Suspicious River by Laura Kasischke Page A

half-human? An orange flower with a child’s face in the center of its petals?
    That last photo—I even tried to dig it up in August, but it was nowhere to be found, and part of me was relieved that my own black magic always failed, that my bargains with the devil fell through each time.
    He didn’t seem to want my soul at any price.
     
    I smoked a cigarette in the office, and then I went to his room.
    Gary Jensen opened the door before I could knock.
    “Heard you coming up the stars,” he said, and it took me a moment to realize he’d said “stairs,” swimming through his thick accent. He slid his arms around my waist. I put my own around his neck. The kiss he offered was slippery and hot. Our tongues swam over and under each other like river snakes.
     
    The week before my appointment, I said to my father at the kitchen table, “I have to have an abortion.”
    He stared at me for what seemed a long time, then started to cry. He put his head in his hands and sobbed while his cigarette burned to nothing in an ashtray at his elbow. I watched the top of his head, the short stubble there, and I thought he’d become an old man fast but still had a marine recruit’s new hair. After a while his nose was running and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. I reached across the table and squeezed his wrist, which was thin and tangled with blue veins like yarn, something sewn up sloppily. He looked at me.
    My father was a big man. Hands like catchers’ mitts. A man who might have been a soldier or a football player, who might’ve been able to beat another man to the ground with his bare hands in an old-fashioned war before weapons or after the big home game, behind the bleachers, over the honor of some girl. Instead, he’d been convinced to sell cleaning products for the rest of his life by a man in a blue suit who’d come to the door the day after his high school graduation: That day, my father had been feeling confused, hung-over, and bored, and his mother was fretting about his future as if it were a case of the flu, a can of tomato sauce in her fist in the kitchen, raised. His younger brother, Andy, already owned a car.
    My father’s failure as a salesman left him rubbery and nervous in the presence of men. Even at church, he would stand back from the other ushers, who were not as tall as he was but who appeared much taller in their blue suits. Theirs was a kind of height my father never had, and it had nothing to do with height. They’d speak to him kindly, as if he were a much younger or much older man. My father let those other men make all the decisions that mattered—where to park the rich old ladies in their sterling silver wheelchairs, where to set the stack of extra pamphlets about God.
    He could never even look the mechanic, with his dirty hands, in the eye. Failure had made my enormous father small and shy, and then his last sales trip had trapped him in the twisted wreckage of his Ford, crushed, finally, and for real—blood and bone meal under the dashboard, crying the whole time for my dead mother while they pried him out—the sound of pots and pans clattering in a restaurant kitchen as they did. The sound of a can opener cutting into dented tin.
    “We have to stay over,” I said. “I have to be there Tuesday afternoon for tests, and then they do the abortion on Wednesday morning. I’ll make a reservation for us somewhere cheap. Somewhere like the Motel 6, O.K.?”
    “This is my fault,” my father said in a high voice, a statement like a question, wiping his nose and eyes hard with a wadded paper towel. “You’re just a little girl. You needed a mama.”
    He started to cry harder.
    “No,” I said and shook my head. “It’s O.K., Dad. It will be fine. But you have to go with me to Grand Rapids on Tuesday. A guardian has to be with me.”
    My father nodded his head. “Of course,” he said. “Of course, baby. I love you so much.”
     
    Gary Jensen caught my tongue between his teeth,