by Devin Murphy
“So what’s going on?” he asks. My cheek rests against him, and my nose sinks into the valley of his chest muscles. I feel his chin on my head and suddenly realize my hand is against his back, gripping it like a closed claw. His T-shirt sticks to my face where my tears are soaking in.
“It’s okay,” he says. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I sob into his warm chest, hating him for only coming now. I think of all the infinite images of mountains a person can conjure and how none of them are worth a damn for leaning into like this.
“It’s okay, I’m here now,” he says. “Let’s go inside and talk about it.”
“No, no,” I say backing away from him, hoping some internal mountain will hold me. “I can’t now, I’m busy.”
“You have to tell me what’s going on, babe,” he says.
“Don’t call me ‘babe’!” I yell at him. “You can’t come around now and call me ‘babe’!”
“I’m sorry. Let’s sit down and talk about this. Are you hungry? Can I make you some dinner?” he asks.
“I’ve already eaten, and I’m late for a meeting.”
“Come on, Jamie, you don’t have a meeting, just talk to me. Please.” He seems so familiar standing there, and all I want is to crash into him again, let him hold me up like he used to before every fantasy life I played out with him shattered against the fantasies he chased after. Thinking about that I feel a dormant anger rise up and I don’t want to look at him anymore.
“I have to leave, John. I’m late.”
“Please tell me what these tests were all about,” he pleads.
“I’m not really sure, to be honest. But I don’t want to talk about it right now,” I say, walking to the couch and grabbing my bag. “Now, you can walk me out if you like, but I’m leaving.”
“We need to talk about this, Jamie. If not tonight, then tomorrow,” he says, shutting the door behind us as I walk by him.
“I’m coming by tomorrow. I’ll take you out and we can talk. Okay?” He says the last part slowly, like he’s being deflated as I shut my car door on him.
The evening traffic rush is over, and I can’t imagine what I’m doing. I’m not sure where my new penchant for sick games has come from. I catch a red fox in my headlights as I pull into the campus parking lot. It trots slowly toward a girl who’s talking into a cell phone. “Watch out! Watch out!” I yell, but the girl doesn’t hear me and the fox passes behind her by no more than a foot and runs away.
I can only get a few hours of work done after a slow start, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve lost my mind and am traumatizing my daughter. Walking to the small coffee cart next to the entrance of the library, I see Chow-Fung leaning over a large table surrounded by notebooks and texts. I order two coffees and go to his table.
“Maybe this will help you get through all those books tonight,” I say, placing the hot cup of coffee onto his table. He looks up at me uncomprehendingly. His thin dark hair is ruffled at the bangs where his hand was propping up his head.
“Oh. Hello, Professor Thurber,” he says sleepily.
“Are you still trying to figure out the brain?” I ask.
“I’m not sure I’ll have it all set by tonight, but this will certainly help, thank you,” he says picking up the cup of coffee.
“Well, I hope my brain was a help. I mean I hope it meant something—those tests.” I imagine unbuttoning my blouse and having the T-shirt he’d given me underneath, but I’m not wearing it. Just an overwashed bra with dead elastic that I’m not sure he’d care to see. I imagine taking his hand from his book and using his fingers to trace words over my stomach that would be on a shirt I could give him. I’d do it in cursive so his fingers spelled out I’ve seen how your body feels.
“Thank you for the coffee, Professor,” he says. “Your participation was important to my study.”
“And when do you get all your results in?” I ask.
“Oh, those will take a long time to figure out, but your participation was important,” he says again, wanting to get back to his work.
“Those tests were important, huh? I thought so. That’s what I told my daughter,” I say to him as I walk away, disappointed I couldn’t get him to talk more.
I spend an hour in the morning looking out the window, waiting for John to pull up. I try to return to how it felt to have his arms over my shoulders and the way his chin rested on my head. For a moment, it felt like when we were younger, when all that desire and chemistry had the potential to surge back up the way it did after he was injured, and then again on our trip to Mexico. It makes me mad how no one tells the truth about love. Or maybe no one really knows the length and breadth of it, with its weary middles, and surprising rejuvenations.
When John arrives, he doesn’t see me watching from the window as he takes a deep breath, slowly letting it out, trying to work up a smile before he limps over and knocks on the door. I never understood how he could win at poker nights with his friends when he wears every emotion and thought on his body—like a mime. I take the same sort of deep breath before answering, and it surprises me how much I want to be in love with him again.
“Good morning,” he says, not making a move to come inside, “I thought we could go to the park and have a bike ride.”
“Since when have you been a bike rider?”
“Well, get ready and I’ll show you something,” he says.
It’s almost noon when I walk outside to his truck and see the handlebar rising from the cab. Inside there is a maroon tandem bicycle.
“Who’d you have in mind when you bought this thing?” I imagine him with whatever woman he has now, and her looking closely at the muscles of his back as he pumps away on the bike. I’m suddenly jealous, remembering women have always loved John.
“I bought it hoping to get Tina to spend some time with me,” he says.
“Hah! How’s that working for you?”
“How do you think?” he says, smiling. “She laughed at me when I showed it to her, said it was a piece of junk.”
“That sounds about right,” I say. “Listen, John—”
“Wait, let’s go out for a while, get some fresh air, and we’ll talk later, okay?” In his truck he pats my knee, and the weight of his hand seems tremendous. He’s probably horrified at the thought of me dying and leaving him full-time with Tina. Tina who has grown away from us so quickly that I know we are both terrified of losing her completely. I watch as he drives us along the main roads to the trailhead of the bike path. The path connects our two neighborhoods and the parking lot is right in the middle of our two places, like he’d purposely chosen neutral ground.
John steadies the bike while I get on it. The first few yards after he pushes us off are wobbly until he straightens us out. Over his shoulder and around me tree branches hang overhead, full of light from what is becoming a beautiful day. The trail goes into the woods and follows a shallow river with brown water-glossed stones. I can see the muscles on his injured side straining as he pedals. From my own handlebars, which are close to him, I lean forward and place my forehead against his back.
“So what’s going to happen?” he says softly as he stops pedaling and we glide down the path.
“I really don’t know,” I tell him, feeling like I have some sickness in me that’s kept me isolated for so long.
“Well, can you tell me what it is at least? I can’t not know, Jamie,” he says. I can tell how scared he is, and I imagine us loving each other again would feel like this. At the bottom of the hill he starts pedaling and I hear a rattle from our bike. A twig full of leaves is caught in the chain, and when he slows down at the top of the hill I hop off to pull it out. “Is it bad?” he asks getting off the bike from the other side so he can look at me.
“It’s just a twig,” I say, crouching to pull it away.
“Come on, tell me something,” he says, leaning toward me, making the bike roll backward enough that the chain slips under my thumb and pulls it into the teet
h of the chain wheel.
My eyes aren’t shut when I scream, and John’s face muscles slacken and drop from confusion. When I scream again he sees that my finger is caught and reaches over the bike frame to grab me, but this rolls the bike back again and a tooth grinds through my thumbnail and pinches tight to the bone. The sound doesn’t seem like it is coming from me. John tries to walk around the bike, but any fraction of movement only grinds the tooth deeper into the bloody pink pulp beneath my nail and pushes the nail away from the skin.
“Hold still,” he says, turning the pedal, which makes my head fill with the same horrible sound that I know is my own screaming.
The metal tooth on the chain wheel grinds down farther still, and from my knees I scream at him, “No! No! Stop!” From the corner of my eyes I see two bikers twenty yards up the trail watching us. John moves the pedal again, and as I feel the metal sink deeper into bone I hate him again for everything I ever hated him for in the past. The image of him holding me at my doorstep last night ruptures into nothing, like we had never touched, leaving only pain and this ineffectual man staring down at me.
“Help!” the scream says. The bikers come toward us. A man and his son. The look on the man’s face when he kneels next to me is patient and sad, like he was waiting to see if John could rescue me without the embarrassment of needing a stranger to do it for him.
“I’m dying,” I yell at John, “and you can’t do anything!”
“You’ll be okay, honey,” the man tells me. The boy watches without saying anything. “Hold the bike steady,” he tells John.
“What’s your name?”
“Jamie.”
“Okay, Jamie. I’m Travis. Now, there’s no way to do this that won’t hurt, so we’ll just get it over with, okay?” He puts a hand on my shoulder so I look at him. He is a young man, boyish, if not for a thick stubble. He’s trying to be kind, and when he tells me to hold my breath, I do. He grips the chain around the wheel and pulls down, trying to slacken it. He whispers, “Now pull,” and I do, letting the top part of the fingernail tear off and the pink bloody part come loose and throb in front of me like everything in the world is chiseling into the tip of my thumb. “There you go,” he says looking at my hand. “You may need a few stitches but you’ll be fine now.”
John is watching as I’m on my knees crying. His shadow crosses the bike and lies on the ground at my side. I think of his shadow with a snowcap on it. I think of his shadow next to a goat, of his shadow within another shadow, and of a shadow in love. The air on my torn skin hurts, and seeing how so little can strip away what protects how raw we are makes me deflated and angry.
John lays the bike down and kneels next to me. “You’re dying?” he asks. There is now very little left of the man who hugged me the night before, only the old hurts that keep coming back, like our tangle of emotions are married, like there’s another set of vows that were meant to last forever and ever, Amen.
“Do we need to go to the hospital?” he asks.
“No, I don’t think more tests will do me any good. I’m going to go home. You can take your bike back for one of your girlfriends,” I say, walking away from him.
“Jamie,” he says, starting to walk after me.
I turn back toward him and hold out my good hand. “You can’t help me, John. I thought you could. I wanted you to be able to, but you can’t. I want to walk home by myself now.”
People are biking and jogging past me on the trail going in both directions. In the sunlight they look happy. I wrap my fingers over my thumb and squeeze so it won’t bleed anymore and I can’t look at it. I walk past a small park with a playground and several winding bright yellow slides and a set of monkey bars. I catch the silhouette of a woman swinging from one bar to the next, a small boy jumping around beneath her saying, “You’re almost there. Almost.”
Several hundred yards past the playground there is a large corrugated iron train bridge. Through a cropping of bushes I see a group of kids ahead of me on the trail that dips under the bridge. There are over a dozen of them and I wonder who’s supposed to be watching them.
I recognize an obese Latino kid with his shirt off from Tina’s school and realize all these kids are skipping class.
“You ain’t got the balls,” the boy says, reaching under the fold of his gut and making a cupping motion on his crotch. “You ain’t got the balls,” he yells again, looking up to a group of six kids walking across the track to the middle of the bridge.
Tina walks onto the bridge slowly behind the group that is now in the middle looking down at the water. I stop behind the bush and am furious at her for skipping school. I figure if I wait a minute I can catch her smoking and pile up the charges on her. I see her lift her dark shirt up over her head. She’s wearing a plain white bra, and I’m amazed as she slips her hands into the waistband of her skirt and pushes it down around her ankles and then walks to the group of kids on the bridge. From where I am I can see the small fold between her legs through white lace underwear, the two dots of her nipples, darker against the cotton cup of her small bra, the subtle arch of her stomach and shoulders, and the sun on her hair and round face. I used to have skin like that, I think, taking a giant step toward her, but I hear the voice again, “You ain’t got the balls,” and I can’t bring myself to walk anymore; I’m frozen and can almost feel the air right around my daughter standing on the bridge.
She slips a leg through the wire cable of the bridge and the world slows down. She is so confident and beautiful it seems she should always be above others, so they can look up at her. She grips the cable behind her and leans forward. All the air in my chest sucks in on itself. The river I’ve been walking along can’t be deeper than two feet, but I can’t bring my feet to move. I want her to hold on tighter, to crawl back onto the bridge and go to school. I want to hold her, and for her to be able to fly if she falls.
I imagine my test results coming from Chow-Fung. I now know what they will say. They’ll tell me the cord between the heart and the brain is taut. The brain or mind can do nothing but produce endless images that the heart, a first-class sucker, can only hope are true. But a lifetime of hoping for those images that never happen coats a person in a fine powder of disappointment, layer upon layer, until there is a heavy feeling of something solid and permanent that can’t be chipped away. I watch Tina, who now seems to have all my qualities that are fading, and I want her to stay suspended above others without ever falling.
I look out from the bushes at my only child on the edge as she leans back into the bridge cables, bends her knees, and jumps. The bush scrapes my face as I dart out toward Tina who’s just jumped into the mouth of disappointment, daring it to swallow her.
Waving both my hands over my head like I can catch her, I see the sound of the giant splash where Tina hits the water. I taste the smell of churned-up river water as her head comes up and shakes out her hair. Every inch of the world that holds and lifts my daughter is confused as she pops above the surface. I see her smile sink when she sees me running toward her. Her friends are all looking at me, too, like I am her crazed mother, or their own crazed mother, or the world is full of mothers lurking behind bushes waiting to charge them. I watch the water flow off Tina’s shoulders as she scuttles out of the river and I can hear the yelling, I know they can all hear it, before I recognize the loud voice as my own. “I’m fine—I’m fine—I’m fine,” the voice rings out, like it’s understood I’m speaking for us all.
13
Lewis Thurber, 2018
Lewis felt wiggling fat rolls bunched from his waistline to his clavicles as he pedaled up the long incline. A slow heat burned from his quads to the bone with each strained pump of his legs. Top of the rise, fat ass had been his mantra for the last half hour on the hill. He’d rest at the top. He’d make it to the top. His neon-green jersey, frothed in sweat, stuck to his chest. His chest jiggled, and the bloom of embarrassment with how bad of a shape he was in since he’d begun studying for his captain’s licen
se made him pump his legs harder. When he crested the hill, he saw the long red-and-brown roll of Wyoming topography stretching out beneath a perfect blue sky. The sun glinted off the deep draws and rounded stones of dried creek beds on his glide down. With the wind whistling through his red helmet and panniers, he felt like he’d found a long-lost thread of a path he’d veered from that lay across the barren part of the country.
Now that he was in the West, inland, away from everything at sea where he had built a life, he still couldn’t describe it. The unassailable purity of the blue sky gave him a peace he had longed for, had known he had been missing for years. One truth was that he had become a soft, pink mess of a middle-aged man, overweight, prediabetic. Another, the one that mattered here, was that he felt very close to rediscovering some inner fire that used to drive him.
Several more large hills. Two he had to stop and push his bike on. Three long, fun descents. Then he found himself pedaling through rolling granite terraces that stretched out of sight. By his map, he was nearly two hundred miles from the old Motel 6 parking lot in Cheyenne he started from three days ago. By the same map, that left nearly seven hundred more miles to go. It seemed such an unobtainable distance. He set his next short-term goal as a town called Natrona, ten miles ahead. When he disembarked his last ship in Delaware the American shad, which traveled in large schools out at sea, were still making their runs, taking one flooded channel after another to get back to the river where they were spawned. The shad don’t eat on their run home and live off their own fat, as if winnowing down to meet their pasts. The thought made him consider pushing off his meal but instead he ate a tortilla wrap full of peanut butter and drank a pint of water.
When he reached the sign, it read “Natrona, Population 16.” He could envision it on a topographical map. I am here. All he saw was a train depot with a rusted diesel locomotive and a square, timber building with lacquered horizontal boarding and a red neon Budweiser sign. There was no name on the bar. A line of sparrows perched on the lip of the roof. In the gravel lot were two pickup trucks with souped-up suspensions and tires and a military-green heavy truck.