The Underneath Read online

  Kay studied, then, the sullen face of Michelle Whitehead. In pleading “not guilty,” what part of her child’s suffering did she think wasn’t her fault?

  Michael suddenly spoke: “Ah, dammit.”

  Kay put down the paper.

  “I’ve got to get back there.”

  She said nothing.

  “Tim’s come down with some kind of virus.” Michael furrowed his brow. “They’re airlifting him out.”

  Was this true? Because she suspected: you just want to get out of here. Away from me, from us. To be there. With her.

  Now Michael reached out as if to touch her, to put his hand on her wrist. What would his touch feel like? Warm—sweaty in this summer heat? Damp and warm? Or oddly cool and dry, papery? Ghostly. But he retracted himself, his hand awkwardly hovering above hers.

  At last, he lowered it to the armrest.

  Sometimes, she could see the small of his back, his smooth shoulder. Just fragments, fluttering like prayer flags in her memory. I used to cast myself open for him, she thought. I ached for him. But now I cannot remember how I felt—the urge to rut and the rutting itself, against bathroom sinks, on beds, on floors, in hotel rooms. And love, hot, blind, fierce: wanting to be inside his skin. Back then—three, four years ago? Back then, we inhabited the same bodies as these that have not touched in a year. Not even a public gesture.

  She studied the floor, white, clean linoleum, the faint scuffing of claw marks, some dog in a panic.

  “When are you going?”

  “This afternoon. A late flight out of Montreal.”

  Barbara will be there, Kay thought. Barb waiting for him in the Montreal Airport Embassy Suites in lingerie, a red peephole bra, just to make her ridiculous.

  “And the children?”

  Michael rubbed his face with his hands. “Sorry. I’m sorry, Kay.”

  “Sorry?” Kay began, because that was as far as she could get. She could feel the weight of the hammer in her hand again, the coolness of the cellar. She looked out from herself at the large woman with the little fluffy dog and the man with his ancient black lab that had a plastic cone around its head and a massive growth on its ass.

  He was staring at his phone. He wasn’t reading anything. He wasn’t rifling through his messages. He was simply staring at the keypad. At last he said, “I know it was important for us.”

  Then the receptionist chirped in: “Mr. Ward, Mrs. Ward? Dr. Berry will see you now.”

  They’d never had a pet. In London it was too much hassle; in Nairobi, they’d been too busy. Freya had finally given up her campaigns for a bunny, a gerbil, a guinea pig, a kitten. On this, at least, Michael and Kay were in agreement.

  Kay was surprised by how much the examination room looked like their pediatrician’s—the table, the strong natural light, the expert in a white coat.

  “Hi, I’m Dr. Berry.” A small, neat, dark-haired man in glasses, he glanced at the thumping, hissing tub. “Cat caught in a trap, you said?”

  Michael nodded, lifted the tub onto the examination table. “It’s not ours. We found it in the basement. We’re just renting for the summer.”

  Dr. Berry lifted the lid, pursed his lips. “That leg’s going to have to come off. Feral, by the look of her.” He put the lid back on. “Where you folks from?”

  “London.”

  “But you’re American?”

  “We’ve been away a long time,” Kay replied.

  Dr. Berry glanced at her, very briefly. Then back at Michael, he spoke specifically to Michael. “You want to know the cost of the amputation versus the cost of euthanasia?”

  “Sure. Yeah. That sounds reasonable.”

  “A grand for the amputation, 200 bucks for the other thing. What do you do in London?”

  “Film.”

  “Movies? Famous people?”

  “Documentaries.”

  Dr. Berry nodded, continued speaking only to Michael. “Thing is with the amputation, then you’ve got a three-legged wild cat that you’re going to have to domesticate somehow because in the wild a three-legged cat will last about a day before some coyote scoffs it, and poof, there’s your grand gone.”

  “Kill it,” Kay said. Now Dr. Berry peered at her, almost startled that she had spoken.

  “Yes,” Michael nodded. “Best thing.”

  “What kind of documentaries? Anything I’ve seen?”

  “Mainly Africa.”

  “Wildlife? My wife and I love Discovery.”

  “Political stuff,” Michael said. “Wars. Corruption.”

  Dr. Berry’s entire body swiveled toward Michael and away from Kay, his hands braced against the examining table. He was deeply impressed. “Africa. Wow. That must get hairy.”

  “It can,” Michael agreed and Kay just looked out the window at the lumber yard, the arboreal carnage, the severed trunks turned toward her, row upon row, stacked a dozen feet high, oozing with sap.

  3

  BEN SURVEYED HIS HOME, SUCH as it was, better from the inside than the out, where the aluminum siding was coming loose, a corner piece clacking in the faintest breeze. From the outside, it was the kind of place that in a hurricane broke open like an egg, a rotten, festering egg. Inside, however, it might be cozy, when the heater was working, or it might be cool, if all the windows opened and were not, instead, permanently sealed with marine sealant. It might be homey with Jake’s toys, his clothes neatly piled on the chair. It might even be Shevaunne who’d washed them and folded them, carefully paired the socks, excised the stain from a cherry pie she might have made.

  She stirred on the sofa like a creature in the mud, a mutant, pink mud-puppy. Eyes still closed, she groped for her cigarettes. “Get me a coffee, willya.” He ignored her, started in on the dishes that she might have done, in that alternative world, but had not done in this actual one.

  “Fuck you,” she mumbled, coughed.

  Whatever his intention, it had not been this.

  Months ago, back in April, he had been coming out of the Colonial Motel in Littleton. Things had gone well with Slim in the over-heated motel room with its fecal-hued decor; they’d shared a brief celebratory joint, the operation running very smoothly, the tight teamwork, the logging truck up to Favreau’s in Quebec. Slim was pleased. He had given Ben an ounce of coke and Ben’d demurred; he hardly ever did the stuff. But Slim pressed the baggie into his hand, “C’mon, man, I don’t have a box of chocolates.”

  He’d been coming out of the motel. Two women smiled at him, waved little waves, their impression of normal. We’re just normal gals going to a normal motel room in the middle of a normal day. Their wrists were thin as twigs. Behind them, a tiny fellow scampered low like a fisher cat, pointy teeth, glinty-eyed.

  The word was out, the junkie Twitter, Tweeker, Instagram. And they had been shifting in and out of the motel parking lot, tramping, shuffling, scuttling up and down. They looked like junkies. If you wanted to cast a movie with 20 junkies, this is as far as you’d have to go. Even the recently washed ones looked unkempt, hunched over their empty stomachs, and something about their eyes, restless and hinky. They smelled like dandruff, and compost, as if their constipation, the shit impacted for weeks in their colons, was off-gassing.

  Ben had been coming out into the grubby April daylight, stubborn cold from the White Mountains slapping him across the face. The snow curdled on the verges, drawing back from the debris it had hidden all winter: beer cans, dog crap, syringes. He’d been heading for his truck, stepping off the curb, when a Pajero pulled to a stop. Right there, right in front of him. Junkie car, he knew instantly. The expired registration, the missing muffler—errands the owners just never got around to because they were too busy stealing morphine patches from cancer patients or ripping off the farm stands along Route 2.

  The woman, the man got out. They didn’t have on coats. They were wearing sneakers. Her sweatpants were bright pink but dirty. Their faces were grey, like mushrooms in the cellar. Ben barely noticed them. Except he did. He gave
the woman a second look.

  Because she was looking at him, an energy passed between them, some kind of human code—and he would remember this with absolute clarity, like a particular color, even though it was happening at a micro level, below sound and light and even thought, down in the earth of the mind. She was telling him something, willing him to look, look. Her eyes catching his, shifting away, then back, then away, ahead, into the building. She stumbled at the curb, muttered some obscenity, clearly it was the curb’s fault.

  He’d said to himself, Please don’t— She and the man were behind him now, Please don’t— He’d heard the motel’s front door open. Please don’t, he’d thought. Please don’t let there be a kid. But of course there was a kid; the woman had been trying to tell him. With what was left of her smacked-out brain, with some remnant of her mother’s love, she’d left him in the car, her child, her asset. She wasn’t selling him. Yet. She wasn’t that far down. Yet. The “yet” was out there, she could perhaps glimpse it in the distance like a dark tower, and therein the dark walls lay all the terrible things she was capable of.

  She had dropped her gaze and walked past Ben. She had stumbled. She had cursed the curb. She and the man had gone into the motel to score. Ben glanced into the Pajero and saw the child. He was sitting in the middle of the back seat, no seatbelt, a hat and a jacket, filthy and too big. He was five, Ben reckoned, his eyes erased, gone like a war child, pin pricks.

  Ben had been five miles along the I-93 when he’d realized he knew the woman. A long time ago. The foster home in Gilman, not a bad place. Shevaunne. Shevaunne, he’d never known her last name. Shevaunne had been her family’s mattress until finally a teacher at school noticed the scab on her lip wasn’t a cold sore but syphilis.

  The boy, that boy. Ben felt himself gag. He could smell sour milk. Do not turn around. That boy, that child, broken doll.

  The next exit was six miles ahead.

  Do not turn around.

  Do not turn around.

  Do not fucking turn around do not open the door, the words all running together, overlapping, lapping, lapping so it was three or four voices all at once in his ears stereoscopic, do not do not open open the door the door do you hear me Benben you don’t mind Momma partying do you, Benben.

  He’d smelled the sour milk, the sourness of three days, the curds and the whey.

  He knew the boy knew the smell as he knew hunger’s metal coiling and he knew about the door you must never open, the turning around you must never do Benbenbenbenbenben.

  He’d exhaled and inhaled, breath ragged as an asthmatic. He’d checked the mirrors, no cops. He’d swerved into the left lane, into a pull-out used by the plow trucks, and looped back toward Littleton.

  I am turning around, he thought, I am turning the fuck around.

  And it was just that, the car turning, going back the way he’d come, not the entire Universe upending, the planet tilting on a new axis. He was just one man, in a truck, turning around.

  At the motel, he’d staked out the Pajero. After 30 minutes, Shevaunne—it was her, he was sure, even 20 years later, even with her brown teeth and ratty hair—and the man got back into the car; they were laughing, light of step having done a nip to take off the edge.

  They’d stopped at McDonald’s on the way, food for the boy, celebratory milkshakes for the grown-ups, onto the highway, exiting for Concord; then, from Route 2, a side road, a dark wood, the house within it moldering, stained, the dirty snow banked up against the windows where no sun came and no sun was wanted. There was a broken plastic climbing gym half-buried in the snow. It looked so like the house from Ben’s own childhood, he was sure he could enter and turn left down a hallway, into the first bedroom and see his mattress on the floor with its Captain America sheets.

  The junkies got out of the car. When the boy did not immediately comply, the man jerked open the door and yanked him out. The boy fell in the snow. The man shouted at him to get up. Ben waited for the kick—he was sure the kick would come. But Shevaunne stepped forward, took the boy’s arm, and led him to the house. They went in, the door shut, the lights did not go on.

  For a week, Ben watched the house. Shevaunne and the man were too preoccupied to notice him parked on the road. They came, they went, sometimes with the boy, sometimes they left him alone in the house for hours and hours, a day, two days. Once or twice the boy came outside and wandered around the yard. He found a stick and started hitting trees and then the stick broke and he went back inside. At last, the man left by himself. Ben followed him until he saw him turn onto the interstate. Then he doubled back to the house.

  For a while—a dozen minutes?—he waited, considering the outcomes. Because the moment was upon him. The best thing was for him to drive away, forget it, he had his small life. But he got out of the truck. He walked up the cracked asphalt drive. He walked forward, not backward. He had momentum.

  “Hello?” he called, knocking on the door.

  The door was open.

  “Hey, hello?”

  He could hear the low murmur of the TV. His mother had loved, loved Cops. “Like home videos, eh, Benben,” she’d say with a chuckle, tousling his hair. She’d watched the screen intently, imagining she might one day see someone she knew. From Ben’s perspective, she’d known them all, every loser, meth-head, crack-head, smack-head, face down, perp-walker, always wearing flip-flops and cargo shorts, tatts and tank tops. They were the same; they were interchangeable. Paulie, Rickie, Dickie, Bill, Jed, do not turn around do not turn around who do we have here?

  “Shevaunne?” Ben’s voice intruded into the still house. No one moved much in here, the air stiff with the smell of microwave popcorn and unwashed hair and cheap coffee.

  “Fuh? Wha?” He heard a garbled yelp from the back room.

  “Shevaunne? I’m an old friend. Ben, Ben Comeau. I’m at the front door.”

  She ambled out. From a distance, in the poor light, she looked pretty, she looked young, but when she came closer he could see how her mascara and eye-liner were smeared, seeping into the cracks around her narrow eyes. Her hair was limp, greasy.

  “Wha? Who the fuck’r you?”

  “Ben Comeau. The home in Gilman? Mr. and Mrs. Bailey, you remember?”

  She tilted her head, which put her off balance and she staggered. “Ben?”

  By now the boy had slipped along the hallway and hovered behind her. He was small, feral, and gave the impression of being difficult to catch.

  “You had zits.” The memory focused her, an image she could grab on to. “They were seeping.” Her eyes were so narrow, he couldn’t see the color, he thought blue. “Whaddya wan, Ben?”

  He glanced at the boy and she smiled a little smile as she reached out to touch her son, her hand on his head. “You a kiddie fiddler?”

  A reasonable question—though, was she asking or offering?

  “No.”

  “Some church thing? You wanna pray or some shi?”

  “I want you to come and live with me, you and the boy. I’ll take care of you.”

  “I don think so.” Her voice was lazy and slow. She was in the easy hammock of her high.

  “There’s a good school for him,” Ben gestured to the boy. “He’ll have regular food.”

  “Get the fuh out,” she said.

  But Ben would not. He had turned around. He was not all ruin. There was sunshine and fields of flowers. He had turned around, he had opened the door. This was why he had come. He knew she was watching him, trying to figure him out, if he was a freak or a weirdo and how much longer it might be until her boyfriend got back. He looked directly back at her, “And I have a steady supply for you, Shevaunne.”

  She had shrugged her junkie shoulders. She had all the loyalty of a plastic bag on a windy day.

  4

  The house emerged through the fringing green of sheltering maples. It was calendar pretty, with its high, peaked roof, dormers, and white clapboard siding. Already, Kay referred to it as home—she and Michael
were coming home from the vet’s—though they’d only been here two weeks. What might it be like to live here, to possess this summer beauty? The views tilted south across rough fields and dense green woods, not another house for miles. Dawns unfolded in silence broken only by birdsong; so quiet she could hear the snap-snap of chickadees’ wings as they flew to the bird-feeder. It was the opposite of London with its hard angles, its miserly slabs of light.

  The monthly rent was cheap, and Kay had wondered why the house hadn’t already been taken. According to an email from Alice, the caretaker, it had no internet and extremely poor cell phone coverage, and “people want that nowadays.” This lack of communication had, ironically, proved the main attraction to Michael. They would play cards as a family in the evening, they would take walks and read books. With the children at day camp, Michael would have time to work on his latest proposal and Kay to write whatever it was she was writing. They wouldn’t be distracted by the siren song of internet news and Netflix.

  That had been the idea, the promise.

  But here was Michael, sitting beside her, catching the very last bar of reception on approach. He always wanted her to drive so he could tap-tap-tap his phone. The past few nights, she’d heard him talking in the bathroom, murmur murmur. He had to stand on the toilet, twisting his whole body at an odd angle to get even one bar. How did he contort himself like this for so long? She couldn’t make out the words or even his tone, and she couldn’t creep up on him as the floor boards were too creaky. He would mumble on and on, whomever he was talking to—Barbara?—never seemed to reply.

  A few feet ahead of the car, yellow butterflies clustered on a puddle in the middle of the drive. Kay slowed, and when the butterflies did not fly off, she braked.

  “Stop,” she said.

  She turned off the engine. Michael didn’t hear her or wasn’t listening. He kept tapping. She slammed her hand on the dashboard. “Stop tapping!”