Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

He will wordlessly put his pillow on the floor, wordlessly spread his blanket and lie down. She will reach for him, take his hand, and say dreams? He will squeeze her hand and she will feel an immense gratitude and he will say yeah and then take his hand from hers and return it below his blanket.

“Jesus Christ, ” her friend Jill will say the next morning. “Did you call the police?”

“Charles didn’t want to,” Claire will say. She is in the bathroom, on the phone. Phone cord stretching from the kitchen.

“ I would’ve called the police.”

“He was crying, Jill.”

Her husband will take the day off from work. The moment to talk about what happened to them, between them, is long past. His mouth is tender; in the mirror it looks sore, like the guy, whoever it was, had taken a fistful of cotton and jammed it in his lip and left it there. To his surprise he is pleased to see his face mildly disfigured, it makes him look not himself, as if a harder face had surfaced in order to give proper shape to the way he is feeling. His gums throb, pulse outward from an epicenter he locates in the middle of his palate. The pain, the mild pain, is radiant, and moves away from him like ripple-waves, bouncing off the bathroom walls, coming back to him never fully absorbed. He’ll spend the morning driving around from hardware store to hardware store, looking for dead bolts, looking for window locks, talking to some kid in an orange apron about home security systems. He’ll return with a sack full of metal, and spread it on the dining room table and stare at the pile, hands on his hips, a picture, to Claire, who is watching him from the kitchen, of someone reading fortune bones. She will walk behind him as he’s sorting the pile, drape her arms around him and feel, at his side, under his lightweight jacket, something hard.

“Hunting knife,” he’ll say.

“You’re wearing it around?” she’ll say.

“I just bought it,” he’ll say.

“Don’t you think that’s a little . . .”

“ What? ” he’ll hiss.

She’ll be taken aback. She’ll step away from her husband, and let him come to her. When he doesn’t, she’ll say, “What are you going to do? Get in a knife fight?”

“Did you get punched in the face?”

“He took my purse, remember. I was there too.”

“I know you were there.”

“What’s next, a gun? Do we want that in our house? Are you going to let all of this into our house?”

“I’m protecting our family, Claire. It’s pretty simple. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to install some locks.”

The house, locked, will feel different than before. The creaks louder, the plumbing worse. Every quirk an agitation. Four days after the attack, Saturday night, her husband will spend an entire evening driving around the neighborhood, flashing high beams into unlit corners. He’ll walk back into the house and go straight upstairs. He’ll inspect his lip for half an hour, just looking at himself in the mirror, while Claire reads Sam to bed. This, she’ll remind him, is a night when they should be eating together. He’ll say he had work to do, and she will let it slide. Two mornings later, while Charles is at his office, one of the newly installed locks will fall off the door and hit the ground with a sound like a table collapsing. She’ll inspect the divot left in the wood floor by the falling lock, unsurprised.

“What’d you do?” he’ll say when she reaches him at work to tell him about the lock.

“I didn’t do anything, it just fell off.”

“You did something .”

While he’s at work, she’ll hire someone to switch out the locks. That night, in the kitchen, she’ll tell her husband something’s wrong here and he’ll say nothing’s wrong here and she’ll say you’re not acting like yourself and he’ll say maybe I don’t like myself and she’ll tell him these things happen and maybe he needs to talk to someone about it and he’ll say well, isn’t that just like you to think that and that she has no idea what he’s going through and she’ll say what on earth are you going through and they’ll be interrupted by their son, who has heard them from his bedroom, and who is sending wooden blocks down the stairs to get them to stop arguing.

She’ll reach for him in bed, and he’ll grab her hand and take a shot at flinging it across the room. Don’t you ever do that again she’ll say, and he’ll say I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

On Friday, their son will come home from school, dropped off in front of their house by the bus, by the driver who, most days, is overly friendly, but today will drive away as soon as the doors close behind Sam, as if, she thinks, he’s got more important things to do today than make sure there’s someone around to welcome each weather-bundled child safely inside. She’ll meet him at the door, take his backpack and half-eaten lunch, ask him about Ms. Sabotka, and listen as he lists in chronological order everything he did today, first snack time, then recess, then drawing, then cursive, then choosing the music everyone in the class would listen to, then computers. She’ll ask him then if he still wants to go over to Patrick’s house for a sleepover, Patrick, the son of her friend Jill, who is as loud as Sam is soft, the Patrick who has stolen his toys and was then made by Jill to sheepishly return them, the Patrick forgiven instantaneously by her son, as if his toys meant so much less to him than Patrick himself, since it was Patrick, she was told, who wrestled with an older boy who was taking Sam’s money at school. Of course, Mom he’ll say, and she’ll wonder, on the car ride over, if she was right or wrong in detecting a note of irritation in his voice, in that word, Mom .

Jill will have tea waiting for her. The two boys will immediately run outside arm in arm, like European kids, she’ll think, like boys still unembarrassed by their own enthusiasm for each other. Jill will ask her how she’s doing, and she’ll say fine, fine and then catch herself on the verge of saying more, but what, exactly, she doesn’t know, except that it feels like something’s been deposited in the back of her throat, and she’s been walking around for most of the day in a dreamy nonawake state, replaying the evening in her head. Oh, honey Jill will say, and reach across the counter for her hand, and then at least he only wanted your purse, you can thank God for that, and also that Charles was there because otherwise who knows? But Charles was there, and it had still happened, and whatever it was that this sort of violet talking had meant, if it meant anything at all, was that he had been unable to do anything to stop it. Which is not to say he should’ve tried, you should always just hand the stuff over, big deal Jill will say, and Claire will hear herself saying I know, I know . But still, it was just one punch and he’d gone down, and did not get back up, and had not chased the guy across the street, and did not act the way she wanted him to act, and had, in fact, left it to her to resolve the altercation. Which she had done. And which, she thinks, she is now being punished for.

She can see the boys through the kitchen window, engaged in some game with obscure rules involving imaginary enemies, the two boys clearly on the same side, lobbing what she assumes are grenades over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. One of them brings his hand to his mouth and bites like he’s holding an apple and then drops it, alerting the other one of the calamity about to befall them inside their own bunker, and the two of them dive into the snow, covering their ears with an oh, no! that’s audible even from where she’s sitting. The tea is warming her hands, and she listens as Jill lists one complaint after another, about her mother-in-law, about uninvited guests, about their dog and how he only seems to shit when he’s sure he’s got the widest audience available, about their heating bill, which, now that Patrick knows how to adjust the thermostat, has become astronomical. She’s heard all of this before. Jill, Claire will know, is just trying to cheer her up. Eventually, Claire will decide to go home. She’ll walk outside as it’s getting dark, and drop a kiss on her son’s cheek that he’ll make a big show out of wiping away. She’ll tell him to remember to brush his teeth, in circles, every tooth, and then, after a final shrug from Sam and a good-bye from Jill, will get in her car and drive the five miles home without turning on the radio.