20. Clarence #2
A minute ago this driveway had a whole night in it. The gallery lights are still on inside, throwing gold out across the lawn. I spent two days hanging those, because I wanted her to walk in and just get it, without me having to find the words.
There’s a bottle open on the counter we never poured.
The whole evening’s still in there, waiting to happen. And it’s not going to. It already happened, and I let it get torn apart on my own front steps.
Here’s the thing about me. I plan. I think six moves ahead, I don’t get caught out, it’s the thing Adam always hated most about me.
And I just got caught out worse than I ever have in my life. In front of the one person I’d burn all of it down to keep.
So I stop planning. For once in my life I don’t think it through at all.
I’m in the house and back out with my keys before I’ve even decided to move, front door hanging wide open behind me, gallery lights still burning, and I don’t care about a single bit of it. None of it matters if she drives off into the dark believing what she’s telling herself right now.
And I know exactly what she’s telling herself. She did it once already, to my own brother, in front of the whole town. I am not letting her stick me in the same drawer as Adam. Not without a fight.
The engine catches and I’m out the gate.
I call her at the first red light.
It rings four times, each one longer than the last, and then there’s her voicemail. Bright, recorded, nothing like how she actually sounds anymore. I wait for the beep and I keep it together for exactly as long as it takes to get the words out.
“It’s me. I’m coming to you, okay? Wherever you are, I’m coming. None of that back there was real. None of it. And I’m going to prove it to you. Just please don’t decide anything about us until you see my face. I’m on my way.”
The light goes green. I drive. Two minutes down the road I can’t stand it, so I call again.
Straight to voicemail this time. No rings at all. She’s looking at the screen and sending me there, or her phone’s already buried in the bottom of her bag, and I don’t get to know which.
I hang up before the beep and I call a third time, like the number might behave differently if I hit it hard enough, and it doesn’t, of course it doesn’t, just that same bright recorded voice telling me she’s not available.
I don’t leave another message. There’s nothing left to say into a machine that I haven’t already said.
At the next light I try words instead.
I type it out and it’s wrong, too much, sounds like a man making excuses.
I delete it. Try again, shorter, and it sounds cold.
Delete. There’s no way to fit it in the box, no version of I am nothing like my brother that doesn’t read like the exact line my brother would type.
In the end I stop trying to make it perfect and I just send the truest thing I’ve got.
On my way to you. Please just wait. All of it was real. You’re the realest thing I’ve got. Let me say it to your face.
Then I sit there at a green light staring at the word under it. Delivered. No dots. No moving. Just delivered, sitting there, going nowhere.
A horn goes off behind me and I drive.
The whole next mile I’m telling myself a story.
She’s driving, that’s all. Both hands on the wheel like a responsible person, eyes on the road, that’s why she’s not picking up.
Or she’s already at work, scrubbed in somewhere with her phone shut in a locker.
Or it’s down at the bottom of her bag under the keys and the gum and the spare hair tie, and she just can’t hear it going off.
Any story but the real one.
The real one is that she’s done answering the phone for men who hurt her. And as of an hour ago, that’s me. I’m just one more name she scrolls past and lets ring out.
The rain starts a couple miles out.
No warning, the way it never gives you any this time of year. A few fat drops on the windshield, and then a wall of it all at once. The wipers go full speed and lose anyway. The road turns into nothing but smeared streetlight and black water and the red blur of somebody’s brake lights way up ahead.
Slow down, I tell myself. The roads are bad. Ease off, take it easy, you’re no good to her wrapped around a pole.
And I mean to. I do.
But my head isn’t in the car. It’s back on those front steps, on her face going to that flat, fake calm, on her voice cracking on I have to go.
It’s three miles up the road with her, willing her to still be reachable when I get there, before she finishes building the wall brick by brick in her own head.
That’s the thing about driving like this. I’m not even seeing the rain. My foot’s heavier than it should be and I don’t clock it, because I’m somewhere else entirely, with her, instead of here on a wet road in the dark where I actually am.
I don’t even see the curve until I’m already in it.
The back tires go first, sliding sideways on water they can’t grip. I turn into it the way you’re supposed to, but the road’s already gone out from under me, and the tires make a sound no car should ever make.
And here’s the stupid part. The part I’ll never get to tell anybody.
In the half second where I should be thinking about the brake, the wheel, anything that might save my life, the only thing in my head is her.
The guardrail comes up way too fast. The whole world tips sideways and goes quiet.
The last thing in me before it all goes dark isn’t fear. It’s her. It’s that I never said it. I had it the whole drive, right there on the tip of my tongue, those three words I’ve been swallowing for weeks, and I kept saving them for her face.
And now I might not get to give them to her at all.
I’m falling in love with you, Charly.
I never said it. After everything, after every single way I practiced it in my head on the way over, I never once got it out loud.
Then there’s nothing.