Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

She asked if it had been harder than he thought seeing his father, and he was surprised by how sad it made him even now. He told her that over and over again he thought he understood how little he meant to his father, and over and over again he found out he meant even less.

“He just doesn’t like me,” Karel said. He shrugged helplessly.

He told her how much his father had always mistrusted him — him! What was he going to do? Who was he going to betray his father to? — and the way he’d always been amazed that all that suspicion had never seemed a burden for his father to carry. He gave her examples, and the food arrived. She said quietly that in the case of her and her mother she was beginning to realize how much alike they were. “My aunt says I’m turning into her,” she said.

The notion bothered him and he thought she was leading him to something, that she thought it was true in his case. Maybe she was right: if things were bad between him and his father, did he really think it was all his father’s fault? He remembered the way even as a small child when he watched his father doing something wrong he would think, I’ll always be able to use this against him. He had collected and exaggerated his father’s faults. They were always reacting to each other, and that had something to do, he realized, with their helplessness together.

Leda saw his sadness and leaned forward and whispered something he didn’t hear. He was grateful and reminded of an early memory of one of his mother’s quiet counter-demonstrations of sympathy on his behalf.

Over dessert she didn’t seem bothered by his suggestion that his father had changed. Her mother said if you lay down with dogs you got up with fleas, she said. The comment stung him. He imagined her discovering where he’d been with Kehr.

They walked home in step behind a drunk who seemed perpetually ready to topple over. They balked for a while at the riskiness of passing him and finally slipped by when he collapsed against a fence rail. When they looked back again he’d slid to a sitting position.

It was quiet and the lights were out when they got home, and Leda took off Karel’s shoes and settled him into some blankets on the floor. He realized he had drunk too much and he felt vague and slightly paralyzed. She kissed him goodnight and disappeared, and he lay back while the ceiling wavered above him in the dark. He listened to David’s breathing and Nicholas’s slight snore. He felt with some sadness that even loving Leda as he did he hadn’t succeeded in adjusting himself here, to these people, either, and that even in this city that he’d dreamed of coming back to he was still an outsider.

The next morning they went to the beach. He still hadn’t met Leda’s aunt and was nervous about that. She was out when he got up. They took Nicholas and David, and Mrs. Schiele left with them to look for work. Leda would have to as well in a few days, she warned before they split up. She told Karel in an aside that he should keep an eye on David’s cough. Leda told him as they waved goodbye that her mother was becoming obsessed with everybody’s health. She speculated that it was her way of dealing with her powerlessness in everything else.

It was a hot day. The breeze off the water made him wonder just what his favorite smell was, if it wasn’t this. Leda seemed very happy, and he wondered if in some situations thoughtlessness was justified.

The beach was a startling bone color, and in the shallows offshore the water was an electric blue. Both were crowded. They crossed a paved area to the sand and spread their blanket in the shadow of an upside-down white dory with a shattered keel. Leda warned David about splinters and he and Nicholas whooped-hooped their way across the hot sand to the water’s edge.

Leda lay on her back facing the sun. Karel lay beside her, propped up on his elbows. She took his hand. She was wearing a pale gray bathing suit, and he looked down at the water and told her she looked beautiful. Her toes waved in his line of sight, acknowledging the compliment.

The sand was powdery and made him think of hot ash. He dug around with his heels and unearthed a green wine bottle choked with sand. Adults on other blankets were bobbing their forefingers, counting children crouched over tide pools. He closed his eyes. Leda murmured something beside him. They could live here with every day the same as the day before. He’d provide for them all and they’d make him happy and drive Kehr and the image of himself in the cellars of the Civil Guard out of his mind.

They went down to the water to swim. Sandpipers milled around nervously in the glaze of the wave’s retreat, and he thought he could hear the suction of their feet on the wet sand. On the reef he could see the shadow of a sea bass lunging at nothing, and at their feet a jellyfish had washed up onto the sand. It trembled in the wind and David poked at it and dropped rocks on it. Karel dove in, and when he surfaced and looked back Leda had her arms out but instead of emulating his dive sat down suddenly at the water’s edge and began to splash herself. Her brothers surprised her from behind and threw her in.

He opened his eyes in the underwater silence while she swam to him. Below them in the hazy green light they could see scraps of a fishing net rotting over tin cans and a whelk gripping a holster. Above them the surface rippled like the ceiling of a luminous tent, and they held hands and floated with the dreaming motion of clouds leaving the world behind.

Back on the blankets they watched her brothers and other boys splashing around a tide pool to collect crabs for a crab war. They toweled off and stared at gulls perched on the dory and the gulls looked back at them as if they knew that when these people were gone others would show up and stare at them, too. Leda lay back and settled herself comfortably with her face to the sun again. Beyond her someone was swinging a baby so that its toes skimmed the sand and the baby was screaming in terror and glee. Karel lay with his hand on his cheek and looked at the wet dark hair combed back from her forehead and the grains of sand that glittered in her ears and imagined with a kind of onrushing contentment that his life was starting now, that what he could do now, finally, was figure out the ways to be happy.

When he met Leda’s aunt she told him it was nice to meet him and that he had to leave. She made him repeat the story of how he got there alone, and it was clear she thought something was suspicious about all of this and that there might be trouble in it. Leda and her mother protested and argued and claimed they couldn’t believe she was acting this way, but in the end it didn’t matter and Leda’s mother explained to him that this was her husband’s sister, and he found himself out on the street with his beltpack and a bag of food, saying goodbye to Leda while the aunt looked down at them from the upstairs window. He still didn’t know her name. He was a little frightened but he had money and he told Leda he was going to stay at the Golden Angel, at least until he could find a cheaper place, and that she should look for him there.

It took him longer than he expected to find it. The same manager, the tubby man with the sunburned head, was sitting on a wooden chair in the cool shade of the entrance. He didn’t remember Karel. He led him inside.

Karel stood taking deep breaths while the manager fussed with the register. The lobby was the way he recalled it, musty and fragrant with the scent of wood. He went into the common room and visited the painting of the cavalry charge. He had tears in his eyes. For what? he thought. Those days? The situation now? He turned to the manager, who was waiting. He realized he wanted to bring Leda back here and couple an old happiness with the present one, though he wasn’t sure why.