Frederick Busch - Girls

“This is because all I am here is your nurse. Except when you’re mine. I’m very angry about that. I feel terrible that everything about us ends up like we’re two sick little people and we take turns looking after each other. Can you understand that? Does it make any sense?”

“What we do with each other, or your moving out?”

“Oh, I’m not moving out. It isn’t as if you’re a drunk and I’m running for my life, or I’m punishing you.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is punishment. It will be. Not living with you.”

“But, really. Look what living with me is.”

“Or your living with me.”

She said, “Yes.”

“Can the dog stay here?”

“It isn’t a divorce,” she said. “We’re not having a custody fight about a dog.”

“Don’t you want him, though?”

“You mean, don’t I want you. Yes.”

“Then why leave? To make the point? I know the point. Some of it. I know what you’re talking about. You’re trying to make something happen, Fanny. But what’s going to happen?”

“You and I could get to wherever we’ve been going about our child.”

I closed my eyes because her white face hurt me. She was so tired and sad. It had gone on so long. And the pills were softening me. I could feel me falling in on myself. “Fanny,” I said, making my eyes open, “what if we’re there?”

“And this is it? And we can’t get any better?”

“Any better. Any closer to wherever you thought we’d go. Any smarter about knowing how to handle it. What if this is it, the whole it?”

She was shaking her head. Her hair whipped. “That would be like winter all year,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Then what’s supposed to happen, do you think?” My sore lips wouldn’t work right.

“What always happens,” she said. “You have a hard, terrible winter; then it ends.”

Someone in the dream of Fanny and me being sad talked sternly about spring.

Then I woke up and it was almost time for Fanny to go back to work, and then it was three days later. I spoke to the security people, and I asked the dispatcher, “Are there any other missing girls?”

“Damned if I know, Jack. You want me to ask around?”

I told her no. We talked about schedules, and I said I would be in the next day. When Fanny left for work that night, she carried a suitcase and wore a rucksack that made her look like a girl in college. I was still trying to invent a way of asking her to stay that would sound sensible when she came over to me and leaned down like she was going to kiss me good-bye. I leaned farther down toward my coffee mug. Her lips touched me on the head, above my right ear.

“Call me,” she said.

“You want to talk to me?”

“I’m doing this to help, you dumb fuck. This isn’t about a fight.”

I said, “Oh.” I said it stupidly, not with any sarcastic intentions. It was roughly what I knew during those days: Oh.

I went into the hospital next morning, but not anyplace near Emergency. The doctor unwrapped me. I had another X ray. Then he showed me the little cracks and then he wrapped me again. He examined my fingers. He asked if I needed more tablets for pain. I lied. At ten o’clock, I was in the security building, reading the dossier of the woman who’d filled in for me and who was now a candidate for Big Pete’s job. I arranged to have her fill in at night and on party weekends, and I looked at the ad we would use to find other applicants. I read incident reports, and I talked to my administrative vice president.

When I went out on my rounds, I stopped first at the library to find out about Irene Horstmuller and the Vice President. When I was in the parking lot, I thought of how it would feel to climb down from the Jeep and walk up the stone steps into the library, and I decided to let the Constitution and the second in command take care of themselves for a while.

I suppose I was sitting there with my eyes closed and my mouth open when Dispatch connected me and Sergeant Bird, who reported that the kid from up north had been found dead in a motel room.

“No nightmare stuff,” he said. “The guy apparently laid a pillow on top of her face and suffocated her. We’ve got a description and we’ll catch him here or they’ll find him in Toronto. My feeling about this is we’ve got separate perpetrators and therefore no serial crime. Which would be nice.”

“The thing is,” I said, “you find the serial killers at the end, when they make a mess of it because they’re boiling over by then. So you get five, ten, fifteen deaths over the years, and then you catch them.”

“I’m grateful you found the time to mention it,” he said.

“Janice Tanner?”

“Zip.”

“Well.”

“You know how long these things can take.”

“The thing is, her mother’s halfway dead already. She wants to know.”

“Everyone wants to know,” Bird said.

“I appreciate your calling,” I said.

“And I appreciate your appreciation,” he said.

I was a little annoying to some students after that call. They were rolling a friend down the hill below the library. The aim, apparently, was to see how much snow would build up around him.

I hit the roof light, and I stood at the top of the hill on the edge of the road, giving them the mean-cop stance — legs apart, hands on my waist, no facial expression. When they came up, puffing and grinning and not much caring that I was there, I looked past them until I saw their friend break himself out of the snowball and start the climb up.

“You can smother someone that way,” I said.

“Yeah, well, we didn’t,” the tall one with dark whiskers said. “We weren’t trying to. We were having fun.”

The shorter one said, “We were like playing. You know? I mean, what is this about, please?”

“I suppose it’s about my trying to give you fellows a hard time for endangering his life.” I gestured down the hill.

“We got assassins on the loose, and there’s a rape every — what, four seconds? And the starving children of the Balkan nations? And you’re fucking around with us? ”

If I wasn’t careful, he was going to call home and ask his father to purchase me and ship me someplace. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to take my flashlight out and bounce it all over him. Then my ribs would feel worse, and I’d be unemployed, and Fanny would never come home.

“No,” I said. “I’m not. Just let’s all be careful.”

I made myself not hear what all three of them were saying by the time I was back at the door. It took me a minute to work myself up the running board and behind the wheel, and I thought about the pain pills but decided not to take any. I finished my run up the hill, then began to circle back down. When I passed the library hill, they were gone. I saw no new posters on cars or buildings. On the other hand, I saw Janice’s face wherever I went that morning and all that afternoon.

She said, “I’m sorry.”

I was lying very still, smacking my eyelashes against myself, trying to figure out not where I was, because I knew it when I woke up, but why I had let myself go there. I was in her house and in her bedroom and in her bed. I was on my back, and she had pulled the covers away. She was leaning on an arm.

She said, “I wanted to look at you, and I woke you up.”

“Not much to look at,” I said. “Bandages, balls, black-and-blue marks.”

“It was the balls part,” she said. She cupped them in her small hand and moved her head, then hesitated, then went on and pushed her face gently into me. She said, “Mmm.”