by Kate Wisel
“Can I have one thing to myself?” I asked, oddly weightless.
In the driveway, there’s a truck. There’s a truck. I leave my coat on the seat and click the door shut. A leaf blower drones in the backyard, the singular whine loudening as I climb down the path. Off by the trees, slimed leaves lift, then hurl themselves against the fence. A tall guy wearing sagging Dickies holds the blower like a wand, turning it back and forth over the grass. He has big headphones over an orange beanie like an air traffic controller. He doesn’t see me. Then he does. I wave my arm out. The blower groans as the dust lifts into the air. A whiff of spring. I can’t help it. I smile.
“Hey,” I shout.
“What?” he says.
“You the gardener?” I say. He slips off his headphones, then his beanie. Oversized diamond studs in both ears shine like a truck pulling up.
“You Mick’s wife?” he says, swiping his hair back, tangled and tied. The leaf blower looks like a toy in his hand. The tarp on the grill flaps.
“I asked you first,” I say. I’m not afraid. He is an animal cooperating pre-catch. I’m already walking down the path. The blower hangs by his side. The wispy hair on his chin resembles the fuzz on a tennis ball.
“I might be,” he says. Boston draws up thick in his throat.
“You want to come inside?” I ask. He turns to face the lake, the wind picking up. A chime on the porch crashes hard.
“I have to finish up,” he says. He swings the blower and points to the sand at the edge of the water, the leaves and broken branches trapped on the shore. “It’s going to start raining like a bastard.”
His bottom lip twists as the arrogant wind picks up. He’s young. He thinks he knows how everything’s going to go. A top tooth juts out against his bottom lip like a loose blind zigged against the row. He kicks up the blower, it roars, and then he turns again, his shoulder blades jutting from under his shirt. Leaves circle overhead. Down at the shore he revs it, annihilating the debris. And then the raindrops begin to prick, needling the length of my arms, then slipping fast through my fingers. I picture us inside as it storms, him on his knees, taping those Band-Aids down to my wrist. He cuts the blower like a murderer on Halloween as the rain makes a sheet between us. He struts his way up towards where I’m waiting at the sliding door.
I’m hiding my head in the fridge, rearranging bottles.
“I just have Heineken,” I say. “And you left your things here.”
I set two beers on the counter next to the stuff. His things spread into the distinct shape of a body outlined in chalk, the frame like a free fall. He stands looking out at the water with his hands punched into his pockets, his shirt dark with rainwater.
“Are you going to call the cops?” he says.
I walk behind him with a beer, then pick a clung leaf off his back. The belt loop of his sagging Dickies has come apart.
“No.”
“I don’t understand,” he says.
“I do,” I say. “You needed somewhere to stay?”
He smiles, a huff. “I don’t have a place. Right now, I mean. I don’t mean any harm.”
“I don’t, either.” I hold out the beer. He looks down at my hand, then back up at me. He takes the beer and sits at the table, one leg out, his construction boots big and rimmed with dirt.
I join him, thumbing the side of my beer. “What’s your name?” I say, twisting my hair up.
“Jordan,” he mumbles.
“Where are you going to stay now?” He leans, his elbows on his knees, rubbing his palms together.
“Nowhere. In my truck. I’m from Bourne. Just up Route Six.”
“I know where that is,” I say. I read the obituaries. Cape Cod in winter. The land of overdoses. Cop bringing the same girl back with Narcan three times in one day. The narrow highway, empty liquor stores, the ocean swallowing hard as it draws back from the rocks.
“My boyfriend was an addict,” I say. Jordan takes a swig, stays quiet. Breaking in, it’s probably not the worst thing Jordan’s done. I see Benny’s clenched teeth, braces fresh off. His fist around a hammer and his palm flattened on the desk. The hammer pounds pounds pounds. I wait with him in the ER to score pills. Or in the parking lot at the pain clinics in New Hampshire, something to mend his anger. Driving home, waiting for the complete close of his eyelids, the jerk of the wheel to grab onto. I was a waiter.
“I was in sober living,” Jordan says.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” he says. His palms shush together, eyes flitting from the counter to the door. “I stayed there awhile. I started working again at my buddy’s construction company.”
“That’s hard work,” I say.
“It’s not. I like to be outside building houses, fixing roofs. Problem was his brother.”
“Why?”
“I went over to his place just to see if I could be strong, not use. I guess that’s not true. Junkie etiquette is that you don’t shoot up a guy in recovery because you don’t want them to wind up back like you—unless they ask twice.”
“You asked twice.”
At Al-Anon long after Benny died, I sat away from the circle in a church basement bubbling in the letters on the handouts. Women subdued, pink tissues damp in their clenched fists. And then they would start talking and they wouldn’t for the life of them stop. Rage cut through my notebook, scribbling on its own like a lie detector test. I’d think, You don’t run out on people. I’d think, When someone is suffering, when someone you love is hurt, you go to them.
“This place helped me let go of my son,” a woman across from me said, her lips cracked down the center.
The wind overturned a kayak and rained twigs onto the grass. I have a life vest in my hands.
“Put this on,” I say. We’re outside the wet shed, the wood smelling like pencil shavings.
“Nah,” he says.
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll do it your way.”
We flip the kayak, then pull it through the oatmeal of the sand. The water ices up around my ankles till we leap onto the rain-splattered seats and push ourselves out into the lake. I’ve never been on a boat. The oars bump up against the plastic and the handles are heavy as trash bags. I think of a drain gasping dry and what’s at the bottom of all this. But there’s a glittering stillness when we stop, the boat spins in the center of the water, and we’re far away from all the leaves and the trees and the houses. A low fog spills into the boat like karaoke smoke.
“It’s nice out here,” I say.
“I’ve come out here, like, every day, past two weeks,” Jordan says, smiling. He’s handsome when he smiles, like maybe if I turned his teeth back together one after the other, he’d have a chance.
“You just take the boat?”
He shrugs, chucks a tiny rock into the water, and it breaks the surface again and again until it stills. I want to tell him that you can’t go home, how I wouldn’t recognize home if I woke up in my childhood bed.
“This is my house, you know,” I say. “This is my boat, these are my oars, and this is my fucking lake.”
Jordan looks at me crazily and I break into a cackle. We laugh hard and I reach out and slap at the water. The two boys are back on the dock, their heads the size of pennies. They whip lines that fly riblike in white arcs, then sink. Even if I shouted, “This is private property! I’ll call the police!” they would never hear me. The kayak starts to spin. I pull out a cigarette and Jordan reaches over. His lighter snaps and the flame is neon and surreal; it colors his face with a glow that isn’t there. Mick said he’d divorce me if I didn’t stop smoking. I won’t and he will.
The wind picks up harder. Jordan reaches out his other hand to cover the light. The boat bobs, gaining power, the water coming up over the edge, and then in one rough curve we’re flipped. The cold is painless, at first. I swipe out to feel Jordan, slice my arms through the water, then open my eyes against the muck. Above is Jordan’s sneaker, and when I grab hold he kicks, and the lig
ht sparks like power lines. We come up through the circle of water, choking and weightless. The water at the surface looks clear, like you could sip it if you were thirsty enough, which I am. Jordan’s breaths are short, his eyelashes sparkling with beads of water. I wrap my arms around his neck. My thighs around his torso. Kiss his twitching eyelids like a mother.
Earlier, Jordan got up to go to the bathroom. I almost grabbed his arm. I was popping off another cap when he came back. He stood, looking out at the lake again. He laughed and it scared me. We faced each other on the dining room chairs. He was sweating through his hair. I saw it. His face looked like the delayed surveillance at the liquor store. He rolled up a sleeve and his forearm was scratched and purpled.
“Did you get high?” I whispered. I started to cry.
“Yeah,” he said. His eyes swung lazily.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. I was in tears, and crazy.
His head bobbed back. He took me in with a squint and sucked in his breath. “Shit. I don’t know,” he said. “Sorry?”
“You’re not sorry,” I spat.
“You’re kind of freaking me out,” he mumbled. “Are you going to call the cops?”
His eyes flickered, chlorine-shot like he’d been staring at a penny for days on the floor of a pool. He was ruining it, this fight. Outside the rain slowed and I reached for his shoulder. I swept my hand up the solid curve beneath his T-shirt, then pressed my thumb to his neck, felt his pulse jump.
“I would never do that,” I said, my thumb unmoving. When the cops found Benny slumped against the tile in a Laundromat bathroom, he was two hours dead.
I looked up at Jordan. “Shoot me up?”
The pressure from my thumb remained even as the beat from his neck raced on and on, then broke in a twitch.
“No,” he said. “Let’s go out on the lake.”
But I asked twice. The lighter clicked under the spoon and the bubbles popped up tiny as Jordan flicked his wrist to shake them down. The kitchen filled with a sweet burning smell, candy in a bonfire. He took a Q-tip from his pocket and rolled it into a ball between his fingers, then sank the cotton into the bent spoon. The syringe drew up swirling and cloudy.
“Do some push-ups,” Jordan said, so I got to the floor. Back on the chair, dizzied, he slapped the crook of my arm. I watched as my blood drew up dark, Jordan’s lips by the needle. For a second I was stunned, something warm siphoning up my throat. I threw up, spit and beer all over Jordan’s shoes. Later, on the floor, the sun was out, my head was pricked with warmth, but it was just Jordan’s fingers in my hair.
We swim to the dock, which sways afloat. The boys are gone. I’m sure of it now. We kneel on the raft, our clothes hissing out streams of water from all sides like piss. I tilt back my head. The sun warms my neck and spins little rhombuses on the surface of my hands. We jump off the dock onto the starch of the sand.
The house waits for us as we trudge up the hill. Inside, beer, a fire, the warmth. A place to stay, though I’m more afraid than ever. Our sneakers squeak muck. I peel off my sweater and it slaps onto the concrete.
“Fuck,” Jordan says. He’s pulling on the back slider but it’s good and locked.
He pounds on the glass. He pounds and pounds. I tilt my face back, feel the specks of sun but can’t slide inside its center. Its warmth caught and laced through branches. Anything out here could happen, the March rain switching back to snow. Even sheltered, the homicidal birds that own the trees call out into the void as though possessed.
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE
I WAS RUNNING FAST down Comm Ave when I saw the bike theft. Some kid in a hoodie had cut the lock. That cutting part I imagined. What I did see was a concierge outside the Eliot pulling the bike back from the kid like a tug-of-war. By this point I was running in place. I could run ten miles now. From my apartment, all the way across the BU Bridge, deep into downtown through the Common, then back again. I had skaters’ calves, tight and glistening, like nylon. I was the only one who saw.
The kid looked confused, then directly at me, pulling the bike from the concierge. He was committed. He had already broken the lock. He yanked it hard and it bounced off the sidewalk as he hopped on, then flew right through the intersection on Mass Ave. There was a green light and I felt something terrible happen before it happened. I put my hands to my ears before he was hit. I watched the light turn yellow and felt the heat of the sun on my hair as the crash turned metallic, something skidding and crunched twisting through my ears like a corkscrew.
By now there was a crowd, a kid on the street in the middle of the intersection, and the lady whose car he hit leaning over him. She was in an MBTA public transit uniform, which made me think the police might come faster, though the two are not connected. The kid leapt up, as if by CPR, out from where someone could have outlined his body in chalk. The MBTA lady said, “Hey!” as he picked up the broken bike and spun it around, trying to make it go in a forward motion. The lady grabbed his arm and shouted, “Look what you did to my car!”
The kid wasn’t listening. He was getting ready to run.
The lady kept one eye on the kid as she circled her dented car with a phone to her ear. A couple men in business suits had wandered into the street, keeping a hand on the kid’s shoulder, murmuring things to him as if they were already his lawyers. The kid squinted up into the sun, and I imagined him saying to himself, “Fuck!”
Like that, just as I thought, he spun out of the men’s grip like he was dribbling a basketball through their legs. He abandoned the broken bike. I don’t know what to say about what happened next, other than it was automatic. I’ve been training for a whole year. I beat myself against my own time, every time. I don’t miss a day.
I ran, the same route I run anyway, the sidewalk all the way down Comm Ave. It couldn’t be a straighter line. From behind us, I heard the MBTA lady shout, “Get him!” and it blew like a whistle through my ears.
The kid had speed but I had purpose. He was done for. I was motored by the slick machinery of rage. The kid didn’t know me, but I was his nightmare. I was going to catch him. Our bodies would collide, we’d trip into a fountain in the Common. I’d keep him down in the shallow water, his shirt dark and ballooning from below. I could feel the twitch like it was my own, his body fitful under my grip. And when I pulled him up by the throat, he would recognize my murderous eyes on the worst day of his life. What then would he have to say for himself?
He dashed through more green lights and I was closing in, darting through traffic, past brownstones and Marlborough Street, the trees flicking symbols of light off his back. I don’t know what to say about what happened next, other than it was unrehearsed. I was getting close. Close enough to tap his T-shirt. Then I saw the frame of someone who looked like my ex-husband nearing. He was walking towards us, five parked cars away down the sidewalk. He was wearing Jesus sandals and a button-down, his hair faded on the side in that new Nazi cut.
It was my ex-husband. I knew what Mick would think of me before we made eye contact, his knowing green eyes all over me, then gone, going the other way. I didn’t stop running.
After he tried to divorce me, I broke into his Cape house and did heroin for the first and last time. I threw my lighter at his second-floor window till he let me in. I went to the Gallows on a Wednesday. I took seven shots of Maker’s. I texted him I was pregnant. When he didn’t believe me, I threatened to murder him. It only led to us having sex for the last time. I hacked into his email, showed up to his friend’s bachelor party, and chased him down the street after he told me to never, ever call him again. I did call him again, after he changed his number.
Now I am running after the boy, in flesh-colored spandex like I’m naked, and it’s the first time we’ve seen each other since last year. I thought about stopping and explaining everything. This kid stole a bike. I started running last June. I’m not crazy. I’m trying to be a hero. But I didn’t know how to quit anymore. Even if I did, I wouldn’t.
We’v
e passed my ex-husband. It’s easier to forget someone when you have a higher purpose. I was so close I smelled the cotton on the kid’s T-shirt, and the sweat on his neck was close enough to lick. I made one last leap. It’s the leap I make when I’m a second from home, a final “Take that.” It was enough to get him. I’m not strong but the kid was out of breath by now, and I thought he was kind of impressed.
I held his waist as we took tandem huffs like a dilapidated prom photo. We took deep breaths until they slowed, and then it was just my heartbeat pressed to his back. The kid had his hands on his knees, and for a second, I wanted badly for him to look back at me. I unchained my arms from his torso and took a few steps back, hands on my hips. I waited, the sun making one of those swift disappearances. Then I let him go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE FOLLOWING STORIES HAVE appeared first, in different versions, as: “Frankie” in Redivider; “Cribs” in SmokeLong Quarterly; “Stage Four” in New Ohio Review; “Benny’s Bed” in Sante Fe Quarterly; “How I Dance” in Corium Magazine; “Tell Us Things” in Juked Magazine; “California” in Atticus Review and The Drum; “English High” in Literary Orphans; “Good Job” in New Delta Review; “I’m Exaggerating” in Tin House online; “What Counts” in Bartleby Snopes; “Mick’s Street” in Gulf Coast; and “Run for Your Life” in Bartleby Snopes.
Thank you to Min Jin Lee, the good people at the University of Pittsburgh Press—Maria Sticco, Alex Wolfe, Chloe Wertz, Amy Sherman, and Jane McCafferty—and Christine Ma.
Thank you to Jenn De Leon and Adam Stumacher, my writing parents, who showed me love and gave me direction. Pam Houston, who changed my life in one car ride by opening her world to me. Maryse Meijer, whose edits recalibrated my eyes and contained decades of lessons. Benjamin Percy, who gave me the best advice. My friends and readers and teachers, Lloyd Schwartz, Joe Torra, Vincent Scarpa, Nadine Kenney-Johnstone, Cady Vishniac, Amy Bond, Pam Zhang, Michelle Wildgen.