I sit in the ladder-backed chair and listen to the burr of the phone, think of the other end ringing in the house among the trees where it’s three hours later. It’s more than a year since I’ve seen her.
“Where are you?” Callie asks.
“Los Angeles.”
“Why?”
I look out the window. The street is dark and slick. I didn’t expect the rain. A car has its window taped with plastic.
“I took a bus from Baltimore,” I say. “I wanted to be where you weren’t.”
The line is silent but for a crackling. I wonder how much she thinks about me. I wish I was drunk.
“What’s it like there?” she asks.
“Depends what you’re doing,” I say.
Latin music comes from an apartment opposite. I can see people through a frosted skylight, like a party, but nobody dances.
“I tried stunt riding,” I say. “They’d heard about me jumping cars. They had me jump on a horse from a building.” I wait for her to say something back but she doesn’t. “I told them horses aren’t built for that.”
The smell of dried pine wafts from the Christmas tree that grows in a pot beside me. It still has its decorations from last year, a silver bird and plastic bells.
“They wanted me to jump a convertible Buick on a skewbald pony,” I say.
“You need a decent horse for that,” she says.
I pick up a pencil, it feels cold against my fingers. “I’ve been giving midweek ladies’ riding lessons,” I say. “Some of them have expensive horses.” I make it sound better than it is. Every time I see a likely thoroughbred, I think of what Callie and I would make of it, how we’d school it over jumps, what we’d put in its mouth, a loose-ring snaffle or a soft rubber Pelham.
A woman walks along the street below me, her hair pinned up in a sort of nest. Her dress is flimsy for a rainy night. She has on what look like ballroom dancing shoes.
“The women here are different,” I say. “Sort of brassy.”
“Have you been with any?” she asks.
“Not yet.”
The shadows from car lights extend along the buildings and then fade as they pass the end of the street.
“Where do you stay?” she asks.
“An apartment in Hollywood.” I don’t tell her it’s “nightly and furnished,” how there isn’t a bed, just a vinyl chaise longue with a blanket and cushions. How they have big, uncomfortable buttons. I look at the unshaded lamp. The room makes me weary.
A dull noise breaks the quiet on the end of the phone. It sounds like a closing door.
“Are you alone?” I ask.
“Charlie Easterbrook’s come home,” she says.
“Is he the father or the son?”
“The father.”
I wonder if she’s still with Buddy Black, or if it’s Charlie Easterbrook now. It’s been more than a year that I’ve been with myself. I think about her all the time, as if she lives in a room inside my chest, a place I get my breath from.
“Do you miss me?” I say to the silence.
“You were the one who got on the bus,” she says.
I bite down on the end of the pencil, taste the wood on my teeth. “You don’t have to stay to be the one who’s left behind,” I say.
A group of men walks out of the apartment opposite. Black pants and white shirts, their hair slicked back from their faces, drunk enough to be happy.
“America’s lonely without you,” I say.
“You’ll get used to it,” she says.
The letter I wrote her is on the table beside me, the shape of my hand traced on the page when I didn’t know what to say. A picture of a banjo player is on the wall, his shoes and shirt made from stuck-on bits of glitter, his face made up to look like he’s smiling. How does she know what I’ll get used to?
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” I say. I look out the window, the street is empty and quiet. “I’m going back where I came from.”
“That’s a bit drastic,” she says, and then there is silence. She doesn’t ask me to stay. “Are you in touch with your father?”
“Not ’specially,” I say. There’s a chill in the room, I feel it in my feet. I close the window with my free hand.
“You never told me what happened to your mother either,” she says.
I press the side of my face to the cold closed window, against the street outside. I realise how little she knows about me, how little I’ve told her. “I watched her die,” I say. I don’t tell her how it happened. “It’s been eleven years.” I keep one ear tight to the receiver, the other against the glass as if listening for something else. The street is bare and still. My breathing sounds deliberate.
“If you’d planted a sapling there, it would be a tree by now,” says Callie.
“My father would have cut it down.”
I hear her breathing. “Don’t go forever,” she says.