Chapter 4
The race organizers catch Fletcher at the second checkpoint and mention to him, “Oh, hey, your girlfriend had a little run-in with the local wildlife.” When he shows up at the recovery tent where Eve is lying on a cot, she realizes she didn’t expect him to come.
She didn’t want him to. Because if he had kept running, it would’ve made for a great grievance.
I got attacked by a mountain lion and my boyfriend kept running.
That’s the kind of thing you could break up with someone over.
That’s the kind of thing that would settle it.
He sits lightly on the edge of her bed.
“You okay?” he says.
What a banal question. She has just been attacked by a giant cat and he goes with “you okay?”
“Would you still love me if I developed cougar-like superpowers?” she asks.
He lifts the collar of her shirt; a race shirt she was given despite not racing (imagine). He hmms quietly.
“You know,” Eve says, “jumping, big claws, a way with younger men.”
“What have they done to treat this?”
“They cleaned it and put on antiseptic. But they said I should call my doctor once we get back to service.”
“That seems fine.”
“Not if my doctor is a younger man.”
Fletcher looks at Eve for a long moment, and Eve looks back.
She thinks of those first months they were together, the fucking finally months, when they trailed each other around campus to study dates and lawn parties.
He always seemed so amused by her; so willing to wait patiently while she stood in the spotlight.
Her boyfriend before Fletcher had been jealous and prickly, so in comparison, being with Fletcher had felt like breathing clean air.
It did not occur to her until much later that some people are in relationships where they are more than just tolerated.
“Okay,” Fletcher says finally. “Well, why don’t we drive you home, then.”
For a moment, Eve thinks he’s suggesting a road trip. They are going to New York! But that’s not what he means by home. He means, of course, the Boulder house with the laminate countertops. The place she has chosen to live.
They get in the car and Eve puts on a Stella Seaport album that was big when they were in college. Stella Seaport got huge overnight but has never lived up to her potential. Someone on Reddit recently suggested that maybe the same thing had happened to Eve Olsen; too big too fast.
Eve’s first album, PRELAPSARIAN, came out just after she graduated college, the same month she moved to Colorado. Her sophomore album is still forthcoming.
“Would you be upset if I sang about you?” Eve asks.
“What do you mean?”
“If I wrote songs about you. Because, like, if I wrote about having sex or fighting or being in love, everyone would assume I was talking about you.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t love it.”
“Okay,” Eve says. She picks at the gauze at the edge of her bandage. “Why not?”
“What do you mean, why not? Who would want that?”
“I don’t think I’d mind.”
“Of course you would,” he says tiredly.
“I think I’d like to be a muse. To know someone cared that much, you know? To know I’m living in someone’s brain.”
“Mmm.”
“You don’t agree?”
“I don’t know, Eve.”
“Are you afraid I’d make you look bad?” Eve asks. “If I sang about you? Or is it just a general vulnerability thing?”
“I haven’t really thought about it.”
“I just wish you would interrogate your feelings.”
“This is starting to feel very therapy.”
“How would you know?” Eve says. “You’ve never been to therapy.”
“Not everyone needs it.”
That’s when the semitruck in front of them blows out a tire, skids into the median, veers sideways, and launches upside down through the air. In the moment before impact, Eve thinks:
Seriously, what the fuck
Gus the Subaru is so not going to make it out of this
I think the universe is trying to tell me something
There’s a nonzero chance I die in the next five seconds
If I don’t, I am moving back to New York
Impact. Eve’s neck snaps back and the airbag erupts.
Everything smells of burning rubber. She hears a ringing, and as the sound moves through her she feels an epiphany about that word, ringing, because the sound seems to spin in circles, pitching higher, waning, coming back again.
She’s enringed by it. Then her heartbeat returns.
She hears it, fluidlike, inside her skull.
There are two versions of this story, and in one, Eve is dead, and in the other, Eve is alive, and that’s what this album is going to be about.
It will start with a ringing, and it will end with a breakup.
It’s suddenly so clear. Fucking finally.