Tag: fiction

Roger and Flight 8124 | Dustin Moon

Canada banned smoking on all national flights in 1994. I know this because I looked it up on my phone while I waited at the gate because holy shit I need a cigarette. The kind of need that makes you question your life choices—a miniature sawing sensation that turns your skin hot. Choices like taking up smoking. I remember when smoking disgusted me. Had it been Charlie’s fault? I can’t remember and it’s not important and that somehow makes it worse.

1994. Ten years too late. So like me.

We board and I hand the nice gentleman at the podium my boarding pass, neatly tucked in my open passport like a bookmark. He inspects it too casually—like a you’re too young for me vibe embodies him (because he’s clearly gay)—and whatever, that’s fine, gets me in my seat faster. And my seat isn’t terrible. Aisle but can’t complain much because the middle seat between me and a woman in a baby-vomit green sweater is a no-show. Everybody takes too long to stow their carry-ons and find their place and then the plane takes too long meandering to its runway, but eventually we leave the ground. I stare at my boarding pass, blank, still too warm, still unsure how a cigarette would cool me but certain it would. And hour one of flight no. 8124 Vancouver to Toronto begins.

No, it hadn’t been Charlie. Not Charlie, when he turned in the front seat, reached back to me with his offer: a puff from the cigarette that had clung from his dry lips. He had watched my face in the rear-view mirror when I climbed into the back of his Jeep, motor idling. He had watched when he blew white smoke and it engulfed the cab despite his open window, how I closed my eyes and relished the aroma. Not Charlie—because when I reached for the cigarette, the spiderweb trail of saliva still connected to its end from Charlie’s mouth stayed my hand, led me to politely decline. So I hadn’t started smoking that night. 

Not that night. Not that night.

Good. Yes. Let’s think about that now. 

Sybil. I had to focus on Sybil, who I was visiting in Toronto. She deserved my attention. Our siblinghood deserved my attention.

We’d made up at Grandfather’s funeral. Or partially—I don’t know. We talked. We talked and it felt so nice to talk to my sister again. Then the event ended, Mother wanted to leave and she was my ride. Sybil had to go back to the hotel to catch up on sleep, had to fly back to Toronto the next morning. Something about licking her wounds, but I missed that part. I think she’d built the funeral up in her head too much. So like her.

And Harrison? Bless my brother’s heart, but he’s a useless sounding board.

Sybil hadn’t expected to see me and refused to talk to me at first. She came around during the final ceremony. I don’t know why. I think Harrison spoke to her earlier. Maybe he isn’t useless. But we talked. We talked and I apologized and I tried not to cry but I know I did and I said I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you can’t begin to fathom the depths of how sorry I am. And she listened. And she didn’t exactly forgive me but she said let’s continue talking in a more appropriate setting, and I said I go back to UBC tomorrow, and you go back to Toronto      tomorrow, and she said I’ll fly you out to Toronto soon.

My seat’s comfort waned as the flight entered hour two.

I clicked my nails on the armrest. Tried to suppress what the chemicals in my brain begged me for. Tried to focus on Sybil but now that only made me a bigger bundle of anxiety, so I thought about smoking again. Thought about quitting. Entertained the idea like Mother entertains new diets—a passing fancy of a thought, everybody wave as it disappears back to wherever it first slipped out from.

Tried to recall my first ciggie again. Had it been Pearl? The best answer was somehow simultaneously yes and no. When would she have even tried? Did she even smoke? Had she been in the Jeep with me and Charlie? Yeah, front passenger. The reason I was in the back. The reason I ventured out at all—determined to live, whatever my fifteen-year-old definition of living was back then. More or less just resolute to change Pearl’s (accurate) perception of me. Get her to stop making comments like, “Why do you need to find a cute boy at school? Don’t you have enough stable boys on hand?” or “You need to snap out of your Royal Tenenbaums bubble.”

Pearl’s family was lottery rich as opposed to Mother’s generational inheritance. Her parents bought the 4200 sq. ft. house across the street from us when I was six. Must be nice, I always thought, to have the same privilege of the wealthy with none of the snobbery.

She’d made that Tenenbaums crack earlier that day. That’s why I agreed to join her and Charlie en route to a party on the outskirts of town. That was the whole goddamn reason for that night.

That night.

Christ. Time to accept the inevitable. To try and sit through this long, smokeless flight without replaying that night would be impossible. I’ve always had to pick at my scabs.

Because it hadn’t just been those cracks from Pearl. She was my best friend through grade school since the day she moved in across the street, but our friendship was always this simmering passive-aggressive kind. Like she looked down on me but also presumed I looked down on her. One day she’d be vulnerable and open and make jokes that weren’t at my expense, then she’d harangue me for my taste in clothes, my use of words like jape and paramount. She questioned why I insisted Mother put me in public school. Thought it a transparent attempt to appear normal. Didn’t matter how many times I explained we weren’t billionaire rich, we weren’t even high society; we lived in the goddamn sticks in Parksville for god’s sake. Didn’t matter how often I explained that I wanted to go to public school because that’s what my siblings did. Back when there was less money. Back when Dad was alive.

Who was Pearl to look down on anyone? Her name was Pearl.

I’ve mentally edited and compartmentalized too much of that night. My memory jumps from Charlie and his saliva string—a high school senior Pearl knew better than I did, but he drove a Jeep and he smoked and he had a goatee so he was flush with social currency—to the drive to the house party near the Englishman River. We left the highway at some point, just past the orange bridge out of town, onto a dirt trail canopied by fir trees that blocked out the moonlight. Just the road, trunks, and branches in the Jeep’s headlamps. Then the road worsened and Charlie astutely commented, “Bumpy road, huh?” 

And then I felt the first pangs of homesickness. The whole family was at the house that night: Harrison and his girlfriend Jean, Sybil and her husband Evan. And Mother. Can’t remember why. Might’ve been Thanksgiving. Funny what you forget and what you remember. But the night’s goal was debauchery. That’s how I’d prove to Pearl I wasn’t a lonely, pasty, silver-spooned brat with a pretentious mother in a too-big house. That’s how I’d find myself and feel alive: I’d lose my virginity at the party and I’d come of age, just like they do in the movies. 

Then: the house built into a densely forested hill near the river. Crowds tapered up and down the slope, using protruding tree roots as steps, making a zigzaggy path between house and river. People clustered near the water, some ankle deep, but most gathered around the house, illuminated by dollar store string lanterns, white smoke thick from cigarettes/vapes/joints. When I saw the place, the size of the party, I knew: I could find a good-looking guy here. I could get laid. I could do it.

I recognized the song that boomed from the house as we conquered the hill in subpar footwear. I said, “Hey, this is Malajube,” but neither Charlie nor Pearl acknowledged me. Charlie waved at people who recognized him.

Inside, in the kitchen, Charlie found a Coke and offered it to me. I wanted a drink drink. I wanted debauchery. But I popped it anyway and sipped. Then I asked if I should take my shoes off in the house, to which Charlie absolutely pissed himself laughing.

Charlie found the host like a bloodhound. Another senior. Parents out of town. Classic stuff. He called himself Winnipeg because, you guessed it, he moved here from Winnipeg three years ago. But the enigmatic charm of that nickname wore off when Charlie introduced us and he asked, “So, you’re a homo or something?”

“Something.”

Pearl laughed. 

I soon felt like an experiment on display. Look at the weird kid who comes from that big house near the farmland. Why do they live out there? It’s just him and his mom in that mansion? Look, he’s queer but he can’t outright say it or he might jeopardize his trust fund. Poor thing. Hope he doesn’t break a nail never working a day in his life. 

And there was no sense telling them Mother didn’t operate that way. There was no family company to provide a nepotistic paycheque for the rest of my life. She hoarded the money because she knew we lived tenuously on her savings. She had never worked a day in her life. But Sybil had to become a lawyer on her own. Sybil has to pay her way in the country’s most expensive city—solo. And Harrison, far from a success, rents a shoebox in Victoria. I’ll be the same once I’m done with my pointless Communications degree. Mother hasn’t the means or desire to pay for anyone but her and her horses.
The flight attendant pulls me out of my trance. Asks if I would like to purchase overpriced soda or juice. I ask her to fill my water bottle.

I did find a good-looking boy at Winnipeg’s party. His name was Nick. Or maybe Kyle? There are always so many Nicks and Kyles. He wore black jeans and an oversized red hoodie. New to shaving based on the smoothness interspersed with patches. Could’ve been a year older than me. But he was wasted and I was only two drinks in, and he had a hard time staying upright as we made out against a tree closer to the riverbed, and the more his tongue wrestled mine, the more the stench of beer subsumed my nostrils. I pulled away, he looked inquisitive, then he looked worried because he was falling over, and I gripped his hoodie but there was too much goddamn hoodie to grab, and he slid down the tree, chipping bark, until he landed in the dirt, snickering and apologizing. I said I needed another drink, which I did. So I left him. And I felt a touch bad about it. Might still.

I found Pearl again and we chatted about the playlist that blared from an unseen Bluetooth speaker. She asked if I’d gotten any. Said my lips looked red. I said I was cold. She said lips turn blue when they’re cold. I said when something happens, she’ll know. I asked if she’d seen anyone cute. She raised her drink, a purple can, and said the blueberry ciders in the fridge are downright adorable.

Then she said, quite seriously, “You don’t have anything to prove.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”     

She raised both hands in feigned surrender. “Sor-ry. Never mind.”

But her eyes locked into mine. She could always get under my skin but this was the first and only time she made me feel… unarmed. Like I should feel bad, not because I was worthless but because I had worth and was squandering it. To keep looking at her would’ve made me come undone, so I abandoned her in a panic, raced to find a fresh drink and body.

I found both. A guy with a full beard. Large biceps. Older than me but also shorter than me. A fun dynamic. But he was more experienced than Nick/Kyle, and he knew what to do, where to go, and he found us an unused bedroom on the second floor. A double bed centre stage. Posters of Metallica and Black Sabbath and what looked like Harry Styles (the lighting was poor) festooned the walls. We made out horizontally, I think on some coats, and just when my jeans felt a little too tight, a handful of people piled into the room, giggling, having a right fit, sloppy wasted, then paralyzed at the sight of us. Then one of them said, “Jake?” and my fella jolted off me, suddenly upright.

Jake said, “No?”

I snorted so hard it hurt. Still, a hot flush coursed through my cheeks.

The girl who recognized Jake said, “Oh my god! I’m telling Emma!”

I cabbed home after that. Tipped generously. Don’t know why.

I jangled my house keys in my hand as I approached the door, the inebriation still with me, and then I noticed him: Evan stood at the far corner of the house, light jacket on, hardly recognizable in the night but it was him, unmistakably, with the orange pinhole of a lit cigarette.

We stared at each other for a bit, not seeing each other’s eyes from this distance.

Then I said, “Oh. Hey.”

“Hi, Roger.”

“Can’t sleep?”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Party.”

He dropped his ciggie and crushed it under his boot. Mother would have choice words once she noticed the butts around the property. 

He removed the pack from his coat and offered it. “Want one?”

I approached him. Took the smoke. He lit it for me and I watched his pupils dance in firelight before he withdrew it to spark his own.

My first cigarette didn’t go down well. I inhaled too sharply. Then came the hacking, the horrible hacking like when something fuzzy is caught in your throat but you can’t force it out, and soon your esophagus turns raw and your head aches. Evan patted my back and chuckled, told me to keep my coughs to a minimum so not to wake Dame Judy Wench (Mother, I assumed).

“Have you smoked pot?” Evan asked.

“No,” I wheezed.

“Visualize the smoke as it enters your body. You control where it goes. You control how long you hold it. Hold it in your lungs longer than you think you should. Then release.”

The flight attendant comes by for another round. This time asks for any refuse I may have. I shake my head—no trash.

Still don’t know why he wanted me. Truth is, I can only guess as much for my own part. Two humiliating failures, desperately hanging onto a buzz that was meant to be a blitz, even more desperate to prove I was wanted, that I could clock my worth through somebody else’s lust. Their judgment, however impaired, would be all-vindicating. And from what I could tell in the shallow porchlight, Evan’s judgment wasn’t even impaired.

But the honest answer is Evan always turned my stomach when he entered the room. He and Sybil hadn’t dated long before they married—maybe five months—so he seemed like this dark and handsome creature who simply materialized, part of the family with little warm-up. We never held deep conversations. We never engaged on a particular issue. He—or maybe I—or maybe both of us kept each other at an implicit arm’s length during family functions. No outpouring of affection (not that such was our family’s style), no cold dismissals, and no polite hugs in between. I didn’t want to keep it that way, but you never feel like your voice matters when you’re the youngest of the clan by ten-plus years. You withdraw into yourself, certain your opinion will be brushed off or eye-rolled out of consideration, because please, Roger, the adults are talking. 

But at the same time, I did want to keep it that way. I liked Evan’s inscrutable allure. I liked the way he smiled at me a little differently than everyone else—including Sybil. Maybe now I recognize that as predatory. Or maybe now I’m too immobilized with guilt to analyze any of this accurately. To analyze the reason I’m on this plane.

Fucked up, the destruction we’ll wage to feel a little better about ourselves. God. I wish I had never been fifteen. I wish none of us ever had to be fifteen.

The pilot announced our approach of YYZ. Anxiety swelled in my gut. This would go well. It was difficult to envision a scenario where tensions rose. Sybil will be waiting for me at the airport and we’ll get coffee downtown and we’ll begin the delicate process of reconnecting our lives to each other’s. We had never been that close, my siblings and I. Our family doesn’t get close to anyone. But that made it even more maddening how much I missed them. I missed my sister. And maybe, subconsciously, all this was an exercise of self-soothing, self-forgiving. But I think I love my sister. I think she loves me. I think there’s worth in that. There’s self-worth in that. There has to be.

About the Author:

Who Takes the Bus in LA | Marc Eichen

Hey, you want pizza?

I brought you pizza so we could share. What did you used to say? – something about food and love? But I didn’t overthink it. Picked the pepperoni and mushroom, from the place you like up on East Chavez. Yah, that one, near the King Taco.

You sure? ‘Caus I’m not havin’ it later, in front of the TV. Trying to get healthy.

It’s nice up here, no? You can see across the freeways. Downtown. All the way to the mountains when it’s clear. Did you ever want to go to the mountains? I forget.

You can see the hood. You remember, when you couldn’t get anything to eat after eight or the latest nine? Or when everything was closed with rolled down riot gates like it was Beirut. You couldn’t get anything at all? Well, that is so not today. It is a such different place. I mean, of course, it’s the same place, really. King Taco is still there and the Pasteleria on Wabash. And down East First, there’s still the giant Food4Less, the one where you got caught stealing a supersize bag of chips.

I can’ believe you put the bag under your sweater. You thinkin’ like what? And then we got hysterical when that checkout boy smacked it and must have broken most of the chips into tiny pieces and then, when you yelled at him, he threatened to call the cops and kicked us out. Not that we believed him, or thought the cops, even the rental cops, would ever come.

And then, when we were outside and Johnny D, one of the dudes from the WF, the one with the skull hand tat came over and, yeah, asked if you wanted him to smack that guy. I saw him on the bus. Can you believe it? And you didn’t know what to say, you were laughing so hard because of the broken chips, because he came over, because you thought he would do it if you asked. Maybe because you had just figured out you could get him to do anything if you asked.

That place, the Food4Less is still there, but word is, it’s going too. Replaced by something else, Kroegers or Whole something. Or maybe a shopping plaza with a Starbucks and a Target. The Food4Less’ got the biggest lot in the neighborhood. The lot where those guys stand, like your uncle or whoever he is, in the morning and hope some whitey would cruise in their Tesla and give them a day’s work cleanin’ the pool or somethin’. Fat chance. Or late at night when boys in their hoodies sell shit to those whities snaking by in their same Teslas?

Yeah, well. That’s how it goes, you know? You sure you don’t want this slice? You can pick off the mushrooms. I won’t get mad.

⁂

You remember when I got the job at Metro? It was just another cleaning job and you didn’t have much to say about it. But after I applied to be an operator there was something about me driving that you didn’t like. You would ask me, “why do you want to do that?” As if driving was a step down from cleaning the buses. Or maybe we were both cleaning so that made it Ok or equal. I used to tell you, I’m not pushing the buses and besides I did all the numbers and I’m going to make one fifty more an hour and there’s a differential too if I work nights. You said what good is that extra one fifty an hour? You think that’s going to get us a house in The Valley? And what if you have to drive the car all the way to a depot in Culver? You’re going to spend that much time and money on gas.

It really made me mad, that you wouldn’t listen to me. I kept telling you to just look at the numbers and you were yelling that the numbers didn’t mean shit. We had a big fight about it. I said you were always keeping me down, seeing all the bad stuff that could happen. And you said I never listened to how you felt. I said, you never want to leave. You never want to get out. Even on your day off, what do we do? We get stoned. We watch Manana para Siempre or Property Brothers on HDTV. How many times can we watch that shit? Why don’t you want to get out, do something else besides clean rooms at the Marriott and detail cars at Al’s Auto Spa? And you said, that’s a lie. You said I was never satisfied with what I had. Never. I do get out, you said. Al’s is almost in Wellington Heights. And I said, Wow, the suburbs. And then you came over and I thought you were going to throw something or smack me but we had make-up sex the way I like it. And then you said, isn’t this enough. Where do you want to go? And I said, nowhere. One hundred percent nowhere.

But you knew it wasn’t enough and so did I.

⁂

That next week you came home with a catalog from LATTC. I said, what the hell is this? And you said, See, I can do stuff. I can plan.

Where did you get this?

At Al’s.

No, you didn’t.

Did so. Hector has been talkin’ to me about how he’s taking courses. ‘motive and diesel courses. He gave it to me. We could both take one.

And I started to say how the hell are we gonna pay for this?

Don’t stop before you start, you said. I looked and Metro will pay half for you. And maybe I’ll just sit-in the first semester and see how it goes.

You were right. That’s how we started taking classes at night. Remember the weekend before we went. We were both so scared we were going to mess up, not get in, or do the wrong thing. And I switched my schedule so we could register and came home and you were all dressed up in that black dress, like you were going out. And I didn’t tell you but I was so proud of you. You had our GED stuff folded up in a crinkly brown envelope. You looked so smart.

And when the counselor asked if we had graduated from high school, you took them out like the conquering hero, like HERE WE ARE and she said, “No, no, honey. We don’t need those. What’s your social? If you graduated here in LA, I can just look you up.”

We had a deal that semester. We would both take something, you know, practical, like something that could get us better jobs and then we could take something that we wanted, something fun. But that very first semester I think I took intro psych and you took music, remember? ‘Cause that was all that was open.

I never told you, but you looked so happy anytime you had your earbuds in, listening to music for your class. I would ask you, what’s so great about that music? That opera? I know I gave you a hard time about it, because I thought it took you someplace else, someplace you went without me. But it was still so great to see how happy it made you. Walking down the street or doing the dishes in your torn cut-offs and tee-shirt, you looked so beautiful.

⁂

You were right about all the gas and stuff. Right about a bunch of things. Right about how I never listened to you.

I was taking the Dodge your mom unloaded on us. Oh yes she did! I was driving out to Culver to pick up the bus and do the 108 route back to town. And one of the other drivers asked me if I had ever been to Venice and I thought at first she was talking about the Venice, like in Italy with the canals, but she laughed and said, “No, our Venice. Venice Beach. Check it out.”

You got laid off from the Marriott, but you were still working at Al’s. You were coughing just a little. You had taken a COVID test and they were going to text you about it but they just didn’t. We got up early on a Wednesday when we were both off. You said, you know we can take the bus. Like that was our joke because I got on free. So we did and took the masks you still had from the Marriott. When we got to Venice, the end of the line, we walked out past the homeless dudes with the vans permanently parked on Main, out past the concrete on Speedway and Ocean Front, out to the shore.

There was a guy in a torn down army jacket with a big dog on a leash. You remember? He kept looking around in that over-the-shoulder, half-scared way. You said he looked like an ex-con or some kind of white banger. He was talking to the dog and then he unhooked the collar and began to throw a Frisbee into the waves so the dog could run and swim and bring the Frisbee back, over and over. After, they went to this pipe near the skate park to rinse off. The dog sat and kept giving his paw and let this guy dry him off with an old towel he took out of his backpack.

You held my hand and told me you were wrong because they both looked so happy to be there, so happy they were making each other happy. That was as close to an apology as I ever heard you say.

It felt like that to me too, but I didn’t tell you. I never told you enough. You were right about that too.

What is it, I thought, about the beach that makes everyone happy? Maybe not just happy, but free? Is it the flat and white and warm between your toes, even in winter? Is it the memory of your parents when they took you on a good day and bought you anything you wanted from Mr. Softee? Is it looking out into the forever or the sound of the waves that makes the roar of the planes and the 405 and the stuff they said to you at Al’s dim till it’s nothing?

After a while of walking and watching the skateboarders and the kids with their dads we bought some gum and went to the Library Alehouse and had eggs. We shared a beer and weren’t wearing masks. The waitress, who was wearing one, gave us the hairy eyeball.

You got a text on your phone. It said you were positive and you should quarantine at home. You showed it to me and I said well I guess this means I’m positive too. And you said maybe we should put on our masks so we did. And the waitress came over with our check and made some comment that she was glad we got the message. I thought why the fuck are you glad about that. And then I realized, when I looked at you and you were already thinking we should go, that she meant some message from her eyeballing us.

And we took the bus all the way home and I was feeling so bad because I knew we should have taken the car. The ride that seemed so short on the way to the beach felt like we were driving in slow motion up some endless hill.

We got out and came back to the apartment. And you put on your pajamas and your robe and got into bed and just sat there because there wasn’t any difference from that morning and yet it felt like there was a ten-thousand percent difference. Like we were being bombed and strafed by some silent air force. I said, I guess I’ll sleep on the couch. So I did and made coffee, like the day before and the day before that. And I figured, maybe this is the worst of it.

⁂

You were fine, just fine for a few days. You said maybe it’s no worse than a cold and then you got a fever. I went to the drugstore and got some flu stuff to make a drink so you could sleep. And that helped a little, I guess. And then a couple of nights later, after I came home from my shift, it must have been two or three, I heard you coughing in the bathroom and you came out and told me you couldn’t breathe.

We put on some sweats and took the pirate taxi to the ER and a nurse asked if you had been tested. You said yes. He asked for your Social and looked you up. He was all gowned up and took your temperature and asked about me and took my temperature.

He told me I should go home and they were going to put you in observation. I started yelling that there was nothing to observe, that they needed to cure you, like now. And he told me, in a way that was like he had said this before maybe 110 times just that day, to go home and quarantine or he would call security.

You had forgotten your phone so there was no way I could contact you. But I told you I would come tomorrow morning, before work, and drop off the phone. And we didn’t kiss or hug because…because why? Because we didn’t feel that way. Because I was coming back tomorrow? Because you weren’t supposed to?

They just put one of those plastic colored bands, an orange one, around your wrist and one around your ankle and you walked through the doors that said, ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE, VIRAL POSITIVE. LOCKED FACILITY.

⁂

The next day, when I got to the hospital, there was a security guy there and I said I have a phone for my friend. And he looked you up. He held open a plastic folder, told me not to touch it and I dropped your phone, the charger and rest of the chewing gum we bought at the beach. He sealed it, wrote your name on it with some numbers and said it would get to you. And I just stood there, like something else was supposed to happen. Like he was going to call you on the phone and you were going to come running down and we were going to hug and chat.

He said, “Is there something else?”

I just looked at him. Something else for what? Something else to do? There was nothing else to do. That was the point.

You know we aren’t suppose to take our phones with us during our shift at Metro. You could get fired for even having it in a locker at the depot. But they didn’t have enough people driving as it was so things were loosening up.

I got a text, later, while I was driving out on Washington. It was late and the bus was pretty empty so at the light, the long one at Sepulveda, I took the phone out and saw it was from you and my heart was, like, pounding. Hey baby. Pretty crazy in here. But doing OK. Should come home soon. Later.

The next day they had put in Plexi to protect the operators, or so they said.

⁂

And then there was nothing.

I couldn’t go see you and I didn’t hear nothing. I sat behind that Plexi that was supposed to protect me. But protect me from what? I didn’t want to be protected. I didn’t want anything. Or at least the thing I wanted most I couldn’t have.

And a week later your mom called and I wasn’t even home and she left a message, all screaming and crying, that you were dead and they had the funeral. And then she hung up.

And when I tried to call her and talk to her she said it was God’s way of punishing us – for who we were, for where we lived. And that it was my fault ‘cause I got it from somebody on the Metro.

And I kept calling her back and she kept hanging up. Until finally she told me where you were buried. And that she never wanted to see my face. Never.

⁂

I didn’t take any days off, so no one at Metro even knew. I still had to pay the rent and the gas bill. But really I just kept workin’ because it was all I had. One night after the other.

That night, yeah, it was no different from any other night. I took the bus out from the stall at the Plaza and already a half dozen of them were waiting. Willies. And I let them on, some of them even paying, most not. Why give them a hard time. It’s not like they are getting over, for God sakes, they have nothing, I thought, just like me. They don’t even have each other.

And then, right before I’m pulling out, Johnny D gets on with some girl who, I don’t know, looked like she was maybe fifteen. He pretends not to know me and they sit in the back and I can see they are smoking and all over each other and I’m thinking they are going out to West LA, to some club.

I pick up a few more at Union Station and one of those guys gets on and his shopping cart is spilling over with crap and he’s eating a bagel and it’s all over his face and he’s got this radio playing. But what am I going to say, right?

And he sits in the handicapped place with his cart in front of him. He’s got, like earphones, but his radio is on loud and everyone can hear it all over the bus.

That time of night is never really busy. We’re rolling down West Pico and some old Anglo couple gets on and tries to pay with a Tap card but it doesn’t work. Who knows why.

And Johnny D starts beefing with me from the back of the bus, yellin’, “How come you let them through? How come we got to pay and you let them through? You’re all the same,” he says, “looking out for each other.”

I just let it go, because I figured he would cool himself out. He’s just showing off for this babe.

Things are OK for a while and then Johnny starts in with the guy with the shopping cart. “I don’t want to hear that fuckin’ noise. Use your fuckin’ ‘phones. None of us have to hear shit like that.”

And this guy is not saying anything. He’s enjoying the music and then I realize maybe he can’t hear anything. Maybe he doesn’t even know he’s got music on.

⁂

We get to the last stop and I yell into the mike that doesn’t work and then I turn around, “This is the end of the line. Santa Monica.” And all the Willies get up slowly. Why get off the bus into the rain? I have to say it again, at least twice. But finally Johnny D and his girlfriend are the last to get up. And they push their way out of the back door.
I look at my watch, the one you got me with the green plastic band, and I’ve got five or six before I have to turn it around and go back to the Transit Plaza and Division Thirteen. I see Johnny walking up the sidewalk like he has someplace to go. And the guy with the cart is crossing up at the corner under the freeway. And Johnny is yelling at him.

And I don’t know, I just start to get mad. I can hear the trucks grinding to a stop above, on the freeway bridge at the very end of the 10, like every night. And I’m going home to a dark apartment and an empty cold bed and that’s what it’s going to be like every night. And fucking Johnny D is hassling this guy, like I’ll bet he does every night. Like what the hell? Why are you hassling this guy? What has he ever done to you? He’s just some guy with a cart and a bagel. Some guy who maybe wants to get some sleep under the freeway.

The bagel guy is crossing up at the corner and Johnny is walking up there. My foot hits the gas to the floor and all of a sudden it’s raining and I don’t know what I’m doing and Johnny is in the road and he doesn’t see me coming except for the last minute when I can see him put his arm up in the headlights. And I slam on the brakes at the last second and the bus grinds to a stop in front of him, not five inches from his arm in front of his face and up against the concrete, the side wall of the freeway bridge. And the babe is screaming and Johnny D is yellin’ at me, callin’ me a stupid dyke, telling me he’s coming after me. And I’m yellin’ back at him, “You ass, you stupid fuck, I saved your ass. You could’ve been a bug on the side of the damn freeway bridge.”

⁂

I throw the bus into reverse and I’m about to drive off, like it was nothing and then the cops come and I think oh shit, I’m going to lose my damn job. I’m going to be detailing cars at Al’s for seven bucks an hour.

I’m so lost in my own head, I don’t even remember anything. I know one of the cops, a guy in a suit, gave me his card and the night rep from the union called me and told me to take some administrative leave and there would be a hearing.

You know how those things go. The hearing is set in a couple of weeks. And I’m worrying, if I should buy a dress or what. Me in a dress? When was the last time that happened? So I go with the uniform. The night before, I get out the ironing board, just like you would and get one of those operas you used to listen to and just iron it slow and nice. And I make sure I have my One Year service pin with the gold bus over my name tag, like you would have told me to do.

Either they save you or they fry you. And in this case, when the hearing came up the union said the bus was defective and the road was wet. And twenty minutes later, after the woman from Metro and the women from the union talked to the judge, they told me to go home and I would be able to come back to work the next week. They told me that would be the end of it.

But it never is.

Every night I get the bus and I look for that guy with the bagel. I look for Johnny D. and the babe. But they’re never there. And every night I come to the end of the line and my heart starts pounding and I wait for something else to happen — but it never does. And then every night I come home and I lay down in our bed and close my eyes and instead of you, I get the bagel guy and Johnny D yelling at me, cursing me, asking me who do I think I am and if I think I’m God or something. Every fucking night.

⁂

I call the number on the card. And speak to some guy who says we should meet. So after my shift I go over to the police station over in Santa Monica. It takes them an hour to find the file but then the detective, the one from under the freeway bridge, brings me over to his desk. There is a picture of some kids and a bunch of paper under an old phone that looked like it was broken.

And I tell him, I just wanted to keep Johnny D out of my head so you could be there. And he comes in close and said, “You see this file? It says…” and he looks in the file. “It says it was an incident, not even a crime.” He closes the file and taps the desk with it. “Happens every night. So how about we keep it that way?”

“I guess —“ I say to him, not really knowing what that would do.

“But I still want to hear, ‘cause that’s really what it’s about.”

I nod.

“Let me get us some coffee, because you know I’ve got all night.” And then he rocks back in his chair and just waits.

And I start to cry. Right there at his gray steel desk with the busted phone. And he gives me a tissue out of a pop-up box with pink happy flowers, like the ones we never bought and I start to laugh. And he said, “So why don’t you just tell me. Saying it out loud might do it. Kind of magic like that.”

And I tell him I don’t believe in magic.

And he says, “Yah, well. Me neither. But you gotta believe in something. And I believe in this.”

He gets up for the coffee and even pours me a cup in a fat diner mug with a green ring. He brings over three sugar packets and I tell him no, trying to be more healthy. And he says, “yeah, me too.”

So then I tell him everything. Everything about us, about that time on the beach in Venice, about you and Johnny D and the chips at the Food4Less, about that night on the bus. I didn’t tell him about how you liked opera when you did the dishes or how you tasted like lemon meringue when I kissed you after a shower. Some things I keep just for me, forever.

And I ask him, “You really think this helps?”

And he says, “Yeah.” I dump one of the sugars in my coffee and he takes one. “It’s about the story. And how you tell it.”

So I’m comin’ up here just to tell you too. I might not be able to explain all the shit that’s happened. But no matter what, we’ll talk and look at the hood and the freeway and the clouds as they come in over the ocean and the mountains. And I’ll bring pizza ‘cause, like you used to say, I remember now, love is food.

About the Author:

Take Your Shot | Briana Wipf

The rims after the Fourth of July started to fade from lush green to dull silvery brown, having run out of the winter and spring water stores and now parched by the dryness of summer. Alan liked to whip around corners of the gravel road built on the edge of the rims without braking, regardless of how fast he was driving his truck, a silver 1999 Dodge Ram. As he did so, Maddie reached for the oh-shit handle above the window and watched the concave arc of the rims come into view as Alan steered the truck around the curve. 

“Big baby!” he laughed. He always said something when she grabbed the handle or sped up.

They were shooting gophers today. It was July seventh, a bit late in the season, but they had come upon a few coteries and done well, taking turns shooting out of the Dodge’s windows with Alan’s twenty-two, which spit shell casings out onto the dash with taut pops, setting them up for their roll toward the windshield.  

The rims north of town are visual evidence of the Two Medicine Formation, which runs east of the Rocky Mountain Front and formed during the Cretaceous period. 

That’s what Mr. Fredrickson, Maddie’s earth science teacher, taught them sophomore year. He only called on the pretty girls who tanned and wore eyeliner. Maddie hadn’t been one of them.

Gopher shooting was probably the one thing Alan never criticized Maddie about. Everything else – her family, her hair, her boobs, her job, her love of watching Frasier reruns, her clothes – he picked at. Her family was oilfield trash, her hair was too long and stringy, her boobs were too small, her job was boring, Frasier was boring, and her clothes looked like they came from Goodwill (sometimes they did). 

As if Alan would know anything; he had had the same buzzed haircut since high school, ten years ago. He occasionally bought expensive tequila that he drank out of those orange plastic cups with rounded rims that he got after his grandma died. In fact, most of his furniture came out of his dead grandma’s house, and she had last decorated around 1981. 

Alan worked at the bulk fuel plant in town. He had lasted a semester in college in Havre but passed only one class because he didn’t show up for his finals. Then he drifted around, did some custom cutting, and got thrown in jail in Oklahoma after a bar fight. He still couldn’t go into Canada because of that. Not that he’d take Maddie to Lethbridge for a weekend anyway; he didn’t invite Maddie anywhere. He bought her dinner once two years ago. 

“We can go look at the Harrisons’,” Alan said, his voice elevated slightly so he could be heard over the rattling of the truck. “Joe and me were up there a couple weeks ago and just murdered them.”

Joe was Alan’s cousin who would visit every few months. When they were together, Maddie couldn’t even get a text message back. Sometimes, they went to Billings for long weekends, and Maddie knew he was cheating on her down there. 

“You two have quite the bromance,” Maddie had said once.

Alan immediately bristled. “I ain’t no fag.”

That’s usually how he was. He voted for Obama, he said just so he could say the n-word and be able to argue he wasn’t racist (Maddie had never actually heard him say the word; he even said “n-word” when explaining himself). This time around he was planning on voting for Romney, reasoning he had given the “black community” enough of a chance to run things.

Maddie was three years younger than Alan. She hadn’t given him any thought when they were in school, and it wasn’t until she had moved back home after finishing a paralegal program that she got to know him. They were both playing in a Monday-night pool league that winter. The first time their teams played against each other, they flirted, and Alan got Final Jeopardy, playing on one of the screens in the bar. Alan could be funny and he was smart in a hard-knock way. And goddamn was the sex ever good.

Maddie hadn’t planned on coming back home; she’d hoped to major in history or English and then go to law school, but when her dad went on disability after he hurt his back, the family couldn’t help her with tuition anymore. So she moved home and tried to save money and figure out what to do next. She lived with her grandma, who had dementia and couldn’t live alone.

That was four years ago. Maddie had assumed Grandma Barb would soon need care that Maddie couldn’t give her, and she’d have to go to the nursing home. But Grandma Barb’s decline plateaued, and she had become so docile that she could be left in the house during the day. She just continually checked the mail. Twice a day – when she found a newspaper in the morning and a packet of political mailers and sweepstakes entries in the afternoon – she hit her jackpot.

The road on the Harrisons’ place was a two-track easement used by farmers and oilfield producers. The truck bounced over ruts a foot deep. Someone had bajaed their way down the road the last time it rained, molding the crusted dirt into little mountain ranges. 

“Jesus,” Alan said as they bucked over the road. Maddie held tight to the oh-shit handle.

Finally, they came to a stop. A pumpjack and tank battery stood about 200 feet away, but other than that, the hilltop where they parked was nothing but last fall’s cut grain, short and spiky like Alan’s hair.

“I gotta pee, and no faggy music while I’m gone,” he said, referring to “Another One Bites the Dust,” which was playing low on the radio. He punctuated the statement by turning off the ignition with a flourish.

“Whatever,” Maddie said as she rolled down the window: you couldn’t leave a vehicle running this time of year for fear of starting a fire, and the truck’s A/C didn’t work anymore, anyway. She sighed, annoyed at herself for not calling Alan out on his comment, but she was so tired of it. She was tired of everything.

The Great Plains are the nation’s breadbasket, its fertile soil providing wheat and corn to a growing nation. 

Or at least that’s what had stuck with Maddie from fifth-grade social studies class. She reached for the Skittles she had bought earlier, along with a pack of condoms, at the gas station. The checker was a guy she had gone to school with; he used to sit next to her in that fifth-grade class and flip his top eyelids inside out when he got bored. Today, he had embarrassedly asked her if she wanted a bag, but she declined and stuffed the Skittles and condoms in her purse. Alan wouldn’t buy condoms. He would wear them, reluctantly.

Alan opened the driver’s door but got interrupted by a text message. He took his phone out of his pocket, flipped up the screen, and used his square thumb to tap the number pad. Alan refused to get a smartphone out of paranoia about privacy or something. He didn’t even have Facebook. 

“You want to go for a walk?” he asked after finishing his text and returning his phone to his pocket. He grabbed the gun and propped up against the middle seat. 

Maddie opened the door and slid out of the truck, but she just wanted to go home. She knew how this afternoon would wind up, anyway. They’d shoot some more gophers, fool around in the back of the truck, and Alan would take her back to town and drop her off at her grandma’s house. Then she wouldn’t hear from him for a day or so until he texted her asking for photos.

At first, Maddie didn’t mind. It was exciting, and no one else had ever asked for anything like that, certainly not in college, where she made plenty of friends and dated a few guys, but nothing that lasted longer than a month. And it was nice to be wanted. But after a while, she got tired of Alan’s growing demands. If she said no, sometimes he’d give her the silent treatment for days. So she’d snap a pic and get it over with. 

“You see that?” Alan said, stopping and pointing to a mound with about six gophers crawling around it. He raised the scope to his eye and took a shot. The bullet sent up a puff of dust about fifteen feet from his target, and the gophers disappeared. 

“Did you do something to this scope?” 

“No,” Maddie said. “You just suck today.”

He repeated her in a high, sing-song voice, “You just suck today.”

Maddie almost hated him. She wanted out; she’d wanted out for a year. But there was no one else, not around here. And those photos. 

Alan took three more shots before he hit a gopher in the head, sending the animal’s body into death convulsions. 

“Can I?” Maddie said as he reloaded, reaching toward the gun.

“No, you’ll talk shit if you do,” he said, clearly offended by her earlier comment. 

Maddie rolled her eyes and sat on a sandstone jutting out of the grass. She checked her phone but only had two bars and no text messages. Alan took a few shots, growing more and more frustrated. 

“It’s shooting to the right,” he said at one point.

Maddie mouthed “Whatever,” but he wasn’t looking at her.

“If you’re going to pout, I’ll just take your ass home,” he said.

“Fine, I’m getting hungry anyway.”

“Well don’t have a huge burger like you did yesterday,” he said. “I don’t like fat asses.”

Maddie got up and started toward the truck. “I’ll eat what I want.” 

She got into the truck but left the door open so some air could circulate. Alan followed a couple minutes later, jumping into the driver’s seat without turning her way. He wore oblong sporty sunglasses that wrapped around the side of his head, so Maddie couldn’t tell if he was glancing at her from behind the dark lenses. 

Alan started the truck and put it into gear. “Good thing I got them pictures for later since you’re being a brat.”

Maddie knew what that meant. It wasn’t just that he’d use them now that they wouldn’t be hooking up today. He brought them up whenever he was annoyed. 

They drove down the easement without talking, and when they got to the smoother county road, he hit the gas, driving far faster than Maddie was comfortable with. She started to reach for the oh-shit handle but stopped herself, afraid it might make him drive faster. She glanced at the speedometer and saw he was driving over 50. The tires kicked up gravel that popped against the bottom of the truck. The road now angled downhill and started curving along the rim. As they whipped around the curve, Maddie became aware that Alan wasn’t braking. 

“Alan!” she shouted, glancing out the window at the hill, about a forty-foot drop before the land leveled out. 

But Alan didn’t respond; the truck had left the road and dropped downward. He swore as the truck started rolling. His body hit Maddie’s hard, pushing her toward the door, but her seatbelt had locked up already. And then as the truck kept rolling, Maddie was aware of Alan’s body dropping to the ceiling of the cab before being thrown back to the driver’s seat. Another full revolution, repeating the pattern, throwing Alan’s body like a pinball before the truck came to a rest, right-side up.

Maddie sat, dazed. Her right arm ached like it had been punched, but other than that, she couldn’t feel any pain. Her stomach felt twisted, and she thought for a moment she would vomit. She was aware of the roof of the truck crunched down near the top of her head. The intact windshield was a network of webs and cracks, impossible to see out of.

“Alan?” she said. He was lying on the middle seat, bent sideways at the waist. 

He didn’t respond. 

“Alan? Are you ok?” Maddie asked, yelling now.

She put her hand on the side of his head, aware suddenly that his face was bloody and his nose likely smashed. She found a pulse on his neck. 

“Okay,” she said to herself and reached across Alan’s body to take the key out of the ignition. She forced the door open and pulled her phone out of her pocket. No bars. Alan had a different carrier, so she dug around in the front seat to find his phone. He didn’t have any bars either. 

“Okay,” she repeated. “Okay, okay.”

She would need to run up the hill and hope for coverage. She took a few steps upward, then stopped. Alan’s phone was still in her hand. 

She turned back to the truck and opened the toolbox installed in the bed under the rear window. It wasn’t locked; it hardly ever was, but there usually wasn’t much in there, just a few screwdrivers and a monkey wrench. She took the wrench, opened the scratched tailgate, and put the phone on it. 

“Alan?” she called, but there was no answer.

Maddie swung the wrench as hard as she could, slamming it down on the phone, shattering its screen. She hit it again. And again, over and over. She started screaming, swearing at the top of her lungs. The phone resisted the beating at first, but after a few more swings, the shattered screen went dark, splitting in two at the hinge. She kept swinging; she didn’t notice her aching right arm or the metallic banging on the tailgate. 

At last, Maddie stopped. The phone was in two pieces. 

“Alan?” she called. Nothing.

She ran up to the truck and checked on him again. There was still a pulse. He must have hit his head hard enough to knock him out. Maddie ran back to the phone and wondered for the first time how to explain its demolition. But she didn’t have to. She spotted a pumpjack and tank battery about a quarter mile away and took off running toward it, running as fast as she could over the rough, dry prairie. 

This area of Montana weathered the Great Depression better than many others, its economy buoyed by the recent discovery of oil. 

Maddie had written a paper about the local oil industry in a history class in college.

At the tank battery, she climbed the grated steel steps to the thief hatch at the top of the tank, opened it, and dropped the two pieces of phone in the brown, fetid crude oil inside. 

That was it. Maddie’s chest felt light. She exhaled.

She returned to the truck, her ponytail sticking to her neck and her t-shirt wet with sweat. 

“Alan?” 

Nothing.

Maddie ran up the hill, picking her way past rocks and gopher holes, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes, and reached the road, sweating and out of breath. She dialed 911 on her phone. It rang twice.

“Hello? I’m out on Rim Road. We’ve been in an accident. We need an ambulance.”

About the Author:

Let It Burn | Noelle Nori

I cross one leg over the other, my right foot twitching like the broken minute hand of a clock. The pain will last until Wednesday, I remind myself. And that’s okay. It will burn, but let it burn. I should be taking off my coat, stretching, acclimating my muscles. Instead I huddle further into my big blue parka, keep shaking my foot to an inaudible beat.  

“First time?” 

I glance up. A perky looking twenty-something in a high ponytail is hanging up her coat, pulling one leg up behind her to stretch out a lean quad.

“No,” I say. 

Ponytail raises her eyebrows, looks at my dancing foot. 

“First time in a long time,” I amend. She nods like she understands. But she doesn’t.

I heave myself off the chair and lean against the doorframe of the waiting area as a trickle of sweaty women emerge from Studio C. There is a line of students in the hallway waiting to get in, and I take a spot behind Ponytail. Inside the studio I shed my coat, fold it into a puffy pile on the bench at the front of the room. I take off my shoes and socks and place them under the bench. The cool-down music is still humming out of the speakers, Jason Mraz telling us to “Love Someone.”

The other women and I gather our torture devices: squishy ball, Pilates ring, handled band, Versa Loop. I select two-pound weights (I’d been up to three pounds before I stopped coming) and pull a mat off the back barre. Ponytail is in my spot: middle row, right side of the room. For a minute, I consider asking if she would mind moving. But she looks all settled in, sitting with her legs outstretched, folding her torso over them. I glance around the room and head for the back left corner. 

“Good to see you, Liz,” Marla says. 

Marla is the instructor and owner of Artists in Motion, and I’m surprised she remembers me. It’s been nearly a year. I smile at her as she walks to the sound system to change the music, relieved she hasn’t stopped to make small talk. I hadn’t thought to prepare for what’s new, how have you been, what kept you away? If I’d thought about the possibility of having to answer friendly questions, I might not have come. Marla cranks the volume, and Jason Mraz’s croon is replaced by Jessie J thumping out instructions to “Do It like a Dude.”

Warm up begins. It’s always the same, and my body remembers what to do. Legs zip up, feet turn out. We snap them in. Out, then in. Just warming up the feet. Next, big wide second position. Push off with the working leg. Eight on each side. We’ve barely started, and I can already feel the heat spreading across my chest, already see my winter-white skin turning pink in the mirror.

Plank work is next. I get down on the mat and push myself up on my hands. We’re supposed to keep our eyes on the floor, but I tuck in my chin, look under me where the skin around my middle sags, my Lycra-woven top no match for gravity. My stomach that still looks pregnant, at least to me. Greg swears he cannot see it, as if this will make me feel better. As if anything could make me feel better. 

“Breathe, ladies. In through the nose, out through the mouth.” 

I puff out short breaths. My back and stomach are on fire, and I have to let my knees drop to the mat. It should be easy, just holding a position. A lot of things should be easy but aren’t. I hoist myself back up on my hands as Marla counts down: five, four, three, two, one. Sighs all around as we sink into child’s pose. 

Why it’s called “child’s pose” is beyond me. I’ve never seen a child make this pose, at least not naturally, not without inducement from a yoga instructor, like that time I accidentally walked into the wrong class at Yoga For All. Maybe because it’s supposed to be easy, as in “so easy a child can do it.” Maybe I should be posing like this all the time, summoning the childbearing gods. Maybe that’s what they did in the pregnancy yoga class I suddenly got an email for after I hadn’t taken a class there in years. Scary stuff, how companies know everything. No privacy anymore. Who wants to raise a child in this, I think as I exhale, my breath syncopating with the breath of the other women around me.

Shoulders are next. I follow Marla’s movements in the mirror, nice and long. “Soft,” she likes to remind us. “Soft.” Soft as…as a baby’s bottom. Such a funny expression. This is soft like…like a lullaby. Gentle. Be gentle with yourself, Liz.

“Almost there, 16 pulses. This is where it counts.” 

This is where it burns. I should have gone for the one-pounders, the “baby weights.” God, does everything have to be about babies? I can’t escape it, even in here, and I set my jaw. So much for soft and gentle. My arms quiver. Does that count as a pulse? That’s what my doctor said that day. “I’m sorry Liz, there’s no pulse.” She’d meant to say “heartbeat,” of course, but she’d said pulse.

We drop the weights and stretch. When I first started coming to class, the goal was to get those wedding arms that every Pinterest board seems obsessed with, to look good in my bikini on our honeymoon. While I like sports, I’m no natural athlete. I know all about the dangers of the modern sedentary lifestyle, but the truth is, I hate the gym. I hate the way the whole place smells like rubber: rubberized floor, rubber on the treadmills, rubber ends on the weights. I hate the sight of the bulky guys in the mirror, the ones who – it is so obvious – do not get that large without chemical assistance, muscles piled on top of muscles and neck veins bulging. And I hate the sounds. The clanging and clattering of machines, the grunting. One September night five years ago, I found a Groupon for a three-class pass for this studio. Nine months later, I’d reshaped my body. Butt stood up perky like it was saying hello, even after I crushed it all day sitting at work. My posture improved. I could carry six grocery bags from my car into my apartment building and up six floors without wanting to kill myself. All this from one class a week. Slow and steady. Consistent. I hadn’t even changed my eating habits. I tried to sprinkle in other workouts when I could – Zumba, an occasional extra evening class – but these were sporadic. No, Saturday mornings at 9:30 I could commit to, and I told myself that if I did only that, it was enough. The rest would take care of itself. And it did.

We cycle through the rest of our arm routine (biceps and triceps with the handled band) and then move to the barre. We always begin with pliés. Marla walks around the room, checking form. When she gets to me, she kicks a foot underneath my heel to take it a notch higher. “You should be shaking right now,” she says as we move into our third set, and I am. Sweat is pouring off me, pooling in places that make it look like I am peeing myself. We pulse it out, burn it out. Just when I think my legs might buckle beneath me, we’re done.

People who’ve never taken barre are surprised at just how intense it is. After all, no one is running around the room or throwing down twenty pound weights. I once dragged my friend Dee with me. Dee regularly runs marathons. Halfway through class, I saw her brunette head duck out the door, and when class let out, I had a text from her saying she was “alternately sitting in a bathtub of ice and lying down with the heating pad.” I remember being surprised, not because I didn’t think the class was hard, but because Dee had always been in better shape than I was. Plus, she was tough in a way I couldn’t compete with. 26.2 miles requires a mental fortitude I can’t even imagine. Later, she told me that she hurt for a week in places she didn’t know existed. But now I know a week is nothing. Try six months. 

We are standing on our left legs now, right legs extended out behind us, arms resting lightly on the barre, unless you are like me and leaning a quarter of your body weight against it. I’ve never liked this exercise. I have a hard time keeping my hips square. I try to focus on the muscle just under my right butt cheek as I slowly raise and lower my right leg to the ground, but I’m already burning. My pelvis twists, and Marla comes over and adjusts me so that my right hip faces the floor once again. I try to take my mind off how much it hurts. I picture what the bone must look like, a round knob, and mentally draw a smiley face on it. Say hi to the floor, Mr. Knob. We start the second set, and I pretend they are two lovers in love, Mr. Knob who cannot take his eyes off Mr. Floor. Through my labored breathing, I chuckle. This is a recently acquired habit, this naming of inanimate objects, and I’m not very creative with it. They are always mister whatever-they-are. It started out of sheer terror, looking at the needle full of egg-churning hormones Greg held in his hand. Hello, Mr. Needle, I’d said, not knowing what to say, and Greg and I had laughed.

“Sixteen pulses, and you’re done!” 

Marla says this to encourage us, to make us keep going, but I know what is coming. I bring my right leg down for a few beats, gearing up for a little thing she calls “bonus Saturday.” I am not wrong. I take a breath and start again. That’s all Greg and I seem to do lately, start again. I thought it would have worked by now. And I guess, technically it did work, this last time. I got pregnant. But getting pregnant doesn’t count as success. I mean, it’s better than not getting pregnant, but it’s like getting possession in a football game. You still have to go all the way downfield.

We finish the bonus set, and I cross my right ankle over my left knee to sit back into a figure four stretch. The second leg always hurts worse than the first one, and I don’t know how I will make it through. I need something to focus on – anything, anything other than the pain. I get into position and decide that after class, I am going to go to TJ Maxx and reward myself with a new workout top, one not so Lycra-y, one that doesn’t outline my there-but-no-longer-there bump. Maybe the cool, free-flowing kind like Marla is wearing now where the top is stitched to the bra in only a few places so it’s all wrappy and drapey and pretty like a dancer’s. Marla has had four kids. Nope, that’s the wrong thing to think about. Think about something else, quickly. Think how this pain will be worth it, how your butt will look so good in a couple months. Ahh, yes, that’s it. Pulse it out. Let it burn.

We stretch the left side, and calves are next. For some reason, I am really good at relevés. We start with our feet turned out, calf muscles just kissing each other, and rise up on both legs. I make sure to extend my arches; that’s what gives you such a pretty, curvy silhouette back there, like the kind Betty Grable had in her pin-up photos with the seamed stockings. Maybe I should buy myself a pair of those, too.

When we pulse, the movements are tiny but effective. I lower my heels a quarter inch, then push back up, remembering the last class I took before I stopped coming last year. We’d done a bonus round, and my legs burned until the following Friday, the calf muscles doubling in size as though I were flexing when I was just sitting. They went back down, of course, and the pain went away, but I was putting myself through enough pain with the IVF, and I decided I didn’t need any more, even if it could make you look good in seamed stockings.

We switch to single legs, and I point my right toes behind me, pull the arch in to cut across my left calf. Marla asked me once if I’d been a dancer. No, I’d said. Not unless you counted classes at the Y when I was ten years old. At Marla’s studio, they offer toddler classes. Apparently it is never too early to start.

We move into the last set, feet together, and I think of what the specialist said, that we should have started sooner. Those were the first words out of her mouth when we sat down. Hi. Nice to meet you. You should have started sooner. I grit my teeth and push up, lengthening my arches until flames ripple down the backs of my calves. I had found myself wanting to explain, to apologize: I’m sorry. Sorry I didn’t meet Greg until I was thirty-two, sorry we dated for two years and were engaged for one, sorry we had the foolish idea to embrace a “whatever happens, happens” mentality after the wedding, sorry if I ever even once that first year felt the tiniest bit relieved when I saw that monthly red splotch in my underwear, sorry that I went back to not thinking about it the second year, sorry that we wasted another twelve months trying on our own before coming to see you, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. And when Marla yells, “Bonus Saturday!” I’m not annoyed, not at all, I’m raring to go, and Marla must sense this because she comes over and drops a foam block next to me so I hop on, line up my toes, the same movement only now I have greater range of motion, can give my heels farther to go, give my muscles a deeper workout.

By the end of the round I am shaking, quivering, calf muscles spasming. I straighten one leg behind me and lunge as far as I can while keeping my back heel on the ground, then I switch sides. Marla hasn’t called out the next position yet so I stretch both sides again, then reach for my water, trying to regain my breath. When I glance around though, I see that it’s not a respite granted out of the goodness of her heart. A small cluster of women have gathered around Ponytail, who is doubled over near the barre on the other side of the room, her blonde hair nearly brushing the floor. 

“I’m okay,” she calls to Marla, who has started to walk over. Then she says, sounding slightly embarrassed, “That time,” and heads nod in sympathy. One woman hobbles to the front of the room, digs in her purse, and brandishes an Advil bottle. 

“Has she eaten?” another one asks. “She shouldn’t take it on an empty stomach.” Ponytail’s ponytail bobs in affirmation, sweeping the floor, and Advil hobbles back with her bottle. 

“I’m sorry,” Ponytail says as Advil shakes out two tablets into Ponytail’s palm. “It came on all of a sudden.” 

“Should you keep going?” Has-She-Eaten asks, and I recognize her as Bonnie, the fit little grandmother who can do crunches for days.

“I’ll be okay. I can push through,” Ponytail says as she retakes her place.

We resume. The incident must have sobered Marla because she takes it easy on us: no more bonus sets. We finish our exercises at the barre, and then it’s time to lie down on our mats. Mr. Right Ankle, meet Mr. Left Kneecap, and with that I push up, pelvis lifting off the ground. Up and down, working that left hamstring gets a little boring after a while, and I need to keep my mind off the ache building in my leg, so I turn my head on the mat and flick my eyes around the room. There is Ponytail huffing away, locks splayed out above her head like bristles of a broom. Every once in a while she stops, hugs her knees to her chest. I try to think back to the moment when my period went from being an inconvenient afterthought like Ponytail’s to that thing we planned our lives around. Marla counts down the final set, tells us to stretch.

I switch legs, begin making introductions to the opposite sides of my anatomy. Two years ago. That was it. Standing in Target a week after our second anniversary, reaching for my usual box of 36-count Tampax and finding myself thinking, Wow, that seems like a lot. And then, with a smile, Maybe I won’t need them soon. Coming home to Greg mowing the lawn, baseball cap turned backwards, sweat glistening off his exposed arms. Deciding in the middle of the front yard that instead of letting whatever happen or not, we were going to make it happen. 

We were focused, goal-oriented. Finishing with a kiss and a high-five. Of course we could make it happen. But when a year went by and I was still buying Tampax (although I had downsized to the 16-count), we went to the doctor, who referred us to that specialist. Tests, tests, tests. First him, then me. The good news was, nothing was really wrong, at least outside of our ages. The bad news was, if something were actually wrong, there might have been something we could do about it. Something easier – and maybe less expensive – than what we were doing now. An operation, supplements. Something. 

I sigh and stretch out my right hamstring. Inner thighs are next, and I place the Pilates ring between my knees. This is a deceptively hard exercise. It’s easy to just bring your knees together, but the movement needs to come from the muscle. I focus on trying to make the foam handles touch. 

Marla takes us up to double-time, and my legs shake as I try to keep up. “Pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse!” she shouts. “16 more, and we’re done!” Then, “I lied, 32 more!”  

I groan and let my knees fall apart, resting a minute. When there are eight more left, I pick up again. I can do eight more. I can see the finish line.

We are almost done now. All we have left is core work, then we cool down. Marla calls out a modification “if you’re pregnant or have lower back pain.” I’ve seen women who are pregnant take this class before, but today no one is, at least not that I can tell, and I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting them, even when they aren’t showing per se. Marla must see me struggling because she calls out another modification, “if you have weak abdominals.” Yep, that’s me. I’m not overweight, despite the fact that I haven’t worked out in months, despite the – I can’t rightfully call it baby weight, let’s say hormonal weight – but I have so little ab strength it’s astounding even to me, and after a minute, I decide to just sit this one out. I put one hand on the small curve of my lower stomach and breathe, my lungs hollowing out the way my belly did six months ago. Oh god, don’t think about that; don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry. But one tear escapes, rolls down my cheek to mingle with the beads of sweat, and it’s a strange relief to just lie here and let it. Everyone has their eyes glued up to the ceiling, crunching away. 

The music changes, slows, becomes soft and comforting, like the hug we give ourselves as we pull our knees in toward our chests. I could stay in this position forever. 

But it’s time to move. We sit up and splay our legs apart. I can’t get mine very far from each other, the tightness like an elastic band pulled back with nowhere to go. We stretch to each side, then bring our legs back together and slowly rise up, clapping for ourselves and each other. 

On rubbery legs I make my way over to the bench. There is a line of women in the hallway, waiting for the adult ballet class to begin. I slowly put on socks and shoes, my big blue parka, as Jason Mraz reminds us to “Love Someone.” I’ll be sore until Wednesday, possibly all week. But that’s okay; the burn will pass; it’ll get easier, and when it does, I’ll be glad I pushed through.

I hold the door for Ponytail on my way out. 

“See you next week,” I say.

About the Author:

The Children | Adeline Lovell

Caroline’s sister calls her, which is immediately concerning. Usually, their relationship is relegated to texting once every few weeks and a cheap dinner out during Caroline’s annual visit home. Caroline almost lets it ring, then realizes if she is calling like this it might be an emergency so she picks up. 

“Brittany?” she says, realizing a moment later that she sounds cold in her surprise. “Everything okay?” 

“Hey, Caro,” says Brittany. “Yeah, of course everything’s okay. I’m in the city, though.” “In New York?” 

“Uh, yeah.” 

“Why?” Caroline flinches, ashamed of herself. She cannot help it. 

“I just thought I’d come down for the weekend.” Her voice is airy and nonchalant, but Caroline does not miss the thrum of disappointment. For a moment she truly and completely despises herself. “Are you… are you doing anything tonight?” 

“Um,” Caroline says, delaying. “I was gonna have dinner with Hannah. But… but we’d love for you to come, if you wanted to.” Even she is aware of the flimsiness in the offer, the lack of enthusiasm that must sound hateful. Christ, what is wrong with her? “Please, come. We’d love to see you.” 

“Okay,” says Brittany, a little more chipper. “Sure. Thanks. Where were you guys gonna go?” 

“We’ll come to you,” says Caroline quickly, not wanting to bring Brittany to her neighborhood, to restaurants where she knows the staff, and into their home where they have cash

and valuables. And besides, she wouldn’t know how to use the subway, so she’d take a Lyft and then ask Caroline to cover for it. “Where are you?” 

“Um,” Brittany says. “In Manhattan. Near Bleecker Street? Hang on, I’ll drop my location.” 

Caroline waits, gritting her teeth against her impatience. She’s seeing her therapist the day after tomorrow, and they will no doubt discuss this whole night in extreme detail, and Dr. Turner will make her feel less guilty about being such a bitch, instead calling it boundary setting or something. 

The pin comes through. Brittany is indeed near Bleecker Street. 

“Okay,” says Caroline. “Wanna meet at Washington Square Park?” 

“Sure,” says Brittany. “Where’s that?” 

“Check your map,” Caroline says. Then, gentler, “See you soon. I’m happy you’re here.” — 

She calls Hannah after that. “Hey, babe,” she says when Hannah picks up. “Um. Brittany just called me and told me she’s in town.” 

“Oh,” Hannah says. “Okay. We should probably see her, right?” 

“You don’t have to,” Caroline tells her. “But, um, I should.” 

“No, I’ll do whatever. Should we invite her over?” 

“No, no. I told her we’d meet her for dinner at Washington Square Park.” “Sure. I’ll make us a reservation somewhere there.” 

Flooded with relief, Caroline says, “Okay. Fuck. God, she sprung this on me so fast.” 

“It’s alright, honey,” says Hannah. “It’s just dinner.” Even after being married to her for four years, Caroline cannot tell if Hannah’s tolerance for her in-laws is real or faked for

Caroline’s benefit. Hannah is one of the warmest people Caroline has ever known, but everyone has their limits. 

“Maybe it’ll be nice.” 

That, Caroline knows is a lie, but she is appreciative. Hannah, at least, will dilute some of the acidity. 

“Thanks, babe,” she says. “Text me where.” 

“Will do. Love you.” 

“You, too. Hey, feeling okay?” 

“Yep! Totally. I’ll see you tonight.” 

— 

They meet up in the park. She sees Brittany right away, sitting on a bench, watching a busker perform with wide eyes. Brittany always manages to look out of place, her body perched unnaturally, like she thinks she’s being scouted for a model agency for women who look their age with the exception of teenage crooked teeth and a smattering of chin acne. 

God, you’re mean, Caroline tells herself. She feels particularly awful when Brittany sees her and looks delighted. She leaps to her feet and waves, the movements exaggerated. Caroline lifts a hand. When Brittany reaches her, Caroline is surprised by how tightly Brittany hugs her. It makes something twist in her chest, hard and fast. 

Brittany looks good, as far as good can go for anyone in her family. She has let her hair go brown again, the awful, juvenile bleach-blonde look finally retired, and she has gained a little weight, but she looks healthier than the addict-skinny she had been. 

“I’m so happy to see you,” Brittany says. As they’re walking, she links her arm with Caroline’s, and Caroline makes an active effort not to pull away. She just hates forced affection, is all, and they’re a little old to be walking around like that. 

“Me, too,” Caroline says. “I can’t believe you’re here, did you drive?”

“Nah. Took the Greyhound. It was long as shit, but it only cost, like, forty, round-trip.” Caroline is about to ask when her return bus is when Brittany spots Hannah and gives her the same exaggerated wave like they are all much closer than they really are. 

Hannah picked a nice Mexican restaurant, and it is a relief to sit down and busy themselves with the extensive menu. Brittany drinks two mojitos, which Caroline has to tell herself not to judge. She’s twenty-seven years old and, anyway, it’s not like the politics of letting someone else, even her sister, buy her dinner is really something she expects Brittany to understand. And, she supposes, you can be in recovery from drug addiction and still drink. But actually, she has no idea. 

She should know; she’d seen a bit of Brittany’s most recent decline into drugs. It was thirteen months ago, the last time she’d been home. As she’d gotten further upstate, the leaves around her car began to turn the colors of an enormous, harmless blaze. She drove a little over the speed limit, oranges and reds pressing her in, and a little mass of anxiety began to calcify in her stomach as she drew closer. When she was ten minutes from her neighborhood she’d pulled over and bawled. Her dread was not without reason. Brittany was living at home with their mom, but Caroline didn’t know who to worry about more. Her father and Brittany were the gentlest ones in the family. He tolerated her vulnerabilities more than anyone else and in return, she tried to resist her tendencies toward self-destructiveness. Caroline usually relegated her visits home to once a year, but her father had been dead for three months and Becca had called her, half-begging her to come home for a few days and convince Brittany to go back to rehab. 

“If you come,” Becca, her oldest sister, had said, “she’ll know it’s serious.” Caroline heard the bitterness, the quiet implication that she only made herself present for emergencies. She almost suggested a

formal intervention, but she realized they would probably have to get her brother involved for that and that was the last thing anyone needed, especially Brittany. 

When she arrived home, only her mom was there. Caroline had told her she was coming, and when she’d opened their permanently unlocked front door and stepped into the living room, she hadn’t even stood up. 

“Hey,” her mom said. “Nice of you to come.” 

“Mom,” said Caroline. She pinched the bridge of her nose until the aggravation ebbed. “I was worried about you all.” 

“I’ll bet,” her mother replied. Then, a little softer, she added, “Well, the one you should be most worried about isn’t even here. Maybe you can pick her up.” 

“Where is she?” Caroline asked. 

“She’s been at a friend’s since last night. That skinny young man who took Becca to prom, with the neck tattoo, I think. They’ve been spending time together.” “I’ll go get her,” Caroline said. Relieved, shamefully, for the excuse not to stay in this small, small house a second longer. The smell of cheap cat litter was making her nauseous, and the chair her dad used to read the paper in sat discolored and mocking. 

She called Becca for the guy’s address and drove the ten minutes to get there. The house was a squat, one-story building with an American flag hanging over the front window. She knocked and got no answer, then let herself in. 

She was immediately dizzy with a sense of extreme pariahdom, like walking into a high school party full of people who hated her. The air was vile with all sorts of degrading human activity, and she could hear, faintly, something playing on a TV. She followed the sound to

find a small, dark room full of people in all states of intoxication, an episode of Breaking Bad unwatched on the television. 

“Caro!” Brittany shrilled. Caroline had to wait a moment for her eyes to adjust before she saw her sister. She was lying on a threadbare couch, her legs thrown over the arm, her head resting on the lap of a man who was so high he looked comatose. “Sit down!” 

“No thanks,” said Caroline shortly. “I came to get you, Brittany. C’mon.” 

Someone behind her snickered, and Caroline turned. A man lay there, topless, his leer shameless. She became aware that this was not only a disgusting room, but a dangerous one, and the desire to get herself and Brittany out of there angled towards desperation. 

“I’m good,” said Brittany. She patted the couch lightly to make her point. 

“I need your help with something,” Caroline snapped. Her patience was non-existent. She felt a humiliating little quiver in her hands. 

“C’mon, Brittany. We have to go.” 

Brittany laughed, the sound high and mean. “I should probably go, guys,” she said to no one in particular. “Caro’s never in town. Can’t let her fancy writer friends think she’d give us white trash the time of day.” 

“Now,” Caroline said, her face and voice impassive. Brittany began to drag herself up, one limb at a time. 

“Your sister’s hot,” said a man sitting on the floor, who could not have been younger than thirty. Caroline could not be bothered to even scoff at him. 

“She’s gay,” Brittany told him, and there were a few whistles and jeers from the men. 

The faint sense of a threat rang through Caroline again, and she snapped, “We’re going.” As she turned away, Brittany stumbling along with her, a bout of hysterical laughter rose from the remaining group.

Caroline didn’t speak in the car. Not because she was worried she would scream, although she was, but because there was a slight tremor all throughout her body and she didn’t trust herself to drive well while shouting at her sister. She bit the inside of her cheek to prevent herself from glaring at all of Brittany’s dramatic movements from the passenger seat, the way she was rolling her head back like an imitation of an actress in a porno. She reached towards the radio, and Caroline caught a flash of track marks up her arms. When she turned it on, Xanadu filled the car, and Brittany giggled and closed her eyes, swaying a little. 

“Fucking turn it off,” Caroline said. She kept her eyes on the road while Brittany looked her over, then silenced the music. 

“Why are you so mad at me?” Brittany asked, her voice high and whiny. 

“Is that a real question?” She swallowed against the bitterness in her voice. Reasoning with Brittany right then would have been like reasoning with an exhausted toddler. 

“I didn’t ask you to come,” Brittany said.

 She looked freakishly thin, Caroline thought, the pale streetlights deepening the bags under her eyes. 

“You’re such a fucking control freak. How can Hannah stand you?” When Caroline didn’t respond, she added, “You think you’re gonna stop me from doing what I’m gonna do?” 

They had reached the house; Caroline turned the car off, and darkness fell over them save for a small white rectangle from their living room window. 

“If you’re gonna kill yourself on drugs,” she said, “do it. But mom will kill herself, and Becca will blame herself, and I’ll never fucking recover because my baby sister will overdose in a house full of illiterate pieces of shit when we all tried to fucking help her. So as long as you make peace with that, I’m not going to drive five hours and pick you up from places like that anymore.”

Brittany unbuckled herself and slunk out of the passenger seat and into her room where Caroline was sure, she drugged herself up again. Caroline stuck around another thirty-six hours. She grocery-shopped for her mom and bought dinner for Becca and her husband and hired a cleaning lady to come to the house the next week after she left. When she left, Brittany was not there to say goodbye. She arrived home late, said hello to her wife, and made herself a gin and tonic. 

“You think she’s gonna get herself together?” Hannah asked when Caroline joined her in the living room. 

She sank beside Hannah on the couch and took a long sip of her drink. “I can’t help everyone,” she finally said weakly. 

You don’t help anyone, she thought and threw back another swig. 

Two days later, Becca called Caroline to tell her Brittany had checked herself into rehab. 

“I guess whatever you said to her helped,” Becca told her, almost reluctantly. Then she said, “Um, her insurance doesn’t—” 

“I got it,” Caroline said, “I’ll write the check.” It was a relief, actually, to be asked for money that time. It was the one thing she knew she could provide. 

Brittany looks mostly okay, Caroline decides, throughout dinner. The three of them sit in a booth, Caroline and Hannah on one side. Occasionally, Hannah will brush her foot against Caroline’s calf. 

Caroline uses their time together to gain some insight into her family. Brittany is the only one of them who will not answer these questions with quips about how she should be more involved with them. “I talked to Mom a few days ago,” Caroline starts, her voice light. “She didn’t sound so good.”

Brittany momentarily stops trying to bend her paper straw into something functional. “God, yeah. She’s… yeah. If you even bring Dad up, she just—” Brittany brings her hand up and mimes tears pouring down her face. Their father has been dead for a year and a half, and their mother has taken it hard. “Becca does a lot of the cooking for her, and I do grocery shopping, and I know you’ve been sending money, so thanks. And so does Martin.” 

Caroline rolls her eyes. “How’s our dear brother?” 

“A pain in my fucking ass. Excuse me,” Brittany says hastily to Hannah as if Hannah will be inexplicably offended by bad language. Hannah smiles indulgently. “He’s fucking always calling me and Becca and telling us that we’re not taking good care of Mom, that we should do more for her. You know what he did? He bought her a fucking iPhone eleven. A seventy-two-year-old woman. Like that’s what she needs.” She scoffs, but her eyes glitter with real hate. Caroline feels for her. 

“I’m sorry you’re dealing with that,” Caroline tells her. Hannah nods in agreement, her face appropriately sympathetic. 

“Have you heard from him?” Brittany asks her. 

“Not for a while,” Caroline replies. 

The last interaction she’d had with him had been a long, convoluted text telling her what an awful daughter and sister she was. It had been sent at four in the morning and included sentences like I hope the Brooklyn key parties were worth missing the last few years of your dad’s life and It’s insane on so many levels that they’re keeping you in the will. Caroline had never even heard anyone use the phrase ‘key party’ until that text. 

“Has he been saying what a bad daughter I am?”

Brittany shrugs, which Caroline interprets as a yes. “I gotta pee,” she says suddenly. Caroline looks at the empty glasses, the bottoms clotted with wet mint, and is unsurprised. “Breaking the seal,” Brittany giggles. She stands, steadying herself with the table. 

“No one has said ‘breaking the seal’ since sophomore year of college,” Caroline says to Hannah, once Brittany is out of earshot. Hannah gives her hand a squeeze. 

“Babe,” she says, “I might head home. My back is fucking killing me.” 

For the first time all evening, Caroline really looks at her wife, and realizes she is a little wan.

“Oh, god, of course,” Caroline says. “Everything—everything’s okay, right?” She touches Hannah’s stomach gently. Under her cable knit sweater, the little swell is invisible. 

“Yeah, nothing feels unusual. I’m just beat.” 

Caroline nods, kisses her, and says, “I don’t think I’ll be long.” 

Brittany returns, a little steadier on her feet, sliding back into the booth with surprising grace. 

“Hannah’s gotta go,” Caroline tells her. She tries, momentarily, to find a way to leave with her, but she cannot construct a justification for leaving Brittany alone in the West Village, two mojitos in. 

“I’ve got an early day tomorrow,” Hannah says, apologetic. “Brittany, it was so lovely to see you. I’m so happy we did this.” 

When Caroline had introduced Hannah to her family, all they could talk about, even more than her being a woman, was her being British. She watches Brittany grin at the apparent inherent sophistication in everything she says as Hannah hugs her briefly. 

“Thanks for dinner.” Brittany gestures to the remains of the meal. “See you soon.”

Perhaps, thinks Caroline, she is reading too much into it. People say ‘see you soon’ even when they have no plans to see each other soon or at any point. If she expected to crash with them, she would have said, ‘see you tonight.’ 

It’s not that they don’t have the room, or like Brittany is a particularly egregious houseguest. It’s just that Caroline pictures the whole rest of the night with her sister, and breakfast tomorrow, and helping her find her way to Port Authority, and feels instantly exhausted. The labor of it seems so extreme that she almost cannot imagine herself having completed it, the day rolling by without her sister there. She does not know how she made it so long, living at home. Everything seems less bearable on the other side of it. 

Caroline pays right after Hannah departs. Brittany thanks her again. Caroline had not been drinking in solidarity with Hannah, but she really wishes she had let her wife bear the misery of a sober evening out with her in-law alone. Caroline could have had one drink, she thinks regrettably. Even the placebo effect of alcohol would have calmed her a little. She does not know why this feels so unbearable, her sister’s presence and nowhere to go, the music and chatter in the restaurant suddenly assaultive. 

“Dessert?” Brittany says. “There’s gotta be ice cream around here, right?” “Sure,” says Caroline. 

It is still early spring, and ice cream at this time of night isn’t entirely enjoyable. But they buy it from a place right next to the park and sit on the steps of the NYU law library, looking out at Washington Square Park. When their knees bump, it’s uncomfortable, like sitting beside a stranger on an airplane and having to pull away before continuing to invade their space.

Brittany doesn’t talk while she eats, and Caroline realizes Brittany has driven almost all of the conversation so far. She clears her throat and says, “So, how’s work?” Work, for Brittany, is a Goodwill sandwiched between a closed sex store and a smoothie joint. 

Brittany does not answer right away. She circles her spoon around the rim of the cup, gathers her cookies and cream, and licks it off in a way that almost looks sexual. Caroline cringes. 

Flatly, Brittany says, “So you’re really not gonna ask me why I’m here, huh?” Vague shame flushes Caroline. “What?” 

“Obviously I didn’t take a fucking Greyhound six hours to go to M and M world.” Caroline laughs weakly, but Brittany isn’t smiling. “Well, how was I supposed to know?” Caroline says, annoyed. 

Brittany scowls. “Right, why would you even consider anything I’m doing.” 

“Britt,” says Caroline, hurt even though she can’t begrudge her sister the reaction. “Okay. So, why are you here?” 

She scoops another spoonful of ice cream, the same complete circle around the bowl. She does not lift it to her mouth. “I got an abortion this morning.” 

“Oh,” says Caroline. Indifferent, overdoing the nonchalance, like she’d been told Brittany got a new sweater. “Oh,” she says again. “Um. How are you feeling?” 

She shrugs. “Like fucking shit. But I took Advil and that helped.” She makes an unattractive puckering noise with her tongue that Caroline tries not to flinch at. “You know they told me to go home and rest. But I wanted to see you.” 

Caroline, unsure what else to do, squeezes her sister’s shoulder. She wishes she were not so cold, she wishes she could pull Brittany into her arms without flinching. Brittany has always

seemed so vulnerable in a way that only the youngest child can, and Caroline has had to fight against her repulsion at it. She was always a terrible protector of her sister and the shame of that overwhelms her in a way it hasn’t in a long time. 

When Caroline was twenty-one and Brittany was seventeen, Brittany had a boyfriend named Jimmy. Caroline had been home from college, sulking. She hated coming home, but the lease for the apartment near campus that she was renting with friends did not start for a week. 

Her family already detested her enough for having left them to go to a college so far away, an Ivy League at that, full of rich kids studying things like philosophy and art history who would become Caroline’s good friends. 

Her parents and siblings were all rooting for her to fail, at least a little bit. It would have humbled her: Caro, who has always thought she was better than everyone around her, leaving to study English, changing her name to Caroline. The prodigal daughter returned. She didn’t even mind. She held onto that, especially at the beginning, when she was neck-deep in her fear of everyone else at Yale knowing just by looking at her that she’d once lived in a trailer and had never been on a plane and had aborted the quarterback’s baby weeks before he was declared brain dead in a drunk driving accident, a pretty standard occurrence in her town. So she thought about the other almost-success stories turned into cautionary tales, the gym teacher who had once looked like she might make it to the Olympics for skiing before flunking out of her scholarship and the Target general manager who had moved out to Silicon Valley to start a business with people he met online only to have a nervous breakdown and move back in with his mom. She thought of her sister Becca, three years older than she was and married to the most boring man in the world, pregnant with his baby and still working twelve-hour shifts as a waitress, and her brother, selling insurance over the phone, his anger that this was his life glittering off of him. She thought of her father, who worked for a moving company and hardly spoke, carrying the quiet disappointment of his life so heavily that he started to stoop at age forty, and her mother, coming home from her lunch lady job to read paperback romance novels and heat up meatloaf for children who barely acknowledged her. She revered these people. She thought of them all the time. They all thought she had betrayed them, that she was cold and elitist and cruel, so she leaned into that, she held them up as examples for the worst possible outcomes and it worked. The revulsion that grew around her like a cocoon protected her as she moved forward. She started essays the day they were assigned and got a job working nights in the library so she had an excuse not to party and put all the money she made immediately into savings. She was about to be a senior and graduate with honors and, if the internship she had this summer went the way she hoped and hired her, move to New York to work at a publishing house. 

The mutual disgust between her and her family had folded on itself into something enormous and quivering with a life of its own, pushing in between them even when a conversation with the potential to be pleasant began. “Can I help with dinner?” Caroline would ask, and her mother would say, “Oh, my cooking isn’t too trashy for you?” and Caroline would leave the room. Becca would say, “Caro, let’s go out now that you can get into bars,” and Caroline would have to grit her teeth against unmitigated disgust at the thought of going out and watching her sister get trashed while her husband laughed at her and guys she went to high school with leered at her while nursing their activism. No one could stand to have her home and she couldn’t stand to be there. 

But that week, she was. Her mother was making passive-aggressive comments about leaving, how she would be gone again next week, and all they had in the way of sustenance that adhered to her vegetarianism was Triscuits, American cheese, vanilla Oreos, and Rolling Rocks.

Brittany was still a kid and had not yet grown into the resentment her older siblings and parents harbored. Caroline hoped that perhaps she would be able to go to college and get out of there too. Definitely not Yale with her grades, probably not anywhere too competitive, but the state schools weren’t bad—she could become a teacher, maybe even a nurse or a paralegal if she worked hard. Caroline wanted this for Brittany, but not badly enough that she could put energy into convincing her. She had gotten this far by putting herself first. She could not dedicate anything to her family without risking being swallowed by them, chewed up in the manner that they all did to one another. They lived too close to each other; it was like being in an airless cell with someone, recycling the same air until they were being sustained only on toxic gasps. She would not be discarded by them in this shithole town to make minimum wage and drive into Syracuse if she wanted to meet other gay women. 

“Caro,” Brittany said, materializing in the kitchen, where Caroline was debating making a grilled cheese. She was startled out of her bitterness. “Come get a Mcflurry with me.” Because the options were that or listening to Fox News from the living room, she had. Brittany had gotten her license since the last time Caroline had been home, and it felt strange to sit next to her sister in the passenger seat. Brittany was playing The Dixie Chicks. Caroline watched familiar storefronts roll by, greyer and sadder than they’d seemed when she lived here. Half of them had been shuttered since she’d last visited. The car rose over a small hill; they were getting to the obligatory small-town stretch of corporate stores. She used to find them kind of dazzling, a clean, predictable world of neon lights, a dome of every object and food and service anyone could need from birth to death, improbably pretty when the sunset turned the sky to a creamsicle color and bright, familiar signs burned underneath the blaze. It depressed her this time.

Brittany drove past Mcdonald’s, and Caroline said, “You missed it.” Brittany didn’t say anything. “Britt,” Caroline said, annoyed, “are you paying attention?” 

“I gotta go to CVS first,” said Brittany. 

“Okay,” Caroline said, “what for?” 

Brittany turned into the parking lot, a little haphazardly: the car had a momentary suspension in what felt like an arc. Caroline held the dashboard. 

“Caro,” said Brittany, once she’d parked, “can I borrow thirty bucks?” 

“What? Why?” 

Brittany checked her appearance in the rearview mirror and applied chapstick. “Morning-after pill.” 

“What?” said Caroline, briefly slipping into the prudishness of an old maid. “Are you kidding me?” 

Brittany rolled her eyes. “No. Please?” 

“Brittany,” Caroline said tartly. “Jesus, you have to use protection.” 

“I know, I know. Can we talk about this after? I do want those McFlurries.” Caroline retrieved thirty bucks from her wallet, handed them over, and watched her baby sister flounce inside. She lowered her head and pinched the bridge of her nose until Brittany returned, plastic bag in hand. 

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll get your milkshake.” Caroline nodded dumbly. Brittany opened the pink box, popped the pill out of its foil, and downed it with a final slug of an old can of root beer that was sitting in her car, getting flat and warm. Caroline thought how much packaging those brands wasted for one fucking pill.

“Alright,” Brittany said like she had just finished a particularly inconvenient chore. “Flurries.” 

Caroline ended up paying for those too. They sat in Brittany’s car, the sky turning the clementine color that made Caroline want to cry, inexplicably, the storefronts threaded in gold. It could almost look pretty here. They ate in silence for a few minutes. 

“You do need to use protection,” said Caroline finally. She sounded so old. “Jimmy won’t.” Brittany shrugged. 

“What do you mean he won’t? Like it doesn’t fucking feel good?” She huffed out a sneer. 

Brittany shook her head. “Not that.” She smirked like she was holding onto a juicy, slightly amusing piece of information and debating whether to share it. “Alright. He wants me to get pregnant.” 

Caroline gave Brittany a humorless snort. 

“I’m dead fucking serious,” Brittany said. “He wants my baby.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows just a bit, like, can you believe someone is so crazy for me? 

Caroline had the momentary sensation of being held under cold water. “What?” “He thinks if I get pregnant, I’ll have to marry him.” 

Dread coiled in Caroline’s chest. “So—So—you tell him to wear a condom, he says he doesn’t want to, and you guys laugh and have unprotected sex?” 

“Pretty much,” Brittany said. “He kisses my stomach after, can you believe that?” Caroline closed her eyes. Vertigo was closing in on her. “How long has this been going on?” 

“‘Bout two months.” Brittany studied her and clocked, apparently for the first time, the blatant horror on her face. “It’s no big deal, Caro. Really. Normally I just steal the pills, but I figured you wouldn’t approve of that. I’m not gonna get knocked up.”

“Brittany,” Caroline said. “That’s rape.” 

Brittany let out a little snort of air. “It’s not. I like having sex with him.” She smirked again. 

Caroline, her voice splintering at its edges, said, “If he’s trying to get you pregnant against your will, and refusing to wear a condom, that actually is rape.” 

Brittany gave her a long, pitying look. “Caro,” she said, “Jimmy isn’t, like, abusing me. He wouldn’t have the balls. The reason he does that is ‘cause I’m out of his league and he knows it. Believe me, he’s a sweet guy.” Caroline was taken aback by the condescension in her voice. 

“I’ll kill him,” she said, hearing the melodrama in her voice. Everything, through her rage, was tinged white on the edges. 

“Oh, my god. It’s not a big deal. I’d never have brought it up if I knew you were gonna freak out about it.” Caroline felt out of control; she wanted to howl. “Nevermind. Drop it. Forget I said anything.” 

Caroline had told Martin. Together, they’d waited for fucking Jimmy after his lacrosse practice, kicked the shit out of him, and Martin had said, “If you ever get near my sister again I’ll have you in jail where you’ll be the one getting knocked up.” Not his smoothest, but Caroline appreciated the sentiment, and it got across. They had driven home together in Martin’s car and stopped at the Seven-Eleven along the way to pick up sodas. 

“You think he’ll leave her alone?” Martin asked her, as he pulled in front of their parent’s house to drop her off. 

“Yeah,” Caroline said. “Thanks for doing that with me.”

“Thanks for telling me.” They smiled at each other, uncomfortable, and then she stepped out of the car. It was the closest she’d ever felt to her brother, and the last time she would feel that way. 

Now, Brittany looks smaller than she had at seventeen, her edges sanded down, as vulnerable as she has ever been with Caroline. Caroline wishes they were somewhere else. The steps of a law school building seem so trite for this conversation, and not private enough. In a thirty-foot radius from where they sit, homeless men are asleep on the benches, 17-year-olds blow smoke rings, holding blunts with acrylic nails, and a young couple on an early date sits at the fountain, facing each other shyly. 

“Who’s was it?” Caroline asks her quietly. 

Brittany examines her nails. They are short and unpainted. “I’ve been seeing this guy. His name’s Aaron. He teaches history.” She snorts, self-deprecating, or maybe mocking towards Aaron for the appalling crime of teaching history. 

“Did he know?” 

“No. God, no. He’s too—he’s really nice, you know? He’s like, the first nice guy I’ve ever gone out with. He’s annoying about it sometimes. I told him my favorite show was This is Us, and on our next date he told me he’d started watching it.” Brittany shakes her head. Caroline thinks that sounds very nice and normal. “I was like, ‘you don’t have to be me.’”

“You said that?” Caroline says, startled. 

“Yeah.” 

They look at each other and burst out laughing, uninhibited. Caroline is wiping tears from her eyes by the time she manages, “Brittany, god, you’re harsh.”

Brittany grins. “I know, I know. But like, I could tell he wants us to like, send each other good morning texts and go to bed and breakfasts and all that crap. And like, I don’t know. Sure, that’d be nice, but we have nothing in common.” 

Caroline grimaces. They both go quiet while a group of young drunk people pass them, shrieking with laughter like no inside joke has ever possibly been as funny as theirs. “Wait,” Caroline says, “how come you came all the way down for the… to do it? The laws are the same up there, right?” 

“I know, like, at least two girls who work at the Planned Parenthood up there,” Brittany says. “I didn’t need that.” 

Caroline nods, unsurprised. She has never missed that at home, the incestuousness of tiny towns, the way she could not turn anywhere without being assaulted by the gossip of others. 

“Um, and honestly, I kind of wanted to talk to you.” Brittany presses her palms together as she says this. “I, uh—people are weird about this shit, you know? I mean, obviously.” 

“Yeah,” says Caroline. “I got an abortion my senior year of high school,” she says. She’s going for empathy, but it feels stilted and forced. It’s like she’s telling her they saw the same movie last week. 

Brittany says, “I wondered if you were gonna tell me that.” 

A cold thrum passes through her. “You knew?” 

“I found the paperwork in your dresser drawer a couple months after you left to go to college. Dumb to leave that, by the way.” 

“Huh,” says Caroline. She remembers not knowing if she would need to hold onto that for medical records, and not wanting to bring it to Yale, where she was certain she would not only be a hick but a slut if anyone found out.

“Yeah.” She pauses. “Do you regret it?” 

“I don’t even think about it,” Caroline tells her truthfully. She had not even really thought about it then, certainly hadn’t grieved over it. It had been the baby of a boy who she hadn’t even liked. He wasn’t her boyfriend. They had sex at one of the only parties Caroline had ever been to in high school, and she can remember how badly it hurt, that she had pulled his hair so she didn’t scream. She didn’t even know yet that she didn’t want sex with any man, she just thought it was supposed to be clean pain, like the way exercise ached but felt good in the end. They didn’t make eye contact in school the next day. It literally had not crossed her mind to tell him she was pregnant until the Planned Parenthood lady asked her about the father. 

Six weeks later, he wrapped his car around a telephone pole driving home drunk after a party. Everyone whispered about it in school, more intrigued than devastated: he was a being kept alive by machines but he was a vegetable. When his family pulled the plug on him, Caroline signed the big banner that her school put up in the hallway and hardly ever thought about him again. When abortion comes up, in conversations with her lefty Brooklyn friends or in tweets from angry young women she respects, she almost never thinks of it as something that applies to her, although of course, it actually applies more to her than most. 

“Hannah’s pregnant,” Caroline says. “We’re having a baby.” She tells Brittany this, she reasons, because six months from now, Hannah will give birth and Brittany will wonder why Caroline left out this important detail on a night they spent talking about pregnancies. 

Brittany snaps her head up. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, wow.” Then she bursts into tears. 

“I’m sorry,” Caroline says, bewildered. “I didn’t—sorry.” She flushes, disgusted with herself. She feels close to tears too. She is respected, people send her their manuscripts and beg

her to tell them how to improve their language, and right now she cannot say anything that does not pour gasoline on this flammable situation. 

Brittany shakes her head. She sniffles loudly, and drags the back of her hand under her eyes. It’s like watching a little kid cry. Caroline fights improbable annoyance. She takes her sister’s hand, winces at the moisture. 

“It’s gonna be okay, Brittany,” she says, the words sounding flimsy. Brittany nods, her face screwed up in grief. “Here, why don’t you come back to Brooklyn with me and spend the night?” Even as she’s talking, she finds herself mentally begging Brittany to decline. She’s exhausted. 

“Okay,” says Brittany, hiccupping. Caroline puts her hand between Brittany’s shoulder blades. They both sit still. 

— 

Caroline hopes, in spite of herself, that when she wakes in the morning Brittany will be gone, will maybe have washed the mugs of tea left in the sink the previous night. When she gets downstairs, Brittany has not even woken yet. 

She looks around her beautiful kitchen, light pouring in in buttery streaks, a vase of wildflowers sitting on the kitchen island. She is filled with inexplicable longing for her own life. She wants to distill it, drink it when she forgets her fortune, the fortune she made. Upstairs, her perfect wife is asleep in their large, soft bed. Their baby is the size of a plum. The one she aborted was only a few weeks smaller than the one she and Hannah have now, but she cannot muster any emotion for it beyond a collection of cells, a procedure as impersonal as a root canal. She is grateful to whatever it is in her that allows that, her own emotional stuntedness, perhaps.

Brittany’s presence in her home, in the light of day, feels oppressive, a wine stain on a cashmere sweater. She winces at this reaction, but she cannot banish it. She wants her life to herself again. She is so unspeakably angry at her sister for showing up here in her life full of pleasures and making her think about unwanted pregnancies and siblings who resent her and a mother she never calls. An ache swells behind her eyes. 

Caroline is making coffee and steeping in her anger when Brittany emerges. She looks like a teenager stumbling out of bed at noon. “Hey,” she says, and Caroline says, “Hi.” “Coffee?” Caroline adds, after a moment. Brittany nods. 

Brittany piles hers with cream and sugar. Caroline adds almond milk to hers. They sit across from each other, quiet. 

“Thanks for last night,” Brittany finally says. “Sorry I freaked out.” 

This thaws Caroline some. She says, “Yeah, ‘course.” 

Brittany takes a swig of coffee. Caroline remembers to ask how she feels. “Okay,” she says, “better.” 

“Good.” 

Brittany watches her, her face full of expectation. Caroline busies herself with the dishes in the sink. “My bus ticket is for today at two. From Port something.” 

“Oh,” says Caroline, hoping the relief does not show through. “Okay. You know how to get to Port Authority? No, you don’t, sorry. It’s pretty easy from here.” 

“Cool,” says Brittany. 

“It was really nice to see you,” Caroline says. She feels like this morning will never end, like the hour will keep stretching itself forth and she will never have her kitchen to herself again. Her sister, her whole family, are their own fucking planets, bringing a gravitational field into

every space and dragging her, flailing, into it. She feels so ashamed, like the morning after a one night stand, wanting to shower and file away the evening in a far, strange corner of her memory. “Yeah,” Brittany says. “Maybe I’ll come back? After New Years, or something?” 

“Yeah,” says Caroline. “Maybe, yeah.”