Baptism for the Dead Page 3

  He was new, just moved from Provo to accept a position as professor of English at the college. He was thirty-one, never married. He had a quick and very charming smile, the kind the author of an old-fashioned book might call rakish. His face, though, wore too much tiredness and resolve around the eyes. And there was an otherness to him, a careful way of moving, a careful way of looking about him, a softness of voice that lacked the confidence my friends’ husbands possessed by nature. I knew right away. I could tell, as everyone could, I suppose, but never mind. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that James, like me, had a secret. What were the odds that two people would meet, so perfectly and miserably matched? That too must have been a sign from God, I though wryly, remembering my Adam, throttling my urge to crack open the walls of the singles’ ward with laughter or with fists or with sobs.

  We dated for three months – movies, lunch dates, walks in the park – and when he asked me if I would marry him I didn’t hesitate. We could keep our secrets together. Short of Adam, he was the best spouse I could possibly have hoped for.

  For his part, James knew I was observant and honest. He had commented on how sharp I was on our first date. That’s what he called it: sharp. I thought what he meant was You’re not like the rest of them. Sharp, so he must have known that I knew, even though I never said a word, not even to him.

  James was sharp, too. Far sharper than me, to tell the truth. I am sure he knew right from the start that I, too, was hiding something from the world. But we never spoke of our secrets; not once.

  We did speak often of starting a family. He desperately wanted to be a father and fawned over babies and toddlers, tossing them up into the air until they squealed, running them around the church lawn on his tall shoulders. Kids adored him. Parents respected him, not only because he was a professor but because he was making all the right choices, living the right kind of life. But although they respected him, none of them quite trusted him enough to leave him alone with their children. That always angered me. James was no threat to anybody, least of all to children. I wanted to call them out, shame them publicly for their ignorant assumptions. But to take them to task would have meant admitting what James was out loud, and that would never do.

  Poor, sweet, earnest James. He wanted children, but he lacked enthusiasm for the required mechanics. Even hand-holding or long embraces made him uncomfortable, so after the first six months of our marriage I let him off the hook entirely, stopped trying to coax intimacy from him. It was for his sake that I stopped acknowledging the void in my life where some sweet fire, or at least a handy matchbook, should have been. We got into bed together every night with our books and our amiable nonchalance, and after the reading lamps were shut off, after the peck on the cheek good-night, we resolutely turned our backs on one another to sleep on our separate sides, in our separate realms.

  There was nothing I could do to change the situation, and anyway, despite my advanced age I was in no hurry to become a mother. Instead I took a part-time job at the campus cafe, an acceptable pastime for a woman who did not yet have a brood to tend. It was not that I needed the money. James’s salary was generous and we shared all we had equally. The job was an occupation in the purest sense of the word, a distraction, a misdirection. I watched my modest paychecks trickle into my separate bank account the way a bored kid might watch ants in an ant farm fill a chamber with waste or with larvae. Well, would you look at that.

  I did want kids of my own some day; just not badly enough to press the issue. Our pretense was much harder on James than it was on me. On the rare occasions when I brought up the subject of children, I deferred without protest to his usual line: It will happen when Heavenly Father wants it to happen.

  That would have been some miracle. Acres of burning bushes.

  On our wedding night he made love to me with his eyes closed, not out of passion but out of a sort of strained concentration, like a man enduring a dental cleaning. Afterward he shut himself in the bathroom for a long time while I blinked in bed, rolling the edge of the sheet between my fingers and trying to puzzle out what had just happened to us. When he finally emerged, dressed in a business-like bathrobe, he was all kindness and smiles. We put in a movie and watched it sitting up, propped against our pillows. My head was on his shoulder. His hand was on the remote.

  You do what’s right in Rexburg. Even if it is against your nature. Even if you are not right, you still do the right thing. That is what God expects, and so that is what the town expects. They all expected me to be happy with James. They all believed God had brought us together, and after all, we were sealed now for eternity. No going back.

  I may have had no reason to believe in God, but I had plenty of evidence that Rexburg was real.

  James and I had only been married a couple of weeks. Most of my things were still in boxes, stacked around the house, waiting to be unpacked and incorporated into my husband’s home. My wedding gown was still at the cleaner’s. James had declared the garden officially mine, and I was on my knees in the grass pulling thready weeds from between clumps of flowers. It was that familiar kind of Idaho afternoon, with light that managed to be both warm and blue, and slanted at a sleepy, idle angle onto the earth. I was thinking of dinner, of baking a spectacular dish of home-made macaroni with ham – something to impress my new husband, to make him feel he had chosen wisely in his selection of an eternal partner. I had, electrically pulsing in my middle, that special thrill of excitement which only new brides can feel over the prospect of macaroni with ham.

  From two doors down there rose a sudden shriek – not the cry of someone hurting, but a scream of rage. I stood – the knees of my pants were soaked and stained with grass – and walked down the drive to the road, to see from a polite and unobtrusive distance what was going on.

  Marsha, nineteen, freckled, cute, sat slumped behind the wheel of her lime green pickup truck in the drive of her parents’ house. Her face was buckled in upon itself, flushed with the heat of desperation and shame. Her father and brother solemnly carried boxes and suitcases to the truck, set them inside the open bed with care. I wondered whether it was Marsha who had screamed, but soon her mother emerged from the garage’s open moaning mouth with a look of such fury that even I drew back, and Marsha drew back, cowering, her posture, her whole demeanor a ruin of distress. The mother carried something in her hands, an unfolded bundle of clothes. A load from the dryer, I thought dumbly as I watched her throw the clothes through the open window onto Marsha’s lap. Marsha moved timidly, gathering them to herself.

  “You will not stay here,” the mother shouted, her voice raw and terrible. “I don’t care where you go.” And she kicked the tire of the truck with such ferocity that I turned and ran down the walkway, back into my house.

  I hid inside while my mind fell all over itself, trying to process the scene. Marsha had married a nice boy who had just taken over his father’s printing shop on Main Street. Six months ago, after the wedding, they had moved to a two-bedroom fixer-upper on the west side of town. What was she doing at her parents’? Hours later, after I had wrangled my frantically prepared macaroni into the oven, I called Katherine to learn the news.

  “Didn’t you hear?” Katherine’s voice was low and sorry. “Marsha cheated on her husband. Can you imagine! They only just married. He’s already filed for divorce. She was staying with her folks but I guess they didn’t know the cause of it until now. I don’t blame them for being so angry.”

  “Where will she go now? Does she have friends she can stay with?”

  “I wouldn’t concern yourself with an adulterer,” Katherine advised. And that was that. If I wanted to keep up appearances I wouldn’t concern myself. Nobody else would, either.

  I burned the macaroni. James laughed it off and scraped away the burned part, and ate the rest like it was caviar. I could hardly manage two bites. The sound of the mother’s scream filled my head, and when I thought back on what I had witnessed that afternoon I could swear the truck’s tir
e had sparked when she kicked it, as though the very force of her rage had been made manifest. I thought of Marsha weakly gathering her unfolded clothes in her lap, as if she might put her world back into some order by folding them. I wanted to tell her to come stay with James and me; we had plenty of spare bedrooms, unoccupied as they were by children. But by now Marsha was long gone, driving out into the sage flats on a quarter tank of gas. She had always been a smart girl. She had already realized, no doubt, that there was no place for her in Rexburg. Not anymore.

  But there was still a place for me, and so I didn’t concern myself, and kept to my garden and my cooking and my husband, and hoped, with the fervency of prayer, that no one saw below the surface.

  9.

  The whole town suspected James’s secret, but the whole town knew as well that we were doing the right thing together. That made us both redeemed, and made the thing he hid irrelevant. There was a time when I felt good about our marriage. I was helping him live the right kind of life, according to all the definitions of right either one of us knew. So what, that I wanted to hold hands and kiss on the Bench like I’d done with Adam years ago? So what, that my own husband never touched me with any real affection? I told myself very firmly that I didn’t mind. But still, no matter how I tried to stifle the memory, Adam was with me, his smile and his laugh, the haze on his glasses, his mouth, his neck, the weight of him.

  A good woman would have set these memories aside in some box of scraps and mothballs and forged ahead, allowed herself to be husbanded. For a while I did. I was good. But by the time our second anniversary came and went, I wanted Adam more than ever before – that sun warmth, the dust devils, the breaking glass.

  In Rexburg you must always look for signs, for earthquakes and lunar eclipses. When you find a sign, you don’t ignore it.

  10.

  Thursday was girls’ night out. My friends left their kids at home with their husbands and congregated in a round green vinyl booth at Sombrero’s. Pre-dinner, we restricted ourselves to a few tortilla chips each: baby weight to lose, for those who’d had babies, which was everyone but me. Artificial mariachi music wafted from speakers concealed by plastic plants while we talked about husbands, church, children. Occasionally the conversation tiptoed around the edges of sex, dangerously dirty. We stirred our strawberry lemonades nervously, giggled like school girls, and then Katherine guided us back onto the path of righteousness. Some things never change. Katherine soberly reminded us of the women in town who struggled with migraines, difficult children, endometriosis, any number of other trials provided by God in His wisdom. The rest of us nodded and frowned and made appropriate sounds of sympathy or disapproval, as warranted.

  Thursday nights. Pick one. Throw a dart at the calendar. Every Thursday night was just like all the others before. Some things never change, except for when they do.

  One very special girls’ night out remains in my mind as the day my world broke apart. The day of the Second Coming. It was a disarmingly Rexburgian Thursday, which only served to underscore the drama. The early summer storm had rolled into Sombrero’s parking lot. The evening light was olive green. Big warm rain drops pinged on the windows in an uneven rhythm. Young mothers hustled children into tan and green minivans. Husbands held up magazines as makeshift umbrellas and rushed across the wide street to indistinct red-brick buildings. Routine. Artificial music, artificial talk, artificial thunder storm.

  On that Thursday, as it happened, I was the topic of our concerned discussion. This is an uncomfortable place to be in. Now I would feel justified in telling my friends to mind their own damn business, but those were the Rexburg days, the camouflage days. In those days telling off one’s friends was not done.

  Katherine’s face was a pretty mask of just-so worry. She leaned across the table to winnow out my feelings on the subject of my apparent barrenness. I tried to be what I knew I should be: dutiful wife hoping for family. Soon enough, though, just as the waiter came by with a round of refills, I grew annoyed with being put on the spot.

  “Twenty-five isn’t old,” I said. Most of my friends had their first children within a year of marriage – mothers before the age of twenty-one – and were on to second and third helpings. But still, twenty-five is not old. “James says it will happen when God wants it to.” The girls made their hen-clucks of agreement.

  Katherine said, “Well, sometimes even God needs a little push. Are you two – you know – doing what you need to do?”

  “Of course.” Of course not.

  “Maybe you should look into artificial insemination. Not by some stranger. You can use

  James’s...stuff.”

  I was about to ask her what precisely she meant by stuff, and then enjoy the sight of her blushing and floundering, when suddenly (thankfully) Katherine veered away from the subject at such a sharp angle that we were all seasick in her wake. She leaned across the table to whisper, “Look at that guy.” Her eyes flashed, pointing without pointing.

  Once I realized with relief that I was no longer under her microscope, I turned to look in the direction of her glance, and captured him in the act of sitting, just alighting on the cool green vinyl, a bird, a ghost settling onto a wire. Time bent backward in that long instant, the long indrawn breath when he emerged out of a memory otherworld. Rapid-fire series of impressions, in the order I saw them, in the order I felt them: plaid shirt open, faded cotton underneath, warm young hands very big, ragged pulse under my cold skin. Fiddling with his silverware. Dark hair, not neat but not messy. Heat rising to my face. The same eyes. He wore different-shaped glasses, but with the same thick lenses, and the remembered planes of his face were altered slightly by a new short beard. But the same eyes. Exactly, precisely the same: that particular shade of dark blue, the shot of red at the rims visible across the restaurant aisle, the thickness of the lashes.

  For one hysterical moment I thought that Adam had come back to town. I was ready to run to him, throw myself on him where he sat slumped over his table, pushing a butter knife back and forth with one long, elegant finger. Just in time I noticed the differences between Adam and this man. These hands were too large and the fingers too thin, this nose too beaky, too prominent. But this – this resurrection, this miracle, these eyes – this was a sign, the kind of real, palpable, unmistakable portent Rexburgers only dream of finding.

  A waiter stopped at the doppelgangers table, took his order. When the stranger spoke, his mouth was too wide, the teeth too large, almost comically so.

  But the eyes were Adam’s.

  Rain pinging on the window.

  “Who is that?” Danae whispered.

  Quiet settled around our table while we all processed the intrusion: Stranger. Not-us.

  The waiter edged up to the man’s table, gingerly set down a bottle of beer, and sped away again. The man, still hunched with his forearms folded on the tabletop, turned his head a fraction. He smiled after the waiter past his angular shoulder. The smile turned into a dry little laugh, a private joke. His hand went around the beer bottle, and with his heavy eyes fixed on, looking through the tabletop he used his butter knife to press a wedge of lime through the bottle’s mouth. The beer responded with a brief, shy, passionate fizz. The knife rose to his long mouth; his tongue appeared to lick the flavor of lime away; the soles of my feet pulsed, and I tasted in my own mouth the acridity of citrus and cheap metal. When he lifted the bottle to his lips and drank, his eyes met mine. I did not look away.

  The man grinned.

  He is definitely not from Rexburg, said Katherine’s voice from somewhere inside or outside of my head.

  11.

  I was alone in the parking lot. The sky was pinking and purpling in preparation for a spectacular sunset on the heels of the evening’s thunder. I hovered around my car, watched the wide empty streets. The wide empty eye sockets of abandoned buildings watched the innocuous pink and purple of Rexburg. I had faked an emergency text from James and left early, depositing my share of the bill on the tab
le in folded fives and singles. The paving in the lot was still darkly wet, diamond-studded with rain.

  I did not get into my car and leave. Not just yet. I felt compelled by some primal force to watch that man leave the restaurant, to see how he moved and to check this observation against the memory of Adam in motion. Then I would make my escape.

  But when he produced himself from Sombrero’s interior (heavy door sliding off fingertips, right hand in pocket, precise controlled swing of hip and knee) he saw me right away, standing beside my sedan, staring at him, and he came over (smile that was close to a smirk, squinting eyes that held me stiffly in place.) He said, “Hi.”

  “You’re not from Rexburg,” I said after we had exchanged the expected, the wary smile from me, guarded; the lax shrug from him.

  “No. I’m just passing through.” Something like that. “I’m on sabbatical. Decided to tour the western States for a bit.”

  “But Rexburg, of all places.”

  “The light is good here,” he said, as if that explained everything. He pointed to the clouds nimbusing eastward in colors of panic or embarrassment.

  Through polite if somewhat tense conversation, I learned that he was an illustrator. Books of all kinds – the covers of novels, kids’ stories, medical texts, manuals. Space ships abducting attractive women. Friendly dogs. Dissections. Team lifts. Grueling work, he told me, not nearly as fun as I thought it was, but it paid the bills. He had meant to see the West for a long time, and had finally saved up enough money to do it, to take as long as he wanted and just explore and draw and paint, get his creativity back, get back his passion for art after the drain of illustrating for years on end. He was on his way to Yellowstone, but had stopped in Rexburg yesterday for gas. He found all the houses fascinating: stoically alike and insistently pleasant. Ticky-tacky, he called them. He had spent an entire day secretly painting Rexburg homes from the camouflage hide of his car, on a block of watercolor paper he kept in the glove box. Did I want to see the paintings?