Bonnie Nadzam - Lamb

Nothing.

“Can’t you find it in your heart to forgive me?”

She said nothing.

“You can say no, if you want to. That’s how it’s going to be—where we say everything we’re thinking. Especially things that are hard to say. Promise you’ll always tell me those things. And the stupid stuff. Everything. I want to know when you’re homesick. When you’re cold. Or like, when you have diarrhea.”

“Ew.” She made a face.

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve had diarrhea, haven’t you?”

Her mouth was twisted into a crinkled bud. Trying not to laugh.

“Don’t pretend you haven’t. Where it tears up your belly and it feels like someone is slicing your guts with a lawn mower blade, and it’s all messy and it burns your butt and it’s terrible, right?”

“Oh, sick.” But she was smiling now.

“I want to know when you have it next. And I want to know when you need to vomit, so I can hold your hair back and brush your teeth for you, right? We don’t have to be big and bad and tough with each other, do we? It’s not like that, is it? Aren’t we friends? Don’t friends make mistakes and miscalculations and still they’re friends?”

“I guess.”

“You’re embarrassed because I saw you naked. No. I know you are. And I’m sorry. I’d take off all my clothes now too, but I don’t think you want to see it.”

She looked out the window away from him, smiling at the glass.

“Look at this. Would you look at this? Is this the most beautiful place on the planet or what? Look—look—another hawk. Do you see that wingspan?” He tipped his head beside the steering wheel and watched it spiraling up into the blue sky.

“Did I bruise your eye?”

“Why? You want to even them out?”

“Maybe.”

“You think about it. And let me know what you decide.”

“Gary.”

“Tom.”

“You don’t have to turn around.”

“Listen. Don’t make your mind up yet. Jury’s still out on the truck driver, right?”

She watched him. He put the truck in Park and opened his arms. “Will you give me a hug?” She let him enclose her. “Are we making up?” She nodded her head in his shirt. He pushed her away and looked at her. “Favorite girl,” he said and pulled her back in. “Favorite girl favorite girl.”

“Are you ready? Because this is going to change your life.”

“I’m ready.”

“Get up on your knees in the seat.”

“On my knees?”

“Right. Like that. Keep your eyes closed.”

“Like this?”

“Perfect. Give me a second.”

“What are you doing?”

“Turning off the engine.”

“What?”

“Okay. Open your eyes.”

The truck was parked in front of a sheet-metal outbuilding Lamb would call the shop. He looked at the girl. He loved to make her eyes big. Her mouth was open. Sweet. He gently pressed a finger beneath her chin and shut it. She grinned, up on her knees, and looked all around, three hundred and sixty degrees. In the new quiet, engine off, they could hear the rush of a river. A magpie sat on the rusted weather vane and blinked. No other houses in sight. Grass and a blue sawtooth horizon and trees and somewhere out behind those trees, nothing and nothing and nothing and nothing. Lamb opened the glove compartment and took out a small ring of keys.

“Just like you imagined?”

“But”—she was whispering—“I thought we were pretending.”

“We were.” He got out of the Ford and pointed at the house. He pointed to the water tank off beside the shop. It was all just as he’d said. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

She followed him through a brown metal door into a huge shop. He pointed to the woodstove, at the pickle jar on the workbench. She took it all in, looked at him with a huge open-mouthed smile on her little face.

“I know,” he said. He crossed the room and opened the box beside the pickle jar and took out a soft pack of Marlboros and shook one out. He put it in his mouth, held it with his teeth, and led the girl across the shop to a green-painted door. “Go on,” he said, “open it.”

She turned the handle and there it was: the bunk beds, the old, soft sleeping bags, the nightstand.

“I think there might be something up there,” he said, lifting his chin toward the top bunk. He took a matchbook out of his back pocket and lit the cigarette. She went into the small room and climbed up the bunk. On the pillow there was a brown paper package.

“What does it say?”

She kneeled on the mattress, staring. “It says my name.”

“Open it.”

“But Gary.”

“The fewer questions you ask, the more fun this is going to be. Open it.”

She lifted the package. It was a bag folded under, and out slid a blue-and-white striped nightgown. The stripes were strings of blue roses.

She made a crooked smile and climbed down with it.

“Isn’t that pretty,” he said.

“I’ve never had one like this.”

“I didn’t think you had.”

She stood there holding it, then let it unfold and pressed it to her shoulders. “I think it’s a little big.”

“You’ll grow into it.”

She fingered the blue satin ribbon woven around the collar.

“I thought we’d go see the river.”

“Can I wear this?”

He stared at her. “If you want to,” he said. “It’s your week.”

She crossed the tiny room with the nightgown on her arm and put her hand on the door. “Go,” she said. “I’ll change.”

She stepped out of the shop in the blue-and-white flannel nightgown lifting the hem: bare feet.

“Come on,” he said. “Race you to the river.”

The unpaved county road curved northwest in a pale dirt hook, so when Lamb led the girl across toward the river, he could see the white of another house ahead. Just under a mile up the road.

“Gary,” Tommie whispered and stopped. She pointed to the other side of the river, beyond which lay a field of yellow-green and gray grass into which several does and a four-point buck dipped their heads. Lamb nodded as if he knew they’d be there, as if he’d planned the whole thing, the deer, the bend of flyaway grass, the red-branched willow striping the blue sky. He smiled down at her as if to say: didn’t I tell you so? They walked on, stepping over saltbush, their footsteps crackling through the dry grass, scaring up field mice and finally alerting the mule deer, which went tearing off toward the low distant line of foothills.

Our girl stood and looked into the water, the tapering branches of water birch quaking behind her. “Can we swim?” Her belly stuck out a little beneath the clean and bright white flannel, freckles multiplying by the trillion on her cheeks and on the backs of her hands, and he wanted to reach out and freeze her, stop her just as she was. Seize her from the woman who would steal her away a day at a time. The river water was as low and as clear as it would be all year but still broke white over small piles of rocks. Yellow grass blew slowly in the bright shallows. He could see her cracking her head, could imagine too poignantly the turn in the story that would leave him with a dead girl on his hands.

“It’s not deep enough. Look at those rocks.”

“Oh.”

“We can fish, though.”

“Oh.”

“That doesn’t interest you?”

“I don’t like fish.”

“Well, you’ve never had it right out of the river. When you eat it like that, it turns all your skin just the faintest silver.”

“You’re weird.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Will it cover up my freckles then?”

“It will brighten them into blinding points of light.”

“Can I be like Medusa where it kills people?”