And then there was the first night after it all when she approached him on the couch and said, come here, come to bed, I can’t sleep alone. And he did that too, laid so as not to touch her, to keep space so that she could hear him breathe, know that he was there.
Then he felt her hand on his hip, his stomach.
Her fingers were cold and he focused on that. Imagined them like metal or stone or anything but flesh.
“Don’t you think it’s a little soon?” he said. “Don’t you think we need more time?”
She rolled over, placed her head on his chest as she used to.
“I need to know it can be good, Ethan. I need to know it can be safe.”
His eyes were closed when he took her in his arms, rocked her and kissed her, and, though he tried not to, imagined her there in the bar with booze sheen sweating on her skin and her hair glinting under the chemical light. Her hair that he held now in his hands, his frail hands like it, the frail light, holding her and watching her taking a drink and smiling and now, here, she’s crying into his shoulder, his neck, whispering something in his ear that even if he listened to he would never understand at all.
The girl still sobbed against his shoulder. He held her, he kissed her forehead. Slowly, he pushed her from him. He touched her hair and the wet rim of her lips. He wiped tears from her face with his hands. She might not recover, he thought. She might fall into a fever from which only I can shake her.
“How did she die?” the girl whispered.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There was nothing I could do.”
HE PUT HER TO BED. He pulled the covers about her and said, “We’ll leave in the morning for America.” He tried to shower but the water was off. It didn’t matter. He closed the door to the bedroom and went out onto the balcony to watch the sun, that had never set, begin to rise. The radio came on without him touching it and he did not know how to turn it off. There were more rumors on the wires: explosions in the market, fires on the road. The airport was smoked in. No flights could leave the capital. They said an eruption was imminent, they said El Lobo disappeared in the night, they said a storm was coming.
He lowered the volume and stood on the crooked balcony facing the sea. Hundreds of feet below, the smell of fish rot rose from the empty malecón. Flocks of large black birds passed through the new morning of the turning world and he saw some glinting white wreckage breaching on the tide. The sea hurled itself at the dawn. There was fire on the wind. The girl who slept in the other room continued to breathe. His comfort began to dissipate, but it was not gone yet. He stood at the balcony, he smelled the fires, he felt something still in his chest. He spoke her name out loud and then said it again and listened to the girl who sighed and mumbled through dream and turned in her sleep like the sea.
END
Horse Latitudes Page 35