Chapter 8 #2
I waited until he was out of view and then counted down from one hundred.
When I reached the end, I picked up my phone.
A jagged crack along the back. But it still worked.
I dialed without thinking. I felt foolish, or really, I felt like a child: needy and scared.
I was about to hang up when the call clicked on from the other side.
Stephen’s voice, groggy with sleep.
“Mark.” Across the street, a car U-turned, tires screeching, headlights off. I tensed, but it kept going and disappeared around the corner. “Are you there?”
“Sorry.” Why had I called? “I know it’s late.”
A pause. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I don’t know.” I waited a moment and then … “Would you come over?”
“What’s going on?” The gravelly underbelly of sleep in his voice was gone, cleared out with alarm.
“I’m just having a weird night.” I flattened myself against the building. The brick pushed back, cold and ungiving. My head swam. “Never mind. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
Nothing, and then, “I’ll be there soon.”
Stephen arrived at my apartment not long after me: low, soft knocks on the door.
I called out. “It’s open.”
I was splayed on the couch, thumbs pushed into the pocket of my brows to still the pounding. The door opened and Stephen stood still in the threshold. He reminded me of a scene from a movie, any movie: men standing in doorways, filling the space with their silence.
“Are you coming in?”
He took his time, hanging his jacket on the hook by the door, making his slow way around the couch. I moved my legs to make room for him but he perched at the edge of the coffee table, hands folded together. I sat up and a rush of air whooshed through me. Dizzy, disoriented.
“I do not feel great.”
Stephen went to the kitchen and returned a moment later, glass of water in hand. I edged over, making room. “Come sit.” He did. “I guess I’m drunk, it just hit me. It was Safie’s idea.” I drained the glass in one long swallow.
“I’m sure she had some help.”
“We all played our parts.” I smiled, and it made my face ache.
“Did something happen tonight?”
How to convey the strangeness of the man, my fear of him, my feeling that I had somehow brought it on myself?
The ways it made me hate this town, and this job, and hate myself for thinking I could make something work here.
What could I say about how he held my arm, the force of it expressing a desire to hurt me, but some other desire as well?
It all seemed suddenly minor, not noteworthy, my recollection fuzzy.
“No,” I said. “Nothing happened.”
“Well—okay.”
Stephen looked disheveled but still somehow dignified, his handsomeness pushing through.
Hair messy with interrupted sleep, stubble like pinpoints of light across his cheeks and chin.
I could see the uncertainty behind his eyes, the waiting.
I’d been a horrible boyfriend, and truthfully, I hadn’t been a great one before all this.
And yet, Stephen was the one I called, and he came right over, in the middle of the night without asking a thing.
“I know I’ve been awful, disappearing on you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Stephen eased into the couch, releasing himself to it. “It’s alright.”
“It’s really not. I’m sure it hasn’t been fun for you.”
“Not everything has to be fun, Mark.”
“I know.”
“I just don’t like having no idea what’s going on with you. You ditch out on your own drinks, no explanation. Acting like it’s nothing. And then I don’t hear from you for weeks. What am I supposed to do with that? It feels like—you’ve gone somewhere.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“Well, what is it? What’s happening with you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then let’s figure it out.”
We sat in quiet and a clammy sensation wrapped itself around my neck and I understood why I had called. Stephen deserved better, he always had. He reached for my hand and I pulled it back.
“I don’t think we should do this anymore.
” And then, like he wouldn’t have understood what I meant: “I need this to end.” Stephen said nothing.
The moment stretched on, the silence shattering.
He made no sound. Tears pooled in his eyes and he clasped his hands, knuckles white with pressure. “Stephen.”
And then he leapt from the couch, lifted, it seemed, by a sudden rage.
“You called me here in the middle of the night to break up with me?”
“No, I didn’t. I mean—”
“You.” His voice a growl, the word an insult.
He was trembling all over. He raised his hand and I panicked in that instant he might strike me.
And then the fear turned pliable, bending inside me, rubbery and soft, and I wished he would.
But he stepped away, moving toward the door.
“You drunk piece of shit. I’ve always known you weren’t into this. ”
“That’s not true. Sit down. Let’s talk.”
“What is there to say? I guess it’s pretty pathetic, me sticking around.
Hoping sooner or later you would see this could really work.
I might be a fool, but I’m not an idiot.
Something has changed. But you, you can’t even look at me.
” At that I raised my head, of course; I wished I hadn’t: Stephen’s face was twisted, terrible.
I had done this to him. “You’re too shut down and scared of people to just tell me whatever the fuck is going on. I’d rather be a fool than a coward.”
“Stephen, wait—”
But he was out the door. It slammed shut, rattling in its jamb. I listened to him bounding down the stairs. I thought I even heard a pause, halfway down. I imagined him realizing he had left his jacket—it hung on its hook, limp and gray—and then deciding it wasn’t worth coming back for.
I woke with a vicious hangover, a lump on the back of my head where I’d struck the wall.
Somehow I made it to the airport. The plane was mercifully uncrowded.
I had a row to myself. We took off, rocking through pulpy clouds.
I palmed some aspirin, forcing them down with a cup of lukewarm coffee.
It tasted of plastic. When the flight attendant passed a second time, I asked for a beer.
She hesitated—it was not yet eight in the morning—before smiling.
“It’s how we get through the holidays, isn’t it?
” I fell asleep and woke, a searing crick in my neck, to the announcement that we were landing.
I stepped onto the jet bridge and the eager humidity enveloped me.
Even in late November, the South Florida air clung to you, a second skin you could not shed.
It felt immediately and deeply familiar.
I turned my Tyler phone back on and a moment later it sounded with a message.
I opened it: a photo in bed, shirt off, wide grin.
He had gone home to North Carolina at the start of the week.
He said he argued with his mother about it; it seemed like a waste of money when he’d be back for winter break in just a few weeks.
“But she’s obsessed with Thanksgiving,” he said.
“Last year she asked me to do grace and when I said something about genocide, she started screaming about why can’t she have just one nice day.
” He’d laughed as he told the story. I peered at the photo grainy on the small screen, trying to glean some detail about his life from his surroundings.
But there was nothing but a blank wall behind him. I typed my reply—miss you—and hit SEND.
I moved out with the slow mix of other last-minute arrivals: retired snowbirds starting their winter seasons, struggling off-kilter with overstuffed suitcases; young couples, voices stretched with tension, wrangling children fussing to be set loose; a teenage girl traveling alone, head encased in gigantic earphones, the tinny sounds of thrashing guitars eking out.
Curbside, families reunited, grandparents swooping those same fussing children into outstretched arms as the parents hoisted luggage into trunks.
Traffic was light but steady and I watched for the car, trying to remember my last trip down.
Had it been a year? Or more? They were almost upon me when I spotted them, my father at the wheel, my mother pointing through the windshield in my direction.
The car looked more weathered than I remembered, sun-bleached maroon, paint brindled and curling at the seam of the roof.
I tossed my bag into the back and followed.
“You made it,” my father said—he loved announcing the obvious.
“I did.”
It was freezing inside; I’d forgotten how high they kept the AC.
My father wore a baseball cap, thin wisps of white hair flying from the sides.
My mother’s hair, too, seemed grayer. And then I realized: She had stopped coloring it.
She faced forward, watching the road, correcting my father’s driving and asking questions about my classes, my book.
Traffic picked up outside the airport, families headed to join other branches for the day.
The battery of cars inched along in fits and starts.
We exited the highway and rolled down a long stretch of road, blocks of parks and condo developments and gas stations, medians crowned with palm trees, shopping centers with grocery stores as big as amphitheaters.
Every other building new and unfamiliar.