“Hmm…hey, you know what I would get her?”
“What’s that?”
“Some colored pencils and a new sketch pad. She loves to draw, that girl. Not bad, either, for a kid her age.”
“Do you sell those here?”
“No, but I can get them, no problem.”
“That will be great. I really appreciate your help. Is a hundred dollars enough for all that?”
“Oh yeah. If not I’ll make it enough. Hey, you want me to send you a photo of Emma when I give her the sketch pad?”
“Oh man, that would be excellent.”
She reached for a small pad and pen on the cash register and handed them to him. “Give me a phone number and I’ll text some photos to you later tonight.”
He wrote down Jayme’s number and returned the pad and pen to her. She looked at it and said, “She’s going to want to know who the stuff is from, Ryan. She knows you, right?”
“Just tell her it’s from Jayme,” he said.
“Funny, you don’t look much like a Jayme.”
He smiled. “Jayme will be relieved to hear that.” He reached for his bag of road food. “Thank you for taking care of all this.”
“Hey, it’s not a problem. We watch out for each other around here.”
He smiled again, turned away, went out the door and to the car. Placed the grocery bags in the back seat, then climbed in behind the wheel. Jayme had been crying again, her face still wet with tears. “I feel so damn helpless,” she told him.
He took her hand. “I know, baby. I know.”
Thirty
When the thing you fear the most is the thing you need the most
It was late afternoon when Boyd left Flores’s apartment, the sun a soft yellow orb behind dirty white clouds layered across the horizon. To Boyd it looked as if the sun had simply pulled over for a rest, needed to catch its breath before starting another day on the other side of the world. Boyd needed to catch his breath too, needed to curtail the feathery sensation in his stomach. He needed to walk a while and think about what had happened back there above the hardware store. He needed to sort out his feelings, needed to label and categorize them appropriately. Brandy Springs Park was the closest place for serious walking and cogitation, just three blocks south, so he picked up a sixteen-ounce French roast at Sheetz and, sipping as he walked, entered the park at the lower end, near the doggie runs. The goose pond looked dirty and thick with mud, but the geese didn’t seem to mind. The park was quiet, only two people and their dogs so far, and their voices faded behind him inside the chain-link kennels while he moved on.
The first thing Dani had said after he’d climbed into bed beside her was, “If it feels good and doesn’t hurt anybody, why not? Right?”
“Right,” he’d said, but he had lain there stiffly on his back, staring at the ceiling. Then she’d rolled toward him, laid a hand on his chest. It moved slowly down over his stomach, then stopped.
“You plan on taking your shorts off?” she’d asked, and he’d said, “Eventually.”
“Why not now?” she said, so he had, and she touched him, and soon he stopped wondering about the wisdom of his actions. He liked that she seemed almost coldly objective in her approach, that she skipped all but a few of the kisses most women demand before getting down to business. He liked kissing too, liked it a lot, but in this case he considered it dangerous. To him kissing was one of the most intimate things two people could do. You did it only with people you cared about deeply. He cared about Flores but a relationship was just out of the question, could turn his entire life into an unpredictable mess. He didn’t need the drama, the complications of such a troubled young woman. Not to mention the looks and remarks he would get from the guys at the barracks if they found out. The warnings he would get from Captain Bowen. But the main worry was Flores herself. She was so, what was the word? Unpredictable.
Even before Flores’s injury he had sensed an undercurrent of anger in her. Previously it had shown itself only in an occasional sarcastic remark, but now it radiated off her like a hot breeze. Even the sex had seemed angry. She took control right from the start, and her heedless actions had emboldened him. But then, just as her orgasm began, he’d felt dampness against his shoulder and realized that she was crying, that she was weeping and clinging to him more tightly than he had ever before been held.
Not that he hadn’t enjoyed the sex, it was great. But the way she held him afterward—that frightened him. And the knowledge that it frightened him only exacerbated his suspicion that it had all been a big mistake.
Now as he played it all over in his head, he didn’t even realize that he had picked up his pace significantly and was striding along like a man trying to put some distance between himself and something following. His hand was wet with coffee that had splashed out of the little hole in the plastic cap. What caught his attention was a sound off to his left, a high-pitched “Unh!” soon followed by another. “Unh!”
The sound was coming from a small playground. A little boy trying and failing to leap high enough to grasp the bar suspended from a zip line strung between two poles fifteen feet apart. At its highest point the line was maybe seven feet off the ground. The boy looked to be only four or five, and the bar was well out of reach for him. His mother, a young woman in her early twenties, was seated atop a picnic table several yards away, fixated on her cell phone. Boyd watched the boy leap again and again, each time with a grunt of frustration to which his mother failed to react.
Boyd turned and crossed to the zip line, approached the boy, then asked, “You need a little help there, pardner?”
“I can’t weach it,” the boy said.
Boyd looked toward the mother, who had not yet raised her eyes to them. “Excuse me, miss?”
She looked up. Was surprised to see him there.
“Is it okay if I give your little boy a boost here?”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay, sure. Be my guest. He’s too heavy for me to lift.”
Boyd set his coffee cup out of the way and spent the next twenty minutes hoisting the boy up to the bar, then hurrying along beside him, hands poised to catch him if he lost his grip. The boy might have continued longer but his mother finally tucked the cell phone into her jeans pocket and came to take her son by his hand. “That’s enough for today. We need to get home.”
The boy hurried to keep up with her. But after three steps he twisted around to call out, “Thank you, mister!”
Boyd gave him a two-finger salute. Retrieved his coffee, cold now, and continued his walk, but at a more leisurely pace. He made four full laps of the park’s loop before turning back up the sidewalk and toward his car. His legs were pleasantly tired, his body pleasantly warm, and his mind was pleasantly if intriguingly calm.
Thirty-One
Like a flailing speck in an angry sea
DeMarco driving with the dying sun at his back, Jayme with her face relaxed finally, eyes closed and head lying back in her captain’s chair, earbuds in as her cell phone ran through her playlist, Hero asleep on the vibrating floor between them. It had been a long day and was not yet over. Before pulling out of the campground five hours earlier they had let Hero run until he wore himself out, and since then they had stopped twice to let him pee. Would stop one more time before pulling into the backyard, ETA 10:30 p.m., nothing but four hours of flat Ohio ahead.
During the first hours of the drive Jayme kept looking at her cell phone. Then she would look out the windshield and gaze into the distance and say, “I wonder if she knows yet.” Or, “The doctor would tell her, I’m sure.” Or, “I wonder how she’s taking it.” Or, “She must be scared to death right now.” Or, “I wish we were there with her. I wish we had stayed.”
He had responded to only the last statement. “We’re still little more than strangers to them, sweetheart.”
To which she had answered, almost a
ngrily, “I don’t feel like a stranger to her. Or her to me. We should have stayed with her.”
Around five thirty her cell phone had beeped, a text from an unknown number, and she had opened the text to find three photos: one of the Barrie’s kitchen counter covered with groceries, one of Emma’s wide-eyed surprise as she pulled a new sketch pad out of a grocery bag, and one of Emma standing with a page from that sketch pad pressed to her chest, the words Thank you! in bold blue script in her hand, a big red heart underneath.
Jayme had been surprised and a little confused at first, but DeMarco’s smile gave the secret away. He told her then about the groceries, and she nearly sent them into a ditch with a strangling hug around his neck.
Only recently had she stopped fidgeting in her seat, staring to the side, then forward, then glancing backward into the RV as if she heard something there. Earlier in the trip she would get up and make her way past the kitchen area and into the bedroom. Twice she had stood at the threshold to the bedroom, her hands on the doorframe as her body swayed in response to the RV’s movements. He wished she would climb onto the bed and find some peace in sleep, but she always returned to sit beside him again. Only thirty minutes ago had she finally grown still, her breath regular, one hand, even in sleep, holding her cell phone close.
Now, with Jayme and Hero both blessedly drowsing, DeMarco kept both hands on the wheel except when he reached for his coffee in the cup holder. The RV shuddered each time an eighteen-wheeler blew past. He wondered what the old ship pilots had sipped when sailing the seven seas. Grog, maybe. In a heavy metal mug. But wouldn’t that be a soporific, the very opposite of what they needed? Tea, then. A dark, bitter, unsweetened tea, brewed in an iron pot swaying over a fire in the ship’s galley.
It felt good to be at his land yacht’s wheel. Maybe he had been one of those seamen in a previous life. One of those lonely men who never felt at home on land but could think of nothing but the land while sailing to some foreign port, the ship a mere speck out there on the endlessly churning sea.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, saw his tired eyes. You’re not lonely anymore, are you, matey?
Or was he? The irony of having an NDE, or of any encounter with the supernatural, was that even as it connected you with a larger reality, it further separated you from everyone else in the current reality. The encounter was always a personal one, unshared and, in the end, unshareable. Each time he thought about his experience, he entered into an utterly private place. No one else could join him there, not even, he supposed, if they had had their own similar experience.
Jayme was inside her own experience too. As was Hero. Whether dreaming or awake, everybody was in his or her own experience. Their experiences could overlap with others’, of course, but it was a temporary union and merely a glancing blow compared to the intensity of what he had experienced when outside of his body. As a consequence, he now had knowledge he could not articulate. Experience he could not transfer or adequately share with anybody else.
And what of God? What of the Source? It could divide itself into a trillion trillion consciousnesses yet always be only itself. Only a trillion trillion tiny specks bobbing and flailing about in a sea of lonely self.
Yes, no question, no doubt. DeMarco was sailing his own ship across a vast sea. No other sailors aboard. No land in sight. His body, and Jayme’s, and Hero’s were their own personal schooners, their own personal anchors. He wished he could merge with them, pass through and experience them as he had when he passed through his mother and father and everyone else he had known when they were all just milky clouds of being in an infinite sea of black. Someday he would. Someday.
He looked down at Hero, who had awakened now and was watching him curiously, head cocked. “Someday,” DeMarco whispered. Then he whispered the same to Jayme, her eyes still closed, chest rising and falling evenly, her eyelashes fluttering a little as she dreamed. So close and yet so distant. He barely knew her. He knew death better than he knew her, was more intimate with the infinite than he would ever be with her. At least in this life.
Oh, yes, he was lonely. And how he longed for an end to it.
Thirty-Two
Hello, my friend
During his first hour back home in his own bed, DeMarco felt the RV still rocking beneath him. Then he slept, but restlessly, dreaming of somebody chasing him, their footsteps echoing so loudly through the great hollow space that his eardrums ached. And when he was awakened at 7:20 the next morning by Hero’s cold wet nose against his cheek, and tried to roll silently out of bed, he stifled a groan. His shoulders were stiff and sore, ribs sore, his spine a brittle, gnarled twig.
But it was good to be home again. His bedroom smelled like sunlight. Like more or less fresh linen on the bed. And Jayme lying there on her side, the rise of her hip, one leg uncovered from midthigh down… When was the last time they had made love? Four full days ago. Too long. He stood there gazing at her, his genitals growing heavy. Then Hero rubbed against his leg, and DeMarco reacted with a start like a schoolboy caught stealing a look at pornography.
“Shh!” he told the dog, even though it hadn’t made a sound. Then a last, nostalgic glance at Jayme before he turned and tiptoed to the door.
Back to routine, the same old same old.
A gray, chilly morning. “Good morning, morning,” he said softly. He stood on the edge of the porch for a few moments, coffee cup in hand, the rising heat from the cup warming his face while Hero loped around the yard doing a security check of each of his pee posts and reestablishing his pheromonal claim to them. Then DeMarco, clothed only in red-and-black basketball shorts and a gray T-shirt, stepped down into the dew-wet grass. His breath caught at the startling cold. “Whew!” he said, but he did not move. A little shock was a good thing in the morning. Gets the eyes opened up. Gets the juices flowing. A jolt of cold stabbing at his toes was a benign kind of pain, and he wanted to experience it.
He sipped his hot coffee and felt his toes tingling and looked up at the sky, and for some reason he thought of Seneca then, the Roman sage and philosopher of the first century AD. In one of his epistles, Seneca had quoted Hecato of Rhodes, “I have begun to be a friend to myself.” DeMarco had never read Hecato but maybe he would someday. For now, he was pleased to recognize that he, too, had finally entered into that stage of evolution. He no longer despised himself. It changed everything.
During his last years as a teenager and after his father was gone he had liked to rise early, washing and dressing in darkness. He had taught himself as a boy how to move quietly, like an Indian in moccasins in the old Westerns on TV, and he had taken pleasure from the independence he felt from having a few dollars in his pocket from seasonal construction work, liked how strong and light on his feet he had felt. Most of the people in the trailer court were on welfare or social security and there were few lights shining inside the metal boxes as he passed silently between them on his way to the street. He liked going into the convenience store and getting a large black coffee in a cardboard cup and walking with it warming his hand in the cool, clean morning, then taking the long way back home with the first long streaks of sunlight painting the ground, the old leaves brown and looking softened by the dew like old leather, the grass new and sparkling green in the yellow light. His mother would still be sleeping when he returned home, and he would scramble some eggs and fry a slice or two of ham, would eat half of the food straight from the skillet and cover the rest with aluminum foil for his mother to warm up later. Then he would set out again to either school or work and begin the necessary business of the day feeling like his own man for a change, not the fearful boy always wondering if the next day would bring his father into his life again like an explosion of foul air.
Those had been mostly good days for him, between his father’s death and the rotten business in Panama during the invasion, all of that unnecessary carnage and the deceit behind it. After Panama he had seldom felt like his o
wn man again, and seldom since then felt light on his feet or as stealthy as an Indian. But now he did. All it had taken was a bullet in the chest. You should have thought of that sooner, he told himself with a smile.
The sky was the color of a dirty nickel that had passed through a thousand hands yet had spent most of its life in the blackness of a pocket, bouncing against its mates of lesser and greater value. A nickel, DeMarco told himself, isn’t much good on its own. No coin is. Generally they get doled out in the company of others. Between enlistment and Ryan Jr., there had seldom been a time when he had not felt like a dirty nickel apart from all the others, no matter how much he liked them. Apart by then from even his mother, apart from his fellow soldiers, apart from Laraine and the women he had lain with before meeting her. Then Ryan Jr. came and he’d felt suddenly complete and unalone, a sum total. Then that was torn from him too and back he went into aloneness, more abjectly alone than ever. Because alone is not always the same, not just one condition and always that condition. There are numerous gradations of alone. He had spent time in all of them. In solitary, which is sometimes the best variation of alone, potentially benign and often courted, prized and hoarded. The other depths were less enjoyable. Take desolate, for example. Forlorn. Bereft. Inconsolable. He possessed an intimate knowledge of all of them and more. All classifiable under the single heading of wretched and alone.
But now I have Jayme, he told the gray sky. And she makes gray not nearly as gray as gray used to be. And he had Hero too. It was funny how four legs and a wagging tail and big brown eyes could provide such good company. Plus I have a different way of looking at gray, he thought. And a different way of looking at the sky. And at me.
But cold feet, he realized, are still cold feet. Numb is numb. Back up onto the porch he went, the cold boards a few degrees warmer than the grass. “Speed it up,” he told Hero, and had to chuckle when the dog froze in place and cocked his head at him.
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