4 - Helen

The Aether and the Lie is a story about heartbreak, art, murder, and what can motivate crimes. Enzi saves a life. 

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Transcript

      “The Lie,” a novel by Steve S. Saroff
      © 2021 Steve S. Saroff
      Helen
      
Once I had stability which calmed all the other variables. I thought that my constant had found me. 

Is it only once in a lifetime, and then forever a search for what was lost? Preparing, and working, so that mistakes that ruined the first chance will not be made again? 

Wanting what was good. Wanting what is gone. The morning warmth of a clean kitchen, bread baking in an oven. Wanting a small garden behind a rented house on the north side of town. Springtime. Talking about good things to be done with tomatoes. Pulling weeds from near the young basil plants. Her going to the university, and me working my labor job. Evenings. Her with class work, me with math books. The stuff that I was studying on my own, not knowing where it would lead. 

She would come over and say to me, “Put this away. I will rub your back. Let's drink beer and dance. Here. In our home.”

It was after another homeless winter of oil-field labor. It was the springtime after the winter where I had been robbed of my car and all my possessions. I had stayed in Eastern Montana then, working up near the Canadian border on the catwalks under the oil derricks, and I had saved enough cash to buy another old car. Then I drove to Missoula where I found work, and I rented a room. Then Helen found me. 

Helen. I met her in Maloney’s, an Irish bar on Main Street. A bar with bright lights, Jameson’s, and beer and not much else. I was in there after a day of work. She was in there with a group of students, and when she was next to me, ordering a beer, she touched my arm, she said, “Hey.” 

Once in a lifetime?

She asked me if she could eat some of the peanuts spread on the bar in front of my beer. She leaned on her elbows. A jean jacket that was a size too large over a white tee shirt. Long, lose hair. High, Irish cheekbones, sad, Irish eyes. She asked me if I was going to the university. I told her no, that I was not a student. She asked me where I was from. I told her that I was not from anywhere anymore.  She said, “We all have to be from someplace.” 

I was shy, not knowing what to say to her. Not understanding why she was talking to me. Instead of answering her, I asked her where she was from. Then I asked her why she was in Montana. She sat down on the barstool next to me. She said, “I looked at a map and Montana seemed a good distance from where I was at the time.” Then she asked, “You want to cross the street? You want to dance with me?”

She told me later that she liked my hands, how rough they looked, and that I didn't remind her of anyone she had ever known. Such a small, uncontrollable thing, and forever then I was lost. We were dancing in the Top Hat. She was spinning with both her feet in the air. I was holding on to her, my arms around her waist, her arms around my neck. Her hair was across her face and brushing against mine. She smelled like coffee and lilacs. I told her this, and she said that I smelled like dust. She said, “Maybe we fit each other.” Between songs we were sweating and laughing. We found out each other's name. I told her that I was not planning on being in town long, that I was staying at a motel near the river where I paid for a room a week at a time. She asked me to take her to the room, to show her the river. I told her that the river there was muddy. She laughed and said, “Then show me your bed.” I told her that the room's bed was lumpy and narrow, and that I slept in a sleeping bag. “Then show me that,” she said, “just get me out of these bars.”

I am remembering the goodness before the lie. I am rememberin leaving home, remembering the years of the road and the years of labor which ended after I met Helen. She was my love, my one. 

I am remembering Helen and I walking down to the Clark Fork River, that first night after we left the Top Hat. We were behind the Sweet Rest Motel on Broadway on the edge of downtown. She was drunk, but I was not. She was standing on the point of a large, angular rock, a beer bottle in her hand, saying, “Watch me now.” Then she tried to spin on one foot, like a ballerina. She said, “I can do a pirouette. My mother made me take lessons. Watch.” She spun. She fell. Her hand with the beer bottle did not let go, and that bottle broke in her hand, and the glass cut deep. Not a metaphor, not some fiction. Real blood, and a wound that nearly took her hand.

When Helen and I had first gotten to my motel room, and when we were getting out of my car, I had been frightened of her directness. She pulled my shirt as I was unlocking the room's door. She kissed my neck. When I opened the door and turned on the light, she walked in past me, straight to the table where I had my books. 

She picked one up, opened it, and then sat down on the bed, and said, “Yuck. I hated math. I thought you weren't a student?” Not knowing how to explain, I took the book from her and said, “Let's walk along the river, ok?” 

Now she was sitting in the mud, holding her hand, crying. I sat next to her, saying, “It doesn't look bad,” saying this because in the dark I couldn't see much except the mud. However, when I touched her hand, I felt her blood splashing out on me. I stood her up. I walked her to my car. She said she was going to pass out. I opened the back door, and she lay down on the seat, on top of the few changes of clean clothes I had back there. I said to squeeze the cut hard, and then drove fast to St. Pat's. 

At the hospital I parked next to the where the ambulances parked. I opened the back door to let her out, but she couldn't sit up. She seemed unconscious. There was blood everywhere. I crawled in next to her, held hard onto her hand and wrist, and pulled her to a sitting position. Then I got her outside the car and onto her feet and dragged her into the emergency room.

She had lost a lot of blood, but the doctor said that she had probably passed out because she had been so drunk. They had taken her into a room where they cleaned and sewed her up. The broken bottle had cut an artery and a vein in her palm, but no tendons, no nerves. A nurse brought me a clipboard and asked me for information. I said all I knew was her first name, and that I had just met her. The nurse sat down next to me then, and said, “Can you wait here and take her home? Do you know if she has medical insurance?”

I reached into my pocket and brought out my wallet. I looked inside and I said to the nurse, “I have some money on me. You can have it, but I have no idea who she is.”

The nurse smiled, patted my arm, and told me to put my wallet away. “When she is able to talk, we'll find out what we need.”

I spent six hours in the waiting room. A nurse finally came in with Helen, who was pale and had a large bandage and splint on her left hand. The nurse gave me a list of instructions about changing the bandage and some prescriptions for medicine. “You need to get her home now,” she said.

I brought Helen back out to my car. It was now daylight. I was supposed to be at work. She sat down in the front seat. I said something about her mother not doing a good job with the ballet lessons, and she laughed a little. I asked her where she lived, and she told me. I drove her home, stopping first to buy the prescriptions. 

She lived in a small house on the north side of town. I parked in front of the house, and she got out, wobbly, still drunk, and drugged. She leaned against the car and said, “Oh my.” So, I got out and went around to help her. When I got to her, she was still leaning against the car and looking at my clothes in the back seat. She said, “Did I do all that?” 

“You were bleeding,” I said.

“No kidding,” she said, “I ruined your clothes. I'm so sorry for all of this.” 

I got her arm over my shoulders and helped her into the house, helped her lay down on her bed. I put the medicine where she could reach it, got her some water, and then told her that I had to go. “I have to see if I still have a job,” I said.

She nodded, said she was sorry again, and I left.

That is how I met Helen. All these years later, these girls with their blood. Helen's blood long ago, Kaori's blood soon. And their paint. Helen and Kaori... their paint... and their sadness and their way of showing with no words.

I lost my job. I showed up after being awake all night in the emergency room and got fired for being late. I didn't care. I went back to the motel room, lay down on the bed, and slept. When I woke up, late in the afternoon, I drove to a Laundromat and washed the clothes that had been in the back seat. Then I came back to the room and started packing the few things I had left there. I was going to drive to Idaho; I was about to leave again.

I was putting my stuff into the trunk of the car when a car pulled in next to me, and Helen was there. Her car window rolled down, her smile, her sad eyes. Her bandaged left hand.

“Hi,” she said. “I tried to call. They said you just checked out. I need to apologize and thank you for taking care of me.”

She stayed in her car. I stayed where I was. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. 

“Here,” she said, “I was out of it this morning. Here, take this, you paid for all my drugs.” She was crossing her good, right arm over and out the window, holding some cash.

I told her I didn't care that it hadn't been much, but she kept saying to take it. So, I walked over and stood there, by the window, took the money and put it in my pocket. 

I asked her if she hurt much, and she said she did. I looked at the size of the bandage and asked her how she was going to be. She said she hadn't figured out yet how she would get dressed. She was wearing the jean jacket from the night before, except that it was draped over her left arm. She was still wearing the white tee shirt that she had on in the bar. But now it was stained with blood and river mud. 

“You took my shoes off,” she said, “I put them back on, but I couldn't tie the laces.” She laughed. Could you tie them for me?”

She opened the car door, swung her feet out onto the parking lot, and I knelt and tied her shoes, her muddy shoes. Then I stood up and told her I was leaving town.

She said, “But we just met,” and tried to brush the hair out of her face but she used the bad hand, and said, “Ow. Damn, this hurts.” 

I asked her if she was going to miss many classes, and she said she was but that it didn't matter. Then she told me that it was a good thing that she hadn't injured her right hand. 

“You wouldn't be able to write, then?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “I wouldn't be able to paint.”

“You have a job?” I asked, not understanding.

“No,” she said, “I'm an art student.”

Blood and paint. I remember how I stood there, in the parking lot of the Sweet Rest, talking for more than an hour, as the evening got dark. She asked why I had the textbooks that she had seen the night before. I told her that I read them to look cool. She told me that she didn't believe me. I told her that I liked math because it was something that I could understand. I told her that sometimes when I worked on problems it felt the same way as listening to music. She talked about music then, saying that when she drove from Detroit, she liked the AM radio stations that come through at night. She said she liked the way songs would fade away before they were done, and that sometimes the static was the best ending.

She said her parents were angry with her for coming to Montana. She said that her father told her not to study art. She said, “Why study at all if it isn't what you want, right?”

I had sat down on the parking lot. I was touching her shoelaces, wondering about when I would get up, get in my car, and drive away. Then she said that her hand hurt, that she had to get home and take some pills. I stood up, said, it had been nice talking with her, and I started to get into my car. I didn't know anything...

She almost let me go, but she said, “Wait. We should talk more.”

I stopped and looked at her. It was dark, nothing but flashing neon from the motel's half-broken sign. She said, “I'll need you to help me with my shoes for a few days. Is that ok?”

I parked my car in front of Helen's house. I helped her with her shoes. I cut the stained shirt off of her with a scissors, her bandaged arm resting on my shoulder, me trembling, her saying, “I couldn't do this myself.” 

I helped her on with another shirt. I buttoned it for her. She asked me to light a candle, she turned off the lamps. Then she swallowed pills and drank from a bottle of wine. She lay down. I got my sleeping bag from the back seat of my car. I came back into her room. I lay down on the floor next to her bed. She moved to the bed's edge so that we could see each other. She said that I didn’t have to sleep on the floor. I told her that I wanted to. She asked me why, and I told her that I am comfortable on the floor. She yanked all the blankets off her bed then lays on the floor next to me.

I didn’t know where to put my arms. I didn’t know how to lie next to someone. She said, “Here, come here,” and with her good hand she pulled me until I was wrapped about her, both of us on our sides facing each other. She whispered, “Talk to me as I fall asleep.”

I wanted to tell her about trout from the Yellowstone River caught with just a piece of string, a hook, and grasshoppers. I wanted her to understand the fires made from river driftwood and all the stars in the perfect sky. Instead, I said, “I don't know, I don't know, how, how, to talk,” I said, “I don't know,” I said, “I don't know where to begin,” I said, “I don't know anyone, I don't know anyone,” all this in a stammer, a nervous and shy voice.

She nodded, brushing her head against mine. She whispered, “I don't know anyone either. No one knows me. Tell me small things.”

That night, that first night with Helen, I told her about how I remembered names of rivers, all the rivers I had slept next to. “Tell me,” she said, and then she fell asleep as I strung together names, moving from the East to the West, Shenandoah, Susquehanna, Missouri, Wind River, Columbia.

I found another job, pushing a vacuum cleaner, emptying trashcans, and doing the other things that a janitor does. 

For a while I kept sleeping on her floor. There was no rush, and I eventually started sleeping in her bed. I would wake sometimes in the night and listen to her breathing next to me. I would wake and feel her arms around me. In the mornings she would get out of bed and open the windows. That spring sunlight, the scents from the flowering trees in her back yard, all of it pouring in.

It had been a month from the night she cut her hand. The bandages were gone. The stitches were out. She told me that I am not camping now. She said that I am living with her. She told me that I don't have to keep everything I owned in my car. 

She went to classes, painted, and pulled me into a place I had never been before. A place with no struggle. We were both sitting cross-legged in her bed. She reached and touched hands, leaned forward so that all her hair was spilling into her lap. She wanted to know what I would do with my life. She said that I couldn’t just be a janitor. I asked her why not.  She told me that I must be more. I asked her again why, and she just stared at me. 

I didn't get it then. The hint of what was coming. Instead, all I cared about was how every afternoon, leaving work, I would be happy. I would be coming back to Helen's house to share with her. 

She bought me presents. A bottle of Spanish olives. Bottles of wine. I also brought her things. Loafs of bread from the local bakery. Flowers from the side of the mountains: Shooting Stars and Lupine, Arrow Leaf and Larkspur. In the evenings she would come home from classes and put the flowers in a vase. I would light the candles along the window ledge, the candles on the table, the candles near the bath. She would turn off all the lights and paint. Canvasses leaning against the walls, Helen sitting cross-legged in front of them, her bandaged hand in her lap, a long brush in her hand, the colors muted and orange in the dim light. I would soak in the tub ? the grit of my day's work coming out of my pores ? until she would say, “Enzi, come here and tell me what you think.” I would bring one of the candles and sit next to her, moving the flame close enough to see brightness in the wet paint.

She also gave me warmth and touch two, and often three times a day. She'd pull her shirt off and tug at my hands. Me just barely into the place, the door hardly closed. “Let me wash first,” I said. She just laughed and then unbuttoned her jeans, and asked, “Why?”

And in the dark too. Me still so close to the road, my solitary nightmares coming at four in the morning. Gasping, awake, I think I am lying by some highway. I'm so young that the barking dogs are terror, so young that I'm hiding from police, so young that I am scared of the older bums who will beat and rob me. It is raining hard; I'm soaked and cold. But it’s just sweat, and the barking dogs are chained down the street, and I'm not a run-a-way. Instead, I am lying next to a beautiful woman who has told me, “Wake me whenever you want.” I am warm and safe, and I reach across the bed's darkness and hold her. Just hold her, my heartbeat going from panic to peace. She calms me, she tells me I am dreaming. She puts her mouth against my ear. She tells me how good things are. She tells me how happy she is. I fall back to sleep listening in the dark to the whispered plans of our shared life.  I wanted nothing else. There should have been nothing else.

I wanted to grow with her. I would meet her parents and impress them with my devotion; this was the plan. We were drunk in the kitchen. Drinking wine from the bottle that we are passing back and forth. She invited friends from her art classes, and it was a simple party. Then she said, “I'll say, Dad, meet Enzi, he vacuums,” and all the fun evaporated because she was laughing and her friends were laughing, and it was hilarious to them.