James Hannah: Sign Languages

“We always get ice. That’s my job, Dad. Brother finds the TV programs and helps me unpack, and Mom oversees us.”

“Do you need help unpacking?”

“Oh no, see.”

Henry propped his head on his hand to watch her open the bureau drawers.

“It’s all done. And I put your stuff in the bathroom.” She nodded and closed the drawers. “Be back in a minute.”

“Hey, wait.” Henry sat up slowly and straightened his twisted clothes. “I’ll go with you.”

“Nope, I am six now. It’s back around the corner. We passed it, remember? You can watch me from the door if you want to.”

She wore shorts, and he watched her strong legs and hips. Her back was perfectly straight like the backs of women he’d seen riding English style. The parking lot of the motel was filling with late arrivals off the interstate. Two noisy older couples walked slowly between rows of parked cars toward Chuck’s Best Steak House. Lightning reddened the bottoms of distant thunderheads.

Before he’d met Martha and before he’d turned to studying so hard there had been a girl named Alice. Alice Williams. She’d flown to Los Angeles on a special flight full of pregnant women and gotten an abortion. Now the cost seemed small — a car payment or two — but then it had set him back for months. He’d seen her once afterward. Now he remembered why he’d been unable to say no to Martha about this one. Though he had known it was foolish, he had believed for a long time he must do penance for the abortion. That he must pay back that thin, awkward girl. Thunder crackled in the distance, and Henry thought Maggie should have returned by now. He left the door open behind him.

“Maggie? Maggie?” He hurried along the concrete balcony, but Maggie came racing around the corner giggling, her face red. The hollow tubular ice tumbled from the bucket and skittered through the iron railings.

Henry ate slowly, letting the food soothe him. The steak was better than average. Across from him the table was littered with the jumbled debris of Maggie’s meal.

“Wow, I’m tight as a tick,” she said.

Henry nodded, recognizing a phrase his father had taught her. She had quickly devoured all of a chopped sirloin sandwich and a slice of cherry cheesecake. Then, finding he had access to a confused but huge salad bar complete with ice cream and the makings for exotic sundaes, she had eaten a half-dozen other things as well.

Henry took more iced tea from the waitress and couldn’t tell if her face was smiling at the child’s excess or scowling at his obvious lack of control. “Thanks.”

The waitress ducked her head and hurried off to her corner to resume a long brown cigarette. The only other customers were a trucker whose rig idled under the motel sign and a woman young enough to be his daughter. Her bare left shoulder was a patchwork of dark tattoos over her pale redhead’s skin. Her hand, under the table, was in the man’s khaki pants. They laughed and talked quietly. Henry wondered if they’d known each other for a long time, or if they’d met down the road somewhere when she’d asked for a ride or he’d been kind enough to stop.

Just as Henry finished eating, a thunderstorm rolled over them, rattling the stacks of tea glasses and causing the lights to flicker. The rain came down in heavy sheets, obscuring the parked truck, blurring the red, white, and blue neon of the motel sign.

“Wow… boom… bet Mom and Brother are scared, huh? Bet they wish they were here.” Maggie wet her finger and lifted bacon bits from the edge of his salad. “Hey! We could have gone swimming. Mom packed the suits!” She looked up, her blue eyes suddenly sad.

Henry nodded. “We got in too late. Grandmommie’ll take you to the pool. Remember there’s one right down the street in the park? You’ve been… but you don’t remember it, do you?” He was afraid that now with the dark and the loud storm and the strange bed coming up she might think too much of Martha and home. He was afraid she’d cry and he wouldn’t be able to console her. He recalled some truly awful night in a motel room in Wisconsin when David was nine months old. Looking out into the rain at the watery headlights of cars still on the interstate, he thought about how much things were going to change in less than a month. Soon their furniture would move past this café and over the exchange and west to Texas. He pictured himself and his family in the back of the van doing their usual stuff — watching TV or cooking dinner.

They lingered, waiting for the rain to diminish, until the waitress asked them to leave. She had another job somewhere else. They took a newspaper from the tiny vestibule and made a dash through the downpour that had brought a hot blanket of steam up from the concrete.

In the room, Henry toweled off their hair and prepared Maggie’s toothbrush. She brushed methodically. He wanted to hurry her but didn’t.

“Hey, let’s phone Mom and Brother and tell ‘em about that cheesecake and sundae bar. Brother’ll be mad as a wet hen.” Maggie laughed. “That’s like us running across the parking lot. Two wet hens.”

“They’re at camp, remember?”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m being silly now.”

Henry put her wet clothes over the shower curtain and dried her hair more thoroughly against the chill of the room.

“It’s past eleven. You should have been asleep hours ago. What would your…” He bit his lip and gave her a kiss as she settled into the bed near the window.

“Can I color some?”

“Oh Maggie, aren’t you exhausted?”

“Nope, not a bit.”

“I shouldn’t have let you have a Coke.”

“Well, you did. And now I’ll just have to color.”

“For a minute.”

“For two minutes.”

“Two minutes and that’s all.”

She jumped down to her huge canvas bag of toys and brought out a cigar box of crayons and a thick coloring book.

In the bathroom Henry could hear the rain better. He undressed and washed his face. Though he was all aches, he decided to shower in the morning. If he closed his eyes he saw the interstate ahead and the desolation of flaring fields. The sky was dust and smoke. He thought about his father. He was two different men. One a starving young soldier forcing himself to keep up, to stay on the narrow roads leading from the fields into the more dangerous jungle. The other they’d see tomorrow morning standing behind the screen door. He’d wave brusquely with his left hand and fumble with the latch, mumbling to himself about the conspiracy of all things that stick or come loose.

He thought about Janet; saw her long thin arm on the back of the couch. Martha had never worn nail polish, and he had never asked her to. The memory of its dazzle further pained his eyes.

He put on his pajama bottoms and turned out all the lights except the dim one over Maggie’s shoulder. Her head was down, her hand busy.

Henry read the HBO guide and found that a movie he had wanted to see for years had started less than fifteen minutes earlier. He rolled the TV stand as far as it would go and turned its back to Maggie.

“Not for kids, huh?” she said.

“Right. And you need to go to bed now.”

“I’m in bed,” she giggled.

“To sleep. You know what I mean.” But he kept his voice light.

The movie was about alien things like long worms with terrible eyes and teeth. They crawled down throats and became people. You had to catch them in the dark when they became disoriented or something. Henry couldn’t understand it all, though he couldn’t believe missing fifteen minutes was the reason.

The movie was truly violent, and he kept glancing at Maggie and turning down the volume when they emerged to claim new victims and turning it up when the good guy, a smalltown doctor, was begging people to believe him, that he had the answers.