Newbie

by Jo Noelle

  As we turn to drive up my street, I begin pulling together my computer case, purse, pillow, blanket and coat so I can make a quick escape. Kevin parks in the driveway and I reach for the door handle. With one foot out, I realize that my blanket or coat—or both—are twisted in the seatbelt and I tip, dropping my pillow on the snow. In the time it takes me to untwist, Kevin has retrieved my suitcase.

  “Thanks. See you later.” I reach for the pull bar, but drop my purse and coat. We both bend to pick them up, but he’s quicker. Then my computer case begins to slip, and I drop the suitcase handle to secure the computer.

  “Here, Soph.” He hands me my coat and purse. “I’ll take this.”

  “I can get it,” I begin to say, but he’s already moving up the sidewalk with the wheels of the suitcase clicking over the cracks and chunks of ice. He abandons my suitcase at the threshold and steps to my side to pick up the part of my blanket dragging on the ground behind me, then tucks it in at my elbow. Just as the door opens, Kevin brushes his lips to my cheek. “Do you want help in?” he asks.

  My eyes open wide; my neck and cheeks flush hot.

  “No, thanks. I’ll take it from here,” Liam answers, but instead of reaching for my suitcase, he leans in my face and kisses my lips.

  My blush deepens. Do I just walk in? I want to. Are they waiting for me to introduce them? ’Cause that’s not going to happen. Or explain something? Nope, again.

  I stop wondering as Liam extends his hand. “Hello, Kevin. I’m Liam. Thanks for helping Sophie to the door.” Then he reaches for my suitcase.

  “No problem,” Kevin says without taking his eyes off mine. His smile slowly broadens. “See you next weekend, Soph.”

  My stuff sits in a heap in the foyer as I close the door behind me and look into Liam’s face. My stomach tightens as I vacillate between misery and relief.

  “Have you eaten?” he asks.

  “No.” I slide my arms under his and rest my hands on his shoulder blades. “Because I have a hot date for dinner tonight.” His familiar hug warms me and I lean in, breathing deeply Liam’s scent, though my heart is still racing from anxiety. “I missed you, and I’m sorry. I really don’t ever want you to wonder how I feel about you or about someone else. I know you saw Kevin kiss me on the cheek, but he just does it. It surprised me last night and I accidentally kissed him back, but not because I wanted to kiss him. It was more of a good-night thing. You know, cheek kiss—ciao. I really just want to kiss you.”

  “On which cheek?”

  “What?”

  “He kissed you on which cheek?”

  I lay my finger on my right cheek and Liam runs the back of his hand gently across the surface. Then he bends to kiss it again and again, saying, “But maybe he kissed it here … or here … or here. And now it’s gone.” He tilts back and looks at my smile. I’m sure he sees relief. “Shall we have dinner?”

  January 12, 2008

  Newbie Blog:

  Monday’s High Will Be Twenty-Three

  Hmmm. Recess duty for the coldest month of the year? Give it to the newbie. Maybe it wasn’t a deliberate decision, but who would actually feel good about signing someone else up for this month?

  But what’s not to love—biting wind, overcast skies, frost on the trees, new snow every few days, melting snow on all the others, mud traps followed by plates of ice, numb fingers and red faces. I even wake in my sleep, barking, “Don’t throw that.” “Don’t slide there.” “Keep your shoes dry.” “Go back inside and get your coat.” “No, you can’t take ice inside with you.”

  I check weather.com religiously to see what the temperature will be. I’m hoping it gets colder. If it’s cold enough, morning recess will be called as an inside day. Wish me luck.

  On Sunday night as we watch TV, Mina phone rings. “Hi, Scarlet. How’s your visit?” She pauses, and her mouth drops open silently as her hand covers her lips. Her eyes move back and forth, searching for understanding. I set down my ice cream, scoot to the edge of the couch, and look into Mina’s face. I’m close enough to hear Scarlet’s voice.

  “The doctor said the recovery from a heart attack like Dad’s could take a couple of months. I can’t leave Mom to do this alone. I need to move back home for a while. I’m sorry, Mina. I’ll come next week to get my stuff, but I wanted to give you as much time as possible to find a new roommate. If you don’t find one, keep my deposit for the next month’s rent.”

  “That’s fine. Don’t worry about us at all. How’s your dad?”

  “The doctor said he’s going to be all right, but it will take a long time. He’s coming home in a few days.”

  “And your mom?”

  I stand with tears in my eyes, and Mina pats my leg as I leave. The memories are still present and vivid, though nearly three years have passed. In my memory, the smell of antiseptic burns the back of my nose and throat. The lights in the waiting room are unnaturally bright, even for the clearest summer day.

  I remember that the tightness in her words was apparent even in the phone call. “Your dad’s had a heart attack. The ambulance is taking him now.”

  “Mom, where are you? Where should I come?”

  “He looks bad, Soph. So gray.”

  “Mom, which hospital?”

  “University. It was the closest one.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  Mom’s phone call replayed over and over in my mind as I followed the signs to the cardiac intensive care unit. Mom saw me coming and rushed forward to hug me.

  “The nurse says we can see him in a couple of minutes, but only one at a time and for a very short visit. Sophie, you have to come with me. I can’t do this alone.”

  A nurse approached us. “Dr. Anders would like to talk with you.” Then she led us to a private waiting room where we met the doctor. We sat together, leaning to look at the diagram of a heart he held in front of him. He explained the location of the blockage and the affected areas of the muscle.

  “May we see him now or are you going to operate?” Mom asked.

  The doctor gazed silently toward his clipboard. I turned to Mom and hugged her close. “He’s going to die,” I stated breathlessly, “Isn’t he?” I directed my question toward the doctor. Mom pressed into my side, shoulders shaking without any sound of crying.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. There’s significant damage—too much. His heart muscle is dying. His organs are showing stress as well from insufficient oxygen. I want you to have a chance to be with him, if you’d like.”

  “Yes,” Mom whispered as she stood, pulling my arm with her.

  The nurse’s lips pursed, but the doctor spoke first. “I think you may want to come together.” The significance of his words wasn’t lost on me—we can relax the rules when a man is dying.

  Dad’s room was dim, with a single bed and walls of equipment surrounding him on two sides. The doctor pulled in another chair as we entered. Mom gasped and squeezed my hand, then released it to lay her hand on top of Dad’s as she stood near his head.

  “He has been unconscious since he arrived in the ambulance. If you need anything you can call the nurse there.” He pointed to the phone on the table then left.

  Tears ran down Mom’s cheeks, and her eyes were rimmed with red. Just tears, no sobbing—just heartbreaking distress and helplessness. We stood in a quiet room. Dad’s life was no longer measured in years or even days, but by the beeping tones of the machines at his side. I sat in a chair and Mom leaned over Dad’s face to kiss him. Then she laid her cheek beside his and began whispering, her tears wetting his face.

  After a moment, she surveyed the bed. Most of the machines’ leads and wires were connected to Dad’s left side. Though the bed was small, she pushed herself beside him on the edge of the bed and rested her hand on his chest at the base of his neck. They fit together like puzzle pieces cut from the same picture, each open and incomplete without the other. My eyes could no longer contain the grief, and silent tears ran steadily again.

&n
bsp; We stayed with dad while doctors and nurses updated the records and the machines’ lights flashed in warning though the alarm bells had been disabled. We stayed while some of the equipment was disconnected. We stay until Mom could leave Dad, and I kissed him good-bye.

  I sleep in snatches tonight. My mother’s last hug with my father is fresh in my mind. Occasionally, I dream of Liam lying on a bed and me curled next to him, as my mother had with my father. My eyes snap open, my breath shallow and strained. Over and over, the feeling of possibly losing Liam racks my heart with wonder at the inherent loss inside of love. Just a dream. I lay on my bed, again passing through Dad’s final moments. “Please bless Scarlet’s family,” I think in echoes.

  On Saturday, Kevin and I are on a listing trip again instead of having a partnership meeting. We drop down to Pueblo and take off for Kansas. We won’t go quite that far, but every mile we drive looks less like Colorado as the mountains sink into the horizon behind us. There’s just flat, deserted farmland on both sides of the road.

  The listing trip this weekend is Saturday only. We’ll do the appointments and head back tonight, arriving home by ten or eleven.

  The meetings today aren’t as productive as last week’s. In fact, we don’t get a single listing. Kevin is able to get two maybes, and I’m sure he will have them listed after a couple of callbacks.

  Following the last sales pitch, we jump back in Kevin’s Explorer and start home. When we began our last appointment, there were a few flakes fluttering down, but when we leave, it’s snowing in earnest. Since we are heading into the storm, it should be worse ahead of us. But we expected this—well, not this. We expected a few flakes. Kevin says the storm should have passed far south of us. The weather forecaster said there was a severe storm warning for the mountains south of here, on the border of Colorado and for most of New Mexico tonight.

  We’re still a few miles from La Junta and it has been almost a whiteout for the past half hour. This drive should take less than an hour, and we’ve been at it for two. Deep snow is piling up on the road and we’re moving slowly, sometimes only twenty miles per hour. The tires on the car in front of us flips clods of snow behind it as it crawls along. We decide not to stop for food, but to drive straight through. We’d like to get to Pueblo and turn north to leave this storm behind us.

  The wind is creating a blizzard by blowing the snow from the ground back up with heavy snow still falling. We leave La Junta but only get five miles in fifteen minutes. The yellow lights of a snowplow are flashing behind a barricade also flashing yellow—Road Closed. The red-and-blue lights belong to the police officers directing all drivers to return to La Junta. Along with the rest of the cars, we turn around and crawl back to town to wait out the storm.

  “Shall we eat?” Kevin asks as we re-enter town after ten o’clock. Only one café is open and there are a dozen cars parked around it. Most have out-of-state license plates, so they’re probably stranded like us. We race from the car to the restaurant door with icy wind and snow pelting our exposed skin. Since there are no tables available, we sit at the lunch counter and watch the snowstorm increase in fury as we eat.

  When we finish our meal, Kevin asks the waitress if she knows about the road conditions to Pueblo.

  “They say,” she inclines her head toward two cops sitting in a nearby booth, “that the storm should pass by us about midnight. But the highway department won’t open the road though until they get it cleared off. They can’t clear off the snow until they get all the stranded travelers off it. And they can’t do that until they get more snowplows—and it stops snowing.”

  “Did they say when it might open?” I ask.

  “Six o’clock tomorrow morning, if it all goes well. If you folks want a hotel, you better hurry. They fill up fast during blizzards.”

  I step into the hall by the ladies’ room and call Liam, then Mina, to let them know we’re snowed in. Mina took the news much better than Liam did. I think he was being a little unreasonable—Kevin didn’t plan the snowstorm.

  We try several hotels, even some with questionable pasts, but can’t find rooms. At the last motel, we’re again told that they are sold out. “Can we stay in the lobby on the couches?” I ask desperately. The guy behind the counter begins shaking his head immediately, but then stops.

  “We have a break room for employees. It’s the same size as one of our small rooms. We have a few storage boxes in there, but it has a bathroom and the door locks. I could rent that to you, I guess.”

  “We’ll take it,” I say, passing him a credit card. A weary-looking man in line behind us turns and leaves the lobby.

  The desk attendant hands Kevin two blankets and me two towels along with a room key, and we move off to find the break room. Bugs scatter across the vinyl floor as we click on the light. I can’t be sure how many—it seemed like a lot, since they’re very fast and didn’t stick around to be counted. A 1950’s chrome and yellow linoleum table and six mismatched chairs sit in the middle of the room, piled high with cleaning produces. The only other furniture is a television, couch, and desk. The room is very small, and storage boxes fill the floor space.

  I’m a little puzzled if the clerk meant for us to sleep on the floor. Kevin begins stacking the chairs on the table and it them under the window. He pulls the pillows off the couch, unfolds a hidden mattress and begins laying the blankets on top. There’s another blanket and two pillows in the closet and he puts them on the bed, too. Thankfully his brain is less tired than mine and he thought to look around for everything we need. Then he sits on the edge and begins removing his shoes.

  Yes, I’m standing there watching him, wondering if he thinks he gets the bed just because he had the blankets, and knew the couch was a sleeper, and found the other blanket and pillows. Now he’s removing his shirt. “Stop. What are you doing?”

  “Going to sleep. Right here. Right now,” he replies, tossing his shirt over the chairs. Removing his wallet, phone, and belt, he slides his feet under the top two blankets.

  Okay there’s no more hint he works out—’cause he does. I find myself thinking about cold winter nights and making hot chocolate. I douse the top of the mug with an equal amount of whipped cream and stir it in. Kevin’s skin is just that color. Snapping out of my fantasy, I ask, “Where am I going to sleep? We don’t have any more blankets.”

  Kevin points to the other side of the sofa sleeper, and I just shake my head. “Sophie, we can’t sleep on the floor—did you see the bugs?” That makes me shiver. Ew. With a hint of humor in his voice, he adds, “If you promise not to take advantage of me, I’m going to sleep. You can too. Come on it’s late.”

  “Kevin, this is too weird.”

  “It’s okay. I have five brothers and sisters. I’m used to staying on my side of the bed.”

  “Fine.” I eye the size of the bed, barely a double. “Stay on your side.” I open the towels and roll them into logs, placing them down the middle of the mattress as Kevin laughs.

  “Good night, Sophie,” he says as he turns off the lamp. The lights outside the window are barely dimmed by the thin curtain. Kevin is lying on his back, his arms and shoulders out of the blankets with the back of both wrists resting on his forehead, his eyes staring at the ceiling.

  “Good night.”

  “Sophie, why didn’t you tell me about Liam? It was obvious you told him about me, since he knew my name.”

  I pause, remembering our return from the Breckenridge trip last Saturday, meeting Liam on the porch. “I was trying to keep our relationship business and not bring the personal into it.”

  “But it’s not just business. You keep saying that, but it’s not.”

  “Kevin, it really is.”

  “You want to think so, but I don’t agree.” He sits up enough to lean on his left elbow and forearm, bumping the towel roll between us. His shadowed expression is both soft and knowing, and he’s clearly past his side of the bed. Is he trying to see if I’ll move toward him? “What I think is,” he
continues, “that you think Liam would be jealous of me …”

  No—right now, if he saw this, he’d burst a vein. He is never going to know about this.

  “… and you didn’t mention him because you didn’t want me to know you were dating someone. I think you’re interested in me. You kissed me back.”

  The memory constricts my stomach, causing me to take a deep breath, which I exhale slowly—I hope silently. In some alternate universe I would have been attracted and willing to pursue the relationship, but not now.

  “And just a moment ago, you didn’t take your eyes off me until the light went out.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off you then, either. I still haven’t. “Kevin, we have a business relationship, and Liam and I have a personal one. Period.” Then I straighten the towel between us again. I’m going to ignore him now, and fake sleep if I have to, because having a discussion about relationships while lying in bed with him is off the chart for uncomfortable.

  Kevin drops from his elbow to lie on his side. His eyes are on level with mine. “Good night, Sophie.”

  I’ve already said good night. I turn onto my side away from Kevin, relieved to be looking anywhere else, acutely aware of his breath whispering behind me. Eventually he rolls away and I can close my eyes. My mind goes silent but I don’t sleep well, but only because I imagine the bugs can climb as well as they can crawl.

  January 20, 2008

  Newbie Blog:

  My Life in First-Grade Literature

  Maybe Cinderella does her work every day, then more work at night. She finally comes to the notice of a prince or two, both handsome with wealthy kingdoms and the kind of personalities that can sweep a servant off her feet. And if the eye were making the decision, it might be difficult, but there is only one who has Cinderella’s heart.