by Cai Emmons
“What’s wrong? Are you alright?” Reed asks, rising from his seat and hovering. “Should I do something?”
She can’t speak. She tries to wrest her gaze from the sky. Something is terribly wrong. The heat subsides a little, the tone grows fainter, and the sounds of normalcy return. “I’m fine,” she finally manages to say. “I’m really fine.”
He raises a single eyebrow in doubt and relaxes back down into his seat. “If you say so.”
She can’t shake the daze, the sense of remove from her surroundings, from Reed. She glances to the window again—the clouds are marching southward like a herd of reluctant buffalo. She drags her attention back to the table. Where to go from here? The conversation is waterlogged.
People have come into the restaurant without her noticing. They’re all middle-aged or downright old, people whose skin and hair have been leached of color, people you never want to imagine being. She’s quite sure she’ll never get old, not like that.
The waitress has arrived. She stands by the table ready to write, looking bored, or as if they’ve affronted her.
“I’ll have a burger with fries. And a Diet Coke,” Bronwyn says quickly, wanting to be decisive and to get rid of the waitress as quickly as possible. She’s been trying to eat better—less meat, more vegetables, no fried foods—but the options here are limited.
“I’ll have a green salad and mint tea,” Reed says. He hands the waitress his menu and she takes off before Bronwyn can change her order.
Salad? Tea? He has never been a particularly healthy eater. Why now? How can she not conclude that he’s trying to show her up? It leaves her rattled, insulted, loathe to say a thing. She waits for him to take the conversational ball, wrapping her arms around her abdomen and giving herself a hug while trying to avoid the magnetic pull of the sky. She fixes her eyes on his tremulous gray ones.
“I guess I should get to the point,” he says. He lays his bare hairy forearms on the table as if emptying a heavy suitcase of purpose there.
“You came here with a specific point to make?”
“Didn’t you?”
“You’re mad at me, obviously.”
He blinks. “Not mad.”
She searches his eyes, and it all seems so obvious. The metallic gray of his irises has liquefied into a viscous pity. “Are you saying—? What are you saying?”
The world falls away again, the tables full of elderly diners, the plates of fried clams and lobster rolls, the cups of coffee rattling against their saucers, the fishy smell. All of it, unperceived, ceases to exist. She is in a sac, everything around her blurred, muted, distant. Even Reed appears to be miles away, his arms gesturing, his mouth moving nonsensically. She is alone again. Five years ago her mother’s death put her here. Now Reed.
“. . . Can you honestly say that?”
Honestly say what? She missed it entirely. She feels her eyes bulging.
“Can you honestly say that we haven’t been out of sync for a while? It’s probably my fault. I know I’ve been too preoccupied with school. Long distance, ugh, it’s so impossible.”
“That’s why I’m hoping you’ll move here.”
“But the jobs I want, the good litigation jobs, they’re mostly in New York. A few in Boston, but mostly New York.”
“Then you’re saying you won’t consider moving here?”
The waitress plunks down their plates. “Anything else?”
They both shake their heads.
Bronwyn stares at her burger, wondering if it could be plastic. She picks up a French fry and squeezes it between thumb and forefinger, watching the soft white potato inside ooze past the fried casing. So that’s the long and the short of it. He won’t move. No matter how beautiful it is. He’s not going to move just for her.
“You’ve been seeing someone else?” she says.
He nods.
“You’re in love?”
He nods again.
Three years they’ve been together and now that history vanishes in seconds. There will remain a few stories, nothing more. Possible accusations rise and recede in her mind like spring showers. You should have . . . We should have . . .
“Tell me about her.”
“What good would that do?”
“She’s better than me, I guess.”
“Don’t do that to yourself. You’re a wonderful woman. What’s happened—it’s no one’s fault. It’s just the circumstances. The luck of the draw, you know?”
Someone’s luck perhaps, but not hers. “Well, she must have something I don’t have. Is she a lawyer? Is she rich?”
Reed sips his tea.
“What’s her name?”
“Does that matter? You don’t know her, if that’s what you’re asking.” He pauses, reaches across the table to stroke the fingernail of her pinkie. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers. “Really.”
Bronwyn’s breath is deep and loud as a diver’s, a reminder of what it takes to stay alive. She lifts her burger, takes a bite, then another and another, barely chewing, swallowing as fast as she can.
After Reed has left she sits in her car in the parking lot for a long time trying to envision his nameless woman. She’s lost in a cyclone of loneliness. She’s a star without a planet, a magnet with no further ability to attract. A motherless child. There is something awry with her mind; it seems to have unseated itself from her brain, a dissatisfied guest.
She remembers Reed once likening her to a meteor, saying she burned hotter than most women. But obviously his view has changed. Either her heat no longer appeals, or she has used it up. Whatever the reason, he has now discarded her. How wrong-headed she was to think that if anyone ended the relationship it would be she. She supposes she should have seen this coming, but how? There were no signs as far as she could see. Her powers of perception have always been keen, though perhaps not in relation to people. Maybe what has happened was always destined to happen. Reed knows his worth, as one of the nice and sensitive men who women look for. (Well, he wasn’t always a hundred percent nice and sensitive. Once, during his first year of law school, she came in on him with some of his buddies reviewing a list of their female classmates, playing a “game” called “Fuck, Marry, Kill.”) It hasn’t helped her case that his parents have never liked her—she should have taken their dislike more seriously. Her mother, it turns out, was right. A woman who expects too much gets beaten down. And Bronwyn has definitely expected too much, aspired too high, thought she was smarter and more attractive than she really is. Well, now she’s been shown up, outdone by some other woman, a lawyer no doubt, who will be the recipient of Reed’s attention and charm and money and protection.
She wishes she could cry, but she can’t. She’s never been a crier, has always responded to life’s blows with a mute, blank affect that seems like better protection. Above her the clouds are now stationary, impassive as a firing squad. She slams her eyes shut. The sky and its atmosphere are doing strange things to her. She has to stop looking up for a while. There are no portents there. She’s a scientist for heaven’s sake, she doesn’t believe in portents.
The rejection has altered her body and is affecting her brain too, her only real asset. There is still time before she must be at work. A walk on the beach could be restorative.
4
At Odiorne Point State Park the sight of the ocean is immediately tranquilizing. She loves the sand, the cool trembling water, the ranting gulls, the waves’ susurrus. The ocean holds onto an untouchable wildness that the rest of the world is losing. Today, a Wednesday, the park is deserted, no doubt because of the overcast sky. No families, no hand-in-hand lovers, no tourists with maps and binoculars. She sees only a single runner, a woman, adhering to her fitness routine, face set in an expression of grim stoicism. Bronwyn always finds this a sad sight; she hates the thought of anything in her own life becoming so doggedly, cheerlessly habitual, and yet there is something in the woman’s face she understands, and she worries her own face might sometimes look as cheerless.
She puts on the running shoes she always leaves in the trunk and chooses a path that leads over a lawn, then slopes gently down through tall beach grass to the shore. It’s a shaggy, scraggy beach, one for walking and skipping stones, its sand coarse and multi-colored as wild rice, and strewn with pebbles and fist-sized rocks and driftwood and whorls of dry black seaweed. Unraked, unmanicured, it doesn’t have the fine-grained white sand that appeals to sun-bathers and swimmers. Bronwyn likes it for that. She appreciates an unpretentious beach, a beach that still belongs more to the earth than to humans.
Whenever she comes here she thinks of childhood trips to the Jersey shore, to those wide flat beaches where swimmers and sunbathers flocked during heat waves—Long Beach Township, or Surf City, or Seaside Park, sometimes further north to Manasquan or Belmar. Maggie always had strict rules. No running, no rolling in the sand, no throwing rocks or shells, no swimming until she said it was time. But mainly Bronwyn was to always stay in Maggie’s sightlines. Dreadful things are done to girls who are found alone, Maggie would say, though when Bronwyn would push to know what exactly was done to those girls, Maggie would never say. Girls just never have an easy time of it; men call the shots in this world, you might as well know that from the get-go.
Here the shoreline curves in a gentle crescent. The tide is out and timid waves nibble the sand. At the far end of the beach a woman tosses a stick for her dog. Bronwyn loves dogs, has been teased for the way she brings her face right down to a dog’s to exchange sloppy kisses.
Usually she walks quickly, savoring the elasticity and power of her legs, but today her dress is restrictive, and the sky’s strange antics grip her attention, keeping her in place. The clouds are cleaving in a solid impenetrable line, as they have been for several days, barring the brief movement she witnessed at the Blue Skiff. In all her years of weather watching she has never seen such prolonged and defiant stillness. It reminds her a little of how her mother’s face used to look just before an outburst, battened down, so uncannily motionless it almost seemed dead, or as if she was compressing all her energy to bring additional force to her imminent explosion. There’s that feeling now, of limitless energy hovering behind the gray-brown wash of clouds. The sun is clearly there, but inaccessible, a curtained wizard waiting, unwilling to reveal his next move.
Surely things are moving in other places—natural forces are never static—so why not here on this stretch of New Hampshire coastline? It’s almost like being at the eye of a glacially moving storm. A catalyst is necessary, a slight change of temperature, or air pressure, or wind speed. A sword of righteous anger.
She draws a line with her gaze up from her shoes across the rough rock and sand and desiccated seaweed. It travels over the black water to the murky horizon where sea and sky are scarcely differentiated. In the path of her gaze the molecules are stuck in their dance like human veins occluded by plaque. She locks her eyes on a distant point where the clouds look most menacing. Her vision takes in a wide swath of sky. Eyes like telescopes, she zeroes in on the distant droplets. She sees molecules: hydrogen, oxygen. She hears the rise and fall of her own breathing, nothing more. Then a pulsing hum. Her body expands in steely concentration until it domes the beach, the ocean. An inferno, hot as the sun, explodes in her gut, spreads to her chest. She doesn’t move, at once sunk in her body and soaring out of it. She presides here for a while, swirling in moisture and light, in a trance but more sentient than ever before.
A spear of sunlight tears the sky vertically, lightning-like, dividing it in half. She pants, grabs another breath, deeper, and holds it for a long time, releases it slowly, to a sound like a pigeon’s coo. Before her, the sky is ripped and frayed by the light streak, the cloud masses on either side parting and drifting in different directions as she’s never seen clouds do; the light in the middle spills out, viral, blooming, a gold limned with silver. It’s like the light after drenching rain storms, prismatic, promising rainbows, light so sudden and welcome it appears more dimensional and colorful than other light.
The dog surprises her, bounding up to her legs, barking enthusiastically, demanding attention. Bronwyn pants, turns, begins to hear the world again. The light has blinded her, leaving dark floaters drifting across her vision like a flotilla of tiny boats. The day has become a circus, loud and confusing. She crouches to greet the dog. “Hey there, buddy.” She looks around to find the dog’s owner, but there isn’t a soul in sight, and the dog takes off back down the beach.
The sky looks dappled now, like the forest floor on an exceptionally sunny day. Not quite as disturbingly dramatic as it was a minute ago, though still impressive. She thinks of Reed, wonders if he is seeing this. To whom could she describe this piercing beauty? Suddenly she panics. She’s due at work in ten minutes and at best it’s a forty-five-minute drive. She hikes her dress to her thighs, sprints toward the car, trips on some of the loose rocks, falls, scrambles up. She arrives at her car panting, discombobulated. Behind the wheel she studies the sky again. The light has gone from gold to white, a canvas to be filled. She gets out of the car and brushes the sand and curls of seaweed from her dress. She peers at herself in the window’s reflection. Her hair jets out in all directions, but she has nothing with which to groom it except her hands.
She drives too fast, eyes on the horizon. Stuart doesn’t take lateness lightly. He lectures tardy employees about professional carelessness and about their disrespect for the “team.” Will she make a ploy for sympathy by telling him she’s been dumped? Would it make any difference with Stuart? She’s certainly not going to tell him she fears there might be something wrong with her brain.
She makes a resolution: when she arrives at work she will enter cheerfully, genuflect to Stuart, apologize, pander, tell him she’s sorry and she’ll never be late again. Then she will prepare for the first of four nightly broadcasts. She will download the National Weather Service data and make some sense of it all; she will prepare her remarks, create her graphics. By the end of her last broadcast it will be close to midnight.
In the rearview mirror something catches her eye. Crap, a New Hampshire State Patrol car, flashing its lights. She pulls over and watches the cruiser pull in behind her. A Paul Bunyan-sized officer gets out of his cruiser and lopes to her car with swaggering, no-nonsense, officer-of-the-law authority.
She rolls down her window to act the part of the good citizen, aware she does not look like a particularly good citizen now. He leans down, his chest curving over the window gap and blocking the sky like a giant umbrella.
“I don’t suppose you know how fast you were going?”
“No.”
“Seventy-eight. In a forty-five-mile-an-hour zone.”
“Oh.”
“That’s all you have to say for yourself? Oh?”
“What would you like me to say?”
“I’ll bet there are a lot of times you have a heck of a lot to say.” He stares at her with a blank unrelenting look that is hard to interpret. Suspicion? Lasciviousness?
“I’m late for work.”
“You and every other schmo. I need to see your license, registration, and proof of insurance.”
She digs into her purse and the glove box, mind running triple speed, unreasonably furious. She hands him the documents, and he glances at them, slaps the top of the Volvo twice so the car’s entire body shivers, and heads back to his cruiser.
Bronwyn smoothes her hair. She needs to bring this day into submission. An earring is missing. Damn. She can’t go on the air with a single earring. That is something Stuart would definitely scold her for. She searches the passenger’s seat. Not there. She unclips her seat belt and looks on the floor. Not there either. She’s just getting out of the car to search the back seat when the officer returns.
“Get back in the car,” he orders.
She does as he says. The power is all his, legal and personal. He can do whatever he wants with her—ticket her, arrest her, rape her if he chooses. He’s easily twice her size.
She is just a speeding, unstable girl, a possible suspect, no doubt looking for drugs on the floor of her car.
“I lost an earring,” she says in self-defense.
He hands her papers through the window and leans down. He’s smiling. “You’re the weather gal, aren’t you? I watch you every night.”
She nods, noticing the hand that hangs at his side, thick as a baseball glove, broad and leathery.
“I didn’t recognize you at first. You’re a tiny little thing, aren’t you? Even prettier in real life than on the tube.”
“It’s been a hard day and I’m late for work. Can you just ticket me and let me go?”
“Hold your horses, sweetness. Guess what? You’re in luck. I’m giving you a warning, no ticket. But watch your speed. We don’t want you in a ditch. We need you on TV.”
“Thanks. I will.”
“Hope you don’t mind my saying . . .” He flaps his fingers in an inchoate gesture over his head. “You have stuff in your hair. You might want to fix that before you go on the air.”
Her hand leaps up to finger her hair. She pulls off a piece of seaweed. She’s trembling. He watches intently.
“You okay? Trouble with your boyfriend, maybe? He gives you any guff, you call me. Good-looking gal like you, no one should give you any guff.” He hands her his card. Ken Donovan. He means well, she supposes.
“Good to meet you, Bronwyn. Hey, you should get yourself a new car. Being a celebrity and all.” He licks his upper lip. “You got my card.”
She nods and smiles weakly. By now Stuart is probably furious.
5
Bronwyn is fifty minutes late and there is no way to enter the WVOX building inconspicuously. Nicole, sitting at the front desk applying eyeliner, is unavoidable. She and Bronwyn always talk.
