Fellow Mortals: A Novel Read online

  “It’s great.” Bob smiles.

  The boys nod in agreement, though it all feels obligatory to Peg, who finds a little bone inside her enchilada verde.

  “Looks like Billy’s hard at work,” Bob ventures through a bite.

  “He had better clean it up before it rains,” Peg says, referring to the drywall piled out back. “It’s bad enough he hasn’t finished with the siding or the lawn. At least before the fire they were hidden up the block. Honestly,” she says, “between the damage and the two empty lots, I couldn’t move a property in this neighborhood if they were giving it away.”

  “Sam bought land.”

  “And if he’d gone with me instead of Marcie Ross, he would have saved five hundred dollars an acre.”

  The family falls silent at the name Marcie Ross—a nemesis of Peg’s, rosy and repellent. Bob will never be forgiven for the time he complimented Marcie’s billboard near the CITGO station, and all he really said was that her hair looked better than it used to.

  “And remember what I told you,” Peg says to Danny and Ethan. “You’re not to go anywhere near the trailer or the woods.”

  “Why?” Danny asks.

  “I’m not comfortable having you talk to Mr. Bailey.”

  “Your mother doesn’t mean that Sam’s a bad person,” Bob says. “He just wants some privacy.”

  “Which I would give him,” Peg insists, “if I could talk to him a minute. But he’s always in the woods doing who knows what. I keep leaving notes. He’s never there—he’s like a ghost.”

  “He was there before dinner.”

  “What, where?”

  “In the trailer.”

  Peg stands up and marches to the door, still in motion when she bends to get her pumps—hop, pop, double hop—and off she goes, into the darkly falling evening and across the barren plot. She keeps her eyes upon the trailer, moving at a clip, half expecting Sam’ll spot her and rabbit into the trees. When she makes it to the door, she doesn’t hear a thing. There’s not a glimmer of light from either set of blinds. But the strangeness is the reason that she soldiered out at all, and she’s about to follow through when Sam emerges from the door.

  Peg retreats until the streetlights are visible again.

  “Hi,” she says, frightened of his tall silhouette.

  She doesn’t say more until he’s lit enough to recognize. He’s skinnier and browner with a two-day beard; it occurs to Peg she hasn’t really seen him since the fire, that she can’t talk trailer straightaway without condolences.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. She really truly is.

  “Thanks,” Sam says. “I got your notes. I should have said hello.”

  “No, please. We were worried, that was all.”

  “How are your boys?”

  “They’re fine, they’re shaken up. It scared them.”

  “I know.”

  He keeps looking eerier the better her eyes become, dangerous and lank, wearing dirty jeans and flannel. There was style to his hair but now it’s scruffy. She can smell him. He reminds her of a homeless man who used to be a student, someone in the very early stages of addiction.

  “I heard you bought the land back here,” Peg says. “I wish I’d known. Are you planning to rebuild?”

  “No.”

  “You’re staying in the trailer, then?”

  “I haven’t worked it out,” he says. “It’s only been a month.”

  “No, of course,” Peg says. “I only meant to say…”

  “Thanks for coming by.”

  He turns toward the door, finished with the talk.

  “Sam,” Peg says, stepping forward inadvertently.

  He stops and they’re together, closer in the dark, in the very tight gap between the trailer and the trees. She can hardly see his eyes but feels the way he’s looking at her, staring down and using all his height to make her small.

  “May I ask you a personal question?” Peg says.

  He doesn’t tell her no.

  “What are you doing for a bathroom?”

  “There’s a tank,” Sam says, and she imagines it beside her, there beneath the floor in the damp, muddy gloom.

  “It isn’t any of my business…”

  “I’m asking you to go,” Sam says.

  She doesn’t have a breath, never mind an answer. He leaves her there abruptly, goes inside, and shuts the door. It’s as if he’s really vanished, how she’s instantly alone.

  8

  “There wasn’t a phone,” Henry tells Ava at the door, panting like he’s jogged the whole way home. Before he says more, Wing’s jumping up between them, Nan’s calling them to eat, and Henry’s kicking off his shoes and walking to the bathroom. He’s muddy, with a crust of dried blood along his forearm.

  “Henry…”

  “Just a sec, I’ve got to whiz like the devil.”

  “You were bleeding.”

  “What? Whoop, look at that. I didn’t even feel it. It’s the blood thinners, babe. Lemme wash, just a minute. Start without me,” Henry says, leaving Ava, Nan, and Joan to listen to his stream.

  They’ve waited up to eat, growing antsy when he didn’t arrive by six o’clock, and they’re all privately starving except for Henry, who’s drawn and openly starving, so much so that Ava stops herself from questioning him fully until he’s eaten. He marches out of the bathroom and animates the room, more vigorous than all three women put together. He stretches and groans and wipes his face, rocks the chair, clatters silverware, and shifts the whole table when he moves, and even in the dining room the air feels open and the birds outside sound a little more alive. He cuts a piece of meatball and palms it out for Wing, who wolfs it with a smack and grumbles for another. Henry wipes his hand and balls the napkin on the table, then digs into his food with his head mere inches from the plate.

  “We didn’t say grace,” Joan reminds them, awed by the suddenness and speed of Henry’s eating. They’re serious meatballs; Joan herself can handle only one.

  Henry says the prayer with his mouth full, mumbling under Nan’s crisp enunciation, and then he’s all about the meal, making it look more physical than ordinary eating, bolting it down and smearing the rim of his milk glass with tomato sauce. Nan winds spaghetti very tightly on a fork. Joan cuts her meatball into quarters with a butter knife. Ava’s appetite grows after three or four bites, several hours’ worth of stomach acid blanketed with pasta.

  “So he didn’t chase you off,” she finally says.

  “He tried to at first,” Henry tells her. “Then he needed help dragging logs off the footpath.”

  “Logs?” Ava says, brandishing her fork.

  “Well not logs,” Henry says. “Just branches and sticks,” and she can see the little man cycling in his head, trying desperately to brake and pedal in reverse.

  “The poor guy’s living in a trailer. He’s sculpting whole trees. He’s got a sculpture out there … I couldn’t really see it but the arm was sticking up. You’d have sworn that it was real.”

  “He’s very talented,” Nan declares. “He sculpted every day.”

  “Yeah, it’s good he’s staying busy, right? I guess he bought the land for all the wood. It’s something back there, but man, that trailer’s really small.”

  “What did he say?” Ava asks.

  “Not a lot. I apologized as much as I could, told him anything he needed…” Henry pauses for a second, glancing up at Ava. “He asked about the fire. He wanted to know what Laura looked like. I almost couldn’t answer but I had to, you know?”

  Ava thinks of Laura, whom she never once saw, the woman with the hair Henry openly admired. She didn’t seem real when she was actually alive but Ava senses her tonight, like a presence in the room. Henry withers in his chair and lays his fork beside his plate. She leans across the tabletop and takes him by the hand.

  “He didn’t seem to want me there.” Henry sighs.

  “You ought to respect his wishes.”

  “I don’t know,” Nan says. She
folds her napkin into a triangle and looks at Ava. “What if Henry is the person Sam really needs?”

  “Or the only one he doesn’t need,” Ava says. “Isn’t that up to Sam?”

  “Of course it is,” Henry tells her. “I just can’t tell what he wants.”

  “He let Henry stay there for hours,” Nan says. “That doesn’t sound like a man who wants to be alone.”

  “It sounds like a man who doesn’t know when to leave,” Ava says, sharply enough for Joan—still working on her meatball—to put her knife down and glance around the table in alarm.

  “I think it’s up to Henry,” Nan says.

  “Are you going there for him or for yourself?” Ava asks him.

  “Why’s it got to be one or the other? Look at us. We’re married, you and me,” Henry says, making a you-and-me gesture with his hand.

  “You and I,” Nan whispers.

  “We love each other, back and forth,” Henry says. “We can’t be selfless all the time or the other person’d get gypped out of their being selfless.”

  “What does that even mean?” Ava asks.

  The light’s turned purple outside, dusky warm and giving the room a saturated hue. A phoebe cheeps. Ava squeaks her chair without moving and the Finns, stock-still, make no sound at all.

  “Joan,” Henry says. “What do you think he needs?”

  She looks up spooked, shaken by her name, having sat there comfortably forgotten with her meal. Henry stares at her with open-faced sincerity and hope.

  “A friend?” Joan asks.

  Ava sighs and shakes her head.

  “Absolutely right,” he says, drumming on the table. “It’s exactly that simple.”

  Joan looks relieved.

  * * *

  Ava’s ready to sleep at nine o’clock, the arches of her feet full of buckshot and thorns. Before they go upstairs, Joan leads Henry into the kitchen. She’s been working on her puzzle all afternoon and has the border and the lower-left corner nearly done. Henry laughs, assuming she’s been having a marvelous time, and his laughter automatically convinces Joan she has. They all say good night and go their separate ways, Nan and Joan with cups of tea and a criminal forensics show, Ava to the bedroom with Henry at her heels.

  “Tell me the truth,” she says, stopping him the second he’s in the room.

  “What?”

  “You pushed yourself today.”

  “He needed help to clear a path. It wasn’t dangerous.”

  “You promised me a year ago. You promised not to push…”

  “I know, I know,” Henry says, defeated far too easily for Ava to pursue a proper argument. “I promise…”

  “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t.”

  He had promised with cigars.

  “I didn’t mean to worry you,” he says. “Ava, look at me. I didn’t—”

  “Let it go. I’m glad it went well, I’m glad you’re okay. But I’m really too exhausted for a long conversation,” and with that she turns away and leaves him at the door.

  It feels later than it is, deeper into summer—almost like fall is right around the bend. The room’s muggy and she can’t raise the window any higher. She would like nothing better than to sleep outdoors with the June constellations moving overhead and the grass still warm from the afternoon sun. The room’s cramped and the ceiling’s too low to hang a fan. She’s tired of the wall paint—gingerbread tan—more suitable for winter when it cozies up the bed. She can’t stop yawning and her eyes have a leak. She sits and feels the mattress sag. They ought to flip it, ought to buy a new box spring. She wonders how it feels starting over altogether. Brand-new wardrobe. Bright white sheets. Working with an architect, drawing up plans.

  Wingnut pauses in the middle of the room, neither wagging nor alert but lazily content. He’s filthy from the woods and needs a bath. So does Henry, who has the pine-sapped look of someone who’s sweat and dried several times in one afternoon. He peels off his shirt and stretches out his arms, works a rotator cuff and groans when it pops.

  “He isn’t living very good,” Henry says. “I think I ought to bring him something.”

  “We have enough to pay for already, feeding two extra mouths.”

  “They barely eat.”

  “And only one of us is working.”

  “I’m still getting paid.”

  “But only one of us is working,” Ava says, and shuts her eyes.

  She’s noticed how he looks when he riffles through the mail, separating bills like a cardsharp handling a deck, knowing all his pals are out delivering their routes. Even his body misses work; he’s gained ten pounds since the fire, and it’s taken an afternoon of threatening his heart to make him look spent instead of restless.

  “Did I do something wrong? Aside from moving logs?”

  “I’m tired and my feet hurt.”

  “Give me those.”

  He kneels and rubs his hands together, building up heat.

  “You’re exhausted,” Ava says. “I ought to be giving you a massage.”

  “I’m fine,” he says. “I told you—it was really easy work.”

  He lifts her foot, intuiting the one that hurts most, and tips her back gently onto the bed. Ava props on her elbows, just to show resistance, but the pressure of his thumb immediately glows. Henry hums at her foot, near enough to kiss it, his mustache not quite tickling her sole.

  Mr. Clean gets rid of dirt and grime and grease in just a minute … She’s never decided if it’s worse that he hums old commercials, or that she always hears the lyric bouncing in her head. But she’s happy they’re in tune, that his hands are on her foot, and that he really did survive the visit out to Sam’s. He hits a spot along her arch that prickles up her thigh. She settles back and hears maple leaves swishing in the yard. She thinks of fireflies bobbing outside, gold-green, and it’s almost like dozing in a hammock in the breeze.

  “I’ll tell you,” Henry says. “Seeing him alone out there, living in a trailer…”

  “Shh,” Ava says, opening her toes.

  * * *

  Henry and Wing drive back to Arcadia Street the next morning. They follow Ava going to work until she turns her own way and blows them a kiss out the window, more professional and beautiful than Henry’s used to seeing her at home. She’s a woman he’d admire if he passed her on the road, and he thinks of other people that’ll see her this way—patients at the lab, businessmen and doctors—when her smile is directed at the world instead of him.

  For days and days she swaddled him up, petting his hair and bringing him drinks, calling him from work every two or three hours just to see if he was doing okay. But when the newness of the fire wore off, when the aftermath and living with the Finns grew familiar, he began to feel a starchiness in all her ministrations. He’d sensed a similar detachment from a surgeon last summer when he had to get a coronary stent. The surgery itself had gone as well as they had hoped, but the artery they’d pierced to get the catheter inside kept bleeding, just a little, when it should have knit together. Each day, Henry’s surgeon grew increasingly annoyed, subtly at first and openly at last, as if the bleeding were a voluntary failure of his patient.

  Wing tracks Ava for as long as he can see her. Then he’s back, eyes ahead, remembering the way and sniffing in the wind. Henry’s eager, too. He’s in agony from yesterday, sore at every joint, but Ava’s kiss pepped him up and what’s a little rain? He’s brought along a thermos and a bag full of sandwiches and pears. He could haul a whole forest. It’s a wide-open day.

  He parks in front of the Bailey lot and double-toots the horn.

  Like a shot, there’s Sam striding at the car. He’s wearing long johns and socks without shoes, pounding into puddles and electrically awake. Henry steps out, shutting Wingnut in.

  “Get out of here!” Sam yells, ten feet away and bearing down fast.

  Henry backs up and stumbles off the curb. Sam shoves him in the chest.

  “Whoa…,” Henry says.

  Sam pushe
s him again. They tangle at the feet and topple in the road. Wing snarls in the car, scratching at the door. Henry gasps and doesn’t move. Sam grabs him by the neck, kneeling on his stomach, and his face is inescapable and near enough to blur. There’s banana on his breath and mud below his eye, and Henry has a feeling like he’s staring at a relative, everything familiar from the oil on his nose to the one stray whisker he neglected when he shaved.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Henry stammers.

  “You killed her,” Sam says. “Understand? Understand?” punctuating each with a jostle and a bump.

  “I’m sorry,” Henry moans, incapable of stopping. He’s shaken by a sob. Snot bubbles from his nostril.

  Sam is catatonic when he wobbles to his feet. He walks away, leaving Henry like he isn’t even there. Wing’s stopped barking but he presses at the glass. Henry stands and has to catch himself; he might have sprained an ankle. He watches Sam trudge toward the trailer, where he walks around back and shuts the door too quietly to hear. Henry wipes his hands, conscious of his heart and of the rainfall just now beating on his head.

  He slumps into the car, holding Wingnut back with an outstretched arm. Wing’s beside himself and jumps around, front seat, backseat. The air smells heavily of overwrought dog.

  “Settle down,” Henry says.

  The engine sounds offensive and he stalls when he turns. He starts the car again, grinds a gear, and drives away, clipping the curb and squealing when he jerks around the corner. Wing jostles up against him.

  “Sit!” Henry yells, frightening him down.

  He clears the neighborhood and drives toward the busier part of town, unaware he’s doing fifty till he skids to meet a red light. He’s pretty sure he jumped a couple of stop signs, too, and when he turns to park the car, once again too abruptly, Wing topples in his seat and thumps against the door. A truck hisses by, buffeting the car. Henry shuts his eyes and breathes through his nose, smelling water and exhaust, remembering the fire trucks and craving a cigar, imagining the taste until his heart feels clenched. He fumbles in the glove box, pops a jar, and chews three aspirin as quickly as he can.

  He turns to look at Wing.