The Muse

by Anne Calhoun

  Phil threw him a disbelieving look that was almost a slap. “This ain’t the ’burbs, cupcake. New York City is pretty fucking impervious. You’ll burn if you don’t. You hate the anger because if you feel it, you have to admit you’re still alive, that you didn’t die in that IED explosion. You’re faking it, biking like a crazy man, artist’s model, flaunting it to everyone, but inside, you haven’t admitted that you’re angry. You lived and they died, and now you have to go on living.”

  The whole diner was silent, even the short order cook staring out from the window to the kitchen. The waitress was frozen between tables, a plate of hash browns and eggs in one hand, the coffeepot in another. Seth had two options: hit Phil until the blood ran from his knuckles and Phil’s face, or run.

  He ran.

  * * *

  Outside the diner he unlocked his bike and set off, pedaling erratically, chest heaving, no idea where he was going, swerving in and out of traffic, cutting off semis making late-evening deliveries, until he found himself at the GWB, heading out of the city into a tangle of highways, heading upstate on 9W, riding like he was racing the sun to the western horizon, pushing himself until his muscles were screaming. He could do this. He’d outrun this before, outridden it. Drawing wouldn’t do it. Arden was too deep in his soul, and if he put pen to paper, it was all over.

  She wasn’t playing to script. She didn’t call, or plead, or push. Every time he was with Arden, his soul rung with the clang of struck steel. She was the honed steel sword, a warrior he could trust at his back, the last thing he ever expected to find in this new world he shouldn’t be living in.

  With words, sure. He’d made no promises with words, never said I love you, or even I really like you, much less what he really felt, which was I think you’re fucking amazing, stronger than the steel in a dress sword, stronger than the guys I fought with. I’d take you at my back in a fight anywhere, anytime, against any odds, because you, Arden MacCarren, are better than a hero. You pick up the pieces left when life detonates. You make do. You just do.

  No. He’d made her promises the only way he knew to make them. He’d made them with his body, with his heart. He’d ridden beside her while she conquered her fears, lain still so she could find a way to see the world, tucked her into the curve of his hip while the sweat dried on their bodies after they burned each other to cinders. The Marine Corps oath was a spoken vow, a ritual, but the bonds were forged in blood, sweat, tears, in torn ligaments and wrenched joints, in exhaustion. That’s the bond he’d forged with Arden.

  Sweat trickled down his temple, jaw. He rubbed his shoulder against his jaw, swerved across traffic and onto a two-lane blacktop road curving into the countryside, slowing when his muscles turned to jelly. He came around a curve and saw the road transition from blacktop to dirt. He sat up straight, braking as he backpedaled, and ran right over a piece of metal partially hidden in the groove where the pavement ended. It sliced through his tire, sent him weaving crazily into the weed-strewn shoulder.

  “Fuck.” He stumbled off the bike, jerked the handlebars around to keep the frame upright. Keepoutofthedirtkeepoutofthedirt, and he was scrambling backward like the time he’d come face-to-face with a scorpion.

  It didn’t take a genius to see the damage. The tire and inner tube were cut as cleanly as if a surgeon had taken a scalpel to the tire. He took a cursory look at the shard of metal, identified it by the shade of green as a blade from a piece of farm equipment, then picked it up and flung it into the ditch.

  He reached for the quick-release strap of his messenger bag and realized that in his haste to get away from Phil and his spookily Arden-like insights, he’d left it in the booth. He was alone in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere upstate, with a limp, flapping tire and inner tube, and no repair kit.

  The realization hit him like a body blow, the memory of the camaraderie, getting checked over before he went out on patrol, the physical nature of that. Someone always had his back. But he was alone, really alone, because he’d run away from everyone who mattered to him, and now he was stranded.

  He shoved his hands over his head, squatted on his heels, then got to his feet and blew out his breath hard as he looked around. It was pretty country, thick trees lining the south side of the road, fields fenced in stone to the north. Goldenrod nodded in the ditch between the road and the field. Not a house in sight, and even if he walked back to one of the big houses, and even if someone was home, and even if they had a car big enough for his bike, and even if they were willing to give him a ride to a bike shop, even if there was a bike shop within twenty miles, he still had to ride back into the city.

  Right now that felt like climbing a mountain with a fully loaded field pack on his back.

  Hands still linked behind his head, he looked at the bike. Sweat cooled on his chest, under his arms. In a little while he’d be cold. None of the bike messengers had cars. Phil didn’t either. He could probably scrounge one up, rent one, worst-case scenario, but Phil was probably in class, his mother at work.

  The only person he knew in the city with a car was Arden, and he didn’t know if she drove the car. He’d only seen Derek behind the wheel, never Arden.

  He could smell the dirt, the particles lifting into the air, catching in his nostrils. He wheeled the bike a few yards away, putting pavement between them, and tried to think. The only thing he could think was, Call Arden.

  He didn’t want to do it. He knew if he did he was putting himself in real danger, but he didn’t have a choice.

  She picked up on the third ring. “Hello, Seth,” she said.

  “Hi,” he replied, then cleared his throat and tried again. “Hi.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Apparently the throat-clearing thing hadn’t worked. “I’m fine. I need a favor,” he continued. “Can you come get me? I blew a tire.”

  “Sure, but don’t you have a repair kit?”

  “It’s the tire, not the tube, and anyway, I forgot the kit.”

  “You forgot the kit.”

  “I forgot the kit. Look, if it’s a problem, I’ll—”

  “It’s not a problem. Where are you?” He heard a subtle note in her voice, familiar but hard to identify. Caution, maybe.

  He looked around. The middle of nowhere, aka a field along a dirt road branching from a blacktop road that connected to the 9W. “I don’t know.” It was a pretty big admission for a Marine. “Upstate New York.”

  “Upstate New York?”

  “I went for a ride.” He used the location services, read her his GPS coordinates, then waited while she put them into her maps app.

  “Seth, you’re nearly forty miles outside the city,” she said. “I’m on my way. Don’t go anywhere. I’m on my way. Get somewhere safe.”

  He wheeled the bike to a curve in the road where he could see oncoming traffic but not the dirt road, and leaned against the stone wall to wait for her. The silence was too familiar, reminding him of the rural villages in Afghanistan, the quiet particular to places where people grew things: animals, crops. The farmer who owned the field behind him was growing squash and pumpkins. Their vines lifted and swirled in the dirt like green, tendriling waves anchored to the dirt waves by fat, orange buoy gourds.

  Dirt. He hadn’t smelled the earth, inhaled it deeply, since he left the Marine Corps. A total absence of dirt roads was one of the advantages Manhattan had over Wyoming. He hadn’t heard silence like this since then, either. Military bases were never quiet; the outposts often were, but something rang under this silence, lurked under it, threatened to explode from his ears. He was breathing hard, hearing his breath in his mind, just like he did after—

  He got up, paced around the curve, then back again. Checked his phone. Battery life low from searching for a signal but okay. Leaned against the wall again and felt the dirt rising at his back, threatening to crash over him, pumpkins, vines, and all. Checked his pockets out of habit, felt the folded sheet of paper Arden had given him in one cargo pocket, his notebook in t
he other.

  Looked at neither. Focused on breathing in the smell of tar from the blacktop. Watched the road for Arden.

  When she came she was barreling along like a team on a rescue mission for one of their own, hunched over the wheel, phone in one hand. Her hair caught the sun even through the windshield, her enormous sunglasses obscuring her eyes, but the determined set of her jaw came through loud and clear. She was so intent on getting to him that she drove right past him, around the curve, onto the dirt road. Dust rose into the air, dislodging something inside him, some piece of information he got at gut level before his brain put the awareness into something as superficial as words. Intuition. A gift from the other side, landing with no more impact than a gently lobbed packet of sauce from an MRE, Doug’s voice echoing in his subconscious, Here you go, man, Brian’s laughter, faint and familiar.

  He shook his head once, intending nothing more than to pull himself together. Walk around the curve onto the dirt. Make casual conversation. Hoist his bike into the back of her SUV. Get the fuck out of here.

  He walked around the curve to see taillights flashing red through the dust she left in her wake. Particles clotted in the hairs in his nostrils, and the smell, so familiar, so horrible, the flashing red lights, red dust eerie silence aftermath.

  A figure appeared in the dust, slender and strong. Its mouth moved, but he didn’t hear a word because he’d stopped dead.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” Arden said as she walked through the settling dust to the macadam road where Seth stood with his bike. “I was so focused on the phone I missed you by the side of the road. That’s a metaphor for modern life if there ever . . . was . . . one . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. Seth stood in front of her, staring at her, his body present but nobody home behind his eyes. She’d seen that look before in her own eyes, just when a panic attack hit, terror, loss, loneliness. Desolation. It was a look of utter desolation, the kind of wreck and ruin left behind when a city was sacked, taken from within.

  Or a soul.

  She watched Seth disappear before her eyes, his mind going to a place she knew well but yet couldn’t follow him into. His hand spasmed on the bike’s handlebars. Automatically she looked at them, then at the front tire, which was slit from side to side. So that’s what happened. Irrelevant. The kind of daily obstacle he would normally overcome automatically. Except today he was thirty-seven-point-three miles away from her Upper East Side town house, and he was falling apart in front of her eyes.

  She said nothing. After fifteen years of people trying to help her through panic attacks, she was an expert on what to do or not do when someone fell apart.

  The first sign that he wouldn’t stand there until doomsday was a choked inhale, quickly swallowed. He still wasn’t seeing her but rather some mirage she couldn’t imagine in any real detail, but again, knew.

  Another sound. A sob. Again, swallowed, and oh, how she ached for him. She stepped across the line demarcating dirt and blacktop, and put her hand on his shoulder.

  He shook her off. Turned away, and in the same move, shoved the bike away like it had betrayed him. It skidded across the blacktop to balance precariously on the gravel shoulder, teetering on the ditch. He went to his heels, thudded his fists against his head, breathing hard, words she couldn’t quite understand under the ragged breaths.

  Another sob, almost a retching heave. She stayed where she was, waiting for him to lose the fight he’d fought for so long but couldn’t even hope to win.

  What broke free was a hoarse growl that became a bellow of pain and anger and sorrow and rage, aimed first at the road, then at the sky as the sobs tore free. He stumbled in a circle, then tripped to his knees on the dirt road, pounding the ground with the sides of his fists. Why? Why? tore from his throat until even that word was gone, leaving only wordless howls the heartless blue sky absorbed without a ripple. He staggered upright again, then, shoulders hunched, fists clenched, he stalked in a wide, uneven circle around her, obviously searching for an outlet, not really seeing her. His shoulder bumped hers, but she gave no ground, just lifted her chin and watched him blow to pieces in front of her very eyes. When his swerving path took him into the bike’s range, he picked it up by the frame, staggered through the withering weeds in the ditch to the stone wall, and hurled it into the field. Then he drew back his fist, aiming at the wall.

  “No!” Arden shouted, leaping across the road, down into the ditch. Desiccated stems and leaves crunched under her feet. Her ankle twisted, sending her stumbling into Seth’s arm. “Not—”

  “—your hand. Seth! Not your hand!”

  She was there, slender fingers wrapped around his biceps, physically holding him back from punching the stone-and-mortar wall. Sunlight glinted off her hair, turned her eyes to gold coins fringed with black lashes. The eyes of the dead, covered with coins to pay the ferryman’s fee across the river.

  She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and she was there, in her eyes, alive, fearless, fighting, always fighting. Arden, gold and gleaming.

  “Not your hand,” she said again, gently.

  For a long moment he stared at her. He wanted the pain that would come from driving his fist into rock until the skin bruised and swelled, until his knuckles cracked, until his blood mixed with the dirt, as their blood had. He wanted to hurt and be hurt, to exact the price from some goddamn thing that would give him restitution for what had been taken from him in a single second of light and sound, what he could never make right with his life.

  It would never be enough, and yet it had to be enough. The impossibility of it all was tearing him apart.

  The sob that tore from his throat was different this time. He crumpled to his knees. She jammed her shoulder under his arm and turned with him until he was hunkered down with his back to the stone wall. The curves of stones and gaps between them felt like a wall of sandbags, and that made the sobs worse. He rested his forehead on the heels of his hands, and cried until his throat was raw. He breathed in sunshine, and the scent of her hair, and her perfume, and the oddly mixed smells of fall, things shriveling while the pumpkins bloomed on the vines, the dirt that buried as easily as it gave life. Face buried in her neck, her arms tight around his shoulders, he cried out the loss, and breathed in life.

  When he was done, at long last, he realized the gift he’d been given when her SUV drove past him, throwing the dust of his past in his face. It was the gift of having Arden by his side for the inevitable breakdown, the noise and violence of it. He’d faced his loss and grief and anger with her. With the strongest fighter he knew.

  After a long, long while, he could hear again, not just his own wrenching sobs but the full range of country road sounds, his breathing and hers, his heartbeat, birds and the leaves and dust settling back to earth. Every muscle in his body ached. He sat back and wiped his face inelegantly on his shoulder and sleeve. Arden inched away and looked at the tree line with interest, giving him some space to pull himself together. He drew up his knees and let his hands dangle from them. After a moment, she patted his thigh, and paper crackled in his pocket. He reached into the pocket, felt the sketchbook from Afghanistan, and the page Arden had torn from her notebook.

  He remembered what she’d said at her lawyer’s office. You have to stop running, Seth. When you do, you’ll find out you’re not as alone as you think you are.

  She was here. He had to look at it.

  “Not if you’re not ready,” she said, as if she could read his mind. She probably could. Right now he felt as bare and exposed as a patch of road rash.

  He slid the folded paper back and forth with his thumb, caught a glimpse of blue ink, not her usual choice of medium, a curving line that made his heart stop, because he knew that line. He knew it. He’d lived it.

  He opened the fold, and stopped breathing.

  Using what appeared to be a calligraphy pen and midnight ink, she’d drawn the picture that was the home screen on his phone, not an exact duplic
ation of the photograph, but the essence of the pose. Doug’s ridiculous frame captured in a line of broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist. Manny’s forehead, nose, lips, enigmatic, utterly unique. Brian’s arms spread wide, seemingly trying to encompass all of them, and Seth in the middle, hands shoved in his pockets, head tipped back as he laughed. In her lines was the truth of them, that they wove a fabric of a love he could never hope to duplicate, never thought he’d feel again. The spare lines captured both who they were and the loss he felt without them, the empty places on the page mirroring the emptiness of his soul. In just a few lines she’d captured both what they were, and what they were not now.

  “It’s good,” he said. The words came out garbled. He cleared his throat, felt his eyes fill with tears again. “It’s really good.”

  “Thanks,” she said easily. Cross-legged in the dirt, she gave a quick, sidelong glance at the sketchbook page he still held. “I’m proud of it.”

  “It’s really good,” he repeated. Like a fool. “Just a few lines and you nailed us.”

  “Everything about the four of you shone through in that picture. I just . . .” She shrugged.

  She just . . . did what was incredibly difficult to do. Drawing was a skill you could learn, seeing was a gift, getting inside their tight circle almost impossible, but she’d done it.

  He tipped the paper back down, so he couldn’t see the drawing.

  She plucked a few tiny weeds from between pebbles and dirt, tore them apart, rolled the stems between her thumb and finger. Arden MacCarren, sitting in the dirt in upstate New York, like she had all the time in the world, nowhere else to go, no one else to be. He looked at her, and in that moment knew he was done having the sex he could have after surviving Afghanistan.

  He looked around the bucolic countryside, the dirt road. Fucking dirt roads. His bike wasn’t made for that kind of riding, but a Humvee was, and it still didn’t matter. Safety was an illusion, the world was a merciless place, all we have is each other, and even that can be taken away. He’d tried making himself a moving target, minimizing the collateral damage, shoring up the ruins of people’s lives, denying he had one of his own.