The Nakeds Page 2

  Asher had been acquiring new clothes for years, but what struck her lately was a whole immature style, which had been evolving since Hannah’s birth, that Nina had mistakenly attributed to ambivalence about fatherhood or fear of aging. On his side of the closet was a mound of flip-flops on the floor that especially irked her, a rainbow mountain of rubber shoes. Hanging up, a ridiculous assortment of juvenile T-shirts with band names printed across the front and Hawaiian shirts—garish, bright-colored fabrics with flowers and palm trees and coconuts and hula girls in grass skirts that insulted her own sense of style.

  One morning she’d found him at the closet taking his Beach Boys T-shirt from a hanger. “Maybe that shirt’s a little young,” she’d said.

  “I’m thirty-four—I’m not ninety.” He scowled at her, pulled the shirt over his head. He popped his hands and arms through the short sleeves, smoothed the sides down with more force than was necessary, and avoided her eyes.

  Occasionally she’d find a Surfer magazine on his nightstand or on the bathroom counter.

  “Do you want new hobbies? Is that what this is about? I’ll go to the beach with you. Hannah and I will both go,” she said.

  “I’m not going to the beach,” he said. “Who’s going to the beach?”

  “You’re tan, Asher. How come you’re so tan?”

  “This is California,” he said. “I sit outside on my lunch break and eat a sandwich. I point my face toward the sun—it’s a good feeling.”

  “It’s your chest that’s tan,” she said.

  He was adamant in his denial, claiming only a mild interest in what he called California culture. “It’s good to know what’s going on. We’re not in Philly anymore. We need to acclimate.”

  He said that his interest had to do with work, that many of his young patients who needed fillings or root canals were surfers, and that he wanted to be able to talk to them, distract them from the pain he was about to inflict with his knowledge of waves and barrels and slabs, paddling out, taking off, and the ride. He said it was important that he know the difference between long boards and short boards, the waves that broke in Huntington Beach versus the waves that broke in Newport or Laguna, before he came at a nervous surfer with his needle or noisy drill.

  But then there was sand, and sand was harder to deny, each bit a tiny but very tangible thing left behind. Grainy in their bed, in their sheets, visible in his hair, wet, gray puddles of sand in the shower, and, she was sure, itchy sand in the crack of his ass.

  And now, just an hour before her unconscious daughter, Hannah, would ride in an ambulance to the nearest hospital emergency room, Nina’s denial smacked her in the face—there, on the dresser, the receipts Asher purposefully left out for her, among them one from a new restaurant in San Diego she had heard was good and told him she wanted to try, suggesting a weekend in La Jolla for the three of them, and another from a Huntington Beach Surf Shop, where he’d purchased for his girlfriend an expensive board, a year’s worth of surf wax, and a fancy pink leash. This was how Nina became a woman who knew, a woman reaching into the sink and snatching the glass streaked with cranberry juice and throwing it at a philanderer’s cheek—the gesture, the glass itself, as much about collision and breaking apart as the car that hit her daughter.

  4

  BEHIND THE wheel of his now dented Chevy Nova, Martin Kettle hollered and sobbed. Too afraid to come out and see what had become of the girl, he frantically locked the car doors, as if she were capable of rising from the street to give him a beating, as if she were not an injured girl at all but a monster with great strength.

  He leaned over the stick shift, the seatbelt cutting into him, and stretched his fingers to reach the passenger-side lock. Clumsily, he tried to unclasp the belt, unsuccessful the first time and then finally getting it, cursing himself, and then turned around, flopped between the two bucket seats like a man without bones, and stretched to the back locks. Finally he situated himself again in the front seat and pounded on the lock closest to him. He wanted to die. He wished he’d run into one of the fat trees that lined the street and only hurt himself. He put his hands over his ears, his face to the steering wheel, and made his decision.

  A year ago, on this very street, Martin hit a cat. He remembered the smack, the animal in the air and then landing on its feet very much alive. He remembered the cat had hissed at the car before limping off. And six months later he’d hit a dog. It was after midnight and the dog was a big puppy, a lanky Great Dane. After Martin hit him, he pulled over to the curb while having a panic attack, which he believed to be an actual heart attack—and a young man dying inside a car had every excuse to stay right where he was, in the front seat, tearing at his shirt’s collar. There was little he could do for the puppy anyway, who probably would have taken a chunk out of his hand had Martin been a mentally healthier young man, a young man who might have been able to open the car door and soothe the animal during his last moments. Instead Martin sat in the car, wide-eyed and gasping. And the puppy barked and squealed and whimpered until he was quiet.

  Unlike the cat, the dog and the girl felt similar at impact—something weighty pushing against something weightier, the shock of something where nothing should have been, a horrible resistance where just air and space and wind should have allowed the car through.

  Martin thought that the girl he hit might be dead and if she was, he planned to kill himself when he got home. There were only so many accidental acts of violence a guy could commit before he committed one purposely on himself, he was thinking. He wondered about pills or blades or driving off a cliff and played out the gruesome scenarios in his head, the logistics, the pros and cons: sleep, the ease of access, stomachaches, blood, twisted metal, and the open blue sky.

  He wondered if it was possible to get enough pills from his friend Tony Vancelli, whose dad was a pharmacist and whose medicine cabinet was always stocked with colorful capsules and tablets that he handed out like bubblegum.

  Up until the point when he hit the girl, Martin had been drunk, and the hours right before the accident were lost to him. Still, the impact itself was more than clear: the punch, the blow, the pressure, the sound, a body in the air, then falling to the asphalt like a doll.

  He remembered going for a taco run with Tony just after midnight and talking to his friend about quitting drinking and maybe starting junior college in the fall. He remembered Tony snickering and handing him a green and white capsule that Martin gratefully accepted and swallowed dry. He remembered Tony telling him that painting houses wasn’t so bad, that it wasn’t what he thought he’d be doing four years out of high school but it wasn’t jail either. “It’s not fucking prison. At least I’m outside,” Tony had said.

  “I’m starting to feel that pill,” Martin said.

  “My mom still thinks I’m going to be a pharmacist, but fuck that,” Tony said.

  “Maybe you already are.”

  Tony laughed.

  “At least you’d have access.”

  “I have access now.”

  Martin remembered the pile of tacos wrapped in paper in his lap as he headed back to Tony’s place, the skill it took to unwrap and eat a taco one-handed while driving, the mushy meat and orange grease, how quickly they went down, how his lips tingled from the hot sauce. He remembered focusing, navigating the road, and Tony begging him to pull over so he could throw up in the gutter. When his friend stumbled back to the car and sat down, his stained shirt smelled sour. Martin was surprised when Tony leaned toward him, reached over the emergency brake, and snatched a taco from his crotch. “Hey man, that’s mine,” Martin said, but he let his buddy have it.

  What Martin didn’t remember were the hours in between. He didn’t remember that Tony got a second wind and that the two of them listened to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and drank more beer—one bottle after another, until they were tripping over bottles. They smoked pot out of a bong Tony had fashioned out of a toilet paper roll. They played air guitar, air drums. Tony was dancin
g, having air sex with an air girl. Martin laughed until his stomach hurt and his eyes watered. Tony was singing into his fist one moment and then sleeping in a chair the next.

  While his friend slept, Martin sat on the floor with his back against the couch and tried to read one of Tony’s girlfriends’ magazines, but he was too fucked up to focus; he looked at the pictures instead. Pages and pages of foxy chicks—one chick in a bikini, one in a red silky dress that might have been a nightgown, he wasn’t sure, one in bell-bottom jeans and just a black bra. Then he got to what they called instructional pages, and maybe it was one of those same girls getting her eyebrows plucked. It was weird to see a set of eyes that close up and the tweezers coming toward them—but not nearly as sexy as seeing her in that silky nightgown-thing.

  He closed the magazine and put it aside.

  He watched the dawn come, the sun rising just outside the window.

  He had another beer.

  Sometimes he was like this, unable to sleep, an insomniac on and off since seventh grade—and he found it was better not to fight it. He sipped his beer and thought about Tony. He thought it was good that the two of them had remained friends after high school and then again he thought it wasn’t so good—maybe Martin would be doing other things, impressive things, if he didn’t have Tony’s shit life to compare to his own shit life.

  He missed his ex-girlfriend Margo, who’d left California for some college in Iowa, but he didn’t miss her enough to ask for her back or to fly off to the middle of the country for a visit. “Too much cheese in Iowa,” Martin had told her on the phone when she invited him out.

  “It’s corn,” she had said—and he could have sworn he’d heard her eyes rolling.

  “Too much of something, right?” he said, feeling stupid, holding the receiver away from his ear a second and giving it the finger.

  He watched Tony sleep and decided that, yes, he’d register for fall classes at Manhattan Beach Junior College. He’d take a full load, in fact. He’d tell his parents that he could wait tables at one of their restaurants only on the weekends. If he went to college, even junior college, he’d damn well know which state was known for its cheese and which one was known for its corn. Margo wouldn’t roll her eyes. Maybe he’d go ahead and major in business management or restaurant science—it wouldn’t be so bad to go into his parents’ line of work. He was thinking that it might be cool to feed people, own his own place, be the boss, the one who goes from table to table making his father’s sort of small talk, when Tony farted in his sleep—a loud one. And smelly. Martin was surprised the bass of it didn’t wake Tony up. He picked up the pack of matches they’d used to light the bong and ignited one, waving the flame around, waving it toward Tony’s ass, which was pointed directly at him. He wished his friend would adjust himself so that his ass faced the wall.

  You stink, man, Martin said. Fuck, you stink, Vancelli.

  Tony thrashed around, opened his eyes, startled, and then closed them again.

  Martin popped open another beer.

  And another.

  And then he got up from the floor and stumbled into the kitchen. On the counter sat a moldy loaf of bread and a fruit bowl with one lone apple. There was a line of busy ants on the counter, and a dense, red circle of them right in the middle of a sponge next to the sink. A perfect bull’s-eye. The sink’s paint was peeling and a horrible smell like old meat emanated from the drain. Martin thought he might vomit and stepped away from the sink, bumping into the fridge. He turned around and opened the freezer, where he found a nearly full bottle of vodka. That’s what he needed—a little vodka and Seven Up to settle his stomach, and he’d be on his way.

  Martin didn’t remember leaving his friend’s house, but he remembered hitting the girl. Hitting the girl was like Tony thrashing around and waking up in the chair—it was being thrust into time and space, after being unconscious.

  He wasn’t there and then he was.

  She wasn’t there and then she was.

  Now Martin wanted sleep and he wanted his bed and he wanted his sheets and blankets, and he wanted to bury himself there, he wanted to close the three little windows in his studio apartment, pull the shades, and block out the light, and he wanted to escape the car, the bucket seats, the seatbelt, the windshield, and the dusty dashboard, and he wanted out now, so he pressed his foot to the gas pedal and sped away.

  5

  THE OXYGEN tent was a transparent canopy tucked under the mattress, a clear cube that went over Hannah’s face and shoulders and covered the top half of her chest. Asher and Nina stood by her bed in the ICU, both of them red-eyed and weepy. Every now and then one of them reached inside the tent and stroked Hannah’s cheek. When drops of water gathered on the tent’s walls, Nina reached inside and wiped them clear.

  “It’s like fog. My baby hates fog,” she said to Asher before she remembered that she wasn’t talking to him.

  He moved to touch her arm, but she stepped back, away from him. “Don’t,” she snapped.

  Asher had bought Hannah a present at the gift shop downstairs, a ceramic lamb with fake flowers and plastic green leaves shooting out of its back, and now he held the gift out to her. It was a dumb gift—what kind of a freak lamb grows leaves out of its back? And even dumber was the gesture, holding the damn thing out, as if she could take it from his hands, hold it herself, and thank him. The leaves scratched at the oxygen tent and Hannah turned her face toward the sound, opened her eyes briefly, and then shut them.

  “What’s she going to do with that?” Nina said angrily. She squeezed the tissue in her fist and barely looked at him.

  Asher didn’t answer her. He couldn’t imagine a worse thing happening on a worse day. His daughter hit by a car on her way to school and the bastard who hit her not even sticking around to make sure she was alive, to take the slightest responsibility. It was all too much. He held the lamb tight at his side, trying to hide the dark oval spots of sweat he felt growing under his arms.

  There was one oversized vinyl chair with puffy armrests sitting empty in the corner of the room. A couple that wasn’t on the verge of divorce might have squeezed into that chair together, shared the space, and comforted one another while their daughter slept. At the foot of the bed, a plastic rolling tray with cold metal legs held an orange plastic pitcher of ice water, fat drops of condensation slowly rolling downward.

  Asher had a pair of deep cuts on his left cheek. The gashes, two distinct lines, were so red and thick and fresh that the young nurse wondered out loud if he was the one driving the car that hit Hannah. “No offense,” she said. “I was just wondering. He’s hurt and she’s hurt, that’s all.”

  “He’s her father, her flesh and blood,” Nina said, annoyed. “How could you think such a thing? Do you think I’d let that monster stand by my daughter’s bed? What kind of mother would I be then? He’s her father,” she repeated.

  “Oh,” the nurse said.

  “It was a hit and run,” Nina said, her voice rising.

  “That’s terrible.” The nurse arched her eyebrows, interested.

  “He left her in the road like an animal,” Nina continued.

  “When I find him—” Asher began, but Nina cut him off.

  “You?” she said with a sad laugh.

  “That’s right.” He stood up straight, nodding vigorously.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Bastard left her there,” he said.

  “She could have died,” Nina said.

  “When I find him,” Asher said again, seething.

  The nurse leaned down and fiddled with the dial on the IV bag before pointing at Asher’s face. “What happened there? It looks like you might need stitches. You’re bleeding.”

  “He’s fine,” Nina said dismissively.

  The nurse looked at her, confused.

  “I’m worried about my baby—that’s who I’m worried about.” Nina gestured at Hannah in the tent.

  “I understand that,” the nurse said. “But he’s
bleeding.”

  “Asher would know if he were really hurt, is what I’m saying. He’d be the first one running to a doctor.” Nina looked at Asher and shook her head. She didn’t care whether he stood right there and bled to death. She imagined prying the damn lamb from his grip, backing up into the hall, and aiming the stupid thing at the opposite side of his face. She’d like to split him open one more time before the day was over.

  It was strange to Asher that Nina and the nurse were talking about him like he wasn’t in the room. He felt like a big, dumb sweating child. He looked out the window and toward the parking lot, still holding Hannah’s gift at his side. Outside, an orderly helped a very tall middle-aged man out of a wheelchair and into the backseat of a car. Unsteady on his feet, the man swayed in the wind like a drunk, and the orderly held him around the waist, swaying too. Finally the man dipped into the car and disappeared. Asher wanted to disappear. He lifted a hand to his face and felt the blood. It was drying in raised bumps. He probably looked hideous, scary—maybe even insane, not giving a shit about such an obvious injury. He turned from the window and looked at his wife, who was now leaning toward the nurse, getting a look at her nametag.

  “He ran into a door. Clumsy him. Silly him. Can’t see what’s right there in front of him, Penny,” Nina said.

  The nurse turned to Asher. “You should really have your face looked at. At least get checked out. You don’t look so good. A wound like that could get infected. Maybe get a tetanus shot. Do you want some water?” she asked him.

  “I’m fine,” Asher said.

  “He’s said he’s fine,” Nina snapped. She’d had enough of Penny and her meddling. It was her marriage. He was her husband, at least until he wasn’t anymore. His face was their problem. Hannah was the one who needed attention, not her cheating asshole father.