Just Shelby

by Brooklyn James

  “Nobody wanted me around,” he continues. “Didn’t even consider me good enough to share a bus seat with.” He recollects the snub-nosed faces of our peers, guarding the aisle side of their seats, unwilling to shift their knees or their derrieres for him. “But you did.” He smiles at me tenderly.

  “If it’s any consolation, they’re willing to give up a lot more than their bus seat for you these days.” I laugh. If only he were a fly on the wall at Hot Brown.

  He laughs too, a grimace soon following. The lighthearted action is not so humorous to his clobbered face.

  My hand—led by some biological nurturing instinct—reacts without permission from my mind. It isn’t until Ace draws in his breath that I realize my fingers lightly trace his battle wounds.

  “That has to hurt,” I whisper.

  “Nothing I didn’t ask for,” he whispers back.

  I reach for his can of beer.

  He pulls it away.

  “I’m not going to drink it,” I say, coaxing it from his hand. “If it’s that bad, why do you drink it?”

  Appropriately, he does not answer my rhetorical question.

  Then I pull the Native American-inspired bandanna, holding hostage my unruly mane, from my head. Laying it atop the hood, the pattern looks as vintage as the Jeep. Another flea market find, it was the last gift I received from my father. He said turquoise was symbolic of protection. I don’t know about that. But it does match my eyes, the only standout of my otherwise lackluster appearance.

  I keep those eyes on task. Looking up would be unbearable. I have let my hair down in Ace’s company, and I never wear it down. My hair is coarse, disorderly. I possess neither the product nor the skill to style it like images in popular magazines. If only I were as wild as my hair…

  “What are you doing?” he asks, watching me saturate the turquoise cloth in beer. He is fine, in no need of mollycoddling.

  “I’m returning the favor.” Compassionately blotting and wiping away dried blood from his arresting face only causes him more pain. “Isn’t this nice of me.” I giggle to suppress the angst. To suppress the warm, achy feeling that mushrooms with the nearness of him.

  He does not laugh. Reinforcing that I am not funny. He doesn’t even flinch. The only recoil of his body are his eyes, the caution in them as unbending as their steely color.

  “All better,” I say, before pressing my lips to the injured flesh. My father having done that to me on a few memorable occasions throughout my clumsy childhood, I guess, maybe, I think it is the thing to do. Until I realize what I have done. I have come on to Ace Cooper?

  He comes back—leaning into me until his forehead is level with mine. Like the fit of a perfect running shoe from toe to tip, there is but a thumb’s width of room between our noses.

  “Why’d you do that?” he asks what I am thinking.

  Stock-still and flush all over—mouth full of cotton in suspense—my tongue has not the articulation to form the words I don’t know.

  Forget butterflies and mush. This feels like a chemical reaction. Exothermic. Combustible. Humans can’t actually explode. Can they?

  “Why?” He presses with his words and with the parted mouth they came out of, ever closer to mine.

  “Energy,” I puff, unable to elaborate that it is carried in the form of movement, for the elaborate task that breathing proves to be.

  “Energy?” he says, as perplexed by my nerdy answer as I am this sensation.

  “Energy doesn’t lie. It just…felt right.” I come clean.

  “But it’s not right. It’s all wrong. You can’t just do stuff like that.” Bereft of its usual self-possession, his voice is full of anguish. “Do you know what that does to me?”

  Maybe, hopefully, the same thing it is doing to me.

  Yes. It is. My hand clutched in his and guided to his chest—the heart beneath it hammers. Just like mine.

  “You can’t. I can’t.” He drops my hand and drops out of our intimate space. Sliding down off the hood, the ground does not ground him. He bounds on his toes. His head bobs from shoulder to shoulder. His arms and hands loosely shake about.

  I imagine this is what he must look like right before a fight. It—whatever that just was—did something to me, but it did not make me want to fight. I also imagine that he has been here before, with other girls. I keep imagining that he didn’t stop other girls from doing stuff like that.

  What is he doing here with me!

  “We need to. I need to. Argh!” he growls before he finally stops jouncing and completes a sentence. “We need to get you home.”

  Butterflies and mush commandeered by embarrassment and alienation, I do not argue. And I certainly do not accept his extended hand while dismounting the hood.

  Again the friction does wonders for my driving. I make our way down off that mountain and home as swiftly as he could have, neither of us uttering a word.

  Why didn’t you just fucking kiss her, Cooper.

  Get it over with. Satisfy your curiosity.

  Could it have been awful? Our first…and last…kiss.

  How is it that not making out was more of an adrenaline rush than making out.

  It squashed my damn buzz. Water it is. Pressing the rim of a gallon jug to my lips, I guzzle. Unsatiated, my lips still thirst for the taste of hers.

  And that answers that!

  On the hunt for phone service, I steer my Jeep in the direction of town. Call up Ainsley, Harper, Dreama…anyone, someone. Get your mind off her.

  I call Mom instead.

  “Ace? What is it? Are you okay?” Adrenaline rushes through her system too. I don’t call often, and certainly not at this hour—midnight.

  “No, I’m not. I mean, I’m not hurt or anything. Are you at the hospital?” She’s a nurse with an affinity for night shift.

  “Yes. Come on. By the time you get here, I’ll be ready for my lunch break. And I brought leftover beef bourguignon with homemade egg noodles,” she sings, as if I should be as excited about the fact as she is. “Enough for the both of us. Drive safe. I’m excited to see you.”

  I’m excited to see her too, but for whatever reason I can’t tell her that.

  An hour and a half later when I arrive, she’s in the middle of admitting a premature baby into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit she tirelessly works in.

  A fellow nurse pulls me into the unit, scrubs me down, gowns me up, sits me in a rocking chair, and hands me a tiny creature—a baby—whose entire swaddled body fits in my hands. Immediately ashamed of the nicks on them, they are not fit to hold such a precious thing.

  Hands that boldly delivered to a grown man’s body punishment cautiously deliver to this baby protection. I have held babies, few and far between, at my mother’s work before. She probably considers it a lesson in reproduction, hopefully clinging to abstinence. Every time I hold one, it’s like the first time.

  Are you sure? What do I do? I can’t hurt it, right?

  The nurse reads my thoughts, guiding my hands and arms, cocooning baby to my chest. “Just like that. Cuddle her right there. Let her hear your heartbeat.” She covers us both with a blanket and hurries away to another task.

  “Hey, ankle biter,” I whisper, low enough that only she can hear me. “You’re gonna be alright. You’ll get out of here…just like I did.”

  Talk about perspective. This little thing fights for life and I fight for what?

  The flash from the camera on Mom’s phone wakes me up.

  “That better not end up on Instagram.” I hand the human football back to her, coaching the entire time. Soft hands. Soft hands.

  “Buddy, you’re a girl, make a big noise. Playing in the street, gonna be a big girl someday…We will, we will rock you.” Mom sings her a lullaby, rocking her in arms, then tucking her into an incubator.

  “You’re so weird,” I say.

  “I love you, too,” she says, locking her arm through the crook of my elbow and leading us to the break room.

  “Oh…hi,
Ella,” Mom says to a good-looking girl in scrubs, who is not much older than me, finishing up her lunch.

  “Hi, Miss Wren,” the girl says, raised in Southern tradition.

  “That full moon is showing off its prowess tonight, huh.” Mom washes her hands, wiping beads of work-earned perspiration from her forehead with the paper towel.

  “Yes, ma’am. If only gravitational pull had regard for due dates. I hear y’all are about out of incubators.”

  “You heard right. We’re pulling people in off the streets to hold babies.” Mom winks at me.

  “The ‘boxing baby cuddler,’” Ella says, holding up her phone to display a circulating picture of me holding that preemie.

  I glare at Mom.

  “What! It’s not Instagram.”

  “That is sooo sweet,” Ella’s inflection drips with syrup.

  “I’m not sweet,” I say.

  “Ella, meet my sour son, Ace,” Mom interjects, face scrunched up like she sucked a lemon.

  She and Ella laugh. They’re not funny. They’re delirious. Who works at this hour let alone thinks.

  “Ella is a lab tech.” Mom thrusts me into the chair across from her. “Tell him, Ella, you’re not big on school either…”

  “No, I’m not,” Ella says, the first uncalculated statement in this ambush. “That’s what appealed to me about being a lab tech, two years of school instead of four. I went to a tech school here in town. They’re not pretentious at all, like UK.” She rolls her heavily made-up, and alluring, eyes. “They get it. We all have lives, interests, that matter more to us than school. The coursework is set up so that you can still have a life, you know.”

  No, I don’t know.

  “I worked the whole way through. Kept my own apartment. Went out.” She smiles, gives me a sideways glance, and shrugs at the possibilities.

  Is this the part where I’m supposed to ask her out. She is hot. Where she can tell me all about the benefits of more school after high school.

  “Show him what you did for work,” Mom says, keeping herself out of the intimate table setting by warming and rewarming leftovers.

  Ella pulls up her shirt sleeves, revealing an entirely new set of inked sleeves beneath.

  Damn. Tattoos. Smoking hot.

  Cosmos and feathers and feminine tribal touches and words and her face inside a wolf’s—the work is aesthetic. So real that I resist the urge to allow my hand to follow my eyes in exploring the she-wolf.

  “That’s my spirit animal,” she says.

  I bet it is. “You did this?” The possibilities are compelling.

  “Just the left side,” she speaks to her right-hand dominance. “I could work on you sometime. I mean, if it’s okay with your mom.”

  “Look at his face.” Mom lightly taps my chin. Beneath the fluorescent light over the dining table, the close-up amplifies the discolorations. Her fretful eyes disapprove. “Does it appear as though he asks my permission for anything.”

  Ella’s phone goes off. “And the lunar effect strikes again.”

  She and Mom sigh.

  “Before you go, why don’t you write down your number. Never know when we might need you in NICU.” Mom slides a notepad to Ella for the number and takes over the vacant chair across from me.

  Digits complete, Ella slides the notepad to the middle of the table, as accessible to me as to Mom. “Enjoy your break, Miss Wren. Nice meeting you, baby cuddler,” she says, all smiles, raking her permanently tattooed bottom lip through her teeth and backing out the door.

  “Subtle, Miss Wren.” I push the notepad to her, rejecting the number the way I inherently reject anything she tries to push on me.

  “Eat,” she says.

  I can’t help myself. She was right to sing about this meal. The flavors, the knack, the love—I can taste it all. “God, I miss your cooking.”

  “I miss you, too, bub.”

  We start in comfortable silence amid a few “mmm’s” and clanking forks and favorable grins—the way we used to when Pop missed dinner on night shift at the mine.

  The annoying analog clock on the unhomely wall of this break room underscores the stark reality that we are not home. Time visibly clicking away. I don’t have all night, the way I would if Mom were home.

  I pull the insert from my back pocket and slide it across the table. “What kind of guitar is this?”

  “Bootleg? Now there’s a blast from the past.” She studies the insert with her eyes but not with her hands. As if touching it might transport her back to that past, back to Appalachia. “Where did you dig this up?”

  “From the Koronette.”

  “Your father kept that thing?”

  “He kept everything that belonged to you.” Everything you didn’t take. Everything that would remind you of him, our home, our family.

  “How is he?”

  “The guitar. What is it?” I redirect, refusing to be the go-between. She has his number. He kept it, too.

  Used to my reticence, she gives a heavy sigh and returns to the insert. “It’s hard to tell in such a small image, but maybe handmade? The headstock emblem…what is that…a pant leg inside a boot?” She strains her eyes. “Of course it is, Bootleg. Clever. You know, they were a decent band. All about ‘local’ and ‘sustainable,’ before local and sustainable were catchwords. It’s a shame what happened to Mason Lynn…and Maisy, too.”

  Holler news makes it out of the holler?

  She clutches my hands in hers across the table, her pale blue eyes piercing into mine. “You’re not a part of that drug scene, right.”

  Gray eyes—a variant of blue—are a “polymorphism” of a mutation, she pointed out while taking a genetics class for her nursing degree. Basically, gray eyes lack even more melanin than blue eyes. I always knew we were mutants! she said.

  I let those freak of nature eyes inherited by me do the answering, pressing into hers and full of offense. If she were around, she would know that even my thrill-seeking reaches its limit at drugs.

  “And the fighting, is it necessary? I didn’t spend seven months pregnant growing your flesh and bones, and another two months postpartum taking up residence in a NICU, to see them like this.” She rubs her fingers over my abraded knuckles.

  “You’ll get used to it.” I deliver the words in a different way, but it is the same thing she said to me about splitting up our family.

  “Touché.” Her memory is like an elephant’s. “I hope that someday you can forgive me. That you can understand, we all try to do the best we can. It’s not like I could have made you come with me.”

  Nope, she couldn’t have. Pop needs me more than she does.

  “But it doesn’t make it hurt any less,” she adds.

  No, it doesn’t. “Why’d you do it to begin with? Stay there? Get married? Have me? I mean, you always had bigger dreams, right?” Like Shelby has.

  “I was young, bub. Born and raised there. Of course I had dreams. It’s just that love, young love, has a way of taking over everything else. Love becomes the dream. You fall into it. You make compromises and excuses for it, because it’s all you ever wanted. Then you grow up. And if you don’t grow together, dream together, you realize there is more to life than love. I’ll always love your father. I mean, look what we share, what we made together.” She looks at me, beyond the bruises. “I just outgrew him, that’s all.”

  Shelby would outgrow me, too.

  “That’s why I harp on you about college. About getting out of Appalachia and exploring the world. I get it: you know everything at your age.” She speaks not condescendingly but out of empathy, having known everything at my age too. “I just want you to have experiences, avenues by which to find yourself. Love is a part of that, of course. But if you have other things in front of you that are as interesting as love, maybe love is merely one component of the dream and not the dream itself.”

  She finishes her last bite of leftovers before her fork plummets to the bottom of the bowl, heavy with realization.

/>   “You never ask questions about me and your father. You never let me go on like this. Ella is a good-looking, edgy girl, right up your alley. And you didn’t even bat an eye! Love…” She gapes at me, part supportive mother who wants to nurture and share in the capstones of her son’s life and part hindsight critic who wants anything but for her son to repeat the mistakes she made. “Oh, bub, who is she?” She opts for supportive mother, her inflection gushy and curious and hopeful.

  “Slow your roll. No one said anything about love.” I don’t even know if we’re friends after tonight.

  “Okay, so you’re taking it slow. That’s good! Just tell me about her.”

  I shrug. “She’s a lot like you.”

  “Oh,” Mom says, wind knocked from her hopeful sails.

  “Yep, she’s got bigger dreams than me.”

  “Bigger dreams than you or bigger dreams than Appalachia?”

  “Aren’t they one and the same.” They were for Mom.

  She finally touches the insert, her forefinger playing connect-the-dots with an imaginary square around it. “Bootleg. They used to tour about, guitars, amps, and the whole band traveling in an old Shelby Mustang. Mason and Maisy named their daughter after that Mustang. She still lives next door with her grandfather?”

  I do not react. But the heart beneath my chest quickens. The way it does in her presence or with the thought of her or with the thought of anyone knowing what is in my heart, apparently.

  “Gravitational pull…” Mom says, as if it were inevitable. Or cosmic?

  “Huh?”

  “You and Shelby were born under the same moon. It was as full as it is tonight…the moon and the NICU.” She sits right in front of me but disappears to that night of eighteen years ago. “They were short on incubators. ‘Ovens,’ Mason called them.” She titters like a child.

  “God, we were scared. So young. So unprepared for babies, let alone premature ones. You didn’t wanna breathe and Shelby’s heart didn’t wanna keep pace. Connected to so many things—wires, machines, monitors—we swore you would end up bionic.” A sharp inhale flutters through her lips, pushed by a shuddering abdomen, the panic relieved but still accessible after all these years.