Lacy was on her knees when you found her—six days shy of thirty-five years old and ninety-one days sober. The cats had been chewing the callouses on her feet for two days but were still shitting in their overflowing litter box tucked behind the brand new front-load Whirlpool washer. The warranty tag was still taped over the handle. It had never been used, and this unsettles you, confirms that she had never meant to do it. That it was a baffling, powerful moment of desperation. And before that moment, there was a future where she planned to carry out the banal task of washing her soiled clothing, but with a brand spanking new washer. She had even plugged it in. Attached the water hoses to the spigots and fed the plastic drain pipe through a hole in the kitchen floor, down the basement wall to the French drain.

 And then hanged herself.

It shouldn’t have taken you that long to agree to participate in a well-check. Lacy’d stopped showing up at the River Street meeting three weeks ago, citing an upper respiratory infection that just wouldn’t shake. She was always sick—terminally unwell, always on the mend from something trying to kill her. But the text responses had gotten shorter each time, and no one could seem to get her on the phone, not even Peggy. And then that long silence finally came, the one you hear about in the rooms too often, the one that you could not fill a little over a year ago.

Peggy was the one who spotted the body through the barely parted shades—just enough to make out the top of Lacy’s head tucked forward, the oxygen long expired, her last breath sealed inside by the Ethernet cable she’d used to twist-tie herself to the bedpost. It all happened in jump cuts from there. You became all action. Dislodged the screen, forced yourself through the window like you used to do when you were using. But this time was different. This time, your heart was on fire and you could feel what you couldn’t feel before—your fear of the static in the air and the cats, irremovable in their grotesque and frantic chewing. And the pain in your shins where you leveraged yourself over the sill into the tidy kitchen sink, knowing before you really knew it that you were too late again. Just like with your mom. And David.

You are standing outside of Trinity Lutheran when Peggy tells the story for the fifth time. As if you hadn’t been seeing and smelling and standing there, too. 

“Goddamnit, I thought she was praying when I first saw her,” Peggy explains, smoke from her menthol hanging hard on the image of prayer.

Just then, a white van pulls into the church roundabout and a group of young people emerge from the back. They are all wearing gray sweatpants and oversized T-shirts turned inside out to hide the logos, but you can still read them—Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, Aeropostale. There are five of them. Four guys and one girl. None of them make eye contact with you or Peggy when they pass through the double doors into the hallway leading to the meeting room.

“Hill House is getting a lot of traffic lately,” Peggy says, and it isn’t until she says it that you realize that none of those kids looked old enough to buy cigarettes. “IOP saved my life. I don’t think I could’ve stayed sober if I had had to bunk with a bunch of underagers. I mean, it’s enough to have to parent Glenn, and he’s fifty-six—”

Peggy’s phone chimes. She looks down, dismisses the text with an irreverent tap.

You scan the dark parking lot. Where is everyone else? You want the meeting to be big so that you can hide in it. You want it to be full of people whose stories you have never heard, people who make you feel like less of a monster, people who did not know Lacy. You want distractions. You doubt that the Hill House group will be enough, but you hope they are. Maybe one of them will share something so honest and powerful that people will forget to ask about Lacy and whether you and Peggy are okay after finding her.

You have no desire to share details, and it bothers you that Peggy keeps recalling that image, that Peggy never seems to stop talking. But you don’t say anything because your sponsor tells you that you need to stop seeing people for their defects, that you need to pray for tolerance and love. Right now, though, the thought of prayer fills your stomach with marbles. Lacy isn’t the first woman you’ve known who hanged herself, but she is the first woman whose story felt like it could be your story, whose transparency and doubt and desperation could have been mistaken for your own. Lacy was the first woman to ask you to be her sponsor and the first woman you said yes to.

“I just don’t know if I’ll ever believe in god,” she’d said during your first meeting over coffee. “I’m more afraid of him than dying.” You knew what she meant, and that frightened you. Lacy was the kind of addict you were, which triggered you hard. During that first meeting, you couldn’t stop staring at her distressed Target jeans. You had the same pair, probably in the same size. You hadn’t worn them since your last relapse, and you should have thrown them away, but there they were, tucked fashionably into those tall riding boots of Lacy’s, reminding you what the last time was really like—and, that was it, you tossed them in the trash that night. That’s when you told her that it wasn’t going to work out, that you were sorry. You didn’t think you could give her what she needed, but Peggy could. Peggy with the fourteen years and eight grandkids. Peggy with the government pension and the summer house in Rehoboth.

“Do they know whether she was using when she did it?” everyone had asked.

“Nope,” Peggy would say, then, eyes narrowing over the tops of her Betsey Johnson readers. “But one would hope so.”

It sounded awful, and you hated her for saying it, but you knew what she meant. It was scarier to think Lacy offed herself while sober, like David did. Because who wants to give in just to give up? That was the real reason you wouldn’t sponsor Lacy. David was all it took for you to go back out. Death leaves a frightening emptiness in the chest, and you faced that fear the way you have faced everything in your life. You were high that afternoon, the coffee in the Styrofoam cup from the police station still hot enough to melt the ice on your windshield. Some part of you knew deep down that you couldn’t have stopped him if you’d tried, but now Lacy is gone—Lacy with the Target jeans and the story like yours—and you feel closer to a drink or drug than you’ve felt in the past year since you went back out.

“Thank God it was Evan’s weekend with Chase,” Peggy says. She stubs the cigarette out on the bottom of her Louis Vuittons. “She and I were just out buying him one of those sand and water tables for his fourth birthday on Thursday. She seemed so good then, so excited that they had the Paw Patrol wrapping paper on sale. Goddamn, I can’t even.”

You haven’t asked Peggy a single question since the two of you found Lacy, but the answers keep coming and you don’t know what to do with them, what you have to say to get her to stop talking.

People are coming now, two here and three there. While you wait to see whether you know anyone, the image of the cats chewing on Lacy’s feet enters your mind again, and suddenly, out of nowhere, the question that has been haunting you for days comes barreling out of your mouth before you can stop it: “What’s going to happen with the cats?”

Peggy looks at you as if you’ve been asking unanswerable questions all along. “I have no idea,” she says. She sprays herself with patchouli. “Goddamn,” she sighs—but not to god or you. “We better go get a seat.”

“I’ll be in in a minute,” you say.

You want to be alone. All addicts want to be alone.

But just as Peggy enters in through the double doors, the Hill House girl emerges, wearing a jacket one of the boys she came with was wearing.

“Can I bum a smoke?” the girl asks. Her voice is softer and more polite than you expected, which unsteadies you.

“I don’t smoke. Peggy does. I’m just an innocent bystander.”

The girl smiles a big smile that suggests she is even younger than you thought. Closer to fourteen. Your knees give out a little because she is young enough to be your daughter, and you can’t imagine what this girl looks like when she’s fucked up. When she isn’t smiling.

“Hello.” You hold out your hand, and she takes it.

“Callie. I’m only twenty days. I mean, I only have twenty days.” She laughs uncomfortably and wraps herself deeper into the jacket that isn’t hers.

“Not only,” you say, and you say it because you had been told the same thing when you came in. “Just…twenty days.”

She smiles.

“Be proud of that.”

“Okay.”

Westminster Quarters sounds from the bell tower, marking the hour, but neither you nor Callie move towards the double doors.

“I like your shoes,” she says, pointing at your purple slip-on Chucks. “I have the same ones at home. They’re my favorite pair. I miss them.”

“Thanks. They’re my favorite, too.”

You’ve worn Chucks since you were twelve. You wore them to prom. You wore them to your graduation from the most prestigious film school in the country. You wore them in your brother’s wedding and at your mother’s funeral. You try to stop yourself from feeling the feelings before you feel them, but you can’t. You imagine Callie’s mother slipping freshly laundered clothing into a child’s dresser, placing a new pair of shoes beside the canopy bed you slept in until you were sixteen. Does Callie know how to start a fire without kindling? With licorice sticks? With dryer lint cartons that smelled like your mother when you put a match to them? Does she know how to make a slipknot or the proper way to cool a burn? Did she know that soothing one with ice could cause frostbite?

“When I was a Brownie,” you say, pointing up. “We sang this at the end of every meeting.”

“Cool,” Callie says. “I’ve never been in any, like, organized thing. Well, until now.”

She looks like she is going to ask a question, and the marbles in your stomach start banging together. You want to talk to her, but you don’t want to scare her. And then, you want to scare her. You want to tell her about your mother and filling your underwear with Snickers bars to take to her when she was institutionalized. You were fourteen. Is that how old you are, Callie? You want to show her where you burned your wrists with cigars in college, to explain how Ivy Leagues and terminal degrees couldn’t stop your disease from trying to kill you. You want to tell her about Lacy and how you haven’t been able to sleep for five days because when the sun goes down, the cats are everywhere you look, gnawing the baseboards apart, chewing through the electrical wiring, and then hanging themselves in your windows, their tails hard from rigor mortis, curled violently into a question mark.

You want to tell her that you will answer any question she has. That you wish you had asked the ones you wanted to ask when you had twenty days. That, since then, you have not answered the ones you should have answered.

Callie opens her mouth. Allows the night air in.

The bells are quiet now, but their sound memory hovers over you, fills the parking lot, the street, the neighborhood, connects you and Callie to everything beyond the dark, beyond time, to that place where a clock melody becomes words, words you imagine Lacy’d sung without thinking, without questioning whether she believed in God. A song sung for the pure pleasure of singing, for the pure sense of belonging:

Oh Lord our God

Thy children call

Grant us Thy peace

And bless us all.

You’ve heard Westminster Quarters a million times, been to hundreds of meetings where it signaled the hour, the quarter hour, the half hour—always the measure of arrival and departure and the reprieve in between. How had you never made the connection before? Why were you only making it now?

Callie looks over her shoulder towards the doors. She still looks like she is going to ask a question, but this time, she does.

“Not to be weird, but would it be okay if I sit with you? I’ve never been to one of these outside of Hill House, and the guys are like, sorry—this is so weird—I mean, god, I’m so weird—but you know guys. I don’t want to do anything, but they—you know. And this jacket? They’re always talking, and I’m, like, I can’t hear myself think, let alone have a conversation, which might be a good thing. I don’t know. My head is so full, and I’m trying to empty it out, all of the shit that’s in there, you know? Does that make any sense? I am so sorry. That was probably the most awkward way to ask a stranger for help.”

 “No, not at all,” you say. It is, hands down, the fastest you have ever answered a question in your life. “I’ll go in with you.”

“Really?”

 “Yeah,” you say. She smells wonderful. Like fresh laundry.

“Thank you.”

And as you lead her through the double doors, you feel yourself growing lighter in step, as if you have been given the answer to a burning question you had been too afraid to ask, as if she is helping you more than you are helping her.

     

Tara Stillions Whitehead has had fiction, essays, and hybrid texts published in Chicago Review, Fiction International, Red Rock Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Texas Review, New Orleans Review, Sleipnir, and elsewhere. She has received a Glimmer Train Press Award for New Writers, an AWP Intro Journals Award nomination, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. A former assistant director for film and television, she now lives in Central Pennsylvania, where she teaches English and Film Studies.

They were somewhere on the wrong side of Horsham. At least the number beside Melbourne’s name on the road signs was steadily declining.

Jeremy’s right foot had been on the accelerator so long that he wouldn’t be surprised to find it stuck there at journey’s end. Heat and sweat caused the gum trees on the roadside to dance in his peripheral vision for a fleeting, sickly moment.

“You okay?”

The voice from the back seat prickled the back of Jeremy’s neck. He hadn’t realised he’d moaned softly. “Huh?” he glanced into the mirror. The boy was sprawled along the Valliant’s long back seat, grubby hands cradling a sawn-off shotgun, both truncated barrels pointed at Jeremy’s nape.

“I said,” the boy sighed, “Are you okay? You moaned or something. What’s up?”

Jeremy stared at dark blue bitumen. “Nothing.” What else could he reply? He’d only been heading out for coffee, after all. He wondered again—117^th time this journey—how long did Dirk and Grania wait in their favourite Fremantle café as Jeremy’s expected arrival time came and went? How many different types of shit did they call him for standing them up?

Jeremy remembered how smooth Dirk had sounded on the phone. He’d accepted the purred invitation without hesitation, tied his hair back, grabbed his leather jacket and gone. Almost out the door, he’d doubled back to his bedroom, searching amongst the detritus on the floor for the silver star on a chain Grania and Dirk had given him last Christmas.

They’d wanted coffee in the café he’d first met them in—a good sign. He’d pulled out of his driveway hastily, the sleek classic car narrowly missing the letterbox. At the end of his street, as he checked for non-existent traffic, he realised two things—one, he’d left his phone on the kitchen table, and two, there were shotgun barrels currently being pressed to the back of his neck. The sensation was cold and sharp; he could actually feel tiny, vicious nodules of rudely hacked metal scraping his skin. The Valiant stalled.

“Get it started again! Move it!” The voice sounded so young. Was this a joke? The barrels jabbed him once, twice. Jeremy fumbled the gear stick and ignition, deciding any joke that went like this was best played along with for the time being.

“Right,” the voice resumed when they were back on their way, “I’m heading for Melbourne. You’re gonna be nice and take me there.”

“Melbourne?!” Jeremy stared stupidly at his petrol gauge. “How?!”

“Drive me there of course, dickwit!”

And so it was.

Jeremy barely even noticed Perth falling away behind them those first few hours. His eyes were glued to the roads, not even daring to glance into his mirror. Several times, his fingers cramped around the wheel; knuckles bloodless, white. This Can’t Be Happening, he thought repeatedly, the shotgun’s lazy presence telling him otherwise, even as he thought it.

“We’re … we’re almost out of petrol.” He’d found his voice at last, somewhere behind his knees, apparently.

“Better stop somewhere then, hey?”

A small servo loomed up before them. “You got enough money on ya? Do ya want me to pay?”

Jeremy thought of the coffee and cake money in his jacket and stammered his negative reply.

“Settled then,” the voice breezed, like a boss announcing he’ll pick up the tab at a business luncheon. “I’ll pay our way ’til we get there.” A rolled up bundle of money plonked into Jeremy’s lap. “Use that. And be nice.”

Be nice? Jeremy almost laughed. Shouldn’t the voice say something like “Don’t try anything stupid”? or “No funny business”? Surely “be nice” was a little out of place here?

He stopped the Valiant at a bowser and because the place had a hand-painted sign boasting of driveway service, he waited for an attendant. A man soon appeared, smearing oil stains over a dirty overall. He waddled up to Jeremy’s window, smiling gap-toothedly.

“Series S,” he leered at the Valiant as though appraising a barmaid’s cleavage. “Bewdiful condition. Must be proud of her?”

Jeremy nodded dumbly. There was silence from the back seat and the shotgun had moved from the back of his neck. Surely, though, the amputated barrels were pressed into the restored leather upholstery of his backrest, waiting to blow both he and his beloved car apart unless he did his best to “be nice”.

“Fill her up, thanks,” he croaked.

The attendant shuffled the bowser nozzle into place, free hand tapping on the shiny black roof. “Restore her yerself, did ya?”

“Yeah,” Jeremy sighed. “Spent all summer on it. Me and some friends.”

He was lost for one sweet moment in memories … the bonnet sparkling in strong Perth sunshine, he and Dirk with heads bent close over mechanical intricacies, so engrossed that only Grania jiggling as she waxed the Valiant from bumper to bumper could distract them.

“Must be proud of her,” the attendant drawled again. Jeremy passed the man some money from the roll in his lap, the man passed back some workshop-grubbied change.

“Y-yes, I am. Thank you.”

Back on the road, the voice rose again. “Does that radio work? Or is it just for looks?”

“It works.” Jeremy twiddled the knobs, trying to find something the voice decided it liked.

“Cool!” the voice exclaimed, “Leave it on this!”

They travelled hours without saying a word. Jeremy tried not to look at the landscape too much; he hated being out of the city and this never-ending expanse, the unflinching openness of it, made him queasy. Jeremy instead filled his mind with candlelit images of bedrooms, rough kisses in dark nightclubs, three person conga lines around his kitchen table to cocktail music rescued from op-shops. His abductor stretched out along the back seat and growled along with every lyric the radio spilt into the car’s interior. Darkness was deep around them by the time the voice realised its driver must be wearying.

“Hey!”

Jeremy started at the sound, at the very poke of the voice.

“Tired? Want me to drive a while?”

Jeremy pulled the car into the gravel siding, feeling a little sick. “What’ll you do with me while you’re driving?” Oh god, his mind trembled, don’t let him put me in the boot. Oh god, please…

~

“So!” the boy slid into the driver’s seat, testing his foot-to-pedal comfort, “Ever been tied up before?”

Jeremy couldn’t help laughing. Could this teenager even guess why an adult might find that question amusing? He couldn’t be more than fourteen, surely? For godsake, he was being held captive by a little kid! He looked down at the complicated knots he was tied with and sighed heavily. A little kid who’d been a Boy Scout, obviously.

“Can you drive?” Jeremy demanded. “A lot of work’s gone into this car. I don’t want it wrecked by some little shit out for a joyride.”

The boy turned the engine over expertly and cast Jeremy a baleful look. “Do I look like I’m out for a joyride? Now be nice and sleep. I’ll need you driving during the day when people might see us.”

A flat tyre near the Victorian border was to be the only further event of the journey. Jeremy resigned himself to getting the kid to Melbourne quickly. He didn’t want to ask questions, didn’t want to try escaping and be a maimed or dead hero. The kid didn’t seem talkative either, so they rode out their trip with only the most essential of speech.

That’s why Jeremy was startled by the sudden questioning outside Horsham.

“You okay? You moaned or something. What’s up?”

“Nothing.” He sighed again. “Actually, yeah, something’s up.” He glanced into the mirror, finding the childish, wide brown eyes of his captor peering back. “I was heading out for coffee. Just a bloody coffee. There’s these people … you’re too young to understand, but this … couple … are very dear to me. I haven’t seen them for a while. We’d had this stupid argument over showing the car at a collectors’ show. Yeah, this car. Did it up together, see. Anyway. We had this stupid argument and haven’t seen each other since. I’ve been miserable, okay? Then suddenly they call me and want to meet in the place we first met. That’s where I was going when you popped up. Now here I am,” he made a sweeping gesture at the green and gold land rushing by. “Here I am thousands of miles out of my way, I’ve stood up the two people I love most, and I’ve got a shotgun pointed at the back of my frigging neck! To top all this off—have you seen the state of this car?! She’s a grand old lady and we’re putting her through a bloody cross-country rally!” Jeremy swiped angrily at tears as he finished, wondering what young thugs thought of blokes who cried these days.

The boy was quiet while Jeremy composed himself then, for the first time, he swung his legs over the red leather backrest and fell into the front passenger seat. “I wouldn’t worry about the car if I were you,” he said. “Vals are tough. You could drive her through a war zone and she’d pull up alright on the other side. Plus, y’know, you and yer mates did a great job on her. You could keep going up to Brisbane before she’d even need a service, I bet.”

Jeremy snorted a teary laugh. “And what would you know about cars?”

“My dad was a mechanic. Used to work on oldies like this. Old Valiants. Old Holdens. He would’ve loved this car. Always wanted a Series S…”

Jeremy glanced sideways and caught the wistful look on the boy’s face. It took him a moment longer to realise the shotgun had been left, forgotten, in the back.

“Is that why you chose my car? Because your Dad would’ve liked it?”

“Yeah. Plus it’s not hard to get into a locked Val. Sorry mate, but it isn’t.”

The boy and Jeremy both smiled cautiously. Jeremy shrugged, giving his attention back to the road. He still didn’t want to ask of the boy’s whys and hows, even though it was probably possible to do so now.

~

The lights of Melbourne’s skyscrapers winked at the Valiant as it approached journey’s end. The boy dozed lightly. Jeremy nudged him awake, telling him to put his seatbelt on.

“Sure,” the boy said, first leaning over into the back to shove the shotgun into a battered sports bag. “North Melbourne station’s probably the best place to leave me. D’ya know where that is?”

Jeremy shook his head. “Never been out of WA before.” He laughed grimly. “You know Melbourne?”

“Yeah. My mum’s here somewhere. Haven’t seen her since I was six, when Dad took me to Perth. She’ll probably pretend she’s glad he’s dead when I tell her. But she’ll be upset really, I reckon. She always said he was a loser, doing all those robberies and stuff. Now he’s gone and proved her right. He should’ve stuck to fixing cars, instead of driving ’em away from banks really fast…” He smirked and hauled the sports bag into his lap, hugging it close while Jeremy eased the car into the dark parking area at North Melbourne train station.

They sat silently, looking embarrassed for a short while. “My mum always told me to be nice to people who help me,” the boy fumbled with his seatbelt and sports bag. “I’m sorry if I scared yer too much or anything. I know I’ve really put you out, but there was nuthin’ else I could do. I had to get away real quick … and it’s such a cool car…” He held his hand out. Jeremy looked it at a moment as if wondering what the boy wanted, then he clasped it and shook it solidly.

The boy got out of the car, threw two rolled-up bundles onto the seat and ran off, shouting a childish “Thanks heaps!”.

~

Although he’d given up smoking years ago, Jeremy ripped open a pack of smokes from the nearby pub’s machine as he listened thankfully to the coins dropping into the pay phone. He raised his voice over the traffic-mumble around him and blurted “I love you” into the receiver, barely registering if it was Grania or Dirk who answered at the other end.

     

Welton B. Marsland is a queer-punk writer from Melbourne, Australia whose stories, poetry & more have appeared in many local & international markets. Debut novel “By the Currawong’s Call,” set in 1890s Australia, is available through harpercollins.com.au and recently won the Romance category at the 2018 Bisexual Book Awards in New York. Twitter: @wbmarsland Website: weltonbmarsland.com

Alice stretched her tired body and dropped heavily onto the straight-backed chair at the side of the open casket. She ran calloused hands through dull-blond hair and pressed her palms, just for a moment, against her eyes, steeling her mind against the silence. You’re free now. So…will you?

It was as if someone else had spoken, this unexpected voice inside her head. She looked sharply around the room. It was empty. There was only her husband’s body laid out before her, his face gray, but pain-free; the picture of the Sacred Heart above it; and herself, poised stiffly on the edge of this hard, little chair.

The Sacred Heart seemed to stare at her, a bit like the Mona Lisa, she thought. No matter which way she shifted to try to change the light, his eyes followed her. The voice in her head said it again. “Free, at last. So….will you?” It became like a mantra. It kept time with the tick-tock-tick of the old clock on the mantelpiece. “Free now. Free now. Free. Will you go now? Go now? Go?”

She focused on Matt’s face. This face that had lain beside her all the nights of thirty years, even those of the last ten, when he’d been bed-ridden, unable to move, paralyzed from the neck down, from a fall on the train tracks at work. It wasn’t that she hated him, she thought, swallowing. It was that she felt absolutely nothing. Nothing at all.

“It’s a kind face,” she mused, searching for a feeling, “a warm one, one that lit up often with smiling.”

“He’s a man who’s done his best, all the days of his life” her father had said once, reprimanding her. ” A man who loves you.”

“Enough for both of us,” Matt had said, the day he’d asked her to marry him.

“And you loved your sons” she said aloud now, to try to make herself feel it,

so hard they brought tears to your eyes, in good times and bad.” She sighed. She still felt nothing, Nothing at all.

Her eyes moved down his body. His hands were large as spades, from his work as an electrician for the railroad. Pale and purplish, knob-knuckled and rough-skinned, they lay limply now, folded across his chest. She remembered the feel of them on her skin, their first night, the way they’d grasped at her breasts, pulled at them, how they had closed tight on her shoulders at the end; her feeling of being taken. She had lain there afterwards, thinking about another man, a man who had taught her what it had felt like to open, to surrender; to pour herself, body and soul, like a river into an ocean, like milk into an urn.

~

She’d seen Doug first at a rodeo, three hundred miles away in the eastern part of the state. Black-haired and strong, his eyes, the color of wild phlox, narrowing each time he looked at her, flashing like the sun does on the rough edges of broken ice. Each time something inside her had shimmered. She watched him later, moving with the horses he was loading, his body loose with the out of doors, built to work under wide Montana skies, not in its dried out little towns.

Their first evenings together, at the end of her father’s corral, he had whispered to her of the ways of the wind high up there in the mountains, had dared her to cross the fence, cajoling her to leave her world of pianos and china and little lace doilies, just for an evening. When she declined, he told her he’d wait for her behind the chapel on Sunday, and that he’d show her the places God really lived. So she feigned illness at the start of her papa’s sermon and left for air. He helped her up behind him and immediately they were galloping, out across the mountain-side of the town’s white fences, out to the prairie’s tides washed up against sudden reefs, where there were no fences, only the smell of sage and pine, the ice-cold splash of rock-strewn creeks, the secret dens of animals who lived without fetters.

They’d had six months, six secret months of wild riding across open grassland, six months of him reading to her philosophy and poetry, six months of wet kissing, pressed first up against the rough, flaked bark of spruce trees, later, sprawled on the prickling forest floor. Six months where he’d awakened her as rain does soil and planted in her a new sense of what was possible.

It was a deathly cold winter’s night when the stone he threw woke her – and her papa. It had ended then and there. She remembered the long, slow wail of the train, as it pulled out of town, taking him eastwards. She could see it still, snaking its way out across the prairie, the prairie that stretched in waves like the ocean, waves which that evening were tinted hues of pink and purple, stained by the light of the dying sun. She crept into the frozen fields to do her weeping.

~

A year later, these hands that lay limp now beside her, had taken hold of her and made her a wife.

She had thought about bolting the first day he’d brought her to this town, to the very house where he’d grown up, a house full of the photos and mementos of a family she must now call her own. It was a bigger town than her hometown, but its streets were narrower and its houses smaller. There were no trees to break the dreariness, no views, only the rounded looming shapes of mountains, pressing around her from all sides, crowding out the great expanse of sky. All her life, it had been sky that had soothed her, helped her lungs expand, helped her to breathe. Here, there was almost no sky.

It would have been easy. The train passed behind the fence of their tiny backyard. She could have hopped on it any day, as it slowed its pace to move through town, slipped into one of its carriages, and ridden it ‘til it left this mountain valley far behind. She could have stayed aboard until, turning east across the open prairies; it left even the endless plains behind eventually and began to move between buildings, taller than the wheat silos of her home town, high above streets that danced, not just with the hard green of cottonwoods, but with the soft spread of maple leaves, and the creamy, rose-colored froth of cherry blossom.

But she didn’t.

The boys had come. First Tom. Born whimpering. She remembered the grasp of his hands too, their gripping at her hair, their reluctance ever to let her go. Robert, born a year later had, from the start, sucked at life, not her. He was distant, contained, utterly independent. She adored him.

What she remembers most about those long winters was the unceasing whine of the wind sweeping down from the mountain tops, whipping itself around the outside of the house. Hearing to it, she could think only of the barren, snow-locked flanks of Mt Heron, that beast of a mountain that rose six thousand feet above her window, where even the wolves had to shelter from the cold, from the unbroken, bone-shattering lonesomeness. She would picture the snowfields up there, their top layers shimmering with crystals, burning with starlight, the rocks far below, cracking and splitting beneath their weight of ice, the vast black bowl of the glistening night upended above it all. Sometimes the mountains held her in the immensity of their embrace. Sometimes, it was as though she held them, as though far inside her, in the place of her heart perhaps, or her womb, was a world of pure and dark and ice-cold beauty, lit only by the purple fire of the stars, quite untouched by human feeling.

The clock on the mantelpiece above Matt’s casket chimed loudly. Five o’clock. Another 30 minutes and the evening train, carrying her oldest son, would be pulling in. The clock drew her back to a day she’d spent the last ten years trying to forget. It had sounded just like this the very moment the last living thing inside her died.

Tom had arrived unexpectedly from Bozeman, where he and Robert had been studying. Walking straight into the living room, he waited for his parents to follow. He did not speak until they were seated. Something about his eyes had stopped her heart. The clock began to chime.

“Robert’s dead,” Tom said. “…a car crash. Early this morning. He was drunk.”

After that, all she remembered was the chiming. The sound of it just went on and on in her head. She sat there listening to it. Tom and Matt were talking, she thought. Crying maybe. She just listened to the clock’s voice, to the echoes it made through the silence of the house.

That evening she found herself alone. Matt was at work. Tom was out, making funeral arrangements, taking care of business, acting responsibly. She made her way upstairs. She pulled out the suitcase she had brought from home all those years ago. She put it on the bed and began to pack. “When they come back,” she thought, “I’ll be gone. I’ll figure out where when I’m on the train. It really doesn’t matter. East somewhere, somewhere there’s a college, a library, and a whole lot of pretty trees.”

The wind was cold. A waning moon sailed in and out of bits of angry cloud, never spilling light for long. She had been waiting in the unlit lane by the station trying not to be seen. When the train pulled in she would walk briskly through the turnstile and climb aboard. She would buy the ticket down the line.

She heard the familiar whistle, signaling the train’s passage through town. She bent to lift her suitcase, rising suddenly to a swirl of light from a car pulling in to the station yard. A car door slammed. Footsteps, hasty, on the gravel. She gripped her suitcase, turned away, walking through the turnstile and onto the platform, earlier than she had wanted. She looked southwards anxiously, towards the approaching train.

 A man came up behind her. He was out of breath. She didn’t look around.

 “Mom?” she froze. “MOM!”

 “It’s Dad. He’s had a fall. It’s bad.”

The train’s brakes screeched to a halt. A door opened right in front of her, pouring light across the platform. She moved towards it. She placed her foot on the step. The light was yellow on her shoe.

“He’s in the hospital. They can’t wake him … They think he’s paralyzed … from the neck down.”

She pulled herself into the corridor of the train and turned into a carriage. It was empty. She sat in the seat by the door. She took off her hat. She placed her suitcase by the wall beneath the window. She took off her scarf, her gloves, laid them on top. Then she gazed for one long moment east.

With the first shudder of the carriage she stood up, smoothed her coat and left the train, its gathering speed causing her to almost turn her ankle as she leapt. Her eldest son’s hand steadied her.

“Take me to him.”

From the car she saw the moonlight catch the roof of the train as it made its way out of town. On the other side of the tracks, the snow at the top of Mt Heron glinted and flared. Then a bank of cloud totally swallowed the moon.

~

That was ten years ago. Ten years! She’d counted again this afternoon when, emptying the urinal down the toilet, she had heard him call. Once, twice, a third time:

 “Alice. A-lice. Ple—e—-e—ase…”

Despite the mounting panic in his voice she’d pretended not to hear, listening instead to the tin-like notes the urine made sprinkling against the water of the toilet bowl. She listened to it echo, almost musically, through the silence of the house. She noted the color. Too dark. She’d have to bring him more liquids. Later. She’d been all day in and out of that room. She knew he wasn’t doing well, but, well, she couldn’t breathe. Rubbing the condensation from the inside of the bathroom window, the outline of Mt Heron appeared blurred against the evening sky. She let herself gaze at its highest slopes. She sucked them in. A sudden flurry of hail hit the tiny pane like a fistful of gravel and she started. She’d go later. Just a little later. It was time for dinner.

Alone in the steamed up warmth of her kitchen, the crackling of the wood-stove, the drone of the late afternoon radio, the sweet knowledge that not even the telephone could get to her here, she let a long, slow breath expand her ribs, then let it out. She couldn’t afford to let herself think. She hummed to the tunes that came and went on the radio. Frowning in the half-light at a recipe book, she washed, sliced, cut, diced, flung the vegetables into a casserole, flung the casserole into the stove and turned immediately to baking.

The hard slipperiness of the butter yielded beneath her fingertips. The cool softness of the flour ran across her palms. She rubbed, squeezed, kneaded, rolled, her eyes following the trickle of melting snow, as it slid pencil-thin runways down the opaque windows. Outside, she knew, Mt Heron stood, stood as it always did, stood as she stood in the midst of her life, immobile, expressionless, letting the seasons and the weathers come and go, untouched by any of it.

An hour later, she entered the bedroom to bring Matt his dinner. She found him lifeless, a dribble from his lower lip dried white against the stubble he had wanted her earlier to shave. She moved immediately to do what needed to be done.

The key in the door brought her back to the present. It was Tom. She lifted herself out of the chair to greet him. They hugged, briefly. She pulled away first and left him alone with Matt. In the kitchen she stood, hands on the cold edge of the sink, staring at the hump of Mt Heron through the net curtain. She thought of the high fields, their snow glinting in the starlight. Still, she felt nothing.

~                                       

It was the day after the funeral. Tom and she were returning from an after dinner walk. He’d been trying, all day, to talk her into leaving, into going back East with him back, back to where his wife and he had a place. They’d just turned off Main St. towards the house. The streets were deserted. The shadow of the mountain stood black against the evening sky.

Suddenly, Tom stopped and waved his arm at the streets and their buildings.

“Look at this place! It’s dark! Miserable! Empty! You can’t stay here alone. There’s nothing here for you. Not now.”

She couldn’t help a wry smile. She walked on. He caught up.

“Look, I know I’ve said it before, but it all makes sense. Mo and I have tons of room. You’ll have company, and you’ll have space. When you sell the old house, you’ll have money. Then you can figure out what you want.” His voice whined with frustration. “Just give it a try, will you?”

Alice said nothing. She was trying to picture those tree-lined city streets, the ones she’d dreamed of all those years, trying to see herself walking across a tree-filled campus, reading in an oak-shelved library, sipping coffee with friends, talking poetry. But none of it would come into focus. There was only the mountain, its snow-capped peak shining far above her. Her mind would go nowhere but there. She saw herself standing atop that north facing ridge, way up there at the top of the world, gazing down at this valley that had held her life. She had never been up the mountain. Suddenly she wanted to go. Tom stepped in front of her to peer into her eyes. “I’ll think about it, Tom,” she said. “I will. Now, I, for one, am going to bed.”

Alone in the attic at the top of the house, a place she sometimes slept alone, she stood gazing through the dormer window at Mt Heron. With a flourish she threw the windows open to the night and leaned out. Far below leaves were skittering down First Street, gusting in circles, gathering in the corners of fences, and settling. It was a wind she knew, a wind she watched for, year after year, the one, she believed, came to shiver the tops of things, and whisper to them to grow.

High above it all, Mt Heron glimmered, its peak and ragged edges white with moonlight, its crevices and the meadows where the tree cover grew, pooled in darkness. Watching the curve of its massive flank and the delicate arc of silvered snow across it, Alice felt a sudden opening. The friendless world that had leaned forever against her windowpanes seemed to lift, just a little. The mountain seemed to lean towards her.

“Perhaps,” she thought, sniffing the wind “perhaps, at last, winter is over. Perhaps now, Spring can finally come.”

She had no idea what that might mean. She knew only that she would not recognize it anywhere but here.

     

Cris Mulvey was born and raised in Ireland and spent the first half of her life as an educator, activist, and community organizer. Drawn by the beauty of wild nature and its power to feed, heal, and inspire, she moved to Montana where she began to write poetry, short stories, and memoir. Mulvey currently lives in Northern California with her husband Jack, a dog, and two cats. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including the Naugatuk River Review, the Whitefish Review, Mobius, Last Night and Women’s Voices for Change.

I ran into him, by accident, in a department store in New York. Saks. He was buying a printed silk scarf—probably for one of his many paramours, I think, wryly. The familiar ache rises up and makes me turn away. I am going to pretend that I have not seen him and walk on, but just as I do, he turns.

“Reina! Is that you?”

His eyes flash with the sparkles that first made me fall in love with him, and he takes my arm.

“What a lovely surprise to run into you! How have you been? You look amazing!”

I manage a smile, privately relieved that I had taken some time with my appearance that morning. I know I look good. He gives me a once-over that would be highly inappropriate save from someone who had known your body intimately, and for a long time.

I think: Of all the department stores, in all the towns, in all the world, he walks into mine …”

but I say,

“Jack. How nice to see you.”

He turns back to the saleslady who is wrapping the scarf while she processes his credit card.

“Hold on a second,” he says to me, not relinquishing my arm.

He signs the receipt with his right hand, still resting his left hand on my arm. His left hand has a wedding ring.

Of course I knew that he had remarried. The information had been batted around at a cocktail party and brought to my attention by my husband. “Did you know …?” he asked. “Of course!” I said, shrugging it off, although I experienced a sudden lightheadedness and was having trouble breathing.

He turns back to me:

“Can we … I mean … are you in a big rush? Or can we have a drink somewhere?”

“I … have a meeting I’m supposed to …” I find myself stammering and he sees me flush and smiles broadly.

“Ah, come on! How long has it been? Five years? More? I want to know what you’ve been up to. Can’t the meeting wait?”

It has been seven years. I look at my watch, apprehensively.

“I suppose so,” I say, regretting it immediately. But my heart has risen like a helium balloon. “I’ll … have to make a phone call.”

 “Go ahead,” he says.

He turns to take the shopping bag that the saleslady holds out to him and I see her face respond to the eye-sparkling smile he gives her. Like they all respond.

But I take my cellphone from my purse and walk a distance away, knowing that I will be talking to my answering machine.

“Hello?” I say, into the phone, “It’s Reina. I will be late for the meeting. Please go on without me. Thanks.” I turn the phone off and stare into the distance, amazed at what a cool liar I am. I walk back to him.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get out of here. I know a nice restaurant not far from here. It’s after lunch hour and I’m sure they’ll let us sit with a drink for a while.”

And just like that, as though we were still married, as though I was still his wife, his possession, as though the seven years of therapy had never happened, I let myself be led out of the store.

“Look” he says, pointing up to a wrought iron fire-escape on an apartment building across the street from us, “Look how New Yorker’s strive for a tiny touch of nature.” I look. There is a potted geranium sitting in the one shaft of sunlight that has made it through the concrete labyrinth. “In California,” he says, “there are beautiful flowers all around.”

We turn into a dimly lit restaurant — a French place — that is empty except for a bartender who looks up at us, scowling, as though he has just seen his cigarette break flying out the window. Behind the bar there are racks of wine bottles in a geometric pattern.

We sit down at one of the tables with a blue and white checkered tablecloth on it and the bartender approaches us, resigned.

“Something to drink?” he asks, pleasantly, in an accent that I take as French. Maybe scowling is just his natural demeanor.

“Yes,” says Jack. “Two extra-dry vodka martinis, straight up with a twist.” He remembers.

Then he looks at me,

“You still drink martinis, don’t you?”

I smile and nod, knowing that I don’t drink them in the middle of the day.

“Reina, Reina, Reina!” he says, looking at me and shaking his head. “Look at you! Red is your color!”

“So you always said.”

“I guess the divorce did you good!”

“Oh, Jack. Don’t be ridiculous. The divorce didn’t ‘do me good’; I just pulled myself together afterward and managed to go on with my life. (Good for you, I think! Assert yourself a little.)

“What about you?” I ask. “ You are looking very well also.”

He sits back and sighs, looks down at the table.

 “Yeah. Things have been … good. I’m … I’m just in town for a short time. Actually, leaving tomorrow morning.” He looks up. “I am living in California now. Doing the tennis thing. “

“Ah. That accounts for the tan,” I say, smiling.

A piebald cat emerges from behind the bar and sits on its haunches licking its front paws.

“Yeah. It’s a nice life out there. I don’t know … you get a little older and the winters here start to wear you down. You might consider it yourself.” He looks up hopefully.

The waiter puts the two martini glasses down on the table and leaves.

“You know, I think of you often, Reina,” he says, fingering the stem of his glass. “Do you ever think of me?” He looks up waiting for my answer.

“Sure.” I say. “I think of you every time I wear a piece of the jewelry you gave me.” (Good retort. Keep hitting them back, I say to myself. All you have to do is get them over the net.)

It is beautiful jewelry. He has good taste. Some for my birthday; some for our anniversaries, and some for when he’d come home much too late. When all the wars are over and civilizations crushed, jewelry is what will remain. If you don’t believe me, go to the Met.

What I don’t say is that I once stood stock still on a busy New York street thinking I saw him, only to realize, as he came closer, that it was a stranger. Or how, late at night, when my mind wanders, I recall his hands. Or how my life went unspooling when he left and how I ran like a frantic child to pick up the thread.

He raises his glass.

“To old times,” he says.

I raise mine.

“To old times.”

We clink glasses.

The martini is good. Cold and sharp and the vodka infuses my mouth with its familiar bite. May it give me strength, I pray.

He studies my face. He tilts his head and slides his bottom teeth forward, slightly, absently scraping his top teeth. He eyes are searching mine, looking from one to the other. I feel the hackles or the shackles or whatever you call them rise on the back of my neck.

“I hear you’re with someone nice.” he says.

“Really?” I am taken aback. “Who told you?”

“Oh, people are always giving me updates on you,” he says.

I am surprised, but pleasantly so.

There is a pause. The ball is in my court. I have to say something. I meet his eyes.

“Yes,” I say. (Noncommittal. But still an answer. The score is thirty-love. Only, don’t mention “love.”)

He sighs and sits back.

My husband is nice, I think. He is kind and loving and takes good care of me. I have a happy life. A calm and centered life. But how can I say — it is like a missing limb that has been replaced by a brace: an up-to-the-minute, state-of-the-art artificial leg. That you strap on and you can walk as though nothing had happened. It is perfectly functional. But it doesn’t stop you from dreaming that you still had the real thing.

Somewhere in the back of my closet in a shoe box there is a letter in his familiar handwriting. A letter that says, “You need someone who will take a little care of you. I was never good at taking care of you. I let you get fat and unhappy.”

“He takes good care of me,” I say. (Game, set, match!)

“No children?” he asks. He knows the answer. If there had been children his sources would have told him, surely.

“No,” I say.

“We should have had some” he says. “Maybe that would have kept the marriage together.”

“Ha! It rarely does that, so I am told,” I say. “Anyway, I’m passed all that, I’m afraid.”

“Why? You’re still young, Reina. You are two years younger than I am. And I am … what? 41?”

“You are 45, Jack.”

“Oh. Really? Ah. Yeah, I guess so.”

“And you?” I ask, trying to make my voice airy. “No children?” (I don’t want to hear the answer.)

“No,” he says. “She has two from her first marriage, but they live with their father. She didn’t want any more.”

I nod. My heart resumes beating.

“Still. We should’ve had some, Reina. They would have been something else!” He smiles at me.

I manage a smile back, thinking, Yeah. They would have been something else!

We stay silent for a while, drinking our martinis and thinking of the children we never had.

“I’m glad that things worked out well for you, Reina. That you seem happy.”

Maybe I should tell him about my recurring dream: the one where I am standing at the luggage carousel of some airport. My suitcase has sprung its locks and is going around and around with the top open. All my belongings are spilling out. My intimates, my bras and panties are strewn across the metal belt, for all to see. I try to pull the suitcase off the conveyer while at the same time stretch out one hand for the items that are moving out of my reach. I am trying to hold everything together and keep the lid of the suitcase from springing open again. (I don’t need a therapist to explain the dream to me.)

A group of rowdy young people enter the restaurant. They appear to have been drinking. They sprawl at a nearby table, laughing and speaking French. The waiter eyes them and brings over some menus. One girl gets up and sits down on her boyfriend’s lap. She is caressing his neck.

We watch them. There goes our quiet drink. He reaches out and puts his hand over mine.

 “My hotel is right down the block,” he says. “The New York Palace. Madison and 50th. You know it, it used to be the Helmsley Palace. Why don’t we go there where it is quiet? I have a dinner I have to attend this evening, but we’ll still have time …”

My blood feels as though it has been carbonated.

‘Yes!” I say, “Yes!” But the words that come out of my mouth are: “I can’t, Jack, I have to get back to my husband.”

He nods, releases my hand, and finishes his drink. I finish mine, excuse myself and find the ladies’ room.

Inside I collapse on a striped divan. Oh God! To be able to pretend for one hour that all the hurt had never happened. That we are still young and so in love. To shut our eyes and cling to each other as we used to; to feel his arms around me, his mouth on mine …to fill the well of longing for just a tiny moment. To feel whole again!

Why did I have to arrive at Saks at exactly that time? What if I had stopped in at the shoemaker’s as I had planned to do, and not suddenly change my mind when I saw the bus approaching? I never would have been at the scarf counter at the same time he was. Why didn’t I turn away a split second sooner, before he saw me? Can all of life hinge on such a tenuous element of chance?

I pull myself together and run a comb through my hair. I add some lipstick and determine to go back out there and face up to the challenge. The martini has made its way into my bloodstream and is giving me strength.

He stands as I approach the table.

“I’ve paid the bill,” he says.

“Thank you,” I manage to say. We leave the restaurant and stand outside for a moment. He is headed in one direction; I in the other.

“Maybe we could meet every five years or so,” he says. “It’s been nice catching up with you.”

“Sure” I say.

I smile at him. A lock of his perfectly coiffed hair has blown lose and I reach to pat it back into place, but stop myself. I think of Barbra Streisand standing in front of the Plaza with Robert Redford at the end of THE WAY WE WERE. That gesture she did spoke volumes. It was so inmate. It told of the affection they still had for each other; of past lives living together, laughing in the sunshine and making love, but there was also the poignancy of the differences that rose up to crush the love — not all of it. Just enough so as not to be able to live together.

I kiss his cheek. “See you in five years,” I say.

I turn and head down the block. I can feel he is watching me, but I don’t turn back. I walk into Saks and go up to the same counter where ladies’ scarves are sold. It only takes me a minute to find a beautiful silk scarf that is way out of my price range. I take it up to the saleslady. It is the same saleslady who was there before. She doesn’t recognize me. That often happens when you stand beside Jack, I think. Standing in his aura. No one can see you because the light that he gives off is so blinding.

I pay for the scarf, head out of the store wearing it and hail a taxi. I give the driver my address and sit back in the seat. There will be no one at home, I know. My husband is away on a business trip. One end of the scarf flutters in the open window.

     

Ellen Tovatt Leary spent twenty years acting on the professional stage. She performed in theaters from the Ahmanson in Los Angeles to the State Theatre in Lincoln Center, including four Broadway, many off-Broadway and regional theaters. She worked with Hal Prince, Maureen Stapleton and James Hammerstein among others. She graduated from Antioch College and was a Fulbright scholar at LAMDA. Her first book, a memoir, Mother Once Removed, details her childhood growing up on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village in the 1940s with an eccentric, divorced mother. She was on the writing staff of the Carnegie Hill News in New York for fourteen years. She has published short stories as well as poems, is a native New Yorker who currently resides, with her husband, in LA.