Page 80 of Shame the Devil
Annabelle said, “I don’t want to come back here,” her voice small and hollow in the cold starlight, and Harlan said, “I know.”
As for him, he was in some other space. The one you went into when you knew you’d lost the game, but you had to play your hardest to the end anyway, because there was no other choice. When you thought,I can have emotion later. Right now, I need to do this.Digging deep for your last bit of strength, focusing on getting every action exactly right, and feeling nothing. He’d seen Jennifer taking the family pictures off the wall, going through the bookcase and packing barely-remembered children’s books and old photo albums into a cardboard box, like somebody would want to remember any of this, and all he’d felt was cold.
At her quiet suggestion, he stopped at Dan’s Supermarket on the way over to the other house. He pushed the cart through brightly lit, chilly aisles with Annabelle beside him and Jennifer putting milk and eggs and bread into the cart, and remembered pushing a cart just like it right here for his mom, with somebody hanging onto the end and the youngest one in the basket. She’d talk about ingredients while they shopped, educating all of them in the most casual way on picking out vegetables, on calculating which size of cereal was the best deal, and teaching them the difference between what you wanted and what you needed. It was his mom who’d told him that the store brand was usually the exact same thing in simpler packaging, except when it wasn’t, and when it made sense to pay for better. She’d taught them how to look for the creamy yellow spot on a watermelon, and had made it a game to thump them all and listen for the deep, hollow sound that told you it was good. When they’d chosen their pumpkins for Halloween, she’d made it an occasion. She’d let them draw the faces on for her to carve out with the sharp knife, and when Halloween was over, she’d showed them how to roast the seeds.
Easter egg hunts on the damp grass, the excitement of finding that plastic egg amidst the tulips, and when he’d gotten old enough to hold back and let a little sister find it instead, how she’d noticed, and how she’d smiled. Like kindness mattered more than winning, exactly like Jennifer had said. The Christmas stockings that she’d sewn for them on the machine, with their names picked out in glitter, that always had the things inside that you knew they would, the ones you were looking forward to. A jar of bubbles. A Matchbox car. A roll of tape of your own. They always had a surprise, though, too, that was just for you. A tiny ceramic dog, one year, that he’d kept on his desk. An Irish Wolfhound, because he’d longed for one, and she knew it. A little black notebook with a loop for a gold pencil, when he been a little older, when there were too many sisters and not enough privacy. “So you can write down your thoughts,” she’d said.
How could he have believed she’d left?
How could he not have looked for her? How could he not even havetried?
He was feeling now. He didn’t want to.
At the house at last, and Jennifer unpacking grocery bags as he brought them in. Purple shadows under her eyes, and her freckles standing out against her white skin.
Too tired. And pregnant.
He told her, “Go take a shower. I’ve got this. I’ll get something delivered for dinner.”
She smiled at him, a weary thing, and said, “I’ve got nothing to change into. I’ll wait for my shower until it’s time for bed.”
“Wait here.” He ran upstairs to the bedroom where he’d dumped his hastily-packed suitcase, and came down with Devils sweatpants and sweatshirt, a T-shirt, a pair of boxer briefs, and socks. She looked at them and laughed, but she took them, and when she came downstairs wearing the sweats,helaughed. First time all day.
“Yeah,” she said, “go on and laugh. Dyma would tell you that this is how I dress all the time. ‘Oversized’ is my look. Maybe I’m transitioning from that idea, though. Other than at home, because I don’t care what you say, oversized is more comfortable.”
He said, “I think that would be a real good plan. Since regular-sized is a great look on you.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back. Another first for today. He hadn’t even smiled when he’d seen her sitting in the car at his gate, had he? He couldn’t remember.
That had just been this morning. It didn’t feel like it.
Dinner was Chinese, Bismarck style, which meant, “Not Chinese enough,” and as soon as they’d eaten and loaded up the dishwasher, Annabelle said, “I’m going to bed.”
He asked, “Want me to come up and talk to you?” With no clue at all what to say.
“No,” she said. “I’m really tired. I just want to go to sleep.” And once again, he wasn’t sure what to do.
Jennifer said, though, when Annabelle had disappeared, “It’s OK. She’s on overload. Sometimes, you need time to process first. Inside, I mean, before you talk about it. Before you eventhinkabout it. Don’t you find that?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
“Like the processing isn’t even happening in your brain,” she said. “Like it’s in your body. Tomorrow’s soon enough. I’m feeling a little that way myself, and I’m just the observer, not the one whose life has just been torn open.” Since she had lines of strain around her mouth now to add to the shadows under her eyes, that wasn’t hard for him to imagine. “You should have another beer, though,” she said. “I’m sure there’s a training regimen, but some nights …” She sat back on the couch in his red sweats, her hands between her knees, and sighed. “Sometimes, you just want to drink it all away until you can forget, don’t you? I think you’d be justified.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t drink when I need to. I drink when I don’t.”
She looked at him with plenty of understanding, but with so much fatigue, and he said, “Go to bed. We’ll talk tomorrow. And—Jennifer.”
“Yes?”
He put out a hand and brushed it over her cheek. “Thanks for coming.”
* * *
The next day,he wasn’t doing any of the things he ought to be doing.
He wasn’t taking Annabelle to buy another suitcase, and helping Jennifer shop for something better than his sweats to wear. Something that wouldn’t be loose, because she thought she had to wear that, because she was ashamed to enjoy feeling beautiful. Something that would show off what he now realized was a pregnancy-ripened figure. Not much belly yet that he could see, but a wholelotof breast. He wasn’t sitting on the Boyfriend Chair telling her to try the next size down and having her get all sassy at him. Giving Annabelle something to laugh about, too.
He wasn’t thinking about which way he wanted that DNA test to turn out, either, because he couldn’t. That part of his mind was a tangled mess. It was what she’d said, maybe. Nothing had settled down enough for him to think about it.
He wasn’t talking to his sister Alison, after her interview with Detective I’m-not-nearly-as-relaxed-as-I-look Johnson. He hadn’t even seen Alison yet, in fact. He also wasn’t meeting Vanessa’s flight. Jennifer and Annabelle were doing that right now.
