by Cora Brent
I met Branson Hickey the first week of kindergarten.
It was the only clear memory I have from that year, except for an enduring terror of the school bus steps. During recess I had just taken a daring leap off one of the playground swings and managed to face plant into the wood chips. Branson volunteered to walk me to the nurse’s office so someone could deal with my bleeding knees.
During the walk down the seemingly endless main corridor of the Hickeyville Elementary School he held my hand and looked me over with approval.
“That was cool,” he said. “You jumped crazy far. What’s your name?”
“Cecily,” I muttered, feeling bashful. I didn’t have any friends who were boys.
He nodded. “That’s nice. I’m Branson. Branson Hickey. My mom and dad always call me Bran. Everyone calls me Bran.”
I stopped walking. “Your last name is like the name of our town.”
Bran shrugged. “Yeah, Hickeyville is named after my great great grandpa or something.”
I was fascinated. “Wow. It’s kind of like you’re famous.”
Bran thought that was funny. He laughed and laughed. That was the first time I ever really noticed the sound of someone’s laughter and it made me feel warm inside.
Bran suddenly reached into his pocket. “Here,” he said and pressed something hard into my palm. “You can have this.”
I stared at the object. “It’s a rock.”
“It’s called flint,” he said confidently. “My brother found it when we were camping last year.”
I felt funny about accepting something from this boy, even if it was just a lumpy gray rock. I tried to give it back. “Don’t you want to keep it?”
“Nah, I’ve got more. It’ll hurt when the nurse puts that stuff on your knee to make it stop bleeding. You can squeeze the rock and it’ll make you feel better.”
I smiled. I knew I was blushing. “Thank you.”
Bran took my hand again and walked me the rest of the way. He held open the door to the nurse’s office. I did what he said and squeezed the rock while the nurse cleaned my scraped knees. He was right. It did make me feel better.
Twenty years later I held the door of the Emergency Room open so Bran could carry an injured girl through it. The ride over here had been short and noisy with Saffron carrying on the backseat and me shouting words of encouragement back to her. Bran was the only one who remained silent, staring straight ahead in the passenger seat of my wheezing old car. The fact that he’d resurfaced so suddenly a thousand miles away from the last place I’d seen him was not something I could make sense of.
Saffron made such a racket in the ER that she caught the attention of the hospital staff. She ended up being bumped ahead of less vocal patients and swept into the triage area the second Bran set her down in a wheelchair. When she was rolled down the hall by a nurse in pink scrubs I stiffly followed and avoided glancing behind me.
Saffron sobbed wretchedly as the nurse questioned her, trying to figure out how she ended up with two broken feet.
“She jumped off the balcony,” I volunteered. “She was just trying to reach the pool. They do that, the kids.”
The nurse looked at me funny but that was probably because the story sounded weird. However, I didn’t have anything else to say at the moment because my brain was still suffering from Branson Hickey Shock Syndrome.
“You’re from the university?” the nurse asked a little wearily. She probably saw the aftermath of a lot of crazy stunts featuring drunk or careless students.
“Yes. I’m a Resident Adviser in a freshman residence hall. I was reading about international economic policy when I heard screaming.” I knew I was babbling about unnecessary details but somehow I couldn’t stop myself. “When I got to the hallway I found Saffron in the arms of Bran Hickey. He carried her to my car.”
“Hmmm” said the nurse. She frowned and typed something on her keyboard. “Who’s Bran Hickey?”
“He’s the man who carried Saffron in here.”
The nurse peered over my shoulder. “What man?”
I turned around and saw the empty doorway. “He’s not here now. He’s in the waiting room I think.”
“Oh.”
“We used to be married,” I said. “Not for very long. Only five months. Sometimes it seems like it was much longer. Oh, but you probably don’t care about that part.”
The nurse shrugged and glued her eyes back to her computer screen. “Not really.”
“Who’s married?” Saffron croaked. Her face was so raw from crying that she looked like she’d been sitting in the sun for six hours. Her legs were sticking straight out to keep her feet from touching anything. I tried to avoid staring at her feet. I was afraid they’d remind me of that scene in Misery where Kathy Bates bludgeoned James Caan’s legs into a pulp. I always closed my eyes at that part.
“No one,” I told her.
“Insurance?” the nurse asked.
Saffron’s face crumpled again. “I don’t have my wallet. But I do have insurance. It’s Blue Cross or something. You can ask my mom.”
A shadow appeared at our backs and I whirled around, half expecting Bran to be looming there. Instead there was a dark-skinned middle aged fellow wearing a cheerful smile and a hospital badge.
“It’s all right. We can deal with insurance details later,” the nurse said as she stood up and beckoned the man at the door. “Let’s get you down to X-Ray.” She offered Saffron a comforting pat on the shoulder.
“Cecily!” Saffron said before she was wheeled away. “Can you call my mom?”
I stared at the silver iPhone she was trying to hand over. “You want me to call your mom?”
Saffron glanced at her feet and grimaced. “If that’s okay. There’s no screen password. Just look for Home in the contacts list.”
“Um.” I stalled, trying to think of an excuse.
“Please.” Saffron sniffed and looked like she was about to melt into tears once more. “She’ll totally freak out and I just can’t handle that right now.”
I wasn’t sure I could handle Saffron’s freaked out mom either. Yet I couldn’t say no.
“Yes, I’ll call her,” I promised, plucking the phone from Saffron’s fingers as the attendant rolled her out of the room. The task would actually buy me at least another minute before I had to head out to the lobby and deal with my own personal emergency.
Of course Saffron’s mother went nuts when she received a late night phone call from her daughter’s number and listened to a stranger explain current events. In fact she got so hysterical you’d think I had just delivered news that Saffron had been vaporized by a laser beam from outer space. She calmed down after a few minutes though. She’d be on the next plane from Portland to Phoenix.
“I’ll tell Saffron,” I said. “I’m sure the doctor will have some news for you soon.”
“Thank you,” said the woman gratefully. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Cecily Hickey.”
“Cecily Hickey,” she repeated.
“Ah, no.” I grimaced. “Wait, that’s wrong. My name is actually Cecily Barnett.”
“Cecily Barnett?” she said but at this point she sounded like she was wondering if I had a few screws loose. “Well thank you, Cecily,” she said somewhat stiffly. “I’ll be calling the hospital now.”
“Good idea,” I muttered, wondering why in the hell I had spat out a name that hadn’t been mine for nearly seven years. I’d barely gotten used to my married name and switched back to my maiden name as soon as the divorce was final.
A different nurse passed by and eyeballed me as I leaned against a white wall outside the triage area.
“Can I help you with something?” she asked.
“No,” I sighed. “I wish you could.”
I pocketed Saffron’s phone, took a deep breath and marched back into the lobby. Somehow I figured he wouldn’t be there, that he would have left or maybe that I’d imagined him after all. Perhaps this
was all some vivid dream or I’d been briefly sucked into an alternate reality vortex.
Branson Hickey was real though. At least he was real enough to be casually sprawled in an orange chair in the hospital lobby and paging through a People magazine as if he hadn’t anything more important to think about than what dress Beyoncé wore on the red carpet.
I paused and studied him, seeing both the boy I’d loved and the man who was now a stranger. I hadn’t heard his voice in seven years and I wasn’t even sure of his whereabouts, other than the fact that he was in the Army. Except for Antha I steered clear of acquaintances from Ohio and didn’t join any of the popular social media sites. I never wanted to know too much. I never wanted to remember.
As Bran turned another page of his silly magazine a couple of soccer mom types with messy topknots and tired faces nudged each other and stared. Bran’s black hair was cut short but the shadow of a beard dusting his jaw meant he hadn’t shaved in at least several days. He was wearing a faded Army t-shirt that strained at the seams over his muscles and distressed jeans that appeared as if they’d suffered through six hundred wash cycles.
He looked careless, wild and delicious. I couldn’t blame those women for staring. If I didn’t know who he was I would probably be searching for a way to get his attention too.
It didn’t seem fair.
The guy should have managed to acquire a few physical flaws in seven years. Instead he shows up here in my part of the country looking like he drank a gallon of sex appeal for breakfast every morning.
Bran stopped thumbing through the magazine and looked up at me. Brown eyes usually aren’t described as striking but his always were. There was a piercing quality to his gaze that once had the power to keep me hypnotized. The tremor that rolled through me as we locked eyes told me some things hadn’t changed.
“Hey, Cess,” he said and casually tossed his magazine to a nearby table. “How’s the girl?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He surveyed me as if I amused him. “Didn’t you go back there with her?”
“No. I mean yes but they took her to get x-rays and she hasn’t met with the doctor yet.”
Bran nodded and grimaced slightly. “Damn, she looked pretty bad. I was walking past the pool when I saw her make the jump. And the assholes who’d been cheering her on scattered while she started screaming so I picked her up and brought her indoors.”
“What the fuck are you doing here, Bran?” I blurted.
He frowned, crossed one ankle over his knee and touched the seat next to him. “We ought to stop shouting across the room.”
There hadn’t actually been any shouting, not yet, but we were attracting some attention. The soccer moms stared. The security guard stared. The two receptionists behind the intake desk stared. An elderly couple holding hands and yawning in some nearby chairs stared.
And, most significantly, Branson Hickey stared. He had a vague smile on his face as he waited to see what I would do next.
So I acted like an adult. I lowered my head and made my way to his side of the room. But instead of sitting down in the chair beside him I rigidly parked myself in the seat across.
He cocked his head. “What was her name again?” he asked.
“Saffron.”
He nodded. “She landed on her heels. They’re probably shattered.”
“Probably. Again, what in god’s name are you doing here, Bran?”
He raised an eyebrow and picked up another magazine. “I rode here in here in your car, Cess. Don’t you remember?”
My fists balled involuntarily. “You know what I mean.”
“Of course I do. Hey, you mind giving me a ride back to campus when Saffron’s all settled?”
I still wasn’t convinced that this exchange with my estranged ex-husband in the hospital lobby was real. This was the kind of thing that happened in movies or soap operas. I clutched the seat of the chair until the plastic dug into my palms.
“Why do you need to get back to campus?” I asked with admirable calm as my mind raged with a thousand more questions.
He drummed his fingers on the back of the chair next to him. “Because I live there.”
My eyes narrowed. “You live where?”
“Yucca Hall. You know it. We were there a little while ago.” He grinned at me as if he knew I’d be appalled by his answer and awaited my reaction with delight.
“Are you joking?”
“Occasionally. But not about this.”
“You can’t live at Yucca Hall, Bran.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a freshman dorm and you’re twenty five years old.”
“You’re twenty five and you live there.”
“How did you know where I live? Anyway, I’m a Resident Advisor. I’m not prowling the hallways looking for teenagers to corrupt. You’ve got to be the oldest person in the building.”
“No, I’m not. You’re three months older, Cess.”
My back stiffened. “Quit talking in fucking circles. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that you’re here.”
Bran sighed. It seemed like he was enjoying himself though. “Of course it’s not a coincidence. You weren’t strong enough to carry a screaming girl with two broken feet. I did you both a favor by carrying her to your car and then into the building.” He leaned forward a little. “And since you’re so interested, I’ll let you know that I’m not corrupting anyone at the moment.”
I dipped my head and pinched the skin between my eyebrows. I needed to think. He still hadn’t explained why he was here. Not in the hospital, but in the damn state.
“Are you okay, Cess?” he asked quietly.
“Yes,” I lied. I was having some trouble sorting through the things happening in my head. When I looked up he was watching me but his eyes were solemn now.
“Do you mind if we start from the beginning?” I asked.
He settled back into the chair and looked a little relieved. “Not at all. You have questions, I’m sure. I don’t mind answering them.”
“So what happened to the Army?”
“Nothing. The Army is right where I left it, Cess.”
“Don’t call me that. So are you, what’s the word, AWOL or something?”
He smiled. He could still pack a thousand promises into one of his smiles. Being confronted by the sight of one again unnerved me to the core.
“Maybe,” he said. “Does that worry you?”
“I’m not worried. But the last I heard you were dodging grenades and running through sand dunes somewhere in the Middle East.”
“I was. “ He shrugged. “I’m done now.”
Bran had enlisted in the Army right after we imploded. Even though I’d made a conscious effort to avoid all Bran-related news over the years, certain pieces of information would manage to find me. I had heard of his long deployments to distant places. And always in the most fearful corner of my mind lived the dread that he was in danger. No matter what had happened between us in the end, the idea of a world without Bran living in it somewhere was unbearable.
Yet just because I didn’t want him being blown to smithereens by a roadside bomb didn’t mean I wanted him sitting three feet away.
“You’re done now,” I repeated, shaking my head. I shrugged helplessly. “This is Arizona, not Ohio.”
“That would explain the palm trees.”
“Cut the crap. Why didn’t you go home?”
He looked me in the eye. “Why didn’t you?”
“Damn it, stop answering my questions with more questions,” I hissed.
“Okay.” Bran crossed his arms and settled back in his chair. “Hickeyville is practically a ghost town now. You must know that. Hell, I heard your mom cleared out and moved to Florida years ago. There aren’t any jobs. The few people left behind are barely scraping by. Even the high school shut its doors and that restaurant where you used to work is now a boarded up drug den. The factory fire kind of sealed the town’s fate.” Bran looked
down at his knees with a sad expression. “There’s not much left to go back to, babe.”
“I’m not your babe,” I whispered, grimacing over Bran’s description of our hometown.
Hickeyville had prospered as a factory town. The huge tile factory operated for nearly eighty years and high school graduates would head straight to work in solid union jobs like their fathers and grandfathers. Except for a few wealthier outliers like Bran’s family, we were all firmly working class but no one seemed to mind. At least, that’s how I remembered it, the world of my childhood.
But by the time I reached my teens, the small town perched on the northeastern lip of the state was already starting to decline. The factory owners were bought out by some global conglomerate and they decided they would rather hire employees in China than Ohio and nothing anyone said could change their minds. They padlocked the factory doors, handed out paltry severance packages and waved from the windows of their luxury vehicles before they drove out of Hickeyville forever, leaving everyone behind to stare at their pink slips and wonder what the hell they were going to do now.
There was always talk about the factory reopening with new owners. Always hope. Always deals that fell through or were only rumors in the first place. And then on a cold, fateful night that I still dreamed about seven years later, the symbol of Hickeyville’s lost prosperity burned down. The fire was accidental, set when a few old homeless men were trying to keep warm by setting paper on fire in a rusted metal drum. One of them died.
Later on it would occur to me that the fire had been an omen of sorts. Wisps of black smoke were still curling out of the ruins a week later when Bran and I suffered our final, devastating confrontation. There was no going back after that. There was, as Bran said, nothing left.
“The high school closed?” I asked softly. “I hadn’t heard.”
“Two years ago,” Bran said as he watched me carefully.
I thought of the rundown old school. I saw the football bleachers and the Friday night lights, heard the screams of the crowd as they cheered on quarterback Branson Hickey, the golden boy, the fortunate son, the flesh and blood hope that Hickeyville’s best days might not be gone after all.
