Richard Bausch - Before, During, After

Natasha looked at her and couldn’t draw the breath to answer.

“What if somebody decides to take this one and fly it into something, you know what I mean? Oh, God — I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t talk like that.”

She could only nod, fearing the next second — the little distressing increments of time. Now. And now. People were moving past her, and several hit her elbow or rubbed against her shoulder. She turned to the woman, who was now talking to the little boy. “Teddy, you have to wear the seat belt. It’s the rules.”

Natasha touched her wrist. “Excuse me,” she murmured. “Can we talk? I have to — there’s a man coming and I have to be talking to someone.”

The woman seemed faintly alarmed. “Excuse me?”

“Please,” Natasha said. But then she saw that Duego was waiting at a seat just past the demarcation of first class and coach. He put his bag in the overhead bin and said something to the elderly woman sitting in the aisle seat there. His manner was deferential. The woman stood to let him take the middle seat. He turned and spoke to the adolescent boy there, who was wearing a blue bandanna over long brown hair.

“I don’t understand,” the young woman beside Natasha began, and abruptly she appeared to come to herself, and began talking. “My name’s Priscilla, and my family calls me Priss. We’re from Durham, but we moved there from Houston. I couldn’t get the flight to Durham, so Miami it is. My dad was an engineer in the space program.” She went on, nervously trying to supply what Natasha had asked for, chattering about the space shuttle program and the people she knew because her husband had worked at Mission Control.

“Thank you,” Natasha said, and squeezed her wrist. “Thank you. So much. It’s — it’s all right now.”

“Mama,” the boy said. “I want to sit in the middle. I’m afraid.”

“We have to put your seat belt on, Teddy. We’ll move you to the middle after we take off. You want to see out the window, don’t you?”

Natasha watched him pout, folding his thin arms, his lower lip sticking out. His mother sighed. Natasha sat quite still, eyes fixed on the boy’s pinched face. Her heart was running, the air beginning to feel thick, and all of life seemed to bend toward the one moment, nothing else having any reality at all, not her life in Memphis or France or Washington, not the first good days on the island, not her future plans or hopes, not Constance or the bad winter, or even Michael Faulk. It was wiped out, everything, annulled by the criminal act she had suffered, and she looked at the little boy, thinking of him grown, thinking of him forcing someone to the ground, seeing it like part of the coloration in the downy flesh of his skinny freckled white arms; and the shaking commenced deep inside, her hands tight on the ends of the armrests, the freeze expanding behind her heart, and this was how it felt to go insane. The flight attendant went through the routine about the exit doors and the floor lighting, the seat belt and the oxygen masks and the cushions that, in the unlikely event of a water landing, could be used as flotation devices. The words knifed through her. Unlikely event. Unlikely event .

When the plane started down the runway, she gave a little cry, and the woman, Priscilla, leaned over and said, “It’s fine, honey. Really. You’ll see.”

9

The house on Swan Ridge was a small two-bedroom bungalow, with a good yard and a shed in the back that could be converted into a work space. Faulk gave Mr. Rainey a small deposit for it, an amount he could afford to lose if Natasha decided that she didn’t like it. But he felt sure she would. It was very close to Iris’s house on Bilders. Mr. Rainey let him have a key to the place and took the lockbox. The two men shook hands and agreed on a time to meet and finalize things. Mr. Rainey drove away, and Faulk took one more look around, moving through the rooms and imagining life there.

This was the one he would take her to.

After lunch he drove to East Memphis to see a friend in the employment services department of the parole board. The friend had left him a message to come see him. His office was in a small windowless annex behind the main building. Faulk had a little trouble finding the place, walking around in the hot sunlight for long minutes. The door was unmarked. It looked like a warehouse entrance. His friend, the supervisor, was a short, squat good-humored man named Lawrence Watson, who smelled of the unlit cigar he kept like a lollipop in the corner of his mouth and always wore a starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The cigar would be smoked in short breaks all day and then patted out and, as Watson cheerfully expressed it, worn for reassurance indoors. A man with a cigar in his mouth was a more confident, forward-going man, he would say. For him the phrase forward going was synonymous with phrases or words like strong willed, resolute, tough minded, progressive, confident , even stubborn . The shades of meaning in it were there in context when you listened to him holding forth. He liked Faulk, and the two men had spent time over the years working together, Faulk having served as a volunteer for some of the programs the board sponsored, including several halfway houses for paroled prisoners or mental patients, or for people who needed medical rehabilitation. Faulk had also been chaplain at the community center in Midtown. Lawrence Watson was a man whose working life had been spent attempting to have a direct effect doing beneficial things for individual people. His goodwill was both boundless and practical. He possessed an unspoken passionate concern for the less fortunate and the troubled, and about this concern he often made jokes, always undercutting the obvious fact that he was a good and loving man. You could not pin him down or get him to speak earnestly about any of it. It was just his work, the thing he was happy doing, and he had been doing it for thirty years.

A job had opened up in corrections, a position in employment counseling for men on parole. “It’s yours if you want it,” he said to Faulk, chewing on the dead cigar.

“I want it.”

“Doesn’t pay much.”

“I don’t need it to.”

“Can you start Monday?”

“If you want. My fiancée’s coming in from being stuck in Jamaica—”

Wilson gave him a look, grinning crookedly.

“I know. Stuck in Jamaica. Sounds crazy. Anyway, she’s arriving later today, and I was thinking we should take a little time.”

“When’s the wedding?”

“First week in October. That first Saturday. So, three weeks. You’re welcome to come.”

“Never met a wedding I didn’t want to miss.”

“You can miss this one, too — it’s going to be very quick and very small.”

“And Jamaica was where she was when the flights stopped?”

“Yes, and all she talked about was wanting to come home.”

“Well, under the circumstances.”

“I know.”

“Way I feel right now, they can nuke the whole goddamm region,” Watson said.

“Is this you talking?”

He smiled the crooked smile. “Don’t tell anybody I said that. Maybe just hoping for another flood in the general area. How would that be? Another forty days and forty nights of rain to cool them all off.”

“You need me to start Monday?”

“How ’bout Wednesday?”

“Wednesday, sure.”

“You know the drill. Look at the history and try to match it up with whatever’s available.”

“See you Wednesday,” Faulk told him.

He went back to his apartment and saw Mr. Baines sitting out on his front stoop. Mr. Baines waved him over.

“I don’t want to be unkind,” he said. “I think I was unkind earlier.”