by Eliza Gordon
We jog along busy NE Sandy Boulevard, heavy with rush-hour traffic, and down Brazee, a quieter side street, with its tasteful Portland-style houses—gable entry, bungalow, Craftsman, the occasional Tudor—kids playing on the sidewalk and street with scooters and bikes, people tending yards that are slowly awakening, drivers pulling into driveways and loosening their ties or carrying in bags of groceries after a long day at their respective workplaces, stopping just long enough to chat with the old lady with the rake or the guy with the rambunctious golden retriever. There is life again, once the winter rains slow and we can emerge from our cocoons without fear of drowning.
Marco and I continue down Brazee to Grant High School, around the back to the adjacent Grant Park where they have a proper running track. He says it’s only a mile each way from the gym to here, but by the time we hit the bouncy, rubberized red track, my legs and feet and lungs are aflame.
I can do this.
The late-afternoon/early-evening weather is perfect—as we reach the midpoint of spring, the days are getting a little longer, though the rain continues to be temperamental, typical of Portland, and the chill in the air lingers on exposed skin moving at our slow jog. Marco’s breathing is even and measured, each step precise and confident—I’m just trying to match his cadence without falling face-first onto the track, only to be trampled by the other joggers out here in their matching reflective coats and expensive shoes. My hands get so sweaty I drop my shiny new water bottle, denting it. Hey, battle scars, baby. Look at me run!
“Four times around the track is one mile. You think you can handle that?”
“I . . . think . . . so,” I say between pounding steps. But I’m already doing the math: one mile to get here, one mile around the track, one mile back to the gym—that’s three miles. The only time I’ve ever purposely moved three miles without the aid of a vehicle was after a concert, when my friend’s shitty truck broke down in the middle of nowhere and we had to walk to a Denny’s up the road just to get cell service, but I was seventeen and stupid drunk, so I just laughed as the blisters formed on my heels and toes because I was young and dumb and with my insane friends, and what are a few blisters in the face of youth and memories?
“Are . . . you . . . wearing . . . a fanny pack?” I say. Marco has a red zippered pouch installed backward so it bounces above his butt.
“Insurance requires me to carry a first aid kit if we train offsite.”
“The Rock . . . would be . . . so impressed.”
Marco’s laugh bounces with his steps. “He did have an affinity for bum bags at one time, didn’t he?”
“He calls it . . . his buff lesbian look.” Man, when did breathing get so hard?
“Appropriately so,” Marco says. “So in consideration of how much time we have left before the event, I’d like to do this run two to three more times in the next ten days, so we can get a good measure on your stamina and really get your body used to this sort of activity. Then I would like to move to Forest Park over off Thurman—there is much variety to be had there in terms of pathways and terrain. This will provide excellent preparation for the obstacle course, I think.” Marco speaks as if he’s standing still and not forcing his heart rate into the red zone. That must just be me, then. If I were a car, my rpm gauge would be spewing puffs of warning smoke.
We slow to a walk after completion of the final lap, and while I’m exhausted, I’m also exhilarated. Finally, those endorphins everyone screams about on the Internet!
“Anything sore? How are you feeling?” Marco says, taking my wrist in one hand and pinching at the joint with the other to count my pulse. Shivers race up my arms, and not because I’m cold.
He has lovely, very warm hands.
I take a deep drink and wipe the sheet of sweat off my forehead with the back of my free hand, not even caring that I probably look like a red uakari monkey right about now. (No. Seriously. Google it. That’s likely what I look like right this second. Especially because he’s still touching me.)
“Uh, I’m good. There are sore bits, and I probably won’t be able to move tomorrow, but I feel good.”
He releases my wrist and takes a sip from his water bottle, and I try not to notice how handsome he is with his hair tucked behind his ears, his deep-brown curls damp with exertion, or how his cheeks have pinked from the brisk air under the ever-present five-o’clock shadow.
There is no doubt about it: Miraculously Beautiful Marco’s name suits him. I hope he decides to take my pulse again.
“Shall we walk a lap before we head back?” He takes the first step before I answer.
We’re quiet for the first half lap, and I’m grateful—gives me time to catch my breath.
“Was I too hard on you? At the gym?”
I smile and fix my ponytail. “Nah. I need to be kicked in the ass. You’re right. Everything you said—you’re right. I spend too much time in my own head, I guess. Especially lately.”
“It sounds like your family puts a lot on you. Do they know about the race yet?”
“Noooo. And they’re just . . . my family. My sisters are both slaying their way through life, and I keep getting a little lost.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, I’m a failed actress working at an insurance company with an unfinished college degree and a string of not-great relationships probably stemming from my overwhelming daddy issues and resultant fear of commitment?”
“Okay, I’m going to stop you right there: Everything you just said is editorialized and likely untrue.”
“Meaning?”
“You are not a failed actress. I’ve lived in Los Angeles. I’ve played the Hollywood game. I know a failed actress when I see one.”
“But you also haven’t seen me in any major motion pictures, and I’m supporting myself by processing medical claims and not vacationing in Bermuda with Ryan Gosling and Jennifer Lawrence.”
“Do they vacation together? Also, Bermuda? With all that triangle business and planes that disappear?” he teases. “You’re missing a key point in what you just said, Dani: You are supporting yourself. Most actors have day jobs until they hit the Big One. You’re still waiting for the right movie to find you.”
I laugh under my breath. “I think I might be in the wrong city for that.”
“Didn’t you mention you once lived in LA?”
“Yeah, but only for just shy of three years. I really miss it, though. I’m busy here with the theater group and classes and whatever auditions Janice can get me, but it’s not the same. The energy is so different—down there, everything feels so frenetic and so much of the city is focused around the entertainment industry—you know how it is, right? There’s live theater everywhere, and you always have a friend or two doing a short film, and everyone just wants to get involved because why not. And it’s crazy, long hours, most of the time with no pay, but it’s so fun. Here it’s just . . . different. Everyone’s cautious and projects are slower to get going—we used to go to free invite-only screenings where we’d watch the film, and then after, we’d have live Q&As with famous actors and directors. It was insane. Nothing like that here.”
“Portland is certainly quieter. But even in LA, three years is hardly long enough to build a career.”
“Right?” I say.
“So why’d you come home?” He looks at me with that question, and before I can speak, he sees the answer on my face. “Your family. They called you back.”
“Five points for Gryffindor.”
“I didn’t mind LA,” he says. “Terrific parties, fun people, the great variety of food—fresh fish tacos with mango salsa, Thai spicy coconut soup, the Armenian chicken kebabs and rice pilaf. My mouth, it waters!” He flattens a hand over his heart.
“Portland’s getting better, though . . .”
“Yes,” he chuckles, “but I could do with less rain.”
“Says the lad from Jolly Old England?”
“Oh, and the beaches. I do miss the beaches.”
>
“The beaches, yessssss! So much flesh, so little time!” I say. He laughs. “What did you do down there?” I ask, hoping my face doesn’t betray that I’ve already IMDB’d him.
“I worked as a stunt coordinator, so it really was a great deal of fun going to work every day.” He takes another drink from his water, his eyes darkening a bit.
“What brought you to the City of Roses?” I say tentatively, hoping I’m not overstepping. “Wait—let me guess: You love food trucks, microbreweries, and hipsters.”
He chuckles. “I had some LA friends who moved here after the ’08 recession, and they raved about it. Seemed like a good place to land, given my state of mind at the time. And I didn’t want to go back to the UK. Nothing really there for me anymore.” He pauses. “There was a horrible accident on the last film I worked on—my best friend was killed, on a stunt I put together.”
“Oh man, I’m so sorry. We don’t have to talk about this, Marco.”
“No, no, it’s all right. As my therapist says, ‘It’s good to talk about these things.’” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “It was a freak accident—I had performed the stunt myself once before to make sure everything was exactly right. A cable locked up, and the driver on the car rig wasn’t going fast enough, so when the actor—my friend—jumped from the moving car onto this other green-screened flatbed truck, he fell short, the cable jerked him sideways, and the car ran over him.” Marco takes another drink and clears his throat. When he speaks again, his voice is rough. “The workplace investigators concluded it wasn’t my fault—it had something to do with the cable mechanism that locked when it should’ve released and the speed of the car, but that doesn’t mean I’m absolved of my guilt.”
Now it’s my turn to put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. For you, and for your friend.”
His face is painted with momentary melancholy, and then it’s gone. “We’re not talking about me right now, though, are we, Ms. Steele. I think you are diverting our course.”
“Me? Never.”
“So we’ve determined that you are not a failed actor, and you are supporting yourself. Who cares about the university degree—I know lots of blowhards with degrees who can’t scramble their own eggs.”
“Hold up—you mean you can?” I say, winking. Miraculously Beautiful Marco has a great laugh, and it’s quickly becoming one of My Most Favorite Things.
“As far as your string of not-great relationships, we’re supposed to go through all that, aren’t we? As humans?” he says. “Aren’t we supposed to test out different people as we work to uncover who we really are? I think we need to do that before we can be of any value in a committed relationship.”
“Wow, someone’s been watching too much Oprah.”
He places his hand over his heart. “I cannot tell a lie.”
“Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing, then. Testing out different people. I think maybe I need to come up with new testing parameters, though. This latest calamity—”
“Trevor?”
“Yeah. What a dick. Pun intended.”
“But he wasn’t a dick when you were dating him.”
“Oh, he sort of was. He’s very competitive—as evidenced by him joining the gym and signing up for the race. He was quite critical too . . . I think we both were of each other. We knew it wasn’t a long-term thing, but we did have an agreement to at least be honest. That pisses me off more than anything. Betrayal. I don’t like being lied to or misled.”
“Yes, it’s never pleasant.”
“You’ve been the recipient of such behavior?” I ask. But he left that door wide open.
“Of course. And if I’m being candid, I wasn’t so well behaved in my younger days. I’m sure there are a few girls back home who would tell you I’m a proper arsehole.”
“You’ll notice my halo is only slightly tarnished, so no judgment here,” I say. “I don’t even know what I want in a relationship. Someone who doesn’t trim his toenails in the living room would be a good start.”
Marco laughs again and swallows the last of his water. “Darling, you really do need to rewrite those parameters.”
I love the way the word darling sounds coming out of his British mouth.
“As for the daddy issues, I don’t think any child comes out of childhood without some degree of scarring from their parents,” he says.
“I think I just pick the wrong guys. And you’ve not met my mother. She’s completely mental.” And though I don’t say it to Marco—it’s a little early in our friendship to bare my scars—I’m not in denial over the gouge that Gerald Robert Steele’s departure left on my skin. I do miss him. I’ve always missed him, even when I’ve hated him. Georgie and Jacqueline moved on better than I have. They were older, and they weren’t into the same stuff as Gerald Robert Steele. Hell, maybe the family therapy worked for them where it failed for me. And I was a Daddy’s girl from the very beginning—sometimes I feel like I’m still that bony, scab-kneed kid sitting out front on the curb, waiting for my father’s truck to rumble up the street, only going in when the mosquitoes had made mincemeat out of my exposed flesh and it was obvious Gerald wasn’t coming back that night, or any night.
How could he have left me to navigate the waters of adolescence with Penelope Steele at the helm of the USS Crazy Town? But I like to think that if Gerald reappeared one day, we’d go have a beer and he’d explain his side of things, and I’d listen and probably yell a little, and then we’d go watch some wrestling and he’d try to convince me it wasn’t at all fake, and I’d laugh and order us another round and bite back all the questions I had about what he’d been doing all these years while I was turning into a grown-up without him.
The sun by now has pulled on a sweater, ready to dip into the cold ocean as she paints the sky hues of purple and pink. My legs feel rubbery, and the sweat coating pretty much every surface of my body has cooled.
Just in time for us to jog back. “You ready to get moving?”
I am, but I’m not. I like being out here, having Marco all to myself.
Marco sets out at a slow jog, off the track, along the Grant Park Path, through trees that are slowly regaining the coats they shed just a few months ago, past the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden, past the tennis courts and pool, and around through the parking lot adjacent to the high school.
In the dim light, I hear—a meow? I glance around to see if there’s a stray following us. Nah, I’m just hearing things.
“Meow!” I’m not imagining the sound—there is a hungry or hurt feline nearby.
From next to the building, a midsize kitten with a harness comes bounding toward us, dragging her bright-pink leash behind her.
“Aldous?”
I stop and hold my hand out. She bumps into my fingertips, gives me a gentle bite, and starts purring.
“You know this cat?” Marco says.
“Yeah, which is weird—” If Aldous is here running around with her leash still attached, where the hell is Howie? “She belongs to a . . .” What is Howie? “She belongs to a friend who collects the recycling at our office. But if Aldous is here . . .” Was she kittennapped? Did she run away?
I scoop up the cat and backtrack toward where she came from. As I’m rounding the corner, Howie’s Whole Foods cart comes into view—but he’s not near it. Something’s not right.
Between the two bigger buildings and a smaller outbuilding, a beat-up tennis shoe sticks out from the building’s end.
I run down to it, and the shoe isn’t empty. Oh dear god—“Howie? Howie, it’s Dani. Howie, look at me,” I say, dropping hard to my knees, Aldous beside me, Marco looking over my shoulder. I shake Howie’s shoulders. “Howie, come on, man, wake up. Howie!” I yell, shaking him harder.
I yank his black duster apart and drop an ear to his chest. He’s not breathing.
“Marco, call 911!”
I launch into chest compressions, forgetting how sore I am as I throw my body weight into his barrel ch
est. Before I can put my mouth over Howie’s, Marco pulls a plastic CPR mouth guard from the pack around his waist. “Never thought I’d have to use this in real life,” he says quietly, his cell phone against his ear.
I’m pounding on Howie’s chest, breathing for him, murmuring over and over that he can’t leave the planet yet because I’m still trying to finish Brave New World and I have a lot of questions and he’s the only one who can answer them. And who else is going to sit outside the office at that rickety, splinter-giving picnic table and eat Voodoo Doughnuts with me on my birthday and tell me about morphology and syntax and diphthongs and other smarty-pants stuff I have yet to learn?
The little cat wails beside me, clawing at my sweatshirt, and it adds to my panic because she’s probably hungry. I really need her dad to wake up.
But his color isn’t right. The only time I’ve ever seen a dead body, it was the neighbor lady’s. Mommy would buy groceries for her once a week. That night when we let ourselves in to drop off her canned soup and Wonder Bread and six-pack of Ensure, we were greeted by Mrs. Jaffrey’s pale-gray, half-lidded stare, the usual pink of her cheeks long gone. I stared at her until the ambulance arrived, waiting for her to wake up, worried they would bury her when she wasn’t really dead.
Howie is near the same waxy color as Mrs. Jaffrey was that night.
Which means I need to pump harder.
“Come on, Howie!” I yell at him between breaths. Aldous wails alongside me. I’m not naive enough to believe the cat found me specifically. She needed a human, and for whatever bizarre reason, I happened to be the first human she came across or who listened to her.
“Do you want to trade off?” Marco kneels beside me.
“No. No, I got it. Just make sure the ambulance can find us.” I have to save him. He’s my friend.
As I’m throwing my terrified energy into reviving him, I notice his hair is wet. He mentioned once that the head of the Grant High School athletic department is an old college buddy. He lets Howie use the facilities twice a week to shower and run a load of clothes while they talk about old times and good books and if the Portland Trailblazers will ever see an NBA playoff again. He must’ve had his shower and then . . .