Vacuum in the Dark by Jen Beagin

Author:Jen Beagin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2019-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

WOODY HAD TALKED IN HIS sleep that night. Gibberish mostly, but she could make out a sentence here and there. “Swim over to me,” he’d said at 2:18 A.M. “Make a keyhole with your arms.”

She’d kept her back to him and stared at the green numbers on the Cartex alarm clock next to the bed. The clock was made to look digital, but the numbers weren’t synchronized and only lined up evenly on the hour. This bothered her for a while.

At 3:13 A.M., which happened to be the time she was born, she heard him mumble, “It hurts. It hurts all over the sheets.”

She got out of bed, pulled back the covers, and looked for blood or shit or piss. Nothing. He was touching himself through his pajama bottoms. “It hurts,” he repeated, and she waited for the rest of the sentence: when your wife doesn’t touch it. That’s what he’d said before, when she was eight, and she’d felt so sorry for him, because it really did look painful—shiny, angry, the wrong color.

She climbed back into bed and stared at the clock. After a while she closed her eyes and drifted off. When she woke, just after dawn, he was lying on his side, holding his head up with one of his hands and staring at her. His skin looked green and baggy, the lesion on his nose glistening like a piece of tar.

“You sleep like an angel,” he whispered.

“Are you in pain?” she asked. “Should I get Grandma?”

“Let her sleep,” he said. “Just bring me my medicine and two fingers of scotch.”

Fingers. He said two, but he always meant three.

She poured the scotch and went for his medicine in the bathroom. It was in its usual spot on the sink. Oramorph Oral Solution, Morphine Sulfate. She unscrewed the cap, squeezed the nipple-like bulb, and drew a full dose into the dropper. Ginger usually emptied the dose into a glass of water, and that’s what Mona did, but it seemed like too little to really do anything, so she added four or five more.

Poor Ginger. When she came into the bedroom that morning Woody’s creepy eyes were still open—of course—but he’d been gone for twenty minutes or more. Mona was just sitting there, paralyzed.

“Happy birthday, mister,” Ginger said, and kissed his forehead.

“He’s not here,” Mona said.

Ginger put her face right up to his and shouted, “Woodrow! Wake up!” She looked pissed off when he didn’t answer. She turned to Mona and said, “Christ! Why the fuck didn’t you come get me?”

She’d never heard Ginger say “fuck” before.

“He said not to wake you,” Mona said in a shaky voice.

After they took his body away, Ginger put on her sunglasses and didn’t remove them for five weeks. If you hadn’t known her, you’d have thought she was legally blind.

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