Peter Orner - Esther Stories

“Cut it out.”

“But you said before you liked this place. That you’d always remember it.”

“I didn’t say I liked it, Wade. I said I’d remember it. I’ll remember that it was strange.”

“But it’s ours,” he said, and he locked his arms around her hips and started walking backward across the gravel, pulling her with him. Sue was taller, so he walked on tiptoe and lodged his chin in the scoop of her shoulder as he steered them back to the room.

Wade rerigged the flashlight, and they talked some more about Marcy. Sue said she screwed around with Kenny Heetz and Avy Thompson on the same night. She told him that Cindy Balter got another DUI. “They’re going to take her license away, and I say good. She deserves it. She’s already hit two deer this summer.” And they talked about work — they were both lifeguards at Lake Hulbert Beach — and how it was so boring because there was never anybody to save.

“I mean I’d save a dog,” Sue said.

They’d both been sitting in the sun all day. That and the excitement of going ahead and doing what they’d been whispering about since April made them both fall asleep just after eleven.

An hour later Wade woke up in the drainy low-battery light. Sue didn’t move when Wade stood up to flick off the flashlight. He nuzzled closer to her in the now darker but now somehow more familiar room. A shadowy little hideout, like the old fort behind Jay Nichols’s father’s place. That fort was really an old shed swallowed by weeds. He and Jay had painted LOYAL ORDER OF THE ODDFELLOWS #561 in black on the door. Wade had always loved abandoned places more than where people lived. Those collapsed barns along County B between Brule and Lake Nebagamon. The burned-out factories in Superior at the end of Tower Avenue, where the strip clubs are.

Once in Ino, right off 53 heading to Washburn/Bayfield, Wade found a crumbling boarded-up house with a piano. It was just sitting there in the middle of the front room, balanced on supports, because someone had bothered to rip out the floorboards but they didn’t take the old piano. He’d stood there and doodled “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on the corroding keys for a while, thinking about all the long-gone fingers that had once touched them. This abandoned motel room was like that house with the piano, a place you could have as yours while you were there, and not because you’d paid somebody for it. Just like those woods behind Jay Nichols’s father’s place, or even the lake — the real lake, Superior, not Hulbert — because it’s nobody’s and everybody’s. There for the taking if you’ve got the balls and can forget about money once in a while. So he’d taken this room—12C — and here they were. Jesus, Jay Nichols has been gone three years. His mother moved to South Carolina and took Jay with her. Better jobs down there. Or were better jobs. They’d missed whatever boom there was. The eighties are dead and buried, Wade’s father had said, even though there was still a year to go when they left in ’89. Wade’s father was suspicious of anyone who left northern Wisconsin. He said Jay’s mother had to be running from something, because this place is as good as any other place in the country, only colder sometimes…Christ, Wade thought, anybody else, like Avy Thompson, that chronic gloater, would have done it outside, on the beach at Anakoosh Point, or at the mouth of the Brule. But out there you risked a fisherman or an old woman waddling by in the morning and the whole moment ruined. Here they could sleep and wake up in the morning when they wanted. Sure, some of the hideousness of the place would shout at their morning eyes, but who would care? They’d done it. A Tuesday night melting into a summer Wednesday. Neither of them had to work till 12:30.

After, she said it was just a joke. At first that’s what she said. After he’d marched barefoot the five miles back to Iron River and found his car parked on South Cotter Road around the corner from Sue’s parents’ place. After he’d pounded the front door, then the side, then the back. All locked. After he chucked a rock at her curtained window and shattered the pane and shouted. She peered out the broken window and looked down. “It was a joke, Wade.” And she laughed at him. Then she went downstairs and opened the door and told him something closer to truth: “I drove away, Wade. Just like you’re always talking about driving away.”

She stood at the door in shorts, and he wanted to hit her. You fucking bitch. But he didn’t say anything, just looked her over. At Sue, with her shorts and bare legs and applesauce yellow-brown hair and headphones on her neck and puggly nose and little sucked-in cheeks like two tiny waterless ponds.

“I thought you were kidnapped, raped. Jesus.”

“Just drove away, Wade.” Now not smiling, now glaring him straight in the face, so it felt as if he was the one being hit. “Just like you’re always blabbing about doing.”

He felt for her across the bed. Nothing. He opened his groggy eyes. Early, not much after seven, but the sun was hot already. Sweating. Alone in the bed. First, he figured she’d gone outside to the bathroom. But when he got up and looked out the window at the trees, he didn’t see her. He shouted for her. No answer. He shouted again and listened, and all he heard was his own sudden panting. He slid his legs into his pants and climbed out the big window. He ran without shoes across the gravel to the stand of pines, knowing she wasn’t there, because he could see she wasn’t there, but checking anyway. Knowing she wasn’t the type of person to take a walk on her own in the morning, and where the hell was there to walk to but the thick mosquitoed woods. Still trying to stay calm. Shouting calmly: Sue! Suzy! Nothing. Then screeching: Suzy! Suzy! He ran around the back and for some reason first looked in the empty pool and thought, Whatever the explanation for this, not waking up with her is the worst thing that will ever happen to me. He thought of his father dying. Thought of himself alone in the house, listening to the clocks. I’m a disgrace of a son. Ashamed but still knowing, even so, that this will always be worse, wherever Sue is, whatever happened, this right now will always be worse than any funeral. He ran on and arrived at the empty space where he’d hidden his car twelve hours earlier and felt in his pocket for his keys. And then — and this he knew with as much certainty as he knew that he’d be buried next to his father behind St. Bartholomew’s — that there would be worse things than even this, so many worse things than this. He knelt down and touched the tire tracks in the mud as if their familiar pattern alone could explain why she’d done it.

Sue peeled out the gravel driveway and thought how kickass it felt to no longer be a virgin and speeding away in your boyfriend’s car. It had everything to do with driving and leaving. But there was more. She loved him. She’d told him that. He’d never told her, but that wasn’t why she stole his keys and took off in his car at dawn. He didn’t have to tell her. She knew he did. That wasn’t it. And she didn’t drive away because he was going to drive away from her sooner or later either. No. She realized as she drove down 53 and away from him and his gaped, sleeping mouth that she was driving away because he thought, One day I’m going to drive away. Because he aspired without her. Like he had some kind of birthright. Her father had gotten away with it. So as she sped by the Ino bar, things made more sense. She was punishing Wade’s thinking. Not the real leaving. The real leaving — if he even had the guts, which was an open question — she could handle, just like her mother had, and maybe by then she wouldn’t even care.