Anna
When I leave the police station, I immediately spot the red Mustang. How old is he? Fifty? And he still drives that thing. I walk into the autumn night, a chill in the air causing my breath to frost like dragon’s breath around my face, and up to the Mustang. Then I climb in, not bothering to contain my sigh. The man who sits behind the wheel is what they call barrel-chested in the novels I sometimes read after studying. His belly is round, too; I believe the word is rotund. His fingers are chubby ring-squashed sausages. His face is fat and mustachioed and full of the judgment I’ve run from since I was eight and Mom dropped dead; ever since Mom died and took with her some essential part of Dad.
“Anna,” he says.
“Dad,” I mutter.
The engine thrums gently and for a time we just sit there, side by side. I want him to drive away. In truth, I want to get out and call a taxi. But Dad will just cause a fuss. He’s the sort of man who would climb out of the car and start shouting, and then the police will come out, and he would start bragging about all his contacts, and . . . No, this is easier. Just wait it out. When he taps the steering wheel, his rings clink, clink, clink.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. They just questioned me. Found nothing. Easy.”
“Oh.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Dad tilting his head at me. “So you’re not in trouble?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t do anything. They’re keeping the car for a while, though. Evidence.”
“Oh.”
I don’t turn and face him, because I know if I do I’d see judgment in his eyes. Maybe well-hidden, maybe not, but definitely there, blazing out like a brand, marking me. I remember when I was fourteen, and I came in one night drunk. Not just drunk like adults get, but drunk in the way only a teenager whose mother has died can get, when vodka seems like elixir and you give no thought to how you’re going to walk home. I stumbled in, and he sprang from his armchair in the front room, loomed over me, and screamed for ten minutes straight. I didn’t even hear the words. What I remember most is curling into a tight ball and weeping and Dad just going on and on with his screaming.
“Are you taking me home?” I ask, when he doesn’t do anything.
“Yes,” he says. “I just wanted to make sure you’re alright.”
Eric is dead, I think. Eric is dead! Dad never hit me, not like Eric, but he hit me with words. Slut, whore, bitch; your mother would be ashamed; get some self-respect.
Stop it, I tell myself. This isn’t helping anybody.
I try to go to my safe place, to the turnstile and the field and the dogs, but Dad clears his throat loudly.
“I’m here for you, you know,” he says.
“I know,” I say, just wanting him to be quiet. Memories fly through my mind, mostly shouting, sometimes talking in a mean low voice about how I’ll never amount to anything. Often, he was clutching a bottle of whisky when he berated me. Other times, it was a picture of Mom, the one where she’s skinny in a bathing suit, taken before I was born.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “If any of this has upset you, I mean.”
“I’m fine,” I reply.
I feel him probing me for an opening in my armor. I know what he wants me to do. I figured out Dad a long time ago. Dad doesn’t see himself as a judgmental, bad person. All those rants, he sees as for my benefit. He doesn’t imagine they broke me in any way. No—he was doing his part as a parent. Now he wants me to turn to him and cry into his chest and for him to be the one to make it all alright. I close myself off against him, securing my armor, and finally he pulls away from the parking lot and drives through the dimness of New York toward my apartment building.
“I want to make sure you’re okay,” he offers as we drive.
“It’s no big deal.”
“He was your ex-husband.”
“He was, and now he’s dead.” I want this to close the conversation. I don’t want to snap, to get angry. I don’t want to say anything mean.
“But still . . . doesn’t it upset you?”
“That the man who beat me and stole my self-respect and tried to steal my dreams is dead? Not really.”
Dad flinches. My words come out barbed, acidic. I swallow and force away the anger and the hate and focus instead on the road ahead of us. The lights stretch into the darkness a few yards ahead as Dad cruises through the streets. On the sidewalk people are walking to and fro, mostly young and many of them holding bottles of alcohol. One man stumbles into an alleyway, leans against the wall, and drops his trousers. Perhaps it says something that I’d rather watch that than have a conversation with Dad.
“So you’re happy, then?” he probes.
I sigh. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does,” he says. “Your happiness is always my main concern.”
I bite down. Retorts dance on the end of my tongue, tempting me to use them. But I force them away. He believes what he’s saying. He believes that when I went to him after the women’s shelters and he said, “You should’ve come to me first, you idiot,” that that was helpful. Holding a glass of whisky, eyes bloodshot, he continued, “I’m your father. You married a stupid man, because you’re stupid, and on top of that you disrespect me by going to some lesbian refuge instead of your father.” And the morning after, with the apologies. Oh, no, he won’t drink again.
Parents, I think. It’s too complicated.
He loves me, I know that, and yet . . .
I massage my forehead. I’m not getting anywhere and my head is starting to ache.
Finally, Dad pulls up outside my apartment building.
“You can talk to me, you know,” he says, when I make to jump from the car.
“Okay,” I say.
“Is that all?” His voice doesn’t darken, not openly. But I can hear darkness beneath his voice, as though a fine layer of it buoys up each one of his words, ready to consume it. “I’m trying here, Anna, really trying. What would you have me do? I’m trying.”
“I never asked you to,” I say.
“You haven’t looked at me once since you got in,” he says.
My hand on the handle, I squeeze my fingers, the metal digging into my palm. I close my eyes and take a deep breath and let it out slow and long. “Thanks for the ride,” I say, and then climb out of the car as quickly as I can.
I feel Dad’s eyes on me the entire time as I pace to the door, unlock it, and disappear up the stairs. Then the Mustang growls and screeches away. I walk up the stairs to my apartment, heart thudding madly as it always does after seeing Dad. He thinks the years after my mother’s death can just be washed away. Like some graffiti on a bathroom stall, he thinks they can just be scrubbed off. But it doesn’t work like that. Everything leaves a mark, a permanent mark, no matter how much it might one day fade.
When I get into the apartment, I go straight into the shower and wash off the stress of tonight’s events. Eric dead, Eric dead in my trunk, the police, Dad . . .
I scrub myself clean and then climb from the shower, standing near the radiator and letting the heat move through me.
###
After about half an hour, I manage to push Dad from my mind. It’s not an easy feat, but I’m practiced. I’ve been practicing since I was a child.
I pick up one of my college books, sit on the couch in my underwear and a t-shirt, and begin reading. Soon, I’m lost in the world of animals. I’ll be back at the veterinary center soon; the thought gives me strength. Animals are simpler than people, much simpler. They don’t change, not as drastically as we do. If you get a dog, that dog will be much the same as it was when you first got him. Older, more tired, more prone to illness, but inside it will still be the dog it’s always been. There’s no such guarantee with people.
I’m thinking this when there’s a knock at my door.
I place the book on the table and creep over to it. Not the apartment’s buzzer, but a knock. Which must mean it’s either one of the neighbors or Dad has returned, pressed another buzzer, and haggled his way in. I chain the door so that it can only open a few inches, and then open it
The words, I’m tired, Dad, are already on my lips. But it’s not Dad.
It’s the handsome man from the game, the man who was talking with Eric, the man who was laughing with him.
He’s holding a bottle of wine and a cardboard pizza box.
“Can I come in?” he says. “We need to talk.”
He’s wearing the same expensive gray suit and when he smiles at me, I feel like I’m being smiled at by a movie star. The situation is surreal, standing here in nothing but a shirt and my underwear while this handsome stranger shows up, unannounced and uninvited, to my door. I’m painfully aware of my t-shirt hugging close to my large breasts. I shift so that only my head is peering around the door.
“Talk? What do we need to talk about?”
He smiles easily. “It will make sense if you let me in. And look.” He holds up the wine and pizza. “I bring gifts.”
He smiles into my eyes, and despite myself I feel a small smile lift my lips, too. There’s something penetrating about his smile, and especially the way it touches his eyes. Glimmering. I know eyes don’t really glimmer, but when I look at him, they seem to—seem to so strongly that I can’t help but believe they really are. But I can’t just go and let some strange man into my apartment because his eyes glimmer, can I?
“You were talking with Eric,” I say. “Laughing with him. And you’re here. So I’ll assume you know who I am. His ex-wife. What would you want with Eric’s ex-wife?”
“Like I said. To talk.”
His smile falters for a second, and I see something beneath it, a flicker. Not of fear, but of uncertainty. Uncertainty about what, though? What exactly does this man want with me? I ask him, and he forces the smile back onto his face. I see that clearly. It isn’t an easy smile. He pushes it onto his face.
“Who are you and why the hell do we need to talk?” I demand.
He drops the smile and looks at me with his real expression: icy eyes, straight lips, clenched jaw. Not angry, no; I sense that this man, for whatever reason, is beyond anger. He seems more dormant, like something which could explode any moment but will not, because he has control. “I don’t want to scare you,” he says. “That’s the last thing I want, Anna.”
“You know my name, so Eric talked about me. Did he tell you what sort of husband he was?”
“Yes,” the man says. “He told me a lot of things.”
“And you were still friends with him.”
“I was not his friend.”
“You were laughing with him.”
The man sighs, tilts his head back, and lets out a laugh. A convincing laugh. I know it’s fake because there’s nothing to be laughing about, but when he laughs, I almost believe it despite that. It’s the laugh of a man having the most carefree and fun time of his life. Then it abruptly cuts short and he meets my gaze with a shrug. “See? I wasn’t really laughing with him.”
I look the man up and down. Tall, much taller than me, at least a foot taller, and ripped with muscle. It’s not often you can tell that when a man is wearing a suit, but this man’s suit is close-fitting and it outlines his muscles clearly. His arms bulge at the seams of his suit jacket. The jacket is open and his chest muscles are outlined by his shirt. His hands are large, strong. I notice that some of the knuckles are grazed. A fighter, then.
“Why do you want to come inside?” I ask again.
“I won’t discuss it out here,” he says. “I had a plan, you know, Anna. To charm you.”
“You probably could, under different circumstances.”
“Let me in,” he says simply. He takes a step forward so that I have to crane my head to look up at him. He seems huge, towering over me like that, huge and strong. A thousand voices scream at me to shut the door in his face, and only one screams at me to throw it open. But that one voice is hungry, starving; the one voice is captivated with his muscles and his bright blue eyes and the aura of danger that surrounds him. The one voice overpowers the others, and without deciding I close the door, unlatch the chain, and open it once again.
His eyes rove down my body, linger on my breasts, outlined by my shirt, and then to my pale milky legs.
Then his gaze snaps back up to my face. “So, where’s the kitchen?”
I gesture into the apartment, and the grazed-knuckled man steps forward.