Cyril in the Flesh

by Ramsey Hootman

  The other package has Robin’s name on it, but he opens it anyway. This action becomes significantly less transgressive when he pulls out the clothing she ordered for him. More sweats and t-shirts, several sizes larger than the ones she had picked up the night he got out—and a button-up Hawaiian shirt in garish reds and blues.

  “Oooh, pretty,” Nora says, leaning over his arm.

  The back door opens and slams, and Robin walks through the dining room with a hammer in one hand and a drill in the other. Cyril holds up the shirt. “What the—heck—is this?”

  She laughs. “I dunno, I thought it was cute!” She sinks the hammer claw into the plywood blocking off the stairwell and yanks a nail out with a sharp squeak.

  The kids, realizing she is about to unlock a heretofore unexplored terrain, bombard her with questions about how long it’s going to take the sheet of plywood off until she tells them that if they don’t back off and give her some space she’s going to nail it back on again. When the stairwell is open, finally, they rush upward, shrieking.

  For the next hour, as Cyril sets up his phone, he can hear them dashing back and forth over the upper floor. Robin’s voice chimes in now and then with a warning, indistinct but probably “be careful.” Or maybe “don’t jump out the windows.”

  While the phone isn’t the latest model, it’s not five years old, so relatively speaking it feels like an upgrade. Settling for slightly out of date tech also makes it easier to jailbreak. That done, he downloads his usual array of anonymizing and recording apps, including the companion to the surveillance tracker he’d installed on Robin’s phone. He thumbs through it briefly, familiarizing himself with the control interface. It displays her texts, her call log—all things he recognizes firsthand. She’s allowed him unfettered access to both her phone and her laptop thus far, but it might be useful to keep tabs on who she’s talking to, once he moves out.

  While the communications log downloads everything saved in her phone, the tracking function logs its own geographical data, so it only has the information it’s collected since he installed the app. The map controls could use a UI overhaul, but he experiments with backstepping through her timeline. Dropping off the kids daily at Greta’s, running between martial arts and the bank, their trip to the DMV earlier that same day, and finally—

  Cyril refreshes the display, but the information doesn’t change. He frowns.

  The kids’ bedtime routine consists of even more cartoons. When Robin insists it’s time for sleep, really, no, seriously, they are less than thrilled. There is a lot of screaming and, eventually, muffled tears.

  “That’s always fun.” Robin lets out a puff of air as she comes back into the living room, where Cyril is flipping through the Netflix menu from the couch. She stoops to pick up a couple of Legos. “Planning on passing out early again, or should I lock the fridge?”

  He holds up his phone. “What the fuck is this?”

  She blinks. “Uh... your phone?” She tosses the Legos onto the coffee table and comes to look, first squinting at the screen and then taking it from him, using a thumb and forefinger to zoom in on the map. “What is this?” she asks, obviously confused. She gets that he expects her to know what he’s looking at, but she doesn’t.

  And then she does.

  He’d installed the tracking app on Thursday morning, right before they’d walked to the plaza for doughnuts. Healdsburg has no buildings tall enough to impede transmission, so their route is traced perfectly, down to the side of the street they’d been walking on. After that, she’d had to run to a client’s house for a final inspection. That’s what she’d told him, anyway.

  The map says different. Unless her “client” happened to be Kaiser Permanente Medical Center. Not here in town, but in Santa Rosa, half an hour away. She’d parked in the lot, entered the building, and stayed inside for over an hour. Visiting a patient? Seeing a doctor? She could have said, “Hey, I need to go in for my annual checkup,” and he wouldn’t have batted an eye. But she hadn’t said that. She had lied.

  She lets out a long, slow breath. “Why do you have to be such a prick?”

  “You know what I am.”

  She tosses the phone onto his stomach and then just stands there, looking down at him, hands limp at her sides. Then, without comment, she turns and walks into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator door. She stands there staring into the cold light, long enough that he returns his attention to his phone, before saying, finally, “You want one of these?”

  He glances up to see her holding a beer—a green bottle, not her usual golden Corona. “You know I don’t fucking drink.” He doesn’t do well with moderation. If he’d ever bothered to cultivate a taste for alcohol, he’d have been long dead by now.

  “It’s non-alcoholic. But whatever.” She slams the fridge door. “Get off your ass and follow me.”

  “Pass.” Something hard hits his chest like a brick. “Fuck! What the—” It’s a can of root beer.

  “We need to talk.”

  Something in her voice makes him swallow his pithy comeback. “Fine.” He hauls himself off the couch, gritting his teeth against the pain in his lower back, and turns to follow—only to see her jog up the stairwell. At the top, she puts a shoulder to a plywood hatch on hinges, newly installed to keep the kids out while she’s not working, and steps through. Her boots tromp away somewhere over his head.

  Thirteen steps, no railing, no landing. He tackles them one at a time, wincing as the ancient wood groans beneath him. He pauses twice to breathe, and by the time he reaches the summit he’s not sure he’s not having a heart attack. Is that what she wants? Maybe it’s exactly what she wants.

  “Over here.”

  She stands at the front of the house, one foot propped up on the sill of the big picture window, framed by a forest of two-by-fours and trees. The gaps between the bare studs are too narrow to squeeze, so he takes the long way around what will eventually be a hall. The scaffolding they’d erected hugs the exterior wall on his right.

  “This is why you picked me up from prison? So you could fucking kill me?”

  She looks up as he hobbles in. “I insulated the crap out of these floors. It’s the one place we’re safe from little ears. Here.” She sets her beer on the window ledge, lifts a circular saw off a scrap wood step stool, and kicks it in his direction.

  It’s low and too small for even half his ass, but he hands her the can of root beer and spreads his legs, squatting like he’s taking a shit. It’s not comfortable, but he manages to get himself settled, back braced against a couple of framing studs.

  She cracks the tab on the root beer, holding it out the window as it spews. When the foam tapers off, she hands it back, shaking the last drops of fizzy liquid from her fingertips before wiping her hand on her thigh. She retrieves her beer and straddles the window ledge, one leg swinging over the side.

  “Can you... not do that?” He does not want his last memory of her to be her brains on the sidewalk.

  “What? Oh.” She leans further out the window. “If this makes you nervous, wait til I get up on the scaffolding. The porch roof’s out here, though. I’m good.” She stomps to demonstrate, then turns anyway and plants both feet firmly on the sub-floor, dangling the green bottle between her knees.

  They drink, in silence, as the sun slips between the trees.

  “So,” he says. “The view’s nice, but I’m not getting any younger here, so—”

  “Cyril. Can you not...” She pinches the bridge of her nose and lets out a long, heavy sigh. “Okay. Yeah.” She tosses back the last of the faux beer and stands, setting the bottle on the nearest horizontal stud. She squares her shoulders, facing him, and then, just as suddenly, seems to deflate. She turns away, gazing out the window.

  “Well, that was anticlimactic.”

  She exhales a hiss of frustration. “Just—give me a second to pick my words, okay? I didn’t—I didn’t want to do it like this. I mean, you’re just out of prison, you need time to—”
She abandons the sentence with a shake of the head, passing a hand over her brow. The sunset’s orange glow transforms her into a slender silhouette. “I wanted time to figure this out.” She waves a hand at him and then herself. “To figure us out. Without you feeling, I don’t know, obligated.”

  He snorts. “Us. Right.”

  She turns on him. “Oh, screw it, Cyril. I have cancer.”

  Stage 3

  Bargaining

  Chapter 9

  This asshole doesn’t believe, as Robin does, that there is any kind of divine order to the universe, any reciprocity or justice in the end. Still, it’s all too much. Tavis, dead, and then her mother. Prison. All of this in addition to the broader catastrophe of COVID and distance learning and climate change and politics and whatever fresh horrors have dropped today in the endlessly rolling apocalypse which is 2020. And now—cancer? “No,” he says. As if he can stop, rewind the words that have just come out of her mouth. Make it all un-happen.

  She jams a hand down the front of her tank top. Two quick yanks and her breasts lie, little half-shells, between them on the floor. Her chest is flat. Her face is hard.

  He rises, putting out a hand to support himself against the nearest stud. The empty soda can clatters to the plywood floor. His first impulse is to wrap his arms around her—to stop the pieces of her from falling apart. But he doesn’t. “No,” he says again. It’s all that will come.

  “What, you need to see my scars?”

  He’s close enough to catch her wrist before she can yank the neck of her shirt down, hard. For a moment they stand like that, her arm pinned across her chest, fingers clenched into a fist.

  Then she steps back, jerking out of his grasp. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “When—” The shock is starting to wear off, and questions rush in.

  “I found a lump three years ago. Just on the left, but it turns out I have the gene, so I had them take both.” She crosses her arms over her chest, shoulders hunched. “Not like there was much there to begin with, and I’m done having kids, so.” This is how she handles hard things: instead of emotion, she focuses on facts. “It’s why we decided to stay in town. Partly. It was just—my mom died the summer I was working on Cooke’s place, and after that job wrapped George offered to let us crash in one of his barns while I converted it into a duplex. When I got the biopsy results, Greta basically insisted we move in with them during treatment. That was the same year as the Tubbs fire, and this area was hurting so bad for carpenters I could quit everything on Friday and have three jobs lined up by Monday morning. Then this dump hit the market, and Seth had already made a bunch of friends at school, so... here we are.”

  The circular saw that had been on the step stool is attached to an orange extension cord. She bends, yanks the plug out, and begins winding the cord, elbow to palm. Waiting, he realizes, for him to do the math. “If that was three years ago—”

  “I’ve been taking Tamoxifen. It’s a hormone drug that inhibits the type of cancer I had. But it also ups your chances of getting uterine cancer. And...” She shrugs. “I got lucky. So now I have to do the whole miserable thing all over again.” She loops the end of the cord through itself and drops the roll next to the stool. “I’m having a—oh, I forget what it’s called. Basically a hysterectomy. Uterus, ovaries, everything. Plus chemo and radiation.”

  He shifts, pushing away from the stud. “When?”

  “Surgery’s on Wednesday.”

  “Wednesday. Like—”

  “Like four days from now, yeah. Chemo starts two or three weeks after. So life’s gonna be crappy for a while.” She stoops, briefly, to pick up a couple of pieces of scrap wood, tossing them toward a pile of garbage that’s collected in one corner. “Greta’s already invited us to move in with them again, if we need to, so don’t worry about—I mean, not that you—” For the briefest moment, her lips quiver, but she presses them together and clears her throat. Her eyes are dry. “If you want to leave, you should go. Soon.”

  “Uh, no. I'm not going anywhere.”

  She stops, half-bent for another piece of scrap, and straightens slowly. “Are you—”

  “Of course I’m fucking sure.” What other answer can he possibly give? She had sprung him from prison early, offered him everything she thought he wanted—her—to persuade him to be here for her kids, in her own home, when all she’d had to do was tell him the goddamn truth. Not that he can blame her for thinking manipulation is the most effective way to communicate with him.

  She studies him for a long, level moment. “And that’s it. No snarky comeback? No clever insult?”

  “Christ, Robin, you have—I'm not gonna—” He gestures, wordlessly, and lets out an exasperated breath. “Jesus, even I have limits.”

  “Limits? You?” She laughs, with bitter disbelief. “All this time, I just had to get cancer?”

  This is what he’s done to her. “Well, it’s not like you’re getting a free pass, here.” He pushes away thoughts of what’s to come. “Uterine cancer buys you maybe, I dunno, five minutes of civility? Come back when you’ve got an inoperable brain tumor or bone cancer—then we’ll talk.”

  She lets out a bark of laughter and socks him in the arm, hard. “I hate you, you colossal jerk.” Sudden tears carve tracks down her cheeks.

  “Hey—no. Shit. Come here.” He opens his arms, and she falls into his heavy embrace. He must smell like a locker room, but she gathers his sweat-dampened shirt in her fists, pressing her face into his chest, and sobs.

  There’s a limit to how long a person can cry. He’s pushed her there, before. But not tonight. Eventually she sniffs, wiping her nose on the back of her wrist and then his shirt. She breathes deeply, stretching her arms as far around his middle as they will go. “I didn’t want you to think this was why I decided to forgive you.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” As much of a survivor as Robin is, she’s obviously scared to be alone again, sick again, with her kids. Despite the many reasons this asshole given her to hate him, he would never do anything to hurt her kids—which was why, for Seth’s sake, she had grudgingly tolerated his presence even after Tavis died. It’s no surprise to discover she’s willing to exonerate him for their benefit a second time. Why hadn’t she just told him?

  To her great credit, she doesn’t protest. She goes still, listening to his heartbeat or his breath. He feels her swallow. “It’s... like when Tav died,” she says, voice low. “For a while, everything was about his death. But... that didn’t make any of it less true.”

  Death. Prison. Cancer. He doesn’t want any of the things that led to this moment. But he would give anything to stand like this forever. He lowers his chin, slightly, to smell her hair.

  She lets out a long breath, and every muscle in her body seems to relax. Her arms squeeze him, gently. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t.”

  She lifts her head, pulling back to look up at his face. “Hm?”

  He takes her shoulders. He wants to shake, but he just grips her, hard. “Don’t thank me. Don’t—don't ever thank me. For anything.” It makes him sick to think she’d felt the need to offer him anything, let alone the possibility of a relationship. He could spend the rest of his life trying to pay for what he’s already done, and never make a dent in his debt to her. She owes him nothing, least of all her gratitude. Whatever she asks of him is owed. “Ever.”

  Robin takes a moment to absorb this. Then she nods. “Yeah. Okay.”

  She steps back and he lets her go, reaching to pull his shirt back down over his gut. She beats him to it, giving his belly a friendly pat.

  He doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he just stands there, staring at her like an idiot.

  “Think we still have time for a TV show? I promise I’ll keep my hands to myself.”

  He clears his throat. “You’re the one with a job. Well. Sort of.”

  She holds an arm out toward the stairwell. “Felons first. I’ll close up.”

  He turns, a
nd nearly steps on her bra inserts. Not, as it turned out, meant to beguile some undisclosed lover, but him. “Don’t forget your, uh.”

  “Oh shoot, my boobs.”

  Chapter 10

  Long after she’s gone to bed and he has thoroughly gutted the fridge, he digs a pen and two yellow legal pads out of the kitchen drawer and sits down to speak to her in the only way he has ever known how. No email, no pigmented pixels on a glowing screen. Just ink and onion skin.

  He will tell her everything. He will explain the depth of his friendship with Tavis. How he thought he knew what love meant, until he saw her give birth. His devotion to her children, of which she is already well aware. Most importantly, he will tell her about her husband’s death. He will not prevaricate. He will give her the unvarnished truth, and, with it, his soul. If they are to exist together under one roof, let it be with her complete knowledge and willing consent.

  He spends a good twenty minutes hovering over that first blank page. And then, finally, in curt, compact script, he writes: I loved you first.

  He looks at the words. Idiotic. Growling under his breath, he scratches them out.

  Funny, isn’t it? I thought Tav’s death would set me free.

  He crumples the page and begins again. This time, he forces himself to write without thinking, without reflection. He fills one page and then another with half-formulated sentences, entire paragraphs written and then crossed out, ball-point pen pressed so hard it scores the pages beneath.

  Lies, all of it. Nothing but lies.

  He burns the first page over the stove, but he can’t torch the rest without setting fire to the house, or at least tripping the smoke alarm. He rips the pages instead, and then douses them with water. The ink blurs and runs, shedding black tears.