by Cai Emmons
“So—” she finally says, “why are you here?”
“I heard about you. I came to find out.”
“Find out what?”
He hesitates. “The true story.”
A tremor runs through her. “You mean—”
“Yes. I read that paper. The bride saying you changed the weather.”
“You’re not here to write another article are you? I was told you wanted to learn to be a broadcast reporter.”
“I lied.”
She feels punched.
“I know. I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t expect—”
“Nobody talked to me before they wrote that story. It was unprofessional.”
“You don’t want to set the record straight?”
“No.” She is suddenly unpleasantly hot and sweaty and discontented. She gets up and goes inside. She pours more coffee. She checks her phone for messages. There’s a brief one from Vince Carmichael. He’s happy to have her visit, next week would be fine. She stands at the screen door, sipping her coffee and staring out at Matt who still sits in the grass, back to her. It’s not the lying that bothers her. It’s the fact that he used his smile to get to her.
“There’s nothing to write. You can go home now,” she says loudly enough for him to hear.
He gets up and comes to her, standing close, but separated by the screen so his face is altered. “Can we start again? Please?”
She looks away. She needs to disengage, stay on task, make plans for her trip to Oklahoma.
“Okay. Sorry. I’m leaving,” he says. “This was a bad call.”
He lays his mug by the door and takes off, rounding the corner of the house, brushing the azaleas with his shins so they shiver after he’s gone. She stays where she is, deflated by his swift departure, poked by regret. Does she misunderstand other people more than most people do? Recently it seems so. She showers for a long time, asking the water to rinse her anger, annoyed at herself for allowing attraction to derail her. It is just as well the guy left. How could she explain herself to him honestly? How can she explain herself to anyone? Anyone except Vince. She emails Vince—I’ll be there on Monday—and books a flight from Boston to Wichita (flights to Oklahoma City are full). She has a sister in the hospital, she’ll tell Stuart. She must visit this sick sister for at least a week.
A sheen of accomplishment comes over her, along with a newly broken sheen of sweat. The sun is already exerting its muscle, and the heat and light that were gentle earlier have swollen into forces that will soon be diabolical. She takes a towel and strides down to the river under the glare, suddenly bold, seeing the water’s rippled surface moving from blue to black as she approaches. She peels off her shorts, tank top, underwear, moves quickly enough so her fear shrinks to a mere belly-flutter. She balances on two small rocks then steps in, her foot sinking into the cool soft silt. A few steps then she plunges, strokes out to the river’s midpoint. The water is surprisingly warm, its current palpable but not intrusive. She rolls onto her back and floats. A trio of swallows passes silently overhead. From the willow tree a brash crow calls out. She thinks of what might be swimming beneath her and decides it’s fine, whatever is down there probably prefers to keep to itself. Closing her eyes, she loses herself in the water’s melodic lapping, the solid rhythmic bass of the muddy riverbed, the sun’s whir. All the timbres and rhythms side by side compose an encompassing silence, and she dissolves into it, trading molecules with the water until she and it are indistinguishable. Never again will she apologize for who she is.
She opens her eyes and is surprised to see how far downstream she has drifted. She strokes hard, across the current, back to the bank where she towels dry, her skin alive with cool gratitude. She cinches the towel at her chest, turns to go inside, and sees the red car, still in the driveway. The sun whitens the windshield so she can’t tell if anyone’s inside. The car door opens. Matt steps out and saunters down the river bank toward her. He must have seen her swimming.
“You’re still here?” she says. “Or you came back?”
“I won’t write about you, I promise.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re right that I did come here to do that, but when I saw you yesterday—” He shrugs. “I knew I couldn’t.”
“Okay—”
His face runs a relay of sudden movement interrupted by radical stillness—it’s obvious he’s trying to say more.
“Thing is. I write for a crappy Florida paper called The Meteor. I’m not proud of it, believe me. It’s kind of like the National Enquirer. My boss spotted that article about you—he’s always on the lookout for unusual things—and he sent me up here. And I came expecting you would be—well, honestly, a little wacko. But now I see there’s no story here. And even if there were, I wouldn’t subject you to that.”
“Wacko?”
“Well, that article—”
“Why would you work for that kind of paper? I hate those papers. Magazines. Whatever they are.”
“I do too, believe me. But if you’ve got student loans to pay off . . . I looked for a real journalism job, but they’re hard to come by. I’m always looking.”
“You don’t have to explain. I’m not particularly proud of my job either.”
“How was the water?” He smiles.
“Cooling.” She blushes. “In case you’re interested, I’m not wacko.”
“I know. I see that.”
The caesura returns, the sensation of drift, the air itself altered by the collision of so many silent messages. She looks toward the house, wonders what time it is, if she should ask him in again. Something thrums up from the prickly grass through the soles of her bare feet. She is acutely aware of wearing only a towel. She is acutely aware of the length of the fraught silence. She senses if she walks to the house he will follow and he does. She hears him wandering around the living room and porch while she dresses. She wishes she didn’t have to leave for work so soon.
“Wow,” he says, looking up from her binoculars. “You clean up well.”
“Thanks.”
“Your hair is impressive.”
“Thanks—”
“All these instruments you’ve got—” He gestures over them, shaking his head.
“I’m weather-obsessed.”
He chuckles, cracks his knuckles, turns to look at a white-tailed rabbit hopping by close to the house. She is pleased that he seems more nervous than she. The filaments between them are galvanized by the silence. They list toward one another, plants to light, a natural imperative.
“I spend most of my life asking people questions, but now I’m kind of tongue-tied.”
She nods. “I’m always tongue-tied.”
“So why did that woman, the bride, say what she said about you changing the weather?”
She is the touched anemone again, her edges retracting. The situation calls for honesty, but she is not ready to divulge the truth.
“You’ve got to admit it sounds crazy. Magical thinking. I mean, really—”
Crazy. The word burns. “You’ll have to ask her.”
“I guess I’ve offended you.”
She shakes her head. Not offended, wary. Crazy. Wacko. This is how the world is bound to see her if she speaks out. Why would he be any different?
“So you’re heading back to Florida now?” she says, eager to divert the conversation.
“No, Rhode Island. Where my parents live. Two birds, you know?”
“I’m a bird?”
“I don’t mean—” He sighs. “Hey, that raccoon out there—you want me to take care of it?”
“It’s okay.”
“If you have a shovel I can heave it into the woods.”
She has to think. A terrible city slicker until this last year, she has no tools of her own, but there might be some in the landlord’s shed. Leaving Matt to investigate the raccoon, she goes to the shed. There are bags of soil, two hay bales, an old hand-powered lawn mower, and two shovels, a narrow one for
digging holes, the other one wider, for snow. She carries them around to the front of the house and hands them over, along with some yellow rubber kitchen gloves.
He gets to work immediately, bending over and wedging the snow shovel beneath the decaying raccoon without any evident disgust, using the smaller shovel to manipulate the inert body. She watches from the front door, admiring his ease with the task. Once the animal is centered on the wide shovel blade, he looks around for a dumping site, and heads to the woods that mark the edge of the property, maybe fifty yards from the house. When he’s done, he leans the two shovels against the front of the house, removes the gloves, and lays them on the bottom step. She expects him to come back inside, but he doesn’t, he heads to his car.
She calls out. “Don’t you want to wash your hands?”
He shakes his head, raises his arm in a wave, and drives off.
She stands at the open door after he’s gone, staring at the patch of ground where his car was parked. Why did he leave so quickly? Did he not feel the same as she, the interest, the possibility, the animal attraction? Wasn’t that why he was tongue-tied? She may never see him again. He didn’t even leave his contact information, and she has no idea how to spell his last name. He was a momentary gift, offered by fate, then rescinded. Things come and depart, isn’t that nature’s lesson? This heat wave will end too, without any help from her.
15
He’d chosen his words badly. Wacko. Crazy. He never meant to apply those words to her—he should have known better. Now he can’t stop thinking about her as he drives to Rhode Island to visit his parents. She is the kind of woman you can’t help but notice. Partly because she is pretty, yes, and because of the voluminous red hair, but mostly because of her quiet radiant intensity, a little frightening honestly, as if there is light coming off her, or heat, or something. And when she sang “Ring of Fire” on camera he felt as if he was falling into the fire right alongside her. He’ll tell Josh there’s no story here. If he wrote the story she’d never speak to him again.
He replays their conversation again and again, reviewing the way her cheeks and forehead and chin periodically quivered, as if each of her thoughts activated a very specific muscle, so he felt he was witnessing a complicated dance being staged in miniature. Part of his job—the part no one addresses directly in journalism, but which he believes is his forte—is to read people in order to find a way to induce them to speak. But today he botched it. She proved to be a bigger challenge than most of his interviewees. He thinks about the strangeness of that raccoon being right there at the bottom of her front steps, abhorrent with decay. The heat had made the stench intolerable. Why had she left it there? He didn’t have to move it, but it wouldn’t have been very gentlemanly not to offer.
He’s glad he’s got some time off. He’ll stay with his parents for a week before heading back to Florida. Actually he likes visiting his parents, finds them mostly good company, despite his father Ivan’s mockery. What is this crap you write? Who reads it? You would have been better off as a plumber. Everyone needs a good plumber. Matt is the youngest of the Vassily children, his five older siblings are all settled in honorable professions—law, accounting, teaching—and have houses and families. They rarely visit, so Matt, unmarried and unsettled at twenty-eight, is the lone happy recipient of the nurturing his parents still have to give. This summer they have taken a cottage at the shore, and Matt cannot imagine a better place to take a break from the heat. Heat in New England can be bad, but Florida heat is something else again, a condition that settles in like an unwanted house guest, stalking you relentlessly, even in air-conditioned buildings, robbing you of appetite, interrupting your sleep. Since the heat wave began Matt has had the feeling there’s an annoying phantom hair on his arm that he can never find and remove.
He is well aware of the perks of living in Florida. There’s the water and the welcome winter sun. The job, too, embarrassing as it is, has some benefits. He can usually wear shorts to work and they pay him a living wage. Sure, the publication is not known for its journalistic excellence, but he’s getting his school loans paid off. And what other job would allow him to peer into the human psyche as this job does? He has written three stories about people who claimed to have seen aliens, one about a woman who owned a plant that “sighed,” another about a teleporting monk. Some stories come from calls they get, many come from the brain of his editor, Josh Blackburn, who combs small local papers across the country. Matt is fascinated by the eccentric people he meets, and he likes the travel. He also likes to think he gives something back to the people he writes about: a listening ear, a chance to shine.
Maybe crazy is the right word for her. But what does it matter—he’s already blown it.
16
She skulks through Logan Airport, buoyant as a dust kitty. Having lied to Stuart she expects to run into someone who will say, You don’t even have a sister! Her paranoia may be due to what happened last night. After the last broadcast she gave in and smoked a joint with Archie. He drove his pickup to the far side of the parking lot and stopped in the shadows. For the first time in days there was no haze cloaking the stars. He lit a joint, took a toke, and handed it to her. She has smoked only a few times in her life, and beside Archie, she felt like a neophyte. With the first inhalation her entire body seemed to vaporize. She floated and listened to Archie prattling. He was more loquacious than usual, discussing his drug experiences when he was in Eugene, Oregon in the 1970s. He and his friends ate the psychedelic mushrooms they found under cow patties. Sometimes they got sick.
“But it was worth it,” Archie said. “Those babies made everything so intense. You’d eat a banana real slow and you’d understand what it was like to be a banana.”
Bronwyn laughed.
“Why did you change your mind about smoking with me?” he said.
She shrugged. She couldn’t explain. Nothing she might say would make any sense. “A need to be a banana?”
He laughed out the smoke he had just ingested. “So—are you going to tell me what happened at the wedding? You said you’d tell me sometime.”
Overhead the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt were close enough to touch. There was immense heat out there and immense cold. “You have known what it’s like to be a banana. I’m an amoeboid cloud of synchronously oscillating electrons.”
Archie regarded her curiously. She kept her gaze on the sky, finding the Pleiades.
“O-kay.” He waited. “You want to say more?”
“I think that’s enough. I’m not really going to see my sister tomorrow. I don’t even have a sister. Don’t tell Stuart.”
That night—last night—she dreamed she was Mr. Potato Head, her face bulbous and uneven, all her parts removable and made of stiff plastic. Her mouth was on her forehead, an ear was attached where her nose should be, a single eye clung to either side of her head. She woke up laughing maniacally. She has become a divided self: the powerful, private Bronwyn constantly thinking about how she might deploy her energy, and the secretive public stand-in.
The flight takes off into a clear sky with good visibility. The unobstructed view of the Boston skyline tightens her throat. So much has happened to her in the Boston area, the place she came of age. After half an hour, over New York State perhaps, or Pennsylvania, pale gray clouds begin scudding past the window. Moisture from the Gulf of Mexico is wending its way east. It is the same front that is converging with cooler Canadian air and spawning all those twisters in Tornado Alley.
Her thoughts swerve between Matt and Vince. She hasn’t lost Matt—you can’t lose something you’ve never had in the first place. Still, she feels loss. How quickly the heart leaps to its own conclusions. She thought she’d learned better from her experience with Reed. But Vince will distract her, is distracting her already.
Bronwyn’s seatmate is an older woman named Doris. She doesn’t like flying and sits in the middle seat with her eyes clamped shut well after takeoff. She reminds Bronwyn of what happened three sum
mers ago, just before she started graduate school. She accompanied Diane, by special invitation, on a data gathering trip to Colorado where Diane was part of a long-term study of aerosol composition over the polluted cities east of the Rockies, Denver in particular. They went up in a midsized Piper aircraft equipped for data gathering, with instruments mounted on its wings measuring such things as cloud density and particulate concentration. Inside the plane a small team of researchers monitored the data. In addition to Diane and Bronwyn and the pilot, there was a man from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and a professor from UCLA with his graduate assistant. Bronwyn was the only one without a specific task to perform so she was free to watch.
Diane, sitting up front, directed the pilot. They began high, maybe twenty thousand feet up. For five or ten minutes they flew in one direction, then they reversed direction and revisited the same stretch of the troposphere at a lower altitude. All the while they were gathering data and samples. Diane leaned close to the pilot so she wouldn’t have to yell. Her tunic, wet with sweat, clung to her back. Every once in a while she turned around and glanced at Bronwyn, her smile twitching. Bronwyn wanted to help, but wasn’t sure what to do. When they came in for a landing Diane closed her eyes and sat eerily still. Later she admitted to Bronwyn that she was still scared of flying. She had tried to desensitize herself, but it hadn’t worked. A therapist said her fear of flying spoke to her fear of losing control. “Could you be more obvious?” Diane said. “Of course I fear losing control! It wouldn’t be smart not to fear that.” Her physician offered her anti-anxiety medication, but Diane refused to take anything that might blunt her cognition. “There’s always someone who’s trying to normalize you,” Diane said. “They want to tell you your experience is wrong or bad or untrue, when all it really is is your honest report of what happened and how you feel about it.” But the fear never seemed to hold her back. She was always flying off to one place or another for business or pleasure.
