This Is How I'd Love You Read online

  He placed one hand upon her ankle, letting its heat settle into her. Then, as though tracing an unknown path, he pulled his fingers ever northward, lingering on the back of her knee, its pale, hidden crease. He laid his hand with a gentle force upon her groin, sliding the linen of her undergarment against her. Hensley felt struck, paralyzed, as she looked up at the rafters, the ropes connected to the curtain, and the backdrops hanging so far above. As though she had become a spectator of this play, an observer who simultaneously longed for the girl below to rebuke him and hoped she didn’t. She doubted everything but the truth of the performance; like the best theater, she forgot that it was all orchestrated, arranged. She believed his performance, his certainty that she could relieve his suffering with just one look, could assuage his temper if only he had her lips upon his, could look forward without despair if he knew she were his. And his voice, as he seemed to unfold her, admiring each piece of her as he did, was utterly irresistible.

  As she walked home alone, the sun just setting over the Hudson, she reassured herself that nothing had been lost. He would not, he assured her, ruin her. He knew how to protect her, how to keep her pure. When he bid her good-bye, the headmistress watching over them as they exited the school building, he merely shook her gloved hand as though there was absolutely nothing between them. Was this, she wondered, the secret of adult life? Was coupling not a sacred mystery at all, but rather tucked into nearly every corner, as ordinary as a cigarette case or bus fare?

  When she entered the apartment, her father was stretched out on the couch, his fingers drumming gently upon his chest.

  “Good rehearsal?” he asked quietly.

  She dropped her satchel and removed her hat and gloves. “Hectic,” she replied, blushing, afraid the desire had not yet faded from her eyes. “But Mr. Teagan is utterly brilliant. It will all come off.”

  Her father sat up. “Do you have someone to talk to, Hensley?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About your life. About what is happening in your life? I’m not much good at girl talk. Your mother would want you to have that.”

  Hensley felt perspiration forming around her hairline. What could he possibly know? She removed her coat. “Nothing’s happening. Why would you say such a thing?”

  “I am not accusing you of anything, my dear. But I know—I’ve been told—that girls can often let their hearts precede their heads.”

  “Really? Is that what you’ve heard? Well, I’ve been told over and over that men often let their guns precede their heads. I don’t believe one gender has the monopoly on irrationality.”

  “Touché, Hennie.” He massaged his temples, as though easing some deep, ancient pain. “I only know how often I yearn for your mother’s wisdom. I’m sure you do, too.”

  Hensley nodded. Her father stood up and, before settling himself behind his desk, he placed a strong hand on her arm, giving her a quick squeeze.

  She swallowed hard in order to clear the regret and the guilt that had gathered in the back of her throat.

  “I will make a carrot soup. There is always wisdom in that,” she said brightly, wondering when she’d become such a good actress.

  • • •

  At the final dress rehearsal before opening night, Hensley had a thousand final alterations to make and Mr. Teagan stayed with her, pacing behind her as she worked.

  “Nervous?” she asked, threading her needle.

  He grabbed her shoulders, held her face close to his. “I’ve done it. I’ve enlisted. I will ship out this summer.”

  “What? I thought . . .”

  “I was compelled. I thought about you, how perfect you are, and I want to protect that. I want to give my life to the fight, Hennie.”

  “Lowe, my God. Are you sure?”

  “It’s done. Oh, Hensley, my love. It didn’t feel real until I cast my eyes upon you this afternoon. Now, I understand what I will lose. What grief I’ve brought upon myself!”

  His eyes seemed about to flood with tears. Hensley wrapped her arms around him. “You will not lose anything. You will be fine.”

  He pressed his lips against hers, the warmth of his tongue cajoling hers. He was excited, unbuttoning her blouse with a fierceness that startled her.

  “Lowell,” she said, pulling away. “Mr. Teagan, I have loads of work to do. Tomorrow is the opening and there are a thousand seams to sew. Perhaps I should take all of this home with me.”

  “And leave me? When I am most vulnerable?” He walked to the center of the stage, his footsteps echoing across the theater. Beneath the dimmed lights, he spoke. “This,” he said as he gestured to his heart, “does not make excuses, Hensley. I’ve made my home beneath your skin, in the place where your breath begins and your pulse throbs. You cannot deny me now. I may never return.”

  He walked back across the stage, breathless, his shirt open. “Let me show you what it is to truly be inside another. To live in the deepest part of ourselves.”

  Hensley was trembling at the audacity of his suggestion. But she was also terrified of his death. There were already tears forming as he led her to the stable that the prop department had constructed with cardboard and straw. A papier-mâché horse stood watch as she allowed Mr. Teagan what she believed was his heart’s greatest desire.

  • • •

  It is nearly noon and the house cats are basking in the summer sun that drenches the small courtyard behind the house when Hensley ties Thunder to a post nearby. They are somehow oblivious to the tin of smoked trout Hensley opens, anticipating her father’s return for lunch. She plates the fish, pulls a handful of crackers from the barrel, and apportions some of the deep red raspberries she collected yesterday from the riverbank into a small bowl.

  Hensley pushes the screen door open. The cats, Isaac and Newton, blink in acknowledgment. Hensley drags her fingers across Newton’s gray head, his fur hot and dry. The cats were here when they arrived last month, though nameless. They mewed loudly the first few days, staking their claim to the patches of sunlight that warmed the wood floors and the muslin-covered settee that stood before the fireplace, placing dead mice upon the hearth and at their bedsides. They also tumbled and played against each other with such alacrity that her father thought they were a perfect embodiment of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Their antics are a welcome diversion for Hensley, but their indifference reminds her again and again that they belong to the house, not to her.

  Her father likes to call this small patch of unmortared bricks their terrace. But it is really just a blank space between exterior walls. It is also where they’ve stacked several wooden crates in which their belongings were packed. Hensley leans against this stack and looks to the land beyond their house. The absence of buildings, bridges, motorcars, fireplugs is still disorienting. The blue sky haunts her with its immensity; its constant, aching presence. Hensley sometimes winces when she walks outside, afraid of the way the landscape shrinks her. She has never felt so small and inconsequential.

  The mound of dirt behind their house slowly rises, becoming a steep hill just one hundred yards away. There are several structures, one just a pile of logs hammered together with a tarp thrown over the top, that look down upon the back of Hensley and her father’s house.

  Berto’s house is at the top of the ridge, with a view over the town and beyond. He shares the place with his sister, but Hensley has only seen the girl once, in the twilight, smoking a cigarette, her long dark hair falling in front of her face. Hensley waved, but the girl threw the cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, extinguishing its glow. Then she went inside and let the screen door fall closed behind her so that it echoed down the hill.

  Their own house faces the main street, which is but a wide dirt boulevard lined with large cottonwood trees. A wooden sidewalk runs the length of each side, echoing the vibrations and noise of the town’s commerce all the way to their front porch. It i
s the only piece of life here that reminds her of a city and she loves to listen to the wooden slats clicking and groaning as people go about their day. At noon and at sundown, she can hear her father’s footsteps coming home, the notes of his distinctive stride carried to her through the thick adobe walls.

  There are plenty of storefronts lining the wooden sidewalk—even a Chinese food restaurant and a dry goods store with several bolts of decent linen. But Hensley doesn’t want to go out again, she doesn’t want to acclimate. Nothing feels real here. Or, perhaps, “here” has very little to do with it. She touches the desk, the doorknob, saying the words to herself, or sometimes aloud, just to remember the existence of concrete, actual objects.

  Charles leans so far forward, his chin nearly rests on the wheel. The use of headlights is strictly prohibited so close to the front. Nobody’s eyesight is good enough for this, he thinks just before the road is illuminated and then decimated by a barrage of light. He stands on the brake and turns the wheel into the darkness. His chin hits the steering wheel and bounces off with a surprising smack as his molars slam together and ring in his head. The truck hangs on two wheels before jamming to a hard stop against some unknown obstacle. An inordinate amount of wet, slick blood drips into his lap.

  He cuts the engine and grabs for his helmet, holding it over his head, waiting for another shell. The fear that makes his hands tremble turns his thoughts fatalistic. As he huddles there in utter darkness, already bleeding, he imagines the disappointment his father will feel at his death. How irked he will be that the fortune will have to transfer to his second cousin.

  But the singe of smoke in the air is all that follows. And then, just beside the King George, there is an awful, deep howling. He must investigate; he must respond, damn it. As Charles reaches for the torch, he hopes this dim light will not get him killed. It appears that he is smack up against a tree, its deeply wrinkled bark almost an outgrowth of the truck’s green metal. The incongruity of the two objects is momentarily disorienting. It is a blooming tree, with white flowers that are falling around him like a winter blizzard. The shrieking continues and Charles steps out of the truck, surmising that he’s inadvertently come upon a field of wounded. Using the torch, though, he sees nothing but grass. No bloodied bodies, no pits emanating smoke and rot, no destruction at all.

  He follows the sound with his light and is startled to see a horse, its nostrils flared, its eyes alight with panic. The horse bares its awkward, yellowed teeth, bellowing another horrible complaint. “Damn,” he says quietly, wishing he hadn’t bothered to get out of the truck. Wishing he’d just backed away from the tree and driven on into the darkness. But now he has no choice. Charles moves toward the animal and it quivers. It is standing on three legs, the fourth nowhere in sight. A bulging, inside-out wound is throbbing and oozing, its parts hanging in the space where there was once a leg.

  “Oh, hell,” Charles says, pressing his sleeve against his own chin. “What’s happened to you, huh?”

  The animal tries to move, to rush at Charles, but it stumbles and falls, crushing its own entrails beneath its body. It howls a terrifying protest and Charles holds both his hands out in front of him, hoping to calm or quiet the beast.

  Charles realizes immediately that there is nothing to be done. He kneels on the ground and the horse continues to fight, thrusting its good legs in desperate, painful attempts to right itself.

  Charles places one hand against the beast’s face, wishing its terrible moaning would cease. The flanks of its jaw are soft and significant like Charles’s favorite childhood Labrador, Tux. He strokes the horse gently with his fingertips, remembering how when he was a boy, he’d often sneak Tux to his bedroom, allowing the dog to sleep on his bed. Tux’s heavy body near his feet was a constant, unspoken reassurance and when he awoke with the dog’s soft, graceful profile having inched ever closer to his own, he felt adored. His mother and father didn’t approve and both he and Tux were scolded when Charles appeared for breakfast with Tux’s blond hairs clinging to his navy uniform jacket.

  Charles tries to soothe the horse, speaking the reassurances that come without thought, the blood from his own gash dripping onto the suedelike muzzle of the dying beast.

  Its eyes are black and knowing; its lashes as thick and pretty as any girl’s. Charles lets the horse see the pistol cradled in his other hand.

  “You’ve fought as hard as any of them,” Charles says, sensing that the horse is grateful for the vibrations of his voice. He still whines with each labored breath, but he no longer screams. Charles thinks of all the carts that this creature has pulled across long distances, its regal silhouette providing comfort where there is none.

  Charles presses the chamber firmly against the horse’s forehead as his other hand rests upon the animal’s hot, slick jaw. When his Labrador had developed a tender lump under one ear and he was unable to control his bowels, Charles’s father put him on a lead and took him somewhere across the river. Charles never saw Tux again. His mother brought him the dog’s collar that night as he cried beneath his quilt. She placed the faded leather strap upon his dresser. Then, with her hand on Charles’s forehead, she shushed him. “Suffering is for little boys and the mothers who love them and hate to see them cry. It is not for animals.” Charles can hear his mother’s voice even now as he turns his face away and squeezes the trigger. The sound of the gun cracks and the bullet pushes hard against the horse’s head, yanking it away from Charles, leaving it inches away from his hands.

  Charles suddenly remembers the words from the margin of Mr. Dench’s letter. The horror that surrounds you now will recede into a past that you can leave behind. Does this girl have any idea what it means when she writes the word horror? Can she possibly know what it might mean to him if she were to recognize his hidden message? Can she possibly imagine that he is thinking of her now, without even knowing her? Thinking of her words just after he’s fired his pistol into this poor horse’s head?

  “I’m sorry,” he says as the blood soundlessly leaks out, soaking through his pants where he kneels. He turns away from the horse and walks back to the truck and replaces the gun in its holster. Wiping his face, wincing at the throbbing he’s just noticed beneath his chin, he backs the King George away from the tree. The engine whistles slightly, a wisp of smoke escaping from the hood. He ignores it and drives on up the darkened hill to where he fears men have already died on account of his delay.

  • • •

  Though he continues to aid Charles in his fool’s mission to provide beds for the gassed soldiers from which they may dictate their last words, against the prohibitions of the doctors, Rogerson is loath to load any casualty who can talk. Also, he has started cursing like a soldier.

  “I don’t wanna hear their voices. I just want bodies. Give me blood, guts, shit. I’ll take a man in ten pieces so long as he keeps quiet. If they can talk, they can wait. Or they can die without giving me nightmares.”

  Charles, the memory of the horse’s terrifying moan still fresh in his mind, props his foot on the dashboard. “Would you really have shot those first three? If you’d known, I mean? Before we got them to hospital?”

  The wind whips through the cab, buffering their words with its insistent whoosh. “Do we believe in the Golden Rule during war? Or is there a moratorium on all that?”

  Rogerson lights another cigarette, his habit more and more urgent by the day. “All I know is I’d want you to shoot me, Reid. Put the bloody bullet through my head or my heart and let me go quickly. We heard them coughing out their own rotted lungs. We fucking listened to their throats closing. Dying from the inside out. Whatever short, joyous life they lived to that point matters none.”

  “Agreed.” Charles nods. When he told Rogerson about the horse, his entrails hanging, slick, from his belly, Rogerson only served himself another scoop of potatoes. Rogerson had grown up on a farm, seen all kids of livestock butchered and euthanized. It didn’t
faze him. But Charles had been unable to sleep, remembering the weight of the horse’s head once the bullet pierced it. The heat draining out and its flesh sagging almost immediately. The clap of the gun seemed to reverberate in him, making his fingers numb and useless. He’d wanted to feel his effect on the world and now he had. “But it’s hard to know. I mean, what the universe might have planned. I hate to get in the way of God.”

  Rogerson laughs and drags deeply on his cigarette, letting the cherry crackle and burn persuasively. “God knows good and well that there is no cure for chlorine gas, Reid.”

  “Sure. But what about the suffering? Could it mean something? Maybe the end, painful as it was, allowed one of those boys to find a peace he hadn’t had before.”

  Rogerson lets the ashes hang precariously over his own lap. “You’re talking fairy tales now. Or a kind of devotion to God that I don’t have. Nor does he, Reid. He doesn’t really give a shit about us. Isn’t that part abundantly clear? We are not his first priority. Who knows what is? But you took more care with that horse than God has ever taken with one of us.” The ashes fall just then, singeing the seat. “God does not take care of us. We take care of each other.”

  Charles turns this over in his mind. He thinks of Mr. Dench and how closely his atheism resembles Rogerson’s belief. “What good is it to believe in God if you don’t think he can protect you?”

  “Despair. I can’t tolerate the meaninglessness of nothing. God exists so that I can sleep at night.”

  “This mess,” Charles says, pointing at the relay post that has just come into view, boys spilling out its doorway, limping and bloody, “makes it all seem meaningless. Or full of meaning. I can’t decide.”

  “Well, while you’re walking the philosophical highway, I want to urge you not to be seduced by the idea of suffering. We’ve all got the right to happiness. Regardless of who made us or who’s in control, life means nothing if it’s dull and dreary. Drug addicts and boozers believe in suffering.”