I can’t move anything, said Peter. She puts it back. She’s got a mental tape measure. She can tell when anything is changed in the slightest. Believe me, she knew we tipped the table over.
Landreaux nodded.
I’d like to. . switch that off in her, said Peter.
Then felt disloyal. After all, Nola had moved into the Ravich house, fairly new, but also filled with things that his parents and grandparents had owned. Her meticulous care of these objects comforted him.
I mean if she could just let go sometimes, he added.
You’d like her to be happy again, said Landreaux.
Happy? Peter said the word because it was an odd, archaic word. She gets mad at Maggie, that’s the worst, but really, she’s done nothing but try. She’s a good mother. At first I tried to bring LaRose back to you guys. I thought what you did was all wrong, thought she would get better without him. Then I realized if I brought him back, that would kill her.
Landreaux thought of Emmaline wretchedly bent over in the sweat lodge.
Still, it’s LaRose, said Peter. His breath rasped. His heart sounded in his ears. He knew what he was going to say would make Nola cry in that shrill animal keening way she went out to the barn to do, after the kids were sleeping, hoping she could not be heard. It’s LaRose, said Peter. We have to think of him. We should share him. We should, you know, make things easier between us all.
Oh, said Landreaux.
As if the lid had lifted off his brain he blazed with shock and light. He couldn’t speak. Weakness assailed him and he put his head down on the table. Peter looked down on his parted hair, the long tail of it, the loose power of Landreaux’s folded arms. A sinuous contempt gripped him and he thought of the rapture he would feel for an hour, maybe two hours, after he brought down his ax on Landreaux’s head. Indeed, he’d named his woodpile for his friend, and the mental image was the cause of its growing size. If not for LaRose, he thought, if not for LaRose. Then the picture of the boy’s grief covered his thinking.
After Landreaux had left, Peter lay on the living room carpet, staring at the ceiling fan. Hands on his forehead, stomach whirling with the blades. He wasn’t a man to make friends, and it was hard, this thing with Landreaux. Peter was six foot two, powerful because he worked the farm, but weak, too, in the ankles, in the knees, in the wrists and neck. Wherever one part of his body met up with another part, it hurt. Still, it was his method to suck it up. High school coaches had taught him that. This was his family’s farm before the family died off, except for one now Floridian brother he’d bought out. Peter’s family were Russian-German immigrants, there long enough to have picked buffalo bones off the land.
When he is feeling well, Peter throws LaRose and Maggie in the air. Falling, they catch the smile on his cool, Slavic face. He rises at 5:00 a.m. and goes to bed at midnight. He works those other jobs, plus the farm, yet there is so much left over. Nola, he met in Fargo. They both went to NDSU and it was a surprise they’d never run into each other in small-town Pluto — a raw little place with a few old buildings, a struggling grocery, some gift shops, a Cenex, and a new Bank of the West. Peter’s family had farmed outside of town and Nola’s mother, Marn, had lived there as a child — they sometimes visited the land she had leased out. Once things became too difficult after Billy Peace died, she had moved with the kids to Fargo. Made them go by their second names because of certain people.
From the beginning, Peter was crazy about Nola. She was tensile and finely made. Her hair was dirty blond, though she bleached it brighter. It turned brownish in the winter if she let it go, exactly his shade. Her face was cheerleader-cute and dainty, but her eyes were slant and calculating. She was elusive, sliding away into her thoughts. No matter how much energy he expended he couldn’t catch her. He couldn’t even find her when she was right in front of him. Sometimes her merciless dark eyes gave nothing back. Her face shut. She was a blank wall, fresh painted. He groped to find a secret hinge. It sprung sometimes in bed and she was alive to him with radiant warmth, her face rosy and gentle, her eyes merry with affection. That was real, wasn’t it? He couldn’t tell anymore.
How would he give her the news? The plan that he and Landreaux had agreed upon. Sharing the upbringing of LaRose — a casual arrangement month by month that the men would set up, it being too loaded otherwise. He would tell her carefully. He would tell her in the barn. Then Nola could react however. Peter had become adept at maintaining an inner equilibrium during the screaming, shouting, foul shouting, rage, sorrow, misery, fury, whimper-weeping, fear, frothing, foaming, singing, praying, and then the ordinary harrowing peace that followed.
Sometimes now in the ordinary peace they made love. It wasn’t mean like the first time. He was not forgiven, but he was accepted. As an asshole, maybe, but one who would not hurt her again. Okay, slug me, he had told her every time she was on top. No thanks, she always said, it will make us even. Their love was quiet, maybe tender, maybe odd or maybe fake. She hummed while she sucked his cock. But now she hummed actual tunes. The next day he’d remember the melody as sly and mocking, though he couldn’t name the words. Her glow of sweet responsive warmth sank into him like radiation. Sometimes it strengthened him. Sometimes he felt it poisoning his bones.
After he and Landreaux spoke of raising LaRose together, it was as if she knew. Nola came to Peter deliciously needy. Afterward, she nestled against him, pushing him around to get comfortable. No way he was going to tell her then. Maybe in the morning, he thought. After Maggie went to school.
You dove, he said. He stroked her shoulder all one way, like feathers.
A mean dove. Who will peck out your heart, she said.
That would hurt.
I can’t help myself. Will you stay with me, she said, suddenly, if I go crazy?
There was desolation in her voice, so he tried to joke.
Well, you already are crazy.
He felt tears on his chest. Oh, he’d gone too far.
In a good way. I love your crazy!
How come you’re not crazy?
I am, inside.
No, you’re not. You’re not crazy. How can you not go crazy? We lost him. How can you not go crazy? Don’t you fucking care?
Her voice rose sharper, louder.
You don’t fucking care! You cold bitch, you Nazi. You don’t care!
Hey, he said, holding her. Both of us can’t go crazy. At the same time, anyway. Let’s take turns.
She went silent, then abruptly laughed.
Bitch. Nazi.
She laughed harder. Her laughing slipped a bolt in Peter, and then they were both laughing in a sick way, both unhinged again with the same first anguish, both weeping into each other’s hair, snot dripping in the sheets.
You’re still my dove, he said, later on. I’ll never stop loving you.
But she terrified him, freezing his love, and he could hear the death of certainty in what he said. The worst kind of loneliness gripped him. The kind you feel alongside another person.
Later still, waking in the dark, he put his hand on her skin, sleepily wishing his strange old wish, that he could dissolve into her, be her, that they could be one creature rocking in the dark.
Yes, wearily, as he drifted again toward sleep. All this and he still had to give her the news tomorrow. Not in the house where LaRose could hear, but out in the barn. It might drive her dangerously past crazy, at first, to share LaRose, but it had to be. He couldn’t bear the weird indecency of what he felt they were doing to the child.
Nola was fine when he told her and fine for days after. She’d expected it. She was all right, until she saw the mouse, not that she was afraid of it. But when you saw one, that meant ten thousand had already invaded. It was in the entryway to the garage. She cornered and tried to stomp it, but the mouse popped from under her shoe. That steamed her up. She was not alone at the house that day but Maggie and LaRose were out in the yard. She had just made sure. They were not allowed to leave the yard and knew she would check on them every fifteen minutes. Nola stood in the little mudroom between the house and the garage. She rarely went into the garage — it was Peter’s place, his workshop. She hardly drove anywhere, but when she did he moved the car out for her. Since he’d taken the extra jobs, he did not spend much time out in the garage.