Claire Watkins - Battleborn

Carter considers the bed Val has folded out for them, converted from two bench seats and the dining table. Will he roll? he asks.

How surprised Marin is to be asked this. How satisfying it feels that Carter does not have the answer.

No, she says, shaking her head casually. He can’t roll.

Okay, Carter says. He builds a barrier of pillows and sleeping bags at the edge of the bed. He swaddles the child and lays him on his back—always on his back—in the center of the bed. As Carter pulls the door of the RV quietly closed, he pauses with a hand still on the knob. The smell of Jake’s cigar has made its way to them. Those pillows, says Carter. You sure he’ll be okay?

He’ll be fine , she says. He can’t roll.

Of course he can’t roll. She wouldn’t have suggested putting him on the bed if he could. The baby is too young to roll. He won’t roll for weeks. The books say so. The pediatrician says so. He can reach his arms above his head and sometimes he sort of scissor-kicks his legs inside his sacklike pajamas, but he cannot roll.

But the baby can roll. Once, she laid him on his back in the center of their bed back home, in the adobe house. He was asleep. Carter was at work. She hopped into the shower. She had to. She had a cheesy something behind her ears and in the creases of her knees. She washed her hair and used the lather from the shampoo to wash her body. She did not use conditioner. She did not shave. She kept the bathroom door open. Five minutes, tops. She stepped out of the shower and looked into the bedroom and the baby was not where she’d left him.

She ran to the bed, naked, dripping wet. Then she saw him. Half wedged beneath her own plump pillow. Still breathing. Thank God , still breathing. She lifted the pillow. He must have rolled in his sleep. How true, she thought, once the panic began to recede, once the baby was laid safely in the Pack ’n Play, once she was dry and dressing. To be capable of a thing only in a dreamworld. This was two weeks ago, nearly. She never told Carter.

Outside, Jake and Val put the children to bed in their tent, finally, and the adults settle into the story world of old friends. Marin gets another beer. Bent over the cooler, she can feel the warmth of the fire on her back and her husband watching her. She won’t look to him. Not tonight. She won’t see his once-fine face drooped with disappointment. She will not, will not look to him. She feels as though she has been looking to him her entire life.

Around the fire it is old times. Remember? they ask. Remember walking home through South Campus? Remember filling Sandy’s mailbox with crushed beer cans? Remember our illiterate landlord on the Strand? Remember that note he left us; oh, how did it end? They all say it together, roaring: I will not be tolerated .

Jake brings out a pipe and a baggie from a cloth coin purse. He offers it to Carter.

Carter says, No, thanks, man.

Jake extends the pipe to Marin. Em?

Em. He used to call her that.

Marin takes it. What the hell? They smoke a bit, Marin, Val and Jake. After some time, Marin exhales and says, Remember when we used to climb up on my roof and smoke?

Jake smiles and says, Remember watching the fireworks from up there?

Marin says, Remember Tarv?

Christ, Tarv!

Jake’s roommate. Tarv had gotten fucked up and was doing a happy jig to celebrate how fucked up he’d gotten when he stomped through the rotted roof of Marin’s apartment building. Marin and Jake climbed down the ladder as fast as their laughter would allow them. They left Tarv wedged in the building, his leg dangling through a neighbor’s bedroom ceiling. Remember, remember, remember. Whatever happened to Tarv? How did they turn out to be anyone other than who they were on that roof?

There is a little stretch of quiet and in this they can hear the distant voices of other campers and the hoot of a night bird. On the ground at Jake’s feet Dingus runs a dream run, then whimpers, then is still. Val stands and announces she’s going to bed. Everyone tells her good night. Marin looks at Carter, the firelight making long shadows on his face. He ignores her. For a moment she cannot remember why. She grows afraid. He is staring into the fire and she looks at it too. Her husband will not even look at her. Why? Where is he?

Marin tamps down her fear and goes to pee in the darkness. She can see stars while she’s peeing, and these stars remind her of the town they will return to. She realizes she has no one there and grows afraid again, out in the trees with her pants down.

Once, early on, Marin took Carter to visit her hometown, the T of two state routes in the Mojave desert. They drove there and spent a night at the motel where she and her childhood friends used to jump the fence to swim in the kidney-shaped swimming pool. He was the first man she’d brought home in a very long time. Jake had not been interested in that sort of thing.

That night, Marin and Carter swam in the pool, alone. He held her in the soft water and kissed her, the rough beginnings of his beard chafing against her neck and her jaw and her collarbone. When the pool lights turned off, he lifted her to the edge and untied the knot at the back of her neck. He took her nipples into his mouth, first one, then the other, and after he said, I’ve been wanting to do that all night. Then he pulled the crotch of her bathing suit to one side and fucked her like he hasn’t since.

We used to play a game here, she told him, when they were finished. I forget what it was called. But the premise was this: Marco Polo without the calls. Someone was It and the rest of them would say nothing. The pool was small, but it hadn’t seemed so then. Back then it seemed extravagant. Of course, visiting with Carter she saw that it was the least the town could do.

In the game, the It would have to feel where they were. No talking. No calling. Just old friends in the too-warm water. There were times when the It would be right in front of you, and you would be holding your breath, and It would reach out and touch the lip of the pool instead of you. To get away you had to slip down into that silky chlorinated dream. How inadequate that felt, to It. To be so sure you were reaching for a friend. Someone who knew you. And to touch only concrete. The lip of a swimming pool. It ought to mean something.

She has to get back. She finds a firelight in the night and makes her way to it, hoping it is theirs.

Jake is there, alone. She sits beside him. Hey, she says.

Hey, he says.

Carter go to bed?

Jake nods to the RV. Baby was crying, he said. You didn’t hear?

I never do.

Well. Jake stands. He laughs a little, to himself.

What? she says, standing and stepping toward him.

Remember when you pushed Miles into the fishpond? he says. At Corinne’s parents’. Remember?

Marin nods. She remembers everything. She moves closer to Jake. She can smell cigar on him. She can see miniature reflections of the fire in his eyes. She can see herself underneath him.

He provoked me, she says, and hooks her fingers in the waist of his shorts.

Jake smiles and tilts his head to the right slightly, the way a curious bird might. Then he steps back, allowing her hands to fall from his waistband, shaking his head. He tosses something—a twig? a pine needle?—into the fire. My God, he says, kindly. What a nightmare you must be.

Jake goes to bed and Marin sits in his chair and props her feet on the warm rocks near the fire. She puts her face in her hands. She lived alone once, for a year and a half, in the building where Tarv fell through the roof. Sometimes, in that aloneness, she did weird things. She walked around her apartment wearing a piece from a Halloween costume—a pair of white silk gloves, usually, or an eye patch—or as many pieces of jewelry as she could, or a bathing suit under her regular clothes. She took pieces of metal into her mouth to get a feel for them. A coin, a pin, an earring. In her bathroom mirror she flicked her eyeliner pencil twice on her upper lip to make the two tines of a dashing, charcoal-colored mustache. She would say words that she liked out loud. Pith . Coalesce . Dirigible . She wasn’t lonely. It wasn’t that. She was the opposite of lonely.