Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

“Get off,” Mike said. “Now.”

The man ignored him, his face flushed as he pulled down her underwear.

Mike stepped forward and pushed him off, and he landed hard on the floor, his jeans unbuckled, sprawled there waving his arms and legs languidly, like a turtle on his back.

Turning back to Samantha, Mike pulled her dress down — it barely reached her thighs — and picked her up, draping her arm across his shoulder. “Can you walk?” he said. She didn’t answer. She smelled of puke and beer.

Downstairs, in the living room, there was now only one guy left, the one who’d spoken earlier. He was crouched over a bong, filling his lungs. When he saw them, he let out a stream of smoke and smiled. “Girl had a little too much fun, huh?”

At the sound of his voice, Sam came around, gurgling a little. “Thank you for the party,” she said weakly.

“You’re so welcome,” the guy said. “Dude, need help getting her to the car?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Mike said, propping Samantha against his leg as he opened the screen door.

The guy smiled again. “Whatever,” he said.

After Mike got her buckled up, he started the car. The fat man came running out of the house, shaking his fist. When Mike reached over the girl to lock the door, Sam woke up and smiled vaguely. “Bye,” she said.

Pulling into the Kents’ house, he saw the driveway was empty. Sam was awake, staring listlessly at the window.

“Where are your parents?”

“They took my brother to visit colleges.”

He turned off the ignition and rolled down the windows, a breeze carrying the smell of skunk into the car. Sam sat with her seat belt on, dazed or sick or simply pliant. He knew he should scold her, express concern, or both. Be parental. But it was three in the morning and he was wiped out. A headache pressed its angry iron grip upon him. Leaning back in the driver’s seat, he said the first thing that came to his mind. “Did Lauren know those guys?”

She nodded. “Sure,” she said. “We partied with them sometimes.”

His skin prickled with revulsion. “The night of the accident, were you partying with them?”

She squinted at him. “We never got there,” she said simply.

Nights when Lauren was out, he and Diana told themselves not to wait up, that they knew her friends and where she was. Every time they called her cell she’d answer promptly. She was allergic to hazelnuts and they’d trained her to ask about the food in every restaurant or home, even if it was something that didn’t seem like it would have nuts in it. Once when she was eleven she ate some chocolate cake at a party and went into anaphylactic shock, her throat swelling, and he’d plunged the EpiPen into her skinny thigh as she stared mutely at him, terrified … These memories skittered like marbles across the flat planes of his brain.

“Thanks for picking me up,” her friend said.

The fake politeness of teenagers drove him crazy. He looked at her, not knowing if she remembered what had just happened to her, or if he should remind her. “Are you okay?”

“Absolutely,” she said, then got out and walked slowly, carefully, up to the door. Only when she got to the front door, framed beneath the yellow porch light, did he notice she wasn’t wearing any shoes.

Back home he slid into bed next to Diana, needing her body beside him. He put his palm on her hip, and she nestled back against him. Lying still, he tried to time his breathing with hers. When they were first married, her hair was long, well below her shoulders, and it would get into his eyes and mouth while they were wrapped together in bed. And when she was pregnant, it grew thick and silky, with a heft and shine they both loved; he used to run his hands through it, feeling it slip around his fingers like ribbon. After Lauren was born, she cut it short, because the baby kept pulling on it, and she’d kept it like that. Now the black was spiked with gray. He reached his arm over her stomach and in her sleep she took his hand and put it between her legs, warming it there.

He thought back to when her hair was long. He was twenty-five, waiting for friends in a bar after work, when he noticed this pretty girl sitting alone in a corner. Her friend had flaked out on her; he never met his. They’d been dating three weeks when she invited him over to her parents’ house for Sunday supper. She went to church with her parents every week, and they spent the rest of the day together. At the time he thought she went along just because she was a good daughter, not realizing how tenaciously she believed. It had taken him a while to come to grips with that, but he had. On that first night, he was greeted by her father, a portly, jowly man with skin so saggy it was as if gravity were tugging it downward.

He looked at Mike and said, “You must be the young man I’ve heard so much about.”

“I hope so,” Mike said, and held out his hand, but the other man didn’t take it, just stood there staring at him, his eyes half-hidden by his fleshy lids. Mike heard Diana and her mother talking, and the mysterious clatter of kitchen work. Almost reluctantly, her father gestured for Mike to come into the living room. It was clearly a place they spent little time in, with an uncomfortable-looking, straight-backed couch and side tables riotous with doilies and knickknacks.

“What is it you do for a living?”

“I’m in sales,” Mike said. He had a job at a medical supply company, and hated it, how he had to inflict himself on people, the associations with illness and death.

Diana’s father grunted, his expression impossible to interpret. “You like it?”

“Not very much.”

He lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer one to Mike, who didn’t smoke and maintained his college habit of running ten miles a week but nonetheless thought it rude.

“Diana says you’re from Ohio.”

“Columbus. Sir.”

“What church does your family go to?”

Mike took a breath. His hands were sweating. The two women were chatting away in the kitchen, their voices too low for him to make out what they were saying. Whatever they were cooking smelled good — pot roast, maybe — but why was Diana leaving him stranded out here?

“We don’t go to church,” he said. “My parents were raised Lutheran, but they didn’t much care for it.”

“Ha!” Diana’s father barked. “Didn’t care for it!” Mirthlessly he shook his belly, exhaling smoke at the same time.

At this, Diana finally came out of the kitchen, her eyes dancing as she took in Mike’s discomfort. “Are you tormenting him, Daddy?” she said.

“Not too much,” he told her. “I got to make sure he’s all right for you, sugar.”

“He’s just fine,” Diana said, and Mike flushed as if she’d said much more.

After Diana’s mother brought out plate after plate of food, her father said grace. They all held hands. As they unclasped, her father turned to her and said, “Mike says he’s thinking of being a teacher.”

Diana and Mike exchanged puzzled glances; her father went on imperturbably. “Knowledge is the thing. It will last a lifetime. Better than material goods.” He was a deacon at the church and his voice rolled from him in waves, inexorable as his thick sagging flesh, a deep, rich river of words. “To mold young minds,” he said to Mike, “is to better the world. It is itself a kind of religion.”

That evening, he and Diana slept together for the first time back at his little apartment, and afterward he said, “What do you think your dad meant about me being a teacher? I didn’t say anything like that.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He gets ideas like that sometimes. He calls them inspirations.”

Mike ran a strand of her hair through his fingers. “I think I might give it a try,” he said.