The night of the snowstorm, Sandra woke disoriented in an unfamiliar bed. The room felt too warm—stuffy, suffocating. She sat up, panic tightening her chest, blinking for a few moments until her eyes began to adjust, and she came back to her life—February, Indiana, Kevin. This was his apartment. He slept beside her, mouth open, breathing heavily. Sandra hadn’t yet slept beside him enough to know whether he was having a nightmare. Does he always breathe like that? She slid out of the covers, careful not to wake him, and crept out of the bedroom. Kevin’s apartment was darker than her own; she held her arms straight out in front of her and felt the walls for guidance. She would go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea and sit there until the anxiety eased its grip and she could sleep again.
Crossing the living room, her bare foot smacked against something hard, and there was a sickening snap of wood. Clutching her throbbing toes tightly in her hand, she stood on one leg like a flamingo, like the stretch they did in high school when she was on the track team. It was supposed to stretch your quads. Sandra hadn’t stretched her quads in months. Winters in Indiana were so brutally cold that she hadn’t run, not once, not a single step since the first snowfall back in November. Trekking to the gym was too much of a hassle, and afterwards she’d have to trudge through the snow to her car, sweat freezing on her skin beneath layers of shirts and a scarf and marshmallow coat, chilling her in a clammy way like the flu.
Cursing herself, Clumsy, clumsy, Sandra glanced back, and there was Kevin’s guitar, shipwrecked in the middle of the living room carpet like a piece of driftwood, broken.
•••••••
She first met Kevin a few weeks ago, at the bagel shop across the street from the office complex where he worked as an accountant, she as a paralegal. They both went to the bagel shop occasionally for lunch, but likely would have continued not noticing one another had the waitress not mistakenly switched their sandwich orders. Sandra hadn’t even been aware of the mix-up. She stared blankly out the window at the gray clouds threatening snow, nearly halfway through eating Kevin’s entire turkey-bacon-tomato club, when he hesitantly approached her, holding out a ham-and-swiss like an apology. “Excuse me, miss? I think this is your sandwich.”
Sandra was so embarrassed she waved him off. “Keep it—it’s yours,” she said. He remained awkwardly standing there beside her, and she realized he wanted his sandwich, not hers. Her anxiety pooled with exasperation. Really! Can’t he just go ask them to make him a new one? With a flimsy plastic butter knife, she tried cutting away the part she’d eaten, sawing futilely at the thick bagel.
“It’s okay,” he said finally. “I mean, can I have yours?”
“Sure,” Sandra said, relieved. “It’s ham and cheese.”
“Sounds good.” He paused, and Sandra turned back to the window, wondering if he sensed her embarrassment, or if maybe her cheeks still looked flushed from the cold outside. “Is anyone sitting here?” he asked.
“No,” Sandra said, moving her purse to make more room. He sat at the stool next to her, his long legs touching the floor under the counter. Looking back on it later, she would wonder if that was the moment some part of her had recognized his resemblance to Stephen, or if that recognition had come even earlier—if some part of her had seen it at first glance, that first “Excuse me,” and she had internally pushed it away, chosen to pretend not to see.
•••••••
For their first date, Kevin took Sandra to the Indianapolis Museum of Art to see a special Basquiat exhibit. The paintings reminded Sandra of graffiti art, all bright colors and bold, shaky lines. Kevin put his arm around her as they stood in front of a painting of a crazed angel, its wings protruding erratically from its tilted body. Sandra liked the weight of Kevin’s arm across her shoulders. She felt like a helium balloon, and he was her tether to the earth. The angel’s halo looked sharp, pointy, as if made from barbed wire.
Years ago, Stephen had taken Sandra to the zoo and first put his arm around her in front of the giraffe exhibit. When she breathed in, he smelled like laundry detergent. Even in the sticky summer heat, Sandra had liked the weight of Stephen’s arm across her shoulders. She liked the way he squeezed his eyes shut when he laughed, which made evoking his laughter feel wonderful, an accomplishment. And she liked how tall he was—six foot two, a full five inches taller than she. He could put his arm around her shoulders and make her feel small beneath its heaviness, the hairs on his arm tickling the back of her neck. I’ll have to tilt my face up to kiss him, she had thought.
Standing there in front of the Basquiat angel, Sandra tilted up her face and pressed her lips against Kevin’s. When she inhaled, he smelled like the laundry detergent Stephen had used. Kevin kissed her readily, one hand against the small of her back, pressing her to him. After a moment, Sandra pulled away. They wandered through the rest of the exhibit. At the exit, a sign informed them that Basquiat was twenty-seven when he died, and that age, twenty-seven—Stephen’s age—settled painfully in Sandra’s gut as if she had swallowed a rock.
It was not that night but a couple nights later that Kevin told Sandra about the windmills in his hometown. They were nestled together in his bed after sleeping together for the first time. She lay with her head on his bare chest and her feet touching his, listening as he described the way the windmills stretched across the cornfields, smooth white towers with gently rotating blades.
“That sounds like science fiction,” Sandra said. “Like a Ray Bradbury story.”
“No, no—not like that.” Kevin sat up a little, palmed Sandra’s hair with his large hand. “It’s kind of beautiful, actually.” He told her how, in autumn, the tall stalks of corn rippled beneath the windmills like something alive, laughing. Sandra closed her eyes and tried to picture it. Everything stirred by the same gentle force. She tipped her head back and looked at Kevin’s face, or what she could see of it from that angle: sharp nose, long eyelashes, swipe of stubble along his jaw. Not a Basquiat painting; more like a Picasso.
Back in high school, she had told her best friend, Diana, that she liked Stephen, really liked him, because she could lie like this with her face pressed against his sweaty chest, very close to his armpit, and not want to move.
“You should take me there,” she said to Kevin. “To the windmills.” For a moment Kevin didn’t respond. Sandra wondered if he hadn’t heard her, or if maybe she crossed some line without realizing it. Should she clarify, retract, amend? She wasn’t asking him to take her home to his family; she didn’t mean that. It was much too soon for that. She just wanted to see the windmills.
But then Kevin looked down at her and smiled. “When the weather clears, we’ll go.”
Sandra ran her fingers down his arm and softly squeezed his hand, unsure whether to believe him. Thinking maybe she had spoken too soon, maybe the windmills should be left as something he described to her, something she could dream about.
•••••••
She and Stephen had dated for eleven months in high school. He was her first boyfriend. Tall and lank limbed, he walked through the halls bobbing his head, as if listening to his own personal soundtrack. She thought he was unbearably sophisticated because he liked post-Impressionist art and European techno music. He could play nearly any corny pop song on the acoustic guitar, making it sound fresh, making her love it anew. For her eighteenth birthday he gave her a print of Starry Night, her favorite painting. He was thoughtful and self-assured, and there was a time she loved him fully, fiercely, like a treasured part of herself.
And now she had to go home for his funeral. On WebMD, a “pulmonary embolism” was explained as a blood clot forming and traveling to your lungs, causing death. Paralysis greatly increased one’s risk for a pulmonary embolism, the article explained. Blood pooled when muscles were not used frequently enough.
Sandra wished she hadn’t looked it up. She couldn’t shake the image of Stephen gasping for breath, suffocating on his own blood.
•••••••
Early in the morning she jolted awake, skin clammy, stomach unsettled.
Kevin stirred. “Sandra? You okay?”
“Bad dream,” she said. It had been a long time since she’d dreamt of Stephen, but it hadn’t surprised her when he came strolling toward her with his familiar loping walk and wide smile. He was shirtless, his skin so translucent she could see the blue veins beneath. She could see his heart, pulsing and very red, throbbing like a wound.
She had not told Kevin about Stephen. There was no reason to—not yet. Possibly not ever. Why did he need to know? She thought of the windmills and was grateful that she had never seen them. She was not ready. Once she saw them in real life, she would lose her imaginings of what they might have been.
Kevin pulled her closer, his arm draped heavily around her waist, his breathing loud and steady against her ear. Eventually she fell asleep again. They spent the rest of the morning curled against each other under blankets. Later, Kevin made peanut butter toast and hot chocolate, and he and Sandra perched on the bedroom windowsill and ate, watching the swirling currents of snow. Mounds of white obscured the streets and heaped the boughs of the trees, more snow floating down and down. If this kept up, maybe her flight would be canceled, and the decision she had agonized over for weeks—go or not go?—would be determined instead by Mother Nature. Sandra thought about the windmills and imagined them spinning wildly in the icy wind. Or maybe their blades would be eerily immobile, frozen.
“What are you thinking about?” Kevin asked.
“Oh, nothing.” Sandra reached for the TV remote. “Okay if I check the news?”
“Sure,” Kevin said, carrying their plates and mugs to the kitchen.
Back in college, Sandra began regularly watching the news to get lost in problems bigger than her own. Gradually something shifted; the news became a source of comfort, something she leaned on to feel stable. Anything could happen, yes, but the world would keep right on going, the same as always. She preferred the local news because the evening anchorwoman had a sweetly awful perm and liked to say, “Well, isn’t that nice” in the same tone of voice Sandra’s mother would use.
The morning anchorwoman did not have a perm; her hair looked chemically straightened, and her smile was sharp edged, a weapon. The weatherman warned of ice storms as red letters spelling out STORM WATCH flashed across the top of the screen. He explained that such storms were dangerous because the ice could bring down power lines. Sandra breathed in and out, anxiety spiderwebbing outward from her chest, down her arms, settling in her stomach like heavy stones. She found Kevin in the kitchen, rinsing toast crumbs off their breakfast plates.
“What if the electricity goes out?” Sandra asked.
Kevin put his arm across her shoulders; his wrist bled water through her shirt. “Don’t worry, baby, I’ll keep you warm.” He winked. Sandra laughed but shrank away, gazing out the window at the swirls of snow. Kevin busied himself opening kitchen cabinets. “Really, though, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got candles here somewhere.”
“I think maybe I should leave soon,” Sandra said. “Before it gets dark.”
“You shouldn’t go out in weather like this. Stay here tonight.”
“I can’t.”
“Getting bored of me already?”
“No, it’s not like that.” Sandra crossed her arms, feeling her ribs beneath her fingers. “I have a flight to catch tomorrow. I need to pack.”
“A flight? Where?”
“Home.”
“As in California?”
“Yeah. Just for a couple days.”
Kevin studied her, and Sandra could see the questions turning in his mind. She prepared herself to stay composed when he asked why. She would calmly say, “A memorial service. A friend of mine passed away.” She would not cry. She would act like an adult and deal with it because she was an adult now, twenty-six years old, and death was something adults had to deal with.
Kevin had just one question. “Do you need someone to drive you to the airport?”
And so, Sandra stayed over again.
And that was how she found herself crouching at three in the morning in the darkness of Kevin’s living room, running her thumb back and forth over the snapped neck of his acoustic guitar. She crouched there, feeling the break, the bent strings, the permanence of her misstep. Then she picked up the guitar, cradling it carefully against her body, and stashed it in the hall closet, behind a curtain of coats and umbrellas and a plastic sled, where she hoped Kevin would not find it for a while. At least not until she was safely aboard her flight. For the first time, she felt sure that she would go.
•••••••
Stephen had been paralyzed at a party eight years before. December 17, Robbie Zwick’s house, a hazy-skied California night absent of stars. In the ensuing years, Sandra would examine and re-examine her memory of that night, trying to find the exact moment the party had veered off the path leading to normal and expected outcomes (cheap beer spilled on her shoes; a dull hangover; a coffee date with her best friend Diana the next morning to dissect every diminutive outfit and conversation) and had rerouted itself toward nightmare. Again and again, the moment that stuck in her memory was this: someone had the idea to go skinny-dipping. The moment that changed everything.
Afterward, nobody except for Sandra remembered whose idea it had been. Sandra remembered, because it had been her idea.
Robbie Zwick lived in the Keys, a ritzy neighborhood with a wide mouth that opened directly onto the driftwood-studded sand of the beach. The houses were a blank-faced assembly line of white stucco walls and terra-cotta roofs. Twin rows of palm trees arched their shaggy fronds over the clean-swept sidewalks. Robbie’s house had been established as a party spot in high school. His parents, both surgeons, were often working late or out of town, leaving Robbie to fend for himself with their platinum credit card and his fake ID. They had a six-CD stereo, an ornately tiled pool and Jacuzzi tub surrounded by a large swath of smooth wooden deck, and neighbors who never called the police to complain about the noise. Word had traveled quickly that a reunion party was going down at Robbie’s the Friday before Christmas, when everyone would be home from college for winter break.
Sandra was a sophomore at Purdue. As much as she loved the independence of college life, she was happy to have a break from the cold weather, the ice scrapers and chapped hands and numb lips, the vast expanse of eerie, frozen farmland that reminded her of some post-apocalyptic landscape. She was happy to be back in her California hometown, where everyone wore T-shirts and shorts, where you could skinny-dip even in winter. A Kanye song thumped from the stereo, and a dance floor was slowly forming over by the barbeque grill, under the potted palms. Sandra bobbed her head a little to the beat, taking sips from her red plastic cup, feeling glad that she had come. Something’s going to happen. She could feel it.
She gazed around the pool deck, enjoying the cloudy film settling over her thoughts. Stephen was taller than she remembered, and he had grown out his hair a little bit, and she wanted to flirt with him and maybe make out with him later in a dark corner of Robbie Zwick’s house. She was thinking about the first time they’d had sex, in the back seat of his mom’s car parked at Fisherman’s Point, looking out at the ocean. Her prom dress hiked up around her ribcage. The way he groaned her name when he came, then collapsed on top of her and kissed her hair. She was thinking all of this, downing the last of her third rum and Coke, feeling Stephen’s eyes on her from across the pool deck as she half listened to Siggy Taylor speculate about Josephine Clerice’s nose job, the stereo blasting Justin Timberlake, her best friend Diana grinding with Matt Hayward, who had gone away to Dartmouth and come back preppy chic, which was now “in.” Thinking all of this, Sandra said to no one and everyone, “Let’s go skinny-dipping!” and peeled off her T-shirt in one fluid motion, as if she was born to play this role in the event, as if everything were predestined.
She thought back to that moment often in later years, trying to sponge away the guilt; it had felt fated, that moment. Because the reality was, Sandra hated pools and she hated swimming and she hated her bony hips and A-cup boobs. She had never been skinny-dipping in her life.
Then other people were taking off their clothes and running out onto the pool deck, pushing each other in. Sandra eggbeatered in the deep end, the water not as warm as she had expected, goosebumps rising on her breasts and arms. A group of boys splashed each other, and water got in her eyes. There was shouting, and laughter, and then it was as if everything narrowed, a camera lens focusing, zooming in, a beat, two beats of silence, and then screams and panic erupting from the shallow end.
A body, floating there.
Stephen’s hair, newly grown out.
•••••••
In the morning the sky felt heavy, as if the air itself were thicker. Kevin’s Jeep was a bread loaf of snow. He opened the passenger door for Sandra and cleared off the snow while she sat in the frozen leather seat, trying to think of the right words to tell him about his guitar.
She couldn’t come up with anything.
They were mostly quiet on the drive to Sandra’s apartment for her suitcase, and then the thirty minutes to the airport, listening to the radio broadcasters warn of icy roads. Kevin drove slowly, staring hard at the road through the blur of windshield wipers. The snow kept falling. At the airport, Sandra gave Kevin a goodbye hug and fled into the security line, digging in her purse for her wallet so as not to have to watch him walk away. He’d said he would pick her up when she returned, but Sandra felt sure he would find his guitar in the next three days, and everything would fall to nothing. She imagined Kevin bringing the broken guitar with him to the airport. He would wait for her in baggage claim, holding it by the bent neck, and when she came out with the stream of weary passengers, he would thrust the guitar at her, an accusation.
Why hadn’t she woken him and told him? Why hadn’t she told him this morning? She could call him, but she told herself it was the type of thing better done in person. On the plane, waiting to take off, she closed her eyes and imagined driving home with him from the airport, asking him to come inside her apartment, pressing the length of her body against his as she turned the key in the lock. “I’m so sorry,” she would murmur. “I broke your guitar.” Maybe he wouldn’t care. Maybe they would make love sweetly, gently, the way her virgin self had imagined it would always be.
•••••••
In high school, Sandra had been a middle-distance runner. The half mile was her race. It was the least glamorous of all the running events, but it was the only race Sandra was decent at; the quarter mile was too fast, and the full mile was too long. So, she did the half mile, and she even won a gold medal at the county championships when she was a junior and had that one shining tremendous race when her lungs didn’t flare up and her legs didn’t ache, as if weights that had been tied to her ankles for years were suddenly gone. She flew around the springy rubber track like a runner in a movie, with the music crescendoing in the background and triumphant cymbals crashing as she broke the tape at the finish line. That race lasted two minutes and eighteen seconds. It was the only time in her life she felt truly good at something.
Stephen had been on the track team, too; that’s how they met. He made running look effortless. He floated around the track, and at the end of the race he was all smiles and strength, jogging back to cheer on his teammates while everyone else who finished after him was doubled over, hands on knees, gasping for breath.
“When I think of Stephen, it is that memory I find myself returning to most,” Sandra said at the funeral, shifting her weight in her modest black shoes with the buckles that pinched, shoes she hadn’t worn since her first job interview after graduating college. She thought suddenly of the shoes she had worn to prom, a sparkly silver heel with bows at the toes, the way Stephen had tenderly slipped them off her feet that night at Fisherman’s Point in the back seat of his mom’s car. She swallowed, tried to steady her breathing. Ever since she’d gotten off the plane, her breathing had felt shallow, as if she could not get enough air. She leaned into the cold wooden lectern and continued into the microphone. “When I think of Stephen, I picture him just after a race, radiant, waving to us in the bleachers. That is the way I want to remember him.”
What she didn’t say was that at times she still felt like she was running after him, or running away from him, or maybe she was bent over on the sidelines, lungs clawing for breath, unable to keep going.
•••••••
Kevin picked her up from the airport. She felt relief as she walked to his familiar Jeep parked unevenly against the curb—relief that he was there waiting for her, or maybe just that her real, present-tense life was waiting for her. Kevin got out to help her load her suitcase into the back. He gave her a big hug.
“Hi,” she said, hugging him back.
“I missed you,” he said.
Driving home, they didn’t talk much. The engine hummed loudly, and his hand brushed against her knee when he reached for the gearshift. Sandra thought he probably hadn’t found his guitar yet. She leaned back in her seat and gazed out the window at the light fading from the sky and snow. Kevin passed the turnoff to her apartment, then the turnoff to his apartment, and kept driving.
Sandra sat up. “Where are you going?”
“Taking you to the windmills,” Kevin said.
They drove out onto Highway 52, slicing through the silent cornfields. It was dark by the time they reached Benton County. Sandra couldn’t see the windmills, only their blinking red lights warning airplanes. It was both beautiful and eerie, the sea of red dots in the blackness. Sandra felt the confession rising within her.
Kevin, I have to tell you something.
It’s broken.
It’s my fault.
In the moment before Sandra spoke and everything came spilling out—the memorial service, skinny-dipping, the guilt she still lugged around like a heavy suitcase—she thought of her first date with Stephen. It was early August, heat rising from the cement in thick waves, and more than once Sandra escaped to the bathroom to splash water on her face and flap her arms vigorously, worried about the sweat conquering swaths of fabric below her armpits. Stephen’s armpits seemed impossibly dry. He and Sandra paused in front of the giraffe enclosure. Most of the animals were out of sight in their cages, having retreated to shady patches beneath the bushes or submerged themselves in pools of water, but the giraffes were braving the sunshine, nibbling at the leafy branches of the eucalyptus trees. One of them turned, ears twitching in the faint hint of a breeze, and that’s when Sandra noticed.
“Look!” she said, pointing. “Its neck—look!”
“Whoa,” Stephen said.
The giraffe’s neck was crooked, L-shaped, extending straight up from its body before making two sharp turns and rising to its head. It looked like the giraffe had swallowed a boomerang.
“Do you think it hurts?” Sandra had asked.
“Probably,” Stephen said. Sandra flinched inwardly at his indifferent tone; perhaps Stephen noticed because he added, his voice softened, “But maybe not. Seems like he gets along fine.” And that was when Stephen first put his arm around her shoulders, squeezing her body gently against his.
Suddenly, Kevin veered the Jeep to the right. He and Sandra jostled in their seats as it bumped off the highway and onto the frozen dirt of the fields. Kevin steered toward the nearest windmill. Its red light flashed a steady rhythm—on and off, on and off. Like it was warning her to stay away.
Or maybe not. Maybe it was offering guidance, beckoning her forward.
Sandra took a deep, full breath and opened her mouth to speak.