Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

When she turns onto her street, onto their street, onto the street where all three of them live, and have lived for six years, she’ll see that every light in her house is turned on and blazing, a beacon in the night, so bright there’s a halo effect around the whole place. It looks, she’ll think, like they’ve stolen all the electricity in the city. She will stop and park, walk on the sidewalk and pretend she’s a neighbor, out for a stroll, and that this is not her house, but the house of someone she barely knows, but whom she is friendly with, someone with whom, every third Tuesday, she makes bad, cross-alley recycling jokes, someone who can be counted on to bring KFC to the neighborhood potlucks and sends the kids wild, but that’s it. A good-morning here, a can-you-believe-this-weather there. Nothing more than that. This house, now her neighbor’s house, suddenly feels warm to her.

On the machine, there will be a message from her mother, and her husband will not be home.

“Well, this one was a gentleman, at least,” her mother will say when Claire calls back. They’ve already talked about the mugging. Her mother is past it. No big deal. No one died. That’s the main thrust of her mother’s thinking, that no one died, so what’s the problem?

“What do you mean by gentleman?” Claire will say.

“He opened doors! Car doors. He ordered for me. Swordfish. Which I’m not in the habit of eating, but I told myself: you never eat fish, but maybe you should. And I’m glad I did. They sprinkled nuts on it. He ordered steak for himself.”

“Sounds wonderful?”

“But he’s just so old . They’re all so old. He shouldn’t even be eating steak. I think he was showing off.”

“You’re not old.”

“I’m older than you.”

“That doesn’t make you old. Are you going to see him again?”

“What else would I do? I don’t know. He wants to get married.”

“To you?”

“No, he didn’t pro pose . But he did say he was in favor of ‘cutting to the chase,’ whatever that means.”

“Gawd. Guard that chastity.”

“And you,” her mother will say. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

This interest, the sudden turn in the conversation, will surprise Claire, and she’ll not know, exactly, what to say. “ I’m fine. I didn’t get hit.” That’s where she will start, and then she will tell her mother about the locks, about the driving around, about the knife, about how unacceptable all of it is, about how strange it can be to know someone and then not, but strange is the wrong word, the word she is looking for is more like: unsettling . Or frightening. Like you are strapped in the back of some car you think will stay on the road, but you can’t see the driver’s face in the mirror, or even if the driver is there at all. Or, like your husband is simply not acting like himself, her mother will say. That is true, she will say back. Not himself. And everything I do seems wrong.

“Claire, it was humiliating for him.”

“It was humiliating for me. He’s not handling this well.”

Her mother will say she’s sorry to hear it. And Claire will know she means it. But she’ll also know her mother’s true stance on all of this, because what her mother will come just short of saying is that if Claire is not careful, if she doesn’t lead with sympathy, even at cost to herself, she will end up alone, just like her mother, going on dates, and talking about swordfish with strangers.

“Why are you sticking up for him?” Claire will ask.

“I’m not,” her mother will say. “I’m sticking up for marriage.”

After the conversation is over, after she’s reluctantly hung up the telephone, severed the connection as her father used to say, and left her mother, alone, in the small apartment they helped her rent, Claire will walk the downstairs of her own house, calling for Charles on the off chance he snuck in while she was on the phone. The house, as she wanders through it—though it is bathed in light, or perhaps because it is bathed in light—will feel strangely uninhabited, will feel, and this is the only way she can think of it, like a movie set, with all these rooms just waiting, begging, to be inhabited by actors, and she’ll find herself turning the lights out one by one as she passes through them. She’ll return to the kitchen, and call Jill.

“Not there?” Jill will say.

“Not here. I think he’s out looking for those kids. Or trying to save the neighborhood. Out on patrol.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous. He bought a knife, for God’s sake.”

“He’s probably getting milk. Listen to yourself.”

“He’s not getting milk. How’re the boys?”

“The house is at seventy-eight, they picked some boogers, and we ordered a pizza.”

“Sam hasn’t been sleeping well. I told you that, though, right?”

“Yes. You want me to send John over? Are you really getting freaked out?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Do you want to come over here?”

“No. Thank you.”

She’ll put the receiver down, listen for her husband, and wonder if she should call the police. And tell them what? That a week ago they had been mugged? That her husband has been acting like he’s become trapped by a movie in his head, a version not of what did happen, but what should have happened? Is there anything at all the police could do at this point? On the fridge, there are notes, and photographs, and a couple baseball cards stuck on with magnets. A picture-strip of her and Charles, mugging for the camera in a photo booth, years ago, before Sam. And she’s surprised to see, there in the picture, in his then-face, young, and exuberant, a glimmer of his now-face, hard set, distant, determined, unkind. As if this were the sort of man he had always planned to grow into.

Her husband, five blocks away, will be heading home. Coming toward him, a group of kids, a pack of kids, there must be ten of them, hooded against the cold. High school kids. Little shits . He makes up his mind to walk right down the center of the group and puts his head down until they come face-to-face and then he’s suddenly flushed and nervous and despite himself, despite his resolve not to step out of the way, despite the fact that he’s got some store-bought confidence sheathed in his pocket, despite the fact that he’s been walking around all night looking for kids just like these, at the last moment he steps aside. ’Scuse you one of them says. He’ll mumble something in reply, and immediately regret it. What? one of them will say, turning around, clearly the leader, since the rest fall in line behind him. Nothing . What? Nothing. Thought so.

Claire, alone in the house, standing in the kitchen, will be visited by a memory she has of the vacation they took after she found out she was pregnant. They, the two of them, Claire and Charles, on their way to Maui, sparing no expense, and once there sparing not even themselves in the Hawaiian heat. The sun cooked through their low-SPF sunscreen almost immediately and forced them back inside to the hotel pool, where they lounged, dispirited, until they realized the beach umbrellas were rentable and rented one, and tromped back down to the ocean. They were in so much pain from the sun but couldn’t stomach the idea of flying ten hours to not lie out on the beach, and so they spent the rest of the late morning wearing long sleeves, in the umbrella’s shade. Around lunch, after two hours of baking, fully clothed, in the midday Maui heat, Charles had turned to her, wearing sunglasses and a Gilligan hat that barely provided shade for his zinc-painted face, and said in his father’s voice: well, this is money well spent . It had made her laugh so hard—his face, she hadn’t recognized it, neon-covered and smiling, an advertisement for some debacle vacation, and his voice so like his father’s—that some of her virgin banana daiquiri had come through her nose. He had said Claire, that is beautiful and she told him if he didn’t like what he saw, it was just his tough luck. He’d said no, I like it as he got up on his elbows, I love it as he stood and then fell on his knees next to her and said I like it and then, out of nowhere, like something out of a nature show, he had ducked in close and licked the tip of her nose. She was so surprised by this, and made so oddly happy, that she dipped her nose deep into her drink and told him to try again, and the two of them had made a spectacle of their love for each other. You don’t fly ten hours to act like yourself, you fly ten hours specifically not to act like yourself, to rev whatever engines require revving, to get sunburned and silly, to not care, to really not care that you look like tourists with sun poisoning, or like two people trying to convince each other the decisions you made together were the right ones. Had there been anxiety about the pregnancy? There had been. But here they were: paradise. And it hadn’t mattered the next day when the rain began, conjured up from who knows where and so relentless they dubbed it parade-stopping, because near the beach was a cabana, and after they’d braved the sheeting water found themselves sitting alone under its roof. They stayed for hours. And just as they took one last look at the ocean before turning back to the hotel, the wind knocked a coconut from its palm tree and the thing flew down to them and rolled across the cabana’s slat floor. A hairy bowling ball, come to deliver the news. She had picked it up, and handed it to her husband, and told him congratulations, it’s a coconut, and he had said that’s fine by me and then after deciding it would be a girl and naming her, they’d taken turns reassuring each other they’d protect her from every bar-sponsored spike on the beach. Even if it was a coconut. Even if security, in coconut-land, couldn’t be guaranteed, they told her that tonight, at least, was one night she wouldn’t have to worry about thirsty tourists. They’d held the thing like a newborn, and enjoyed the expansive feeling they imagined this stranger would bring them, agreed that this stranger’s intrusion would result only in a deepening of themselves. That was the promise, then. They’d agreed.