This section of the novel was sent on March 15...
Perhaps because of this incident, by the time we arrived home I was less determined to share with Abby what Mrs. Schwinn had told me. Maybe if Abby had been awake, instead of sleeping so soundly on the bed, the momentum of the encounter might have carried me in that direction. But seeing her there, with her mouth open and her breath pouring out in grunts and snores, I felt like I wanted this to myself. She was not very interested in the Dead Baby Story, anyway. Whenever I brought it up she sighed and rolled her eyes.
Daisy was still asleep, so I carried her into her room and set her in the crib. She let out a little moan and rolled onto her side. I stood there for a while and watched her.
“What about you?” I whispered. “Are you interested in the Dead Baby Story?”
Her eyes pulsed under their papery lids. When she slept, she went somewhere deeper than us grown-ups. What do one-year-olds dream about? Was she seeing the dead squirrel? Her little hands were balled into fists. I reached down and touched her smooth cheek.
Sometimes when I watched Daisy sleeping I was overcome with fear. How on earth was I supposed to take care of this helpless creature? She couldn’t walk (though she could crawl), she couldn’t speak more than a few nonsense words, she could barely feed herself and even then half the food ended up on the floor. It was hard to imagine she would ever learn how to use the toilet, never mind some day grow up and meet a man and have her own kids. When Daisy was born, the midwife handed me this red, wrinkled monkey who stared up at me with a stupefied expression. Daisy was just as shocked as I was. And our relationship had not changed, with both of us wary of the other, just waiting for something to go terribly wrong. It wasn’t that I expected her to disappoint me, but that I was sure I’d disappoint her. And sometimes, when I looked into her disconcertingly piercing eyes, it seemed she was sure I’d disappoint her, too.
That first year with Daisy. The wailing in the middle of the night, that guttural cry, more like a small farm animal than a human being. It cut through my sleep like a corroded blade, and even though it was Abby who did all the heavy lifting—the endless breastfeeding!—I felt exhausted all the time. When I went back to work that Fall (Daisy was born during the school’s summer vacation, thank God), I had difficulty concentrating. My students would ask me questions and I stood before them like a hollow, papier-mâché version of myself. It sounds like I’m blaming the baby for what happened that first year, but I’m not. Not all new fathers, however tired and anxious, end up making out with a seventeen year-old girl.
Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the window screens. Rain started pinging on the roof. I went around the house shutting the windows, leaving them open an inch for air to circulate. Then I checked in on Abby. She lay in the exact same position, mouth open, chest rising and dropping. I thought about crawling in beside her. The room was dark, rain fell like silver wires. But something stopped me. She looked so scrawny there, in her baggy jeans and t-shirt. Sometimes I worried she might break in two just from the force of gravity. When we’d met, ten years earlier, she’d been so sturdy, on the cusp of graduating from law school, her back strong from hauling around all those books and ideas. Three years later, we married. Six more years and Daisy came along, and it was as if some of the life had poured out of her in the birthing room along with the blood and water. She quit her job to stay at home with the baby, willing to live on my teacher’s salary for a few years, and look what I went and did.
Okay Peterson. That was her actual name. Not a nickname, she was quick to point out. Her parents were bohemian types with funny ideas. Her little brother was named Cymbal. Okay always pretended to be annoyed by her name but I suspected she liked it, especially when it prompted interest from boys.
She was a very mature seventeen. In her plaid uniform skirt and white blouse she was a grown man’s fantasy of a school girl in bloom, pleats flapping against her smooth thighs as she stalked the halls of St. Lucy’s Academy. Her black hair fell over her face so that she was always flipping it back, giving quick glimpses of her pale face, thin lips, green eyes. From behind the waterfall of hair she watched others as they watched her.
I was directing the school play, an original drama written by one of my students. Okay was playing the lead character, a drug addict living in a fleabag hotel populated by the usual skid row residents. It was a decent little play, given the age of the author. The characters were stereotypes but there were some surprises and a touching ending. Okay was great in the role. She managed to put aside her schoolgirl glamour and project the sad, desperate part of herself.
There were some long rehearsals after school, sometimes into the evening. Okay was always lingering after the others had gone, asking questions about her character. Why is she so into drugs, Mr. Hammond? Where are her parents? Does she believe in God? Other girls had had crushes on me. I never took it more seriously than students who were angry at me for giving them a bad grade. It was part of the job. I would answer Okay’s questions patiently and then shoo her home. Then I would go home myself to find the apartment in disarray, with Daisy squalling and a depressed Abby thrilled to step aside and let daddy take over. Some nights, when Daisy had finally fallen asleep, and Abby lay there snoring, I’d think of Okay and wonder.
On the night of dress rehearsal, the performance was a mess. I kept the cast late, going over the scenes, making changes, fixing problems. When we were finally finished they all went home except for Okay, who volunteered to help me clean up and prepare for opening night. While we swept the stage and fine-tuned the set she told me she was learning a lot and thought maybe she wanted to be an actress. I told her that was great, and she asked if I could help her find a good college program. By the time we were finished talking the stage had long been prepped and we were sitting on the ratty sofa that was part of the set. I told her she was very terrific in the role. She told me she couldn’t do it without me. I told her that was nonsense. She told me I was her favorite teacher. I said I was flattered. She stretched out her long legs and pulled aside her hair. It was like I was drunk. I could feel my thickened blood struggling through my veins. And she could tell. She laughed. What’s so funny? I asked. Would it be bad if we kissed? she asked. Yes, I said. Do you want to be bad? she asked.
To kiss someone new after ten years. Every hair on my body stood up and cheered. I tried not to listen to Abby’s off-stage voice: No! Meanwhile, Okay latched herself onto me like she’d never let go. I remembered being seventeen, half a lifetime ago, and the bottomless need. I knew I couldn’t fill that. After a long time, during which I allowed Okay to rub her hands across my chest and belly and lap, I managed to push her away. Oh please, she said. Her face was red, her thin lips swollen. I stood up and looked down on her and said I couldn’t, not now, not later. This was awkward with that obvious lump in my pants. She tried to interrupt but when I mentioned my wife, my daughter—that word still felt foreign in my mouth—she went quiet. I told her to go home and study her lines.
4. Goodnight Nobody
We were headed over to the Johnstons’ for dinner. Abby baked an apple pie, which I carried in both my hands, having been warned not to tip it (the juice would leak out the sides), while Abby carried Daisy.The Johnstons’ house had been added on to over the years, but unlike Jerry Winters’s place some thought had gone into the additions. From the road the two-story structure appeared cohesive, as if it had been constructed all at once, but as we approached up the gravel driveway I could make out the former chimney line and the difference between the upstairs and downstairs windows. Up close like this there was a shabbiness that, for some shameful reason, I found gratifying. The front yard, which, like ours, rolled gently down from the house to a stone wall, was haphazardly gardened, with sections here and there devoted to flowers covered by a thin, nearly invisible plastic netting.
We climbed some uneven stone steps to the front door. Still holding the pie in both hands, I pushed the doorbell with my elbow.
“Did you hear it ring?” I asked.
“Push it again,” Abby said.
“Let’s see if someone comes.”
I stood on my toes and peered through the small square of glass in the door. I saw a sparsely furnished living room tinted a fading pink by the early evening sun. Beyond that a square of yellow light fell across the carpet, perhaps from the kitchen.
“You have to push it hard,” Abby said.
“I thought I did.”
“Maybe you have to lean into it.”
“Or maybe it’s broken.”
“So knock.”
I slipped a palm beneath the pie tin to free up a hand.
“Careful with that, please.”
Just as I was about to knock, the door swung open, and there stood Monica Johnston in cut-off jeans and a gingham top that fell short of her waist.
“Hi!” Abby shouted. “We weren’t sure if the bell rang.”
“It rang,” Monica said. She stood there, blocking the doorway. Her belly was flat and tan. There was a gold hoop in her navel.
“Your mom invited us for dinner?” Abby said.
“Uh-huh.” The girl stepped aside and smiled as I passed. Had she noticed me staring at her midriff?
“Welcome, welcome!” Frannie cried out as she emerged from the kitchen. She wore a long, pale green apron with World’s Sexiest Chef emblazoned across her perky chest. “Oh, you didn’t need to bring that,” she said, grabbing the pie from my hands before I could warn her to be careful. Without spilling a drop, she leaned in and kissed me on the lips. Her mouth tasted sweet. Then she kissed Abby, also on the lips.
“Look at that little angel!” she said, grabbing Daisy’s face with her free hand. The baby wore a white cotton dress with dancing blue elephants, her thin blonde hair combed back and held in place by a matching blue barrette. For someone who couldn’t care less about what he wore himself, I was very attentive to Daisy’s appearance. I was proud of her cute looks and determined to have her be my ambassador. Frannie squeezed the baby’s cheeks and said, “Just look at her, Monica, honey. She is just luscious.”
Monica ignored her mother and ran up a flight of carpeted stairs. I could not help but notice the round moons peaking out of her cutoffs.
Frannie bent into Daisy’s face and said, “Don’t ever grow into a teenager, little girl.” Daisy grinned, showing two tiny upper teeth, and tried to gab Frannie’s nose. Frannie giggled and said, “Would y’all like a glass of wine? I just opened a bottle of Chardonnay and it’s yummy.”
We followed her into the kitchen, which was double the size of ours. Abby wore the look of a bag lady gazing into the window of a fancy restaurant. “What a beautiful kitchen.”
“You’ll have to excuse the mess. I can’t seem to cook without destroying the place. Arnie’s always threatening to kill me.”
There were dirty dishes and bowls piled in the double sink, but other than that the room was sparkling.
“Where is the man of the house?” I asked. We still had not officially met. I’d seen him coming and going, but never to say hello.
“Oh, he’ll be here shortly,” Frannie said. “I told him I’d make a capon out of him if he was late.”
She poured two glasses of wine and refilled her own. I was more of a beer man, but I thanked her anyway and held up my glass in a toast. “Cheers.”
“To neighbors,” Frannie said. “Now you sit right down while I finish up here.” She waved us toward a set of tall stools lining a large, tile-topped island.
“Can we help?” Abby asked.
“No way. You’re guests. I may try to get my useless offspring down here to lend a hand, though.”
We watched Frannie prepare a tossed salad and occasionally check on a lasagna in the oven. Daisy sat perched on Abby’s lap, fascinated by Frannie’s ceaseless activity. Our hostess didn’t seem at all bothered by the heat in the kitchen, which was turning my underarms swampy. To counteract this sense of wilting I quickly drained two glasses of the sickly sweet wine.
While she dervished around the kitchen, Frannie filled us in on neighborhood gossip. Carol Howser, a single mother who lived on the other side of Jerry Winters’s place, was a heavy drinker. Daryl and Rose Pierce were a “mixed” couple, with one little boy who had the most gorgeous skin tone. “Poor Mrs. Schwinn” lost her husband ten years ago when a car ran him down on Love Lane.
“Really?” I said. “I almost got run down there myself.”
“It’s a terrible spot,” Frannie said. “In front of Carol Howser’s place.”
“When was that?” Abby asked me.
“A few days ago.”
“With Daisy?” There was that look—the one you give a child abuser. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“You were asleep when we got home,” I said, making it her fault.
“Mr. Schwinn was such a mean old man,” Frannie said, coming to my rescue. “Nobody minded much when it happened.”
“You’re terrible!” Abby laughed.
“Well, it’s true. Especially Mrs. Schwinn.”
Frannie went on to regale us with stories of Mr. Schwinn’s dislike of black people and cats. Throughout all this I could feel the wine seeping into my brain.
“Hey, speaking of neighborhood gossip,” I said. Abby turned and gave me the hairy eyeball. She knew what was coming. “We heard this crazy story about our house the other day.”
Frannie was peering deep into her oven. I could feel the heat all the way across the kitchen. Why someone without air conditioning would bake a lasagna in the middle of summer was beyond me.
“Do you know anything about a murder being committed there?” I asked.
Frannie continued to stare at her lasagna. “How on earth are you supposed to know when one of these things is done?”
“Our yard guy told us that a baby was killed there. Some crazy lunatic did it.” I was trying to make it sound sort of harmless—just more gossip.
Frannie slammed the oven door. “I don’t know anything about a lunatic next door.”
“You guys weren’t living here then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Abby nudged me with her knee. I smiled, enjoying this switch—she was usually the one asking all the probing questions.
“So you knew them?” I asked.
“Vaguely.” Frannie’s face, normally open and warm, had shut down. “We hadn’t been here very long when all that happened.”
“Carl is obsessed with the story,” Abby said. “It seems a bit morbid for a nice occasion like this. Don’t you think?” She smiled at me, but the muscles around her mouth were taut.
“I’m just trying to get the details straight,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know much more than you do,” Frannie said.
“But you did know them?”
Frannie was about to say something when the kitchen door swung open and in came Arnie Johnston, tall and wide-shouldered in his work shirt and oil-smeared trousers.
“Hey, darlin’,” Frannie said, perking up as she went to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She introduced us, and Arnie strode over and shook our hands.
“You’re home oily,” I said. Frannie laughed in her stagey way while Arnie forced a smile. His face was handsome but cold. I got the feeling he wasn’t thrilled to have guests in his home. He barely even acknowledged Daisy.
“Why don’t you run upstairs and change, sweetie?” Frannie said. “And drag those children of yours down here while you’re at it. Dinner’s almost ready.”
Arnie obeyed without a word, the strong, silent type. When he was gone, Frannie said in a stage whisper, “Don’t mention the murdered baby thing around Arnie.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Just don’t bring it up, okay?”
During dinner, with another glass or two of Chardonnay sloshing around my cranium, I kept wondering what made Frannie so anxious about the Dead Baby Story. Arnie sat at the head of the dining room table, methodically cutting his lasagna with a knife and shoveling it into his mouth. He drank a beer, which I coveted, but he made no offer to share. In retaliation, I drank another glass of wine. The kids were chips off the old block, silently boring into their dinner like small prairie animals determined to finish their meals before some hawk swooped down and carried them away. Ellis had his father’s closely-spaced eyes and clenched jaw. Monica, who sat directly across from me, resembled her mother so directly that she could have been pulled from her like putty. Her face was unblemished and radiant, even behind her scowl. Before she lifted her fork she would swoop a strand of her long blonde hair behind a perfectly formed ear. As she chewed, her bowed lips squirmed daintily beneath her slightly upturned nose. She barely looked up from her plate, but when she did she caught me staring. I looked away, toward Daisy, who sat in an old high chair that Arnie had dragged up from the basement. She was playing with a lasagna noodle, her face smeared with tomato sauce. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Monica watching me. I was a little afraid of her.
“So how’s the oil business, Arnie?” I asked.
“Steady,” he said in between bites. I considered counting how many chews he gave each mouthful, but I’d had enough wine that any numbers beyond ten melted into each another.
“How long have you been with OilCo?”
He looked up at a corner of the ceiling. “Twenty-one years.”
“Twenty-two,” Frannie said.
“Mm mm. Twenty-one.”
“You started the day after our fifth anniversary, remember?” Frannie turned to Abby and added, “Seems like yesterday.”
“You’ve been married twenty-six years?” Abby asked.
“Excuse me,” Arnie said, pushing back from the table.
“Oh no you don’t,” Frannie said.
“Be right back.” Arnie walked through the kitchen to the back door.
“Can you believe that man still smokes cigarettes?”
“That’s not good,” Abby said.
“Maybe I’ll go keep him company,” I said, rising. I didn’t particularly want to spend time with this stoney man, but I was pretty drunk now and half-convinced I could break him down like a wild colt. The ladies watched me go as if I were leaving to walk across hot coals.
Arnie stood out on the back patio, smoking a cigarette. There was a glass-topped table and chairs beneath an umbrella, a massive gas grill, and, beyond the patio, the familiar lawn with the swing set and folding chair. A fat squirrel scampered across the top rail of the fence.
“Hey,” I said.
He was already half-way through the cigarette, as if he’d burned it away with one long inhale.
“Nice yard,” I said. “Nice grill.”
“Thanks.”
Suddenly conscious of my hands, I wished I’d brought my wine glass. Arnie puffed away and stared off into the distance.
“So you’ve been here twenty-six years?”
He shook his head. “Longer.”
“Oh. I thought—“
“Fran is mixed up, as usual.”
Another pause. He tossed the still-smoking butt out onto the lawn.
“Wanna get high?” he asked, pulling a small pipe and a pill bottle from his shirt pocket.
“Really?”
He unscrewed the bottle and removed a tiny bit of green herb. He gently tapped the pot into the pipe bowl, screwed the bottle top back on, and produced a lighter.
“Surprised?” he said.
“A little.”
He tilted the lighter flame into the bowl and inhaled. He held his breath for a moment, then let the smoke roll from his mouth. He offered the pipe to me.
“Why not?” It had been years. I inhaled as Arnie relit the bowl. My throat burned, but I managed not to cough until I’d held the smoke in for a few seconds. Then it roared out in a loud, rolling bark that left my eyes watering.
“Thanks, man,” I croaked.
He lit himself another bowlful. The sky seemed to take on a slightly different hue.
“So,” I said. “You’ve probably seen a lot of folks come and go.”
“Some. You want another hit?”
“No thanks.” My head felt like it was filled with helium. “That’s strong stuff.”
“I get it from some guy across the lake.”
I felt the wine slowly burning off under the heat of the pot. For what seemed like an hour I watched the fat squirrel leap from the fence to a tree and expertly barber pole its way to the uppermost branches. It was the most impressive feat of athleticism I’d ever witnessed.
“So,” I finally said, “how many have come and gone in our house?”
He looked over at 49 Love Lane, just beyond the fence and a few wispy shrubs.
“Quite a few.”
“Yeah?”
“It being haunted and all.”
I started laughing. “Excuse me?”
“They didn’t tell you that?”
“No, they didn’t.”
“I think they’re supposed to tell you that sort of thing.”
“Really? By law?”
“Well, they don’t have to tell you the place is haunted, maybe, but they have to tell you there was a violent incident there.”
Something about the phrase must have cracked me up because I felt my face erupting into a childish grin. “What kind of violent incident?” I asked.
Arnie proceeded to recount pretty much the same story that Anders Lehigh had told: the screwed-up parents, the ten year-old boy, the baby. But unlike Lehigh, Arnie seemed to enjoy telling the story. Every time I said “Really?” or “Holy shit!” he relished my shock. I wondered why Frannie had warned me not to say anything to him about the murder. Maybe it was less that the story disturbed him than the story excited him.
“Did you know the family well?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“Do you remember their names?”
He shook his head no. “Been a long time. Before the kids, even.”
“I wonder what happened to them.”
He shrugged. “The idiot went to jail, I know that. The mom and the boy moved away somewhere.” As he spoke, he headed toward the door. He was apparently done talking about it. I followed him inside and into the kitchen. As I walked I noticed that my movements and thoughts were slightly disjointed. I was in a movie with the sound out of sync.
Arnie paused at the refrigerator and grabbed another beer.
“Is it really haunted?” I asked quietly. I could hear the women buzzing in the next room.
“Some of the folks who’ve lived there say so.”
“They saw things?”
“Saw things. Heard things. Whatever. Talk to Frannie. She’s the one they told this crap to.”
“Can I have one of those beers?” I asked.
He looked surprised. “Sure. I guess so.”
“And where’s your john?”
He handed me a beer and pointed toward a door in the hall off the kitchen.
The bathroom was done up in red: red sink, red wallpaper, red toilet seat. It was like stepping into the interior of my eyeballs. Over the commode hung a sign done up in the style of the Whitman’s sampler: If it’s yellow, be mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. This is what happens when you don’t have city water, I thought. Another, smaller, sign was framed and propped up on the tank: If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie & wipe the seatie!
I didn’t buy that Arnie couldn’t remember the names of the people next door. He may have been pushing fifty but he had the same expression a sixteen year-old has when lying. I’d seen it hundreds of times. The eyes go all darty, looking everywhere at once.
What was he leaving out?
*
Later that night, back at home, Daisy was having trouble settling down, so I sat her on my lap and read Goodnight Moon, her current favorite. I was still a little high and having a hard time reading. I found the book’s lack of punctuation especially maddening. Where were the goddamn commas? I felt like an obsessive-compulsive in a roomful of half-open drawers. Something else about the book provoked anxiety in me: all those wide shots of the bedroom, where nothing seemed to remain in place. Where did that “quiet old lady” come from, anyway? She seemed a malevolent presence somehow. And the bunny in the bed—why did he seem to be climbing out at one point? It was like he was trying to escape this surreal prison cell. Then there was that one unnerving page, empty but for the words “Goodnight nobody.” For the first time the book struck me as the record of an existential nightmare. I read it quickly, eager to finish, but then Daisy turned the pages back to the beginning and grunted her version of “Again.”
Earlier, on the way back from the Johnstons’, I’d told Abby about getting high with Arnie. I hadn’t planned to tell her, but she knew something was up with me—I’d had a giggling fit during dessert, having remembered the signs in the bathroom—and I really wanted to surprise her with this revelation about uptight Arnie Johnston.
“You were out there smoking dope?”
“Can you believe Arnie’s a pothead?”
“I can’t believe you.”
“What?”
“How old are you, anyway? Nineteen?”
I was just being neighborly.”
Daisy watched us closely, recognizing the smell of fire in the air, so Abby tried to keep her anger under wraps, but I could see she the flames right behind her eyes.
“No wonder you were acting so stupid,” she said, unlocking the door to the house. She didn’t talk to me after that except to say she was tired and would I please read to Daisy. “If you can see straight, that is.”
After I’d read Goodnight Moon five times, Daisy finally fell asleep in my arms. I sat there in the chair listening to Daisy breathe and Abby turning magazine pages in the bedroom. My brain felt tired, like a muscle after exercise. I shut my eyes and fell into a brief dream about the fat squirrel in the Johnstons’ yard. The squirrel sat in my lap and while I stoked its soft, white belly it looked up and said, “Be a sweetie.” When I woke up I had no idea what time it was. Daisy lay sprawled across my legs. I shook the sleep from my head, carried Daisy into her room and set her in the crib. I stood there in the dark for a while, remembering what Arnie had said about the house being haunted. I thought again of the night Abby heard the baby crying.
From the bedroom Abby called to me in a heightened whisper: “Carl! Carl!”
She had shut off the lamp, but in the light from the living room I could see she wasn’t in bed.
“Carl.”
She was kneeling at the window wearing one of my old t-shirts.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Shhh.” She waved me over.
“What’re you doing?”
She pointed out the window toward the Johnstons’ yard. The night was dark beneath a moonless sky. I could barely make out the swing set poles and the fence just a few yards away.
“What?”
“Look.”
As my eyes started to adjust, I thought I could make out some movement in the yard. Something pale. The darkness seemed to be reactivating the THC in my system. It was as though everything was behind a scrim.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Listen.”
I heard crickets and the insect buzz of a television somewhere. There was also a soft, cooing sound.
“Is that a fox or something?” I asked. Ms. Schwinn had told us that foxes occasionally roamed the neighborhood.
“Look closer, you idiot.”
Some pale animal in the yard was moving up and down. Maybe it was a hawk feasting on a rabbit.
“It’s the Johnstons,” Abby said, giggling.
I squinted until my dry eyes were about to pop out of their sockets. The hawk slowly morphed into a pair of buttocks.
“What the--?”
On either side of the pale ass I could now make out two long legs.
“Can you believe it?” Abby whispered.
I wanted to turn away but I couldn’t. There was that electric thrill that I used to get as a teenager looking at dirty magazines. Even more exciting than the sight was the sound of Frannie Johnston cooing rhythmically, the pitch reaching higher and higher as Arnie gyrated atop her.
Next to me, Abby was breathing heavily, heat rolling off her. I put my hand on the nape of her neck. Her skin was goose-pimpled. She pushed her hand beneath my shirt and rubbed my back.
Arnie’s ass pumped away while Frannie let out quick bursts if air. I kissed Abby’s ear. She groaned. As I sucked on her earlobe I imagined a clearer picture of the action: Frannie naked, her face red and sweaty, her breasts jiggling as Arnie pounded away. I reached under Abby’s t-shirt and cupped her breast. The nipple was like a rock.
“Oh God!” Frannie cried out in a voice that didn’t even sound like hers. This was followed by a low grunt as Arnie ground himself on top of her. I moved my lips down to Abby’s neck.
“Holy crap,” she grunted.
“Mmmm.”
“That’s not Frannie.”
The pale ass was covered up now. I could barely make out the dark shape of a man standing in the yard. Beneath, still lying on the grass, was a half-nude woman.
“That’s not her?” I asked.
“I think that’s Monica.”
I peered into the blackness. The woman pulled on a pair of shorts. All I could see now were her long legs.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Shh.”
“Who’s the guy, then?”
“Shhh.”
They were talking softly but I couldn’t make out the words. The man, or boy, lay down beside Monica. There was a girlish giggle.
“That’s her,” Abby said. “That’s Monica.”
“Why would she do that right in the back yard like that?”
Abby stood and went to the bed. I watched for a while longer, but the two figures did not move. Their words blended in with the sound of the crickets.
I checked the clock—1:42—then joined Abby and draped a leg across her. “Arnie would kill her if he knew,” I said. I kissed her ear, but she did not make a sound. “What’s wrong?”
“I think that was Arnie.”
“What?” I sat up. In the light that filtered in from the living room her face was hard and cold.
“I think that was Arnie,” she repeated.
“Arnie and--?”
“I don’t know.”
“But—“
“I don’t know, Carl.”
I lay back down and stared up at the ceiling. My high was gone, dissipated by the idea of Arnie and Monica. I climbed from bed, went out to the living room and shut out the light. Back in the bedroom I looked out at the window again, but the figures were gone.
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