The Accidentals Read online

  Do I see the name first? Or is it the set of his jaw, familiar yet strange: square now, trap-like?

  Daniel Baker. Number 197, top left, page 28.

  Something (a feather? a cobweb?) touches my cheek, then rolls down. I taste salt. Did I do this?

  A MOMENT LATER, I’m called back, and here’s the dog, wet and trembling. She has little red welts all over her but she’s lost the melanoma look. She smells like the insecticide Dad uses on crabgrass. When she spots me, her face lights up and her tired eyes glow. She starts to smile and pant.

  “We have some questions about . . . What’s its name?” the vet’s assistant says. She has black curly hair and a long nose. I imagine her with a poodle’s tail.

  I hesitate. “Laika,” I say, finally.

  “How do you spell that?” the poodle asks.

  “L-a-i-k-a, like the Sputnik dog.”

  The vet glares at me. “You’re naming your dog after a communist?”

  “Yes.” I let the s sizzle.

  The vet shuffles his papers. He’s a large man with enormous hands, mottled in freckles and little black hairs that look remarkably like the flea-tick combo formerly on my dog. “How long has the animal been constipated?”

  “A while,” I lie. “Several days.”

  “Exactly how many days?”

  “Four.”

  “Has the animal been vaccinated for rabies?”

  I don’t like the way his lip curls around the word animal. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  He comes to attention; his eyebrows look like helicopters about to take off. “Maybe isn’t good enough. We can’t let you take this dog out of here without a rabies shot.” He sniffs.

  “And how much is that going to cost? This is a stray dog.”

  “You’re going to have to get it vaccinated before we will release it. Otherwise it will go to the pound. We have a responsibility here.”

  At that point, as if she can understand he’s talking about a needle in her near future, Laika, who is not as trusting as her namesake, starts struggling to get off the table. I pick her up and put her on the floor. She sniffs around a bit, like she’s looking for a particular bite of food. Then she positions herself like a comma and begins to toss back a trail of turds the size and color of new potatoes. She inches along in a half circle around the examining table, barely missing the vet’s shoe. She just keeps humping along and leaving her trail behind. She looks as purposeful as a flower girl throwing rose petals at a wedding.

  The vet looks down. “Well, she’s sure not constipated anymore.”

  Without a word the assistant hands me a roll of paper towels, so I start picking up what the dog’s laid down, trying not to go into the dry heaves. Meanwhile, a much-relieved Laika kicks up her heels and scampers over to the door leading out.

  “She needs to be spayed,” the vet says. “We can do it on Monday.”

  When I open my mouth to say, No thank you, we’re just passing through, I begin to gag uncontrollably. I grab a garbage can and vomit clear fluid into it. I have become the world’s leading expert in throwing up, so I do it neatly, without much ado, wiping the saliva off my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Oh dear,” the assistant says and turns white around the gills.

  “Sorry,” I say, “got to go, hope it’s not contagious.” I grab my dog and get us both out the door. I carry her straight through the waiting room at a fast trot. When the receptionist stands up and says, “You. Just a moment, please,” I call out, “I’ve got a really terrible stomach flu, please send me a bill.” Then we’re sprung, out the front door, into the parking lot and the roar of the traffic.

  Just as I’m opening the car door, a truck backfires and Laika jackknifes from my arms. I make a pass for her little rat tail as she hits the ground, but she’s the slippery fish.

  For some reason, maybe because I have the dead soldiers on my mind, I holler: “Halt!” I’m the General with a capital G and my dog’s in the minefield, two seconds from being blown to smithereens. She stops short at the curb, four lanes of wheels clattering by, dump trucks and cement mixers, fancy cars and beat-up wrecks. She sniffs the air, suspicious of any of the choices she needs to make.

  Then, after what seems like a year, she crouches down on the curb and looks back at me slyly, as though she wants to plan a party.

  I stalk her as stealthily as any enemy. As the cars whizz by, I tell her there is hamburger in her future. We will plan the best of all parties. I’ll never fly her to the moon.

  She crouches there on the curb, inches from a gruesome death, still planning her party—would it be steak or chicken, hamburger or hot dogs? I creep up to her, barely touch her tensed back. She sits for my touch, wanting it. I gather her up and she lets herself be gathered, whimpering a little. I hold her tight and feel her heart clattering about in her chest.

  THAT NIGHT IN the motel Jim and I lie in bed and watch the first man walk on the moon, plant his little flag, and salute it. Against the pocked surface, it looks like a postage stamp.

  Jim takes my hand and holds it to his cheek. “At least everybody’s still alive,” he says. He doesn’t look at me when he says it, just turns his face into my palm as if to smell it.

  “No,” I say, “everybody isn’t.”

  He raises his head and looks at me. I tell him about Daniel. “Would have been me,” he says. He sighs and his head falls back onto the pillow. He takes one long exhausted breath and is asleep.

  AS THE TV flickered, time seemed to flow out before me like a vast canopy of galaxies, millions of light-years into the future. My heart pounded, and I was deeply afraid. I had seen how all the light had gone out of my sister’s eyes. I had seen my mother’s blood on the bed sheets. Since my bride of Christ days, I’d feared that what happened to them would happen to me, and now it had.

  Then, I didn’t know that when my child emerged from the dark tunnel I’d become, he would come in peace. He would fasten on, as if we were the only ones living on this cold moon of a planet, as if love were as strange and unfathomable and vast as all of outer space. I didn’t know that one night our boy would be crying with a fever and I would walk into his room and find Jim standing in front of the window with him in his arms, naming the stars: that my heart would flare and burn with a dark energy, streak across the sky like a comet.

  What I didn’t know would fill up that black, black sky. I didn’t know our boy, our Noel, would be born six weeks early, on Christmas Eve. I didn’t know he would turn out to be a difficult child, would call one teacher a woolly mammoth, tell another she had lovely acne, get suspended from second grade for refusing to draw pictures of flowers, instead covering his pages with numbers ten miles long. I didn’t know I’d need to give up everything and teach him at home until one day, when he multiplied 1,285,009 times 15,897,121 in his head and came up with the right answer, it would become clear that he was not only difficult but also outrageously brilliant. And what would I have done had I known those things? What would you have done?

  THAT NIGHT WHEN the first man walked on the moon, I turned out the light and Laika crawled into bed between us. She brought the only flea in the room with her. It hopped back and forth among the three of us. All night we fought it, itching and scratching and, in the case of Jim and me, cursing.

  The next morning I found it sitting on the tip of my dog’s nose, as if it had landed there from somewhere far far away: another country, a distant planet.

  21

  Holly

  WHEN JIM CALLED, HE TOLD ME THE BABY WAS EARLY.

  “Sorry, sir,” Jim said. “We’d hoped it’d be late so you wouldn’t know.”

  “Boy or girl?” I said and he said boy.

  Early or late, I didn’t give a flip. All I heard was boy.

  I jumped in the car and headed for New Orleans. It was Christmas Eve and the City looked like a crown of diamonds in the dark water of the Rigolets. To tell the truth, I’d been pretty down that night, half concentrating on my crossword, thin
king of Christmases past, wishing for Olivia and my boy, and my girls too of course, wanting my family whole. But now my boy had finally come into the world, and I sped across the bridge into the City, my heart pumping.

  When I walked into the hospital room, all smiles, June was sitting up in bed with the baby in her arms. He was boohooing and so was she. She handed him off to me. “Take him, Dad. I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t know what to do with a baby.” Then she sank down under the covers and turned her back to us both.

  My boy didn’t look a single day early. He looked right on time, his face fat as a chipmunk’s, his hair all grown in. I walked with him around the room once, then twice, and, bingo, he stopped crying. Well, I’ll be dogged, I thought. Here you are, come back to me. You sure took your own sweet time.

  Oddly, he favored Grace.

  That night my crossword asked for a synonym for regret, three letters: rue. Words, I’d discovered over the years, took on color. Rue was gray, the color of the sky the day Grace’s baby died and the world almost went up in smoke. That baby I never saw. I wonder who she favored.

  ON THE WEEKENDS now, I drive over and stay with my boy so June can get out a bit, do some errands, get her hair done. I bring stuffed animals and candy and books and a little telescope. I take him for rides in the car. Last week I got the notion to go by and get Frances over on Louis XIV and drive over to the lake just a few blocks from her house.

  I hadn’t seen Frances since the Christmas Grace was pregnant. She was planting begonias in the bed outside her front door. “Want to take a ride with two fellows?” I asked.

  She looked up from her digging and squinted at me. “Look what the dog dragged in.”

  Her hair was gray now. There was a lock in her eyes and her face was flushed and a little sweaty. She looked softer somehow.

  “It’s not a good time,” she said, pointing at the flowers.

  Then Noel popped up out of the seat and patted the dash and she said, “Good heavens, Holly, a baby shouldn’t be bouncing around in a car like that.”

  “Well, he won’t be if you’ll get in and hold him,” I said.

  At the lake we sat on a bench looking out. Noel went to sleep in Frances’s lap. The tide was coming in and lapping at the breakwater. Some pelicans cruised the waves. We sat there a good long time, just being quiet together. I didn’t ask why she hadn’t taken Grace’s baby girl, and she didn’t say. I reached over and patted Noel’s head, then left my hand there in her lap.

  NOW THAT NOEL’S older, I sit him on the sofa between me and Frances and read him the girls’ old Uncle Wiggily books. The other day he pulled the book away from me and began to read out loud, the words coming out all wrong: backward and haywire. Said alligator scalery-skillery the now you got I have. He looked at me and grinned from ear to ear. He’s only three. Sometimes he scares me a little.

  When I was a boy and my granddad would come to visit, he’d take me on his knee and tell me about a little fellow down in the low country who’d been born with an upside-down brain. The stories made me laugh. This little fellow tried to ride a bicycle backward, ate the rind of the watermelon instead of the red inside part, hugged a fish, and caught a snake. If there was an oddball, topsy-turvy way to do something, he’d find it.

  “Our boy’s going to be a pistol,” I say to Frances.

  She looks up from her book and frowns. “It’s time to teach that boy to read from left to right, Holly,” she says and pulls him into her lap.

  22

  Grace

  I DID WHAT I NEEDED TO DO. I MADE WHAT HAPPENED ON that creek bank into a Sappho poem, a fragment of a fragment, so jaggedly torn you couldn’t even tell what the letters had been. But sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I saw dark water and that flock of little finches feeding in the brush. Some nights when I shut my eyes to sleep, the scene flared like a distant star against the black underside of my eyelids: stunned girl half in/half out of the water, wet hair sticking to her cheek, bruises opening on her thighs like dark roses: Not Grace.

  One day I called Frances and asked why she hadn’t taken the baby.

  “I just changed my mind is all. I just couldn’t do it,” she said breezily, as if she’d decided against getting an ice cream cone or going to the picture show. “It’s better,” she added, “for the child to have younger parents, a mother and a father, not some old maid schoolteacher like me. Better to make a clean break.”

  CHICAGO WAS THE farthest I’d ever been from home. I might as well have been on the North Pole. Gone were the scrub pines and alligator-still water, the blanketed breathless heat, and for that I was grateful. At college I stayed as far away from boys as I could get. My second semester I fell head over heels in love with Greek, the letters reminding me of the shapes my jacks formed when I’d throw them across the floor, all piled up and askew, a puzzle to be deciphered with a flick of the wrist. I signed up for a course in Greek culture and history because it sounded exotic enough to transport me from my small shameful life. Over those first weeks, I tunneled into the distant past the way my father had tunneled into our backyard after Mama died. I moved seamlessly from undergrad to grad school; and somehow, as the years passed and the grants and fellowships poured in, I was visiting the world’s collections of papyrus, bending over the cloudy tangled texts with my magnifying glass, trying to decipher meaning from fragments, trying not to sneeze from all that ancient dust. I felt like a spider who had cast a looping thread out into the unknown, and it had caught on another life, another world.

  When Dad went to New Orleans to live with Frances, he called me to come get my few belongings left in the little house with its fenced corner yard. St. Augustine grass had covered the trail Mama had made pacing our fence line; our old swing set was rusted orange, with one of the two swings hanging listlessly by one chain. Dad’s precisely pruned boxwoods had shot up into unruly trees. The house was hard to sell. Dad hired a man to replace the stained boards on the bedroom floor, but he did a shoddy job and the oak planks he inserted turned out a lighter shade than the rest of the floor, causing potential buyers to ask questions.

  After grad school, Chicago kept me on, and between research trips I endured a frigid fourth-floor apartment near campus where I kept my single bed and desk. Against all odds, I still waited for that tap on the window, the letter or phone call coming when least expected, the unannounced appearance at my door, the two of them full of news. What would they be like now? Would I even recognize them? Sometimes they got muddled in my head. Daniel’s blue eyes imbedded in George’s olive skin, George’s thick fingers at the ends of Daniel’s slender wrists. I would tell them what I knew: that we had had a baby girl and now she was almost a teenager. I would ask them to help me find her.

  When the job offer came from Vanderbilt, I jumped at it; my first thought was Daniel and George and how they’d have a better chance of finding me in Nashville, closer to home. The three of us would set out to find our daughter. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to find her once I discovered that Frances hadn’t taken her. In New Orleans I’d gone first to the orphanage, only to find it gone and in its place a posh set of condos. There were no records of her adoption in the city or parish offices. Neither Frances nor my father was any help, saying only that they felt sure she was fine, best to let sleeping dogs lie. There was something odd about how they said it, as if my baby girl were a figment of my imagination, as if they were humoring me in acknowledging her existence.

  As the years rolled by and Daniel and George didn’t come and I’d not found my daughter, it occurred to me that I needed help. It was 1981 by then, and hiring a private eye was all I knew to do. There was no Google or ancestry.com, only Dick Tracy of the funny papers and Jim Rockford on TV. People could get lost if they wanted to.

  I picked my private eye out of the Yellow Pages. His name was Landon Higginsworth. He had a tasteful ad promising immediate results and a money-back guarantee. Detective work seemed to me a shady business, all guns and drugs and nasty d
ivorces accompanied by compromising photos, but Landon Higginsworth sounded like a trustworthy name.

  The location of his office was reassuring: downtown, on the fourth floor of the old National Life building, which seemed like a reasonable place, not sleazy. His name was on the door. I walked right in, expecting an office and a receptionist, perhaps a scattering of shady characters sitting in the waiting room reading Field & Stream. Instead, there was Landon Higginsworth himself sitting behind a card table in the middle of a tiny office with one window, covered over inside and out by cobwebs strewn with the carcasses of moths. On the floor were stacks of boxes. Dust particles floated in the air.

  He looked at me apologetically. “Sorry things are such a mess, I’ve just moved in.” His voice was mild-mannered, reasonable.

  Still, I didn’t believe him; the dust looked and smelled old and so did he. When he rose and shook my hand, I got a whiff of him that reminded me of Frances, but with a touch of vinegar, something with a bite.

  He was a small man, with skin weathered and ancient, and arms that hung longer than you’d expect, giving him the appearance of a monkey. His eyes were gold nuggets and lively.

  In the corner, on a grimy pillow, lay a large dog of no discernable breed. It lifted its head and gazed in my direction briefly, then put its head back down, sighed, and put one paw over its eyes, as if it couldn’t bear the sight of me.