A Handful of Fire

by Alexis Alvarez

  “Wow.” I look around, and shiver. It’s not heated and the walls merely serve to protect a pocket of dull cold. The air in here is still and flat.

  “I’d like to fix it up into something he’d use, so when it gets warmer,” he swallows, “and he has friends over, it can be a good place to hang out.”

  “That’s a great idea.” I pick up a plastic truck with a smiling face, put it down beside a plastic pail and shovel printed with little crabs and fish. “Some of this stuff will probably need to go.” I purse my lips, looking around.

  He nods. “Well, if you’re up for it, I’d love your suggestions on how to improve it. Anything I ask him or tell him, these days, is automatically crap. Even if I offer him Disneyland on a silver platter.”

  “That’s because he doesn’t want Disneyland on a silver platter. He wants you. Just you, to laugh and hang out with him.” I touch his arm. “You can’t buy him back, Gabriel.”

  “I know that.” He moves away.

  “Spend time with him.” I look at his face, and he’s looking at mine, his eyes searching. “For simple things. Build with him. Ask about robots. Draw something funny and show him. Don’t yell or criticize or anything, even if he acts like a little jerk. Show him the fun, happy side of you. Try that for a while. I think it will go so fast, once you open up the floodgates. You just need to get them open.” I think about the playhouse door, how it resisted, how it screamed. But now we’re inside.

  “I can do that. I used to have fun with him, Shai.” He sounds defensive.

  “I believe you.” I’m not lying. I can see his humor, his exuberance for life in the rare smiles he gives, in the few jokes he’s made. I know there’s depth to him. “He knows it, too. It will all come back.”

  He nods. “I hope so.”

  He steps closer. I hold my breath, then let it out in a silent puff. He puts his hand on my cheek and holds it there and I reach up and cover his fingers with mine.

  “Shai. You’re amazing.” He sounds reverent. I step into his warmth, feeling his body heat emanate from his chest. His jacket brushes against me.

  “I’m just me.” My voice is low.

  He presses his hand into my skin, then lifts the other one to cup my face. “Being you, just you, is amazing, then.” His fingers caress me as he holds, and I melt into his grip. He steps in and I smell a rush of his cologne. His lips look soft and firm and I want them on mine again. I want his chest against my chest. I want him skin on skin.

  His voice is hoarse. “You’re changing Michael. You’re changing me. I like it.” His eyes look dark in here, still green, but the green of pools deep in a forest, hidden and mysterious. His cheekbones are defined, even in this shadowless light. I want to reach up and run my finger down one, feeling the short stubble at his chin.

  “That’s my job.” I hurry to add, “But it’s my job because it’s my heart. Helping kids and families is what makes me whole, Gabriel. It means everything to me. You and Michael? You mean a lot. To me.”

  “You mean—” He breaks off. When he steps closer, his eyes are predatory. He leans in and I feel his breath on my neck.

  “Gabriel?” My voice is tentative. I want to kiss him, but last time he stopped. And what about Arielle? And my job.

  We look at each other, then he steps back and breaks the gaze. “Shai. I’m—. Fuck.”

  “It’s okay.” It’s not, but I don’t know what else to say.

  “We should head back in. It’s freezing in here.”

  I nod and follow, relieved and desolate at once.

  The little pond is frozen over, and I gasp—there are koi below the surface, lined up, like cars in a lot. “Gabriel!” I point. “There are fish in there. This cold doesn’t kill them?”

  He laughs. “No. We have a pond-keeper who comes to take care of them. He’ll break the ice now and then to allow the ammonia out. They go into torpor in the winter to conserve energy. As long as the pond doesn’t get below about thirty-four degrees in the warmest pocket of water, they’ll be fine. They’re pretty hardy.”

  “That’s utterly incredible.” I can’t get over it. There’s a layer of ice, something a cat could skitter across. And below it, like modern art come alive, bodies part secret because the ice is part opaque, these brilliant bursts of orange, brown, white. I can’t stop staring. “Do they even know it’s winter?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know, but every spring, they’re still here, as strong as ever.”

  Shai’s in my mind. When I kissed her, I felt things that scared me—things I haven’t felt since Irene. I love it. And yet I don’t want to go there; it’s too soon. Those parts of me are buried deep, like those fish under the ice in my pond—alive, but hibernating. Expose them to heat too fast and they’ll die.

  Still, I can’t stop running the images in my mind, a jerky stop-motion film. Her sighs, her soft neck exposed as she leans her head back, her eyelids fluttering, long lashes on her cheeks. So fucking pretty.

  The feel of her breasts, warm and taut; the nipples heaven in my fingers. Her tongue, her lips, her smell. The way she pressed into me, not just against me but deeper, our bodies merging in a way that made me feel whole for the first time in years.

  The look in her eyes, wounded, when I pulled away.

  Seeing her hurt is the last thing I want. Well, maybe not the absolute last, but it’s not high on the list. The ultimate last thing I want is another loss in my life, for someone important to die in agony, because that would kill me, too.

  Sometimes I think I’m as fragile as the thin layer of ice on that pond, full of tiny cracks, like an old porcelain vase from China, and all it will take is a simple touch to make me lose my shit completely. I cannot chance that, because Michael needs me. It’s simple. I have to be there.

  There are people in the world who have more difficult situations, whose suffering makes mine a joke. With my education and wealth, what I’ve accomplished, at least I can provide my son with the best doctors and therapies in the world. Cancer is a crap-shoot, but at least I can give him every possible tool in the world’s arsenal. What I can’t provide is any certainty that things will work out, not to him or to myself, and that’s something no amount of money can provide. That eats at me, a slow and determined acid, wearing grooves into my mind.

  Old records, with their lines and ridges, playing out the same song forever—that’s what my brain has become. Some of my anxieties about Michael, about life, fate? I think they’re worn so deeply into the pattern of my brain that they’ve created an unchangeable maze that funnels my thoughts, always, down the same halls, to the same conclusions. I’ve seen colorful renditions of how neurotransmitters work; seen actual STEM images of axonal junctions, but I envision a tangled mass of strands, Ariadne’s ball of twine, that leads nowhere except dead ends and bleak vistas.

  But Shai—being with her makes my needle skip.

  Still, I have Arielle, who completes me in a way I’ve needed these past years. Arielle doesn’t care what’s below my surface, nor I hers. We’re all surface together, running the same maze together, a path we know by heart. And this isn’t bad. In fact, it’s kept me sane. All those little cracks on my exterior? She fills them in just enough so I don’t fly apart. She’s just enough glue to fix my veneer, and maybe I’m that for her, too, in some way. The truth is that I don’t think much about what Arielle needs. I take what I need from her as long as she gives it.

  I’m afraid that with Shai, I’ll need to open up my heart in ways I’m not willing to do. Shai’s not a surface kind of girl. I just don’t know if I’m ready to have someone plumb the depths.

  He’s playing another song I recognize. “The Pearl Fishers,” I say as I enter his office, shutting the door behind me with a soft click. “La Fond Du Temple Saint.”

  I wonder if he feels that almost painful joy in his soul when the two voices in the duet merge so beautifully that it’s almost unbelievable. It’s a song about friends, at the root of it; are he and I friends, yet? I’m
not sure what we are.

  “You know a lot about music,” he says, and I feel like it’s a question, an invitation.

  “Because I recognize two songs?” My voice is light, but my eyes are seeking his, finding the light in them. He’s easier today; his demeanor is more relaxed, his eyes softer. And I think he’s looking at me like I’m a woman, not a therapist. Maybe he stopped being “sorry” and wants it to happen again, the kiss. Maybe he was never sorry.

  “Two classical opera songs that most people your age would never have heard of,” he replies, a small smile on his lips. He stands up and comes close, just to the edge of my space. “And that I love.” He’s flirting, at least a little, and that sends my body into a thrill of adrenaline.

  “My age is your age, close enough, anyway,” I point out. “And I love them, too.”

  He tilts his head. “Why?”

  “Why are we the same age?” I tease. “I assume it’s because we were both born in relatively close succession. Although I suppose you have to look at the larger picture. If you look from far enough away, people from a hundred years ago are more or less our same age, too. If you’re working on a millennial scale.”

  That thought is sobering and reassuring at once. It smashes ancestors and descendants close enough that I can feel the breath of my great-grandmother on my cheek, hear the laughter of a different century. All the differences in technology are nothing compared to the human spirit that endures: The soul that seeks companionship, affirmation, love. And it somehow breaches the differences between me and Gabriel, too: Things like wealth, family, his sadness, mine. It pushes us so close together that those things fade into the background, dissolving like tissue paper in a spring rain.

  He laughs, and his face transforms into happiness. And God: happy, laughing Gabriel is so suddenly sexy that I suck in a breath. I want him, even though it goes against my professional ethics.

  “A millennial scale? Let me get through this week first, before I start thinking about such a vast amount of hours,” he says, grinning. I smell his cologne, a spicy scent that I’ve come to recognize. His lips look soft.

  “One week at a time. That’s fair.” I smile, and our eyes meet and lock.

  “Did you grow up listening to this music?” He’s curious, and it’s not just about the music in my past. His eyes follow my finger when I wind a curl around it.

  I blush and nod, watching him watching me. “My dad loved opera. Most Mexicans don’t, but my family was anything but typical, I guess. He played—well, still plays it, all the time. So I sort of learned to love it, too.”

  I lick my bottom lip and I see something spark in his eyes, and he swallows. The look in his eye makes butterflies start to swirl in my stomach. For a second I’m back in high school, standing close to a boy that I liked, wondering: Does he? Does he not? That crazy mix of anticipation and uncertainty: It’s like a drug

  “Do you play an instrument?” he asks.

  “No. My sis—I used to take piano lessons, but that, well, that stopped after a while.” I blink a few times. “You?”

  “No. I’d like Michael to learn piano though, someday.”

  “You’d probably have to get a piano first, then.” I look around the study, although surely it wouldn’t go in here. “Or at least a keyboard. Unless you’re planning to go old school.”

  “Old school? As in?” He raises an eyebrow and steps in an inch.

  My heart hammers. “My mom said that when she was a girl, she took lessons, piano lessons, from a nun at the church. She had no piano to practice on during the week, so her father made her a fake keyboard out of tape on the kitchen table. He measured out where all the black and white keys would go, and laid down tape strips for each one. And she’d play invisible music on those keys, right on the table, to practice the movements at least.”

  It’s a story of my mother’s that intrigued me from the first time I heard it. How could someone practice piano without even hearing the sounds? Without feeling the keys? But my mom said it helped.

  “Really?” Gabriel sounds surprised.

  “Yes. I think it must have taken a lot of patience to do that.”

  “And trust,” Gabriel adds, and his face grows thoughtful. “To trust that just learning the movements, deaf and mute, would someday result in the most beautiful music. It’s fascinating.”

  “I imagine you’re right.” I try to think of my mom as a little girl, tapping on the table, probably singing the music along inside her head. Then I think of her now, her hands wrinkled and veiny, and how I haven’t visited in so long, how I’m still angry at her, even after a decade, and I have to push back those thoughts to focus on the present.

  “That reminds me of a story about Beethoven,” Gabriel says. He raises one hand toward my face, then puts it into his pocket. My skin tingles at the almost caress.

  “What story?” My breath comes in shallow.

  “He wrote his famous Ninth Symphony when he was going deaf. But he was so full of music that he could hear it in his head, all of it, even when he couldn’t hear it with his ears. Some people think it’s his best thing ever—his ultimate masterpiece. Written when he’d never be able to hear it played.”

  “That’s so sad.” I think briefly about this; composing the most spectacular thing of your life and not getting to hear it. I imagine other lost things: People who are gone. Faces of children you’d never see. I swallow.

  “But fantastic, too, right?” He cocks his head. “Think about knowing the music so well that you don’t even need to hear it.”

  “I still like hearing things for real. It’s better than my imagination. It’s the best thing, to hear music in the moment.” I love the way his eyes look right now, so deep, so green.

  “Some people say the best thing is not the moment itself, but the moment just after,” he says immediately. I can feel the heat of his body emanating toward me. My body wants to lean in.

  “Do you think they’re right?” I ask. I can’t look away from his gaze.

  “I don’t know,” he says. His eyes darken. “Let’s see. Tell me whether this is better,” and without warning, he leans in and brushes my lips with his, “or this.” He pulls back to look into my eyes. “Which one, Shai?” His voice is low and gravelly. “Tell me.”

  I can’t breathe. The passion floods my body at the brush of his lips on mine. It was just a soft touch, but it awakens my body and I want more.

  “Maybe we need to try it again,” he murmurs, and leans in. My eyes flutter shut and I make a little noise, waiting for the touch of his lips, when the rattle of the doorknob startles me from my trance.

  “Gabriel! Shai? Are you guys in there? Can you come here? I want to show you something I made.” It’s Michael, and I step back just before he enters the room, tablet in hand. “I made a new house in Minecraft with my updated mods and I want to show you.”

  I step back, put a hand to my lips, then move it fast, in case that looks suspicious or abnormal. I feel like I’m breathing fast.

  Gabriel clears his throat. “I’d love to see it.”

  “Awesome!” Michael hops around with the tablet, then comes to stand between us. “Look.”

  I look at the screen, and express admiration for what he’s built. It’s truly an impressive structure.

  “Someday,” Gabriel tells him, “you can be an architect and build things like that in real life, Son.”

  “This is real life.” Michael’s voice goes flat. “Minecraft is real, Gabriel.”

  “Of course it is. I meant, you can do that in the non-Minecraft world, too, if you want. The point is that you can do anything you want.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Michael’s voice holds grudging acceptance. “You think I could do that?”

  “I know it.” Gabriel ruffles Michael’s hair and gives me a brilliant smile. I return it, shaky. What the hell am I doing?

  “Cool.” Michael doesn’t pull away. “Look at this one now.” And he taps, points, touches Gabriel’s arm, then holds i
t when Gabriel takes the tablet. Their laughter makes me feel glad.

  And even though I’m disappointed that our moment was cut short, and confused about what it meant, and worried that I’m blurring the lines between my job and my life, I smile back, because this is happiness you can hear. It’s in the real world. It’s not imaginary music, and I’m not deaf, and these words, from these two people, make my soul sing, right now, in this moment.

  “So I think he’s starting to really like me,” I say, waiting in the Starbucks drive-through. Exhaust grows in front of me, a flower unfurling to the sky, dirty white dissolving into nothing. I can smell the car in front of me, an acrid odor. Cars have their own B.O. signature. I wonder if the workers can recognize the scent of the regulars, always having to stick their head and hands out of their warm enclave into the bite of winter and the swirling collection of gasses.

  “Gabriel?” Kelsie’s voice is distracted. I hear her muffled words, “Anna, no, honey. Put it in the sink. In the sink.”

  “No. Michael.” Although my heart pulses faster just at the mention of Gabriel. It’s hard not to switch the conversation to him. In fact, avoiding it feels like pushing a boulder uphill, and I’m a little irritated that she can’t see and appreciate my monumentally significant restraint in this matter.

  Do I talk about him too much? Kelsie and I have become pretty close. We’re real friends, now. We meet up once a week, and talk as least as often. She gets me, and I like her, and Michael and Anna have formed a powerful bond of friendship. Gabriel gave permission for me to take Michael to meet up with Kelsie and Anna. I asked him if he wanted to background check them first. I was only half-joking, rolling my eyes; he laughed and said that if I trusted them, then he trusted me.

  I’m careful not to share anything about Michael or my other patients that would break the bonds of patient–client confidentiality. I would never discuss things we talk about, or Michael’s medical history, even if she knows some of it from the shared hospital experiences. But I am okay talking about general things.