by Mark Powell
“Guys! Come on. Here we are!”
Thank God because her nerves were fissuring. Thank God because her legs and lower back were twitching with a consistency that promised imminent muscle cramps. That morning she’d gotten up at three to run fifteen miles along the over-lit streets of their neighborhood, mile after mile while the watch on her wrist logged steps, heart rate, cadence, stride length. But not exactly gotten up to run. She was already up when she decided that waiting for the sun was ridiculous—why not go now? Well, because it’s night, Tess. But what was night, really? There was some celestial explanation, scientific and precise, but for Tess it was more and more becoming a social construction, and a very foreign one at that. Just when Laurie started sleeping through the night Tess found her body had lost interest in it. So why not be up? Why not burn off the exhaustion?
“Come on, Mom,” Wally said, because now it was Tess who wasn’t keeping up. “Come on, I’m starving.”
They sat at a center table with their crunch-wrap tacos and slices of pepperoni, Laurie out of the BabyBjörn carrier and asleep on Tess’s shoulder. Tess did not eat. Tess looked around. They were here, too. Brown skinned and young. Teenage boys but also girls, and she thought of the possibility of an attack, a suicide bomber weaving down between the Manchu Wok and the California Pizza Kitchen, stepping out from behind the potted palms to praise Allah and self-destruct. A vest of ball bearings and ten-penny nails. This was always a possibility. There was a credible threat. She had heard this on the radio—a credible threat this holiday season, though Homeland Security reports no specific targets. But there was increased chatter. There were large gatherings in churches and malls. No specific targets, she thought, except Tess and her children and their collective life.
Something gurgled and beeped and she looked up to see Wally across the table with a phone in his hands. He held it horizontally and worked the screen with his thumbs.
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
“What?”
“That phone. Where did you get it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? How can you not know?”
“I just got it.”
“It’s a phone.”
“Yeah.”
“Did your father give it to you? Is that his old iPhone?”
He didn’t bother to look up, just affected this monumental sigh that dismissed the matter as superfluous at best.
“Minecraft?” she asked.
“Let me see,” said Daniel, and then he was hanging over his brother saying touch that and go over there.
“Please put that away,” she said.
“One second.”
“Wallace?”
“One second, all right?”
“Put that thing away this minute.”
And he did, throwing back his head as if he might howl, as if he could barely contain the injustice. Yet he did, he did. All she got was the sigh.
“We’re at the table,” she said.
“We’re at the mall, Mom.”
“Still.”
“I thought you liked it.”
“I did. I do.”
“Forget it.”
“Honey, it’s just.”
“It’s not even real.”
“Please, Wally.”
“Just forget it. It’s not even real. None of it.”
None of what? she was about to ask, but then she saw her, a woman, and Tess knew her, Tess knew her from her pictures. It was—my God—it was . . . She started strapping sleeping Laurie back into her carrier.
“Come on,” she said. “Are you finished? Are you finished, Daniel? Put that away, Wally.”
She was up, moving, winching down Laurie who was suddenly awake and whimpering, following the woman who was walking rapidly into the interior of the mall, into the crowds and escalators and glass elevators gliding up and gliding down between the plastic snowflakes.
“Mom?” Wally said.
“Come on.”
“Mom, you have to bus your table?”
“Leave it.”
“I don’t want to—”
“Leave it.”
She was getting away, the woman was escaping—could she say that, did that sound crazy, escaping? Tess didn’t care. She felt her pulse in the too-tight straps of the carrier, she felt adrenaline flooding out into her muscles, loosening them. She was power-walking, speed-walking, half-dragging Wally and Daniel.
“Mom?” Wally said.
Laurie was crying. Daniel was muttering. She didn’t even have his hand. She had his wrist, and maybe what he said was something like stop or you’re hurting me, but she couldn’t stop, she kept going. This woman—Tess had to find her, to catch her. She had to talk to her because if Tess could just have a word with her, just thirty seconds, she thought perhaps she could solve everything, or if not everything then so much. Mom! They passed the giant Christmas tree, the dangling ornaments, the shiny new cars from Fairway Ford and Al Beaver Kia. Old Navy, Sunglass Hut, GameStop. Was she crazy? It’s not even real, he had said. What wasn’t real? The little world inside his hand or the little world inside her head?
“Mom?”
She couldn’t see her now. Oh my God, she had lost her. She couldn’t see the woman.
“Mom?”
Laurie was still crying, louder now, and she had lost her, Tess had lost her. She realized then Wally had taken her wrist in his surprisingly strong hand. He was pulling her.
She said something, she said the woman’s name.
“Who?” Wally asked.
It’s not even real.
“Mom, stop. Who is it?”
She said it again, muttered it, and he bent closer, suddenly gentle with her, taking care of his mother, easing her back to what was or wasn’t, but doing it so delicately that she felt a wave of gratitude so strong she whispered it so that only he could hear.
39.
Kayla woke beside him. Crazy, but also not. Completely sane, really, because that was how it felt: the most natural and most right thing she had done in she didn’t know when. It was late morning—she could tell from the film of gray light filling the room—and somewhere down beneath the covers his hand slept on her inner thigh where it had come to rest after they had made love in the predawn darkness.
She wanted it to stay there and tried to stay as still as possible. He was breathing in a slow, deep rhythm and for a moment she studied his lashes, their delicate curling length below the thicker eyebrows—the only hint he wasn’t as white-bread as Kayla. They’d talked a little that first day he came into the gym and then the next day when he had asked her out. That was a week ago, though it seemed like months. Owing, surely, to the fact that they had been virtually inseparable ever since. He would hang around the desk, disappear into the weights for twenty minutes and then return, smiling, always smiling. Clearly unable to leave her alone, clearly trying to impress her, and yeah, she was impressed.
That third night they went back to a place out on Highway 411 and the following night she had brought him back to her apartment. He’d more or less been there ever since, which was exactly what she wanted, exactly how it should be. Because being with him, the thing Kayla had come to realize wasn’t that she actually did resent her father—she could no more conjure that emotion than she could call him—rather a part of her had always been grieving for what might have been. What might have been, it turned out, was a larger life, one beyond the rut of her classes and work and workouts, the expectations that were, if not low, wildly circumscribed. It was her new friendship with Tess Maynard—they were meeting that evening, and it was Reed. Mostly, it was Reed.
That larger life stirred now, moved his hand.
“Hey, there, sleepyhead,” she said.
“Hey. Been watching me sleep?”
“All night. Creepy enough for you?”
He smiled and planted his palms over his eyes.
“My favorite kind of creepy. What time is it?”
“Tim
e to get up,” she said. “I want to take you to my gym today.”
“I go to your gym every day.”
“Not where I work. I mean where I actually work out.”
“Is this like meeting the parents?”
“Except triple that. It’s like the ultimate level of intimacy.”
He reached out for her, her arm, her breast, her hair.
“Come here, first,” he said.
“Time to get up.”
“Come here for one second first.”
“Later.” She kissed the tip of his nose and slipped out of warm bed, feet on the cold floorboards. “Definitely later.”
*
East Tennessee Barbell shared space with a PT clinic in the front and a tanning salon in the back, the hall lined with glass-tubed coffins, housewives in robes ducking in and out of changing rooms. The lobby was full of old folks, a wheeled oxygen tank and the tube that forked up a man’s nose. Aluminum walkers. Wheelchairs. One counter taking Medicare Part B and selling gel packs of Biofreeze. The other with a cooler of Ripped Fuel and Muscle Milk.
The weights were in the back. Bumper plates and a rack of giant dumbbells—110, 120—bent under their own weight so that they appeared as rusty frowns. There were three squat cages and a tub of chalk. Flags on the wall—she’d been coming here for two years and had the flags down—the American flag, the Army, the Navy, the Marines. A flag for the SEALs. An old Vietnam-era Green Berets with its empty-eyed skull, a knife through one hollowed socket.
Kayla scanned her key fob and paid his $5 day pass.
The place was crowded with the flat-topped, tank-topped powerlifters in Timberlands and knee wraps. Middle-aged and drinking out of shaker cups between sets. Some guy with a black widow tattooed on his neck dead-lifting ten plates. A couple of middle-aged guys in tracksuits. High-school footballers and guys who would never get over the fact they no longer were. An Island-looking dude, slick with coconut oil and cut crazily, wondering, she guessed, how the hell he wound up in this Ronald McDonald Reagan-ville.
All the while the stereo bounced Metallica off the block walls:
Exit: light.
Enter: night.
There was one other woman, maybe mid-forties, headphones on, eyes locked on the mirror in front of her. She was a bodybuilder, too. She wore sweats but it wasn’t hard to tell, the flared lines and fake breasts, the spray-on tan that was almost orange. Hair dyed. Lips collagen-blown.
“I was going to squat,” Kayla said. “And then do deads and calves and finish with some abs.”
“You really come here?”
“You don’t like it?”
“No,” he said. “It’s great. You just seem so.”
“So what?”
“I don’t know, just so.”
“Well, I’m not.”
His smile was cocked to one side, half-bewildered, half-knowing.
“Yeah, I’m starting to get that,” he said. “I love it.”
She got under the bar, that comforting sense of the cold metal pressed through the fabric of her shirt. The stereo was blaring and here amidst the noise was the thing about lifting: it was hers in a way no other part of her life could be. Take the past. Take a few expressions. Try: “standing water.” Pair it with: “too fast for conditions.” Consider: “facial reconstructive surgery,” or “massive head trauma.” Remember to include: “dead on arrival.” Now shuffle them any way you like, mix them, toss them. But in the end you have to use them, you have to somehow form a life from them. But here’s the joke: it’s already been formed for you. You only thought you were in charge.
But under the bar, she was. It was the only place in the world where all the bullshit washed out clear. The only place where she pushed back against what was otherwise the total freaking acceptance of her fate.
They worked up in sets of three. He was wiry and stronger than you would think, had told her about fighting in Atlanta and you could see that bunched density in the muscle fibers of his chest and shoulders, could see how he had lost weight when he caught the flu.
She hit three reps of 185 and slid a ten on each end, paced to the water fountain and back and then slid beneath the bar. Three more reps. She was in yoga tights and a T-shirt that would have been loose had it not been sweat-stuck to her back.
He did a set of three at 275, as heavy as he would go, and they slid off the quarters so Kayla could do her last set at 225.
A couple of the powerlifters wandered over.
“You gonna squat that?”
“Three reps. Yeah.”
“How much you walk around?”
“Like 117.”
“Shit, girl.”
Three reps. The exhaled breath, the spitting exhaustion. The sheer clarity of being.
It felt like magic.
It felt like love, and she knew that was exactly what it was.
*
After they got back to her apartment, after they started kissing in the stairwell and barely made it through the door, she took a shower while he lay on the bed and flipped channels. Came out pink from the hot water, a towel around her like the sort of dress she could never afford.
“I have to go in like thirty minutes,” she said.
“No problem.”
“You want to just stay here or something?”
“I’ll probably drive back to my place.”
She had no idea where his place was, only that she didn’t want him going there. She wanted him here when she came in to sleep, here when she woke the next morning.
“Just stay why don’t you? I won’t be that late.”
He sort of shrugged and she pulled her panties on beneath the towel.
“Hey,” she said, and let the towel fall. “Do me a favor.”
He leaned forward and dropped the remote on the bed.
“You got it.”
“Not that. Not right now. But look at me.”
“Oh, I’m looking.”
“Seriously.” She turned and twisted toward him. “What about my abs?”
“Tight.”
“What about my glutes?”
“Very tight.”
“Be serious. I’m like weeks out from competing.”
“I am being serious. Crazy tight.” He took the remote back up and waved it at the tattoo on her thigh. “Tell me about the bird.”
“I’ll probably try to cover it with makeup for the contest.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a swallow-tailed kite. You ever seen one?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was my mom’s favorite. She loved all sorts of birds, but the swallow-tail is maybe the most graceful flier. We don’t get them up here, but when we went to the beach she would just watch them for hours.”
“I think it’s beautiful.”
“I’ll probably try to cover it.”
“Come here.”
“I don’t want to be late.”
“Come here first.”
*
She was late, but it didn’t matter. Flushed with happiness as she drove south to a bistro in Chattanooga she and Tess had determined to be more or less halfway between them. She was late and it was starting to sleet, but she didn’t care and knew Tess wouldn’t care either. They had made love again and holding each other she had asked him to spend Christmas with her at her grandparents’ and he had said yes. She wanted to take him to her special place, the original home place she had turned into a sort of shrine to her mother. Kind of embarrassing, but somehow it wouldn’t be with him. She couldn’t wait to tell Tess that. She couldn’t wait to tell her she was in love.
40.
On the first day of exams John was back in his office. It was December and he had a full slate of counseling sessions, the end-of-semester panic that always ran thick with accusations and explanations. All of it followed by pleading and bargaining. He had spent the morning mediating a dispute between a sophomore and her U.S. lit professor whose use of Lolita, she claimed, was promoting a
campus-wide rape culture.
It would have surprised John had another student not once claimed that the inclusion of Alice Walker in a course on Modern Christian Thought offended his evangelical beliefs thus violating the campus code on freedom of religious expression. The student asked the professor to allow him to read the Left Behind series instead. The professor refused. So he had his parents call and John wound up sitting down with all four, a fruitless discussion about which the best thing you could say was that they had all agreed to disagree.
He had twenty minutes between sessions and was eating a banana when Jimmy Stone pushed open his door and shut it behind him.
“There he is,” Stone said.
“I’ve got a student walking through that door in about three minutes.”
“Guess I’ll need to hurry then.”
Stone sat down and crossed his legs, pants riding up from one sockless boat shoe so that John was gifted a long expanse of hairless white shin. He put a piece of paper on John’s desk and slapped it for emphasis.
“What is this?”
“Just read it.”
It was an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website. Two bodies had been found in a Kirkwood apartment. Both were shot in the living room, their throats slashed so deeply they were nearly decapitated. The bodies were covered with empty meth baggies and several hundred dollars in small bills, a ceremonial scattering it seemed. Stone had circled the name Suleyman Nawaf.
“You know the name?” he asked.
“Should I?”
“I want to assure you your colleague Professor Hadawi does.”
“Sounds like drug crime, gang stuff.” He slid the article away from him. “Sorry. I’m in the dark on this.”
“Well, I want to assure you the good professor is not.”
“Where is Hadawi?”
“Excellent question.” Stone walked to the door. “Does this lock?”
“No.”
He clicked the knob. “Yeah, it does.”
“I have a student here any second. Don’t lock it.”
“Too late,” Stone said.
When he turned he was holding a pistol.