Richard Bausch - Before, During, After

3

“Why didn’t you report it?” Iris said, crying. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell Michael ?”

“Don’t,” Natasha said. “Please.”

They were at the kitchen table, facing each other. Iris reached across and took her hands. “Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t. Please.”

There was a slight pause.

“I talked to someone in Orlando, a policewoman. It — look, there’s nothing to be done.”

“Oh, God,” Iris burst out. “What am I saying?” She stood up and moved around the table and embraced her, holding her head against her abdomen, softly patting the side of her face.

Natasha wept, touching the back of the older woman’s hand.

A few moments later, her grandmother said, “God. I should’ve seen it. I knew there was something else. I should’ve pressed you until you told me.”

“It’s all right now. I feel better telling you.”

Iris sat down again. “You don’t think Michael — he’s not heading to Orlando—”

“We didn’t get as far as the name.”

Iris appeared to deliberate for a moment. “Honey, I’ve never seen two people more in love.”

Natasha waited, watching her begin to sniffle.

“God,” Iris went on, gaining control of herself. “I’m so sorry about it.”

“Don’t, please.”

They did not speak for a few moments.

Presently, she breathed the words out. “He’ll want to do something about it. He’ll be back and he’ll want to — you know he’ll — you’ll have to tell him all of it.”

“No. I can’t — I can’t have him know some of it.”

The other’s voice was steady now. “Tell me what you think he can’t know.”

“I let — I let the — let him kiss me. Oh, I want to get past it. I wish it never was.”

Iris waited for her to subside. “But that’s such a small thing, isn’t it? A moment’s failing. And you were afraid. You thought Michael was — you were alone and he was alone and everyone was suffering this terrible thing. You didn’t know.”

Natasha sat there crying softly into her fingers. “It was hard enough telling you all that. And look what he thought. Without my saying anything . No, I can’t. I can’t .”

“You think he went to his apartment?”

Natasha looked into her eyes but did not speak.

The old woman held the handkerchief to her mouth and then wiped her eyes and her forehead. “You’ll get past this, honey. There’s people — I’m sure there’s people you can talk to. And you’re pregnant.”

“What if he can’t believe it’s his.”

She obviously had not thought of this. “But you—”

“I know.” Natasha sobbed. “But it crossed my mind.”

“You’re having Michael Faulk’s baby,” Iris told her. “That’s what’s happening.”

“I feel so sick of everything, Iris.”

A little later, they went into the living room and sat on the sofa facing the window out onto the street. They were quiet. The younger woman kept sniffling. The sky was darkening outside.

Iris said, “You have to talk to him, honey.”

“I wish I felt different. I don’t even like to think about him right now. I don’t.”

“No, now. Honey — there’s a child. You have to try, anyway … you’ve just got to try.”

“He thought I was with someone else, Iris.”

“Well, he can’t be expected to know what he wasn’t told.”

Natasha looked at her. “But he assumed—”

A moment passed.

“The assumption came from what he’s afraid of,” Iris said. “And he might’ve been right in assuming, with the rest of us, that if it was something like — if it was — that you’d have told him.”

Natasha remained silent.

“Right?”

“So many never — you know?” She sniffled. “Nobody knows it happened. I read up — I—”

Iris did not respond.

“Could be — anyone. Anyone you meet.”

“Do you love Michael?”

“You should’ve seen him. I thought he was going to hurt me.”

Iris said, “Jesus.” She stood and started out of the room. She wasn’t limping at all, and she’d left her cane leaning against the umbrella stand.

Natasha followed her into the kitchen. “I thought the whole world was over when New York happened,” she sobbed. “Oh, what happened to us. We didn’t have anything to do with it. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

Her grandmother moved to hold her. “Baby,” she said.

“Nothing makes any sense .”

They were quiet, standing close, looking like two people undecided about whether to leave a room or remain in it.

“I would like to have known her,” Natasha said, suddenly.

Iris blinked, and stared. Then: “Your mother.”

“Yes.”

There was another pause.

“I used to think about what it would’ve been to — to get to know her as something other than a soft blur.”

“A soft blur is a pretty good thing to have when nothing is the only other choice.”

Natasha wiped her eyes with a napkin from the table. “I don’t mean anything about you — but I feel like I don’t have anything to lean on, nothing to brace myself.”

Iris said. “I’m here.”

They were still facing each other.

“You’ll stay here for a while?” Iris asked.

“I don’t know.”

4

He drove out to the interstate and along Highway 40 toward Nashville. He went fast, pressing the pedal to the floor, taking the car up to ninety-five miles an hour. He had no destination in mind. It was just going on. Speeding away. The road made its gradual curves before him and then was straight for miles. Away. That was what was needed. He was taking himself away. He imagined simply driving off the side, into a tree, or over one of the bridges skirting a riverbed. The only sound was the wind-rush of the car as he sped on.

He drove to Jackson and pulled into a rest area and stopped, and put his forehead down on the steering wheel. He had been struggling with his faith, the whole edifice threatening to collapse, and now his marriage and this marvelous love he had been given so freely were casualties of all that. Abruptly, it came to him, with a terrible, leveling force, that she was a victim not only of the assault but of his, Faulk’s, failure of trust: how wrong he had been, and he understood utterly now what that meant. Some element of his makeup had fallen into this pit of mistrust, this obsession. Last night’s fit had arisen out of the crazy, synthetic, self-righteous anger of intoxication, and he was painfully aware of that. He had imagined everything from the beginning, had been wrong the whole time, and it was his suspicions about her that had magnified her unease and anxiety.

The truth of this flamed forth, here, in the closed car, in the troubled light of morning. She was innocent. She was innocent and she was beautiful and true and herself, and all of her breathing life was her own, and he had not been worthy of her.

He drove back toward Memphis. There was almost no traffic. He kept exactly to the speed limit. His eyes stung. He was out of breath. The sky before him changed to towering dark folds of cloud, and lightning flashed at the very tops of them, not going to the ground but forking, extending across.

At Iris’s house he parked the car and sat for a while behind the wheel. Perhaps they were watching from the windows. The rain started, big drops splashing, then a downpour. He waited, and gradually the rain subsided and became a steady fall.

Natasha saw him from the window, and her grandmother spoke about immediately going out and meeting him, even with the rain pouring down. “Don’t let him sit there.” Natasha felt like hiding, going to the back of the house and letting him knock and waiting for him to leave. But she had been hiding, she told herself. When the rain slackened and he got out and walked up to knock on the door, Iris opened it and let him in. He stood in the light of the entrance, eyes cast down. Rain dripped from his hair onto his face, so that it looked like he was crying.