American Boy - Larry Watson [68]
She walked around the bed and picked up Dr. Dunbar’s pack of cigarettes. She shook one out and lit it, and nothing in her actions suggested that the cigarettes were not hers or her brand, or that my question had unnerved her in the least. “You know what was strange?” She exhaled toward the ceiling. “I was in the backseat with him when he was, you know, breathing his last breath, or however you want to say it—”
“—How does Dr. Dunbar say it?”
She paused for a moment. “Died, I think. Yeah, died. That’s all.”
Exactly right. I remembered a little talk Dr. Dunbar once had with Johnny and me, after he’d tried—and failed—to save Carl Oslund, a hunter who’d sliced through his femoral artery when he was field dressing a deer. The doctor had just returned to the house after speaking to Carl’s parents. “Don’t hide behind medical language,” the doctor told us. “People have a hard enough time understanding when they’re nervous or under pressure. Just give it to them straight. Bled to death. Died. Not exsanguinated. Not expired.”
“Anyway,” Louisa continued, “when Mr. McDonough was choking—which isn’t exactly what happened because he didn’t really have enough breath to choke—it made me think of Lester. When he died, I mean. When they first told me Lester killed himself in his cell, I thought, good. Good riddance to the sonofabitch. Serves him right. But then when I saw Mr. McDonough dying—and really not wanting to—I thought, poor Lester. Doing that all alone.... And if there was anything Lester wasn’t good at, it was being alone. So I held Mr. McDonough close and watched him go. And then right at the end, when his eyes started kind of staring off, I realized that no matter what, when you’re dying, you’re alone.” She shrugged. “There it is. To answer your question, it was a fucking picnic. But why ask me? You and Johnny came through it. You know. Just add a dying man and there you have it.”
“Dr. Dunbar and Johnny went to see if they could find a room for you.”
“And you,” said Louisa. “Yeah, I heard. They won’t have any trouble getting a room. No trouble at all.”
“Johnny’s pretty upset. He thinks his dad isn’t going to be his dad anymore.”
“He’ll get over it.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. Her shoes were under the bed too, and one was revealed when Louisa disturbed the bedspread. She bent over to push the shoe back, and when she did I could see down the front of her slip. Her breasts weighed down and strained against the slip’s thin fabric. She started to sit back up, but when she realized where my gaze was focused, she stopped. Her body was slightly angled, so only one breast was fully exposed, allowing me to see once again that mauve nipple I’d first seen on Thanksgiving Day. In the cabin’s dim light the aureole looked almost purple, more like a bruise than the small, stippled circle of flesh it was. Still, her power over me could only increase so long as she remained in that position.
“You can help Johnny,” Louisa said. “You’ve made out fine without a father.”
“It doesn’t have to happen.”
She arched her eyebrows. “Matthew. Don’t you think it already has?”
“You could leave.”
Louisa’s laughter was icier than the wind that had blown all day. “Leave? Where the hell am I supposed to go? And why would I want to?”
Louisa leaned back on the bed, propping herself up on her elbows. When she did, her slip rode up above her knees. She had two slips—I’d seen the other one earlier in her dresser drawer—and this was the better one, worn to church on Sunday and then to a motel with a man whose marriage she hoped to destroy.
I had seen Louisa Lindahl’s breasts, her scar, her torn underwear. I’d heard her secrets, and I knew her lies. But when I’d read her list for self-improvement, I felt as if her soul had been revealed to me. Once my eyes had traveled down that paper with its third-grade handwriting and its determined plan to advance her station in life through imitation and force of will, I felt as if I’d made Louisa Lindahl mine. No one could understand her the way I did.
“Come on,” I said, reaching a hand