Under the Rainbow

by Celia Laskey

  “Impossible riddles. Sometimes I think the only true relationship a person can have is with someone they’re not bound to in any way.”

  “So friendship,” says Harley, smiling.

  * * *

  • • •

  HARLEY HAS BEEN gone for twelve days. I go to a current events class, but I leave halfway through, after someone asks if ISIS can read her emails to her grandson. I try a “garden meditation social,” which might as well be called “garden wheelchair napping.” Shirley takes pity on me and joins me in watching Looking for Love, but she chatters the whole way through, so I can’t follow anything. I ask the staff if there are any new volunteers. They shake their heads and suggest I try to make some friends.

  My potted herbs are steadily declining. The basil is going brown at the stalk, and the squiggly white lines have become more numerous and pronounced. The sage leaves, once soft and fuzzy as rabbit ears, are now dry to the touch and look singed around the edges. The parsley has faded to a sickly yellow. I water the plants excessively, hoping all they need is moisture, and slide them across the windowsill in tandem with the sun. Then one day I discover a young grass-like weed next to the basil’s browning stalk. The herbs have never been outside—how the hell a weed found its way into the soil is beyond me. As I pinch the weed’s root between my fingernails, an image shoves into my mind: me, standing behind the locked front door, watching Jillian’s pale neck turn pink as she bent over the lawn. Did I really force her to stay out there all day? Did I refuse to give her even a glass of water? I release the weed from between my fingers, deciding to let it grow.

  A few days later, in an unprecedented act, I call Jillian instead of waiting for her to call me. I tell her to get Kyle on a conference line while wheeling myself up and down the short length of my room until the phone cord becomes taut.

  “Mom? Is everything okay?” Jillian asks.

  “I think I understand about the glaciers now.”

  “Are you having a stroke?” Kyle says.

  I wheel myself to the pot of herbs, which are now a desiccated purplish brown, and examine the weed. It’s gotten slightly taller and is still green, but droops from the top as if hanging its head. “I’m trying to say I’m sorry, if I wasn’t the mother I hoped I was. If I really did make you weed the whole lawn that day, or other things I’ve forgotten. And I know you two are probably sorry. I forgive you. Do you forgive me?”

  “You forgive us?” says Jillian. “For what?”

  “For putting me in this home. For abandoning me.”

  “This is just classic,” says Kyle.

  There’s a few long seconds of silence before Jillian softly says, “Are you dying?”

  “Not presently,” I say. I fill the watering can and shower the dead herbs with water, hoping the weed’s stubborn tenacity will ensure its survival. I’m probably the only gardener to hope for such a thing. “So? Do you accept my apology?”

  “I don’t really know what to say, Mom,” Jillian says.

  “Maybe it would help if we got together. You two could come visit. I know I don’t normally ask, but I’d really like to see you.”

  “So that’s why you apologized,” says Kyle. “Because you’re all alone and finally want us around.”

  A click on the other end.

  “Kyle?” I say.

  “I think he hung up, Mom,” says Jillian. “I’m really sorry, but I have to go, too. I’ll get back to you about the visit.”

  “You’re sorry?” I say into the emptiness of the dial tone. “You’re really sorry?”

  Ten Years Later

  Gabe

  Even in my most private fantasies, I never pictured myself marrying a man. The farthest I’d let myself imagine was a relationship, probably covert, but hopefully there’d be love. And yet somehow, at fifty years old, I’ve found myself looking out our bedroom window at a large white tent sitting in the field behind our house, while trying to force a pair of stupid silver cuff links through the holes of my brand-new button-down. The cuff links and tailored suit were a compromise; Brad had wanted a wedding with violins, ornate flower arrangements, a three-course meal, and white doves, for crying out loud, whereas I would have been happy to go to the Town Hall in my flannel. So we met somewhere in the middle: a bluegrass band, a barbecue buffet, Tegan officiating, and jars of wildflowers arranged by Jean.

  The funny thing is, Jean ended up leaving me. About ten years ago now. Told me she hadn’t been happy for a long time, that it always felt like something was missing. A few months later I ran into her and Jeff Peterson at Giovanni’s and she blushed and wouldn’t meet my eyes. Then I started seeing them everywhere—in line at Dillons, on walks in the nature preserve, once even with Jeff’s kids in tow. Later, she’d admitted that they had been having an affair for months before she’d left me. She told me they met at Dunkin’ Donuts, where they both went for their morning coffee, and one day they just “got to talking.”

  I never cheated on her. After I came out to Tegan and we started talking through the logistics of how I’d tell Jean and Billy and what my life might look like afterward, I got scared shitless. Who would I possibly meet in Big Burr? I could leave, but to go where? I had no desire to live in a city, with everything crammed so tight and no open space, but what would be the point of going to another small town? If I was going to do that, I might as well stay in Big Burr, where at least I could be close to Billy. Even if it meant living alone in some crappy apartment with dingy wall-to-wall carpeting and a single window, my nights a long pathetic blur of frozen dinners eaten on the couch while watching Naked and Afraid marathons and compulsively checking Grindr, only to see that there was no one new within a hundred miles.

  And that’s exactly what my life did look like for a long time after Jean left me. I took to sitting in my tree stand for hours, well past hunting season, seeing how long I could go without moving. Fooling nature into thinking I didn’t exist. Fooling myself, too. It was the one way I could get myself to stop thinking about what my life had become. One day I watched a robin build a nest step by step in the tree next to me, gathering beakfuls of dead grass and twigs and depositing them in a protected nook until she had a big enough pile that she could stamp her feet in the center, spin around in a circle to make a cup shape, then fill the cup with mud.

  Another day I watched a red fox trot across the field and stop partway, tilting its head back and forth in intense concentration, then launch itself off its back legs and dive headfirst into the snow up to its shoulders. It did this countless times until it emerged with a mouse clamped between its teeth. Perched high up in my tree stand, watching the animals while pretending I didn’t exist—that was the closest I ever got to a sense of peace.

  Eventually I found a guy on a new app called Myxr. He lived in Kansas City but was taking a leave of absence to come back to Dry Creek and care for his mom, who had early-stage dementia. For our first few “dates” we met at a bar, then hooked up in my truck. Once I was sure he wasn’t going to pull something, I let him come over when Billy wasn’t at home—Jean and I shared custody, so Billy was with me every other week. When Billy was at home, we’d meet at a Holiday Inn Express in Dry Creek. At that point, I still wasn’t out to anyone other than Tegan. This went on for about six months, and just as I was starting to picture a possible life in Kansas City, one day he just didn’t show up at the hotel, where I’d been waiting in a room for him for hours, and instead texted me that he thought we should stop seeing each other.

  On my way out of the hotel, picturing my miserable return to a life of frozen dinners and mind-numbing TV, I ran into the manager, Brad, who always seemed to be working when I checked in. He was very obviously gay, with a high singsongy voice, overblown hand gestures, and a bubble butt in tight khakis that he sashayed from side to side when he walked. Dry Creek was slightly more metropolitan than Big Burr, but not metropolitan enough for drawing that kind of at
tention to yourself. On my third or fourth time checking in, he’d remarked on how often I was staying at the hotel and asked if I was in town for business or pleasure, a knowing glint in his eye that made my stomach drop.

  “Neither, I guess,” I said, hoping that would be evasive enough to conclude the small talk.

  “Hmmmm.” He drummed his fingers against the desk and I noticed that his right pinkie was painted with a sparkly silver polish. “If it’s not business and it’s not pleasure, that must mean you have family in the area?” He smiled in an exaggerated way, his teeth apart and his tongue just slightly poking through, like a golden retriever freeze-framed mid-pant.

  I got the sense that the questions wouldn’t stop until I said yes to something, so I said yes, my tone just short of rudeness, and looked pointedly at my watch.

  Seemingly oblivious, he glanced down at my driver’s license, a strand of chunky-highlighted hair releasing itself from the gelled coif on his head. He reminded me of a Ken doll, with the immovable hair and the plastered-on smile and the generically proportioned features. “I don’t think I know any Cunninghams, and I’m the town’s official busybody. Where do they live?”

  “In Big Burr, actually,” I said. “I just like staying in Dry Creek. Better hotels and restaurants and everything.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, putting on a stuffy British accent. “You’re craving the refinement and endless options that Dry Creek has to offer.”

  I let out a short laugh while snapping my wallet shut, hoping that would bring an end to the conversation, but Brad plowed on. “So where are you visiting from?” he asked.

  I pressed my lips together, forcing myself to take a long breath, then said the first place that occurred to me, New York City.

  “I’ve been there once,” he said, his blue eyes widening. “Magical place. I saw a woman on the subway rubbing herself down with Orange Glo, that wood cleaner, while the woman sitting next to her puked into a handbag.”

  Tegan once complained to me that people who didn’t live in New York only wanted to tell you about the grossest things that had happened to them there. “Yup, it’s a crazy place,” I said, shaking my head like I was all too familiar with these scenarios.

  Finally he let me leave, though I swore I could feel his eyes on me until I hit the parking lot. Every time I saw him after that he’d say, “Hey, New York City!” and we’d talk for a while, my nervousness that it was only a matter of time until he discovered I’d made up everything lending an extra dose of awkwardness to our conversations. When it became clear we were becoming friends, or something like it, I thought about telling him the truth, but there was never the right opening and it had already gone on for so long. How could I explain why I lied without sounding nuts?

  But the night my boyfriend, or whatever he had been, decided to break it off, I was so irate that when Brad said, “Hey, New York City!” I completely lost it and started yelling at him about how I didn’t live in New York and had made it all up because I actually lived in Big Burr and was still closeted to almost everyone who lived there and I had been coming to the Holiday Inn Express for the last six months to meet up with a guy who had just ended it via text message.

  Brad listened with a bemused, sympathetic expression, then when I was done yelling he insisted on taking me out for a drink at the sports bar down the street—where he ordered a Budweiser, to my surprise—and we got to know each other. He was from Salt Lake City but lived in Dry Creek because it’s where his husband was from, his husband who had died a few years earlier from a rare form of cancer. He was extraordinarily close to his husband’s family, who loved him better than his own, so he had decided to stay in Dry Creek and see if he could build a new life for himself. Being a hotel manager wasn’t his dream job, but it paid the bills. He was taking business classes at the community college because he wanted to open his own coffee shop that served “actual coffee,” which, according to him, was impossible to find in small Kansas towns. It reminded me of Tegan and David, which made me smile.

  “And what exactly is actual coffee?” I asked.

  “It should be as velvety as a velour tracksuit, pleasantly bitter like Dr. House, and have body like Beyoncé,” he said.

  I laughed. “I have no idea what that means.”

  He started singing a song I didn’t know in a too-loud voice while bouncing his shoulders up and down. “I ain’t worried, doin’ me tonight, a little sweat ain’t never hurt nobody,” he sang in a slightly off-key falsetto.

  I glanced around us at the men with beards wearing flannel shirts; men who looked like me. “People are looking at you,” I said, even though they might have just been looking in our general direction.

  He kept shaking his shoulders. “So? I don’t care.”

  I humphed. “No one who says that really means it.”

  “So says you.” He arched a brow.

  We left shortly after that. In the parking lot, he put his number in my phone, saying I should call him if I ever needed to talk again. Then he got in a pastel-green Fiat and drove away. I assumed that was the last time I’d ever see him.

  But a few days later, as I was sitting in my tree stand practicing invisibility, watching a shiny black beetle that had fallen onto its back frantically kick its legs in the air, I kept thinking about when the men in the bar were looking at Brad and he said he didn’t care. He really did seem completely unbothered. I picked up a twig and used it to flip the beetle over, then I called Tegan and told her that the guy I was seeing had ended it.

  “Oh, Gabe, I’m sorry,” she said. “How do you feel?” At the time Tegan was in grad school for clinical social work, with a focus on mental health counseling. Her goal was to become a therapist for LGBTQ youth, which nicely summed up our current dynamic—me a gay baby in my forties and Tegan my confidant, still relentlessly trying to persuade me to come out to the rest of the world. I never thought Tegan would end up as one of my best friends, but over the years she’d become the person I turned to first.

  “Originally I thought I was sad,” I said. “But if I’m honest with myself, I don’t think it was ever going anywhere. We were just two warm bodies.”

  “Well, maybe now you’re ready for something a little more serious,” she said. “Now that you know your way around a penis.”

  I laughed. “Something serious. How does one go about finding that?”

  “Maybe instead of starting with sex, try starting with, like, talking. To someone whose personality you like.”

  I thought about Brad, how nice it was to just talk to him—until he burst into song. “There is this guy,” I said. “But I don’t think he’s my type.”

  “Why not? What’s your type?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that I’ve ever pictured anything.”

  “Well, maybe that’s the problem.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A FEW WEEKS passed. A cold front came through and I couldn’t sit in the tree stand for more than fifteen minutes without my feet going numb, but staying in my apartment felt even more numbing. When Jean and I listed the house, I felt so weirdly outside myself that I tossed all my hunting trophies except the deer, which I mounted above my bed in the new apartment. I never bothered to put up any other decorations, so even after two years, the rest of the walls were still bare. Folding chairs surrounded the wobbly kitchen table abandoned by the previous tenant. I kept my toiletries on top of the toilet tank, since there were no cabinets in the bathroom, and I probably knocked my deodorant into the toilet bowl at least once a week. I decided it was time I went to Target for some apartment upgrades. Target was in Dry Creek. When I drove past the Holiday Inn Express I jerked the wheel to the right and pulled in.

  “Oh, hi, New York City!” Brad said when he saw me hanging around in the lobby. “Are things back on with your guy?”

  “No, I just figured I’d stop in and say
hi on my way to Target. My apartment needs . . . something.”

  He laughed. “Something?”

  “Well, it could feel a little more lived in.”

  “Ah. I imagine that’ll be really easy for you, picking out decorations and such.” He pointed all his fingers at me and rotated his wrist in circles around my midsection, indicating my ten-year-old Carhartt jacket and paint-stained jeans. “My lunch break is in ten minutes. Do you want some help?”

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “I live for a trip to Target,” he said, dead serious.

  * * *

  • • •

  WE WANDERED UP and down aisles filled with screaming babies and arguing couples as Brad determinedly placed various items in my cart, saying things like, “A nice big mirror on the wall in your bedroom will really open up the space,” “Overhead lighting is worse than a Kay Jewelers commercial,” and “Storage doesn’t have to be ugly.” In his own cart, he added a grapefruit-scented spray cleaner, a gigantic tub of trail mix, two cases of sparkling water with some very eighties branding, and the new Halo game.

  I scrunched up my face. “Wait, you play Halo?”

  He shrugged. “Who doesn’t?”

  I asked him a question to gauge his seriousness as a player. “Okay, you know the beach level? Have you beaten it?”

  “Maybe,” he said coyly.

  I widened my eyes. “How the fuck?”

  He leaned in and lowered his voice. “You have to jump off the cliff.”

  “I tried that.”

  He smiled his golden retriever smile. “There’s a cave halfway down. You have to press the over arrow at just the right time, then you can go through.” A vibrating noise emanated from his pants. He took his phone out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. “Do you mind if I take this? It’s my mom-in-law, and I’ve been a little concerned about her.”