Fifteen Minutes to Live

by Phoef Sutton

  She turned him around and kissed him. His mind was reeling from surprise to fear to pleasure, but it was soon calmed by a wave of memory. The thick, softness of her lips and the taste of cigarette on her tongue. Nothing like this could have brought her here, but her hand was running down his chest and into his jeans.

  “What are you all dressed for? Did you think we were going on a hike?”

  One of the first things he learned as a comedy writer was not to try to make a joke if he couldn’t think of anything funny. So he just kissed her again and let her fumble with his belt. She backed away and touched his lip curiously, with her fingers.

  “Since when did you grow a mustache?” she asked, sounding genuinely confused.

  “I had to do something while I was waiting for you.”

  He kissed her neck and she giggled. “It tickles.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” he murmured while nibbling on the tender flesh of her neck.

  She gasped. It was a tender gasp, yearning and hungry, and at the sound of it Carl froze and felt his lips tremble on her neck. He knew that gasp so well, and it came from so long ago that he felt his heart grow in his chest. He shut his eyes and tears squeezed from them.

  Jesse pulled away to look at him, puzzled. “What is it?”

  He laughed. Only two tears had fallen. He was in control. He squeezed her arms, playfully. “It’s just so good to see you.”

  “You silly.”

  In the old days she had always been the one to frighten him off with the depth of her feelings, now here she was, laughing at his emotion as if her showing up now were the most natural thing in the world. Didn’t she know, or didn’t she want to know, that he could stare at her in this darkness all night long? Was it all just a game to her?

  She unfastened the top two buttons of his jeans and reached in. Any resentment he might have been feeling vanished in a surge of good will. “He’s happy to see me too.” There’s an adorable tone of pride a teen-age girl gets in her voice when she realizes she can cause an erection. Grown women never have that tone, they know the potential for pain and confusion too well, or perhaps they’re just bored with the whole thing. But a girl still thinks it’s a marvel she can have that kind of power, and never thinks of what it might bring on. Jesse still had that tone in her voice. Carl thought his heart would break.

  He pulled her close to him and kissed her again. She flinched for a moment when she felt the bristles of his mustache but he pulled her to him. He ran his hands over her body wildly, wanting to touch every inch, wanting to devour her. She pulled away again, laughing.

  “Jesus, where have they been keeping you?”

  He moved to her again, and they crawled over each other. It had been years since he’d gone wild on a woman like that, pawing and rubbing even though they were both still fully clothed. There weren’t enough restrictions on adult sex to make it this exciting. He was pulling up her shirt and when she brushed him off, playfully. “Come on. Not here, your parents will hear.”

  He could have told her his parents were dead, but he didn’t like to change the subject. So they ran to the greenhouse, clinging to each other just like the old days. Only they didn’t feel like the old days. They felt like now. It was all the things that had happened since that seemed like distant memories.

  “What happened to the avocado tree?” she asked as they passed the old stump.

  “It died,” he said, breathless.

  “You’re kidding?” She sounded genuinely shocked and he thought of telling her that time does pass and she couldn’t expect all the things to remain the same and that was all a part of growing old gracefully and accepting the passage of the years, but he grabbed her tits instead. She laughed and dashed ahead into the greenhouse.

  He was on her in a moment, swinging the door shut behind him and touching every part of her. He stripped every bit of clothing off her and himself, which was an insanely dangerous thing to do, considering his parents might burst in any second. And he couldn’t help but consider that. He couldn’t help but travel back, using her body as a time machine. He forgot that he’d ever been with another woman and fell back into the patterns of Jesse as if he’d made love to her yesterday, making circles with his fingers and tongue, pressing and pinching and biting in all the magic places. Hearing her gasp and cry out the magic sounds, seeing her white flesh turn ruddy as it blushed and her muscles tightened and her back arched and the sounds stopped, even her breath stopped as she pushed herself up at him and his mouth filled with her taste. Finally the sigh and the shudder came, she fell back to the earth floor of the greenhouse. Tears came again to him and this time he couldn’t stop them. He rubbed his face against her and mingled his wetness with hers.

  She twined her fingers in his hair and shushed him like a loving mother. Then she pulled him up onto her and it was a long time before they were still.

  When it was over she fell asleep. He realized that he’d never seen her sleep before. There was never that kind of time in the old days. She’d always rush out after a cigarette or two, each time professing to be shocked that she’d taken such chances.

  He studied her face. The moon had made its way through the haze and was falling on her through the skylight. He was relieved to see that she did look older. This was no visit from the Twilight Zone after all. There were tiny wrinkles around her eyes, a smile line at the sides of her mouth, a very slight sagging of the flesh on her throat. Her body had changed too, a little broader below, but he liked that. There was a scar on the side of her belly, perhaps from an appendectomy. Its bright redness contrasted vividly with the paleness of her skin. He liked that too.

  He nuzzled up to her and tried to pretend that she might like the added inches on his own gut. He felt as if it might be possible to ignore all these details and just close his eyes and go back to a time when they’d both been impossibly young. When they’d wanted each other so much they’d thought they were in love. But what if he did? The morning would still come, her game would be over and she’d be on her way. Don’t pretend that makes you angry, he told himself. What the hell would you do if she wanted to stay?

  He opened his eyes and was thirty, with a set of car keys digging into his back, laying on the hard dirt floor of a run down greenhouse, hugging a woman he hadn’t seen or heard from in twelve years, wondering what she was doing here. Women are always complaining about men falling asleep after sex, but Carl preferred that to staying awake and thinking.

  He shifted a bit, slipping the car keys to a less painful location. She awoke suddenly, gasping as if she didn’t know where she was, then she nuzzled up to him, contented.

  “I fell asleep,” she apologized.

  “I took it as a personal compliment.”

  “Silly. What time is it?”

  He retrieved his watch from under the pile of clothes. “Four thirty,” he told her.

  “Shit!” She was up and scurrying around for her clothes. “Why the hell didn’t you wake me up? Mom’s gonna kill me.”

  “How is your mom?”

  “She’s gonna kill me, that’s how she is. Where the hell are my clothes?”

  He gave her the white sundress and she looked at it, puzzled, as if she’d never seen it before. “What’s that?”

  “Your dress.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said doubtfully. She took it and started slipping it on. “God, I hope I can get home before she wakes up.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “Oh right, you’re going to wake your dad up and ask for the keys.”

  “I have my own car, Jesse.”

  “Since when?”

  “I don’t know, 1978?”

  She looked at him in angry annoyance. “Stop being weird.” She looked closer. “Where the hell’d you get that mustache?”

  Carl was getting annoyed.

  Jesse brushed by him and headed out into the yard. He followed her. She was heading for the gate, so he called out to her. “I told you I was driving you home.�
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  “Keep quiet! Do you want to get us killed?”

  He took her arm and led her to the patio and into the house. He flicked on the light and his eyes ached with the brightness. She snapped at him, “Carl, what about your folks?”

  He turned and faced her. Just because she still lived with her mother, why should she think he did? Why should she think he still lived here at all? Unless some mutual friend had told her. But then she would have heard that his parents were dead. And no matter how much she wanted to play her stupid game, that was hardly something to joke about. “They’re not here,” he said, sharply.

  “They’re not here!” She seemed suddenly angry. “Then why the hell did you drag me out to that old greenhouse if your parents weren’t here?”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Why the hell would I want to lie down in the dirt when I could have a bed?”

  He was getting sick of this. “Look what are you trying to do?”

  “I’m trying to get home so I can get to class tomorrow.”

  “You’re taking classes?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? Of course, I’m taking classes.”

  “Are you going to college?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t decided.” She stopped suddenly and stared at his 70-inch projection TV. “Christ, that’s a big TV. What are these things?” She was examining his home entertainment center.

  “You know, CD, VCR, laser disc player.”

  But she wasn’t listening; she was looking around the room in confusion. “Where’d you get all this furniture? Everything’s different.”

  “Of course everything’s different. What the hell did you think, everything was going to stay the same?”

  “But…” The confusion on her face was undeniable. Carl decided to cut the crap.

  “What are you trying to pull? Is this some game? If you want to fuck me once and never see me again, just tell me!”

  She backed away from him, hurt and afraid. “You know how I feel about you.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t know anything.”

  She shook her head, trying to brush it all away. “I don’t like this, let’s not do this. Just take me home.”

  He gathered up his keys and wallet from the mantelpiece. “Where do you live?”

  She turned on him screaming, “You know where I live!” She was shaking with anger and frustration that was close to tears. He hurried to her in surprise and held her. Feeling her warm body sobbing against him, she was the little girl again and he was her boy. He’d been right when he first saw her, something was wrong. Why wouldn’t she tell him what it was?

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I hope your parents didn’t hear.”

  “They’re not here.”

  “What?”

  “They’re not here.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re dead, Jesse.”

  She pulled away from him, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “That’s not funny,” she said as she headed out the front door.

  They climbed into the car and she looked around her impressed.

  “Where’d you get this thing?”

  “I stole it,” he told her.

  They drove along in silence. Carl figured from her outburst that she lived in the same house, but that hardly made his question anything to get angry about. Nowadays people don’t live in the same state they grew up in, much less the same house.

  That however, was the least of the mysteries of the evening. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what she was up to. She lived at home. Perhaps she was divorced recently. Feeling unhappy with life. Wanting an evening of youth. But how would she have been so sure where he lived? Well, he thought with a laugh, she could have done something damnably clever like look him up in the phone book.

  So she’s sitting at home with her elderly mother, watching late night TV, feeling the urge. She looks him up in the phone book, sneaks to his house, (How? Did she really walk the mile to his house? Did she ride her bike, like she used to in the old days?) throws her pebbles and just assumes that he’ll play along? It was crazy. But he did play along. And could he honestly say he was sorry he had?

  So maybe he should stop complaining and enjoy what had happened for what it was. Maybe she was right. Maybe the only way for it all to work was to pretend that no time had passed.

  “Is that Springsteen?” she asked.

  We hadn’t noticed, but “Better Days” was playing on the radio.

  “Yeah.”

  “He sounds so different.”

  “Yeah, a lot of people think so.”

  “What album is this?”

  “’Lucky Town.’”

  “How did I miss that one? She was looking at him, puzzled. “Where’d you get that stupid mustache?”

  “I grew it.” When was she going to drop that?

  “Oh, right,” she said doubtfully. “It makes you look older.” She looked at him more closely. “A lot older.”

  He had to drive up and down her street twice before he realized that her house wasn’t there anymore. Somebody had torn it down and put up one of those white angular monstrosities that filled the lot with only inches to spare.

  He pulled over and asked her, confused, “Is this it?” Then he looked over at her and saw the horror in her eyes. “Where’s my house?” She asked, her voice small with fear. “There’s the Rooney’s house, there’s the…Jesus, where the hell’s my house? Where’s my house?”

  Carl reached out to hold her, but before he could reach her she was out of the car. He leapt out to follow her. She was pacing the dark street, staring at the impossible building in front of her.

  “I know this is the right place. How could it be gone? I was just there. How could they take it away?” She was seized with a horrible new thought. “Mom and Dad…and Jeff, are they okay?”

  She broke into a run, heading for the house. He grabbed her and she staggered to a stop. “I gotta get in there,” she was trying to pull away. “I have to find out if they’re in there.”

  “They’re not in there,” he told her.

  “How do you know?” she asked, and suddenly he seemed threatening to her as everything else. “Do you know something about this?”

  “No, but it’s obviously something very serious and you can’t go off and do something that might be…dangerous. Right?”

  She looked back at the house, warily. “Yeah,” she agreed.

  He took her back to the car as slowly and carefully as he could and sat her back in the front seat. “Now let’s think about this. When did you see the house last?”

  “What kind of question is that? This morning.”

  “And what did you do this morning?”

  She was annoyed. “I don’t know…” He could see her realize the truth of what she said. “I don’t know. That’s funny. I can’t remember.” She tried to shrug it off. “Just what I always do, got ready for school.”

  “What school?”

  “What do you mean? Our school.”

  He took both her hands and moved close to her so he wouldn’t have to ask the question too loudly. “Jesse, what year is it?”

  “This is silly. It’s 1976.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Seventeen. Are you okay?”

  He took her in his arms and kissed her once before he turned on the car’s interior light. “Look at me.”

  She looked at him in annoyance, but she kept looking. She looked for a long time.

  “You don’t look so good.”

  “I look older.” He let go of her hand long enough to press the button that locked all the doors. “Honey, I’m thirty-five. It’s 1994.” She snatched her hands away. “Your house isn’t there because somebody tore it down. I don’t know where your parents are.”

  “Is this some stupid joke? I’m going home.”

  He pulled down the visor on the passenger side and slid open the mirror. She stared at her fa
ce in fascination. She seemed to trace each new line with her eyes. Then the full force of it hit her. She slammed the visor up and reached for the door. She couldn’t open it; she couldn’t even find the handle. She flung herself in a fury at the ceiling of the car. Carl tried to grab her, but she lashed out at him, smacking his nose and cracking his head against the window.

  She tried to climb into the back and he grabbed her again, pinning her arms. She flailed about, slamming his knee into the steering wheel, gouging his shin with her heel. She kicked open the glove compartment and screamed a long wild howl before she began to cry.

  He held her while she wept, feeling warm blood flowing from his nose, feeling the aching in his shin and the back of his head. He’d had no idea she was that strong. She finally stopped crying and curled up next to the passenger door, silent, breathing heavily. He kept waiting for her to move, but she didn’t. She was still. Maybe she’d passed out. He sighed and fell back on his seat, wiping the blood from his lip. He glanced over at her again, amazed at how peaceful she suddenly looked.

  He drove back to his house. He couldn’t think of where else to take her.

  When they were there he touched her gently to wake her, not knowing what to expect. She stretched sleepily and looked at him fondly. “Did I fall asleep? I’m sorry.”

  He watched her closely. She didn’t seem to have a care in the world. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure I’m okay. Hey, what happened to you?”

  He wiped the blood off his face.

  She was concerned. “Did you get in a fight?”

  “No. You’re not upset?”

  “About what?”

  “About…about your house.”

  She shrugged. “My house is great.” She looked at him more closely. “Where’d you get that stupid mustache?”

  TWO

  He watched her sleeping in his bed, her face blank and passive. A child with that expression looks like an angel; and adult just looks like death.

  He’d convinced her that she’d gotten permission from her mom to spend the night at Julie Rafferty’s, but that it was all really a plan so she could stay the night at his house since his parents were away. He was surprised how eagerly she took to this explanation, even though she didn’t remember making any such plan. Any explanation, however weak, must have been worth grasping if it helped make sense of the horrible confusion that surrounded her.