Time Stamps

by K. L. Kreig

  Her smile is sweetly sassy. “Whimsically alluring, remember?”

  “Oh, yes. I couldn’t possibly forget.” We stay quiet for a while. I replay her story. “Are you coming back to me as a cat, Laurel? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  I expect she’ll demand I case every animal shelter until I find the sassiest, quirkiest, most whimsical cat and then check for a mole on its belly, where Laurel has one. I love to lick it. Maybe we’d even work out a code in advance to be sure it was her. Instead, she averts her eyes. But just as I’m thinking how odd her reaction is, it’s over and her attention is back on me, her face all lit up.

  “Maybe I will be with you in the most unexpected of ways.”

  That catches me off guard.

  I don’t believe in reincarnation. Or ghosts or spirits. Or even purgatory. But I do believe in something bigger than us. Call it God or Allah or Yahweh. Whatever it is, whatever that place beyond our understanding is…I have to believe in it. If I don’t…well, that’s not an option. Because that means I won’t see Laurel again and that I will not accept.

  “Maybe.”

  “That day in Moab, I felt desperate and isolated and devastated to my very core.” Everything about her falls. Her face. Her spirit. Her voice. “So, I do know what you’re going through to some degree, and I am so very sorry to be the one to put you through it this time.”

  “Laur—” She sets a finger to my lips to silence me.

  “It’s my turn. Let me have my turn.”

  When I nod, she drops her fingers. The tips land lightly on my chest.

  “I’m sorry that when I leave, I won’t be coming back with some surly park ranger.”

  I don’t have words. They’re all jumbled together in the middle of my gut.

  “I’m sorry our time together will be cut short.”

  “I wouldn’t change a thing.” Though, I don’t know who I am without her. I was pretty solid on who I was before her, but not anymore.

  “And I’m really sorry we couldn’t have a baby.”

  “Stop,” I snip. “It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault, Laurel. Not the baby, or the cancer. It’s our lot, our hand. You did nothing wrong.”

  “I’m not saying I did. I’m only saying I wish you had a part of me when I’m gone.”

  “I will always have a part of you, Laurel. You’re here.” I flatten her palm over my heart. “You will always be here.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “It’s enough.”

  It has to be. Even if it wasn’t, not a damn thing we can do about it anyway. Besides, how would I handle a kid by myself?

  “And I want you to know that…” She looks as though she’s organizing her thoughts. I want to press my mouth to hers, trading my life force with hers. I have tried. Over and over. I have tried and I have failed. “The day I met you I felt like I was dropped inside a kaleidoscope, and no matter what angle I view life through now, all I see is beautiful brilliance. Even through all of this.”

  “You’re the shards of glass,” I tell her, my voice hoarse. I trace the outer edges of her lips, lingering in the divot on top. “You are what creates the beauty, Laurel. You are the beauty.”

  “You’re the mirrors. And the light. You are what allows me to see it, Roth. Thank you.”

  Thank me? She is the blessing. The blue in the sky. The sparkle in a star. The universe shines for her.

  “I wouldn’t change a thing, Laurel. Not a day, not a word, not a kiss, not an argument, not a Tuesday.” If I had only one day with her, I would take it without complaint.

  “Don’t forget about me, okay?”

  Forget about her? Beyond the bounds of comprehension. I say the only thing she needs to hear.

  “You are unforgettable, Laurel.”

  Her whole body relaxes. “Make love to me.”

  It’s a request and a plea and I want nothing more, but…

  “Are you sure? I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You won’t.”

  “You’re weak.”

  “I want to feel normal. I don’t want to think about tomorrow.” She reaches down, snaking her hand underneath the sheet. She traces the outline of my cock, which saluted her the second she put the words make and love together. “Please, Roth.”

  “Laurel,” I moan. Grasping her wrist, I stop her. If I’m going to make love to her, it will be on my terms. Not because I’m some controlling, call-me-daddy sex freak. I need to watch her every second for signs she’ll try to hide. Like pain. Or exhaustion.

  “Here.” I gently position her hands above her head. She readily complies, and her wiggle matches her victorious smile. This woman. Incredible.

  I move her with care from side to side as I slide her nightgown up and over her, throwing it to the side once off. As I let my gaze caress over flat planes where there were once luscious curves, I have to shove down every feeling that threatens to overwhelm me except for one.

  The intense, immense, undying love I have for her.

  Nothing else belongs in this space with us.

  “You are pure beauty, Laurel.”

  I run a finger between the valley of her breasts, then move to that mole that’s now sunk in the concave of her belly. She moans lightly and both her hands shoot up to grip my hair. The nip of her tugs spurns me downward until my mouth centers over her core.

  I lift my gaze to hers. My breaths are hot.

  She’s watching raptly, expectantly. She shifts her hips upward, her need silent but clear.

  I chuckle and snake my tongue out, barely grazing her.

  “Roth, yes,” she moans.

  Her eyes drift shut. Her lips part. Her nails bite me.

  Laurel and I have always had this combustive connection when we make love. We are more attuned to each other than I have been with anyone else. It’s powerful. Alive. I daresay damn fucking close to nirvana. It’s intoxicating and I can’t get enough.

  So, I don’t disappoint.

  I make love to my wife. With my mouth. My fingers. My cock.

  I take it slow. I drink it in. I tuck away every stuttered catch of her breath. I memorize the brush of her fingers along my shoulder blades. I soak in every liquid writhe of her body against mine.

  I feel her on me, surrounding me.

  And when she finally falls sound asleep in my arms, sated but clearly drained, I recognize Time for the cruel, heartless bitch that she is.

  Time is not a benediction, a miracle, or even a fucking gift as I once thought.

  She is the enemy.

  A coldhearted adversary that always wins without fail.

  And I have learned when She says it’s up, there is no amount of bartering or negotiating or praying or pleading that will change her mind.

  What She says goes.

  The end.

  25

  Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word

  Laurel

  Present

  July 14, 7:23 p.m.

  * * *

  Every family unit has their own dysfunction, I know. Except Roth’s…his is absolutely perfect, trash-talking grandma, game-cheating mother and all. But for the other 99.999 percent of us, we have to decide how to deal with wounded feelings and ill will from people we may not necessarily choose but who are tied to us through nothing other than DNA. These people, our family, they are supposed to be truthful and have our backs. They are supposed to love us without expecting a thing in return. They should be indignant on our behalf when others hurt us and lay down their lives to protect ours. They should celebrate us in our moments of triumph and carry us when both legs have been snapped off at the knees. They are who we call when we want to unburden our souls without judgment. We should know we can count on them any time of the day or night. They are our family from cradle to grave, like it or not.

  My mother is none of those things she is supposed to be. She’s engaged in my life; then she’s not. She offers words of encouragement, then effortlessly backs over them with a Mack truc
k without remorse. When I tell people our relationship is complicated, what I mean is that it’s tied up in so many knots of bruises and resentments and disappointments and scars that I genuinely do not know how to unwind it. There is no beginning. There is no end. Those two points of origin are buried in the middle of that ball somewhere and yanking on any individual strand will only serve to wind it up tighter. The only way to rid yourself of a knot of this magnitude is to cut it out, piece by piece.

  But that also poses its own challenges, because often what’s concealed at the center isn’t a chewy, chocolaty Tootsie Roll. It’s a living, breathing metastases that you’ve now unearthed, and giving it fresh oxygen gives it new life.

  Some people don’t even know what lives in their center. They think they do, but they don’t.

  I do. I can trace that ball back to one singular event.

  And it’s not what you’d think.

  When we were four, Esther accidentally stuck gum in the crown of my hair. Yeah, I didn’t think it was an accident either. After an hour of trying, the only way my mother could get it out was to snip a half dollar-sized clump of hair at the scalp. And the only way to fix me from there was to cut the rest of my long locks off. I cried for days because I looked like a boy. About two weeks later, we were with Mother in the local Shopko and a woman stopped us and said, “I have twins myself, also a boy and a girl.” I made such a scene we had to ditch our cart without checking out, and all the way home Esther dogged Mother to cut her hair too, so people would think we were both boys. She even gave us boy names. She was Alvin and I was Simon. Our dog’s name was Theodore. Ted, for short. Even at four, Esther had a sense of humor. Anyway, I digress.

  Mother refused, of course. “Short hair is great for the summer!” she tried convincing me. Summer was six months away, mind you.

  Esther’s smart-ass reply was, “If it’s so great, why can’t I have short hair too?”

  Mother huffed and refused to talk about it anymore.

  Esther tried Father, only Father always deferred to Mother. But as she usually did, my sister eventually got her way. Somehow, she sweet-talked our father into taking her anyway. She told him Mother had agreed, but had been too busy with school to take her.

  That day, apart from any other I can recall, stands out to me as vividly as if it was yesterday. Father told jokes. He never told jokes. He gave us each a dollar to spend at Beck’s Five and Dime. He never gave us money. I bought ten banana and ten strawberry pieces of taffy, and Esther bought a box of oatmeal cream pies and a twenty-five-cent Cherry Coke, both of which she shared with me. We stopped at the park. He never took us to the park. We played until the sun went down. We didn’t have coats and were freezing, but we didn’t care.

  We came rolling in past dinner, laughing and as high as two kids could be from eating loads of sugar and spending a great day with their dad.

  Candice was not only livid, she was livid with me, like it was somehow my fault.

  Not Esther.

  Not Father.

  Me.

  The day after that was when our father left us.

  And I’ve spent thirty-four years blaming myself for it.

  That’s what’s burning in my very center and you’d think by now, at the mature age of thirty-eight, I would have asked my mother why. Only I was brought up in a home where you didn’t challenge authority. Adults were the rule makers. They were smarter. More experienced. What they said went. To ask questions was disrespectful. And this feeling that the parental bond is sacred and shouldn’t be poked for fear of unleashing a swarm of bees has carried over into adulthood. That respect remains, even though it’s undeserved. Even if it’s unearned.

  But now the rules have changed.

  I am dying.

  And I need something from her now that she’s been unwilling to give me before.

  Honesty.

  “Honey?” My mom blinks rapidly as though she’s gripped by a hallucination. Sometimes when she looks at me, I think she sees Esther. She leans around me and notices Roth standing at my back. “What are you…?” I know she’s spotted the Songbird when she sucks in a breath. “Is that yours?”

  We drove fifteen hundred miles in two days. This leg of the trip didn’t consist of quirky oddity stops and five-star dive restaurants. We made a quick overnight at home since it was about halfway, and we had to pass through Nashville anyway. Meringue wouldn’t even look at me. Early this morning, we left for Leone.

  And now we’re standing on the porch while my mom ogles the camper…RV, I mean.

  “It’s borrowed,” Roth replies tersely. He gets his point across.

  “Well, come in, come in.” She stands aside and waves us on by. “If I’d have known you were coming, I would have made up the guest room and bought some food.”

  “It’s okay, Mom. We’ll sleep in the Songbird.”

  Feeling a bit dizzy, I walk straight to the sofa and sit down. Roth stands in the entryway, his attention dialed in on me. I rub a cramp in my calf. It’s ached for the last few days. And I’m tired. I’ve been more tired lately, even though I sleep a lot. I sigh heavily. I definitely don’t have a year. I don’t even know that I have a month.

  “The Songbird?”

  “The borrowed RV.”

  My mother stares at Roth, confused by his demeanor. Roth is always warm and easygoing. Today he is curt, bordering on caustic. He’s acting totally out of character. I raise my hand toward him, palm up. He practically pushes my mother aside to get to me.

  “Mother, you didn’t tell me you painted the porch.” Gone is the mint green. In its place are sheets of stark white that look ill placed. It’s the color I always wished it were. Now it makes me sad.

  “Well, we haven’t spoken in a while, dear. I planned to tell you next time you called.”

  “Candice,” Roth barks, startling us both. “Cut the bullshit.”

  Woah.

  “Cut the…what?” My mother’s voice fades into nothing as she finally looks at me. Really looks at me long and hard. And then it hits her why I’m here. And why Roth is acting like a rabid animal protecting his spoil. “No,” she chokes, clutching at her chest. Her cheeks pale and her legs wobble and if Roth wasn’t watching for it, she’d be flat out on the floor.

  “Here,” he says, back to his sweet self. He helps her to a chair across from me and fetches her a cold glass of water. She grips it with both hands, liquid spilling over the sides as she brings it to her mouth. Agony radiates from her, crashing into me in tight waves, one after the other. It makes it harder to breathe.

  I hate that I have to be here…for so many different reasons. I’m getting ready to dig into that knot and unearth unbelievable hurts I try not to think much about.

  Roth thought I was being obstinate about not calling my mother, but the truth of the matter is this is not news you deliver over a telephone line. No matter what’s between my mother and me, she deserves more than that. I am her only living child. What’s to be said should only be done in person.

  I want answers, yes.

  I want honesty, of course.

  But the real reason I’m here is that I need amends. I do believe the lines of pain someone else has caused you can start to blur just a little. And eventually, if you let them, they could bleed together, creating a fresh canvas to work from.

  And I need a fresh canvas, even if I don’t have much time to paint on it.

  “Is there nothing they can do?” she asks me for the third time. Roth gave us some privacy after we broke the news, going back to the Songbird. She cried for the first hour. She drank for the next. And now she’s finally ready to talk.

  “Nothing, Mother. I’m sorry.”

  “Not even experimental?” She’s gripping my hand so tightly I wince. She loosens her hold.

  “I don’t want to live that way, Mom. Quality of life matters to me, not simply quantity.”

  “No extraordinary measures, then, huh?” She says this in jest, but she’s still clinging to finding a
yes.

  “That’s not what I want. And I need some measure of control over something.”

  She sits on that for a full minute before replying, “I understand that,” as if she’s walked a mile in my shoes. It feels like a start.

  Mother and I sit on the back side of the porch that overlooks the treehouse. The light is off so as not to attract mosquitoes and beetles. The tire swing creaks back and forth with the breeze. It smells of rain. A storm is expected after midnight.

  “You’re pretty strong for a fifty-three-year-old woman,” I tease.

  “Hey, I won’t be fifty-three until September.”

  “I know. Just seeing if you’re paying attention.”

  Silence rests heavy between us. Neither of us knows where to begin.

  “I haven’t been a good mother.” I start to protest, but she stops me. “It’s okay, dear. You don’t have to lie to make me feel better. A mother knows when she’s failed. But even a failure of a mother shouldn’t have to bury two children.”

  “No,” I reply softly. “She shouldn’t.” Rocks churn in my stomach. Everyone I have lost, so has she. She has suffered as greatly as I have. She probably has a knot that mirrors mine. Somehow, now it feels wrong to dig up buried bones. Maybe some skeletons should stay deep beneath our feet.

  Ultimately, I decide to respect that hallowed ground, but my mother already has a shovel in her hand.

  “I think it’s time I tell you a couple of stories. Would that be okay?”

  I stare at that shovel, poised, ready to break soil, and my mouth waters wildly.

  Do I want the answers I originally sought?

  I won’t get another chance. This I know. I nod once.

  “I imagine you have lots of questions.” No. Just one, actually. Why did my father leave? “But every story starts at the beginning.”

  “Okay.” My heart leaps into my throat, choking me. This is it. The moment I’ve been waiting my entire life for.

  “I don’t want this to taint your view or your memories of him, but my father was an alcoholic.”