It’s pouring, so I decide to take a walk. Think maybe a pack or two or twenty of tars will clear my fog-machine mind.
I slip into my rubber knee-high boots, and pull on my raincoat with the smiley-faced whales on the inside liner. I snag my blue knit sailor’s cap from my bag, an old seaman’s beanie that’s slowly fusing to my hair from overwear. I’ve been sporting this damn thing all winter, cock-eyed and sly, and I pop the collar of my shirts and coats like some secret-agent mystery man. Man-o, I’m so cool, I make ice jealous.
I pull my hood up, and with my head down and my mitts in my pockets, I stalk into the cold foggy face of spring streets, my witness the empty sky. As I walk, I count in my mind the one hundred and ninety-four steps up the hill and around the corner to where I can pop off the road and down into the soggy-bottomed woods, where I know Dad or my wee brother, Miles, won’t drive or bike by me and throw a conniption fit.
My boots slurp through the melt and muck on the trail and I blaze like a smoldering smokestack. I think about everything, I think about Eve. I think about nothing, I think about Eve. I realize I still have her digits memorized from when we were tiny tykes and I wonder if I could ever just call. Just pick up my phone and dial. Talk for hours about nothing, like we used to.
I drag and think about sailors. Beat sailors on big, old, rusty boats that catch slick fish with thick-roped nets that require endless mending. I imagine I look like a sailor. I hold my lit tar between my lips, and inhale like the Marlboro Man, squinting as the smoke singes my eyes and fills the corners of my hood. I rub together my cold red mitts and think of the sailors rubbing together their cold red mitts just before tying massive, twined knots of figure eights and loops and twists, the freezing, pelting rain ricocheting off their rubber hats. I think I would make a kill sailor. That, or a cowboy.
I mull over the wee tykes in Ms. Hayes’s freshie English class and how in school, I’m role-model teacher’s assistant and I strut my stuff, presenting well the myth I know who I am. The cast of characters is the same as it was in my day; there’s the class badrat, pulling a ’tude and talking back to earn the only attention she’s ever gonna get; the jester, first to the punch so that his crank attendance and slipping grades aren’t; the shy betty crushing on me, just as hard as I do on Ms. Hayes; and the class flap-Jack, shouting come-ons to me in mezzo-soprano tones to prove he’s a big boy in front of his little buds.
I know if any of these wee-Jacks could see me now, they’d start dragging tars—if they haven’t already. I remember. That was me. Though don’t get me wrong—99.9 percent of me is massive repulsed by the whole crank deal and I hope they never get the nic itch. I’ve seen the pictures of blackened lungs, the videos of skin-and-bone elders, wheezing through an artificial larynx. Dr. Mom made sure her three children were sufficiently tobacco-traumatized as kids—that is, before she played out her vanishing act, in her wake instructing us in the mysterious merits of abandoning your brood.
All I know is, I hate myself for smoking so much. And if I ever start kissing anyone again I’ll quit in an instant. This I know is truth.
Over the river and through the woods, I drag my way through four sticks and at last schlep it across the old, potholed Murphy Farm field and back onto our street. As I’m loping numbly down the hill, Dad comes rumbling up in his truck and thank geezuschrist I’m not still dragging a tar. I pop a piece of gum in my mouth and go to the window.
“Louie, I haven’t seen you in days,” he says, voice husky from a long day bossing Jacks around in the hospital. His stubble is a gritty shadow on his face and the lines around his eyes are deep, tinted purple. “You okay?” He’s a trauma surgeon in the ER and works crazy hours, and whenever he asks me if I’m okay, I have the feeling he’d rather be taking my blood pressure or white blood cell count than actually talking about how I feel.
I nod. “Swell.”
He sighs. “I’m off to the market. Emergency cookies and milk run for your brother’s Earth Scouts in Technology meeting tomorrow.” I roll my eyes and he smiles. “Wanna come, stranger? Be good to catch up.”
I imagine us driving into the fog, him rambling about work or my elderly Oma’s innumerable health concerns, or Miles, my younger, genius brother-Jack, and his enormous goddamn brain. Or worse, the airwaves will fall dead and we’ll cut a wheel in silence, the awkward hush choking our throats, words, like gas, combusted and lost, evaporating and clogging the fragile crank ozone. The ice caps will melt and polar bears’ll slip tragically through sharp, gaping cracks into the arctic sea …
“Louie?”
I snap into it. “Oh. No. I’m beat.”
Y’know, to save the polar bears and all.
“You sure you’re okay?” he says, thick eyebrows stern across his forehead. “You’re not high, are you?” And I just laugh, walk away. He puts the truck in gear and waves, gunning the gas as I turn to watch his taillights glow smaller and smaller still.
A shivering shambles, I climb the back stairs and stomp onto the porch. I stayed out in the cold rain way too long and I’m a soaking-wet frigid village idiot. Popsicle in Boots. I tromp upstairs and twist shower knobs and pull the sopping layers of fabric from my red-turning-blue skin and shake my arms and pump my fists to warm my ice-cube core.
Warning: Frost Heave.
The water hits my face, chest, arms, in a singeing blast, so hot it feels cold. Glacial streams run from freezing cords of hair plastered down my back and my toes are red-hot roots screaming mercy. My chattering subsides and I’m no longer thaw, I’m simmer. I boil and take mouthfuls of steaming water that warm my ice-cube teeth. My bangs stick in hot slices to my forehead. And my skin tingles back to life.
I close my eyes and think of what a strange day it’s been, what a strange world it always is. And then, because it can’t be helped, I’m on the trail of Evelyn Brooks like hounds on a fox. So heartbreaking with that smudge of black eyeliner shadowing her golden, freckled face. And her hand on my wrist. And the heat it left, and how warm it was.
My fingers travel over hip bone ridges, lower stomach, and down between my thighs. Pink streams of period wash down me, swirling about my feet, and Eve is checking her makeup in the mirror, peeking at me from the corner of her eye, a small smile curling the edges of her full strawberry lips. I wanna tell her how stunning she is. Show her. Like this. Like this.
But she’s a moving target, going backward. She’s Ancient History.
But she’s right here, and I want to tell her. Like this.
And her mouth opens wide and she’s laughing, her pearly whites shining in a Cheshire cat grin. And then Nate Gray is loping eagerly in, a sneaky, slithering snake, pulling her by her waist, cackling head back, teeth bare. The door swings shut. And I’m a blank screen, dead air, white noise.
I open my eyes and am crushed. My hands fall to my water-streaming sides and I have the impulse to put my fist through the fogged-up glass of the shower door. The hot calm the contact would bring, the mess, the glass, the pain. It’s just a thought, passing like a storm cloud through my mind.
This kind of misery is the stuff suicide notes scrawled into shower-curtain mist are made of: “Too lonely. Drowned in inch of shampoo water. For best results, rinse, and repeat. I hereby leave my Zippo collection to Zoë Stone…”
I slouch against the tile and let the water hit my head and run over my ears in a loud streaming rush until I’m numb.