Triptych

She took a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and walked to the back of the house, trying unsuccessfully not to think about Will anymore. Angie checked the machine for messages as she started to undress. Half of her had been expecting him to call, but the other half knew he wouldn’t. Calling her would have been impulsive, and Will was not impulsive. He liked routine. Spontaneity was something for people in movies.

Angie turned on the shower, staring at her reflection in the mirror as she took off her clothes. She could not look at her body without thinking of Will’s. She’d had her share of abuse at the hands of various foster parents and stepfathers, but all of her scars were on the inside. Unlike Will, she did not have the scar down her face, the cigarette burns and gashes where drunken bullies had decided to take out their anger on a defenseless child. She didn’t have a jagged scar ripping up her leg where an open fracture had led to six operations. Neither did she have the still-pink line slicing up her forearm where a razor blade had opened the flesh, draining her blood and nearly costing her life.

The first time they had met was at the Atlanta Children’s Home, which for all intents and purposes was an orphanage. The state tried to place the kids with foster families, but more often than not they came back with new bruises, new stories to tell. Ms. Fla

Angie always told people that her parents had died when she was a child, but the truth was she had no idea who her father was and her mother, Deidre Polaski, was currently a vegetable living in a state home. Speed had been Deidre’s drug of choice, and an overdose had finally put her into an irreversible coma. Angie had been eleven when she found Deidre in the bathroom, slumped over the toilet, the needle still in her arm. She had stayed with her mother for two days, not eating, barely sleeping. Sometime around midnight on the second day, one of her mothers suppliers had come by. He had raped Angie before calling an ambulance to come get her mother.

She got into the shower, let the water cascade down on her and wash off some of the day’s grime.

Rusty.

That was his name.

“I’ll kill you if you tell anyone,” he had warned, his hand wrapped around her throat so tight that she could barely breathe. His pants were still down at his knees, and she remembered looking at his flaccid penis, the curly, dark hairs sprouting along his thighs. “I’ll find you and kill you.”

He wasn’t the first. By that time, Angie was already sexually experienced thanks to a never-ending line of her mother’s boyfriends. Some had been nice, but others had been cruel, menacing animals who had doped up Angie’s mother just so they could get at her girl. In all honesty, by the time Angie reached Ms. Fla

Will’s story wasn’t exactly the same but it was close enough. His body served as a map to pain, whether it was the long, thin scars on his back where the skin had been rent by a whip or the rough patch of flesh on his thigh where they had made a graft to close the electrical burns. His right hand had been crushed twice, his left leg broken in three places. He had once been punched in the face so hard and so repeatedly that his upper lip had split open like a peeled banana. Every time Angie kissed him, she felt the scar against her lips and was reminded of what he’d been through.

That was the one thing about the older kids at the orphanage: they all had a similar history. They were all unwanted. They had all been damaged. The younger ones never stayed for long, but by around the age of six or seven, there was basically no hope that you’d ever be part of a family. For most of them, that was a good thing. They had seen what families were like and preferred the alternative. At least, most of them did.

Will never gave up, though. On visiting day, he’d stand at the mirror, carefully combing his hair, smoothing down his cowlick, trying to make himself look like the kind of kid you’d want to take home with you. She’d wanted to kick him in the teeth, to shake him hard and explain that he wasn’t ever going to be adopted, that no one would want him. One time, she had actually started to do this, but there was something in his expression, a kind of hopefulness mixed with the expectation of failure, that stopped her. Instead of punching him, she had guided him back to the mirror and helped him comb his hair.

Angie turned off the shower and wrapped herself in a towel. She smiled, letting herself remember the first time she had seen Will in the common area. He was eight years old with curly blond hair and a little cupid’s bow of a mouth. He’d always had his nose in a book. At first, Angie had assumed he was a nerd but she later figured out that Will was staring at the words, trying to get them to make sense. The irony was that he loved words, adored books and stories and anything else that might take him out of his surroundings. In a rare moment of candor, he had once told her that being in a library was like sitting down at a table laid with all his favorite foods but not being able to eat any of them. And he hated himself for it.

Even now, he would not accept that his dyslexia was anything but his own personal failure. No matter how much Angie prodded and even begged, he would not get help. By the time she met him, Will had learned all kinds of tricks to hide his problem and Angie doubted his teachers thought of him as anything but slow. His current job was no different. He used colored folders so that he could find cases by sight, and different types of paper so that he could locate them by texture.

In school, Angie was the one who wrote out his term papers, taking dictation on subjects she had no desire to understand. She was the one who had to hear his tape recorder going night after night as he listened to books, memorizing whole passages so that he could contribute in class the next day. By graduation, he had worked ten times as hard as anyone else and still barely passed by the skin of his teeth. And then he went to college.

Angie had never understood why all of this mattered so much to him. With his height and good looks, Will should have grown into the kind of heartbreaker that Angie was always ru

Not that sex had ever been an easy thing between them. God knew Will had the equipment-before she had gone on the pill, Angie’s diaphragm had been the size of a di