Landslide

by Jenn Cooksey

  “And, to make it just the most perfect experience for me, he’s one of those horrendously sloppy kissers, his breath reeked of Captain Morgan, he couldn’t keep it up and ended up passing out before he finished. As thanks though, I puked in his plastic Captain America shield before I passed out too.” I seriously did and I seriously can’t believe I’m telling anyone about what must be the most god-awful first time in sexual history.

  “Oh and then, he wakes me up this morning, actually apologizes for passing out on me, and says, ‘I’d make it up to you some time, but I’m sort of seeing someone.’ He then proceeded to explain that I really needed to get going because whoever that someone is, was probably gonna be showing up in the next thirty minutes. I mean seriously, Cole, what the fuck?”

  By this time, Cole is chuckling to himself in what almost sounds to me like cynicism and I kind of don’t blame him. Like, if it were me hearing about this debacle of epic proportions, I’d feel sorry for the person, but in all honesty, I’d probably be at least laughing on the inside because it’s absolutely ridiculous and I sort of got what I deserved. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though.

  “Man, sounds like you picked a real winner.”

  “Uh, ya think? Actually, I want you to come kick his ass for me. I think he’s older than you are, but you could totally take him.” God, I would love that so much. And bonus, I’d actually get to see Cole and maybe even be kissed so well I’d forget my name and the migraine I have.

  Oh my God. I cannot believe you even just thought that. What in the actual hell is wrong with you? You might’ve gotten used to being kissed by a master and him always picking up the broken pieces of you with his lips, but that’s not his job, so, way to think of actually using your best friend there, Erica. Bravo, you spoiled, inconsiderate snot. Seriously, you need to get your shit together, girl…

  “Gimme a break, Erica, I’m not driving fourteen hours to beat up Captain America for you just because he had whiskey dick and a girlfriend. It sucks, but it happens, so…better luck next time.”

  “Better luck next time?” Um…I know this is all pretty much my fault and all, but really…who says that?

  “Yeah. You know, I’d suggest maybe seeing what Batman’s got in his utility belt. I bet he packs a punch…probably can handle his liquor better too.”

  “I really hope you’re joking,” I say and then remember something that I always thought was sort of an excuse guys including Cole use like girls do with the excuse of having a headache, but I’m actually hoping it’s real, “But, can I ask you something seriously?”

  “At this point, I don’t see why not.”

  “Is that a real thing?”

  “Is what a real thing?”

  “You know, whiskey dick.”

  “You’re afraid you didn’t do it for him, huh?”

  Yes, exactly. And uh, what the hell is with him today? “Yeah, little bit. Is it real or not?”

  “Yep.”

  “Have you ever…had it? Like, not how you tried to say you were too drunk the night before I left, but I mean, you know, have you ever gone limp or passed out before you were done like Steve Rogers did?”

  “Have you ever heard me share details of my sex life before?”

  “Um, n—no.” Uh-oh. I think I might’ve just crossed a line I never knew had been drawn.

  “That’s because I don’t.”

  “Seriously? After I just told you all my shit?”

  “Seriously. What I do and who I do it with is no one’s business.”

  “And, I’m no one?”

  “Unless you have firsthand experience that enables you to answer questions like that for yourself already, then yes, you’re no one.”

  Uh, ouch. I don’t know what the hell his deal is today, and I’m not in the best mental health personally either, but I kind of think Cole is being a world-class asshole. He can get sketchy and moody sometimes, and although he usually appears super laid back, I’m not going to lie, he has a temper too. However, he’s never been like this to me and he’s never lost his cool with me either. And in the honesty vein, it really pushes my buttons that he’s being so callous with me right now.

  I open my mouth to go off on him for being such a jerk on a day when I really need my best friend, but suddenly, I remember the one and only time Cole scared me. It was in Walmart the night he left home and I remember why he was so angry. He’d had an extremely bad day and although I was part of what pushed him to his breaking point, I wasn’t the target of his rage. Then I realize that he’d said he had something to tell me too before I became a self-absorbed brat whining in my morning after embarrassment and regret.

  I take a deep breath and swallow my irritation enough to be somewhat contrite when I say, “You’re right. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry for dominating the conversation too, so let’s move on. It’s your turn now…what did you have to tell me?”

  “Oh, yeah…almost forgot. I joined the military.”

  24

  “You Won’t Be Mine”

  —Cole—

  Just like I knew it would, telling Erica I was abandoning her by signing my life away to the military cut her to the bone. Truly, it was a thing of destructive beauty. She sobbed and begged me to tell her I was joking, and confidently stepped right into the role I had all but scripted for her when she reminded me of the promise I made to her. My response was simply telling her I didn’t remember making it. But I remember. And I remember effectively sealing it with a kiss too.

  That’s what made it so painfully perfect.

  All her legitimate fears and worry about my safety were completely overshadowed by the unthinkable idea that I wouldn’t remember something so important to her as a promise to not willingly risk my life like that and leave her, because I’m the only one she has left, and after Holden and all she and I have been through together, she can’t handle the day to day stress of worrying if I’m alive or dead etc., ad nauseam.

  It was all about her, like I wanted it to be, and I just calmly toweled off and continued to play her like a fiddle until I fanned the flames high enough for her to get so scared and hurt, she was the one who cut ties. Exactly like I knew she would. It was a brilliant stroke of sadistic genius though, if I do say so myself, punctuating my final words to her the way I did. She’d gotten really teary again and said, “I’m serious, Cole. If you do this, this is goodbye forever. I don’t even want a letter. I just can’t do it.” My response was, “Well, if that’s honestly what you want, then I guess there’s really nothing left for me to say. Except, you know, g’bye, hun.”

  She hung up on me after that. Of course, I broke the bathroom mirror with my fist and it took upwards of fifteen minutes to get all the shards out of my bloody knuckles afterwards, and I had essentially torn myself apart right along with razing her to the ground, but still. I won. The play ended the way I designed it to because I’d controlled every moment of it.

  Behold, the puppet master.

  Why, thank you. Should I bow?

  Nah. You’re good.

  I have no doubt that she didn’t really mean most of what she said, but as far as I’m concerned, she still told me she never wants to hear from me again and that means I’m off the hook. I’m just giving her what she said she wants, like I always have. I’m making it easy for myself to do this time too.

  Although I lied about already signing up, I got back in my car when she was as destroyed and broken as the mirror and I drove back to Vegas, turning my lie into truth without even stopping at home to change the clothes I’d been wearing for almost thirty-six hours. The night before I leave for basic training though finds me having myself a little bonfire. And not a symbolic burning either, like the previous one was. This one is real and hot enough to make me sweat on a cold, November night that threatens improperly cared for plants with frostbite before morning, in addition to being able to inflict third degree burns if I were to reach out and touch it.

  See, I’m not a complete moron, and I’m not u
nfeeling. Decimating the girl I’ve loved my whole life came naturally, maybe, but it wasn’t easy and a very small part of me wanted to make allowances for what she did because it was unintentional—well, leveling me the way I did her was anyway. And that’s where the difference is. She made a choice, drunk or not, and then wanted me to be sympathetic and sympathy is just honestly not something I can drum up this time. I’m not super human. I’m flat-out tired and I’m done living in the subtext. I’m also fed up with putting myself through the hellish turmoil involved in cleaning up after Holden just so that I can maybe have a chance at an honest to God relationship with the girl I love sometime in the vague future.

  However, for the barest, most fleeting of moments, I was tempted to try to find her—just to see her one last time—and had I done that, I know without a doubt that I wouldn’t have ever left. So instead, I wrapped the pain and anger around me like a cape, hugging it tight so that I could have the strength to make my getaway clean and not look back.

  And because of that one moment of temptation, I know I have to rid myself of Erica once and for all. It’s become a matter of survival of the fittest now and burning things like her letter, pictures, and even my cell phone that has been shut off since the moment I heard the click, but still holds her number and address in it…permanently jettisoning all these things into a cleansing fire will help cure me of what I’ve come to think of almost as a disease. It’ll aid me in staying healthy and sound by preventing me from taking her and my dreams of what could’ve been with me. Basically, burning the past and everything I will never have is my way of inducting the new age of living only for myself, and it will dawn with a bugle playing Reveille.

  On a long-suffering sigh I look to the heavens and its landscape of twinkling stars. There’s only one thing left to toast and my trembling hand seems to be having a tremendously hard time letting go of Erica with daisies in her hair. If I do this, I won’t have a single thing left except what I buried in the sand hundreds of miles away, and I have no intention of ever going back there to dig it up. She’ll be gone. For good.

  Come on, buddy, you can do it. You don’t even have to watch it go up in flames. She’ll never be yours now and you know it. Not anymore anyway. So, just close your eyes and let go…

  25

  “Try”

  —Erica—

  “Well, here she is! How was your Thanksgiving dinner, Hazel?”

  “Hazel? Why, my eyes are blue, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, Grandma, your eyes are blue, but your name is Hazel, remember?”

  Dottie, the nurse on duty, shakes her head and gives me a compassionate smile. Looking into the milky white opacity of my grandma’s cataract eyes makes it hard to keep the tears from trickling out of mine again, though.

  I was just about to end my second year of college when my grandma started getting confused and forgetting things. At first it was just little stuff, like, she’d put the sugar jar in the refrigerator instead of the cupboard where it’s been kept for my entire life, or she’d go to the store and leave what she bought in the car. However, it progressed quickly. She began forgetting the answers to things she’d just asked, like where she’d set her glasses down only to be told she had them on already, and not five minutes later, she’d ask again.

  Not even midway through my junior year though, I left the few friends I’d made and my new boyfriend of two weeks to move back home when I got a call from one of our neighbors explaining that my grandma had gone for a walk at eleven at night in her bathrobe and set off their home security alarm when she tried going into their house instead of her own. That was a little over five years ago. At least her Alzheimer’s hasn’t made her lash out or prone to random fits of anger like I know it can sometimes.

  Although for her safety and mine, I had to put her in a nursing home a year and a half ago. It was absolutely, truly, the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever been through; she told me she understood and that it was best for both of us, but the morning I moved her in, she’d completely forgotten everything and didn’t understand why some of her things were in a foreign room. I had to watch her beautiful, confused face fall with understanding and tears for the second time as I relived for her the acrid incident that prompted me to remove her from her home…that she’d gotten up in the middle of the night and decided to start cooking fried chicken, except there was no chicken and she forgot what she was doing and went back to bed, so the Crisco in the frying pan caught fire. As did our house.

  The entire house didn’t burn to the ground, but the smoke detectors upstairs didn’t go off until the whole kitchen was ablaze and by the time I heard them and got her and myself outside to safety, the side of the house the kitchen was on was being devoured by angry, unrelenting flames. My bedroom was directly above the kitchen. For a very short time afterwards, I had very mixed, victimized feelings about it and more than once or twice, I caught myself wishing that I’d never heard the high-pitched screeching warning me of imminent danger. My life just seemed like such a complete waste of time in the first place, and then this happens… I lost just about everything that ever meant anything to me because what wasn’t destroyed in the fire itself was a victim of water damage from the fire hoses. I felt like a failure and I didn’t want to even try to not be anymore.

  A single afternoon at a park convinced me to keep going. Something blowing in the spring breeze that day was whispering to me that I wasn’t done; that my life would have a purpose and I hadn’t even scratched the surface of fulfilling that purpose. It told me that win or lose, I had to pick myself up and keep trying.

  Then I met Greg, and starting over didn’t seem like such a bad idea. He was at the nursing home I’d just moved my grandma into a few towns over from where I grew up, and he was helping his sister get their father settled temporarily, as their father had had a stroke and she just needed some time to make her house safe for him to live in with her and her family full-time. Greg and I met in the rec. room one afternoon when I was waiting for my grandma’s sponge bath to be finished up, and he was doing a lousy job of supervising his nephews while they annoyed old people by banging on the piano keys and rolling the checkers all over the walls and floors like race cars. Actually, no one could keep those hellions in line and I’m sure he’d realized it long before that day and had just given up trying by then.

  In any event, our first date was him taking me for a pudding cup in the cafeteria. He was about ten years older than me and although it really does sound like a lot, he made me laugh and when I was laughing, the years between us didn’t bother me. What did is that he was ready a lot faster than I was to take the next big step in his life. Marriage and kids. We’d been seeing each other for hardly more than five months when we decided to go our separate ways.

  Very non-theatrical is the best way to describe his proposal and our subsequent break-up. It wasn’t anything like the movies—I mean, not even a little bit. There was no getting down on bended knee or even a teeny popping sound with the question; it was a discussion about what we each want out of life. He wanted to get married and have children. I didn’t. Plain and simple.

  He was a nice man, we had things in common, I enjoyed his company, and he treated me well. He had a good, steady job and could provide a more than decent life for me, the sex wasn’t the best, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. He said he loved me and I believed him; however, family life just isn’t what I want for myself anymore. I wasn’t even twenty-four yet, I was still trying to finish nursing school, and I had become used to doing things on my own and, for the most part, being alone—not being accountable to anyone for anything. Except my grandma, but that’s a whole different kind of accountability and she’s the one person who’s never left me so, I haven’t left her.

  Until now that is.

  In the beginning my grandma would get me confused with her little sister who drowned when she was only six, but she hasn’t recognized me or my middle name’s namesake in close to seven months now. As I saw two
days ago and again today though, she’s beginning to not remember her own name either. It makes it easier to leave in some ways and in others, it’s just that much harder.

  During the time my grandma has been in the home, I’ve been here at least once a day whether it was morning, noon, or night, and I’ve sat by her side, read to her, painted her nails, and brushed her hair out for her and pinned it up how she liked wearing it when she used to be able to do it herself, and I’ve become somewhat close to a lot of the nursing staff over the months too, although Dottie is my favorite. She’s a rather buxom black woman with a servant’s heart who volunteers in the nursery at her church and helps some other members of the congregation run a soup kitchen for the homeless and those in need. She’s in her early fifties, widowed with no children, and even though she’s from right here in Riverside County, her words come out with a southern accent sometimes. Dottie is the person who started her shift one day last month by slapping the job section of the newspaper down in front of me and my bowl of lime Jell-O, and thus proceeded to convince me that it’s time for me to start living my life someplace where people don’t come when theirs are almost over.

  I remember teasing her when she told me I needed to “find a good man, settle down, and have loooots of babies.” She’d been reading Gone With the Wind to Mrs. Truax again. I reminded her of that story not being the happiest, what with a war going on, a kid breaking her neck and a pony being shot because of it, not to mention the fire that burned down Atlanta and Scarlett’s home. She’d shooshed me and said, “Oh, you know I only read the good parts. Can’t stand me all the ugliness and drama in most stories nohow.” From that day on, she brought the newspaper with her to work and when I inevitably came to sit with my grandma, she would already have at least two or three potential jobs for me to look into. I didn’t have the heart to tell her finding a job is easier done online now, but wouldn’t you know it, the one I ended up applying for and have all but in the bag now came from a lead she found.