening. His mind idly plucks at subjects to divert attention from the self and ponders the origin of Wednesday. After seven months, he misses the day’s end conversations with Karen as much as anything, her presence in the kitchen, sitting at the island while he rinsed spinach in the sink, opening a bottle of wine, listening to the fluctuating tone of her voice, often a wry note. They talked about everything, so it seemed, including the creeping distance between them over the preceding year, without blame or much anger. But the leaving, when it happened, was still sudden and stark. The absence of her body, her face, her eyes, the understanding in her voice.
Fairly soon after she left he realized that almost all of his local friends were made through Karen, and along with her his connection to them was gone. He gravitated to isolation.
Only a couple of times since did he have any interest in other women, and he felt too awkward to act when the opportunities arose. Their few words shared were welcome, of course, and the invitation to call. One from a woman who once worked with Karen; they met briefly at some function. But even a visit is more than he feels prepared for yet.
Peter has got his newfound bad habits for company — cigarettes close to hand, drinking more than he ever has. A warm evening for May, Woden’s Day. He sits on the back step with a smoke, a vodka tonic, and a can of beer. He tries to read, but every book he picks up lately seems either alien to him or too close to heart. Sometimes to combat the silence he plays music loud, mostly older stuff that he’s had since before his marriage. Karen’s taste was somewhat more varied, and she took every CD she ever purchased with her to California. She wasn’t being mean-hearted, just a bit neurotic, he thought. Wasn’t she starting afresh?
Anyway, he plays “El Corazon” by Steve Earle, and it feeds his needy sense of rebellion. The man’s been married how many times, fearless heart and all? He went to jail on drug charges, for crying out loud, and wrote two albums behind bars.
Blame is pointless. One more drink drags him too near to self-pity. The neighbour kids are out playing ball hockey until their blond mother calls them in at bedtime, casting a glare in his direction. His own backyard is overgrown, grass matted, knee-high weeds gone to seed, everything dried out or wilted by the heat.
The hours have blurred, and well after ten the daylight lingers. Although he hasn’t paid his subscription in months, the newspaper still gets delivered, a pile of back issues stacked by the door. For weeks the headlines have concerned the forest fires raging across the entire Northwest. The haze of smoke in the air gives an amber tint to the light that Peter finds unnerving — too much like urban smog threatening to smother the whole country.
He rises from the step and goes back into the house where thoughts of the past await him in every room. He’s trapped in there and must live among them. The place has been for sale for six months, but the market is way down and there are no buyers in sight. But he has his memories…
“Look at my feet,” Peter said one day last November.
Karen did so, turning her head while brushing her teeth. She glanced down at his feet, undried and flushed from his shower, splayed before him on the purple bath mat as he sat naked on the edge of the tub.
“Uh-huh?” she mumbles, her mouth still full of toothpaste, checking her watch. He was like a sleepy child in the morning. This was a workday.
“Don’t they look like animal feet?” he asked. “I mean, do you ever look at a part of your body and have this primal flashback to huddling in a cave, squatting in a forest or something?”
Karen bent to spit in the sink, laughing with the rush of tap water. She wiped her mouth, examined her hair in the mirror. “My own body or yours? Sweetheart, it’s ten to eight. I’ve got a meeting first thing this morning, and I can’t be late. You’ll still have your feet tonight. We can study them then.”
“Okay,” he growled, reaching for his clean underwear. “Now you’re talking.”
Later that week, on Sunday morning, it happened. They had been together eight years, long enough that Peter could recognize the weight of an impending discussion by the way Karen spooned her muesli. Her hand moved too deliberately and hovered. Peter rose to top up his cup of coffee. He felt foggy, suddenly wary, outgunned by Karen’s powers of concentration.
“There’s something we have to talk about,” she said with none of her usual irony, and his heart faltered.
What really threw him was how quickly Karen proceeded from that opening cliché to the kicker, from gambit to checkmate in a couple of minutes. She looked as beautiful as ever, tawny hair slightly dishevelled, yet her green eyes were evasive. Strangely calm.
Snow was steadily falling, the coffee was still fresh in their vintage beige enamel percolator, orange slices lay on a plate, images from a poem in memory. Peter had fried some bacon, three eggs, and a tomato, and with his Lea & Perrins was all set to savour a country squire’s breakfast. Earlier they’d had a sleepy wake-up love session, and the note of her climax lingered in his ears. The final time.
“Is it the meat?” he asked, gesturing at his plate, appetite quickly fading. Reaching for any humour, even vegetarian, hoping for her smile, for that much reassurance.
“What?”
“The bacon. It stinks up the house, you always say. I try not to eat it very often, but I could go without. I could. Maybe there’s a twelve-step program for bacon hounds.”
She shook her head.
Her look hit him in the pit of his stomach. “Is it the Pink Panther thing? Humming that theme song, or my imitations of Inspector Clouseau? I’ll stop. No more silly accents. I promise.”
“No…” She glanced down with a sad half-smile she couldn’t help.
Her expression caused his heart and hope to stall, then tip into a perilous nosedive. After all, he knew the gist of what she had to say before the words came out. Details didn’t really matter, because they excluded him. So at least he was relieved of guilt in that regard. She needed some time alone, freedom. She’d met someone via an on-line discussion group or chat room. Somebody from Crescent City, California. They had already had a rendezvous in Seattle, that weekend “conference” two months ago. Karen had asked for a leave of absence from the school, for now, but expected she would be giving her notice.
“You’re serious?” He laughed, or attempted to laugh, but his face collapsed, words rolling out like miscast dice. “You have a pen pal in California? And now you’re off to try living with him? Yes, okay, I get it. Wow! Is he like a beach surfer type, or software tycoon, or what?”
“She’s an artist, a sculptor,” Karen spoke softly, head down, her reference to gender escaping him at first with his hearing impaired by anger.
Peter had slept with