“I probably came here out of habit,” he said.
“You were hurt.”
He paused, then said, “I guess I'd better get out of here before the kids wake up.”
“I guess.”
“It would confuse them.”
“Probably,” she said.
They were speaking guardedly now. He shifted forward in his chair as if preparing to leave, and he made a weak joke: “Unless I went out and got myself hit on the head every night until they were used to me turning up.”
Penny sat up straight. He thought she was about to speak. He feared what she would say. His body tensed. She said nothing, but looked at him with a hooded expression, then leaned back. That bodily gesture formalized her position, but exerted the opposite effect upon him. Her formality denied him, and yet she looked sensuous, the long neck, the thin, bare arms coming out of the short-sleeved nightgown. She looked as familiar as earth—flesh, bone, and breath. His desire rose within him and at the same time he considered the years he had stitched into that female body, the quirks he'd acquired to match its quirks. Her body and his and the desire between them were like weatherbeaten bushes grown together to look like one deformed bush that sent out branches in strange directions to protect itself.
Between them they had the pure, hot desire of the old days, and the wear, and also the grief, which waxed wantonly in the cold. For weeks after Nicole's death, he and Penny had lain side by side in bed at night, two felled trees with grief between them like a chasm of snow. They touched hands or toes. They talked across the chasm. Their conversations were repetitious. They misunderstood each other in the same ways again and again. Even when each of them used exactly the same words and meant practically the same thing, they seemed to be moving farther and farther apart.
He would plead with her by saying that somehow they had to get back to the business of living, that that was the only way anything would ever have meaning for them again.
I'm not ready, she would say. I had her in me. She was part of me, my very body. And now she's gone.
You have to get a grip on yourself, he would say. Both of us do. Somehow we have to steer ourselves away from the trouble. We can do that.
No, she would say. I can't solve it by thinking. I have to wait. A death is the end of a presence. You can't just decide to repair it. Don't you see!
But we have to find a way to heal the loss, he would say.
Not me, she would say. Not find it. The body, she would say…and then invariably she would pause, balancing herself, and she would think of how he was fixed on the body that had never been found, the body that was out there in the water somewhere, in the Willamette, the Columbia, or the Pacific, and which had not completed the circuit for him by making palpable the end of its life. By this time, whether or not Nicole's body was found meant little to her, but he seemed to need that palpability to complete Nicole's life, and to feed…to feed what? His hopefulness? Sometimes she would complete her sentence even though she was sure he wouldn't understand it: I'm waiting. The body goes its own way.
Most of the time she didn't complete it. Sometimes when they reached just that juncture, she would merely yield to his sexual need, the strength of urge she sometimes envied in a man, even though she knew it made him feel as if he had come into a house that had its doors ajar but in which there was never anybody at home. She felt like that house, empty but for the stranger in it, and the night he'd left they had done that, and a while afterward he sat up in bed and stared through the doorway into the hall, and he said he didn't understand what was wrong, that maybe he should go out and sleep in his father's toolshed for a couple of nights so they could have some time to think. He was weeping. He was trying to reach her. He wanted her to tell him not to go, but she lay still on her back, terrified, utterly incapable of finding words, and slowly growing cold, cold with outrage that he could so misunderstand her and abandon her when she needed him. He left. When his form turned in the hallway, he looked like a stranger.
Now, seated across from him on the couch, she saw his need in the almost invisible glimmerings of his soft brown eyes and still face—the face bruised and bandaged, but nevertheless the same handsome, dark, slightly pockmarked, strong-featured face she admired for its composure and resented for what it hid. She had seen him responding to her with his need. She'd seen it in the way he leaned forward and put his hands on his knees as if to prepare to stand up and go, but equally prepared, she thought, to lie with her on the couch, which she would probably have allowed. She still loved him in a way he didn't understand. It was only that her body wouldn't accept him until he allowed her to become herself in his presence, until he became himself, until he understood that Nicole's death was not his death to fix and patch up, until he understood that her grief was not his, until he stopped his insufferable thinking and allowed his body to find its own way. Penny rocked forward and gazed at the carpet on the floor.
Lafleur's contemplation quickened when she moved. He thought of the old times before the drowning. He thought of her bare legs levering against his legs, of her breasts dipping to brush his chest, of the mole on her left side, of her long fingers. He thought of the way she had of pausing and balancing herself in the midst of lovemaking. He thought of her abdomen pressing against his, of how her ribs, back, and buttocks felt under his fingers. He looked at her. Bent forward, her head bowed, the blanket spreading downward from her shoulders, and the tops of her breasts visible above the loosely gathered gown, she had taken the position of a penitent. His desire changed into a haunting and then everything froze: Penny, the couch, the dimly lit room, rug, walls, drapes, and the headless dummy. Abruptly he stood up and said, “What happened to my coat?”
“In the hall closet.”
He went to the closet, found his rain slicker and felt for the keys in the pocket. His wallet was there. He took it out and unfolded it. They had taken the money, that was all, and left his credit cards and photos. He placed the wallet in his hip pocket. He could hear Tricia and Andy talking softly in their room. He returned to the living room, holding his slicker by the collar. Light from the kitchen windows caught Penny's face, accentuated the bone, and deepened the shadows in her eye sockets. He paused. The space between them was tremulous with the unspoken. He heard a muffled giggle from down the hall.
“I forgot to tell you that Phil Grimes called last night,” she said. She looked up.
“Here?”
“He said he'd tried everywhere else. He said he'd tried Jewel. He's gone on ahead.”
“That's one less thing for me to worry about,” he said, smiling faintly. His head ached. “Where Phil is, I mean.”
“He said he would call after he got there. I told him you were hurt.”
“I'll call ahead. If he gets you, tell him I'm coming.”
“Jewel will call to find out what's going on.”
They'd become like husband and wife, making arrangements, naming the bases to be touched. Their adherence to the daily thing seemed merciless. “For God's sake, don't tell her,” he said.
“No.”
“Tell her I'm fine. Tell her I'll call from the site.”
She inhaled deeply. “All right.”
He looked down and said, “Thank you.” He heard footsteps in the hall, then the bathroom door clicking shut. Afraid, he said, “I'd better go. “A groping look passed between them. “Thank you,” he repeated. She didn't speak. He went toward the front door, touching the dressmaker's dummy with his fingertips as he passed it. He felt like an idiot. Of all the times he'd felt idiotic, it had never come as strongly as it did just then. This place, he thought, and that woman were the fount of his idiocy. He glanced back. Penny had not moved. She stared blankly into the space before her.
He walked out into the soft Portland air and across the street to his truck. The elbow of his backhoe's armature stuck above the sides of the truck bed and the bulldozer crouched like a pig on the trailer. He climbed into the cab and started the engine. The sound washed over him.