The Blue Hour

by Laura Pritchett

  Punching. Full force.

  Then the car is not beside us anymore. It is in front of us. Sergio has reentered the space behind it, right as both cars curve around a steep bend. I cock my head in confusion, squint my eyes. My brain offers different sequences of slow-motion words to explain what I saw: How strange! A man is punching a woman, there is blood smeared across the woman’s face, there is a man with dark hair, there is a red-faced man driving with one hand, there is a woman cowering, there is a woman with a thin jean jacket ducking down and away, there is a man punching a woman who has pressed herself against the door.

  I turn and blink at my brother. Sergio, in turn, lays on the horn, speeds up to tailgate the car, yells out, “I think that’s the goddamn meth couple! Is it? Write down the license plate, Gris!”

  I grope around for a pen. I knock my head on the glove compartment as my body sways forward and then back as he accelerates. I look up to discover that the white car has sped up and so has Sergio.

  “B-Y-2-0-2-something. Write it down. Gris, write it down! Stupid fucking phone, stupid reception!” He throws his cell phone at the dash and it ricochets and hits me in the knee.

  I scrawl the marks across the front cover of the book I’m reading. I see myself as I was this morning, tossing the book in the car, hoping to enter its imaginary world.

  “Four-door, Honda, eighties,” he says, and he says, “Did you see that woman’s face? Did you see that woman?”

  Only now has my brain registered the image: Through the bits of a mild dusting of snow, I see a woman, a swoosh of straight thin hair and the exact moment her mouth is just starting to open in surprise, or maybe in a cry.

  My daydream was about the same man who is always there, the one who has lived in my head for years, the one who falls in love with me again and again for various reasons and in various circumstances. He doesn’t have a name, even after all these years, but he touches my jawline, brushes my black hair behind my ear, and looks into my eyes.

  I’m no idiot. I see these dreams aren’t about him, and they’re not even about love. I know this because my brain is interested in imagining the falling-in-love stage, and after that, the relationship blurs out of focus and my heart goes numb, and I start a new fantasy altogether.

  What these dreams are about is me, a different, better, fascinating me. I am the star of my own romance novel, a million different copies sold.

  I like to know that through the work of my brain, I can still feel my heart swish open with excitement, constrict with pain, that I can bring myself to tears, all with imagination. I like to know I am still alive. That my grief about the losses of the world have not yet numbed me. That the death of faraways, like immigrants, and that the death of nearbys, like Sy, doesn’t shut me down entirely.

  Daydreaming is my anecdote to reality.

  Now we are going way too fast around the corners, and the shady parts of the road are still covered in the snow from That Blizzard. Behind us is the post office and grocery where I work. In fact, there is Violet, my boss, heading the opposite way as us, down into town. Here’s the sign that advertises YOU MISSED MOON’S RESTAURANT. NIGHT-CRAWLERS, BEER, FOOD, GOOD COMPANY INSIDE—GO BACK IF THAT’S WHAT YOU SEEK! And another hand-painted sign: NEVER TRUST ANYONE UNDER 7,000 FEET. Finally, I speak. “Stop here, up ahead, Gretchen’s house!”

  Sergio hesitates. We can see from the silhouettes that the man has stopped punching and is instead hunched over the wheel, glancing in the rearview mirror, trying to get away. The woman is slumped against the door. Their car backfires and makes a loud explosion, which makes me yelp and cover my ears. I beg. “Sergio, let’s not follow—what would we do?—he probably has a gun—let’s call the police. Stop here!”

  Gretchen’s driveway is coming up fast. I do not know Gretchen very well, as in, I do not know her heart, but I know she buys lots of cleaning supplies and often braids her long graying hair into two thick beautiful pigtails that hang down to her chest and I believe her to be kind, and I know she is dating Joe, who is a farrier, who I do know because I share a horse with a few others on the mountain, and we split the expenses and share the joy of a beautiful quarter horse. He is our horseshoer, he is everyone’s horseshoer. Gretchen, though. She chats with me whenever she is buying groceries, and I know that she loves poetry, especially Whitman, and that she cleans houses. But I have never been to her house. I am thrown forward and Sergio decides last-minute to turn and we are flung to the side as he pulls in her driveway, I am struck with the sense of seeing something familiar: Such a little trailer is where I have imagined meeting my falling-in-love lover, a snowed-in quiet place, such a place where we eke out our quiet, simple lives. Such a place transforms me.

  Sergio stomps on the breaks, jumps out, yells, “It’s an emergency,” and pounds on her door, all at once, or almost once, before I even get there. Gretchen opens the door, startled, and I walk in after him and see her handing him the landline phone, which everyone has up here because cells don’t always work. She has been crying. My cell phone isn’t working, Sergio says, and then he is turning away, preparing to speak. I glance around her house, which has houseplants everywhere, pots of basil still blooming, even now, in the winter. There is the smell of pot. There are books and torn pages from the New York Times, cans of WD-40. Her refrigerator, which is what I’m standing next to, is messiest of all, covered with tacked-up poems and a sticker that says WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY and flyers about how many people in the world lack sanitation, or the average household use of toilet paper per capita per country, or the average pesticide load on average fruits and vegetables. Her house is very cold and I wonder if she is very poor. She is staring at me and so I say, “We were going to go cross-country skiing together, up in the meadow, and have a little ceremony for Sy, for our parents, for all the souls. We saw . . . something . . . bad. He needs to call the police.” And then, because she looks near tears, I say, “How is Joe?”

  “We just broke up,” she says. “We haven’t told anyone yet.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Why?”

  “Things break,” she says. She looks at me with a soft, worn-out look and I know exactly what she is saying. Yes, things break, and our imagination is the only tool we have to patch bits together.

  I look around some more. This is the house I would like to have, but this woman is not happy. Finally, I find the courage to ask: “How is Anya?”

  “She is focused on the kids. Talking and taking them to do fun things. She’s a zombie, going through the motions. She’ll feel it more later.” Then she goes to the kitchen sink and splashes water on her face.

  When I turn back around, Sergio is telling the phone what we’ve seen. I listen, silently urging him to better convey the seriousness of it, the momentum of the man’s fist, the woman’s bloody face, the way her body ricocheted from the force of his blows.

  Sergio tells the sheriff the make of the car and apologizes that he never caught the full license plate, that there was so much mud splattered. But he believes them to be—and here, he hesitates—he’s not sure, but they might be the couple that lives above the Vreeland Ranch in an old trailer. He does not say the word meth. There are certain things you keep quiet about on this mountain, there are certain troubles you avoid. Especially Sergio. He wants to take care of the mountains, he wants to make things with wood, he wants to someday meet a woman. He doesn’t want the sheriff in his life. He answers questions about our location and names, and then there is a pause. He’s searching, I know, for a way to end this conversation right, a way to ask for help for this woman. I am searching, too, for something, anything.

  “Tell them to hurry,” I whisper.

  “It looked pretty bad,” he says. “You might want to hurry.”

  Then he hangs up the phone, turns to me, and holds out his hands.

  As he takes my elbow and leads me out, and back to the truck, he leans over and whispers in my ear, We must do what we set out to do,
but there is only sadness in his eyes.

  “We couldn’t find the car, but we’ll check back by the house,” the sheriff tells me that evening, right as the sky is turning deep cornflower blue. He assures me that they did send up a patrol car but no one was home, the place was locked up, and they could not enter lacking a search warrant and all.

  Oh, Jesus, Mary, I think. We should have followed. Why did I tell him to stop? Why did I not help that woman? By now, of course, the image has taken hold in my mind—a frozen moment that I cannot shake away and that I cannot help but examine for details. I can see the man, the black stubble on his pockmarked red cheek, the dark blue of a T-shirt, I can see the hair of a woman, the bloody face, her denim jacket.

  I write a letter to the Colorado State Patrol in big, loopy handwriting and bad grammar. I don’t know why I want to disguise this, to make it different than our own report. I write, Dear who-ever, I saw a man beating up on some body in his car and it looked real bad so I’m writing to tell you his license plate number. I think it was BY2002. Please, I hope you do something about it. I am pretty sure they live on County Road 44 in a house that might be selling meth.

  After that, I sit down and cry. I am tired from our skiing, my eyes stinging from the burning sage, from weeping, my throat tired from the old prayers of our childhood, my body exhausted from the startle of seeing the meadow, the stacks of rocks, like cairns, the footprints and snowshoe tracks of others. I didn’t know that so many people came. I didn’t know there was so much hurt in this world. I want my parents back. I want someone to love me. I want to close the woman’s eyes, transport her somewhere else, take her away from the real. But her eyes are locked open, so instead I close mine. I try to conjure up my imaginary romantic man, the one who isn’t concerned about the terrors of the world, because he is too intent on me. Or he is concerned with the terrors of the world, and holds me to him, and we push our foreheads against each other’s shoulder for comfort. He is not there, though. For the first time, I cannot find him.

  I stare into the dark and listen to the conversation I realize I am now having in my daydream. I am speaking with the woman who was in the car. We talk about her leaving this man, I assure her of her worth, we work out the details on how she can live alone. I offer advice on safe and welcoming places to go, including moving in with me.

  She reaches out to hold me. I concentrate on how my heart feels, the way it swells with the joy and approval of this imagin-ary me.

  Chapter Nine

  You Win

  The fact that it was a Ducati motorcycle seemed to be significant, which left Flannery feeling shamed. She didn’t know anything about motorcycles, including the brand Ducati, or their Ducatisti, or what made them special. Di was solicitous, though, first by accelerating before Flannery had time to develop any serious anxiety, and then by reaching back to pat Flannery’s leg on straight stretches. But best of all was that Di pulled over twice on paved areas next to the river, turned around, asked if Flannery was doing okay, and her voice and look indicated that she really meant it, that she’d stop if Flannery needed her to.

  Each time, Flannery nodded her big helmeted head and yelled I’m loving it, not entirely true. Then she closed her eyes in wince as Di pulled out and zoomed on. Flannery tried to breathe in and send the air specifically to her right leg, which was vibrating uncontrollably. It was just insane, leaning toward the pavement like that, right into the thing that would kill you.

  Ten minutes into it, though, she’d relaxed enough to move her helmeted head to a more comfortable position that involved sitting back, away from Di, just enough to straighten her neck instead of having it so painfully tilted backward. This allowed her to look around. Now she could see the dark wave of the river, the glow of the yellow aspens, the rocky granite slabs and the slopes of pines that rose up alongside the road. Since they were going up the canyon, she could also see who was going down. Gretchen, the house cleaner; Sergio, the wildlife guy; Violet, the ranch woman who ran the grocery. She wanted them to see her, the world to see her, but they’d never recognize her.

  When they found a pullout to turn around, they had to come to a full stop. That was when Flannery got to implement what she’d learned from Di on how to execute a full stop—keep one hand around Di’s waist, but use the other to brace herself on the Ducati, so the driver wasn’t pulled too hard back and forth. A little dance of hands. The irony of this did not escape Flannery. That’s exactly what she and Di had been doing in the last weeks, and it had come time—surely it had finally come time, because it was crazy-producing not to know—to pick one path or stop for good.

  Much of this was a first. First motorcycle ride ever. First time hearing the word Ducati. First real emotion since her first boyfriend, seven years ago, with that long long long spread of lonely in between. First potential for sex in over three years. Not her first female lover, but her first female love.

  Perhaps Di felt her relax into it, because she waved the Ducati back and forth on a straight patch, and it made Flannery yelp and squeeze. Her leg started shaking and she let it, believing it was best to allow the body to let go of all the shit it was carrying around.

  Flannery jumped up and down like a kid when they got off. She laughed with genuine delight now; she was delighted to have survived, to be off the thing, to have gone in the first place. The air was cold and bright but the sun was shining and Di watched her with a tender look as she helped get the helmet off and pulled Flannery in for a kiss, put her hands in Flannery’s wild blond curls and said you’re so hot. Unzipped the leather jacket and kissed her and said Today is the day, I want you so bad. Held Flannery’s hand out so they could both see how it was shaking, and pulled her in for another kiss, tongue and teeth, moved her hand up to her breast, cupped her crotch and pulled her toward her and said now now now I want you now.

  The lust roared and Flannery kept holding on tight, even when Di released her, so that she could get one last smell of Di’s dark hair, one last hold of Di’s solid body, one moment of muscle and tendon and skin, one more moment of the furious burn and wet—one last moment before Di would leave her. As they walked toward Flannery’s trailer, which was in a small cluster of them next to Moon’s Restaurant and Bar, a bear darted away from the dumpster in the back, a bag of candies or something hanging from her mouth.

  Flannery had herpes, the genital sort, contracted when she was eighteen from the second guy she’d slept with; a one-night stand that changed her life forever. She told this to Di when they were on the couch, about to kiss, and as she said this, she pushed herself up to look in Di’s eyes and she spoke very quickly: “I love you. You don’t need to say it back. But I need to tell you. There’s no mistaking it. You could not believe how badly I want you right now. Want you, and want you. As in, for a relationship, for the real thing. Many women have herpes and don’t know it. About a fifth of the population. I could not tell you, I suppose. I’m making the choice to tell you, because what I want is love, and by telling you, I start the relationship off on the right foot. But it does kill me, I want you to know it kills me, that some small fuck of a virus could get in the way of the largest possible thing, love.”

  Di made a small, beautiful, confused noise. Her long dark hair swirled around her face and she pushed herself up, away from Flannery, and Flannery accommodated her but kept her hands firmly holding Di’s hands in order to keep her grounded, keep her attention. She’d rehearsed it in her mind since she was young, but it never got voiced as hoped. Little fragments came out: It’s not usually a problem, I don’t often have an actual outbreak. Yes, it’s painful. I won’t lie. I can sometimes feel it coming, a little buzzing on the skin, I take the medicine and catch it in time. I’d want you to have some time with this before we continued. Especially if you ever want kids. There are other things we can do until you’re sure. We can use that female condom. Doesn’t guarantee. But before we make love, I think you should do some research. Maybe even talk to your doctor, so that yo
u feel more at ease. I’ve only had two lovers since, one woman, one man, and the woman had it already and didn’t care, and the man took his chances. Neither were love. This is, though. I really, really want you.

  Several looks crossed Di’s face—her freckled, high-cheekboned, slightly pudgy gorgeous face—and they all broke Flannery’s heart. There was openness, confusion, absorption, hurt. There was the scanning of the brain that meant Di was trying to recall what she knew about the virus—was that the one that was incurable but medicine was available? Or the curable one? And shouldn’t she know, shouldn’t by now she have kept them all straight?—and how should she respond politely?—and Flannery watched it all register. Noted the embarrassed shrug, the big exhale of breath.

  Flannery closed her eyes and focused on her own body, how it moved from electrical lust to cold numbness—that old and familiar shift. She sat back on the couch and waited.

  In Flannery’s daydreams, Di responded this way:

  Oh, I know that I already have it, and I was about to tell you. We’re compatible.

  It’s not true, what they say about “No good deed should go unpunished.” You did a good deed by telling me, and I won’t punish you for it.

  The universe is always throwing up various sorts of walls. All kinds of walls! This is your particular wall, and we’ll climb over this one together. Don’t worry.

  Something so tiny should not hurt something so grand. It’s too unjust.

  I don’t care. I love you so much that I don’t care. I want more moments with you. I’m nearly thirty and I know what I want now and I want to spend a good stretch of the rest of my life with you.

  What happened was that Di flopped to the side, and her body said I give up and her voice said, “Oh, that’s why you kept your panties on all the time,” and Flannery said, “Yes, I’m asymptomatic, but the virus is shed even when there’s no symptoms,” and Di said, “Thank you for telling me, but maybe you should have told me sooner?” and Flannery said, “It’s tricky, you know? To know when. There are three rules, they say. Never tell a person right away, if, for example, you can’t trust them to keep your secret or respond with care; never tell them after sex, too late; and never tell them in a moment of passion, since, you know, attraction might cloud clear thinking.” Di was still, said she was absorbing it all. After a while, she said, “No wonder. I always felt you pulling back,” and Flannery said, “I am really attracted to you. But yeah, maybe it changes the way I approach all of it,” and all of it sounded so technical and un-lovely and un-loving that Flannery went flat with the simple sorrow of love never progressing in a graceful mindless passionate way.