We were working from home. You were set up in the spare room downstairs, and I was in the laundry room with a curtain obscuring the machines behind me. My floor was your ceiling, your ceiling my floor. As we worked, I could hear the rumble of your voice through the vent at my feet.
We’d been there well over a year, since the pandemic started. Your law firm closed its office first, methodically issuing laptops and software updates, and you began working from your basement lair. Then the nonprofit where I worked shut down overnight. I watered the cactus on my desk and took my laptop home to the laundry room. Finally I went and got the cactus, too. We sweated through one summer, and then another. It was September, a Friday. We were going out to dinner.
I was clicking away on my laptop when I heard your voice rise. I listened. The sound bounced against the sheet metal, growing louder, but no more coherent. No words, just emphatic rhythm. You sounded upset. I had put a pillow over the vent to block the noise, but I pushed it aside with my foot. I bent forward, listening. I still couldn’t make sense of the sound. Then, a few clear words. “I’ll tell her,” you said. I dropped to my knees, then onto the floor, my ear on the hard grill of the HVAC. It was humiliating but I desperately needed to know. Tell her what? But your voice fell, and the words dissolved into the echo of the vent.
I leaned back on my heels, banging my head hard on the underside of my desk. The pain radiated through my head. When it faded, there I was crouched under my desk with my face in my hands, wet with tears. I listened to the hum of my laptop fan, steady above me. I’ll tell her, you had said. I wondered, what comes next?
The curtain stirred and your footsteps sounded on the stairs. I wiped the tears away, climbed up onto my chair, and clicked my screen alive. I pulled up a grant application to stare at. Your head appeared around the curtain.
“I’m going running,” you said.
“But we’re going to dinner.”
“Yeah, I know. But I’m going running first.”
“I’ll come too,” I said.
I changed into my running gear and went out through the garage. There you were, stretching on the driveway. Your shorts were too short but in an endearing way. You didn’t mind being a decade out of style. And for me, the way your thigh muscles curved out of the flare of fabric worked just fine.
You smeared the sweat out of your eye with the flat of your hand and shoved your fingers up through your hair. It stood in a spiky black fringe for a second before flopping back onto your forehead. Your eyes were on mine for a second and I smiled back, but you twisted away, reaching around to stretch your quads. Your shoulder showed through your sweat-eaten t-shirt. “Fearless,” it said across your chest. I’d been trying to get you to throw that shirt away for ages.
As we set off past the pastel look-alike houses on our loop, turned onto the main road, and hit the rise of the hill, I listened to my heartbeat. It pounded in my ears as I followed you along the row of chestnut trees and toward the park. It seemed too loud. You were disappearing uphill. I was counting the weeks.
I admit I was the cranky one that summer. We had been locked outdoors because of the virus, locked indoors because of the wildfire smoke. But I give myself some credit for calling a timeout when the thermometer hit 115. We booked a motel and packed for the coast.
The sky turned from ochre to blue as we crested the mountains and left the smoke behind. Your phone buzzed angrily from your travel bag, but you ignored it. So did I. When we turned into the gravel courtyard of the motel and dumped our bags in the room, we didn’t mind the crust along the rim of the sink or the matted rug. I slapped on sunscreen. We headed outside.
The beach was a blissful refrigerator. Cool air rolled inland from a purple-gray fogbank that hovered above the shimmer of the ocean. We sat down on the sand and took off our shoes, not minding the wet, and walked across the ripples of packed sand to the surf. The waves arched, crashed, and then receded, leaving tiny stones rolling in their wake. The cold slurry sucked at the arches of our feet. I looked up and the flush of your face reflected the first time I met you, coming toward me with your bicycle on the law school commons, eager, fresh with expectation. “Come on,” I said, and we ran splashing through the shallows. Then, breathless, we sat down and looked past our splayed sandy toes into the ocean.
“Let’s not talk,” you said. “Not about us.”
I thought about the late nights, how you rushed past me down the stairs to your computer, the “special projects” that took you downtown even though your office was closed. Part of me wanted to twist you in the vise you’d made of our life, but when it came right down to it I didn’t want to talk then, either. I would rather ruin a different day. I shoved my heels into the sand and watched the water pool deeper around them.
“Okay,” I said. I thought of past trips to the beach, taking the ferry to the islands to jump off the hot rocks into the cold water of the sound. “Remember,” I said, “that trip we took when you first moved out here? The ferry?”
“Jumping over the gap? That was nuts,” you said.
“I didn’t know what to think,” I said. “Half of me was embarrassed, half of me was impressed. I didn’t know you well enough to be really worried about you.” I remembered waiting behind the landing barrier with our bikes. Suddenly you hopped over the rope and leapt over the churning water between the ferry and the shore. The ferrymen, standing ready to loop their ropes onto the landing posts, looked profoundly irritated. The passengers leaning over the railing above cheered. I kept my eyes on the ground as I rolled the bikes down the ramp and up the hill to meet you, but when I looked up and saw you, it was a light turning on. There you were. You were the one.
“You had to push both bikes,” you said.
I appreciated your remembering that.
The sun glinted across the wet sand when we turned to go back to the motel. The tide had shifted out over the flats. Beds of sand dollars, the same purplish color as the horizon, lay sideways-tipped, their tiny bristles glistening. A fleet of blue-sailed jellyfish sailed stranded in a puddle, trying to tack their way back to the ocean. I bent down to pick one up, but its body collapsed in my palm, and its little sail crumbled.
I followed you back through the sand dunes, the beachgrass slashing tiny stinging cuts on our saltwater legs, and into the motel. We dropped our clothes on the floor and stood together in the tepid water from the corroded showerhead and rinsed off the sand. The rays of light coming in under the curtains laid bands of warm light across the sheets. We fell into bed wet, spread eagled on the smooth sheets and then turned toward each other. Your hands on me were as rough and smooth and warm and cold as the beach. We lay afterwards and watched the sunset flicker on the curtains, my thigh across yours, your hand resting on the dip of my stomach, my breath slow and even until I was asleep.
I woke to the click of the bathroom door. There was a faint line of light under the threshold. The shadow of your feet moved forward, the light flicked off, and you settled heavily back into bed beside me. Your breathing slowed and deepened. The wash of the sea filled the night air with quiet sound. But I couldn’t drift off to sleep. My thoughts kept catching on something. Something small, insistent. I rolled onto my side, and my hip landed on a spot of damp. And then I knew. I had forgotten my birth control. I imagined myself pushing the pill through its packet, could feel the slight sharpness of the foil on my fingertip, and the tiny weight of the pill on my tongue before I swallowed, but I couldn’t make the memory real. I stepped out of bed and shuffled over to my bag. I could feel them with my fingertips in the dark, two extra pills in the packet, untaken.
It had never been a problem when I’d missed a pill before. Odds were it would be fine. But running up the hill after you, I remembered. My legs were leaden. There was a mass of nausea rising in my gut and my head ached. I tried for one last kick up the hill, but there was no kick to be had. I slogged up to where you waited at the top.
Your arms were lifted and twisting around your head. Your expression was intense and remote at the same time, like a hawk on a telephone pole focused on something small and far away. When I caught up with you, I leaned over, hands on knees, sucking in air. Your phone buzzed. You slid it out of your pocket and glanced at it before sliding it back.
“Work problem?” I asked. You kept turning your head, hiding your expression in the flash of your cheekbones and hair.
“Nothing,” you said.
“Anyone I know?” It wasn’t an honest question. I’d seen the name before. It was a yellow flash on the kitchen countertop, a blink from the nightstand in the dark. You were too disorganized to be truly secretive.
“No.” You resumed your stretching, your back to me, pushing your palms against a tree. “It’ll work itself out.”
“You think? Without calling you all the time?” I hadn’t intended my voice to be so sharp. The fatigue from the hill had crystalized into a sharp bright point above my left eye. “Sorry,” I said. “Just short of breath.”
You pushed back from the tree and looked at me. There was a divot between your brows. “What’s your problem?” you asked.
Your concern looked fake, the raised brows and tight lips. It wasn’t helpful, the way you said “problem.”
“I’ll be better on the downhill,” I said.
Back home, as we showered and dressed, we were close in the narrow bathroom. There was a force field between us that meant that as I reached for my towel, your arm retreated, when I passed the sink, you leaned forward, angling your razor to catch the little patch of stubble at the top of the line between your nose and lip. We were used to moving around each other. We had been working and living in the same space for so long. In the bedroom, I pulled on my shirt, slightly tight against my breasts, and bent down to step into my skirt. As my head came up again, tiny flashes of light rose and sparkled in front of me as the background dimmed to black. I sat on the bed, breathing slowly until the sparkles disappeared into the white walls. In the mirror opposite, my long pale face stared listless back at me. I slipped my feet into my sandals. At dinner, I thought. We could talk then.
You drove. I looked out the window and watched the houses go by, the trees along the tilted old sidewalks, crisped ferns, the moss burnt beige by the long summer. Soft billows of air brushed my face. Your face was intent on the curves, a little over the speed limit. It felt safe to have your attention on the road, not thinking of some other person less demanding than I am, someone brisk in an air-conditioned office, her fingertips tapping lightly over the surface of her phone. I laid my hand on the curve of my stomach, then removed it. I didn’t want to be dramatic. I reached my hand out the window and watched it hover in the airstream, up and down, up and down, as we made our way downtown.
You backed into a parking space. There was a crunching sound, and a flock of crows dropped at us from the tree above. I flinched.
“It’s the walnuts,” you said, and I saw that you were right. Nuts had fallen from the trees into the street, crushed by the passing cars. The birds were huddled around us, pecking at the exposed meats.
You pressed your fist against the steering wheel. The horn blasted into the quiet, prompting a storm of noise from the crows, who rose in angry unison and settled in ragged patches in the tree above us. A splurt of white excrement splattered on the windshield, and then another. “Let’s go to dinner,” I said.
We were in the restaurant, at a window table, when the noise started. The dim pock-pock sound of tear gas canisters echoed down the streets toward us. Then, distant shouting, and the wail of sirens.
“Our apologies for the disturbance,” the waiter said, leaning his neatly parted hair over our table. He set down a wedge of terrine, two little plates with pickles, and a miniscule ramekin of mustard, its grains glistening in the light of a stubby candle. He pulled back and stiffened his shoulders, drawing his forefinger along the line of his mustache. “We don’t expect any particular trouble tonight,” he said as he turned away.
This had been our place, back before we could really afford it, when we were saving to buy our house. Our dreams of the future were fueled by the food, the wine, the promise of the night to come. We had mocked the married couples we’d see at the small dark tables along the wall, sitting in tense silence, avoiding each other’s eyes.
I looked across at you, busy with your fork. You were attempting to spear a cornichon, but it kept slipping away. It bounced off your plate and into your lap. I looked up to laugh at it with you, but you picked it up, set it on the edge of your plate, inspected it, and bit it in half. You set the other half on your plate. You reached for more wine, not offering me any, I noticed.
I poured myself another inch of wine, took a sip, and leaned back into my chair. There in the window, above the glow of the squat little candle, our reflections brightened as the dusk settled outside. Your dark, angled profile, my pale face slightly flushed with the wine, the same as always. I might not be pregnant, after all, and for that matter maybe you weren’t in too much of a mess. Maybe I could be forgiving. As I finished up my glass of wine, a habitual fondness percolated up through the rubble of the day. I slipped off my right shoe beneath the table and felt for your foot. You moved your foot beneath mine. I looked up. I was going to tell you.
“Tony,” I started. You put down your wine. You moved your foot away, but I persisted, my eyes locked on yours. “I have—.” But you had turned to face the window. There was a sudden boom, shouting, people running past the window clutching at their faces. The restaurant was silent. We stared into the street. The waiters stood watching, frozen in place with their plates of food.
The stream of runners thickened into a dense confused mass, pushing forward, overflowing into side streets, shoving desperately at one another as they struggled for air. A group was coming toward our window, tears streaming from their eyes as they pulled scarves, sleeves, anything they could over their mouths.
I felt my own throat tighten. They were coming straight at the glass.
You jumped up and were at the door, pulling it open. A swirl of chemical air was followed by a man and two women. They sagged onto a bench at the entrance, sucking in short, panicked breaths. You slammed the door shut as the headwaiter came rushing forward.
“Only customers are allowed in the restaurant,” he said, bristling in his stout apron. His red face glistened through a furze of reddish beard. He paused a moment, then added his customary “sir.”
You glared at him. “They’re taking shelter here,” you said. You looked around the restaurant. “Anyone here object?” No one objected. Instead, one by one the guests sat back down. The waiters resumed delivering dinners and pouring wine. You made your way back to our table.
“Five minutes,” the headwaiter boomed at the people on the bench. “Then you have to go.” He retreated to his desk and poked ostentatiously at his reservation pad. Our food sat untouched between us.
One of the women on the bench unwound the scarf that covered her mouth and looked at the headwaiter. “I have to use the bathroom,” she said. She coughed. Her eyes were streaked with mascara, or it might have been dirt or smoke. No reply. “The bathroom,” she repeated, louder.
“No,” said the headwaiter. “No public bathroom.”
You stood back up. “They’re our guests,” you said. “They can use the bathroom.” The restaurant was quiet. No one moved. You turned to me. “Get up,” you said to me. “You can go with her.”
“You can go,” you had said. Your face wasn’t challenging or inviting, but entirely complacent. It wasn’t you and me anymore. This was a scenario that you expected to direct. I did not get up.
“I’m going anyway,” said the woman with the mascara. “I need to pee.” She pushed herself off the bench, but the headwaiter stood in her way. “Asshole,” the woman said, and shoved past him. You looked disappointed. The actors had gone off script.
You sat back down. “You didn’t help her,” you said.
“You didn’t help her either,” I said. “You just told me what to do.”
“At least I care about what happens. I tried to help. I let them in, after all. You don’t even see what’s going on here. You’re immune. You just want to go out for a nice dinner.”
“That is not true. And anyway this isn’t a nice dinner. It could be a nice dinner, if we still had anything to say to each other.” I paused, remembering to lower my voice. “But no, you spend all your spare time on the phone with some idiot at work, you never tell me anything, and now you accuse me of not caring about anybody else.”
I put down my fork and glared across the candle. It was dark, now. Outside, swirls of people continued to run past, through twists of smoke illuminated by the streetlights.
“I haven’t picked up any calls. My phone is on silent because you wanted an evening out.” You were talking slowly, the kind of slow that’s partly a warning. You held your right hand angled above the table, dropping it onto the wood for emphasis. “And not true? Tell me what you’ve ever done for someone else.” You looked across at me.
“Good idea, turning your phone off, because you think I haven’t noticed? You are not even capable of being considerate, being a good liar, if that’s what it has to be.” I was tripping over my words. I paused, but my anger had a momentum of its own. I needed to land a blow and watch you hurt. “I can hear you talking to her,” I said. “It carries through the vents, up to the laundry room.”
Was it her you were arguing with that morning? I tried to read your face, to see if you would call my bluff. I could see you biting the inside of your cheek. Your hand had retreated to the edge of the table. Your pulse was ticking in the spot above your right eye.
“You’re creating a scene,” you said.
I looked at you over our congealing pasta. The candle wax was pooling onto the table.
I lowered my voice to a harsh whisper. “And why? Why are we having this argument now? You may not appreciate this, but I actually care about us. You need to tell me what is going on with you.” I looked down at my hands and unclenched them. “I have something I have to tell you, too. It’s important.”
That was your cue. But you didn’t ask. You who had greeted me that day above the ferry with eyes that seemed to take in everything.
You took a breath. “I can’t live with someone like you,” you said. “You and your inward-facing world, stacking privilege on privilege so you don’t need to live a real life.”
“Someone like me? How about actual me?” You were fumbling in your wallet. “Look at me,” I said. I glanced at myself in the window, my face red, eyes narrowed, hair tangled around my face. I pulled a twist of hair away from my mouth.
You stood up. “Tony?” I said. “How am I more sheltered than you?”
You ignored me, waving your credit card at a passing waiter. I looked around. The passers-by had disappeared from the bench by the door, the headwaiter was pursing his lips smugly, the other diners averted their eyes when I glanced in their direction.
“How?” I said. “How am I more sheltered?”
“I’m not talking about it,” you said. “You have no idea.”
“You have no idea, either,” I said. “No, because you are the lawyer on the 32nd floor, and you’re not even working it turns out, but—”
“We’re going,” you said, standing. You were using your even voice, stripped of emotion, and you had on your formal face, the one that reminded everyone of how basically decent you are.
“—you have to go in for special projects, what a complete load of—,” I was too angry to continue. I fumbled with my foot under the table, feeling for my shoe. Finally, there it was. I tipped it upright and shoved my foot in. I folded my napkin, composed my face, and walked behind you toward the door.
The door swung open and we stepped outside, the light from the restaurant fanning for a moment across the pavement and then swinging shut. We turned toward the park. I had to hurry to keep up. There was an aura of smoke and teargas around each streetlight. My eyes were streaming. I blinked, and the lights contracted and then expanded again, eclipsing the darkness in front of me. The tears were comforting, like crying but without the feelings.
A group of running men overtook us, their voices ricocheting down the street. Backlit by streetlights, they turned into the park. One of the men stumbled. He stopped, swearing, and kicked at a heaped form on the pavement. A light dropped from the man’s hand onto the heap and then rose again in a poof of light and smoke. It was not a person. It was a pile of branches, bursting into flame. Above, a statue of an elk stood silhouetted against the sky.
“We should go,” I said. “Let’s go home.” You didn’t move. Bright cinders rose from the flare of fire, catching the wind and whirling down the street. The man was still kicking at the branches, hurling curses after each shower of sparks. Others were dumping the contents of a trash can on the flames, while a figure on the side was attacking a tree and dragging more branches to the fire. Everything was brittle from the heat; everything was ready to burn.
“They are destroying everything,” I said. “What am I even trying for? Everything I care about is falling apart.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” You turned to look at me. The firelight flickered over your face, playing with the sideways twist of your mouth, the raise of your right eyebrow. “Everything you care about?”
A ribbon of smoke drifted toward us. The fire was a mass of bright flame behind the black crosshatch of branches. There were five men now, shoving and howling in the fire’s glare. They were sharing swigs from a blunt bottle. One man roared and spat a mouthful that exploded in white light.
“They’re burning down the city,” I said, looking at the fire.
“It will burn out,” you said. “It’ll be gone by morning.”
“I’m going home,” I said. I turned to you, watching your profile. “Come with me.”
“No,” you said. “I’ve had enough.”
You rummaged in your pocket, then held out the car keys, careful not to touch my hand with yours. The keys dropped into my palm.
“Where are you going?” I asked, but your shoulders were squared against me, already turned to go.
I drove up the hill, squinting through the splattered windshield as the wipers smeared the mess back and forth in front of me. I remembered waking up that morning, you next to me, the day ahead of us. Me lying on the floor with my cheek against the cold grill of the air vent. Running up the hill to meet you at the top. I should have told you. Now it feels too late.
I turned onto our street, steering between neat lines of rubbish bins. Tomorrow was garbage day. I turned into the garage and I clicked off the ignition. There in front of me were the boxes from when we moved in five years ago. Lisa. Tony. Bedroom, kitchen, office. I opened the door and put my feet on the ground and walked across the grainy cement floor to take out the trash.
I had rolled the bin down the drive and was pivoting it on the sidewalk when the explosions started again. I stood with my hand on the cool of the bin lid and listened. There was a crescendo, like fireworks, and then silence. Into that silence came a tiny prick of sound, and my heart leapt up, my stomach wrenched, but when I turned toward you there was nothing. Only the dark street. Another snap, and out of the shadows stepped a coyote, looking straight at me, his amber eyes steady and untroubled. A splutter of explosions erupted down the hill, but he didn’t flinch. I lifted the bin lid and let it bang shut. The coyote tilted his head at me and raised one paw and licked it, unimpressed. He was waiting for something else.
From the ravine there rose an eerie yodel, weaving and threading through the firs, a multitude of yippings and howlings tangled into one. The coyote lowered his paw, so close I could hear his nails click, and trotted neatly down the street, the poof of his tail flashing in the streetlights. He turned to look at me one last time, and then was gone. ▩