Frederick Busch - Girls

She drank some soup. “I wish I smoked,” she said.

“It’s great when you don’t know what to say. You light up, you do the little business with the lighter or the match, the this and that that smokers have. I miss it.”

“I miss you,” she said.

I looked at my soup, saw soup, looked up, saw Fanny, didn’t know where to look next. She blew her nose and he thumped his tail.

“I miss us both,” I said.

Then she said, “I miss all three of us.”

“But you didn’t walk off the shift—”

“I told them I didn’t feel well.”

“You didn’t walk off the shift, and leave the hospital without its most experienced ER nurse, just so you could come home and say it was a bad thing Hannah, you know—”

“Died,” she said.

I said, “Died. That’s right.”

“But why not? Isn’t that a thing we need to say?”

“Archie Halpern would think so.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“I mostly know what I think about things from you and from Archie. So, yeah. I guess so. Yeah. I feel shitty, too. How’s that?”

“So now you feel better because you said so,” she said, smiling even though her eyes were filled and her cheeks were streaked. She said, “There. It’s what a nurse knows how to do.”

“Is this what playing nurse means? I always thought it meant, you know—”

“Sex,” she said.

“Ah.”

“Remember it?”

“Sure,” I said. “We used to have it. I think we had some several months ago. Well. I guess I wouldn’t quite call it that.”

“That was not your fault,” she said.

“That’s right. I knew that. You were the one with the erection and you’re to blame for losing it,” I said.

“You don’t do blame about hard-ons.”

The dog slugged the floor with his tail.

“Fanny, I wouldn’t know one of those right now if it knocked me off of my chair.”

“I understand,” she said.

I didn’t know what was in my head, but I was afraid to raise it and let her see my eyes, in case Rosalie Piri was in there looking out.

I shrugged, and she said, “I didn’t come home to make love, Jack.”

Trying not to look sneaky, I did raise my head, and I waited. She was waiting, too. I said, “What, Fanny?”

“Are we, do you think, are we ever going to be all right?”

I nodded hard. I said, “Damned right. Of course we are.”

“Do you have any idea when?”

“We’re getting there,” I said. “Don’t you think? Really?”

Nurses look directly at it, and they name it out loud. She shook her head.

“But maybe,” I said. “Right?”

“If you want it to be maybe, we can say that.”

“Is it worth coming off the shift early to come home and say maybe?”

She said, “Jack.”

The dog thumped his tail.

I said, “So, then, maybe. All right?”

“All right,” she said.

“Really, though. A definite maybe.”

She almost laughed. She shook her head. She finished her soup. I thought, as I stayed where I was, that somebody ought to walk around the table and hug this woman hard and just hold on.

WE HAD THE USUAL upstate January thaw so late in the season, it was two days away from March when temperatures went toward twenty, and people new to the region talked about early spring. Students forsook heavy coats, and some professors came to work in sport jackets with sweaters underneath and, of course, the long scarf wrapped around the neck and trailing down the back.

The dog got down to another level of dead creatures in the forest, and he came back on the second morning of the thaw with a bunch of loose but connected half-defrosted blue-brown flesh that he rolled on in the side yard. He tossed it in the air and chased it, dancing rigidly over it, back and forth, like an old brown rocking chair. Then he aimed his back at it and rolled around, his paws in the air, his back writhing. Occasionally, he took licks at it, then bites. When he came back in, I smelled him and sent him out.

So, before work, on a day when you could see, if not feel, the sun, I rubbed the old dog down with shampoo and then rinsed him off with snow. I didn’t want him soaked so the lanolin ran out of his coat. I also didn’t want to smell the secrets he’d uncovered. But he’d had a happy morning, and I was glad.

When I got to campus, the sun was paler, and it fell with even less weight than it had a couple of hours before. I cranked the window down and stuck my head out to look up. Clouds were massing, dirty and serrated and thick. Our thaw was about to be rescinded.

I had thought about making an appointment for Fanny and me with Archie Halpern. I had thought about it for several nights and days. I didn’t drive to the Blue Bird, though, and I didn’t phone his office on campus or call him at home. I read reports from the night men and I looked through the mail. The president promised us all, students, faculty, and staff (as they called us): He would move heaven and earth, he would use all powers at his disposal, he would bring to bear every resource possessed by the college, to set free Irene Horstmuller. I thought she was wrong and also a goddamned hero and I loved what she did. Archie would call this being in conflict. Apparently, no one was telling the Secret Service or the FBI or anyone in the courts that the records she was sent to jail for protecting didn’t exist. This much of it, I quite enjoyed. In being guilty as charged, she was also innocent, since what she protected by going to jail wasn’t on the surface of the earth or in it. Still, I worried about the Vice President.

In a sealed campus-mail envelope was a letter for me on departmental letterhead. It said:

And?

It wasn’t signed with a name, only an initial: R. I thought it was pretty bold stuff, really. Consorting with staff couldn’t be easy on any campus, and surely not this one, with its heavy burden of reputation. This was a training center for the overprivileged, underdisciplined children of large money and thick ease. They were here to learn how to manage credit cards Fanny and I couldn’t qualify for. The faculty, I believe, enjoyed complaining about but also servicing the kids whose parents gave them the older Volvo to take back to school. You don’t fraternize with staff. You don’t lie down on a bed so when he approaches it your little arms extend above your head and stretch your small breasts tight.

I folded the letter and buttoned it into my shirt pocket. I unbuttoned it and took the letter out and tore it into many small pieces.

There was no mail about Janice Tanner or any of the other missing girls. My vice president for administration wanted my opinion on the performance of our Jeeps. I thought they were all right. They had gotten me where I needed to go, and had maybe saved a girl’s life. On the other hand, pieces of them could break away in your hands. So could anything else, I thought. I chucked his letter. I read that my staff evaluations were late. I chucked that letter, too. It was a good morning for disregarding mail. Of course, I wasn’t disregarding Rosalie Piri’s letter. I was only trying to.

I left the rest of the mail, and I warmed up my Jeep. The sun was so pale, it barely lit the blanket of cloud cover. I thought the wind had picked up. I sniffed out the window, and I smelled moisture. We were going to end the thaw’s little illusion with a giant storm. And we were locked into winter for several more months. The corpses in storage would have to wait for burial. The dog was going to have to be happy with snorting at the surface of things. It was going to get snowy and then it was going to get cold.