Hick - Andrea Portes [67]
She lets out a little smile, faint, like she’s already halfway to purgatory and looking back at this world like a distant memory of a place where nothing works out and dreams turn into sawdust. She can’t wait to see the next place. she’s banking on giving the next place a whirl.
And then I see him, standing in the doorway, frozen, like a figure in a glass globe with the snow swirling around him and the world turned upside down but he’s the one thing staying put.
Beau.
Glenda makes a last stand with a low groan.
Then, with shaky fingers and arms that can barely move, she reaches out from purgatory, like trying to grab his throat or his chest or his heart or maybe just a piece of him. And damn but he reaches for her, too. It doesn’t last long. In fact, it goes by so quick that I can imagine myself, ten years from now, wondering if it happened at all or if it was just some blip in my imagination, some unbelievable piece of a puzzle, too impossible or weird or klutzy to have actually took place, these two, with bright-red hands, trying to grab the very last word before careening straight to hell or heaven or maybe just nothing how about that.
Gone.
Say good-bye to the Silly-Putty moment. it’s over and done with now but you still can’t believe it. You can look at it later and try to make it go different but might as well shout at the stars, might as well start a fight with the moon.
The floor is made of blood and whiskey and two bodies you can’t look at.
Silence.
“Well . . . I reckon they were in love.”
Beau says it, letting out a sigh. He sets himself down, takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.
“I got to Lovelock. I got to Lovelock before I turned back. I shoulda turned back sooner. I shoulda doubled back at Battle Mountain. I don’t know why I didn’t just turn back then . . . I just . . . I got to Lovelock.”
I stay put.
We stay like that for a long time.
Beau stares down at the red-soaked denim and starts to speak.
“They used to run tests downstate. Used to drop bombs and see what’d happen. My mom, the schoolteacher, taught second grade. She used to go watch, bring the whole class, behind a plate-glass window. She said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Like heaven. Man-made heaven in the sky. She had me and that was fine. Nothing wrong. Nothing really wrong there. Maybe I was big, but . . . that’s not really wrong per se. But then she had a baby girl.”
At this he starts to smile, but there’s something else in it, something salty or bittersweet, like the sound of something that never happened.
“She was born with her heart outside her body. You could reach out and grab it if you wanted.”
The air outside is still. The floor smells like copper.
“Sometimes, sometimes I wonder if maybe that should be an option for starters. You could go through your days with your heart outside your body. Live like that.”
Somewhere outside, the wind billows up through the trees. I lay back on the bed and stare up at the ceiling, thinking about man-made heaven in the sky, thinking about Glenda floating up in a bubble and how blood is brighter than bricks.
THIRTY–FIVE
Seems like I’ve spent my entire life poised somewhere between boredom and anxiety, staring out the window somewhere, in a quiet panic, listening to the wind and waiting for the other shoe to drop. What I didn’t know, what I know now, is that once it does, once the silence is broken by the thud of the black boot finally hitting the floor, there’s a kind of peace to it, a snap of relief, like the jolt out of bed before falling asleep.
it’s the tension of not knowing that gives fear free rein to run rampant and make up stories and make it worse and then even worse, spinning tales of failure and no hope and why even try. It lets it take over until fear is all there is and all there will ever be cause that’s what you’re used to. Just fear fear fear.
But once you know what it is you’ve been hiding from, what it is that’s been keeping you up at night, you almost want to laugh out loud that you spent your whole life dreading it. You might