Old Flames, Burned Hands

by McGregor, Tim

  “A little,” she said, making an effort to keep her tone breezy. And feeling shitty about that. “How was your run?”

  “Good.” Shane watched her from behind as he peeled away the last of his clothes, his eyes drawn magnetically to the shape of her ass in those jeans. He came up behind her and wrapped his arms round her waist. “You should come jogging with me sometime.”

  “Not my thing.” She shrugged out of his arms. “You’re all sweaty.”

  “So? Let’s get more sweaty.”

  “Too tired.” She peeled off the shirt and reached for another. She didn’t know what it was about jogging but Shane often came home red-faced and randy, pawing at her like he was starved for sex. Maybe that was why he was always encouraging her to jog with him.

  He frowned. Seeing her topless didn’t help matters either. His eye caught something and he touched her arm. “What happened?”

  She looked down to see his thumb stroke the purpled bruise on her bicep. Her mind blanked. “That? I just bumped into something.”

  “Like what, a Mac truck? When did you do that?”

  “Not sure.” She pulled another shirt over head, the sleeves covering her arms. “I must have done it cleaning out the garage.”

  “Looks nasty.” He checked to make sure the hallway was empty then sauntered into the bathroom, his erection bobbing the air before him.

  The strain in her neck relaxed when she heard the shower thrum to life. What was she doing? Had Shane sensed her tension, her stilted replies? It made her feel a little sick to her stomach but it didn’t stop her from digging for something else to wear. Trying on another top, she was pleasantly surprised by what she’d chosen in her haste. It fit nicely at the waist and plunged recklessly down the neckline.

  SUNSET, according to the weather channel, would fall at 8:58 that night. It was four minutes late. Tilda slipped out to the backyard and unlocked the garage and frowned at the empty space. She had expected him to be waiting for her but the only thing that greeted her was the smell of old concrete. She flopped onto the sofa and stewed, remembering acutely how he used to always make her wait. It drove her crazy, and she realized with a slight hitch of panic that it still did. Death tends to smooth the rough edges of the deceased’s flaws, transforming the departed into something of a saint. Gil Dorsey was no exception, his infuriating shortcomings and tics forgotten and forgiven by the bereaved. Now that he was returned from the land of the shadow of death, she revoked her amnesty. She seethed at his tardiness, his inability to arrive within any reasonable timeframe. In the old days (old days!), it had been a power issue, to make her wait like this. Maybe it still was.

  Desperate for some distraction, her eyes fell to the alien guitar on the bench. Taking up the old gut string, she slipped back out to the yard and plunked down on the picnic table and tuned the strings.

  She strummed and picked, a guitar in her hands as natural as breathing. Thrumming through one of her songs, she remembered a jumble of notes she’d last worked on, the crude rootling of some tune she’d tried to hammer out. Having gone days without playing or even thinking about music, the rough draft of song she had frittered at now came out whole in two passes. No second guessing, no doubts; the melody was just there. With no ready lyrics, she simply hummed the vocal, nailing it dead to rights with little effort. All she needed now were the words and, given the bizarre events of the last few days, finding something to write about would be a cinch. She was already matching couplets in her head.

  She laid the Hummingbird down and sprang to her feet, eager to rush to the kitchen for pen and paper but she stopped herself. She had given this up, hadn’t she? This was the past and it was behind her. No diving for the notebook to capture lightning in a bottle or fighting past clichéd phrases for some accurate way to pinpoint an idea or feeling and wrestle it to the mat. No more music.

  And where the hell was Gil? He said he’d return but she’d been out here for an hour with no sign nor hint that he was coming back to her. How stupid was she? Waiting in the grass for an old boyfriend who’d been dead almost two decades. There was no Gil Dorsey. She’d dreamed the whole damn thing. Was in fact still dreaming as she stood out here waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen. A prom date stranded on the porch, hoping against hope to spot the headlights of her date’s car even as the clock ran out. A fool. Miss Havisham at her cobwebbed wedding banquet under the light of the moon.

  Moon

  June

  Croon

  It was hard to turn off the lyric-crafting. Even the clichéd tripe. Second nature.

  “What’s that one called?”

  She flinched and spun around to see Gil perched on the top of the fence, watching her. “How long have you been sitting there?”

  “I just got here.”

  She meant to level her tone but the sting of being abandoned was too fresh. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  He dropped to the ground but remained just outside of the cast of the patio light. He looked dishevelled, like he’d woken late and ran out the door. He nodded at the guitar on the picnic table. “I liked what you were playing.”

  “It’s nothing.” Her reply was too curt and she scolded herself to get over it. Having anticipated this moment all bloody day, this wasn’t how she wanted it to play out. Gil remained on the far side of the yard. “Come here. I won’t bite.”

  “Take a walk with me.”

  She hesitated but didn’t know why. “Where?”

  “Nowhere. Does it matter?”

  It didn’t. She crossed the yard towards him, suddenly uncertain of how to greet him. She wanted to embrace him, even a quick hug, but he turned and unlatched the gate. Pushed it open for her. “After you,” he said and they proceeded without any greeting at all.

  The gate fed into the garage alley behind the house. Battered roll-up doors on both sides, a webbing of power lines overhead. The lone streetlight flickered as if dying, its light reflected in the puddles of stagnant water that rainbowed with a skein of oil.

  Gil didn’t say anything or even look at her, content to simply walk the length of garages and ramshackle sheds. Striding beside him, it was all Tilda could do to not stare at him or reach out for his hand. To touch him to prove that he was real. Had something changed? He seemed unaware of her, as if he was alone and she just happened to be travelling in the same direction. Maybe this was a mistake? Her stride chased her thoughts and she walked faster, outpacing him as if in a hurry to get there although no destination lay ahead.

  “Where are you rushing to?”

  “Sorry.” Tilda slowed and he came alongside. “I tend to walk fast when I’m antsy.”

  “You do? I don’t remember that.” Passing into a shadow so deep she could barely see him, he said, in lieu of nothing, “You look beautiful tonight.”

  “Thanks. I look my best in the dark” she guffawed. “I can’t even see you in this gloom.”

  “You haven’t changed.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You brush off every compliment. Or dismiss it with a joke. Why do you do that?”

  “I don’t know.” It was the truth, a habit so ingrained he may as well have asked her why she breathes. When had it started and why did it persist? Why does the sun come up? She looked at him. “You’ve changed a little. You never used to say things like that.”

  “Then shame on me. I should have told you that every day.” They came out of the alley, onto the quiet street. No cars or pedestrians. They crossed and he led the way into another alleyway. “If I had, maybe you’d realize it was true.”

  “I doubt it.” Passing under the available light, she stole whatever glances she could without outright staring before they ducked out of the hazy wash of streetlight and back into the gloom. “But saying it too often waters it down and it becomes meaningless. It’s like saying ‘I love you’ too many times. It just becomes words after a while.”

  As she uttered those three words, she saw him flinch and look h
er way but Tilda couldn’t read his face. His eyes narrowed as if offended. He wagged his chin forward. “Come on. Now you’re lagging behind.”

  Cutting across another street and into a deserted laneway, they wound their way west without ever hitting the lights of College Street and she realized Gil was avoiding the streets altogether. A stroll down a maze of back alleys and service lanes, sightseeing the metal fencing and plankboard gates. She thought she knew most of the alleys in her neighbourhood but Gil led her into so many niches cut between buildings and gaps in fences that she became disoriented. “Where are we going?”

  “How about the park?”

  Coming out of another lane, the houses looked familiar. Across the street was the soccer pitch and old oaks of Dufferin Grove. They popped over the low fence and walked through the grass. The trees looked spectral, backlit as they were against the hazy park lights.

  On their right, a clutch of people congregated around the cold fire pit, tipping back beers and smoking weed. Gliding back and forth on their skateboards with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Gil wagged his chin in their direction. “The young ne’er-do-wells.”

  Tilda watched the boys and girls roll away and glide back. “That used to be us.”

  “Neither of us were any good on a board.”

  “No,” she said. “I meant just hanging at the park, doing nothing and spending all night doing it.”

  “You sound wistful.”

  “Sometimes I am.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  They moved on but now Tilda led the way, guiding them past the wooden posts of the playground. She beelined to the swings and plunked down in the vulcanized seat, kicking her feet against the sand. Gil leaned against the pole, watching her swing towards him and then swing away.

  She looked over the play structures. The metal run of the slide buffed shiny from a thousand little bottoms. “I miss this place.”

  “The park?”

  “The playground. We used to come here all the time when Molly was little. We practically camped out here in the summertime.”

  Gil stepped in front of her, like he meant to be walloped by her upswing but then sidestepped at the last second, making Tilda laugh. He dropped into the empty swing next to her. “Molly. That’s a pretty name. How did you choose it?”

  “It was my grandmother’s name.”

  “I don’t remember that either.”

  Tilda tucked her feet on the backswing. “You never met her.”

  “What’s Molly like?”

  “At the moment, she’s a bit of a pill but in her defence, she’s thirteen. Something happens to girls around that age. All those changes produce this weird rage and everybody’s a target.”

  “I’m sure she’ll grow out of it.”

  “Oh I know. It’s just exhausting when there’s no let-up from it.” Tilda sat up, letting her momentum fade. “She’s crackerjack smart. Too smart sometimes. And hilarious and sweet when she allows for it. I really miss that side of her.”

  He whistled. “You have a daughter. That blows me away.”

  “Why does that surprise you?” she asked, a tad too quick and a shade too defensive.

  “Never saw it back then. I know it was a lifetime ago but… I guess it just never came up.” He grinned, teeth flashing in the light. “Does she look like you?”

  “A little. She has my nose but the rest is all her dad.”

  “Her dad.” Gil traced a divot in the sand with his heel and stared at it for a long while. Somewhere in the park, a dog barked and its yap cracked through the still air. He looked up at her. “What’s he like?”

  “Shane? He’s a good man. Sweet and supportive. He’s a really good father.”

  His head bobbed in a slow nod. “That’s important. How did you meet him?”

  “What’s with all the questions?”

  “I want to know everything.”

  She threw up a frown. “But I can’t ask you any questions? That hardly seems fair.”

  “Nothing’s fair.”

  “Gosh. That’s deep, Gil.”

  “And you wonder where your daughter gets her snarkiness from?” He laughed then. “I’ll fill in some blanks, I promise. Right now I want to know about you. You’ve lived a life and I’m a nosy bastard hungry for details.”

  “You make it sound like you’ve been asleep all this time.”

  “I got locked in a deep freezer, missed everything.” He swayed back and forth. “So. Shane. How did that happen?”

  Tilda kicked off her shoes and dug her toes in the sand. She didn’t want to talk about her husband or how they had met or any of that. She crunched the details into the briefest summary. “I met Shane about eighteen months after you… vanished. I was at the bottom of a very dark hole, determined never to sober up or crawl out. For reasons I still can’t decipher, Shane helped me climb out of that awful place and come back to the world. We became really close friends. And then more. A year later, Molly was born.”

  The chains of his swing stopped creaking and Gil became still. “I’m sorry, Til.”

  “Yeah, well… You suck, Gil Dorsey.” She kicked off and swung again. “What was it you used to say? Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

  “I was wrong. And stupid as dirt. Life isn’t a bitch.”

  Tilda dipped back to boost her momentum, anger rising up out of nowhere. “What do you know about it? You up and died or disappeared or whatever you did.”

  “I used to think I knew everything back then. I didn’t know shit. Just a loudmouth covering up his ignorance with braggadocio.”

  “Please don’t get all sullen with me. I can’t do sullen anymore.” Tilda swung, disliking this route the conversation had suddenly taken. Not what she had imagined or scripted in her head. “You weren’t all bad.”

  “Your hindsight has been coloured rosy, my dear. Do you know that I used to resent you sometimes?”

  “Resent me?” A surprise. It threw her rhythm off. “For what?”

  “Your talent. It was real.” He leaned his back against the chain and watched her swing. “I wanted to be an artist so bad but I knew deep down I didn’t have it. But you did. It just rolled out of you so effortlessly. And, being a twenty-something shithead, not only did I resent you for it, sometimes I blamed you too. For holding me back.”

  “Did I?”

  “No. That was just my ego getting in the way.”

  “Your paintings were great,” she protested. “Creepy but great.”

  “They were mediocre. Less than that.” He pushed off and swung to catch her momentum. “It was petty. I’ve had a lot of time to think it over so don’t argue with me. I should have been more supportive, instead of trying to drag you down sometimes. Shame on me.”

  She stopped kicking and fell out of rhythm. Up when he was down, his expression a flash on the bypass.

  His heel plowed the sand, slowing his pace. “How could you just give it up? Music means everything to you.”

  “I just can’t do it anymore. The cost is too high.”

  “Touring I can understand. I remember how tough it was on you. But to never play again? Or write a song? You write songs the way other people breathe. It’s a part of you.”

  “I won’t do it halfway. I can’t just fool around with the guitar sometimes, play the odd show. Get all maudlin about what coulda been. It’s all or it’s nothing.”

  Gil watched her sway. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “I think you should reconsider. All of that stuff, the performing and the songwriting, it’s who you are. Stopping cold turkey would be like amputating a limb. You need it.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “What’s done is done.”

  “What you do, Tilda, it moves people. I mean it physically moves them. People dance, they tap their feet, they sing along. It’s almost a religious experience, the way people respond to music. No one reacts that way to a painting. I wou
ld have killed to have that kind of response to my stuff.” He lifted his gaze to the sky but not a single star was visible. “I wonder why that is.”

  “That’s easy,” Tilda shrugged. “Music doesn’t go through your brain, it goes for the guts first. No other art does that.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Just a theory. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Almost every form of art is visual. It goes through your eyes and then into your brain. Painting, sculpture, books, poetry. Film or photography. Because you have to see it to process it. And if it’s good or if it has meaning, then it reaches down and touches your heart. Music bypasses the brain altogether and goes straight to your guts, to your heart. It either moves you or it doesn’t. You dance or you don’t. But it’s only after it hits your heart that it travels up to the brain. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah, it does. I never thought of it that way.”

  “It’s a primal thing. Your body reacts to music, the brain gets it afterwards.”

  Gil rose out of the seat and looked out over the deserted playground. “I miss seeing you play. There was something almost spooky about watching you onstage. I’d give my left arm to see that again.”

  She drifted to a stop. The rubberized seat felt suddenly uncomfortable so she launched out of it. They were designed for little kids after all, not over-forty ex-musicians with a habit of talking to dead boyfriends.

  She bent to retrieve her shoes and found him staring at her again. His gaze never fell far, watching her every move. It was unnerving and, for reasons that escaped Tilda, it sparked a wick of anger in her. “Where have you been all this time?”

  It broke the spell, the query snapping the glaze from his eyes. He turned aside as if to deflect the question. “Here.”

  “Here?” Her tone sharpened. Was that a joke? “You’ve been here in town this whole time?”

  “Yes.”

  The wick glowed brighter. “So you thought, what the hell, it’s been twenty years. Maybe I’ll stop by and say hello?’”