Close Encounters

by Jen Michalski

  “I couldn’t be better, really,” she assured. She felt his arms around her waist again. She sighed, letting herself lean fully into him. Suddenly the air filled with water. She kicked and struggled through its thick coldness, her foot against what she decided was Lenny’s ribcage, before ascending to the surface.

  “You bastard!” She cried. “You could have hurt us!”

  Ava’s guests were quiet, and she wondered whether she’d been too harsh. A careless prank in Lenny’s mind, surely, pulling them into the pool together. She realized, however, that attention was not turned toward her or Lenny, but at Gavin, who appeared at the head of the deck. He stood behind Leslie, whose skin looked even paler and softer out in the sun, protected thinly by a matching top and shorts with a beach scene on them. Although it was bad enough that the outfit was meant for an older woman, someone perhaps Ava’s mother’s age, on Leslie they had the reverse effect, making her look fourteen. Ava found herself wishing she could buy Leslie some outfits for the rare occasions she was taken out. Perhaps she could even give Gavin’s mother a bag of her own clothes.

  “Look, it’s John Boy and his girlfriend,” Lenny snickered behind her as Ava pulled herself out of the pool.

  “Gavin, I’m glad you and Leslie could make it,” Ava answered, touching Leslie’s hand. Leslie smiled and moaned softly. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “A coke is fine—for both of us,” he answered. Ava watched from the kitchen as a few of her braver friends accosted Gavin and Leslie, although most of them inconspicuously made their way to the other side of the pool, casting curious glances at the couple now and then. She returned and set the cokes down, taking the seat next to Leslie, and watched as Gavin carefully offered some to his sister. They sat drinking in silence while the tenor of her guests congealed into an undercurrent of confusion and hostility. Boys and girls buzzed in corners and lounged in the pool, uncertain of whom to direct their disappointment at, Ava or Gavin, that their carefree, insular world had been pierced by the high school outcast and his handicapped guest. Ava attempted to mingle with her friends, who tried, in unsuccessful ways, to determine the origin of Gavin’s invitation. Lenny and his friends cast mean smiles to Gavin most of the afternoon, smiles signaling that although they would not take issue with Gavin’s presence, certainly not when Ava or her parents were around, he was not welcome and never would be.

  It did not matter to Ava. She would break up with Lenny tonight, she knew, and she would go willingly with Gavin and Leslie into their strange world in the farmhouse, and she would be better, wiser for it. She could only wait impatiently for the pool party and, by extension, her old life to end.

  “When do you want me to pick you up later?” Lenny asked as she bade her classmates goodbye at the driveway. Gavin had left a few hours previously, in anticipation, he secretly explained, of Leslie’s toileting needs.

  “Lenny, I don’t want you to pick me up later,” Ava answered, turning back toward the house.

  “If you’re still mad about the pool…”

  ‘It’s not that, Lenny. I just don’t think this is what I want anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m breaking up with you, Lenny. I’m sorry.”

  “Does this have to do with John Boy and the crip?” He grabbed her arm. “Because if it does…”

  “This has to do with me, Lenny,” Ava wrestled free. “I’ll talk to you later. I need to help my mom clean up now.”

  “Ava, don’t do this…” he stammered, and she placated him, hugging him with vague assurances of a near-future contact before begging off into the house. Later that night she drove out to the old farmhouse on Whipple Tree Road and walked the quarter mile to the bridge. Through the trees she could see Gavin crosslegged on the ground, his sketchbook in his lap. She walked up silently behind him and wove her arms tightly around the broadness of his boy back, not quite a man’s. But growing, tendrils of muscles leeching quietly at night over his ribs and spine, girders of cells and veins. He turned as she held him.

  “Fixed it yet?” She asked. He shook his head and wove his fingers into hers.

  “I’m working on it,” he laughed, and Ava tried to remember if she had heard him laugh before. She decided she hadn’t. She definitely would have remembered its smoothness, its deepness that rumbled through his chest into her arms.

  “Get off my girlfriend, John Boy, you dick.”

  Lenny stood before them now. In her revelry, Ava did not stop to wonder whether he would wait for her, his car parked at the corner of her development, to see if she had been lying to him. Gavin stood up, and Ava fell backward, still seated.

  “What, you thought you could fool me with that little speech, Ava?” Lenny sneered. “I’ve seen you looking at him the past few weeks. I’m not fucking stupid, Ava.”

  “Lenny, leave Gavin out of it. This is between you and me.”

  “How is it between you and me, Ava, when he’s the one who’s fucking you?” Lenny tossed his keys on the ground and stepped toward Gavin. “But don’t worry; John Boy won’t be doing much fucking after I’m done with him.”

  Gavin bent toward Ava to help her up and, she supposed, out of harm’s way. It was then that Lenny cold-clocked him. Gavin staggered and fell on his back.

  “You’re not so smart now, are you, asshole?” Lenny yelled, whipping his foot into Gavin’s exposed gut as Gavin tried to sit up.

  In her head Ava willed Gavin to defend himself, but he lay inert, the wind knocked out of him, while Lenny kicked him repeatedly. At one point, he pulled Lenny to the ground but was no match for Lenny’s wrestling prowess. It was time, Ava decided, to take matters into her own hands.

  “Lenny, stop.” She wrapped her arms around him, feeling his tenseness soften. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll talk about it somewhere else. Leave him alone.”

  She tugged on Lenny’s shirt as he looked for his keys, which Gavin had scooped up in his hand during the tangle. Just then he rolled up to a sitting position and hurled Lenny’s keys with all his might across the river. They landed in a shiny dance on the ground near the other side of the bridge. Ava felt her stomach fall, and the events before her unfolded as if through water, Lenny jogging toward the bridge, Gavin spitting blood at the ground, Ava opening her mouth to keep Lenny from crossing, the first snap of the bridge one third of the way through, Lenny falling through the slats and out of Ava’s view, the thud and silence.

  “Oh god,” Ava staggered toward Gavin. “How could you?!”

  “I didn’t mean to, Ava,” Gavin answered, his face clouded and pained from the beating. It occurred to her that Gavin was just as capable of the unthinking meanness that was bestowed upon him day after day by the other students, the stupid decisions they made out of hurt, anger, revenge. Unfortunately, because he was smarter, he was better at it. “I mean, I thought the calculations were right.”

  “But Gavin, you said…”

  “What? I didn’t think the bridge would collapse. Did you?” He stared at her in shock, in paralysis, as if a car had jumped the rails and was barreling toward him. “I was just trying to get him away from me, you know?”

  He stood up and wrapped his arm around her shoulder as they surveyed Lenny’s motionless body below. Gavin suddenly shook her shoulders desperately, his eyes searching out hers.

  “I didn’t know the bridge wasn’t stable,” he repeated calmly until she finally nodded. “Go to the house and call an ambulance. I’m going to climb down.”

  Ava turned to run back to the house on Whipple Tree Road, but she could not will herself to move. Her arms and legs flailed about helplessly as the weight of gravity finally pulled her to the earth.

  THE TIME MACHINE

  IT LOOKED LIKE A TIME MACHINE, that LaShauna Jackson and her brother Terrell agreed upon. Someone left the metal box with whistle-spout top and the rounded boat windows by the lake in Druid Hill Park, and all day Denise and Sharla and Tyrone and Andre had taken turns climbing in and o
ut of the rusted closet, pretending it was a phat Lincoln Navigator or a swanky crib. But this, this contraption was no ordinary human invention. It was not built for speed or for luxury. It was built with something else in mind entirely, LaShauna and Terrell knew.

  LaShauna Jackson didn’t know too much about time machines, or what they looked like specifically. She had never seen a movie with a time machine in it, except Back to the Future, and that really didn’t look like what she thought a time machine should look like. As she sat by the lake and watched the others worm in and out of it, she wondered where she would travel in a time machine—would she travel back to the times of the American Revolution, which she was learning about in school—or would she travel back to slave times? She didn’t see how she could change anything by traveling back to those times. How could she stop slavery, or the British from invading?

  She wondered if she would travel back and save her Uncle Devon from getting shot on his way to the convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes. Or maybe she could travel back and tell Josey Washington not to get in that car with her mother’s crazy boyfriend, to stay with her and have some Bazooka Joe instead. Maybe she would travel back in time to keep her mom from stealing from work and having to go to jail. Or maybe she could warn Terrell not to wear his new Nikes to the playground so that they wouldn’t get stolen on his way home.

  Maybe she could travel back and be born as someone else, a beautiful, light-skinned black girl who won American Idol or Miss America. Or someone who could pass the fourth grade and didn’t have to be in the special class with nasty Booger Johnson and Trey Hooks, who called her the Michelin tire girl. Or she could be born as Wanda Sanderson, who went to a private school and had a pink cell phone with rhinestones. Or maybe she would not be born at all, but be a cloud hovering over the city, watching all the bad things happen to everyone else but her.

  When Denise and Sharla and Tyrone and Andre got bored with the time machine, they pushed it into the lake and watched it sink before LaShauna even got a chance to play in it.

  “It wasn’t all that,” Terrell shrugged as they walked home. “Whoever left that piece of junk there anyway was crazy stupid.”

  Later that night, after Terrell and her grandmother went to bed, LaShauna slipped out and went back to the park. The lake was smooth, a glass oval in the moonlight. If you hadn’t seen it, you wouldn’t have known the time machine ever existed. LaShauna waded out carefully into the cold water, her feet sinking into the soft mud as the water level began to rise. Her shoe stubbed something big and hard, and she let herself under the water, feeling the square, metal sides of the time machine. As she wedged herself in the box, holding her breath, she felt her pant leg catch on something. Her hands ran over the metal, looking for the snag, her opened eyes seeing only blackness. If this really was a time machine, she thought, she could go back in time and stay in her bed instead of coming out here. But it was a stupid piece of junk somebody abandoned, just like so many other things.

  But as the bubbles from her nose became more frantic, the light began to shine on her, and stars, stars like she had never seen. The lights on the control panel of the time machine lit up, blinking like puppies waiting to be touched. As it began to hum, LaShauna’s body relaxed. All she needed to pick was a destination, and she was on her way.

  THE SITUATION

  THE CHILD WAS NOT HERS. Of that she was certain. But whose was he? This situation was not particularly appealing to Elise. Her flight from Tokyo touched down two hours late and now she waited for her husband, Adam, who might have gone home rather than wait out the delay. She regretted making him pick her up at the airport in the first place, but he had offered on the phone the night before, mentioning he’d taken the day off so that they could sleep in after she arrived. She was so surprised by his sudden generosity, his eagerness, and she had accepted without accounting for international time and, now, the unexpected delay. As she sat in an empty row of seats near baggage claims at four-thirty in the morning, her luggage pulled about her protectively, she watched the small black boy, eight or nine years old, she guessed, scurrying up and down the rows of empty lounge seats around her.

  She wondered if she should just move to another lounge, one slightly more populated, where the boy—if he had the inclination to engage her—might find interest in someone else. When he ran by her, he turned his head back and flashed a grin at her, his dark shiny eyes almost devoid of white, his skin the color of soft caramel, a color that made her hands seem the color of chalk. Although she could not fathom what he was doing here alone at this time of night, Elise had neither the interest nor the energy to find out. At forty-two, she felt it was not her job to worry about other people’s children, particularly when she and Adam had made the mature, albeit gut-wrenching decision, many years ago to have none of their own.

  When the boy came near again Elise busied herself, retying her grey-blond hair tightly into a bun and checking her smooth, youthful face, the result of good genes and weekly spa appointments, in her compact. She scrolled through the telephone list on her cell phone, looking for Adam’s number. She felt the boy looking at her and became slightly uneasy at the prospect of his unpredictability. She noticed an airport employee stroll down the walkway and felt relief pour through her body as the little boy ran off toward him. The boy mocked the cadence of the employee’s walk, a slow swagger that the boy exaggerated with much machismo. Elise’s stomach quickly knotted as the employee continued past without acknowledgment that this mimicking, small child was seemingly unattended in a cavernous airport at close to five in the morning.

  Perhaps the employee thought the boy was hers—a somewhat illogical conclusion, she felt, as it should be obvious that the boy was not hers. Or was it? They were the only people populating this section of the airport; the others on her flight had claimed their baggage and dispersed quietly, leaving two unlikely travelers—herself and the boy—forever linked by proximity, or at least until she found his parents, guardians, whoever was irresponsible enough to let him run around the airport alone at this time of night. Perhaps, she considered, although not very sympathetically, the boy’s mother was a janitor or ticket agent and this was her only option for childcare.

  “You need help with your bags?”

  He stood before her now, his small hand already grasping the handle of the largest suitcase. He was dressed in the casual, lackadaisical way that children are, his shirt coming out of his pants in the back, a shoelace untied and flattened on the end, an undetermined stain near his knee. She steadied the edge of the suitcase toward her, moving her foot against the side.

  “I’m not going anywhere just yet,” she answered.

  “What about then?”

  “Well, I’m sure my husband will be able to help me, but thanks anyway.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “My husband? He’ll be along shortly.”

  “When?”

  “Umm, very soon, I suppose. He’s supposed to pick me up. Umm, are you here with your parents?”

  “No.”

  “Who are you here with, then?”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Well, I just got back from Tokyo, but… I don’t understand what you’re doing here at the airport. It’s nearly five in the morning.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Listen, why don’t you come with me to the security office? I don’t think you should be here by yourself.”

  “I’m not by myself. What’s your name?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Shawn. What’s yours?”

  “Elise.”

  He sat down next to her, swinging his legs and looking intently at her luggage.

  “You got so much stuff…how long you gone?”

  “A few weeks. I had to set up an office for our company there.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Management stuff. It’s hard to explain, really.” She shook her head. “I’m incredibly tired, and I’m still don’t
understand why you’re here by yourself.”

  “I’m not here by myself; I’m with you.”

  “Right now you are, yes, but I’m leaving soon. And I don’t want you to be here by yourself when my husband comes for me.”

  “I won’t be. Then he’ll be with us.”

  “Shawn, I’m really too tired for this. I want to help you, but you have to help me. OK?”

  “I’m trying to help you, Elise.” He pointed his chin into his chest with an air of childish exasperation.

  “Good. Then let’s go to the security office.”

  “But what if your husband shows up?”

  “I doubt he’ll leave just because I’m not right here.”

  “He left you before, didn’t he?”

  “What did you say?” She turned toward him.

  “He left before, right? ‘Cause our flight was delayed.”

  “What do you mean, our flight?”

  “I was on the flight with you.” He smiled, his teeth large and awkward and white. They reminded Elise of her own teeth when she was younger, particularly the slightly crooked incisor that had sometimes still pinched the inside of her lip.

  “I don’t remember you on the flight…” She trailed off, although it was certainly possible, she supposed. “What were you doing in Tokyo?”

  “It’s hard to explain, really.” He fluttered his eyelashes, mocking her.

  “Is your family coming to pick you up, Shawn? Your father?”

  “He left.”

  “What do you mean? He left the airport?”

  “All the men leave.” He turned to her and spoke softly. “You know what I mean?”

  “I do?” She sat back in her seat, not sure whether to be shocked or amused. She wondered whether she had a dollar in her wallet—perhaps she could bribe Shawn away with the promise of a candy bar from the kiosk over at the baggage claim.

  “Did your father leave you?” He twisted back and forth in his seat, his feet in the air. It was such a strange assumption to make, yet she supposed his home life could color his world view that all homes were inherently unstable. “Is that why you’re so sad?”