None of this is a surprise. Don’t think, after all these years, that this is the first time he has resolved to confess, to disgorge his heart of hearts and beg forgiveness for it all.
This asshole has never won a battle against himself. But he tries. Oh, he fucking tries.
He has vomited half his rancid soul onto the second legal pad when the lamp over the dining table is eclipsed by the rosy-fingered glow of dawn. His second attempt is no better than the first. Desperate now, he flips the pages over and scrawls on the back, but it makes no difference.
It’s not her. He may like to shift the blame—but he has known that much, deep down, for a good long while. It is not that she is intimidating, or beautiful, or overwhelmingly angelic. She is every bit as flawed as any other ordinary mortal. No. It is not her. It is that he cannot face himself. That great and powerful I.
A phone trills.
He jerks upright, grimacing as a bolt of sunlight pierces his vision, and rubs the cheek that has been flattened against the dining table, marinating in saliva. He blinks, and three bowls of mostly-eaten cereal come into focus. Three glasses once filled with orange juice. A children’s Bible, forgotten. Sunday. While he’s been playing Goldilocks, they’ve up and gone to... church? During a pandemic? Robin’s mother might have been that zealous, but not her practical, level-headed daughter.
The phone rings for a third or fourth time, buzzing against his thigh. He digs it out and squints at the name on the screen. Her. “What?”
“Oh good, you’re alive. I knew you were a deep sleeper, but I’ve never seen anyone sleep through Nora eating breakfast. Come down here and give me a hand.”
To the barn, she means. “Now?”
“I mean, you could shower, but you’re gonna end up covered in dust.”
The line goes silent, and he consults the phone again to see that it’s well after noon.
And then—he remembers. Cancer. His letter. He puts his hands on the table, as if the lacquered hardwood could be concealing his words. “Fuck,” he breathes. She has taken the pages. Read? His gut clenches.
The pages from the first legal pad are still soaking in a pot of water on the stove. God, was he completely out of his mind? He pours off the grey water into the sink and then dumps the pulpy remainder into the garbage can.
The Sunday silence is cut by the sudden shriek of a miter saw. “Fuck,” he says again.
Outside, the air is thankfully crisp and cool, tinged with a faint smoky scent which might, with equal likelihood, be attributed to a newly lit fireplace or a wildfire just beyond the horizon. He makes his way down the path worn through dry weeds to the ramshackle barn at the bottom of the property. One of two big doors has been pushed open, scoring a track in the dirt, an open portal to an interior which is warm and well lit. Small hand tools hang in neat rows on the wall, larger power tools racked in custom-built shelving. A layer of fragrant sawdust frosts the dirt-packed floor. Sunlight streaks in through gaps in the walls, illuminating a galaxy of dust motes drifting through the air.
Robin looks up from the workbench, no doubt alerted to his presence by the sound of labored breathing. A narrow shaft of light glances across the angles of her cheeks and nose. “You can say no,” she says, mildly.
He yanks his shirt down. “You fucking know I can’t.” Not to anything she asks.
She pencils a measurement onto a piece of scrap plywood, the sketch so abstract he can’t tell what it represents. “‘Won’t’ is not the same as ‘can’t.’”
“Oh, you do not want to play semantics with me, Chica.” He steps over the threshold. “Kids?”
“Lunch at Greta’s. We watch the sermon at their house, and Greta does a little Sunday school lesson. They used to take the kids out to eat after church, but now...” She completes the sentence with a shrug.
Which means they're alone. “Did you fucking read it?”
“Read what? Oh—your long-ass letter?” She straightens and turns, tucking the flat carpenter’s pencil into the lavender kerchief knotted around her hair. “Nope. Just filed it with all the others.”
This is how stupid she makes him: his heart lurches. The others. She kept them.
Then his eyes follow the arc of her cocked thumb to a battered aluminum garbage can.
The ashes are still warm.
A fraction of a second earlier, he’d been worried she’d read the steaming pile of manure he’d produced the night before. Now he turns on her, hands in fists. “You—” In his mind, he grabs her throat and slams her head against the wall. Picks up the iron rake leaning in the corner and uses it to clear her workbench, smash her immaculately organized wall of tools, her truck—
“No more bullshit, Cyril.” She leans her rear against the workbench, crossing her arms over her chest. Her flat chest, he realizes. “I’m not playing your games. You have something to say, say it to my face.”
“I can’t,” he snarls, so close she winces at his sour breath. She knows he can’t. He’s a fucking coward. “Look, you called me down here to work, so either we do it or—”
She laughs, sharp and loud. “Are you actually opting to do manual labor instead of running your mouth? Maybe prison’s changed you after all.”
“Fuck off.”
She ducks around him and crosses to the table saw, set up in the center of the open floor. “Don’t try to guide it; just support the weight and let me do the rest. You can handle that, right?”
He watches, seething for no damn good reason at all, as she adjusts the guide on the table saw and then hefts a full-size sheet of plywood from a stack in the corner. Is it prison that persuades him not to set fire to the rickety footbridge spanning the distance between them? Or cancer? He would not be here, in her life, were it not for prison. But cancer is why he will pull his punches and stay. Cancer is a dense, massive body which warps the space around it, drawing all things toward its center. He is not altered; it is the world itself which is no longer the same.
She hits a button under the saw and it whirrs to life, buzzing noisily as it chews through the first sheet. He stands to one side, supporting the board as she guides it into the blade, and abruptly finds himself holding two awkwardly large pieces of wood.
“Over there!” She shouts over the noise, gesturing. “Against the bench!”
He leans them against her workbench and shuffles back into place to catch the second set. They do this five times, and then pause while she turns the saw off and adjusts the width of the guide, sighting down the table carefully. His ears are ringing. “Shouldn’t you be wearing hearing protection?”
She lifts her head to look at him. “What?”
“Shouldn’t you—” He starts to repeat, but then she catches his eye and winks. “Damn it.”
“You used to be faster on the uptake, big guy.” She nods toward the pair of blue plastic earmuffs sitting on the workbench. “If I put those on, I’d miss out on your charming conversation.” She nods. “Two more, hot dog this time.”
“Hot dog?” he echoes.
“Yeah. Like, hot dog, hamburger?” She saws the air with her hand, first longways and then crossways over the sheet of plywood. “That’s how they tell the kids which direction to fold their paper at school.”
“You have spent way the hell too much time with children.”
She grins as she thumbs the red button and the saw spins to life. “And whose fault is that?”
He shakes his head, backing up as the long slab of plywood becomes two. As the pieces come off the end of the table, he shifts to get a better grip and stumbles back a step, ramming his rear into the far wall. His stumble is punctuated by a discordant clang—her father’s old upright, shrouded in a canvas drop cloth.
“Crap.” Robin jams a thumb into the off switch and comes around the end of the table, brushing sawdust off her shirt and pants before pulling back the paint-spattered cloth. “Seth must have been fooling with it again, because I did not leave the fallboard up.” She runs a hand over the keys. “No
harm done.”
Robin does not play. To her, the piano is not an instrument; it is a work of art, a totem of familial affection. A well-worn castoff when it became her grandmother’s prized possession, the wood had been restored to better-than-original glory by her father’s expert hand. Once upon a time it had been the focal point of her living room, where Tavis, a competent pianist, would pound out her father’s favorite ragtime melodies. Which Cyril knew not only because the letters he traded with Robin had given him a window into every aspect of her personal life, but because he was the one who had taught Tavis to play piano.
Cyril tries a couple of chords. “It’s out of tune.” Badly.
“Well, if it wasn’t before, it certainly is now you sat on it.” She steps back, evaluating the finish with a practiced eye, and sighs. “I need to get it back into the house before it rains, but there’s just so many things that need to get—oh, shoot.” She pats her back pocket and pulls out her phone, clicking it once to display the time. “I gotta pick up the kids. I told Greta—”
He cuts off her social niceties with a wave toward the truck. “Go.”
She reaches into her tool belt and comes up empty. “Crap. I left the keys in the kitchen.” Before he can reply she is off, belt jangling as she jogs up the hill.
Had the few identifiable chunks of Tavis Matheson’s body not been buried six feet beneath the ground, the man would have immediately searched the garage for a couple of dollies and a rope and dragged the piano up to the house. Cyril knows this without a shadow of a doubt, because it is exactly what he would have told his friend to do.
He, on the other hand, reaches under the piano, pulls out the bench, and sits his fat ass down. His skin is slick with sweat and sawdust.
Five years since he touched a piano. This piano, specifically. There used to be sheet music in the bench, but he doesn’t check. Music was his gateway to coding; in many ways his native tongue. So, without rehearsal or warmup, he simply puts his fingers to the keys and begins to play. The off-kilter calliope twang feels like early Cat Stevens, and he allows “Sad Lisa” to frame the path he wanders through a forest of dark and angry chords.
He plays prison, bitter and discordant and small. He plays Tav’s death, and all he’d give to take back the choices he made. He plays Seth and Nora, light and joyful, grown so big it hurts. The time he’s lost, notes tumbling down and away. And her. Oh, God, her.
The day he first saw her. Not in the campus study hall, but months before. Her laughter, so solid and fresh it felt like a slap in the face. Tavis, begging for help to make her his. Her tears. Her eyes, the look on her face the moment she learned the truth.
He plays cancer—but it doesn’t fit.
How can it? This was never part of the song. There was no prelude; no hint of this melody in the overture. Cancer is a chance interloper, a colossal jumping of the shark. She has suffered so much already; she doesn’t also deserve to be the victim of the whims of an indifferent universe. Her story ought, at least, to make sense.
When he’s all played out, he stretches his fingers and puts the fall board down.
“See?” says a quiet voice. “That wasn’t so hard to say.”
He turns, just far enough to see her leaning against the barn door. “What the fuck.”
She crooks a thumb over one shoulder. “Greta was out front with the kids when I got to the house. I put on some Pokémon.” She crosses the barn floor, kicking tracks through the sawdust, and squats next to the piano. She snakes a hand around the back and yanks out a dolly made of scrap wood with a carpet sample stapled on top. “Let’s move it.”
He groans. “Now?” He should have gone straight back up the hill to the house.
She pops back to her feet, like a spring. “Look, Cyril, if you’re going to stay—”
He lifts his hands in surrender. “Yeah, yeah. Your house, your rules. No time like the present.”
She studies him a moment, as if trying to gauge the level of his sincerity. Then she gives a curt nod. “There’s a hand truck and some straps back there somewhere. I’ll get the truck.”
When she’s gone, he puts a hand on the end of the piano and heaves himself to his feet, taking a heavy couple of steps as his back and knees let him know how much happier they were sitting down. But he locates the pale green hand truck and shifts boxes until there’s space enough to wheel it out. The rumble of Robin’s truck is close and he can hear wheels spinning in gravel, so he steps outside and signals as she backs down the steep hill until the truck bed is halfway into the barn.
She kills the engine, hops out of the cab, and then eyeballs the piano. “I think we’re gonna have to take off the camper shell.”
“Course we are.” He drops the tailgate and starts unloading the bed.
“Oh,” she says, when he yanks out a small green tackle box. “Guess I can take that back up to the house.” It rattles as she takes it from him and stows it in the cab.
The contents of the box could be virtually anything—nuts and bolts, beads, loose screws—but the truth solidifies like a marble in his stomach. Pills. “What, you thought I was gonna steal your meds?”
She clambers into the back of the truck and grunts as she pushes a box of spring clamps toward the tailgate. “I mean, you are a hardened criminal.”
“You think you’re joking, but I actually did—”
“Ransack my medicine cabinet. I know. But I figure even you aren’t low enough to steal a cancer patient’s pills.”
“A stirring vote of confidence.”
“Well, I mean, they’re not gonna do much for you, unless you’re into constipation and hot flashes. Wait til after my surgery if you want the hard stuff.” She drops back to the ground. “I’ll get the rest of this. Were there any moving pads back there with the hand truck?”
“I’ll get them.”
Once the truck bed is empty, Robin eyeballs the camper shell and the piano and decides that, actually, if they angle it just right, they might be able to make it work. Cyril contemplates tapping out about sixteen times in the process of loading the piano into the bed, but he settles for a few choice expletives and, with a lot of sweat, a few moving blankets, and a little leverage, they ease it in with about two centimeters to spare. They pile into the cab, and at the top of the hill he gets out and motions her into position as she backs up to the ramp leading to the back door.
By this point the kids have realized that something more exciting than Pokémon is happening, and they’re running around, begging to be allowed to get into the bed of the truck and they promise they’ll be good and not touch anything except for maybe a couple of piano keys just to see if it’ll play on its side, wouldn’t that be cool, and finally Robin steps between them and the truck and points to the door. “Cookies,” she says. “You may each have one cookie. If and only if you go inside and stay out of the way. If you can do that, you will each get a second cookie. And then you can play with the piano. Understood?”
“Yeah!” Nora exclaims, as if this very thing was her goal all along.
“Aw, man,” Seth whines, and dutifully plods into the house after her.
“God,” says Robin, sighing.
“We could call it a day,” Cyril suggests.
Robin yanks the tailgate down. “Oh, hell no.”
They are easing the piano out of the truck bed when Robin says, “I need a favor.”
“This—” Cyril grunts as he hefts the lower end of the piano, currently propped on one thigh—“this doesn’t count?”
She hops out of the truck and positions the dolly underneath. “Down—little more—to your right—there.” She grabs the base, steadying it as he lets the piano down with a whale-spout exhalation of air. "I want you to talk to the kids.”
He tugs a shirtsleeve up to wipe his brow. “About what? Seth already knows I’m staying.” In the area, at least, if not the house.
She sucks a breath in through her teeth. “Not… about that.”
“About—” He dro
ps his sleeve and, seeing her face, lowers his voice to a hiss. “You haven’t told them you have cancer?”
“You’d have figured it out a lot sooner if I had.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? That’s why you didn’t tell them?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. They’re kids, Cyril. I learned this the hard way, last time, but—they don’t need time to process, or plan, or whatever.” She crosses her arms over the top of the piano. “Nora doesn’t even have a concept of time. Seth understands what it is, but he doesn’t really feel it. If I’d told them when I found out—which was only like two weeks ago, by the way, so nice timing there—they’d have spent all this time freaking out. Which basically means getting into trouble and then screaming about the consequences because they’re too young to understand how to process their feelings.” She gives the polished oak two firm pats. “Better just to rip off that band-aid quick and fast.”
So she’d been putting it off until right the fuck now, with fewer than three days left and both of them standing here covered in sweat. “And now you want me to do the ripping.”
“It’ll be fine. Just take them out for ice cream or something. You owe me. Plus?” She shrugs. “You’re good with the kids.”
Is she delusional? “You’re literally their mother.”
“I pack lunches, I do laundry, I drive.” She waves toward the house at her back. “I put a roof over their head. You—I remember how you were with Seth. One time, he didn’t understand why days were shorter in the winter. I’d have just told him that’s how things work, but you sat down and explained the entire solar system in terms a four-year-old could grasp. You're good at… words.”
“Says the woman who burns them. Just admit you’re a fucking coward.”
“Takes one to know one, asshole. Look, I just—God.” She straightens and comes around the side of the piano, lifting her palms in surrender. “Honestly? I can’t do this again. When Tavis died, I thought telling Seth was the hardest thing I’d ever have to do. If I could just make it through that—But then you—and my mom—and then—” She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “It’s always just some damn other thing. Every time. You’d think I’d learn, but when I finished chemo, we threw a freaking party. And now—” Her voice cracks. “Now—”
Cyril in the Flesh Page 12