The Devil’s Redhead, page 40
He trolled her backward around the pool, glancing up at Ed and Polly on the bleachers. They sat close, sharing the Sunday funnies, him in his street clothes, her wrapped in a towel. Suddenly they laughed out loud, knocking against each other, rattling the comics between them. Shel glanced up then, too.
“Polly’s been the queen’s kid sister,” she said. “Even helps me dress sometimes, when I’m just… such a klutz. I feel stupid. And Eddy, God. Eddy’s been stellar.”
“It’s his nature,” Abatangelo said.
“If anything happens to them,” she said, “I’ll never forgive myself.”
Abatangelo kissed her hair. It smelled of chlorine and shampoo. “They’re not here,” he said, “because it’s easy. It’d be nice if we could wish the risks away, but we can’t.”
“We could disappear.” The words came out rushed, hopeless. “Leave them out of it.”
“You tried that once, remember? Where’d it get you?”
“It’s not fair,” Shel said. “Not for them. I’m serious, Danny.”
“Everybody’s serious,” he responded, “and everybody’s scared. Too bad that’s no excuse. If people care about you, return the favor. Love them back. Have the guts to be grateful, make it worth their while. Running’s chickenshit and there’s no guarantee it’ll protect anybody, anyway. I realize, like a lot of sound advice, that’s easy to say and hard to live by and doesn’t seem to solve much, but…”
He tightened his grip around her and kept moving, kissing her hair again. Swirling the water with her feet, she watched the froth dissolve behind her and settled back against his arms, lulled by the rhythm of his breathing. In time, he lay his cheek against her hair and hummed a tune she couldn’t quite place at first. Gradually, it came to her- it was one of the songs he’d sung that night at his flat, when he dropped her into the tub of scalding water and nursed her. A comical song, except now she detected sadness in it. Not tragic or crazy-making or wrong. Gentle. True. Maybe it’s the way he’s humming it, she thought, or just your imagination, or these pills. Then again, maybe it was there all along, that sadness.
Something broke inside her then, a tension wire in her heart, snapping. Her body started to shake with sobs and behind her Abatangelo slowed his pace through the water, whispering in her ear, “Talk to me.” She clutched his arm with one hand while the other signaled that she was good, fine, keep moving. He did so, enveloping her in his arms, and as he did the sorrow rising up inside revealed itself as something familiar, long lost. Like the called-out greeting from an old friend, a wise friend, one who’s been away, it seems, forever.
David Corbett
***
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David Corbett, The Devil’s Redhead
