Comfort Inn

by Mark Trainer

Kelly waits for Scott to come back with dinner, and tries to keep the ice on her eye, but it's melting and the water is running down her forearm and dripping on the bed. It's getting dark, and she sees the Comfort Inn sign at the edge of the parking lot come on.

She keeps touching her tongue to the cut on the inside of her cheek. When her tongue hits it, she can feel the sting all the way up in her nose. She's tried it all different ways. If she pecks at the spot again and again, she can bring tears to her eyes. If she holds her tongue on it, the stinging keeps coming for a few seconds then fades away until she pulls back her tongue, then it hurts all over again.

She's wearing one of Scott's shirts and a pair of his sweat pants. She has the sleeves of the shirt rolled up, and the sweat pants pushed up on her calves, but still she feels like she's swimming in the oversized clothes. She touches a finger to her temple where the skin is discolored a purple-grey. She thinks back to how she tried to protect her face with her arms, and how he pried them away, and the sound the bed made jerking across the hard-wood floor as they tumbled into it. When she was six, she had her first black eye and thought it would change her forever.

They came to the motel in the morning. To be alone, Scott said, to keep other people out of it, to find some way to talk. When she called into work, they said she should know how bad the kids were on the weekend overnights, and asked her who they were supposed to get to fill in.

She doesn't miss the kids. She works with the ones nobody else can handle. One way or another they have all become wards of the county. Social workers pulled these kids from their parents because they were being neglected or abused. Or maybe the parents are in jail, or have just disappeared. Some of these kids will be mainstreamed, and some will go the opposite way, to a J.D. center or something like that. She used to try to pick out who were the monsters, and who were the ones that could respond to kindness and might stay still without her having to hold them there. But after a few weeks, it seemed like all of them were a little of both.

When she started, they told her about the restraining position. That's as far as you're allowed to go. You get behind the child and wrap your legs around his, crossing your ankles in front of him. Then you take his left wrist in your right hand and vice-versa so his arms are crossed in front of him straight- jacket style. And then you just hold him like that and wait.

There's hardly any ice left in the bag. She's surprised that Scott didn't remember to take care of it before he left for the food. He's remembered everything else today. He won't bring back any food for himself. He'll sit and watch her eat.

The first time this happened, Scott dropped his head between his knees, and started crying. She told him that right then, at that moment, she could see the person he really was. She said she could never really hate him because she would always know there was that side to him.

He's not as dramatic this time, but he's still solemnly quiet, and he shakes his head a lot. He seems to want to touch her face all the time. Not her, just her face, just the bruise near the eye.

When she hears the key turn in the door, Kelly puts the dripping plastic bag on the night table. She tucks her feet underneath the covers that have been pushed to the bottom of the bed. Scott's got a McDonald's bag that he puts on the table by the window.

He asks her if she wants to eat at the table or where she is. She tells him to bring the food over to her.

There's an undisturbed bed between the two of them. She's been conscious of it all day. The more the blankets and sheets around her come loose, the more she's aware of the perfectly made bed across from her.

Scott comes around, smoothes the sheets at the edge of her bed and takes out the food. He puts the Coke on the night table and scoops up the ice bag. He takes it into the bathroom, and she hears him empty it into the toilet. He comes back out and sits on the edge of the made bed.

He asks her how she's feeling, and she tells him she's feeling about as good as she looks. He tells her that he'll get more ice when she's finished eating. She's sitting on the bed eating the hamburger with the wrapper spread out in her lap. He leans forward awkwardly and puts his hand on the side of her face. She says no, and pulls away.

The look on his face. It's not the distracted stare that seems to fix on a chair leg or the upper corner of the room where the two walls and the ceiling meet. That always comes before the scary fights. It's not the restless lip-biting face that comes after the fights and makes it look like he's trying to beat up on himself inside. It's his doctor look. This is the look he'll give someday during patient interviews when confronted with a case that, although not foreign to him, he only knows from books. Something not altogether rare, but still something of an academic curiosity.

He stands up and goes to the window, leaving a mussed imprint on the bed. It's nearly dark outside now. He looks through the blinds and tells Kelly that he's going downstairs to the ice machine. He takes the blue plastic container from next to the television, and opens the door just far enough for his body to fit through. He slips out as if he's trying to let as little light as possible onto the parking lot.

She gets off the bed, collects the trash from dinner, and drops it into the tiny can. She goes over to the other bed and pulls the spread taut to erase Scott's mark.

She opens the anatomy text that's on the table next to the bed. Scott has been studying from it for most of the day. She's watched him sit with this book open in front of him, mouthing words to himself, and touching his hand to the part of his body connected to the words.

She looks through the book, through the drawings of people that look like they've been skinned, red and white sinews stretched over their bones. She thinks of the Visible Man. His insides came in pieces, all of which fit into his clear plastic frame. The Visible Man stood on the science teacher's desk, facing the class. His organs were color-coded.

In bed, Scott will tell her the names of the parts of her body, pressing against them with two fingers under the covers, reciting the Latin words for muscles and bones. She doesn't remember many of the names.

They gave her a talk about violence when she started at work. They told her not to shy away from a physical confrontation when the kids get violent. If your anger becomes real, they said, you shouldn't be working here. But a show of anger is all these children respond to. So don't be afraid.

There's one eight-year old that was diagnosed as homicidal. They told her this her first day, and she thought to herself, great, I'm babysitting a killer. And the killer was a bed wetter as well. He was bad in the mornings, and she had had to restrain him twice. Not even nine o'clock, and she was lying on the cold floor embracing a urine-soaked eight-year-old.

The door opens and Scott comes back into the room. He goes into the bathroom and she hears him shuffling around the ice from the bucket. He comes back out, walks around her bed and leaves the fresh bag of ice on the night table.

He doesn't talk very much anymore. Either he's angry with her --like before the fights-- and sits with the distant stare in his eyes saying nothing, or he's angry with himself, so he probably thinks there's nothing he can say. And even when things are good, he's quiet for some other reason.

But she likes the way he doesn't say anything when they make love, like no words could mean anything at that moment. She likes the sound of the two of them against the sheets, and the muffled noises from the street. They make her feel like the two of them live in a world no one else can get at. She forgets about the times like now. It's as if she leaves them in another place. For as long as it lasts, all the problems go away. It's another kind of world, and words from Scott's book have nothing to do with their bodies anymore.

He takes the book from the table and brings it around to the undisturbed bed. He lies down, leaning back against the headboard with his legs crossed at the ankles. He opens the book. His lips move while he reads.

The overnights at work. Before they turn out the lights, she locks the front and back doors of the house where they keep the kids. The doors are locked on the inside as well as the outside. She sleeps in a small bed with a thin mattress. All of them sleep on the second floor of the house. The house is set up as if a family had once lived there, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms on the second floor. The doors between the rooms have all been removed so the second floor is like one big room with a lot of corners and walls.

One night she awoke to hear loud whispers and the jerking creak of one of the small metal-framed beds. Moving through the maze of walls and doorways, she followed the sounds until she came to the area furthest away from where she slept. She saw the silhouette of thin limbs wrenching and tugging at each other on top of a bed near the window. She moved through the long room, in and out of the tangle of beds and sleeping children until she could reach the small figure straddling the child on the bed. As she wrapped her arms around the child's torso from behind, his arms reached back to her head, taking hold of her hair. She pulled the boy away from the bed and then the two of them tumbled together onto the floor. She jerked the child from side to side trying to break the hold he had on her. When she felt a hand give way she grabbed its wrist with her hand and then took the other hand when it tried to establish a new hold on her clothes. The child was kicking, his heels slamming her shins. She wrapped her legs over him, crossing her ankles. The child tried to break her hold with intermittent bursts of force. She lay on the floor, alternately whispering in his ear to try to calm him and calling out for another counselor to help.

Scott begins to shift uncomfortably on the opposite bed. He stands up from the bed, leaving behind a more pronounced impression than before. He sits down between her and the television and looks as though he's come to a decision. He brushes back some strands of hair from her face, but she puts up a hand to make him stop. We've been through hell today, he says. He asks if she's tired.

She says yes, she guesses she is. Scott says they should get ready for bed. She sits up and extends a leg over the side of the bed, feeling for the floor. When both feet have found it, she sits on the edge, surrounding herself with the loose bed spread, blankets and sheets.

In the bathroom, she runs the water in the sink and looks at the damage. She covers the right side of her face, and thinks that she looks okay. But with the other hand over the other side, she looks like something from hell. Around the iris her eye is red with blood. She picks up the hairbrush from her purse and tries the trick again, one side then the other. She makes herself normal with the right hand. She brushes through her hair on the good side until it falls against her face in the familiar way. Then she changes faces. With the left hand over her normal side, she uses the right hand to pull back the hair and stretch the skin around her eye until she can hardly see through it. She can feel the eye glow with pain. She presses her tongue against the cut on the inside of her mouth. She does it again, then again, and once more before turning out the light.

She goes back out into the room. Scott's clothes are across her bed, and the suitcase is opened at its foot. The television is on. Scott is in boxer shorts, standing at the window, closing the blinds. She sees the motel sign disappear between the turning slats.

He turns to the undisturbed bed. He yanks at the spread with a tight fist. One of the pillows tumbles onto the floor. With the bed spread torn away, she can see the pale-red blanket pulled tightly over the mattress like a skin. Scott slides his hand under the blanket at the top and pulls it evenly away to reveal the bleached white sheets.

She undoes the knot in the drawstring of her sweat pants, and lets them fall down. She uses one foot to free the other, then lays the pants across her bed.

She turns to the other bed and guides herself carefully between the sheets. Scott asks her if she wants him to turn off the television. She asks him to leave it on.

Scott climbs in the bed. She's facing away, towards the bathroom. She can feel the warmth of Scott's body as it presses against hers. She can feel his breath on the back of her neck. His arms slide around her. He tells her that he knows as well as she does how insane everything has been, but that he also knows it's going to change. Starting now, he says, it's going to change.

She can't believe what he's saying, because she knows what it's like to work with the idea of changing anything. She knows when all they'll let you do is restrain a violent kid, you'll find a way to make that hurt. You'll grab at his wrists twice as hard as would be needed to keep him from breaking away. You'll bring him to the floor so he hits on his shoulder blades, and you'll pull his arms across him so he'll feel it in the sockets.

She can see her face in the base of the brass lamp fastened to the table between the beds. She tries to pick out the bruises on the shrunken reflection, but the image is too distorted by the shape of the lamp. She reaches out and turns it off, then lets herself fall into the rhythm of Scott's breathing.

When she was a child, she broke a leg ice skating alone across the pond in the woods behind the apartments. After falling, she lay on the ice, looking through the branches of the bare trees to the sky. At first she heard nothing but the wind blowing against the hood of her coat and a dog barking somewhere far away. When she began to scream, the noise sounded so unnatural that she couldn't believe it came from her. It echoed to fill the gaps when she ran out of breath, then seemed to build on itself and take on a life of its own. That evening, she lay in her bed, fastened by the weight of a large cast. She thought of what the doctor told her about the way bones heal, and tried to imagine the pain as the two pieces of her leg welding together again. The air was warm and thick. Light came under the door and she could hear her parents' voices from another room. In the warmth of her room, with the sound of the vaporizer close to her, she thought of her scream. She imagined that it hadn't dissolved when she was found sobbing on the ice, unable to move or cry out, but that it had found a way to grow unfettered, and was still out there in the darkness flying weightlessly from the pond.