ONE PERSON PER LIFE by Kristin Kearns
My wife wants me to look at corpses with her and her family. At this very moment my in-laws are upstairs, getting dressed. “What do you wear to look at corpses?” I ask. “Shrouds?”
“We’re not going as corpses, we’re going to look at them. And they’re not corpses,” Bonny says. “They are bodies that have been carefully preserved for our learning pleasure.”
“Corpses. Let’s go to the Exploratorium instead. It’s free day.”
She makes a horrible face, mouth twisted, eyes crossed. I can’t believe, sometimes, the expressions she’s capable of. “They want to go, Hunt, and I can’t take them alone. Carol’s going to go on and on about the waiting list for preschool. Dad will make loud, horrible jokes.”
“Stick with Ashlee. She doesn’t talk yet.”
Bonny raises her eyebrows. It’s a good thing, she has said, that she doesn’t like kids, because with her life expectancy, there isn’t much point in having any. “She does talk, she just doesn’t say any actual words. Why do they even give vocal chords to children?” She shakes out her Creon tablets and downs them with whole milk, then takes her leftover birthday cake out of the fridge and cuts a big piece. “It’s temporary, Hunt. It’s only in San Francisco for the summer.”
She knows this will get me; I can’t stand missing things that one day won’t be around. I watch her dig into the cake as matter-of-factly as she downed the tablets, which help her digestion. Without them, food would go through her without leaving a trace. “OK,” I say, and she sits on my lap and grabs me in a tight hug, her thin arms straining. I am a large man. She is a small woman. She has fine blond hair and almost invisible eyebrows and a big, dry voice, a voice like aged wine.
Bonny pulls my face to her and talks into my mouth. “They took off the skin so you can see what’s going on inside. Some of the corpses are cut in half.”
“Great,” I say. It sounds disgusting. Like the Holocaust museum where the curriculum demands I take my students every year: there are certain horrors we don’t need to see. Bonny starts coughing and lets go of my face. She coughs into a paper towel until her eyes water. Carol comes into the kitchen.
“Morning,” she says.
“Hey,” I say. “Are you the one who came up with this dead bodies idea?”
“Not dead, educational. I think this is going to be really good for Ashlee. She’s fascinated by internal structures. I can see her as a doctor or an architect.”
“That’s incredible,” I say. “My students are in tenth grade and I can’t see them as anything yet.”
Carol sticks her tongue out at me, inspects a chair for coffee drops and sits down.
“Cake?” Bonny says, wiping her eyes and pointing to the piece she hasn’t finished.
“I wish,” Carol says, pinching her stomach. She takes an apple from the bowl on the table and narrows her eyes at it. Carol has hair like Bonny’s and eyes like Bonny’s but she’s more solid than Bonny, and more dramatic. I have known her since she was thirteen and resentful of the attention Bonny got because of her cystic fibrosis; during Bonny’s coughing fits she used to run upstairs screaming, “I’m going to die too, you know!”
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be married to a woman who goes to the gym and diets and thinks about sending her child to college sixteen years from now. To have a wife who has a midlife crisis at forty-five instead of fifteen, who doesn’t see thirty as old age. I think then I might take the time to look at my life, slice it up, see what it’s made of. As it is, my life is a fog that’s one day going to lift.
Bonny leaves the kitchen and goes into the bathroom, still coughing. Carol forks a bite of cake into her mouth and frowns at the naked tines. “Fuck,” she says. “I need to work out. I don’t care.” She takes another bite. I put on more coffee.
“You’re on vacation,” I say.
“Eventually I’ll have to face the music. I should have another baby. I ate all the time with Ashlee.”
“Good reason to get pregnant,” I say. “Where is Ashlee?”
“Upstairs tying her shoelaces. She’s become fascinated with knots. The nanny is very hands-on.”
“Great,” I say.
I go upstairs to get dressed. Ashlee is in my closet, wearing nothing but a diaper, tying the shoelaces on my running shoes. She looks up at me and smiles. “Tie bow,” she says. Her voice is wobbly and flabby and makes me think of a stretched rubber band. I put my hands on my hips.
“How is Uncle Hunt supposed to put his shoes on if they’re already tied?”
“Uncle Hunt,” she says, grinning at me. She’s cute. I like having her around; she’s tiny but she fills the house up, makes time go a little more slowly. I don’t want to take her to see corpses. I want to take her to the park and stick her on the merry-go-round for a while. She’s too young to think about internal structures. Too young to see what people are like inside.
I ask her for a pair of shoes and she hands me the slippers Bonny gave me last Christmas. I never wear them. They’re an old man’s slippers. I put them on with my jeans and do a shuffle for Ashlee. She laughs. I catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror on the inside of the closet door and am surprised at how much weight I’m putting on. I am surprised at how much age I’m putting on. When I married Bonny, I didn’t think of her eventual, not-so-far-off death as something that would end our life together. I saw it as a sort of cap, a seal that would keep us from getting old. But we are getting old, or older. Bonny just turned thirty-three, the age expectancy she quoted to me in high school, when we started dating; we only put two candles on her cake, two threes, because her lungs don’t have the strength to blow out thirty-three candles.
But overall she’s doing well. She’s holding up. Holding up: it makes her sound like weak shelter in a heavy storm but she’s not like that, she’s more like a car that makes some worrisome sounds but shows no sign of running down. I am starting to think she might live forever. I am starting to feel like she already has. We’ve crammed a lot into our years together, stocking up on time, hoarding life. We were married at twenty, owned a house by the time we were twenty-three. I will grow old in this house without her, or else sell it. Probably sell it.
I sit on the bed and look at Ashlee, this little thing with short blond hair like Bonny’s, grinning away down there among my shoes, and I think: God. It’s what I think when I don’t know what to think. It’s what Bonny says when she’s close to coming. Neither of us is religious but there’s something about that syllable that reduces everything, makes you focus, makes you forget.
We live forty-five minutes south of San Francisco, away from the chaos and city air. I take Carol and Ashlee in my car, and Bonny drives her parents. We crank up the air conditioning and Carol keeps turning back to Ashlee and saying things like, “What’s two plus one?” or “How many fingers am I holding up?” as if Ashlee is a concussion victim instead of a toddler.
“I teach some smart kids,” I say. “Some smart kids who didn’t even go to preschool, and now they’re A.P. students.”
“Colleges are competitive. We want Ashlee to have every opportunity. I don’t ever want her not getting into Yale, and then coming to me and asking, Mommy, why didn’t I go to preschool?”
I turn up the air conditioning. Bonny is behind me, heading onto the freeway. She sticks her arm out the window and waves. Her father’s head is a shadowy mound in the passenger seat. “I didn’t go to preschool.”
“This is a different time. And New York is much, much different from California. New York is on the East Coast,” she says. I look at her, confused, but she’s turned back to Ashlee. “And California is on the West.”
“I knew a girl named Ashley once,” I say. “Spelled the right way.”
“Uh-huh,” Carol says.
“She was my first girlfriend. Ashley Meeks.”
“I thought Bonny was your first.”
“Ashley was first grade. I chased her around the playground every recess until she agreed to be my girlfriend.”
“Ha,” Carol pronounces. “Nowadays if a boy chased a girl around, he’d get sued for sexual harassment.”
I check my mirrors for Bonny but I’ve lost her. The pavement is black and new, and the smell of hot tar stings my nose even though the windows are shut. “One girlfriend,” Carol says after a while, shaking her head. She turns and says to Ashlee, “One. Two. Three,” lifting a new finger with each count. Ashlee counts along. Ashley Meeks. For a week we said hello to each other, and goodbye, and looked away when we accidentally made eye contact. Then I started chasing someone else and it was over. In my memory Ashley is a swirl, a blur, a flash at the edge of my vision.
“I dated nonstop from the time I was fifteen,” Carol says.
“I know. I was there.”
She looks out her window. “I miss cars. It gets tiring taking cabs everywhere. You end up having so many impersonal conversations.”
“I like impersonal conversations,” I say. “They get you out of yourself.”
“I’ve spent my whole life becoming myself,” Carol says. I’m more inclined to say that she’s spent her whole life avoiding herself. Her hair is short and stylish, dyed red; I haven’t seen her without makeup since she was twelve. Bonny was sixteen then, and we’d just started to date. God. I know this family better than I ever knew my own, although we hardly see Carol now that she lives in New York.
Carol looks back at Ashlee. In the rearview mirror I can see that she’s waving her limbs around, undulating like a sea creature. She is wearing her mother’s sunglasses, enormous on her small face, and holding a stuffed horse. “It would be so strange if you remarried,” Carol says, and now I’m confused because she seems to be talking to Ashlee. “Do you think you would?”
“Jesus,” I say. Another religious figure that sometimes pops out of my mouth.
“Come on, Hunt Ketchup. I’m your sis. I’m just trying to have a real conversation.”
I shake my head and change lanes. We’re getting there. I’m dreading the search for parking. Carol says, “No one ever talks about things. We have friends who just adopted a little girl, and they’re not going to tell her she’s adopted. I’d tell her. I’d tell her every day. I couldn’t live with not talking about things.”
“Clearly,” I say.
“If I were Bonny, I’d tell everyone Look, any minute now I could die. Any minute now I could start coughing and end up in the hospital.”
“Charming. Hi, I’m Carol, I’m going to die. Nice to meet you.”
“Whatever.” Carol turns to me and I get a quick flash of how she used to be, defiant, red-lipped, angry. She used to cut herself; I could never get it straight whether she did it in order to feel more or not to feel at all. Bonny never gets angry, not really. She doesn’t have the time, is how she puts it. She doesn’t waste any time, my wife, or words. The last time we visited Carol in New York, we saw a woman who’d been flattened by a truck, pressed into the pavement like a dried flower, and Bonny looked with a bone-dry eye. Tear-jerking, she said. She’s good at summing up emotions: a dead seal on Baker Beach was heartbreaking. Sunsets are awe-inspiring, Picassos are mind-boggling.
“I don’t know, Carol.” I don’t know what this is supposed to mean. I put a hand on her shoulder and then move it back to the wheel. She has tears in her eyes. She spent a month in rehab when she was a teenager; she’s been in therapy forever; how did she end up with a rich husband, a little girl, this definite, fixed life?
“I just want to be with Bonny for as long as I can,” I say. “I try not to think about it.”
Carol turns to face the back seat. “Ashlee?” she says. “Can Mommy wear her sunglasses for a minute?” We crest and San Francisco spills ahead of us, sparkling and sprawling. I feel a sudden detachment from Bonny, from our suburban, curtailed world. In five years I could have a whole different life; I could move to the city; I could be a widower with a new wife, a child. For a moment this is an appealing thought, a future after Bonny, two lives crammed into one. Then I remember what it means and it’s just depressing.
“You’re missing the view,” I say, gesturing at the jigsaw of skyscrapers.
Carol faces front again, her eyes covered. “I live in New York.”
I pull off the freeway and stop at the light. Not knowing what to do, I turn to Ashlee. “What color’s the traffic light?” I ask, and I see why Carol spends so much time talking to her. She looks interested and once she figures out what I’m asking, she gives me a straight answer. It’s the right one. I want to clap, but I keep my hands on the wheel.
By the time we get there, Bonny and Howard and Meg are already part of a line that stretches halfway down the block. There’s construction going on across the street. That’s my favorite thing about cities: the scaffolding, the jackhammers, the promise of something new and concrete. It’s cooler here than in the suburbs, and there’s a clean breeze. “Jesus,” I say as we squeeze in, sparking mutters and dirty looks up and down the line. “Why don’t people just go to a movie?”
“Screw live action!” says Howard, looking around at us. “I want to see dead action!”
“Ha,” Bonny says. Her eyes are watery. I can tell she’s been coughing. I maneuver myself next to her. Ashlee is singing gibberish and Bonny gives her a suspicious look.
Carol says, “Ashlee doesn’t go to movies.”
“More of a theatergoer, are you?” Howard says, tickling Ashlee. Bonny stares at Ashlee’s short, chubby calf, looking half as if she wants to pat it and half as if she wants to eat it.
We creep towards the entrance, past a window labeled Bodies Will Call. Passersby look at us with interest, as if we are the bodies on display. Inside, Meg checks her sweater at Bodies Check. Howard pats his hips and says, “Hang on, let me just make sure I’ve gotten everything out of my body before I hand it over.” The woman behind the window smiles politely.
The exhibit is called The World Within. The first thing we see is a dead man, skinned, hardened and preserved. He appears to be made of plastic, posed like he’s giving a toast with a nonexistent glass. His muscles are flayed from his body, red and stringy. His eyes bulge and his eyebrows are still on, stuck to arches of skin. He still has nails, too, and toenails, and lips and enormous teeth.
“L’chiem!” Howard says, looking around for a laugh. Meg puts her hands to her face and feels around like a blind person making sure she’s all there. Carol starts pointing out the muscles to Ashlee and explaining how they all work together. It’s clear that she doesn’t actually have any idea what she’s talking about. After a moment she stops and stares at the corpse.
I squint until it’s a blur. “What happened to landscapes?” I say. “What happened to painting?”
“Look at his leg,” says Bonny. “It looks like a turkey leg at Thanksgiving.”
Ashlee tries to touch the corpse and Carol scoops her up. “No touching,” she says.
“No touching,” Ashlee repeats. Bonny watches with a look of extreme concentration, as if Ashlee is part of the exhibit. Then she glances at me and walks toward the next corpse. It’s room after room of corpses, arranged in various positions, stripped except for their eyebrows and lips and nails. They all have bulging blue eyes and look scared; they look like they know things aren’t supposed to be this way. A basketball player is set up to take a shot and we can see his intestines, which resemble a collection of bunched-up condoms. He has a tiny, pathetic penis. It makes me angry. I don’t want to know that this is what we are, this collection of skin and bones, meat, grotesque and preservable.
Put some skin on, I want to tell the corpses. Don’t make a mockery of being human.
Carol informs us, in a voice that echoes throughout the air-conditioned room, that the blood has been replaced with liquid plastic in a process called plastination.
“Plastination,” I repeat. I envision a country full of plastic people, plastic houses, the plastic food they set out in furniture stores. Living, flesh-covered people study the exhibits and move on, leaving behind bare, raw bodies.
Scattered among the corpses are cases containing organs, healthy and unhealthy side by side so that we can see how much we screw ourselves up through the daily act of living. I keep an eye out for lungs. I wonder if they will have a cystic fibrosis lung. There is a body sliced widthwise into seven pieces that resemble steaks, and a corpse cut in half, high-fiving itself. Howard says, “How many ways can you cut up a body?”
After about forty-five minutes, Meg sits down on a bench beside a sign titled “Body Facts.” Your brain stops growing at age fifteen. Women blink almost twice as much as men. “You go on,” she tells us. “I’m feeling ill.”
“No skin off my back,” Howard says, looking around for a laugh.
I offer to stay with Meg but Howard says he’ll stay. The way he says it, I know he’s worn himself out with the jokes nobody laughs at. Poor guy. He’s skinny and his hair’s thinning and all he wants to be is funny. He was funny, once. I don’t know where it went, or when, or if we just lost the energy to laugh at him, but it doesn’t seem fair. Bonny kisses her mother’s papery cheek. Her mother closes her eyes and keeps them closed after Bonny’s straightened up.
Carol and Ashlee go on ahead. Bonny and I come to the corpse of a woman with her breast cut open to show the mammary glands. “Ouch,” says a woman beside me. Bonny touches my arm. Her skin on mine gives me the creeps.
“How would they pose me?” Bonny asks, posing like the female corpse.
“God. I don’t know.” I’m starting to feel sick, too, like I ate something bad.
“How about like this?” She stands with her legs apart, arms out, fingers splayed like the finale of a Broadway musical.
“Great.”
“All these people look the same,” Bonny says.
“That’s because they have no skin, and the same stupid look.”
“But they’re all the same size, too.”
“It’s because they’re all Asian.” Carol has come up and is holding Ashlee.
“What?” says Bonny.
“They are. These are Japanese corpses. That’s probably why.”
“Carol,” I say. “I don’t think that’s why.”
She shrugs. “Think about it. It makes sense. Look at how small they all are.”
They are small, it’s true. Compact, like Bonny. I wonder if they were this small with their skin on, or if plastination shrank them. Carol says, “I’m going to take Mom and Ashlee to see the robot exhibit; I think they’re a little freaked out.”
I’d like to go, too. I’d like to go to a body shop and watch cars being fixed for a while. I have a strong desire for metal, rubber, inorganic compounds. Instead I trek with Bonny to the next room. She starts coughing. She sits down on a bench to wait out the fit, and I sit beside her. We are facing a corpse sitting on a chair, thinker-style, his head sliced to show his brain. His brain looks like cauliflower. I look at the corpse and listen to Bonny’s coughing. Every time this happens I wonder if this is it. If we’ll have to go to the hospital, and Bonny will never come out.
The coughing subsides. She’s sweating. I kiss her forehead and taste the ocean.
“Shit,” she whispers. She hates coughing in public. She walks over to the glass case in the middle of the room and squeezes in among the crowd gathered around it. It holds two lungs, one healthy, one cut from a smoker’s chest. Bonny starts coughing again, and the woman next to us turns. She has leathery skin and thin, dry hair. She looks like a forest about to go up in flames. “Are you a smoker too?” she says in a raspy voice.
Bonny shakes her head, coughing into one of the tissues she keeps on her. The people around her pull away slightly.
“I should quit,” the woman says. “I’m going to quit. Look at this.”
Bonny takes my hand and leads the way toward a doorway with a red rope in front of it, and a sign that says “Optional.”
“Was everything else required?” I say. Underneath “Optional” the sign says, “What you are about to see might disturb you.” People trickle out, shaking their heads, cupping their stomachs.
“Let’s skip it,” I say. “Let’s find Carol and take Ashlee for ice cream.”
“Come on, Hunt. I want to see what’s in there.”
“OK,” I say, because I can’t say no to her. I never have. She kisses my cheek and pulls me in.
It’s a room full of fetuses, sealed in display cases like jewelry. They look like they’re made of wax. This whole room screams abortion. Bonny had one when she was almost two months pregnant, years ago. We hadn’t wanted a baby; Bonny’s system wasn’t up to it, and she didn’t want to leave me to raise a baby alone; but here among these preserved, alien-like fetuses, I feel as though I had a hand in driving a species to extinction. It’s funny, the difference between destroying a baby you’ve created and not creating one at all. The same way it’s different to love and lose than never to love at all. It’s funny the way Howard’s jokes are funny: sad, impossible.
At the end of the room, a woman lies on her side, propped up on one elbow, her stomach cut open to show a fetus inside. She has long eyelashes and her mouth is in a coquettish expression, as if she is sexy, as if she is merely posing nude. According to the sign beside her, she is eight months pregnant. She decided to donate herself when she found out that she had a terminal illness. Fetus and all.
“God,” I whisper. Bonny is quiet beside me and I am aware of a gulf between us. Optional. Optional. My body is numb, as if the skin’s been rubbed off. All the choices I’ve made, the choices I’ve followed Bonny to, have been optional.
Bonny says, “If I’d had that baby, it would be fourteen.”
I put my arms around her. She stands wooden in my hug. “Let’s go look at robots,” I say.
“It would be a real person.”
“Don’t think about that.”
“I am thinking about it.” She pulls back. Her skin is pale and waxen compared to the red muscled corpse, her belly flat, hair blond and superfluous. She looks too real to be real. “We could have had a whole child. I would have been around for its whole childhood by now.” She puts her hands to her stomach and keeps them there. “We should have had a baby.”
“We didn’t,” I say. I’m no good with alternate endings. What’s done is done.
“We still could.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“We could try. You never know.”
“You don’t try,” I say. “A baby isn’t something you try. You have it forever. It’s a permanent thing, Bonny.”
“I know that.”
“Permanent,” I repeat, thinking of all the things that aren’t: batteries, leases, twelve-dollar glasses of bourbon, the brief spaces of time before someone blinks or speaks or coughs.
“I know that.” She looks at me and away, blinking rapidly.
“Bonny.” My voice is loud. It reminds me where we are, in a cavernous white room, conspicuous in our aliveness. I shift to a whisper. “I’d rather have you than a baby.”
“You can’t have everything.”
I look at her. I try to look into her but it’s like there’s a wall, stopping my eyes at the surface of her skin.
“Everyone has babies,” she says. “Carol has a baby, our friends have babies, everyone has a baby.” She takes my hand and places it on her stomach. “Imagine something growing in here.”
I don’t want to imagine that; I don’t want to imagine Bonny, posed like the pregnant corpse. There’s enough inside her already, the buildup of mucus, the deteriorating lungs; there’s already enough pulling her away from me. “I’m not ready to be a father.”
“When will you be ready? When you’re forty? I guess you’ll have to have a baby with someone else, then.” My hand is still on her stomach, limp and useless. She tightens her lips. “This is my life, Hunt. The only one I’ll ever have.”
“That’s true,” I say, trying to make light. “One life per person.”
“I’m serious.”
I don’t know how to say that I don’t want to be left alone with our baby once Bonny’s gone. There is no way to say it. I wonder if this is how all parents feel, to some extent, if the idea of new life leads always to the contemplation of death. You never know, after all. Except we do. We know that Bonny won’t live to be a grandmother.
I look at my hand on her stomach, the wedding band biting into my flesh, and it doesn’t look like a hand, not compared to the fingers of these corpses. This is what we are, corpses-in-waiting, meat on the bone, soon to be leftovers.
“It’s my life, too,” I say quietly, half hoping she won’t hear.
She takes my hand and drops it like it’s a used tissue. “Sorry,” she says, “one person per life.” She turns and leaves the exhibit, tapping the glass cases like she did when we went shopping for her engagement ring. Howard is standing by the Optional sign.
“You two look like you’ve seen a corpse,” he says.
“Dad,” says Bonny, “would you have wanted me even if you’d known Mom was going to die before she could raise me?”
Howard looks scared. He looks at me. I shrug. “What?” he says.
“If Mom had cystic fibrosis, would you have wanted me anyway?”
“Oh, we never wanted you,” he says, knuckling the top of her head. Then he stops and looks down at her as though he can’t quite make her out.
Bonny turns abruptly. We follow her, to the elevator and down to the robot exhibit, advertised as a playful look at the intersection between biology and reality. When Ashlee spots me, she holds out her arms and Carol passes her on. Bonny looks away.
“How was the rest of the exhibit?” Meg asks. She’s regained color, away from the corpses.
Bonny shoots me a quick look. “Life-changing,” she says.
In bed later, Bonny opens her pack of birth control pills. “I would like one day,” she says, “one day without pills. No Creon, no birth control, nothing.”
I found one of Carol’s magazines in the living room and am reading about how celebrities are just like real people. I need something mindless, glossy and full-color.
“I’m sick of fighting everything. Disease, coughing, pregnancy. Bring it on. Bring it on, God, or whoever.”
I put my hand on her leg. She moves her leg away. She takes out tonight’s pill and holds it, a tiny green dot, between her thumb and forefinger, and chucks it across the room, where it disappears into the nap of the carpet.
When I wake up in the morning, she isn’t beside me. I sweep my arm across her side of the bed. One day I’ll wake up knowing that she’s slept beside me for the last time. Howard probably has this thought, sometimes, about Meg. She probably has it about him. They are both retired; they get senior discounts and do crossword puzzles at noon. I’d like to be so old.
The whole upstairs is quiet. This past week I’ve awoken to Ashlee jabbering, Carol loudly teaching her something, Howard trying not to make noise but invariably slamming a door or dropping a shoe. Now the silence pounds in my head.
Downstairs, it’s quiet too, the living room strewn with Carol’s clothes and Ashlee’s toys, the sofa bed unmade. I find Bonny in the kitchen, shockingly alive after yesterday’s corpses. She is sipping coffee and watching Ashlee, who is on the floor with a plastic colander on her head, holding a wooden spoon, wearing only a diaper. “Uncle Hunt,” she says.
“That’s quite a hat!” I say. “It’s not going to keep you dry if it rains.” I stand in the doorway. Bonny looks at me and smiles big.
“Morning,” I say.
“Good morning. Coffee? Coffee cake?”
“Coffee,” I say.
“Coffee bread? Coffee pudding? Coffee kebabs?”
I kiss her, help myself to coffee and go to the back door. When I open it, a wave of heat spills in. “Where is everybody?”
“I told Carol we’d watch Ashlee so she could go vintage shopping. She’s dropping Mom and Dad at the beach.”
“Ah.”
“We’re getting along, aren’t we,” she says, looking at Ashlee, who ignores her. Ordinarily I’d sit on the floor next to Ashlee, entertain her by banging out a rhythm on the colander, but I don’t want to upstage Bonny. This is the first time she’s shown any real interest in the kid.
“Ashlee!” Bonny says. “Ashlee, do you want to tie my shoe?” She unties her sneaker, walks over to Ashley and sticks out her foot. Ashlee looks at it and raps her spoon on the tiles. “Come on. Look, my shoe. She did it before.”
“She seems happy enough,” I say.
Bonny perches on my lap. “You’d be a good father.”
I rub her leg.
“Darren hardly pays attention to her. Carol says you’re much better with her than he is.” Bonny is looking at me. It’s making me uncomfortable. It reminds me of the math teacher who had a crush on me last year and stared at me in the teachers’ lounge; I ended up requesting extra lunch duty in order to avoid her.
“I’m sure Darren’s a good dad,” I say.
“She’s thinking about leaving him.”
“Is she.”
“Maybe one day you could marry Carol.”
I ignore her. Ashlee starts fussing. “What is it?” Bonny says. “She’s been fed.”
“She probably needs changing.”
“I’ll do it!” Bonny jumps up like a child eager to please. She picks Ashlee up and I follow the two of them upstairs, to the spare bedroom. She takes off the diaper. I can tell it takes effort for her to keep from wrinkling her nose. With exaggerated motions, Bonny wipes Ashlee and sprinkles baby powder and rediapers her. Then she picks her up and carries her across the room. “Come here, Hunt.”
I join her in front of the dresser. “Look at us,” she says, looking into the mirror. Ashlee is mesmerized by our reflections. She waves at herself. Bonny rests her chin on Ashlee’s forehead. We look good; we look like a family. We could be a newly married couple, but we’re not. We are not new at all.
A starchy whiteness comes over my eyes, the color of Bonny’s wedding dress and our winter wedding day. I remember Bonny walking toward me out of a thin San Francisco haze. There is a hollowness in my rib cage, a vast gaping cave.
“Don’t be sad.” Bonny is looking at my eyes in the mirror. I look as hung over as I feel, although all I had last night was a beer to put a little fizz into the day’s events. Bonny sends me a kiss in the mirror. Ashlee imitates her and together they kiss the air. Just moments ago Ashlee was crying over her wet diaper; just yesterday Bonny was ready to shut me out of her life. I smile at these females, at their moods that can turn on a dime.
Bonny holds Ashlee out to me, and Ashlee kisses my cheek. “Hey, Hunt, let’s make a baby,” Bonny says, just the way last week she said, “Hey, Hunt, let’s go for Indian food.” The way fourteen years ago she said, “Hey, Hunt, let’s get married.” She can make anything sound like the best idea you’ve ever heard, spontaneous and exciting and without consequences.
I poke Ashlee’s stomach. “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”
“Come on, we haven’t had sex in ages.” Bonny heads downstairs, beckoning me to follow. She turns on the television and sets Ashlee down in front of one of the videos Carol brought along, full of singing and counting. “You watch that,” Bonny says to Ashlee. “We’ll be right back.”
Ashlee reaches her arms to me, but then the video starts and she’s mesmerized. She plops down and bangs her spoon on the carpet. “Come on,” Bonny whispers.
“Wait.” I pile sofa cushions around Ashlee, to protect her from sharp edges. We sneak toward the stairs, our eyes on Ashlee, and run up to our room, Bonny pulling off her shirt, shedding her bra. She is joyful, certain, simmering with purpose. I take my shirt off, too. Bonny winds herself around me like the threading of a screw. Her torso sticks to mine. She is a cluster of red muscles, tendons, skin that can be cut back and pulled away, cavities waiting to be filled. I pull away.
“Bonny.”
“Come on, Hunt.” She bends to remove her shoes, then her shorts and her underwear, and unfastens my pants so they pool around my feet. One pill, I think. One pill isn’t enough; you have to miss more than that to make a baby. I will have to tell her no, soon, but not now.
“Give me that,” she says. I look down at my cock. I stare at it because I don’t want to look at Bonny. I’m afraid to. I’m afraid to see her stripped, skinny and waiting. I am afraid that I will see where my wife ends and her insides begin, the bones and muscles and fat, the end of her flesh, the boundaries of her blood.
But sunlight is flooding through the window, I’m growing in her hands, she is rubbing frantically as if my cock is a magic lamp that can give her everything.
“Come on,” she says, “we don’t have forever.”
Kristin Kearns’ stories have appeared in failbetter, Faultline, Calyx, Flyway, and Confrontation.