Swimming Sweet Arrow Part 10

"It's not a game."

"Then what is it?"

She didn't answer, but for the first time I understood that she had no intention of leaving Ray. Luke might be her true love, but she had no intention of choosing. Ray was part of it, part of the whole weave of things, and she wanted to go on living it.

"You'll have to do something sooner or later," I said.

"It isn't that easy, Vangie."

"It's easier than you're making it."

But all she would say to that was, "Maybe."

She started talking about Dreisbach's then. She didn't tell me any more about Luke or Ray. I didn't talk about Del, and it goes without saying that I didn't talk about how I f.u.c.ked her brother.

Probably because it was the easiest thing to do, we decided to get high. As we were smoking up, I told her all the tips I knew about working at Dreisbach's: about hemming her skirts up and about my regulars and how to squeeze a dollar out of people. Because it was easier to talk about jobs and work than anything else, that is what we talked about then, and I did not feel bad about it. She updated me on the latest gossip at the restaurant, and I told her about the joy of picking pears. At least we could laugh and joke. That was the same as it ever was between us.

When we had enough to smoke, June said, "Come on. Let's go to bed."

She took me upstairs to Luke's room, but I couldn't quite believe she wanted us to sleep there.

"I can sack out on the sofa," I said.

"Don't be crazy, Vangie. This is the best bed in the house."

And it was some bed. It was king-size, and the frame was all oak. It was ma.s.sive. The headboard had built-in cupboards, one on each side, and each cupboard closed with its own lead-gla.s.s door. In between the two cupboards was a huge mirror.

"Jesus Christ," I said. "It's like a football field."

"He had to bring it in the house in pieces," June said.

Of course I snooped in the cupboard on my side of the bed as soon as we lay down, because I wanted to see the kind of stuff Luke kept there. I found some magazines, a box of tissues, a clock, and a gun.

I knew the thing was loaded. There would be no point to keep a gun that ready at the bedside if it wasn't loaded.

"What is that?" I said.

"A .38 Special."

"I don't know if I can sleep with that there."

The pistol was black and heavy-looking, and it made me feel sick just to see it.

"I mean it," I told June. "I can't sleep with it there."

"Here," she said, and took one of the magazines. She opened it and laid it over the gun. "Now you can't see it."

"I don't know if that's going to do it," I said.

"I'll put it on my side, then."

The pistol looked crazy in June's hand, and I was glad she was the one who picked it up. I didn't even want to touch it.

"Don't think about it," June said, and closed the cupboard door.

I was almost sorry then that I was staying over. I felt stoned and unsure, my nerves were still jangling from everything that had happened with Kevin Keel, and the gun just upset me. I began to worry that June or I would wake in the night and, in some crazy dream, reach out and make the gun go off. I didn't think we would shoot each other-I just thought we would somehow knock the pistol out of the cupboard and that it would somehow fire and hurt one of us. Even though it was on June's side of the bed, I worried that I might do something crazy and clumsy because I was so afraid. That is what I lay thinking of in that big bed.

"Should I show you something of mine?"

"Sure," I said. I thought, great, she's got a matching pearl-handled pistol or something on her side. But what June pulled out was a little tan thing that looked like a small hair dryer. I didn't know what it was at first, but then I remembered seeing one in a magazine, and it all dawned on me about what it was.

"I keep it here," she said. "I only use it with Luke. Ray couldn't handle it."

She flicked the switch on the top and the thing turned on. It whirred like a bug. I put my hand out to touch the piece that moved.

"It looks like a nose," I said.

"It sort of is like a nose," she said. "You can use it if you want."

She turned off the bedside light then, but I cannot remember how it happened next, the order of things: if she moved her hand down between my legs and then I parted them, or if I parted my legs first.

"Is that the place?"

I moved my hips a little, and then it was the right place. She only touched me a few seconds and she said, "It's better if you take off your underwear."

And there in the p.r.i.c.kling darkness I did that. And that time I know I was the one who moved first, who spread my legs apart so she could get to me.

The little nose piece was so insistent, the buzz so hard, that my skin seemed to draw back. But only for a little while. Pretty soon the buzz was not so hard, and I could feel the tension easing, and all the tightness went into a contraction I had up inside me, and that happened over and over. I came fast and hard in a few minutes.

I did not make a sound, but June knew. She was on the other end of that plastic thing-of course she knew.

"You and Del should get one," she said. "Do you want to use it anymore?"

"No, thanks."

"All right. Do you mind if I do?"

"I don't mind," I said. "Go ahead."

She turned a little to face the wall, for privacy, the way we did when we had hickeys to hide.

"Do you want me to go?" I said.

"No. No, you don't have to go."

It didn't take June that long to come. She did not make any sound. The only reason I knew she did was that her breathing got harder. A few seconds later she turned off the vibrator and put it back in the cupboard, then turned so she could lie on her belly.

"Are you still awake?"

"I'm awake."

"Young and dumb and full of come," she said. "I'm sorry, Vangie. I just had to do that. You came and then I wanted to."

"You don't have to apologize. It's me."

The next thing I said, I could not account for. I felt worried about her being in that house with Luke and Ray, I wished everything could be different for the two of us, and I was glad to be lying there with her, away from the bed I shared with Del and my own life. But I still could not account for what I said, and I could not tell where it came from.

I said to June, "I wish I could be your boyfriend."

I lay and waited in the dark to hear what she would say, and when she did talk, her voice was filled with kindness.

"I know what you mean."

"No, I really wish I could."

"Oh, Vangie," she said, and her voice was still so filled with kindness that I felt she knew what I meant.

"But you can't be."

"I know," I said, and in the sticking darkness I suddenly wasn't so sure that she knew all the things I wanted for her and for me, or that she knew what I meant at all.

"I still wish it," I said.

She did not answer, but moved back against me so her back was resting lightly against my arm and hip. That made me feel better, even though she didn't talk, and even though I knew she wanted me not to talk.

That night, I surprised myself by sleeping. I slept hard at first, then my dreams woke me. I kept seeing the .38 Special and June reaching up into the cupboard. She brought something down between my legs, and I kept thinking it was the gun. I'd worry that it would fire, but then it would turn out not to be the gun at all. Sometimes it was that hard, plastic k.n.o.b touching me, and sometimes it was her hand. It all got mixed up in my mind.

21.

THAT week I could not stop thinking about what happened with June. The thoughts took over the ones about Kevin Keel and those about Del, and I didn't fight them. I let my mind go back again and again to the night I spent with her. I could not stop thinking of the little plastic nose moving over me, or how deep my contractions had been when I came. It felt like they started at the very core of me and kept on reaching out and out and out. I could not have stopped thinking of that if I tried.

With its beige nose, the vibrator wasn't at all like a d.i.l.d.o. It was something altogether different, and I wondered how June had learned about it. I wondered if Luke bought it for her, or if she saw it in a magazine the way I did. But if she just saw it in a magazine, how did she know it would be right for her body, right for coming? And why had she wanted to touch me with it? Because that's how I thought of it, as June touching me, even though there was that plastic between us. Maybe it was like the old days when we wrote notes and recounted each detail of being with Del and Ray: maybe she had just wanted to show me her new trick. Except I remembered how her voice sounded when she said, Is that the place? All murmury and soft. It was like my voice when I was being sweet with Del. Yet June's voice sounded the same way after I told her I wished I could be her boyfriend and she said, But you can't be-so I didn't know what to think of the softness. Maybe it didn't mean anything. Maybe it just meant that we were talking quietly in the darkness.

It took me a couple of days to realize I was not embarra.s.sed by June touching me. If I'd felt any kind of embarra.s.sment, I wouldn't have been able to come. I knew that in my body. What embarra.s.sed me was what I said: I wish I could be your boyfriend. Yet as I thought of my words, I wondered about them. At the time I meant that I felt closer to June than anyone in the world, and that I wanted us to look out for each other and go on caring for each other always. But when I realized I was not embarra.s.sed about June touching me or about her making me come, I wondered if part of me wasn't in love with June, and if that wasn't what I'd been saying that night. Maybe what embarra.s.sed me wasn't what I said at all, but what she told me in return: You can't be.

After I understood that, I did not want to talk to her.

I tried not to make it seem obvious, but June knew something was wrong. We were on the phone when she asked me what was going on.

"I feel funny," I said. "A little uncomfortable."

"What, because of last weekend? It doesn't matter."

I didn't know if she was saying that it didn't matter that the two of us used her vibrator and that she made me come, or if it didn't matter that I said I wanted to be her boyfriend. Both things mattered to me, but I couldn't say that, so I told her, "It's hard for me to see you out there with the two of them." It wasn't entirely a lie.

"I know you think it's wrong."

"That's not even it," I said. "I don't understand how you go on. Don't you worry?"

"No," she said. "You don't know how safe I feel."

She went on to tell me about a photograph of Luke and Ray, one that she'd seen at their mom and dad's house and that she'd thought about for months. Luke and Ray were standing with their mother and father, out in front of the house where they grew up. June said that one day when she was looking at that picture, she thought she understood what she was doing.

"No one can ever get closer to them than me," she said. "Not even their parents. I'm there between them."

"June, it's a picture."

"If you saw it, if you knew how I felt when I saw it, you'd understand. I know you would."

"Maybe," I said.

"You would. I know. You're like a sister to me."

"And you to me," I said, but as soon as I said it, I felt let down. It seemed we were marking an end.

After that conversation, we turned away from each other. No, that's still not the truth. I turned away from June, and she had no choice but to turn away from me. At the time it seemed the right thing to do, because I didn't want to embarra.s.s her further, and because I didn't want her to say, ever, that she didn't want to hear from me. But let me put down here that it was me who had the small heart and it was me who turned away.

There. Now it is all written down.

In the days that followed that conversation, I thought of what June said about the photograph of Ray and Luke. How she said she felt safe when she saw it. Her words were a maze that I was not sure I found the heart of, but I thought she meant this: The picture was a whole. Whether the parents smiled or not, whether they put a hand on the shoulder of each boy, whether one brother threw an arm around the other or they simply stood shoulder to shoulder-none of it mattered. Happy or sad, touching or not touching, the picture was a record of who was bound to whom. That was why people wasted roll after roll of film on stiff poses and artificial smiles: they wanted a picture, if not of their love, at least of their blood.

Without being in that picture, June came to rest at the center of it, between the two brothers. She was st.i.tched into them and between them. Nothing could ever take her out, and that was her power. That was why she didn't stop, and that was why she could feel safe, even in the middle of all the lies and the danger. She believed she could go on floating between two brothers. In dark water, cradled.

22.

DEL came home that week after being gone six-one week bingeing, one week in detox, and four weeks in treatment. Even though it was only about eight at night, we went to bed almost as soon as he walked in the door.

When we lay down on the bed, I tried to act like nothing was different, like things were the way they always were. We kissed slow and deep, and I kept running my hand over Del's back and the railing of his spine. It soothed me to be with his bare skin and to be touching again, but then I'd get aware of myself and everything that had happened, and I'd feel wooden.

When Del pulled away from me and started to move down on the bed so he could lie with his face between my legs, I put my arms tight around him. I made him lie back down.

"How about a birthday b.l.o.w. .j.o.b?" I said, because he'd had his twentieth birthday when he was in treatment. But that wasn't why I was offering it-I wasn't ready for him to touch my v.a.g.i.n.a.