T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

And what had he done to deserve it? He still couldn’t understand. That thing in the Dumpster — and he refused to call it human, let alone a baby — was nobody’s business but his and China’s. That’s what he’d told his attorney, Mrs. Teagues, and his mother and her boyfriend, Howard, and he’d told them over and over again: “ I didn’t do anything wrong. ” Even if it was alive, and it was, he knew in his heart that it was, even before the state prosecutor presented evidence of blunt-force trauma and death by asphyxiation and exposure, it didn’t matter, or shouldn’t have mattered. There was no baby. There was nothing but a mistake, a mistake clothed in blood and mucus. When he really thought about it, thought it through on its merits and dissected all his mother’s pathetic arguments about where he’d be today if she’d felt as he did when she was pregnant herself, he hardened like a rock, like sand turning to stone under all the pressure the planet can bring to bear. Another unwanted child in an overpopulated world? They should have given him a medal.

It was the end of January before bail was set — three hundred and fifty thousand dollars his mother didn’t have — and he was released to house arrest. He wore a plastic anklet that set off an alarm if he went out the door, and so did she, so did China, imprisoned like some fairy-tale princess at her parents’ house. At first, she called him every day, but mostly what she did was cry—“I want to see it,” she sobbed. “I want to see our daughter’s grave. ” That froze him inside. He tried to picture her — her now, China, the love of his life — and he couldn’t. What did she look like? What was her face like, her nose, her hair, her eyes and breasts and the slit between her legs? He drew a blank. There was no way to summon her the way she used to be or even the way she was in court, because all he could remember was the thing that had come out of her, four limbs and the equipment of a female, shoulders rigid and eyes shut tight, as if she were a mummy in a tomb… and the breath, the shuddering long gasping rattle of a breath he could feel ringing inside her even as the black plastic bag closed over her face and the lid of the Dumpster opened like a mouth.

He was in the den, watching basketball, a drink in his hand (7Up mixed with Jack Daniel’s in a ceramic mug, so no one would know he was getting shit-faced at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon), when the phone rang. It was Sarah Teagues. “Listen, Jeremy,” she said in her crisp, equitable tones, “I thought you ought to know — the Berkowitzes are filing a motion to have the case against China dropped.”

His mother’s voice on the portable, too loud, a blast of amplified breath and static: “On what grounds?”

“She never saw the baby, that’s what they’re saying. She thought she had a miscarriage.”

“Yeah, right,” his mother said.

Sarah Teagues was right there, her voice as clear and present as his mother’s. “Jeremy’s the one that threw it in the Dumpster, and they’re saying he acted alone. She took a polygraph test day before yesterday.”

He could feel his heart pounding the way it used to when he plodded up that last agonizing ridge behind the school with the cross-country team, his legs sapped, no more breath left in his body. He didn’t say a word. Didn’t even breathe.

“She’s going to testify against him.”

—

Outside was the world, puddles of ice clinging to the lawn under a weak afternoon sun, all the trees stripped bare, the grass dead, the azalea under the window reduced to an armload of dead brown twigs. She wouldn’t have wanted to go out today anyway. This was the time of year she hated most, the long interval between the holidays and spring break, when nothing grew and nothing changed — it didn’t even seem to snow much anymore. What was out there for her anyway? They wouldn’t let her see Jeremy, wouldn’t even let her talk to him on the phone or write him anymore, and she wouldn’t be able to show her face at the mall or even the movie theater without somebody shouting out her name as if she was a freak, as if she was another Monica Lewinsky or Heidi Fleiss. She wasn’t China Berkowitz, honor student, not anymore — she was the punchline to a joke, a footnote to history.

She wouldn’t mind going for a drive, though — that was something she missed, just following the curves out to the reservoir to watch the way the ice cupped the shore, or up to the turnout on Route 9 to look out over the river where it oozed through the mountains in a shimmering coil of light. Or to take a walk in the woods, just that. She was in her room, on her bed, posters of bands she’d outgrown staring down from the walls, her high school books on two shelves in the corner, the closet door flung open on all the clothes she’d once wanted so desperately she could have died for each individual pair of boots or the cashmere sweaters that felt so good against her skin. At the bottom of her left leg, down there at the foot of the bed, was the anklet she wore now, the plastic anklet with the transmitter inside, no different, she supposed, than the collars they put on wolves to track them across all those miles of barren tundra or the bears sleeping in their dens. Except that hers had an alarm on it.

For a long while she just lay there gazing out the window, watching the rinsed-out sun slip down into the sky that had no more color in it than a TV tuned to an unsubscribed channel, and then she found herself picturing things the way they were an eon ago, when everything was green. She saw the azalea bush in bloom, the leaves knifing out of the trees, butterflies — or were they cabbage moths? — hovering over the flowers. Deep green. That was the color of the world. And she was remembering a night, summer before last, just after she and Jeremy started going together, the crickets thrumming, the air thick with humidity, and him singing along with the car radio, his voice so sweet and pure it was as if he’d written the song himself, just for her. And when they got to where they were going, at the end of that dark lane overhung with trees, to a place where it was private and hushed and the night fell in on itself as if it couldn’t support the weight of the stars, he was as nervous as she was. She moved into his arms, and they kissed, his lips groping for hers in the dark, his fingers trembling over the thin yielding silk of her blouse. He was Jeremy. He was the love of her life. And she closed her eyes and clung to him as if that were all that mattered.

(1999)

That was the sky up above, hot, with a fried egg of a sun stuck in the middle of it, and this was the ground down here, hard, with a layer of parched grass and a smell of dirt and leaf mold, and no matter how much he shouted there didn’t seem to be much else in between. What he could use was a glass of water. He’d been here, what — an hour, maybe? — and the sun hadn’t moved. Or not that he could see, anyway. His lips were dry, and he could feel all that ultraviolet radiation cooking the skin off his face, a piece of meat on the grill, turkey skin, crisp and oozing, peeling away in strips. But he wasn’t hungry — he was never hungry anymore. It was just an image, that was all. He could use a chair, though, and somebody to help him up and put him in it. And some shade. Some iced tea, maybe, beads of moisture sliding down the outside of the glass.

“Eunice!” he called out in a voice that withered in his throat. “Eunice, goddamnit, Eunice!” And then, because he was old and he was angry and he didn’t give a damn anymore, he cried out for help. “Help!” he croaked. “Help!”

But nobody was listening. The sky hung there like a tattered curtain, shreds of cloud draped over the high green crown of the pepper tree he’d planted forty years ago, the day his son was born, and he could hear the superamplified rumble of the TV from behind the shut and locked windows and the roar of the air conditioner, and where was the damn dog anyway? That was it. He remembered now. The dog. He’d come out to look for the dog — she’d been gone too long, too long about her business, and Eunice had turned her parched old lampshade of a head away from the TV screen and said, “Where’s the dog?” He didn’t know where the dog was, though he knew where his first bourbon and water of the day was — right there on the TV tray in front of him — and it was 11:00 a.m. and plenty late enough for it. “How the hell would I know,” he’d said, “you were the one let her out,” and she’d come right back at him with something smart, like “Well you’d better just get yourself out there in the yard and see, hadn’t you?”