by Kevin Wilson
He held her, felt her body ease into his embrace. They made their way to the bed and had sex; he came so fast, but then he worked on her with his hand until she shuddered against him.
They fell asleep and then woke the next morning. All day they waited to hear about Freddie. There was nothing. Ashley kept writing, and Trey surfed the Internet in the tiny motel room. He went out and got Chinese food and brought it back for them to eat. Ashley let Trey read her article, which was amazing. It was the kind of thing that was so far beyond Trey’s own ability that he knew it would get her a lot of attention.
“It’s amazing,” he said.
“Thanks,” she replied, smiling.
“It’s going to be a big deal,” he told her.
“And right after this, I’m going to write about what’s happening to Freddie. I’ll just write about every single injustice that I’m one degree apart from. I’ll write forever.”
The next day, they finally heard that Freddie’s bail was $15,000, and Trey thought about the dent in his bank account, which he’d already fucked up by purchasing that Gordon Gibbs first edition.
“I’m still so fucking angry about this,” she said. “I’m going to have a hard time not punching every fucking cop that I see in that place.”
“I’ll bail you out,” Trey said, and she laughed out loud. As they got dressed, brushed their teeth, Trey said, not really thinking much of it, “Where do you think they got that gun that they planted on Freddie?”
“Who knows?” Ashley replied. “They probably have a box of guns in the trunk of their cruiser to plant on black guys.”
“But couldn’t it be traced?” Trey said. “Why would they risk it?”
“What do you mean?” Ashley said.
“It just seems excessive,” he said, shrugging.
“Do you think it’s his?” she finally asked him, her hands now on her hips, like she was ready for a fight.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Fuck you, Trey,” she said.
“I said that I didn’t know,” he shouted. “I’ve never had to deal with somebody getting arrested. It’s all new to me.”
“Keep your money,” she now said. “I’m going to call my parents.”
“Fuck, don’t do that,” Trey said. “I said I’d pay for it. I believe you.”
“You think the world is so perfect that if something bad happens to a person, you think there’s a reason for it. You think they deserved it.”
“That’s not fair, Ashley, really,” he said. He could feel everything slipping away.
“Sometimes I feel like we’re a hundred miles apart from each other,” she said. “I feel like there’s things that you’ll never understand about me.”
“I’m trying,” he replied. It was over. He could feel it ending, the way things went away and never came back.
“I don’t think that’s enough,” she said. “I think you should go back to Nashville. I think you should stay there.”
“You’re angry,” Trey said. “We should talk about it.”
“I don’t want to talk,” she said.
Trey opened his wallet and pulled out the hundred bucks that he had. “Take it,” he said. “Anything you want, I’ll give it to you.”
“Go home, Trey,” she said.
Trey stared at her for a few seconds, unsure of what to do. She turned away from him, reached for her cell phone, and walked into the bathroom. Trey took out the razor, held it to his throat, and started to drag it across the skin. Just then, Ashley walked back into the room. “Trey!” she shouted. “What the fuc—”
Twenty-four hours earlier, Trey was lying in bed, staring at his computer. He looked around. Ashley was sitting at the wobbly desk against the window. She was turned around in her chair, staring at him.
“What the fuck did you just do?” she asked him.
“What do you mean?” he replied, still trying to come out of the haze, of feeling his blood pulsing inside his body.
“I saw you, Trey. You cut your fucking throat open. Right in front of me.”
“No,” Trey said, confused. He tried to get up, but the sheets were stuck to his legs, and he couldn’t get free. Ashley was now standing, backing away from him, pressing herself against the wall.
“I saw you. It was fucking horrifying. I told you we were over, and you cut your throat, and now here we are. What’s going on?” she asked him.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “I’m not sure why you remembered.”
“I’m scared of you, Trey,” she said.
“Let me explain,” he said.
“I think you better leave,” she said, and Trey once again, nothing to lose, slashed his throat, fell against the headboard of the bed, and woke up twenty-four hours earlier.
He was in his own apartment in Nashville. Immediately, the phone rang. He looked at the screen and saw that it was Ashley. He answered.
“What are you doing?” she said. “What’s going on?”
He slashed his throat again. He didn’t know what else to do, how to fix anything. He woke up twenty-four hours earlier and, without hesitation, slashed his throat again. The pain was excruciating, not enough time passing between the act to help him forget the sensation. He took a few minutes to think it over. His phone was ringing again, Ashley on the line. He let it go to voice mail, but the phone just rang again. She remembered what had happened. Somehow she was caught up in the time warp, he guessed. The phone rang again, and he moved to answer it, no way to avoid what was coming. But then he stopped. There was a way, he realized. If he just kept going, slashing his throat every day for three years, until he found himself before he had met Ashley, maybe she wouldn’t remember. The memory wouldn’t be connected to anything.
He took the razor and slashed his throat again; as he bled out, he heard the phone still ringing.
Time had no shape or feeling. He was in a tunnel, moving backward, with no control over his body. After thirty days, he felt like he’d been running a nonstop marathon. The phone kept ringing, but he wouldn’t answer it. Soon he’d be back to when Ashley was back in Nashville, when she would be in his apartment. He had to move quickly. His throat opened up and it felt like he didn’t even need the razor to do it anymore, that he could just touch his skin and the blood would come.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked him once, when they were sitting on his sofa.
“I promise it’ll be okay,” he told her.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, but he was already drowning in his own blood.
He was two years back in time, always checking the calendar on his phone whenever he woke up again.
“Just talk to me,” she said.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too, you stupid fucking idiot,” she said.
He slashed his throat.
When he finally made it to the day that he had first met her, he didn’t even hesitate. He slashed his throat again. And again. He went back an extra thirty days, just to be safe. He waited for the phone to ring. He looked her up online, read her articles again. What would happen when they met? Would she remember? How could she believe it was anything other than a strange dream?
What he really wanted to know was whether he could start over with her. So much of their relationship had been pure joy. He had fucked up some, but he felt like he could, if given the chance, smooth over those things. He would stop writing silly shit about sweatpants. He would get involved in real issues. They would team up for social justice. He would open himself up to the world.
He went to the library and checked out Gordon Gibbs’s first novel, Soldier’s Joy, about a black man who returns to Detroit after two tours in Vietnam. He’s now addicted to heroin, but he doesn’t feel entirely out of place back in Detroit. Trey read it in a single day. He would talk about it with Ashley when they met again.
What else could he do? Was it enough to live the last three years of his life differently? He moved through the thirty days in a kind of haze. He
simply let his body go through the motions of living. The closer he got to the day when he would walk into the restaurant, see her at their table, the more he felt like it could work.
At night, he started to think about the things he had done. He thought, for the first time in many years, about the reason why he and James, his friend from junior high, stopped being friends. They had been playing basketball at the park when two redneck boys who were sophomores in high school challenged them to a game. James was good, played on the junior high team, so good that he could carry Trey to a win over these two boys, no matter how dirty they played. When they were two points away from winning, James spotted up for a shot, and one of the boys said, “Miss it, you dumb nigger.” The shot clanged off the rim. James looked over at Trey and then back at the boy. “What the hell did you call me?” James asked. The boy and his friend moved closer to James. “You heard what I called you,” he said. James again looked at Trey, who had gone to retrieve the ball.
“Let’s just finish the game, man,” Trey said to the two boys, who were now smiling.
Trey passed the ball to James, who stared at the two boys, who did not make a move. James spotted up, shot the ball, which fell effortlessly through the hoop, and the game was over.
“Good game,” Trey said to the boys, who still were staring at James. He was watching them carefully, waiting for what came next. Finally, the boys spit right at James’s feet and walked away. Trey heard them say the n-word again, then laughter.
“Good shot,” Trey said to James, and he offered his hand for a high five, but James pushed it away.
“Why didn’t you do anything, man?” James asked him as they went to get the basketball, which had rolled to the edge of the court.
“What could I do?” Trey asked.
“You could have helped me beat the shit out of them,” James said.
“They’re older than us,” Trey said.
“Still, man,” James said.
“Forget those guys, man,” Trey said to his friend. “Don’t let it get to you.”
“Yeah,” James said, looking toward the distance where the boys had been walking.
Trey felt ugly, like his skin was blistered and angry. He held the razor. Could he go back that far, to that moment with James? Could he run over to that boy, right after he’d said what he’d said to James, and punch him square in the mouth? The two boys would then kick Trey and James until their teeth loosened and their ribs bruised. Would he and James still be friends?
He thought about when he was four years old, one of his earliest memories, when he’d told a black girl that he’d just met at the park that she looked kind of like a monkey. His mother had heard and taken him to the bathroom and spanked him for the first time in his life, so hard that he had wailed for an hour afterward. He thought about the only Korean girl at his elementary school, when he told her that her lunch that she’d brought from home smelled awful, and how the girl had cried until the teacher had let her call her mother and go home. He thought about how she never brought lunch from home again. He could not remember her name.
What did he want exactly, to go back in time and remove every moment that he had hurt someone? To be worthy of whatever came to him? All he wanted at the moment was Ashley, to be worthy of her. He knew that he wasn’t, not yet.
But the day was here, when he was to finally meet her. Trey dressed, combed his hair. He drove to the restaurant. He walked inside and saw Ashley, sitting at the table. She waved to him. He waved back. He took a step forward. He checked his pocket for the razor. It was there. It was there like it always was, like it always would be, for as long as he needed such things.
A Visit
Missy heard that her mom was in the hospital, had been assaulted in her own home, from a second cousin who had listened to the whole thing on her police scanner. “As soon as I heard the name June Weaver, I figured I should tell somebody. It sounds bad, Missy.”
Missy was in bed, just asleep enough that this phone call felt like an anxiety dream, but she slowly worked her way through the facts. Her husband was snoring like a drugged elk, and she shoved him until he rolled onto his stomach and his breathing normalized. From what she could understand, the bare essentials that came over the police scanner, someone had broken into her mother’s home, where she lived alone, demanded money, assaulted her, and then run off, still at large. They had taken her mother to the hospital over in Custer. Missy thanked the second cousin, a woman she had no memory of ever meeting, not fully awake enough to wonder how the woman had her phone number, and sat in bed, unable to do anything other than think about her options.
She knew she would have to go to her mother in Slidell, a four-hour drive from her apartment in Atlanta, and take care of things. Her only sibling, Tommy, was a bartender in Las Vegas; she didn’t even have a phone number for him any longer, hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. She’d have to take some personal days from the travel agency, her boss surely pissed about it, and her husband and their daughter, Kayla, would have to fend for themselves for a few days. This was easy enough to figure out; the hard part was the uncertainty that awaited her. Her mother, eighty-two years old, had been beaten up, probably by some meth addict, and Missy only knew that there were so many outcomes that were untenable for her, as coldhearted as that seemed.
Their apartment was too small to accommodate her mother. If her mother needed help once she got back from the hospital, there was no money to pay for it. A nursing home was out of the question, too expensive, and her mother would never consent to it anyways. If her mother died—and Missy could not prevent her mind from going to these dark places—she had no idea how to even go about untangling all her mother’s affairs, whatever they might be. She saw her mother on Christmas and Easter, occasionally answered phone calls to help her figure out some tricky website or how to program the satellite TV. Now, as she quickly packed a bag and explained to her groggy husband what was happening, her mother had become the world entire. All the details of how she cared for herself and spent her days, which had become hazy and easy for Missy to ignore over the years, crystallized into a solid and definable sadness.
Before she left, she kissed Kayla, who, even in her sleep, reached out and hugged Missy, and then she was in the car, navigating by memory the turns and highways that led back to her childhood home, her mind unable to settle on any real thought. The interior of the car was dark and silent, and she realized that, though she should be exhausted, her body was rumbling with adrenaline, her hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly that it made her teeth ache.
Four hours later, as she drove down strange highways, past houses that seemed to have exploded, all their contents now on the front lawn, every five miles seeing yet another fireworks store that was just a run-down trailer strung up with Christmas lights, she arrived in Custer. She pulled into the parking lot of the hospital and suddenly realized that she should have called ahead; why had she never thought to phone the hospital to check on her mother’s status? Everything had happened so fast, she supposed, though that didn’t account for the four hours in the car, listening to talk radio and smooth jazz; besides, whatever the outcome, she would still need to come here. No situation would have allowed her to stay in Atlanta.
She walked inside, the lighting so bright, and found a nurses’ station. “My mom came here earlier tonight,” she said to the disinterested nurse who was playing with her cell phone. “June Weaver?”
“You family?” the nurse asked, suddenly suspicious.
“I’m her daughter,” Missy answered. “Can you tell me anything about how she’s doing? Can I see her?”
“She ain’t here,” the nurse finally replied.
“What?” Missy said, the accumulation of exhaustion now settling on her frame. She felt her knees slowly buckle, and she steadied herself against the counter.
“Well, she was here. They brought her in and the cops were here, but she left about thirty minutes ago.”
“You let her go?�
�
“We told her that she should stay, but she didn’t want to. We couldn’t keep her.”
“She went back home?” Missy asked. “But why would they let her go back home? Somebody broke into her house and beat her up, right? How can she just go back there?”
“Well, they caught the guy, so I guess it’s okay,” the woman said. She had clearly moved on to other business, with Missy still standing in front of her.
“Is she okay?” Missy asked, and then, the questions building like a wave, one after the other, she interrupted herself. “Who even drove her home? She lives by herself.”
“Let me ask Janie,” the woman said, and she pushed her chair away from Missy and walked over to another nurse. They consulted for a few seconds and then the nurse came back, shrugging. “Some man picked her up.”
“Jesus,” Missy said. Her nerves were so raw that she knew that she needed to punch someone, but she couldn’t figure out who it should be. She walked back to the parking lot and called her mother on her cell phone, but it went to the answering machine. “Mom?” Missy said into the phone, almost shouting. “It’s Missy. Are you home? I’m real worried, Mom. Pick up, please.”
The machine clicked off, and Missy heard her mother’s soft southern drawl. “Hi, Missy.”
“Mom, what in the hell is going on? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey. I got some stitches on my cheek, but they gave me some medicine at the hospital, and I feel real fine.”
Missy started crying, unsure of the emotion she was experiencing. “I’m coming to see you, Mom,” she said.
“Honey, don’t worry about me. It’s such a long drive. I’m fine, I told you.”
“I’m here,” Missy shouted. “I’m at the hospital right now. I drove here as soon as I heard.”
“Who told you? Why did they tell you?”
“Junie’s daughter called me,” Missy said.
“Honey, Junie doesn’t have a daughter. She’s got four boys.”
“Jesus, Mom, I don’t know. One of those cousins called me. And she called me because you’re my mom and you got assaulted and you were in the hospital. You should still be in the hospital.”
