Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series

by Rivers, Mary Ann

  She’d showed up at Hefin’s place Thursday night.

  She would have to find a way to call him today, thank him for talking to Carrie, for bringing POS Limo back with Lacey.

  She wasn’t even sure where her POS phone was this morning. Lacey probably had her keys. She’d shoved her wallet into her pocket before she and Hefin had left for the hospital. It felt her life was in little pieces, scattered across everything.

  She rubbed her soap over her neck, her armpits, her breasts, felt the sensitive sting where Hefin’s whiskers had scraped. She slid the bar down over her belly and suds ran between her legs. She eased the watery suds down with her hand, gently over her labia, which were tender.

  He’d been here, she thought. Everywhere.

  She put the soap down and rinsed. That was the thing, making love with Hefin was having him everywhere, all at once.

  She rested her cheek against the mauve pink tiles of the shower surround.

  The thing is, she had wanted Hefin with her at the hospital. When she wasn’t completely freaking out about Sarah, she was thinking of Hefin. Because she was so physically uncomfortable at the hospital, she especially thought of how good his body felt against hers. How good her body felt near him.

  She loved how he always submitted to her touching him. From that very first time at the park, how he closed his eyes and let her put her hands on him. He was easy to spoil, and Des liked spoiling people. He didn’t push back against it, he didn’t question it.

  He let her be herself.

  It seemed, too, she let him be himself. She let him break open against her and show her his hurts and sweet dirtiness and tea-making.

  He told her she was noble and that people were better having known her.

  She knew though, she knew he needed to go. And more than ever, she needed to stay. She couldn’t imagine herself anywhere but here. Once, in high school, she had read a poem about how before the speaker in the poem had been to Paris, that Paris was simply a blank canvas and when the speaker imagined herself in Paris, she imagined being glued to the middle of the canvas—blankness all around her.

  Of course, then once she had been to Paris, the canvas filled in—the curling linoleum of the cafe floors, the smells from a certain cheese shop when it propped its doors open.

  When she thought of what Hefin had told her of Aberaeron, she could see him standing by the shore, the colors of the village houses and shops, the blue paint of the inn, his parents’ garden. But when she tried to imagine herself in those places, she was cut out and glued on a blank canvas.

  Except, when she was with him, the only thing she saw in him was her.

  That had never happened. That had never been true. With anybody.

  She usually just saw the good parts of themselves when she looked at the people she loved.

  Somehow, Hefin showed her the best parts of herself.

  It was pretty great, actually. She didn’t realize she had so many best parts.

  Maybe if she hadn’t just started a job, and Sarah hadn’t just been admitted to the hospital, if she still had her savings, she could give him a chance to settle in with his parents, then have a reason to take her first plane ride all the way to Wales. Let him show her Aberaeron, London, those unimaginable places in the world until part of her canvas filled in.

  Then, she would have to come back, and they’d call and email until they couldn’t stand it. Then he’d visit her here, or maybe they’d meet in Chicago for a week, making love in a hotel and taking their distorted picture in the shiny surface of The Bean, like pictures she’d seen posted on friends’ profile pages.

  Then he’d go back.

  She’d cry.

  Write more emails, coordinate more video chats across the time differences, when they could.

  Then, some awful day, they’d know.

  The scar would be tender forever.

  She switched cheeks so the other one could cool against the tile. But even if they simply said good-bye, now, would the cut be any less deep?

  God. It was so going to suck to see the sweet peas bloom on her dome and the snow pile on top of it. Also, she might never be able to hang out in the back of POS Limo ever again.

  Or eat donuts.

  Or drink tea.

  Or look at a map of the United Kingdom.

  Or of China.

  Or of the world, possibly. No atlas browsing, at all.

  She was definitely going to have to start going to a different branch of the library.

  Fuck.

  She scrubbed herself dry and found the jeans she had worn to the hospital, glad that her phone and wallet were in their pockets. She finished dressing. The clanking hadn’t gone away, one of her neighbors was getting industrious with something. She was surprised Betty hadn’t shut it down already.

  She figured she’d go to the hospital and sit with Sarah for a while, then see if PJ wanted to eat lunch or something. She needed to check in with him and make sure he was okay. Before that, she should find out if Lacey or Betty had her keys, use one of their phones to call Sam and see how Sarah was doing.

  She ignored the thumping soreness that just wanted to drive POS Limo straight to Hefin’s, so he could make her tea and kiss her until she couldn’t see straight.

  She went out the back door and slammed it behind her.

  Froze.

  She closed her eyes, then opened them.

  The dome was at least seven feet tall and perfectly egg-shaped. The door arched into it like the entrance to a magical kingdom.

  It took up most of the postage-stamp-size yard. There was a bird perched on the top of it, and for some reason, that was what made it real.

  He’d finished her dome.

  When she had been at the hospital, maybe even when she’d been sleeping a few paces away, he’d been here, breaking and weaving twigs. There wasn’t a single twig left in the yard that wasn’t part of the dome.

  It was beautiful, unlikely, and foreign.

  She stepped off the stoop and walked toward it, then ducked inside.

  The wattle broke the sunlight up so much that the shadows on her body looked woven, too. There was really only one spot, inside, she could stand up straight. It was like being inside and outside all at the same time. She could feel the breeze, hear the birds and the clanking and the kids playing in the alley, but there was a kind of secret privacy, too.

  She was in the neighborhood, in her familiar backyard, but someplace else, too. Someplace she never could have really imagined.

  It was wonderful.

  Then she did the most beautiful, unlikely, and foreign thing she could imagine after the last twenty-four hours she’d had—she laughed.

  Also, she cried a little, but it didn’t hurt like the cry heaves did. It was nice—it felt like getting clean.

  She sat down inside her dome and looked up.

  Everything was in little pieces, but it was more beautiful that way.

  She sat in her dome for a long time, the wet and muddy grass seeping into the seat of her jeans. She thought about when she had rolled around on this exact spot with Hefin when her dome was just a circle of twigs.

  Then they’d made love for the first time, looking right at each other. That was the first time she’d seen herself in him.

  She thought about what she had told him two weeks ago. How they shouldn’t waste the time they had on the good-byes, that she had been wrong about that. She looked through the little spaces in the twigs, at the little slices of the yard, and remembered how full she’d been of the possibility of a couple of months with the beautiful woodcarver she’d been watching for weeks.

  She’d been the one to convince him.

  Now they were in the worst trouble possible and he’d spent a whole day he should have been carving and finished her dome. She’d be able to see it from her bedroom window. One day, maybe even before any sweet peas bloomed on it, or if they did, after the snow melted from it, it would start to crumble.

  It seemed so perfec
t, now, the snaps he’d made in the twigs were bright and golden, but those broken places would darken and twigs would dry out, the joins become less tight, and a few spots would come apart.

  She couldn’t imagine herself in Wales, but she could imagine a day she gathered up all the twigs and put them in yard waste bags to be taken away. What she’d loved about the original inspiration for her dome, Andy Goldsworthy’s work, was how ephemeral it was. Sometimes that artist hadn’t even finished a piece before nature took it back.

  Ephemeral seemed like a pretty stupid concept right now.

  She lay back in the grass and looked up at the ceiling of the dome. Hefin had left a little skylight in the very top.

  Shaped like a heart.

  She closed her eyes. Good-bye, Hefin Thomas.

  Hot tears filled up her ears where they ran down the sides of her temples. The sound of birdsong grew muted. She’d cried more in the last two weeks than she’d cried in a year, and her dad had died and she’d lost her job. If she hadn’t started all this crying by crying in the library, she and Hefin would still be just exchanging secret glances instead of ripping each other’s hearts to pieces.

  The clanking got really loud, and underneath she could hear Betty’s voice.

  She got up and brushed herself off, exited her dome. It really was beautiful. More beautiful than she could have ever made it. She loved that he hadn’t even questioned her half-formed idea to build a twig dome in her backyard because she watched a documentary one time. He helped her just because it made her happy.

  When she started walking toward the alley to fetch POS Limo, she saw that the fence gate was partly open, which was weird because it only latched from the inside. She opened the gate and had her second shock of the morning.

  Betty and Rennie, covered in dirt and rust flakes and grease, had POS Limo partially dismantled right there on the concrete parking pad by the alley. There were roughly ten thousand POS Limo parts and pieces laid out on the pad, and Betty was busy labeling them by writing directly on the concrete pad next to each piece with sidewalk chalk.

  “Um?”

  Betty stood up and brushed off her jeans. Jeans. Betty Lynch did not wear jeans. Rennie didn’t even look up, just kept right on, too busy breaking her limousine.

  “Hello there, Destiny Marie. I wasn’t sure you’d ever wake up.”

  “I woke up to a terrible noise that would have gotten me out here faster if I had known it was my transportation falling apart.”

  “Here you are,” said Betty, and handed Des her key ring.

  “Okay. Thanks.” Des felt like she had entered some bizarro world where no one had to explain themselves after destroying a person’s assets.

  “You’ll find the keys to the Chevette on there.”

  “What?” I looked down at the ring. Two keys with the tops wrapped once with masking tape had been added to the ring. “Marvin’s Chevette?” Betty kept Marvin’s Chevette hatchback, with its custom violet paint job, in pristine condition, driving it only randomly when she was feeling maudlin. Otherwise, she drove a serviceable, small, pickup truck.

  “I should have lent it to you to drive when you had to sell your car, anyway. I don’t need two vehicles, that’s for certain. Please don’t smoke or eat in it.”

  “I don’t smoke. But …”

  “It’s fine,” Betty said firmly.

  “What are you two doing to Dad’s limo?”

  Betty broke into a wide grin that was so unexpected, and made her look so young, especially in the jeans and chambray shirt she was wearing, that Des could feel herself smiling in response and shut it down. She had to remember that these two were in trouble. “Isn’t it marvelous?”

  “That my limo’s in pieces all over the alley under the direction of my landlady and a teenager? No. Not marvelous.”

  “But it is! Lauren, let me show Destiny your plans.” Rennie winced, hard, at the use of his full name, but handed over a greasy booklet. “Here, Destiny, you can see for yourself. It’s what we’ve talked about before, converting the Lincoln to run on vegetable oil. You can get it, for free, from restaurants! Imagine, you can take people from the neighborhood wherever they need to go and never spend a dime yourself. It’s very eco-friendly, too.”

  Des took a slow breath. Gave Rennie a killing look. He just raised an eyebrow and went back to breaking her car, the little shit. “Mrs. Lynch, the thing is, I sort of remember telling you guys that I didn’t want to do this.”

  Betty looked into the middle distance. “I don’t remember that, Destiny.”

  “Right. It’s hard to remember when someone says ‘I don’t want to do that’ three hundred times.”

  Betty snapped her gaze back to Des’s. “Don’t be smart.”

  “Look, Mrs. Lynch—”

  “It’s good for Lauren. He’s taking pictures along the way of the whole process, for his portfolio, so he can apply for a student internship in his engineering program next year. At MIT.” Betty paused for dramatic impact.

  It worked. Destiny pressed her hand over her mouth and felt a burn in her nose. “Oh, Rennie.”

  He looked at her and grinned, and it made him look so much like the little boy she’d babysat for two bucks an hour that she had to swallow over the tears. “Cambridge, Massachusetts, Des. Seven hundred and seventy-five miles away. You know who knows me in Cambridge, Massachusetts?”

  Des smiled. “Who?”

  “Nobody. Not a soul.” He grinned again.

  “Well,” Betty said, “you don’t need to worry about that. You’ll make friends, and visit as often as you can. You can move right back after you’re done with school.”

  Des caught Rennie’s eye and winked, and he went back to work with his wrench. Smiling.

  “So this will help Rennie at school, huh?”

  “That’s right,” Betty said.

  “And it will work, like, the limo will start and drive and run like normal after you crazy people are done?”

  “Better than before,” Betty said.

  “And in the meantime, I can drive Marvin’s sweet ride all over Lakefield? I seem to remember it has a five-speed Turbo-Hydromatic transmission just waiting to get opened up.”

  Betty stiffened, taking Des’s bait. “It’s a loaner, Destiny Marie, not for joyriding. I never need to put it any higher than third gear anywhere I need to go in town.”

  Rennie and Destiny laughed, and it felt good.

  Betty stiffened more, not appreciating their shenanigans. Des stepped over and wrapped her arms around Betty, pushing her face into Betty’s neck like she hadn’t done since she was a child. She still smelled like Jean Naté Bath Splash. “Thanks for dinner, Mrs. Lynch.”

  Betty hugged her back, hard. It felt nice. “Say hello to Sarah for me, Destiny. Lacey filled me in.”

  “Okay.” Destiny kept her face against Betty’s neck. “Please don’t kill Dad’s limo.”

  Betty pushed Des away but held her by the shoulders. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve got Lauren, who’s going to MIT.” Betty looked at him and smiled. “Seven hundred and seventy-five miles from Lakefield, Ohio.”

  “I hope it’s far enough,” Rennie said, from under the hood.

  Betty laughed. “You can’t run away from home, Lauren. Don’t you know? Home’s planted right down inside you. You may live in Massachusetts, but you’ll walk around with Ohio all over you, just the same.”

  “Gross,” replied Rennie.

  Destiny laughed again. Took Betty’s hand, who squeezed it.

  “Did you see your stick house?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “That man was over there all day messing with that. I brought him some brownies and I don’t think anyone’s ever liked my brownies more.”

  “I’m sure not.”

  “He’s not from here.” Betty didn’t have to ask it.

  “Nope.”

  “He told me he was going home, soon.”

  “Yep.”

  “You know, your mama wasn’t
from around here, either.”

  “I know. All of her family is still in Pittsburgh. We never knew the Astors very well.”

  “She converted, you know. So she could marry your dad in the church.”

  “I know.”

  “No small thing for a nice Jewish girl from Pittsburgh. People don’t entirely understand that, nowadays.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “She missed home. All the time. When we’d have coffee in the mornings, like we always did, she’d talk about it sometimes. How much it hurt to not be a part of her parents’ and her two brothers’ lives. Her and Paddy were just starting out for so long, they didn’t get back like she would have liked, then she had all of you. It’s hard for a mother to get away.”

  “They’d visit us. Even after Mom died, they’d come down. PJ sees them the most, I think, because the orchestra does a couple of performances in Pittsburgh every year.”

  “That’s right.” Betty was quiet for a moment. “You know why I think Marie and I were such good friends?”

  “No, Mrs. Lynch.”

  “Well, at first, it was because we sort of understood each other, the social sacrifices, the sacrifices to our families that we’d made to be with our husbands. Marie gave up her faith, her home. When I married Marvin, it was still just not done for a white woman to marry a black man. I lost a lot of my relationship with my parents over that. But it wasn’t long before we realized that what we really had in common was our belief that love could make us happy. Make us feel like no matter what, we hadn’t really made a sacrifice at all. We felt like love could make a home for us. You know what?”

  Des held her jaw tight against more tears. “What’s that?”

  “We were right. Don’t ever think, for a single minute, that your mama wasn’t happy. She loved Paddy beyond reason, and you kids were her whole life. I have no doubt that she watches over all you kids with great love and an interest, even now. As much as Sarah looks like her, you favor her strongly, you know. You’ve always been close to your dad, but you’ve always loved, loved with your whole heart, just like Marie Astor Burnside.”