The Sleeper Read Free Page B

Saturn was in front of the house, and I looked in it as I walked past just to make sure everything was the way it should be. Betsy and Miriam must have gone to Wendy’s for a burger because there were some loose fries and a half-drunk shake in the back next to Miriam’s car seat. In the front, the passenger side was piled with papers and a big loose-leaf notebook for the night class on Web design that Betsy was taking at South Kansas College. In front of the driver’s seat the visor was turned down, and I figured Betsy had been looking at herself, and maybe brushing out her hair. She didn’t wear much makeup. The checklist showed everything normal. A little messy, but normal.
    I leaned in the car and picked up some of the trash, put up the visor, and cradled Betsy’s books in my arm like I would have done if we’d been walking home from school together.
    â€œWhere’d you two go?” I shouted as I let the screen door slam behind me. But no one answered.
    Fear ran under my skin like electricity. The kitchen was empty, and so was our little family room. I went down the hall. Miriam wasn’t in her room. I listened. Nothing. The door to our bedroom was opened. Sheets were jumbled in a pile on the unmade bed.
    I don’t know what I saw at that moment. A kind of emptiness. As if the last five years had just disappeared and there was no history before this moment, and there wouldn’t be any history after. Blank past, blank future, blank present, and the whole of me as hollow and weightless as a ghost.
    Then the sheets moved.
    â€œWell?” said Betsy. “You got something better to do?”
    â€œOh, Baby,” I said, shaking my head to drive out the images that had just been there. I threw off my shirt and unbuttoned my jeans. “But where’s Miriam?”
    â€œLeft her over at her Aunt Lea’s. Thought we could use a little break to cheer us up.” She looked me up and down. “I can see you’re ready to cheer me up. Come here, darlin’, put your arms around me like a circle round the sun.”
    She smelled like life, my Betsy. I held her close to me and breathed her in. We kissed so that our lips just touched, just barely, and passion moved between us like a spirit, through our mouths, through our eyes. Her breasts were small and round and as I ran my tongue over them in the mid-day brightness of the room she stopped me for a second. “Don’t, baby, don’t look at the stretch marks,” she said. And all I could do was laugh. “Everything looks better than perfect to me,” I said. There was no use telling her how much I loved every inch of her body, inside and out, including those tiny lines on the side of the breasts that had held the milk for my daughter. And those wonderful pink nipples, so hard against my fingertips and my tongue. Her stomach, just slightly rounded, and soft, and warm as the earth on a summer day. The light brown hair between her legs, glistening now, rich with the human-animal smells of love, her vagina tasting of salt and iron, like blood, like the world of the living. “Get your face back up here and do your duty,” she said, and as I slid inside her, feeling her body slowly giving way to mine, there was no world but this one of the here, and of the now.
    The Kansas sun coming through the little skylight in our roof made a shining square around us on the bed, forcing us to close our eyes as we lay in each other’s arms. And in that enormous moment of peace I realized that I had never in my life been so happy, or so afraid.
    â€œLet’s talk,” said Betsy.
    â€œLet me listen to you breathe,” I said. “Let’s just let ourselves be.”
    It has seemed strange to me, always, that women want to talk about every single thing in life, while men just want to know that those things are there: love, family, home. Talking about them doesn’t make them happen. They’re