Page 14 of Succubus

We’re smiling at each other, and I have a swooping sensation, a Ferris-wheel sense of lifting into the sky, of everything being sickeningly perfect, the world falling away until it’s miniature.

Is he also feeling it?

What a girly, irrelevant question. It doesn’t matter what he’s feeling, what I think I maybe see in his eyes—an unfolding, a softness.

I blurt, “So tell me about being a doctor. You might need to keep that job, in case the homestead doesn’t work out.” There. I’m investigating! Like Grub told me to. I can write off this whole gardening escapade as a business expense.

“What do you want to know?” Joel goes to unwind the hose from the side of the house, pulls it toward the nascent garden, his biceps pleasingly evident.

I swallow. “Apparently you have some kind of magic, lifesaving touch.” I get right to the point, like a detective. “One of the nurses told me.” Or maybe detectives are more subtle.

But instead of taking the opportunity to talk about a strange, wondrous track record of medical miracles, Joel brushes off the claim entirely and starts talking about his private practice. He loves family medicine—getting to treat patients over long periods of time, at every stage of life. He describes a family under his care, the grandparents as well as the new baby, named—mysteriously—Gertrude. He gives the impression of liking people generally. And then, like someone who feels he’s talked too long about himself even though he’s only been speaking for a minute, he asks about my doula work.

And instead of cleverly interrogating him, I tell him about the pearl-wearing, old-money woman who blared a labor playlist of gangsta rap. About the classic fainting husband at the twin birth. I tell him how it feels to learn clients’ secret fears, to cook their favorite foods when they’re depleted after birth. The way he listens makes me want to keep talking and talking. So, like a weak-willed ghoul, I do.

“What a gift,” he says quietly, “to get to be there for all of that.” We’re standing together near the patio, having finished watering. His arms are lightly crossed, and he gives the impression of a farmer-scholar, with such solid elbows.

“My brother, Adam,” he says, like it’s God speaking through him, smiting me for my sinful thoughts, “I took care of him. At the end of his life.”

A sharp ache unzips along my spine.

He adjusts his glasses, rubs the side of his nose. “What you’re saying, about being there for those moments that no one else sees—It means a lot to me, that I was there with him then.”

He glances up, self-conscious, exposed.

“I’m glad you were,” I say with too much feeling. But he looks at me gratefully, his eyes momentarily exhausted. Like he wishes he could climb out of his life and sit down beside it in the void.

I also wish that. In fact, I am wishing so hard in this moment that there’s nothing except wish left in me.

“I’m really sorry about your brother,” I manage to say. He will never know the cataclysmic extent of this.

His lips shift toward a smile. “Thank you. I miss him.” His voice goes husky. His suffering is right below the surface, muscles moving under skin.

Now I want, urgently, to put my hand on his arm. I want to reach out and touch him the way I would touch Alice or a client, or any other man who needed comfort. (I can touch men from the general population, by the way, just not men I want to touch.)

A headache bursts behind my eye, spreads through my skull. A bubble rises in my throat. In it are the words for telling him that I knew Adam, that I cared about him, even if briefly. I swallow, popping it. The words ooze down, lost.

* * *

Stay for dinner next time? Joel texts me a few days later. I promise I won’t serve raccoon meat.

I make myself come twice as I read and reread this message and imagine his hands on my shoulders, on my back, on my hips, kind and demanding at the same time. Right after, I flash to Arlo, the little dark hairs on his soft belly when I pulled up his shirt with my ignorant teenage fingers. To Omar. The realization that it was me. I had killed him. I had killed all of them. The darkness twists in me, strangling, festering.

No, I text back in my mind. No, sorry. Mondays don’t work anymore.

Yes, I text back in real life.

CHAPTER 6

I’m bad at this,” Joel says, arranging his fork at the side of his plate, “but it’s probably better to just put it out there.” He looks down, seems to gather himself, his curls absorbing the warm light from the stained glass fixture—that old-fashioned Adirondacks-looking kind—hanging over the middle of the table. I love the way the first hints of gray glint in his brown hair, past and future intermingling. I’d love to watch him age, over the decades.

Dear Lord.

We are most of the way through dinner. He made chicken with parsley pesto. Ella is lying on the floor in the living room, playing with Mr. Button.

“Okay,” I say. I can’t read in his expression which way this is about to go, only that he’s nervous.

“I can’t be in a relationship,” he says.