Without Words

by Stewart, Delancey

  Inside, Amy was curled up on the long green couch asleep, probably waiting for me. I didn’t wake her, though I knew she probably wanted me to. Her handbag sat next to her on the couch. I poured myself a glass of water and closed the door to my bedroom. Despite the knowledge that I needed to move forward and put the immense feelings I had for Rob behind me somehow, I couldn’t help but replay the warmth of being next to him, the smooth slide of my skin against his. I lay on my bed and let my mind replay the last hours of our evening under the dark cover of trees, with the wind rising around us, his deep, low voice sounding base and primal, and so, so hot in my ear. I shouldn’t have let things go so far. Now I’d never be able to forget how it had felt to take him in my mouth, the way his eyes had glowed when I’d touched him—the way he’d pushed gently inside me, reverently and slowly filling me.

  I drifted to sleep, thunder rolling around our tiny house, and I lay in my bedroom surrounded by remnants of my evening with Rob.

  …

  The rare storm had littered San Diego’s streets with branches and leaves, giving the neighborhood a war-torn feeling that matched the landscape of my heart. The storm was gone now, and as I stared out the kitchen window filling the coffee pot, I resolved to let my feelings for Rob slide off into the distance like the tumultuous grey clouds retreating eastward. I had vowed to focus on me, on my shop, on my life, and the things that were in my control. And I’d screwed that up. But, I told myself, pouring the water into the coffeemaker, I could start again.

  I was strong. I knew that. I would focus on the things I had in my life now, not on the things I might yearn for, or the things my heart thought it might need. I’d…

  “How was the sex?” Amy shuffled to the coffeemaker, leaning down to peer into the still-empty pot with disappointment. She sighed and leaned back against the counter, crossing her arms.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to do this. I needed to move forward, not gush to my sister about how I was once again wrapped up in someone I was going to lose.

  “No sex? Then why were you out so late? And why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “How are you so awake already?” I asked her.

  “Because I thought I was going to get to hear about sex. If I can’t have it myself, I should at least get to hear about yours.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.” I gave her a small smile.

  Amy sighed deeply and leaned down again to stare at the coffeemaker as if she could mentally urge it forward.

  “Sit down,” I told her. “I’ll bring you a cup when it’s ready. You’re going to intimidate it and then it’ll never make coffee.” I patted the old machine. We needed it to survive. Amy without coffee was a scary proposition.

  She wandered obediently to the couch and waited all of one minute before starting again. “Can’t you tell me anything? Nothing happened? Seriously?”

  I didn’t answer immediately, but the longer I took to respond, the more insistent Amy’s questions became, and the more convinced she was that she was right. She was like a treasure hunter, digging relentlessly when she had the slightest inkling there might be something buried.

  When we both had coffee in hand I sat down to face her. “It was a nice night. He took me to the Old Globe at the park.”

  “The Old Globe? What was showing?” Amy seemed annoyed by this news.

  “King Lear.”

  “How romantic,” she quipped. “Blood, death, betrayal. Perfect date night.”

  “We had a picnic before the show started. He brought wine, and these cookies that I swear we need to get the recipe for. They were better than Nan’s. I think they were made by leprechauns, or maybe they contain crack or something. I’ve got to find out the secret.”

  Amy squinted at me. “The highlight of your evening was a cookie.” It wasn’t a question.

  “From this deli in Hillcrest.”

  She nodded. “Sander’s. I know the place. I know the cookie. I bet I can get the recipe.” Amy liked to have a mission. The cookie seemed to have distracted her, but only momentarily. “Okay, so what happened after the show? A kiss? A grope? Give me something, kid. I know he doesn’t talk much…does the rest of him function…you know?” She was pushing my buttons, and I fell for it like I always do.

  I jumped to Rob’s defense, giving everything away just like that. “Of course everything functions,” I scolded her. Shit. Now she knew more than I’d wanted to reveal. My sister knew how to make me talk. She always had. I dropped my futile guard and told her everything. About the second half of the play, about the blanket under the trees, the way my heart skittered any time Rob looked at me, touched me.

  “Wow,” she breathed when I was finished.

  I nodded, miserable, feeling like I’d just relived the whole amazing evening.

  “You really like this guy,” she said.

  I sank back into the couch, staring at the ceiling.

  “That’s good, Dani. It sounds like he likes you, too.”

  “He’s going to leave.”

  “Why do you assume that?” She got up and refilled her coffee cup, and I explained everything again about the job in Mexico, about his family. “He hasn’t said he’s going,” she pointed out.

  “Why wouldn’t he go?”

  “Maybe so he could stay here with you?”

  “Oh my God, don’t encourage me,” I said, my blood heating again, this time with pricks of anger and frustration. “Don’t you remember the whole thing with Ben? We sat here on this same couch. Having this same conversation. I was all wrapped up in my fucking feelings and you were encouraging me. And what happened? I got crushed. Completely crushed.” I shook my head, hot tears pricking the corners of my eyes as I thought about the embarrassment, and the heartbreak.

  Amy put her cup down on the table and sat to face me again. “This is different.” Her voice was soft and serious, with none of the sarcastic lilt it usually carried.

  I frowned at her.

  “This feels different. The way you talk about Rob. The look on your face when you talk about the time you’ve spent with him. I’m not an expert—much as I hate admitting that about anything.” She smiled, leaning her head to one side. “But I’ve never seen you like this. Maybe what you had before—with Ben—maybe that was infatuation. You were giddy and silly, so ready for it to be real. But what if it wasn’t? And what if this is?”

  Her words crept under my armor and settled there, making me consider them more seriously than I wanted to. “Doesn’t matter,” I told her. “He’ll leave. Between his family and the business just waiting for him, how could he do anything else?” I stood and took my cup to the kitchen, hoping she’d see that this was over. “I’m going for a run.” I turned and went to my room to get dressed, leaving Amy on the couch. When I came back out with my phone and headphones in hand, she was still sitting there.

  “Does this mean I can’t go out with Trent?” she asked.

  I’d forgotten all about that. “Of course not,” I said. “Go out with Trent. Have fun.”

  She beamed, and I left, needing the air and the water to help me refocus on what was important.

  …

  I sweated out most of my confusion and indecision, and pounded myself back into focus along the boardwalk, and then came home to find a note from Amy. She’d gone to Horton Plaza, saying she needed some new work shoes and that I should meet her. Retail therapy didn’t feel like the right thing for me. I texted her my regrets as I stripped off my sweaty clothes to shower.

  Clad in jeans and a loose long-sleeved shirt, my hair tousled and wet down my back, I padded to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. If I was honest, I was happy to have the house to myself. As the adrenaline from the run had been purged from my system under the pounding heat of the shower, I’d begun to feel clearer, calmer. Life did not have to be as complicated as I often tried to make it. If I stayed focused on my goals—on the things I needed to keep close, the things I already had—then my path would be crystal clear.

 
My goals revolved around the shop. Set up, open the doors, and bring people in. Simple. An achievement and a life built by me, for me.

  And the things I needed to worry about beyond that were this house, my life with my sister, and my memories of Nan. The things that made me who I was. I didn’t need anything else to be the Dani I was right now. And that Dani was pretty happy most of the time.

  I boiled water and poured it over the tea leaves, thinking about the night before. I decided to put my feelings for Rob into a dark little box deep inside me and turn my attention to other things.

  Tea in hand, I decided to allow myself a little maudlin sentimentality. I pulled a large square box down from the top of the narrow linen closet in the hall. It had a dark red top and faded blue sides, and had been stored in that exact same place since I’d first come to live at this house as a little girl.

  I sat on the floor, sipped my tea, and removed the lid of the box, feeling a rush of bittersweet memory as the faces smiled up at me from inside. Nan’s photos were in here, plus a few we’d added since she’d been gone. Amy and I didn’t have a lot of family, but what we did have was in this box. I sighed and sipped my tea as I spread the photos around me, finding strength and support in their curling edges and scratched surfaces. Some people got to go to family reunions, I guessed. And that’s sort of what this was for me, even if the pictures were mostly me and Amy, Nan, and a couple of shots of my mom as a child. There was a snapshot of my mom’s wedding day, taken from a distance and not at all the white-dress-and-flowers affair most people imagined a wedding to be. Mom’s had been a civil service at the courthouse, and the picture captured her and my dad in mid-sentence and mid-step, framed slightly off-center. I remembered the conversation I’d had with Nan about it years ago. She hadn’t been invited. But she’d still been in touch with Mom then, and she had taken the photo, hoping one day to give it to her daughter. Nan had always imagined they’d make up, that Mom would grow out of her wildness and immaturity and come home. But it never happened. Once Mom married my dad, a lowlife named Bill Ewell, she only slipped further from Nan’s life. Until she disappeared completely.

  I pulled another photo from the box, smiling at the confident full smile on my grandmother’s face. She was wearing a pair of faded jeans, the old-fashioned kind that came up super high and cinched in around the waist. She had on a plaid shirt with her sleeves rolled up and she was holding a wrench and a motorcycle helmet, standing in front of a rickety-looking motorbike. I’d always loved this picture for the easy joy that radiated from it, the sheer capability Nan’s happy face exuded.

  Here, I thought. Here is my role model. Nan was alone. She didn’t need a man to make her life complete, did she? She’d tried that and came up as short as I always seemed to, choosing the wrong men. Granddad had left, and here was Nan, years later, looking like the master of her world. I wanted that. I wanted her carefree confidence, her assurance that the world could be a magical place, even for a woman who knew her own mind well enough to know she didn’t need to be confounded by the murky untruths that came hand in hand with love and “romance.”

  I stared at the photo for a long time, drawing strength from Nan’s clear confidence. This picture should not be buried in a box. It belonged in a frame, front and center, where I could see it every day and be reminded that I took after Nan. We were strong, and we knew our own minds. I wasn’t going to buy into the idea that I needed a man to make me complete. Just like my Nan, I resented the world for constantly suggesting I wasn’t enough on my own.

  I stood up and pulled a framed photo from the mantel, one that had been there forever. It was a shot of me as a fat baby with crazy wide eyes, one of the few baby pictures I had, since my mom hadn’t taken many and Nan didn’t know us as tiny babies. This one had been part of my adoption file, and I wasn’t even sure how the social services people had gotten it, considering the trailer we lived in had burned down.

  Popping the frame open, I slid the baby photo aside, laying the glass down on the mantel top to put in the photo of Nan. I’d planned to drop the baby photo into the box, but as I held it, it slid apart and I realized I held two pictures. There’d been another in the frame first, and Nan must have put my baby shot on top of it. I slipped out the hidden picture and my eyes widened as I stared at it. The man looked familiar—he had the same narrow forehead and long nose as my mother. And though I knew immediately this was my granddad, there were so many things wrong with this photo. This man didn’t look like any kind of lying bastard, which was the way I’d imagined him for so long—not because Nan said horrible things about him. But because she refused to speak of him at all. Whatever he’d done before leaving her, I figured, must have been the worst thing a man could do to a woman. Something that had caused her to strike him from her history, to erase him and deny him even a mention. I didn’t love the life my parents had brought me into, but I still remembered them. They had whatever small comfort the dead might take in being remembered by the living. Granddad didn’t even get that.

  I stared at the photograph, so struck by the incongruity of the man I saw and the history I thought I knew. In the black-and-white morality of my youth, I’d made my granddad a villain. And a villain didn’t look gentle and young, dashing and enthusiastic. Villains didn’t wear the small, uncertain smile the handsome man in this photo wore. And the bad guy in my imagination absolutely, certainly did not wear a uniform.

  But this man did. The pressed dark green Army jacket pulled across his shoulders perfectly, making him look strong and fit, the flat-topped hat centered on his head.

  I stared at the photo for a long time, trying to rearrange the things I knew so this would make sense. Nan had discussed him with me only once, never mentioning he had been in the service. This photo of a soldier didn’t match the rogue rascal I’d imagined, and I knew only one person who might be able to fill in the details I suddenly needed. Because if it turned out everything I thought I knew about Granddad was wrong, then what else did I have wrong?

  As I dialed Britta’s number, I allowed myself the briefest moment of anger about my past, the almost total absence of family, the enormous vacancy in my life where the people I came from should have been. Britta’s phone went to voicemail and I hung up, immediately dialing the main number for the office of the center where she lived.

  When they answered, I asked for Britta, assuming she might be in the recreation room. Britta didn’t own a cell phone, but she was not usually too hard to reach. “I’m sorry, dear. She won’t be back for a couple of days. She went on the residence trip to Catalina Island. They’ll be back on Tuesday evening.”

  Britta was on a field trip? I hung up, pained by the black hole inside me. All the focus and center I’d found this morning were sucked down into the swirling vortex of uncertainty. I sat on the green couch, still holding the photo, and let myself cry. I’d be focused and strong tomorrow. Today I was confused and lonely.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Rob

  After I dropped Dani off, I forced myself to go to bed without spending too much time considering anything about the way she’d clammed up in the car on the way home. It was late. She was tired, I told myself. I ignored my bullshit meter and tried to get a good night’s sleep, holding on to my amazement over everything else that had happened. Her laughter and her body, her glowing eyes and the clean, fresh scent of her skin filled my head as I drifted off.

  But, the next morning, the sun cleared away the sentimental dust and shone brightly into the corners of my mind. I knew something had gone wrong. But I didn’t know what. And we weren’t working together today, so there was no chance I’d find out. I had all day to churn over it. Not a good thing.

  I scanned backward over the evening. When had it gone off track? Had I said something stupid? Not responded at all when I should have? I didn’t have the answer, but my brain began to twist and turn, and once I’d sent it wheeling, I couldn’t make it stop. I began to feel sick, angry. Shit.

  “Samps
on, let’s go.” I pulled the dog’s leash from the stairwell and he jumped up with a chuff, shifting his weight from paw to paw.

  Trent was at the station until tonight, and the house was too still and quiet.

  Sampson led me down the stairs and we headed out in a slow jog. I let him take care of his business, and then we ran side by side. The route I chose took us back through Ocean Beach to Nimitz, and then south to Sunset Cliffs and Point Loma before we finally found our way back down to the beach. It was hilly and demanding, especially at the end. By the fifth mile, my head stopped throbbing with Dani-inspired confusion, at least a little. I let Sampson off his leash at Dog Beach and stretched, watching him play.

  He didn’t interact a lot with the other dogs, preferring to pounce and dance on the wet sand where the tide came in and out. Now and then he would watch the other dogs, but he didn’t seem to know how to play with them. He was so big, most of the owners would come to stand watchfully nearby if he took an interest in any playful mutts. As if they had any hope of getting between one-hundred-thirty pounds of determined dog and whatever he wanted. Had to admire the belief, though.

  I dropped to the sand and just sat.

  The wind pressed in around me, and I found myself wishing I had a switch I could flip to quiet my mind. Meditation had never worked for me. They’d pushed it on me in therapy, but forcing your mind to still—when your whole problem was that you couldn’t turn off your mind—it wasn’t helpful. And I was no better at it now. I tried to let the sun and the calming sound of the ocean replace the worry and regret about every word I’d uttered the night before, about everything I might have done to send things sideways. She’d been happy, hadn’t she? We had so much in common. Conversation had been easy, even for me. And the electricity between us… Dammit, she was the one practically climbing into my lap in the dark theater. I got hard just thinking about it. God, it had been good to feel wanted. But to feel wanted by Dani—that was transcendent. Until suddenly she moved away. And when her orbit had passed, it was cold in her shadow. I shivered now, knowing this day could go nowhere good if I didn’t find a way to unpack my head.