Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  “You’re just nervous,” he said.

  “No. No, I’m not.” Unwilling, yes. But not nervous. She had handled plenty of babies. Had cared for her nieces and nephews. She knew they could both care for a child and love it and that they would be good parents.

  “You’ll be a fine mother,” the doctor said.

  “I know,” she said. “When I’m ready.” That stopped the conversation.

  He told her she needed to get a morning-after pill and then start taking her pills again as she had before. On her way out she had her prescription filled and then drove to the state park in London and stared into the woods. She held the morning-after pill in her palm then set it in the cup holder. She had gone to the doctor for her pain but had come away making a huge decision she didn’t even bother to tell Richard about. She thought about the look on his face, the concern, when he’d asked that young ER doctor about her health, about how the accident might affect her chances of getting pregnant. She’d never seen him scared before. And she thought about the raids he was going on, cracking down on the surge of meth labs in and around the county. His job was more dangerous than it ever had been. The wind blew against the car, rocking it, and the trees bowed under its force. When she got home that afternoon, she took the morning-after pill in the bathroom while Richard was in the kitchen making them dinner.

  She’s never hidden anything from him before. They have grown up together, and he knows her better than anyone. She doesn’t know how she’s kept her secret so long without him finding out, without him sensing what she has kept from him. But when you love someone you find a way, she tells herself, to make things right and make them believe whatever they have to in order to spare them pain.

  AT HOME, AFTER going Christmas shopping for Richard’s mother and buying her a scarf and some lotions, then to the supermarket, Emma puts away groceries. She checks her cell phone again, afraid she has missed a call from Richard, but there is nothing. They have not spoken since lunch, and she wonders what he has been doing all day and why he hasn’t called. Her mother told her when they married that her only job was to do her part. “If you just do what you’re supposed to, then you can make a marriage work. You can get through your problems.” She thought that meant only being there and being ready, like showing up for work, in a sense. Each one of them had their own roles to play, and hers was to be dependable and faithful and, later, to push him outside of Fordyce on those long journeys to faraway places. It made them both happy. But when she goes to the window at night, not able to sleep from too much thinking, and imagines Richard patrolling their hometown, no matter how hard she tries to convince herself that everything will be okay, she can’t. She paces the house and watches television by flipping through channels too fast to pay attention to any one thing. A stack of books lies by the bed, in each of them a bookmark placed just a few pages in, where she has stopped reading. She can’t get used to the sound of her own breathing it seems, and only rational thought keeps her from panic on some nights. She doesn’t know how many times she has wanted to call him, to ask if he’s all right, to ask him to come back home.

  She’s never needed him like this.

  A cup of tea in one hand and a liquid gel pack from the freezer in the other, Emma stands at the picture window looking out on the neighborhood. Christmas lights sparkle on the thick, fast-falling snow. There is so much on the ground that even though it is well into the evening, it still appears to be dusk with the reflected light from the lawns. She shifts her neck into the gel pack, pressing the cold farther into her flesh. She is waiting for something, she feels. Perhaps Richard’s car, hoping he has changed his mind and will come home before his shift begins, but all she can see up and down the street is the snow covering everything, one layer being laid over the other. The world changing, she thinks.

  THE LIGHTS ARE crashing off the walls, and they fill the living room. Emma has fallen asleep on the couch, and when she hears the doorbell ring, at first she believes it is all a part of a dream, but it rings again followed with a loud knock on the storm door. She kicks off the afghan, and when she rises, she feels her knees go weak with the sight of the cruiser at the curb. She stands, looking outside. The snow has stopped falling, and if not for the lights that color her living room and the pluming exhaust from the car, everything would look calm and peaceful.

  “Will,” she says, opening the door, and hugs herself against the cold. “What is it?”

  “Richard’s in the hospital,” he says.

  “Oh, God,” she says and bends at the waist, grabbing his outstretched arms. Before she can ask what happened he is pulling her up.

  “He’s okay,” he says. “He’s going to be anyway. But something happened.”

  She stands tall and still holds his forearm, squeezing it harder. “Tell me,” she says.

  “He was out on 25, in front of Walmart and a car ahead of him had smoke coming out of the trunk. He pulled it over. Didn’t suspect anything other than something was on fire. He’d just gotten off his break. He wasn’t thinking.” Will is a big man, bigger than Richard, with a deep country accent and kind, soft eyes. His body blocks the cold wind coming through the door. He tells the story calmly, and this calms her some. “The car pulled over and the driver didn’t want him to look in the trunk. He ordered him out of the car and made him pop the trunk. He wasn’t thinking,” Will said again.

  “As soon as the lid is open he sees meth cooking in the back of it. It’s a bomb on four wheels. The driver panics and tackles him into the ditch, gets on top of him, and hits him in the head with a rock and runs for it.”

  “He didn’t hit back?” she asks.

  “Too stunned, I guess. It’s not like him. Like I said, he wasn’t thinking. He’s got a pretty big bump on his head and is a little out of it, but other than that he’s all right. He’d already called the fire department when he had the guy pulled over, otherwise he’d probably still be lying by the side of the road.”

  “He’s okay, though?”

  “He’s fine. His pride is hurt a little is all.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “I’m here to take you to the hospital.”

  She rushes to put on shoes and grab a coat. She doesn’t realize how much snow is on the ground until she steps onto the walkway and her ankle is submerged and snow falls over the lip of her boots. She then thinks of Richard in the ditch, the snow coming up past his ears and his body lying prone and still while cars roll past him on the highway. She thinks of him looking up at the sky with blood trickling onto the white snow and an empty can near his head and the long grass poking through the snow’s surface. She is in the car and it is warm and the police radio crackles, and she hears Marlon’s voice. There’s a crash on the other side of town, near the old Clancy’s hamburger joint at the foot of the hill. Two cars. No injuries. Will picks up the radio and says he’ll be there in fifteen minutes, after he drops Emma off at the hospital.

  The roads have been scraped, but it’s only packed down the snow, making it hard and slick. “Nobody should be out in this,” he says, putting the radio back in its cradle. “You ought to pull over anybody that’s out on a night like this.”

  Emma pulls her coat tight at the collar and looks at the houses with their lights off. It is late, well past midnight, and the sky is clear. Each star is like a bright shining pinprick in a dark fabric that blocks the light. She knows she will have to tell Richard about going back on the birth control and about her fears when she gets to the hospital. And he will forgive her and say he understands what she’s been going through, how an accident like hers can do that to people. She will have to correct him then and say, “It wasn’t an accident. It was a crash. It was two cars colliding, and I’m the only one that lived to tell it. You can’t know what it was like.” That’s when it strikes her that she has been part of a death, of an ending. She grabs at the coat collar, tighter now, and bites down on her knuckles.

  Richard will love her anyway, though. Her deception will
change nothing in his feelings for her, but he can’t know how it felt, how it now feels. He must understand that. He can know how it would feel for him, but he can’t have her feelings too. He can’t know that when she went to the park that day in London after visiting the doctor, in her mind she saw the car coming at her. She felt the impact again and the way it ran through her body and into her life. It has been rippling through her skin ever since without her knowing what it meant or how it changed her.

  She gets out of the car, and the snow has melted into her socks and her ankles chill in the night air. Will only drops her at the curb and tells her he will be back later. She waves goodbye. The hospital sits on a leveled mountain, and she looks down on her hometown and remembers when the building behind her was being built. Nothing has changed so much since then, at least not from so far away. The town lights still look the same to her, and roads wind and cross in their familiar directions. But a thought occurs to her that she had once in New York City. They had been walking through SoHo, and Richard had hated it. He didn’t like the way the people dressed and the little black glasses that everyone seemed to wear. “I bet they don’t even have prescriptions,” he said. “They’re just frames with glass.” “Hush,” she told him. She was looking at all those buildings jammed next to each other, thinking of the thousands of lives in them, stacked on top of each other, separated only by drywall and carpet, plumbing and electrical wires. She wanted to know then what those lives were like. How much different were they from her own? How much different could they be? Standing on the mountain in the winter, bracing herself against the wind, she looks at her hometown and realizes she knows nothing of the lives that sleep below her, the secrets each of them keeps.

  She turns and enters the hospital, gives her name to the receptionist. When she comes to Richard’s room, he smiles and sits up in bed. She rushes over to tell him to relax, to lie down, but he refuses. He scoots over, giving her part of the bed, and she sits. She puts her hands to his face, asks if he is okay. Even after he tells her that everything is fine, that they can go home in a few hours and he will make her pancakes and they will sleep in, she doesn’t get up from the bed. She lies down beside him and pushes as close to him as she can. She has until tomorrow, she thinks, to keep her own secret. One more day and she will tell him everything, and then her fears—all of them—will go away. She feigns sleep when he asks if she is still awake. And before long he is asleep and her breathing finds rhythm with his, and she holds onto his arm all through what’s left of the night.

  SMOLDERS

  THE FIRE BURNED bright. The flames climbed to the height of a small pine and sent smoke to settle in everyone’s hair and clothes. This was the last party of the year. The last time Wren Asher figured he might ever see any of the other bright pink faces standing around the bonfire. They all drank from large cups filled from the Dairy Mart soda fountain down the road and spiked with vodka, bourbon, Mad Dog 20/20, and whatever else they’d been able to score the night before graduation from Swafford’s Auto Body Shop—the front for the local bootlegger. Some still wore red mortarboards with the gold tassels brushing their cheeks as they laughed and talked. Wren held no drink in his hand. He wore a pair of cutoff khaki shorts and a Che Guevara tee shirt he got from a street vendor on a school trip to New York in the fall. In his car was a mason jar full of moonshine his uncle had given him as a graduation present. When Wren had reached for it his uncle had not immediately let go and looked the boy in the eye. “That stuff there will knock your dick in the dirt,” he told him. “I don’t doubt it,” Wren said, but he had never had a drop of alcohol in his eighteen years.

  In a week he was leaving, and he had come to the party more out of obligation than excitement. A rite of passage, really. He wanted to be here because he had known these people all his life but he had never truly felt part of them because he was half-Korean, different from everyone else, the lone minority. But Lucinda was here and that was always enough reason to attend. To call her his crush seemed too immature and to call her more than that was false.

  Someone walked to a pickup and grabbed a wood pallet out of its bed. Skids they called them at the shipping warehouse where Wren had worked the summer before. Presumably, he thought, for the way the forklift just slid right underneath them and lifted the cans of shrink-wrapped soup, cereal, or whatever else they distributed. The boy lifting the skid over his head was Danny Jackson. A big, strong kid slated to head to Georgia next year on a football scholarship. Wren hoped his friend wouldn’t be back home by Christmas. The town had seen it all too often. Once Danny got down there with all those preps and blacks and got his ass whacked a few times on the field, it wouldn’t matter how damn strong he was or how fast he ran. He’d cry homesick and miss being the big shot he was right here in the middle of the same group of friends he’d had since kindergarten. He’d come home, enroll in the local Baptist college, and become an attorney or pharmacist. Fordyce, Kentucky, was littered with men who had been just like him, and like those men, Danny would probably die where he was born. So few people ever really left, Wren thought. He had never thought of Fordyce as a place to escape, and it wasn’t hard for him to imagine staying there forever himself, but his parents had never encouraged him to stay.

  He took in the group around the fire—remembered nearly all their faces from kindergarten—foreheads reddened with sweat from their proximity to the blazing fire. Many of them, though certainly not all, had treated today’s ceremony like an ending. Despite the loud music and booze, a funereal air had been looming over the festivities for the better part of the night. More than once a teammate from the football or basketball team had come up to Wren and hung his arm around the boy’s lean, broad shoulders and said, “This is it, brother. We’re out of here. The best days of our lives are over.” Their coaches had drilled this sentiment into them as a means to tell them that not only was their youth fleeting, but so were their opportunities at glory and that the two were inextricably tied. There was no glory in old age. Not in Fordyce. Not for them. To each one of his friends, Wren wanted to reply, “If these were the best days of our lives, our lives are really going to suck.” But he only nodded and shook his head. There was no point in ruining their buzzes.

  She appeared beside him, her lips turned red from Hawaiian Punch. “Still won’t drink with me?” Her long hair hung to the middle of her back, and she pulled it away from her face, revealing the crisp green eyes he had first seen in third grade and the soft white nape of her neck. He had kissed her there once, not knowing skin could be so soft. They were on that long ride home from New York, and Lucinda had curled beside him on the chartered bus, saying, “You’re the only boy here with any kind of manners, Asher.” Somewhere around Pittsburgh she nuzzled close to him, performed that exact same move with her hair, and in the darkened bus with everyone sleeping around them, Wren leaned in for the kiss. She had not even flinched, as if she knew he’d waited his whole life for such a moment. She pulled him closer, causing an erection to press against his jeans.

  “There’ll be none of that tonight, Asher. Just sleep,” she said without ever opening her eyes.

  The fire threw embers into the sky that seemed to melt with the night. Wren thought about how much he would like the chance to lean in once more. “I’ve got some moonshine in the car,” he said. “Gift from my uncle.” He stepped closer to the fire.

  Lucinda broke into a smile. “Does he know what a pussy you are?” she said.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “He’s mistaken me for someone who is tough.”

  “Never touched a drop in your life and you’ve come here with a full jar of corn mash. That’s what Daddy calls it. I like how that sounds, don’t you?”

  “It’s got a ring to it,” he said. Her tee shirt was low-cut, and the fire’s yellow light danced on the tops of her breasts. If she had said to him in that moment she wanted him to marry her, he would have. He would forgo everything in his own future for the chance to put his lips to that neck once mor
e, to feel the curves of her body under his trembling fingertips and hear a cry of pleasure from that sweet, sugarcoated mouth.

  “What am I going to do without you next year?” she said.

  “What are you going to do without me for the rest of your life?” he shot back. They had always been friends and nothing more, and the impossibility they could ever be together emboldened Wren.

  “You don’t think we’ll keep up? Stay friends.”

  “We might,” he said. “Hard to tell.”

  “I’m hurt by that, Asher.” She never called him by his first name.

  “Cindy, you’re going to have so many boys calling you in the first three weeks of school that if you even remember me by Thanks-giving I’ll be surprised.”

  “I could never forget you,” she said. “You’ll be famous someday.”

  “At what?” he said.

  “Probably whatever you want.”

  She was not drunk, he thought, but on her way. This was his best chance to make a move, to make some lasting memory with a girl he’d always loved. Another skid was thrown onto the fire. Somebody turned up “Sweet Home Alabama” on a car stereo. Even though this was Kentucky, everybody let up a whoop and screamed, “Turn it up!” along with the song. Wren joined in too. He took Lucinda’s hand. He squeezed it tight, interlocking their fingers, and noted she did not let go.