Richard Bausch - Before, During, After

“Maybe I can loan you some money for the short term,” said Constance.

Natasha stood. “I have to go to bed. Good night.”

“Sit down. I want to ask you something. Sit.”

She did so.

“Are we still friends?” Constance had tears starting in her eyes.

“We’re still friends.”

“Where have you been?” She wiped them with the table napkin and folded it tightly in her fist. “I haven’t seen you since yesterday morning.”

“I haven’t felt well.” Natasha sniffled.

“Zummer colds are zuh bad vons.”

“This thing happened to all of us,” Constance said. “And people behave differently in this kind of extremity.”

Natasha nodded but said nothing.

“My daughter isn’t answering her phone. We’ve talked once. That’s it.”

“Maybe she’s out with people. You wanted to go be with people, remember?”

Ratzi said, “Maybe there’s still — you know, the volume of calls.”

“Volume of calls at two in the morning,” said Constance. “ Her time.”

Natasha simply waited to be released.

“Zometimes I unplug my phone ven I go to bed at night.”

“Natasha, how many times have you talked to Iris?”

“I don’t know.”

“I heard you talking to somebody.”

“Ruined,” Mrs. Ratzibungen said.

Two young women came from the other end of the beach, laughing and talking. One, Natasha realized, was the girl she had seen crying in the lobby two days ago. The girl seemed wildly happy now and, seeing Natasha, walked over to her. “Guess what?” she said. “My father’s friend, they found him. He was in Washington having breakfast with some people. He wasn’t even there.”

“Oh, how happy,” Mrs. Ratzibungen said.

Natasha smiled at the girl and nodded, watching her go off with her friend, and she thought of all the people for whom this had not ended happily. When she came down for her walk, she had seen on television an image of people putting pictures of the missing on a wall near the rubble of what was left.

“Natasha’s fiancé was in New York.”

“But he is safe,” Mrs. Ratzibungen said. “Ja?”

“Safe,” Natasha said. “Yes.” She excused herself. This time Constance did not try to stop her. In the room, she lay down and closed her eyes, and a humming sounded in her ears. She got up and took some aspirin, swallowing it with a little water she got bending over the spigot, then went to the bed and lay down and pulled the blanket over herself as if to hide. I will not let it do this to me. I will not let it do this to me .

The humming in her ears went on.

5

He took a cab from the station to his apartment in Chickasaw Gardens. The cabbie and he traded remarks about the surprisingly cool, dry air for mid-September in Memphis, and it felt refreshing to be talking about something other than the attacks and the coming war in Afghanistan. Except that he knew the cabbie was carefully avoiding all of it, and so the overall feeling was of complicity in a kind of ruse. At his apartment, he dropped off his bags, then called the hotel in Jamaica. “You choose,” she had said about a place for them to live, and he heard the note of apathy in her voice, wondering at it, almost as though he were admiring a quality of hers. He thought of her there, alone, marooned, and felt all the more powerfully the will to protect her. Finally he got in his car and drove straight to Iris’s house. She opened the door as he came up onto the stoop. “I’m so glad to see you safe,” she said.

He followed her into the kitchen. She moved well with the cane.

“I’ve been sleepless this whole awful time,” she told him. “I close my eyes and dream I’m sleeping and then I wake up.”

“I guess nobody’s sleeping very well.”

“You too?”

“Me too.”

Sun shown through the white-curtained windows of the patio door. She had made coffee, and she poured him a cup without asking if he wanted it, supporting herself with one hand on the countertop. Her knee was in a brace, and he thought it must be difficult to maneuver with it. But it didn’t seem to bother her at all. She came over to sit across from him with her own cup of coffee.

“I know I’ve fallen asleep for little spells, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.”

He looked at her thick fingers with their chewed nails and the slight arthritic curvature of them.

“How did you fall?”

“Which time?”

“The most recent one.” Faulk knew of the original injury.

“I’d thrown my bedspread off in my sleep, and it was bunched on the floor. I caught my foot in it getting up. If it had happened ten years ago and if I wasn’t already hurting from this other one, it wouldn’t even have been noticeable.”

They drank the coffee in silence for a few moments. It struck him that, apart from the fact that in the normal outward way she had been his parishioner, there wasn’t really very much they knew about each other.

“I’ve got several houses to look at,” he said. “I’ve been researching it. But there’s not much I can do really until Natasha gets back.”

“No.”

“You’re sure you don’t need us to stay here. Because we will, you know. I’m perfectly all right with that.”

She smiled. “It’s the word perfectly in that sentence that gives you away.”

“No,” he said, and he repeated it while she laughed quietly. Her laugh was that of a much-younger woman.

“I am perfectly all right with it.”

“I don’t need you to stay here.”

He sipped the coffee. She looked out the window at her small flower-bordered lawn and sighed. “I don’t like the way our girl sounds on the phone.”

“She just wants to be out of there. And home.”

“Something’s different.”

He had felt it, too. But he did not show this to Iris. He desired to reassure her, and he took some of the reassurance for himself as he spoke: “Coming back home will help her get back to herself. Must’ve been awful being that far away and not knowing, not being able to get through.”

“Best medicine,” Iris said. “People you love around you.”

“Everybody safe.”

“Nothing feels that way, though, now, does it?”

“No.”

“I haven’t felt this apprehensive in a long time.”

“It’s all of us.”

When he left Iris’s he drove to Chickasaw Gardens, intending to arrange his move from the apartment. He had taken the apartment less than six months ago, and there was the problem of the lease. Also, his landlord knew about him and had let it be known that he considered him some sort of renegade. The landlord, Mr. Donald Baines, was by his own conception of himself a devout Christian. The lease was for one year.

“One year,” Mr. Baines said. “Not five and a half months.” He was fifty-something, balding, with an outsized, eerily corrugated beer belly. He wore knit shirts that made the heavy, dimpled, drooping shape of the belly all the more noticeable. There were thick pouches under his small eyes, like emblems of his general flabbiness. Everything about him suggested immobility. He did not drink much, he had told Faulk, but he liked food. He was, he said, addicted to food. It didn’t really matter what it was. He had continually to resist the urge to satisfy not his hunger but his taste buds. It was that simple. Many things, to Mr. Baines, were “that simple,” and anything that wasn’t, he let alone. He had a habit of talking about himself in the third person.

“Of course, I’ll be looking for someone to sublet,” Faulk told him. “But we don’t have much time.”

“You can bring your lovely bride to the apartment and live with her there until the lease is up. Then you’d have time to find a nice place for yourselves. Donald Baines isn’t that much of a stickler about the fine points of the lease.”