Corpus Christi Read online

  Had he opened his eyes? Nora said she thought he had for a second, but she’d turned away, believing they’d missed a turn. Max’s face seemed trapped in the glow of streetlamps— a jaundiced gray. They hit deep, hidden puddles and new pot-holes that jarred the truck and bounced each of them hard on the bench seat. Sonny wanted to slow down, wanted to speed up. Each minute squeezed in around them; they were at the bottom of a well, losing oxygen. Palm trees bowed. The hospital seemed impossibly far; each intersection left him panicked, sick with indecision. Though he retraced their course in his mind and found no mistake, he convinced himself he had taken a wrong turn. The city looked foreign, a maze of Möbius streets that disappeared behind the truck and led nowhere. He had no idea where he was, where he’d taken his fraught, desperate family, but just as he started to confess, the hospital towers came into view, each distant window ablaze with a promising amber light.

  THE OPPORTUNITY TO LEAVE JANICE’S PASSED LIKE a secret. Curtains of rain slapped the north side of the house; the metal garbage can clattered at the top of a driveway; wind slipped between the plywood and the windows, whistling, threatening to pry them apart.

  She remembered the hurricane parties differently. No radio, no dancing in the garage, no lawn chairs or slickers. She placed the same friends not in the garage but around the kitchen table, playing dominoes. She had come with Janice, not after. A sign had sailed across the yard, but she recalled it coming from a nearby gas station—called Kum and Go— not Kmart across town. She told him this sitting in the front room, on a sofa upholstered in Italian silk. Waves of uneasiness rolled over Sonny; he fought back discouragement, a stubborn disbelief. For years he’d thought—fantasized, really—of meeting her again, of happening upon her in an airport or catching her eye in a dark restaurant. He heard himself deliver beautifully aged, devastating orations. He’d had nightmares, too; in one, he stood beside her bathtub and threw a plugged-in television into the water and watched her convulse. Now his words got tangled before he spoke them, his thoughts jettisoned down regrettable tangents.

  “I should admit I remarried,” she said. “A groundskeeper at a cemetery. I was snapping pictures of headstones for a photography class. He was pulling weeds and called me maudlin.”

  “I needed that word for a crossword puzzle last Sunday,” he said. This was true, but more than anything, he wanted not to hear about this man. He checked her fingers again, expecting a ring to have appeared. Nor did he want to tell about the women he’d dated—a divorced waitress, a pacemaker programmer, a veterinary technician—each more familiar than the last, each another version of the same woman.

  Nora said, “We’ve not spoken in two years, the groundskeeper and I. He believes I used him. His term is ‘emotional tampon.’ ”

  She laughed, then he did.

  Outside, the wind picked up the garbage can and hurled it against Janice’s garage door. They both startled at the sound, then recovered, as if someone had unexpectedly entered and left the room. She said, “Still think it’s going to miss us?”

  A gentle lilt had crept into her voice, a beseeching tone fringed with playfulness, as though this would become their private joke.

  SONNY HAD TAKEN SOLACE IN THE COMPLETENESS of her grief. Her devastation reassured him; he thought, This makes sense. She cried and wailed, accepted sympathy and acted alternately hostile and distracted. Then once the obligations were completed, family and friends delivered back to their jobs and homes, she locked herself in Max’s room and refused to leave.

  He set trays of food outside the door—she wouldn’t retrieve them until he showed himself through Max’s back window. When the phone rang, she picked up the extension in the room; she used his bathroom, dried herself with his towels, squeezed into his T-shirts. She detailed these things through the door—the wood still plastered with superhero decals and postcards from Janice’s travels—while Sonny waited for all of this to end, trusting that something would snap and they’d be liberated from such desolation. But sustaining her became his new project. Her despair so steeled him that he was afraid to upset that balance, and he savored the comfort of again counting on something. The worst feeling, far worse than he could have anticipated, was that tending to her distracted him from Max’s absence, that he toiled to sustain her because he’d failed their son; in his darkest moments, he accused himself of employing her hopelessness to pull himself out of the sludge. Or he believed, as never before, that people incurred punishments of the soul.

  On the third day she said, “I found a notebook under his bed.” Then, after a moment: “He had a little girlfriend. Janie Palmer. She has a pony named Sprinkles.”

  He knew her immediately. “Blonde. From the assembly.”

  “Right.”

  He imagined Nora clutching the notebook against her breasts, gazing up to recall Janie Palmer beside Max, swaying and singing “Home on the Range.” He’d worn a cowboy vest fashioned from a paper bag, decorated with crayon zigzags and a tinfoil sheriff’s star. He was pigeon-toed and off-key and so beautiful Sonny had to squeeze his eyes closed.

  Nora said, “She’s a looker! Our little heartbreaker.”

  And what became clear hearing her voice, bubbling and proud and hopeful for that which would never be, was that he had already lost her. When they had heard the word meningitis—they were standing before the hospital’s surreal, childlike mural of Christ feeding a donkey on a plain of blond sand—Sonny sensed that a grotesque race had begun and that he was suddenly responsible for their outrunning a catastrophe. A thing like this either bound people together or drove them apart, but now he knew she was gone. Maybe he’d leave lunch outside her door—already it had become her door, her room—and she’d never answer; maybe tomorrow he’d wake to find her car and clothes gone; maybe in an hour she’d waltz out and they would live together another ten years without exchanging an unkind or meaningful word; maybe she’d cinch Max’s paisley tie around her neck and kick his desk chair out from under her.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “Ravenous,” she said, still bright. “Is there more cereal?”

  “For supper?”

  “Doesn’t it sound delicious? I have a real taste for sugar lately.”

  In the kitchen he mashed enough sleeping pills to knock her out and sifted them into the bowl. Within the hour he lifted the door off its hinges, loaded her into the truck, and returned to the hospital.

  HE TRIED BRINGING HER BACK, WITH KINDNESS AND romance, with promises and memories and plans and pleas, but she always seemed just beyond reach. Nora seemed to think he wanted her to recover—wanted them to recover— and that galled her. But he’d abandoned that dream as he’d abandoned the refinery; when he left for work, he drove to the National Seashore and passed the hours among the mud flats and saltwater marshes. When he returned in the evenings, still under the pretense of a completed shift, she ranted and collapsed, threw accusations and insults and skillets, while all along he was becoming too severe in an unanswerable resistance. No, recovery was not what he wanted; he wanted them to go down together—man, woman, child. But life at home lurched and creaked; love turned into a crossthreaded bolt. He proposed moving from Corpus, and finally that’s what she did, alone. The divorce was swift; she wanted nothing except for the marriage to end.

  He carted their furniture and housewares, the clothes she’d left and even a few of Max’s long-discarded toys onto the lawn and sold them to neighbors and strangers. (After the first plastic tractor sold, he rescued the other toys.) When only piles of blouses and skirts lay on the lawn, he sold the lot for eight dollars. Crystal and antiques went to an auction, yielding more than he’d expected; he sold the Shamrock house after a year in the duplex. Then a deadly void opened—a steep, widening channel across which he still heard her voice and saw her visage—but trying to ford the space would kill him sure as cancer. Days came when he could feel Nora’s presence, as if she’d arrived in Corpus for a visit but hadn’t yet called. Sometimes he heard her saying hi
s name, others he glimpsed her zipping by in traffic. Once he saw her at the cemetery, kneeling beside the headstone. He made his way to her, thinking how fittingly peculiar the scene was, right from a movie. Maybe they’d have an innocuous conversation to counter the melodrama; maybe they’d try vainly to recover their old selves by racing to bed; maybe they would speak of him, laugh about the raffle tickets.

  Janice, not Nora. He felt stifled, shot through with frustration. She said, “Would you believe I haven’t been here since the service?”

  His mind hadn’t indulged such optimistic murmurs when he approached her in McCoy’s. She didn’t look familiar enough to start his gut’s swirl of exquisite agony, yet once he recognized her, he couldn’t blot out the feeling that the boy was with her, hiding behind the discounted shower stalls, waiting.

  THE ELECTRICITY BLACKED OUT. WIND AND THUNDER coupled with darkness and lightning to give Nora enough courage—or fear, or pity—to nestle into his shoulder on the couch. Had he been standing, the smell of her hair, more oily than fragrant, would have buckled his knees. Water poured from the roof. Safety candles flickered on the coffee table. Sex crossed his mind, a breaking light of dangerous possibility, and the notion sent his heart racing; he hoped she couldn’t feel it. He was unsure where to lay his hands, afraid to disturb the delicate air that was so mercifully tempered with her apprehension. Neither said anything, not even when she began to weep quietly into his chest. What, finally, could be said? Drifting to sleep, he imagined the candles igniting a gas leak; as the storm blew outside, he half wished it would turn the house to scrap.

  No memory of retiring to Janice’s room, but he found himself there—clothed, muscles stove-up, on top of the down comforter—waking, then tumbling back into sleep. A ragged dream: strolling with Nora through endless aisles of boats anchored in downtown streets. The vessels are on sale. A cluster of Karankawas, naked and wet and towering, with cane-pierced lips, browse as well. Nora worries the sale hasn’t started yet; she puts her hand on his shoulder, and it stays there while they walk, as if she’s blind. She says, “It’s nice you’re here.” When he woke, she was not beside him, though she had been. He feared that whatever ease they’d enjoyed the night before, whatever comfort the storm had forged between them, would have vanished now, that the morning would have let the air out of Nora’s lovely need.

  She was watching the news, perched in front of a portable television. She wore a jaunty blouse and skirt of Janice’s. Even these years later, he could tell that the clothes were borrowed.

  She said, “They keep showing pictures of a drowned armadillo.”

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  “And film of the island. Turned-over boats, missing roofs. We slept through the worst of it.”

  His heart swelled: We.

  The boarded windows dimmed the house, and the plywood’s still being there pleased him. The room smelled of a velvety, sweetly nauseating perfume. She had opened the front door and the sun filtered in, a new light made brighter by the saturated lawns. Broken, waterlogged branches littered the street. A drenched basset hound trotted along the sidewalk, ambling past neighbors clearing detritus. From down the block, a woman’s ecstatic voice: “Scooter! Scooter!” The dog stopped, perked up its ears, then loped homeward. Across the street, the architect inspected the taped X’s on his tall windows; he was smaller than Sonny remembered, bald now. Wet leaves were plastered to the truck. On television the meteorologist advised viewers not to leave their homes; power lines were down and conditions were ripe for flash floods, lightning, funnel clouds and tornadoes. Defeat weighted his voice; Alicia, his lover, had left him. A map showing the storm’s trajectory clicked on the screen. The eye had hit between Corpus and Kingsville; Sonny’s prediction couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Nora poured coffee. He thought to say he drank only decaf, or to tell about the afternoon on the sixth green that had predicated the change, but he refrained. That day he’d enjoyed a fleeting cogent relief: Max wouldn’t hear of this, wouldn’t have to slog through an autopsy and funeral, wouldn’t have to wonder about his father’s pain or be mired in regret or recover. And he’d wondered when Nora, wherever she was, would receive the news. Now he accepted the coffee because he already felt weakened before her, felt scattered and drugged, and if she hadn’t noticed his vulnerability yet, he didn’t want to lay it bare.

  “I’ve learned to make crepes.” Then as if worried that she’d overstepped her boundary, she exhaled and slouched against the corner. “Or you probably need to get to work.”

  “We’ll open at noon, if at all.” More likely, he had phone messages asking him to come to work. He said, “Tomorrow everything will go on sale.”

  “Sonny . . .” She paused. Over her shoulder, he saw grackles in the yard, hunting beetles and earthworms. Two greenhouse windows were broken. Stalks of banana plants were snapped. She said, “Nothing.”

  He could’ve pressed, maybe she even wanted him to, but he let it go. Let it go, because whatever she would have said could have destroyed him, the words could have instantly unraveled the perfect lace of the night. The threat proved enough. Since finding her in McCoy’s, he’d ignored how the corners of her eyes, tight and slightly, elegantly, upturned, resembled Max’s. He’d ignored how after she left a room the air faintly carried the boy’s powdery scent. Over the years, Sonny had naturally fitted himself to this role—grieving father, abandoned husband. Now such identities seemed selfaggrandizingly thin. And he realized the reason he’d skirted all the serious conversations had nothing to do with a fear that Nora would cave in again, but that he would. After she’d left, breaking down remained his one terror, and he’d clung to it like a lifeline.

  She said, “This morning I remembered when they wanted to cut off our power, on Christmas Eve. You called and convinced them to leave it on, so we could light the tree for Max.”

  How long since he’d recalled that night, how long since he’d heard the name spoken aloud? She said it with such ease that Sonny felt cleaved from himself. And he knew she said it every day; like a prayer or confession, it absolved her.

  “It was their mistake,” he said. “We were square.”

  “That’s what you always said. That was always sweet of you.”

  On television an anchorman interviewed a Port Aransas couple who’d lost everything. Missing person reports were coming in; bridges were washed out. Sonny didn’t want to hear this and didn’t want Nora to either. He said, “The newsman’s a short fella, but you wouldn’t know on television. He comes into McCoy’s.”

  She cupped her hands around the coffee mug. A blush rose in her cheeks. Despite the clammy air that comes after storms, she looked cold and he expected her to shiver. Then, like that, she did. The room’s brandy-tinged light and the air’s fleeting, inexplicable scent of winter gave him the feeling of having crawled through a tunnel, of emerging to find Nora waiting for him. When she wasn’t looking, he found his eyes could linger seconds longer than yesterday.

  She said, “Janice told me you worked there. I was looking for you.”

  To his surprise, his answer didn’t surprise him at all. He said, “I know.”

  THE FERRY ENGINE CHUGGED, TURNING OVER A frothy wake of the olive-hued water between Corpus and Port Aransas. They were due at a picnic for Coastal employees, the annual affair designed to build morale. In the truck bed was an ice chest with beer, mustard potato salad, peeled shrimp, cornbread. Nora and Sonny had bathing suits on under their clothes; Max wore his outright. He’d been grounded for a week and would remain so until Sunday, when he left for Camp Karankawa. But they had agreed he should be allowed to go to the picnic; they recalled how he’d loved last year’s tug-of-war and sack races, how he’d caught a lightning bug in his mouth and the insect continued firing its harmless light on his tongue. Despite their best intentions to stay strict this week, their resolve had wavered. Nora had admitted to letting him watch cartoons after school, and Sonny confessed to telling Max his initiative wou
ld pay off in his adult life.

  No raffle, no fund drive, no prize flight to Astro World. A neighbor had been boasting about his school’s fund drive, so Max had invented his own campaign. He had made up the failing school budget, the depressed playground equipment, the impromptu district meeting that had so swiftly initiated the raffle. He’d already canvassed the neighborhood, come home, and situated himself in his room to denominate bills when Mrs. Dixon called Nora. She’d said, “I need him selling Avon!”

  Sonny hoisted him onto the ferry’s guardrail, kept his arm around Max’s middle. He needed a haircut, and the wind blew back odd strands that tickled Sonny’s neck, cheeks. Before the raffle, he was consumed with scouting, with securing his Karankawa badge, and before that he’d been a dramatist, drafting a play each afternoon, then casting his parents in after-supper productions. He’d written of mobsters and kings and aliens and pirates, and Sonny always felt that he’d not done the parts justice; nightly he’d seen his son be disappointed by his parents. But he’d also felt that he was in a luster, shining in the boy’s reflected light. When he’d arrived home from the refinery and found Nora hanging up with Mrs. Dixon, she’d smiled and said, “Your son.”

  “Looky here,” she said now, leaning over the port side. “Dolphins.”

  Porpoises, actually, four or five racing beside the boat, cameling their backs and jumping out of the water and diving in without a splash. They were dusk-colored—one almost black—their bellies glistening pink in the sun. Nora, he knew, was offering an olive branch, trying to rouse Max from sullenness. This was her way. Whereas Sonny waited for the smoke to clear, she lowered her head and barged in.

  “Flippers,” Max said. “Flippers!”

  That is such a short float across the channel; usually most of the time is spent in traffic, waiting to get to the landing, but within a minute Max was growing antsy. Oh, youth. Hadn’t he just gotten a haircut? Sonny felt certain he had. He imagined the coming week, when he and Nora would have the house to themselves, and he ignored how restricting Max had been its own reward, keeping him at home, with them. This seemed something he would admit one day, perhaps when Max had a son of his own. When will that be? he wondered. When will I have to wait to see you? As the ferry neared the dock and the captain sounded the great horn, as the pod of porpoises banked off to race the opposite boat and Sonny helped his wife and son back into his small truck, their time together threatened to pass within a breath.