Cyril in the Flesh

by Ramsey Hootman

  “Yeah. I know.” She crumples the saran wrap around the crust of her sandwich. “Plus, now they’ve got you.”

  He senses this is the lead-in to a conversation about breaking the news to the kids. It’s a conversation he doesn’t want to have. Not now. Maybe not ever. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?” he says, making it flippant instead.

  Robin grins, and he can see, in her eyes, as she decides to let it go. For now. Then the grin becomes a yawn that she attempts, unsuccessfully, to stifle. “Ugh,” she says, shaking her head. “I need more coffee.”

  “Maybe if you took a fucking break now and then.”

  She gives him a wide-eyed, innocent look. “Is that not what I’m doing?”

  “Mom! Mommy!” Nora trots up to the table. She accepts the half-sandwich Cyril holds out to her and uses it to point across the field. “I wanna go to that structure!”

  Robin’s brow furrows. “Sweetie, that’s not a—”

  But Nora is already out of the gate and dashing across the field. Robin sighs and gets to her feet. “Seth! We’re heading that way!” She glances at Cyril. “You coming?”

  “Yeah. Why not.” He takes the other sandwich half for Seth, slides a bottle of water into one pocket, and flips the cooler lid shut.

  Robin is right, of course. The “play structure” is some kind of above-ground water junction, with six-inch pipes painted red and blue. The kids stand in front of it, munching thoughtfully on their PB&Js, perhaps trying to decide whether this development is more interesting or disappointing. Then Nora says, “Look! A path! I’m gonna find treasure!” and dashes off into the trees.

  “Sweetie, I don’t think that’s a trail!” Robin calls. “Come on back!”

  Seth follows his sister into the brush. “It is, Mom! There’s steps and everything!”

  Robin looks down at her sandals and Cyril’s flip-flops. “We're not exactly wearing appropriate footwear here.”

  “Do we have a choice?” The kids are gone.

  “Damn it.” Robin takes off at a half-jog into the woods.

  Cyril tromps down after her into a tangle of ivy, decaying wood, and damp, sandy soil. Though the entire area has obviously been recently underwater, the ivy is already hard at work covering the detritus with a blanket of thick foliage. The river comes into sight just through the first phalanx of trees, broad and fast and grey-brown, churning under the flat surface.

  “Guys!” Robin shouts from up ahead, jogging down a series of four-by-fours lodged into the hill as rudimentary steps. “Guys, slow down!”

  Cyril follows more slowly. On the far side of the river, there’s a gravel plant, dredging the river bottom and chu-chunking perfect little kernels of rock. Downriver, at the bend, is the perfunctory little bridge that leads into town. Close to the waterline the trees thin out, and it’s easy to see the kids scrambling along the top of a steeply eroded bank.

  Robin catches up with them, finally, not so far ahead of him that he can’t hear her say, “Guys, look at the water.” She points down. “See how fast it’s moving? If you fall in, you’ll be swept away.”

  “Oh,” Seth says.

  Nora says nothing, which suggests she might be taking her mother’s warning as an invitation to adventure. But then Seth picks up a pebble and throws it, and soon they’re taking turns chucking rocks and sticks into the water, seeing how far they can throw and which objects sink or get swept away.

  As Cyril emerges from the thickest underbrush, Robin backtracks a few paces up the bank to join him. “Hey,” she says, smiling. “Look at you.”

  “Fuck off,” he growls, low enough the kids don’t hear. But she’s right. He doesn’t feel like shit. He isn’t gasping for breath. He has absolutely not lost weight (or not much, anyway), but it’s possible he’s traded some fraction of fat for muscle and stamina. He’s tried to avoid thinking about that. Allowing himself even the slightest sense of accomplishment is the first domino in a cascade failure of self-loathing and masochism.

  Abruptly, rock-throwing ends and the kids dash further on down the path.

  “Jesus, are they communicating telepathically?” He moves to follow, but Robin shakes her head.

  “Where are they gonna go?” She points upriver. The path is visible from their vantage point, and the bank much more gradually sloped. “If one of them falls in, they’ll float this way.”

  He shrugs, and they stand together on the little rise and watch, half-hypnotized by the water’s flow.

  Robin’s fingers find their way into his hand.

  He squeezes. Gently.

  She squeezes back.

  If he could stop time, he would do it here. All those days in prison, one exactly like the next. All those nights he spent getting up to no good on the internet. All of them worthless. Here—this day, this moment—is the one he would choose to repeat again and again.

  “This could be nice,” she says, softly. Not looking at him. “Right?”

  “It could’ve been.” But now it’s gone. Whisked away like a leaf on the river.

  She leans away from him, slightly, to look up at his face. “You’re stuck on a point in the future, but you wouldn’t even be standing here if I hadn’t told you what was coming. Would you?”

  They both know the answer is no. Were this anything but his last possible chance with her, he’d never have allowed her to get this close. It would have always been not now, not yet, maybe next time. Someday. When he was good enough. “Is this part of your revenge? To—” his voice catches, but he forces the words out. “To show me what I could have had, before it’s gone?”

  She pulls him to a log at the edge of the bank. She steps up onto it, so she’s nearly at his eye level. “You can have it, you idiot,” she says. “Now.” And she takes his head in her hands and presses his lips to his.

  This time, he doesn’t resist.

  “Mom?”

  Both the kids are standing there, mouths open.

  Cyril shoves her away. Not hard, but hard enough to throw her off balance, and although he makes a grab for her, he’s too late. She lands on her rear in the sandy soil. “Shit—”

  “I’m good, I’m good!” She’s laughing, stretching out a hand to be pulled back to her feet. He obliges, and she dusts the sand off the back of her shorts.

  Seth’s freckled face is crimson.

  Nora looks between them, wide-eyed. “Are you guys gonna marry?”

  “No,” Cyril snaps.

  Robin laughs again. “Don’t worry about it, baby.” She grabs Cyril’s hand, lacing their fingers together, and gives his knuckles a quick peck. “Let’s head back to the playground.”

  Nora shrugs and skips off; Seth darts a quick glance at them and then hurries past, as if he can’t get out of there quickly enough.

  The path is too narrow to allow them to walk side by side—his arms are striated with scratches he’d acquired on the way in—but Robin doesn’t drop his hand. She goes first, pulling him along behind. Her pace is faster than he’s used to, and it’s a gentle slope upward all the way, but when his breaths become audible, she glances back and then stops, turning to face him. He pulls the water bottle out of his pocket, empties half of it into his gullet, and then hands the remainder to her.

  “I need you to do something.” She takes a sip and then offers it back to him—holding onto it when he takes it from her until he looks up, meeting her eyes. “For me.”

  “Shit.” She’s gonna force the issue. Right here, right now. This is where she asks him to tell the kids, or maybe be there when she tells them, and he doesn’t know how he can possibly bear to watch that realization dawn in her children’s eyes. He also can’t tell her no. He takes another swig. “If you’re gonna ask me to haul your ashes to Antarctica or some shit like—”

  “Fuck me.”

  He laughs, short and sharp. “What?”

  Her gaze does not waver. “You heard what I said.”

  He snorts, then laughs and shakes his head. “No.” He caps the bo
ttle and slips it back into his pocket. “You don’t—Jesus, no.” He laughs again, and the sound is harsh and dry. “You don’t want that.”

  “You don’t get to tell me what I want, Cyril. Not anymore. I make my own decisions now.”

  “Oh my God, you’re crazy.” He shoves past her and doesn’t look back until he gets to the truck.

  The ride home is silent. He loses himself in prepping dinner. The kids log onto Minecraft in the living room, and Robin goes down to the barn to work on... whatever. He doesn’t care. Dinner is nearly ready when she comes back, walking past him without acknowledging his presence but stopping to grab a beer from the fridge, and tells the kids, curtly, that it’s time to turn off screens.

  Seth comes into the kitchen. “Not now, kid,” he says, and Seth reads the room for once and leaves.

  Not five minutes later, Cyril hears the kids head upstairs to bother their mother. He considers stopping them, but that’s her problem, not his.

  Dinner comes off the stove, and instead of plopping the pan of pasta in the center of the table he serves up individual portions on plates, sets the table, and gets drinks. When there’s nothing more he can do he goes to the bottom of the stairwell, listening to the thunder of little feet over head.

  “This one’s mine!” Seth’s voice declares. It’s clear as a bell because the second floor is still a blank canvas of sheetrock and plywood flooring. Everything echoes.

  Robin laughs. “Who says you get to choose? You guys are pretty good at sharing. I think—”

  “No!” shouts Nora. “I want my own room!”

  “You said!” Seth protests. “You said we—”

  “Okay, okay, chill. I'm teasing. Yes, you get your own rooms. But there’s just two to pick from, so you have to agree.”

  The kids discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each room for a while, in a surprisingly civilized fashion. How long will they get to enjoy their own spaces before they’re gone again?

  And then the obvious conclusion dawns on him: the kids aren’t moving. When Robin is gone, Greta and her husband will move in. Now the ramp makes perfect sense. They’ll occupy the downstairs bed and bath and office, while the kids will have their own space, unaltered, upstairs.

  And where is he supposed to go? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, after she’s gone.

  “Think about where the sun rises and sets,” Robin tells the kids. “That way’s east, so this one’s gonna be light first thing in the morning.”

  The food is getting cold. He considers yelling up the stairwell. Then he sighs and starts up the steps instead.

  Nora hears him first. “Is it dinner?” she demands, and when he says “on the table” she squeezes past him and dashes downstairs. Seth at least waits until he’s finished coming up the stairs before following his sister.

  Robin doesn’t appear in the hall. He finds her in the eastern bedroom. “So the Cookes are moving in,” he says, keeping his voice low.

  She turns to look at him, her face registering confusion. “What?”

  “Here. I mean, you said the kids could choose their rooms—”

  "No? The Cookes are perfectly happy in their own home. And the second floor is hardly accessible. Although,” she adds, thoughtfully, “I have considered installing an elevator in the laundry room. Remodeling their place really sold me on universal design.”

  He couldn’t care less about Cooke or the accessibility of his house. “Then you’re just—fucking with the kids? Let them have new rooms for a couple of months and then have it all ripped away when you—” He can’t say it. This fucking coward.

  “No,” she says, slowly. Her confusion grows deeper. “I figured they could come stay here whenever they want. Weekends or holidays or whatever works out.”

  “How?”

  She cocks her head, giving him a puzzled—if slightly irritated—grin. “Are you being intentionally obtuse? I thought the plus-size bathroom remodel made it pretty obvious. Or, like, the fact that I made all the doorways four feet wide and seven feet tall.”

  He stares.

  “Mommy!” Nora calls, drawing the word out. “Mommy! I need ketchup!”

  Robin shrugs, turns, and jogs down the stairs.

  The children are nearly finished with dinner when he comes downstairs again. Seth says something, but he doesn’t answer, and when he lets himself out the front door he hears Robin telling the kids not to follow.

  He doesn’t leave. He can’t. He’s not sure, now, if he ever really could.

  He just needs to be alone. He sits on the front porch steps, which only this week he’d helped Robin rebuild, and holds his head in his hands. He’s tired. Exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with flesh or bone.

  Inside, as Robin herds the kids to bed, there are more footsteps; more laughter; more screams. No matter what their—her—children do, it’s loud. And there is always more laughter than tears.

  A few dog walkers pass, casting curious glances at him from behind masks. The sun sets. The house is, finally, still.

  The front door opens. Her bare footsteps pad across the porch, and then she is standing beside him. Something cold touches his shoulder, and he looks up to find her handing him a can of root beer. He takes it. She sits. Pops the cap off a green bottle of non-alcoholic beer.

  “Why are you doing this?” Trying to give him her house, her kids, her everything?

  “I think the bigger questions is, why can’t you accept it?” She upends the bottle, briefly, taking a swig. She grimaces and lets out a grunt of disgust. “I always think this stuff is gonna be better than it is.”

  They watch the stars come out. She finishes off her not-quite-beer. The root beer sits next to him on the porch rail, unopened.

  “Look.” She puts a hand on his arm. “Right now? I feel good. And I know, like, for sure, that this is the best I’m ever going to feel again. Top of the roller coaster. I can’t afford to sit around anymore and wait while you mope or self-flagellate or whatever the hell it is you do. Honestly? This is not even about you. It’s—”

  “About you? Wanting”—he grabs a handful of flesh from his belly and gives it a savage shake—“this?”

  “Is that really so hard to believe?”

  “Disgusting,” he hisses. “Is the word you used to describe me, five years ago. Don’t pretend you’ve suddenly developed a taste for ass cracks and cellulite.”

  “I’m not pretending anything,” she says. “But I’m also not who I was, five years ago.” She leans back, hands on knees, looking up at the rafter they’d sistered under the porch roof, and lets out a slow breath. “I guess... I’ve gotten used to you.”

  “Oh, well, in that case, yes, absolutely, let’s fuck.” He puts a hand on the railing and heaves himself to his feet, stooping to pick up her empty green bottle as he climbs the steps.

  She catches the door as it swings shut between them. “You think blind lust is the only legitimate basis for having sex? News flash, Cyril. Tavis was objectively hot, but he was not actually my type. But I sure as hell fucked him, didn’t I? You made damn sure of that.”

  He collects the dinner plates from the table, stacking his own on top, and eats cold corn on the cob as he files the dirty plates into the dishwasher. She stands in the middle of the kitchen, hands propped on hips, watching him. He squirts dish soap onto the dirty nonstick pans in the sink and runs the water hot.

  Finally, she lets out a huff of breath, lets her arms drop to her sides, and yanks the fridge open. She pulls out another non-alcoholic beer and uses the hem of her shirt to twist off the cap. “Seriously, though, are you really that scared of me seeing your cock?”

  He plunges his hands into the hot, soapy water.

  She leans a hip against the counter and uses the butt of the beer bottle to poke his gut. “Is it hideously deformed? Did it fall off?”

  “Dunno,” he growls. The first pot comes clean, and he reaches for the dish towel to swipe it dry. “Haven’t seen it in about a decade.”


  She snorts laughter. “Well, I know you’ve touched it.” She makes exaggerated huffing noises. “You breathe like a walrus having an asthma attack, you think I can’t hear you in the bathroom?”

  “Fuck.” He slaps the towel down on the counter. “Off.”

  She follows him down the hall and into the bedroom. His bedroom, he realizes. With the Cal king bed and the double-plus-sized bathroom on the other side of the wall. The room now serving as the kids’ bedroom will be his office, so he doesn’t have to climb the stairs when, inevitably, he balloons back to six hundred pounds. (Because what else is he gonna do, when she’s gone?) What he had assumed was the upstairs master bedroom is a combined play area, filled with the kids’ books and electronics. Two smaller bedrooms, one for each kid, so they can come and visit the home their mother built and play with the toys she gave them and talk to the man who worshipped her and lie in the beds where she used to tuck them in and feel, as they sleep, that she might be just around the corner.

  She means him to be the keeper of her mausoleum.

  He yanks open the closet door, where she’s already cleared him his own space inside, moving herself out of the picture foot by square foot. Tav’s old canvas seabag is crammed into a high shelf; this asshole gives it a rough shake and begins stuffing it with the shirts and sweatpants he pulls off the shelves.

  “You need me to say it, Cyril?” she says, so close he can feel her breath on his neck. “You’re not anywhere near as hot as Tavis. But am I physically attracted to you? Yes. Would I have been, under ideal circumstances? Probably not. Doesn’t matter. Everything in my life is a compromise.”

  He turns, forcing her to back up a step.

  She spreads her palms. “What is your hang-up? Isn’t this exactly what you’ve always wanted?”

  He shoulders past her without meeting her eyes. “I want you. Not your body. Not—not that. Not unless it’s real.”

  Behind him, as he leaves the bedroom, she chokes out a high, disbelieving laugh. “Real? Real? You want real, honest-to-goodness fairytale magical true love for ever and ever, or nothing at all?” She laughs again. “When did you ever offer me that choice?”