Mary Ann Rivers

by The Story Guy

  “Brian, I’m calling you later, okay?” My voice is unconvincing.

  “Okay. Carrie, I just—”

  “I’ll call you later. It’s okay, just go be with your sister.”

  He looks at me a moment longer, but then turns and jogs away. The wind off the lake has picked up, and the sun doesn’t quite manage to cut through the unexpectedly cold afternoon.

  Saturday, 8:32 p.m.

  I don’t want to leave a message. I really, really don’t. But I’d said I would call. And some kind of misplaced hope, or Midwestern niceness, means that I will. But after calling three times and listening to the hopeless ring tone, it seems like I have no choice. It has been such a long evening, avoiding my own thoughts.

  “This is Brian Newburgh. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Brian? This is Carrie. Carrie—West. Carrie West. Your Wednesdays-only that is more than Wednesday. I hope—I really, really hope your sister is okay. I’d like to talk to you. Please call me back anytime. I think we need to talk, but I understand if you need some time and just want to—well, hang out? Please call.”

  So, there. I met an anonymous man in a park, twice, had almost anonymous phone sex with him (if you count anonymous as not knowing his last name at the time), then I bullied him into brunch, and finally, when he abandoned the date to rush to the bedside of a sister who is hospitalized, I begged him to call me back.

  I need some perspective. I start to call Shelley, but hesitate. I think about someone else who claimed to have his share of story guys.

  “Justin?”

  “Hey, Carrie, you just caught me. I can talk and walk, but I’m meeting Aaron for a late dinner.”

  I give him my updates, careful not to gloss anything over. “What am I working through here? I like my parents. I’m an only child. I suffer no trauma, hence no posttraumatic syndromes or stress. It’s true that I’ve been pretty lonely around the edges lately, but I’m not afraid of getting myself out there as needed. Have I had a personality change lately? Do you think I’m having a stroke?”

  “Wow, Carrie. When I said you should go for Story Boy I didn’t realize he was a Russian novel.”

  “This is crazy, right? I mean, I’m sure if I would have met him—I don’t know, normally? In a regular way, let’s say—I’d have backed off early. But the novelty of his nutty Wednesday ad and—”

  “I don’t know.” Justin’s voice is slow, thoughtful.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How does he make you feel?”

  “Right now? Off balance. A little embarrassed. Worried. Like I don’t know myself.”

  “Yeah. Exactly. Carrie, would you like to know this part of yourself?”

  “Huh?”

  “The part of yourself that opens herself up to a man based on nothing but a little intuition that there is goodness in him and that he kisses like the world’s ending. Do you want to know that part? Because you don’t have to. You’re right. Your life is a nice one—there are no guarantees, but it’s on the right path to stay a nice one. Brian is not on this path.”

  I switch the phone to the other ear, as if that would help me hear the message better, somehow. My path is the nice one. The one filled with friends who will smile when I buy their children books for their birthdays. Who will take me out, sometimes, when I call on a random night because I can’t settle down. The path with peaceful holidays with my parents, and reasonable work promotions at reasonable times.

  The path with nice men, who take me on nice dates where I learn their last names the minute we shake hands at the bar.

  A path clear of a man with eyes that drift into some private sorrow. A path that will never lead to a man whose hands shake when he holds my face for a kiss that feels like falling.

  “I’m starting to get a sense of why Aaron keeps you.”

  “Speaking of my exceedingly lucky man, I’m nearly there. Are you going to be okay?”

  “Short of someone telling me—wait. There’s another call.” I pull the phone away. Brian.

  “Talk to him. Tell me everything later. This is a good one.” Justin clicks off and I accept Brian’s call, breathless.

  “Brian? Are you okay?”

  “Hey.” His voice is low, gravelly, exhausted. There is a lot of noise in the background.

  “What happened? How is your sister?”

  “I’m so sorry. About the date and running off like that. Not explaining. I don’t really have much I can say right now except how sorry I am for how the afternoon turned out.”

  I blow out a breath. “Brian. That’s not—”

  “I had such an amazing time. The best time I’ve had in maybe years. Not even maybe. For sure the best time I’ve ever had and—wait, hold on.”

  I hear him talking in a low voice to someone else, but the background noise is so bad I have no idea what’s going on, and he’s breaking up.

  “Carrie?”

  “Yeah, Brian. I’m here.”

  “I can’t use my cell phone here. I can’t talk, really. I’m sorry. Jesus, there just isn’t any way to make this right and I have to go. I really have to go. Carrie?”

  “Yes,” I say, frustrated tears burning my eyes. “I’m still here.”

  But I’ve lost the connection, or he has. I hold my phone against my heart like it’s a pebble he’s dropped behind him, hoping I’d find it and follow. Fantasy. A new way to pass my time.

  Wednesday, 12:11 p.m.

  There are so many good reasons not to stand under this pergola in bad weather. But no matter how many of them I gave myself, or how many Shelley added to my list over a long morning shelving, I can’t let go of the image of Brian cutting through the fog and wet on his bike and finding the pergola empty. What his face might look like as he rode away, back into his impossible life. Away from me and my life—wide open and empty.

  The moment the minutes have inched far enough away from noon that I decide to leave the shelter and walk back through the drizzle to the library, I stop, because the man getting out of the strangely tall, navy-blue van that just pulled up in the handicap-accessible parking area adjacent to the shelters moves just like Brian does. I squint, and it is him, getting out. Locking the van. Jogging toward me. And now he’s here. I was certain he wouldn’t be.

  Neither of us says anything, and the details come to me slowly. He’s wearing jeans and battered Converse sneakers. He’s wearing a T-shirt with some kind of awful stain that streaks from collar to hem. His hair is matted against his skull on one side and sticking straight out on the other. Instead of the elegant wire rims he usually wears, his glasses are an obviously older, clunky pair that emphasize the circles under his eyes. There is enough of a confluence of his dark whiskers that it’s nearly a beard, and now I can see the triangle of gray under his full lower lip.

  He looks terrible. Awful. Spectacular.

  “I was getting ready to leave.” I should be angry, I think, but tenderness is coming over me again. He looks like he could use the biggest cup of coffee in the world and a sandwich. And a shower. Maybe a whiskey to drink in the shower after he finishes his sandwich.

  “I’m surprised you’re here at all, but I hoped.” He shoves his hands into his pockets and his waistband dips below his too-short T-shirt. That little strip of exposed belly unties all my knotted places.

  “If you came …” I try to catch his gaze, but it’s somewhere else. I can’t stop looking at him, anyway. At his throat where it dips into his collarbones, right where I’ve had my mouth and tasted, at least a half dozen times. At his surprisingly fine cupid’s bow that fits the tip of my tongue exactly. “I just wanted to see if you were okay. You haven’t returned my other calls, and—”

  “I’m sorry.” He pinches his nose and looks away.

  “No, look. Obviously something big is going on. How is your sister? I’ve been so worried, Brian. That’s what I’m trying to say.” I wish he would just look at me, but he’s making a serious study of middle
distance.

  “Stacy’s—sick. The weekend and beginning of the week have kind of devolved into an epic cluster. She’s going to be okay, it’s something we’ve dealt with for a long time, but I’m really distracted, and now I’m behind at work. I just—I can’t.”

  He finally looks at me, really looks, and his eyes are glassy and bottomed out and squinting tight against pain or tears. My stomach is rolling over and over itself because I can’t think of a way to hang on to him.

  “Look,” I manage to say, “when you’ve got a lot on your plate, it makes it easier to spread some around.” I remember the minuscule contact list on his phone. “If you don’t have many people to help out, I can help out. I really can. I am disgustingly unburdened.” I try a smile meant to broadcast my offer into any chinks he might have in that big wall, but he tilts his head back, squeezing his eyes shut, and I know he wants to escape.

  But I can’t let him, so I step close to him and run my hand down his arm, squeezing his hand. Filling my palm with those tense white knuckles. He lets me, for a second, and his shoulders even relax and round just a little, but then he gently steps away.

  “That’s just it, Carrie. I’m not going to burden you. You would take it all, I can tell. God, it’s tempting. You’re tempting, and more so than just this,” he says, gesturing his hand around the pergola. “You and your big, clear eyes that make me just want to lie down with you and rest.” He pushes the heel of his hand against his forehead and I push my own hand against my chest in sympathy. “Things are really, really messed up right now and Stacy just needs me to figure my shit out for her. I wish—”

  But he drops his chin to his chest and I know he’s not going to actually make his wish.

  This time he steps forward, and before I can process his intent, he cups my face in one hand damp from the rain and kisses me. It is not a lunchtime kiss. It’s a goodbye kiss, soft and flavorless.

  “Brian, please,” I ask him. His answer is to walk away.

  Tuesday, almost a week later, 3:30 p.m.

  Justin and Shelley have wisely decided to leave me alone, and I am doing my best to burn away the rest of the afternoon in the solitary and dirty project of unpacking and organizing the donated tutoring materials in the conference room.

  I spent a lot of time last week trying to figure out if you could go through a breakup if you never really had a relationship to begin with, but those rationales kept dead-ending against my heart’s stubborn insistence that I was very much in a relationship, thankyouverymuch. So then I just gave in to my real-enough breakup and slept my way through the Sunday/Monday weekend, rousing only to drink another glass of wine so I would stop dreaming about Brian.

  That is, until early last night I had one last dream about Brian, the most beautiful dream where he looked young and dimply as we fed each other a picnic with goat cheese and homemade beer and he laughed, laughed so beautifully, at all of my jokes.

  After that dream I decided I had slept enough and was ready to come to work and abuse my co-workers before losing myself in seventeen boxes of algebra workbooks.

  Through the conference room door’s rectangular window, I suddenly see my director, my very pregnant director, run down the hallway, immediately followed by a running Justin and Shelley and one of our security guards. Beyond concerned, I bang out of the conference room and follow them down the hall to where they are exiting through the double fire doors that lead into the lobby.

  My heart is in my throat, because everything seems really quiet, and their alarm was so intense. When I stop at the edge of the three-story atrium of the marble and oak lobby, it’s confusing. No one is yelling or running here. Instead, a large crowd is standing back, circled around people I can’t see, and I can’t hear anything but low voices.

  It gradually makes sense. The people toward the inner part of the circle are wearing the bright blue vests of The Windsor Corner adult day-care program. The program’s building is just a few blocks from the library, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays they bring the center’s severely disabled clients to the library for a story hour, and sometimes a movie. Just behind the uniformed workers, the clients are situated in their chairs and motorized scooters, looking distressed. Two of the day-care workers are crouched, along with Justin and the security guard, on the floor next to an empty wheelchair.

  Oh God. I move forward to help, realizing it must be the day-care client who uses a specialized chair that leans back, nearly into a kind of bed, and is the most fragile of the group. Did she fall?

  When I kneel next to Justin and Shelley, I see that she is curled on her side on the floor, the contractures of her arms and legs so angled that it seems like she must be in pain. She seems so small, but she is a fully grown woman with threads of silver in her dark braid, and air is rhythmically and wetly gasping through a foggy tube in her throat. I have seen her plenty of times, staff wheeling her in with the group, and she is always restless—her head lolling, her legs jerking, despite the black Velcro straps holding her to her chair.

  Justin is smoothing his hands steadily over her shoulders, attempting to soothe her while the security guard and the staff troubleshoot the situation. She has fallen from her chair, apparently from some combination of a seizure and her safety harness getting opened by a mechanism on the center’s bus.

  No one knows if her head or neck is hurt, because she doesn’t communicate at all. No one knows, in fact, if she is done seizing. Everyone has decided not to move her until the ambulance squad arrives. Someone has already called her family. Shelley is whispering with our director, one of the day-care workers is crying, but only Justin is offering the fallen woman comfort.

  I notice that the plastic breathing tube in her throat has a little foam strap holding it to her neck that has come unbuttoned, and part of the tube has come away from the hole in her throat. I reach over and gently start to button it back, ignoring how wet the strap is, how much saliva leaks from the startling edge of the hole, and am gratified to see the tube reset into place and some of the noise from her breathing abate. “Don’t touch that,” says one of the workers, too late, but I just look at her. She was the one crying.

  Then the security guard kneels down, someone with him, and the entire room just sinks away when I realize the man with him is Brian.

  “Brian,” I whisper, but I think only Justin, who grabs my elbow, hears me.

  But my eyes meet Brian’s, equally startled. He recovers first and reaches over Justin to turn the woman firmly and competently toward him. “Stacy!” he says loudly, calmly.

  Stacy.

  His voice is like a spell that settles her larger movements and quiets her breathing. I watch Brian’s big hands examine Stacy from a long, long distance. My brain finds a weird focus on Stacy’s name-tag lanyard, which features her name, “Stacy Newburgh,” surrounded by ladybug stickers.

  In one efficient movement, Brian deadlifts Stacy into his arms, and the effect is as powerful as it is unbelievably gentle. When he stands, cradling her into her chair, his arms working the harness into place, I realize he is wearing a suit. He must have come straight from his job. He must have run across the park to the library.

  Once Stacy is secure, the ambulance squad arrives, and Brian approaches them to talk, quickly shaking their hands and waving them out the door. Because he’s got it. He was here first. Right out of his building and across the park without any questions and, in less than a minute, he did what an atrium full of people couldn’t manage in twenty.

  I stand up, and our eyes meet again. He must have been looking at me, still kneeling on the floor. His hand is brushing the hair that has escaped Stacy’s braid away from her forehead, but he still looks into my eyes. His smile isn’t enough to engage his dimples, but it is beautiful just the same.

  Justin touches my arm and I break my gaze with Brian to meet Justin’s and Shelley’s sympathetic looks. When I see tears spill from Shelley’s eyes, I have to look away to stop my own. I look back to Brian and he is already leaving
, maneuvering Stacy’s chair out of the atrium, one of the workers following.

  My black mood has evaporated, but I’ll never get used to this uncomfortable and sharply bitter sweetness that has taken its place.

  Wednesday, 12:36 p.m.

  Of course, I didn’t expect him to be here, and he’s not, but I needed to feel somehow close to him while I think. The day is beautiful, and the pergola around the picnic table blocks enough of the breeze that I take off my cardigan to enjoy one of the last warm afternoons before the icy midwestern late autumn sends everyone indoors for weeks at a time.

  I lean back, the edge of the table digging into my shoulder blades, replaying the memory of Brian swiftly lifting his sister into her chair. I think about how often he must need to lift her, reposition her, strap and unstrap her.

  I think of what it must be to be a grown man, with a grown sister who he must lift into a bathtub and bathe. I don’t think Stacy is able to toilet on her own, either. I have learned, reading a little on the Internet, that Stacy’s breathing tube is called a tracheostomy, and it means that she likely has a feeding tube in her belly, as well.

  I think about Brian’s big hands changing tubes and diapers and bedding, as gentle and as strong as his hands were yesterday.

  I don’t have a brother or sister, so my empathy keeps bumping up against blind corners in my imagination. But it helps me to remember that alongside Stacy’s tubes and wheelchair and straps, her hair was long and braided, whereas sensible short hair would have been simpler for Brian.

  He keeps Stacy’s hair for herself, I can imagine; he makes sure that she has a herself—even if it means one more task for him, more time he doesn’t have for his own life.