a shard of orange light

At first it was only flashes of color, a light show behind the eyelids.  Sky-blue when the woman spoke, green when it was the man, a tumble of browns and yellows when the other woman came near.  She touched his hand sometimes, whispered to him, and this was orange, a bright shard of it.

Green was the doctor, he learned later, when he could open his eyes and make sense of the images.  The first time he’d opened them had been a shock – a flood of bright white, a flurry of shapes moving faster than he could track, shadows and flickers, a stab of black, then dark red.  He’d closed them again just to keep from throwing up.  The sky-blue woman had leaned across him to adjust his pillow.  She smelled of chemicals, sweat, a brush of floral when her hair swept across his cheek.  The nurse.  Eventually he learned there was a succession of nurses, all of them sky-blue, some of them male, all quick and gentle, sweat, antiseptic, floral.

He slept most of the time.  When he was awake there was a throbbing at the front of his skull.  He imagined his brain shrinking and expanding, pushing up against bone, retreating again.  If it was quiet in the room he could travel inside the rhythm, let himself be buoyed by it, a wave, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, until he fell asleep again.

Often, he was woken by the burst of orange light.  This was always the first sense, then the smell of lemons, soap, something stale.  After that he would register the touch.  Her hand on his arm, or a brush across his forehead, delicate, tentative.  Sometimes a movement across his groin, down his leg, slower, more sure.

Some days he would feign sleep until she left.  Others, when the throbbing in his head was not so bad, he would peel his eyes open slowly, see the rounded, soft shape of her and will himself to focus, but she never crystallized.   Once, while he stared at her, she rose up and loomed over him, all soft brown and yellow, touched her mouth to his.  He could smell coffee on her breath.

After a few days he understood she was saying his name. “Eric.  Eric.”  A low voice, nearly a whisper.  That was all.  He didn’t respond.

When his eyes began to work again, when the blurred shapes became people, faces, he sorted out the brown ponytail, the pale mouth, the glasses with their lenses that reflected the overhead lamps, making it seem she had lights instead of eyes.  She came close, rubbed her thumb briskly across the side of his face, as if he’d been crying, as if there were tears she had to wipe away.

One day he woke and she was standing with her back to him, her shoulders hunched up, holding something to her ear. 

“Well, he needs me now,” he heard her say and a memory flashed before him of her standing in a room – their room, he suddenly realized – her body turned away, her hair bound into a pony tail by a black elastic band, wearing a yellow sweater, just as she was now.

“Jody,” he tried to say, but his voice would not work.  She hadn’t heard him, didn’t turn around. The nurse arrived, and his eyes closed.  He fell asleep.

Other people came.  His father, bearded, grayed, who stood at the bedside with his coat on and cried when he asked, “Where’s mom?” His sister, who looked strangely aged.  She talked with the nurses and gestured a lot and when Jody was in the room, spoke with a loud cheerfulness that even he understood was a lie.  Gradually he came to understand he’d lost time, maybe as much as a decade.  The things before were there – he remembered his childhood, his siblings, high school, the year off to travel the country, coming back home, the job with Uncle Dennis, finding he was good at construction and that he liked the work, meeting Jody at the church he’d visited once or twice.   She looked the same then, hair always neatly brushed and pulled back, the calm gaze, the smile that took her from pretty enough to noticeable.   He remembered their wedding, the apartments they rented while they saved enough for a house, dinners around the thrift store table they’d bought, cooking together after work, the succession of burnt, dry, tasteless meals they managed until they learned how to cook.  He remembered that.

Gone was everything after.  His mother.  She’d died of breast cancer, his sister said, eight years before. But he was sure he’d seen her recently, that she’d been at the apartment.  She’d been wearing that silly baseball cap, the one they got at Joshua Tree, a gray top, white stripes. He remembered pouring her a cup of coffee, sitting across the table.  Last week, maybe?  The week before?  His head ached and he retreated behind his eyelids again until the lights dimmed and the room went quiet.  They’d come again the next day with more of their memories, feel they were doing something helpful by telling him everything he’d lost.

When the doctor came the next morning on his rounds, he feigned a migraine, asked for darkness, silence.  The nurses turned them all away.  Except Jody.  She came in noiselessly, carried the room’s only chair into the corner and sat there, just outside his peripheral vision.  He never turned his head towards her, she never spoke, he didn’t understand why.  It was worse, almost, to remember only the falling into love, unable to remember the falling out.

Later, after he’d been discharged, gone back to make a life in the strange house they owned, he would wonder when she’d become this way, if the calm and poise he’d taken as contentment and self-possession, had really been lassitude, a disinterest in the world.  The only things she seemed to take pleasure in now were the hardships he was causing her – the time off from work to take him to therapy several times a week, buying him new shirts because he’d stained the old ones with his clumsy hands which were still unable to bring food, or a coffee cup, to his mouth without trembling, the extra cleaning because the nurse would be coming by the house.  She recited these burdens to him in detail whenever he asked how she was, becoming suddenly loquacious, voluble.  He would have to close his eyes then, and this too she collected.  He imagined her preening over his offenses while she worked, polishing their edges, gathering them up to be presented to him each night the way other wives brought home armfuls of groceries, a bouquet of flowers.  He grew to dread the sound of her tread on the porch that signaled her return from work.  It was autumn now.  When she opened the door, the sun would be beginning to set and he would see her as he’d seen her first in the hospital, shadowed, dim, soft.  Behind her the sky would be changing its clothes, a flash of purple and pink, the underside of clouds rimmed in yellow, where the sun was sinking, a bright shard of orange light.   

morrisey and park

It was Wednesday, the 5:26 stop at Jefferson St.  She focused on her book, tried not to notice when he stepped into the train, took his usual spot by the door, set the black briefcase between his feet, nodded at the passenger next to him, reached for the bar to steady himself when the train lurched forward again.  The long coat he wore was unbuttoned and hung open, underneath it she could see he’d worn the navy blue trousers again, the pale blue shirt with the pinstripe.  She caught his eye and he smiled at her, held her gaze.  She could feel herself blushing and ducked her head again, let her hair fall around her face.  They’d been doing this same thing for two weeks - one or the other of them looking up, their eyes catching, his wide smile, her ridiculous blush.  She could almost never bring herself to look up at him again after the first smile, but she could feel him glancing over at her.  Annalise, she wanted to say.  My name is Annalise.  And for the twentieth time in the last two weeks, she wished she looked like her name – willowy and dark, with delicate hands, big eyes, a smile as wide as his.  She pushed a lank of  brown hair behind her ear, sat up straighter, tried not to hate her legs, the soft curve of her belly.

A horn blared outside and the train lurched to a stop.  People were always trying to beat the light at Morrisey and Park, darting over the tracks so they wouldn’t be stuck waiting while the train passed.  This time there were voices in the street, people yelling.  She leaned forward to look out the window but she couldn’t see anything.  The intercom crackled and the driver’s voice leapt into the car, loud, but obscured.  She heard only, “delay” and “tracks,” that was enough.  She stole a glance at him.  He was watching her; he smiled again, raised his eyebrows, nodded his head toward the empty seat next to him.  She hadn’t imagined it; it was a clear invitation.  She tried to picture herself standing up, gathering her things, walking down the aisle and sitting next to him.  She put her head back down, tears stinging her eyelids.  Was it some kind of game he was playing?  Some kind of sick, frat boy thing? Would he tell his friends later over drinks, laughing at the absurdity of it:  I just nodded my head at a chair and she stood up and waddled over like a pet dog.  She looked again.  He was still smiling, but he shrugged, looked almost embarrassed.

The intercom shouted again and this time she made out enough to know that there was a car on the tracks, they were going to be awhile.  The woman next to her groaned and the doors slid open as if on cue.  People began zipping up coats, packing up bags, leaving.  The handful who stayed talked loudly, raising their voices above the sound of the road outside, whatever activity was going on at the front of the train.  She pulled her sweater closer around her.

“I hope no one’s hurt out there,” a voice said.  She looked up.  It was him.  He pointed to the empty seat in front of her.  “Is this…?  Do you mind?”

She shook her head, felt the back of her throat tightening.  He was reaching a hand over the seat. 

“I’m Wes.”

“Annalise,” she said, so softly he had to ask her again.  His hand was warm and dry and she didn’t want him to pull it away, but he did.

“Annalise,” he repeated, and she had a sudden urge to be home, to close herself away from the crack opening up in her chest, this bright little hope that was making her mouth turn up, making her want to ask him a thousand questions, learn all his secrets. But he was talking now, telling her that he was glad for the chance to finally say hello since they’d been riding the same train for weeks.

“Yes,” was all she said, and she looked out the window.  There were red and blue lights reflected in the glass, but she hadn’t heard the sirens.  What made someone reckless enough to dart in front of the train?  Were they so anxious to get somewhere they couldn’t wait five more minutes?  Was it really worth risking everything? She stole a look at Wes, who had turned slightly away, was looking out the window himself, a small dejection in his shoulders.  Maybe not a game then.  Maybe she was being foolish.

“Do you like Thai food?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“Yes?” he said, and the smile was back.

“I eat lunch there at the place on the corner sometimes.  I don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here…”

He stood, picked up the briefcase.  “I’m starving.”  His hair was red-gold and he had freckles across the backs of his hands and she sat for a moment, felt something break loose inside her that made her laugh out loud.

His face registered no surprise when she stood. He waited in the aisle, reaching out his hand to hold her bag while she shrugged into her coat, almost as if he already knew she’d need time to steady herself, as if he’d already seen the limp and taken it as part of her.  When they exited the train, he went first, waited on the bottom step so she could grab his arm and use it for balance.  A cool evening wind greeted them out on the street and the sidewalk glittered with an earlier rain.  A block ahead they could see the knot of fire trucks and police officers, bystanders huddled in groups, pointing, shaking heads.  They turned and went the other way, to the little restaurant with the pink and white neon in its dingy window, sat at a table by a poster of a Thai goddess, admitted to each other they couldn’t use chopsticks, ordered curry and green tea, the little salad rolls which they dipped into a common cup.  He worked for the city planner’s office as a consultant, she worked as a paralegal for immigration attorneys.  He loved to hike and climb and was a high school swimming champion.  She made a face and gestured at her leg.  She’d always wanted to play competitive sports, but…  He said he liked movies too, and staying in.  She said she should get out again, start with an easy hike.

When the bill came he tried to pay, but she reached out and put her hand on his arm, said, “Let’s share it,” and this was important to her, that she not be someone who had to be taken care of, but someone who was his equal, right from the start, and he watched her, seemed to understand that this was what she needed and took her card, slipped it into the black book with his, told the waitress to split it evenly.

Outside, the tangle of the accident had been cleared and the train was already gone.  They stood on the sidewalk and laughed and he called rides for them both.

When hers came he leaned in and said, “Can I see you tomorrow?”  And she asked herself, how had this happened?  She was lit up inside, wound like a fully charged engine.  She was racing the light, watching the upcoming tracks, her eyes forward; maybe a train was coming, but maybe not.

“Yes,” she said.

“5:26,” and he grinned and shut the car door and when she looked behind her he had lifted his hand to wave and she lifted her own and everything inside her was saying, “Now!” 

el paso

 There was a song going through her mind.

“Out in the west Texas town of El Paso…”

Her dad used to sing it.  She could picture him leaning toward her, tweaking the tip of her nose and grinning.

“…I fell in love with a Mexican girl…”

She wasn’t Mexican.  This inconsistency bothered her, though he didn’t seem to notice.  He’d had black hair, hazel eyes, sideburns that came down into his full cheeks, the skin pockmarked by former acne.  When he was older, his nose broadened, even the pores, giving him a splattered appearance she would find herself staring at in fascination.

What was the Mexican girl’s name?

Across the room, the dog shifted and groaned.  He was showing his age.  Well, who wasn’t?  From her seat she stretched first one leg out, then another.  Felina.  That was the girl’s name.  Her dad leaned toward her, his green-brown eyes dancing.  She turned her head, as if he were really there, as if his lips could buzz her cheek.

He hadn’t been discriminate.  He’d sung the same song to her mother, whisking her away to dance in the small living room, bending her across his arm, kissing the pale skin on her exposed neck and making her laugh.  She’d watched from the kitchen, happy they belonged to him.  She’d thought him the tallest man alive.  She got up and went across to the bookshelf, pulled down an album.  He was there, on the first page, side by side with her mother, only an inch or so taller.  She blinked.  That made him, what?  5’8?  She flipped through the other pages, but he was sitting in all the rest of the photos.  She shut the book, opened it again.  Her mother’s face stared back at her, composed, serene.  Could she trust any of her childhood memories?  She closed the cover, put it back.

*

She was humming it again.  The sun was coming through the window, warming her arms.  There was a whole story to the song – a gunfight, an escape, a dying embrace – but she only ever heard the first line in her mind.  Was that the only line he’d known? 

“I fell in love…”  

She leaned her head back in her chair, watched the dog twitching in his sleep.  There was no use getting angry at someone dead and gone.  He was a romantic, she could see that now. 

“I fell in love with a Mexican girl…” 

She could remember dancing, spinning away from him, the twist of his wrist bringing her back.  No one ever danced with her like that again, innocent, kind, free of expectations.

She took out her phone, typed in the line she knew, waited for the lyrics to come up.  There was a video, so she played it.  Halfway through, she shut it off.  She didn’t want to hear the whole thing, didn’t want that other voice crowding out his in her memory.  The dog sat up suddenly, began barking.  A bad dream, maybe, or some distant sound from the street triggering his “alert!” response.  She called him to her and patted his head in her lap. 

“Good dog,” she whispered.  A memory: her mother holding her hands tightly over her ears, forehead wrinkled, shoulders hunched. 

“Your mother needs it quiet,” her dad saying and the little brown dog disappearing the next day.  Juno.  That was the dog’s name.  She took out her phone again, dialed.  A man’s voice answered.

“Do you remember Juno?” she asked.

“The dog?  I think so.  Smallish?  Brown?  We didn’t have her for long,” her brother said.

“No,” she said.  “She barked, I think.”

Silence.  Then, “You okay?”

“I’m fine.  Give my love to Charlie.”  She tucked the phone down between her leg and the chair.   The dog looked up at her with his soft eyes and she shifted to move him. 

“Go lay down now,“ she said.

She’d never been to Texas, had her father?  West Texas meant nothing to her.  The whole state stretched out in her mind like one big plain, populated by cattle with long, curving horns broader than their shoulders, horses, improbably saddled, with their bridles hanging down, tumbleweeds, funnels of dust in the distance, the occasional sagebrush.  That wasn’t right, she knew.  There were cities, big cities, but her mind clung to the landscapes from TV westerns.  The kind of place where a cowboy and a Mexican girl might fall into tragic love.

There was a mirror hanging by the front door.  She stepped over the dog’s sleeping body, turned on the light so she could see her reflection.   From a distance it seemed her mother was walking toward her.  They had the same pale skin, the same heart-shaped face.  She pushed her hair back, tucking it away from her face.  That too, was her mother, the way her hands moved, the way the fingers traced the line around her ear.  She got closer, so close her forehead was pressing against the glass.  There he was.  The green irises, the flecks of brown, the circle of gold around the edge.  Kind eyes, good eyes.  She let her breath out and the glass fogged around her mouth obscuring her mother-face.

“Out in the west Texas town of El Paso….” she sang, breathing in, breathing out.  In the mirror her dad’s eyes looked back at her, steady, sure.

talisman

 In the overgrown tangle that was the yard behind the house, he found a nest of new-born garter snakes.  That’s how he knew it was the right house.  He used both hands to pull apart the hedge of weed and bramble and peered in at the nest, the twist of infant snake bodies like a knot of bootstrings, each with a pale yellow stripe running along its sides.  He could see the hole in the earth that was their den, a small black circle deep in the hillside.  If they hadn’t come out looking for the sun just then, he’d never have found them.  He placed his hand carefully on the ground beside the nest and stood very still, waiting.  He could hear his parents and the realtor lady coming out onto the deck, the clomp of shoes on the wood, his father asking questions in the brisk voice he used for work.  He heard, “Do you have a copy of that inspection I could look at?” and he shifted his body into the shade, made himself smaller so they wouldn’t see him there.

He felt the cool ribbon of a snake pass across his waiting hand.  His grandfather said that stillness was the way to gain trust with an animal, and so he didn’t jerk or clench.  The snakes had to know he was safe, that he wasn’t the type of boy to swing them violently into the air or…other things.  The back of his throat rounded and he swallowed quickly, remembering Josiah and the way he’d twisted the snake they’d found, smashed its head.  He blinked his eyes, concentrated on being quiet, sending the message through his arm and down into his hand that he was safe, they could trust him.  He inched his hand closer to the mass of them, let his fingers lift up the thin bodies at the edges.  The snakes shrunk and expanded, weaving and testing, accepting, pouring themselves over him as if he were a natural part of their environment, a common stone, or stick.  He felt the shiver go up his arm all the way to the top of his skull and he smiled broadly.  This was the house.  He twisted himself gently to look at it, the straight lines, the pointed peak right at the center, the white walls and the empty windows that looked like they were just waiting to hold faces, the reflection of lamps, inside them.

His mother had seen him and was coming down the steps; he watched her picking her way through the tall grass, her soft pant legs catching and releasing, gathering a confetti of seed heads.  Be quiet, please be quiet, he pleaded with his mind but he could see on her face that she already understood this.   She knelt down beside him, bringing with her the scent of vanilla, warm grass, the coffee they’d bought from a drive-through on the way here. 

“What did you find?” she whispered, pulling branches back, leaning in to see around his arm.  He tented his hand, a tectonic shift that lifted the snakes and revealed his knuckles, the arch of his fingers.  She grinned, leaning back. 

“A whole nest,” she said.  “That’s lucky.” 

He turned his palm upright and closed the fingers before all the snakes could slip away.  When he lifted out his arm, two black ropes were twisting around his hand.  He held them out so they could watch them, the flattened triangular heads, the eyes like tiny marbles, the upcurved line of their mouths like a knowing smile.  One of the snakes explored the road of his arm, moving past his wrist and then twisting back down towards his hand, but the other stepped out into thin air, leaning itself down, reaching for the earth.  His mother extended her own hand, let it slip across. 

“The people who lived here were old,” she said.  “They got too old to take care of the yard anymore.”  She had seen the poisons in the garage, the fertilizers and traps.  The man had apologized, the realtor said, he’d broken his hip, couldn’t keep it green and tidy as he used to.  She knew this shamed him, because he’d insisted that the realtor explain to them, wanted them to know the house was cared for, but she was glad of it.  The snake she held reached out into the air again, searching for the ground, and she let it go, slanting it back toward its nest. 

“Snakes are a good sign,” she said, standing up and brushing at the grass seeds that clung to her.  “That means there are frogs and insects, birds.”  She breathed in.  “It’s not much to look at, but it feels right, doesn’t it?” 

She put her hands on her hips and smiled down at him. He was silent, watching the snake.  He brought it towards his face, tilted so he could look into the inky eye.  Animals speak with their bodies, his Grampa had told him, and he knew the snake was speaking now, its thread of a tongue tasting the smell of him, its eye taking in his strangeness, its gaze steady and unafraid, its lithe black body calmly coiling itself into a bunched ribbon in the palm of his hand.