Unexpectedly, Milo

by Matthew Dicks

  Christine had taken up the sport after years of relatively little physical activity, so it had come to as a surprise to Milo when he came home one day to find her doubled over and panting in the kitchen. Though she had always been in fine shape, her late-afternoon runs, seemingly initiated on a whim, had begun to take on an almost religious quality when Milo finally asked to join her. Upon reflection, he should have known that the sudden urge to exercise was a sign of trouble. He had seen married women begin intense exercise regimes before, and it usually signaled one of three things: The wife had experienced a health scare, the wife was having an affair, or the husband had been caught cheating. Though none of these was the case in Milo and Christine’s marriage (as far as Milo knew), he suspected that Christine was attempting to dramatically improve her physical appearance, and he should have realized that few women (or men) are willing to do this for a spouse after three years of marriage.

  Christine agreed to allow Milo to run with her, and for the first month, she finished the two-mile route through the neighborhood well ahead of her breathless, bedraggled husband. But as Milo continued to run, his high school cross-country genes began to reassert themselves, and his desire to impress his wife soon had him running stride for stride with her along the course. As Milo’s endurance and speed improved, he noticed that Christine continued to push the pace, running faster and harder as Milo attempted to keep up, until one day, as they rounded a corner in a near sprint, Christine drew to a stop, threw up her hands, and shouted, “What the hell?”

  Milo pulled to a stop along his wife, oblivious to the cause of her anger. Though in retrospect the cause should have been obvious, at the time it was not. “What’s the matter?”

  “You just keep coming, don’t you? You can’t let me have my own thing! You just have to be better than me!”

  “Honey, I’m just trying to keep up with you,” he said between breaths. “I don’t need to pass you. Just keep up. I thought you wanted me to run with you?”

  “I did,” she snapped. She looked at her husband for a moment, eyes bulging, breathing heavily, seeming to search for more words, and for a second, Milo thought that his wife might be in the midst of a panic attack, a condition to which she was occasionally prone. Though these attacks could result in hyperventilation, a loss of equilibrium, and disorientation, Christine’s primary concern had always been the public spectacle and potential embarrassment that she might suffer if one was to ever strike while outside the home, as had happened when she was younger. If Christine were to experience one of these attacks in a public location, like this street corner, Milo was under orders to remove her from the situation as best he could, as quickly as he could, in order to prevent further embarrassment.

  But this was not a panic attack, Milo realized rather quickly, but simply a moment of extreme anger and a subsequent loss for words, something that did not happen often to a litigator such as Christine. For the first time that Milo could remember, his wife didn’t know what to say. For a moment, he thought she might apologize. “I don’t know what came over me,” he half expected her to admit, which would be followed by a brief embrace and an offer of sex when they returned home.

  After all, he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  But for almost a minute, Christine said nothing, and the protracted silence made Milo uneasy. Finally, she spoke, settling on “Never mind,” and took off in another sprint. Unsure what to do, Milo broke into a sprint himself, trying to catch his wife. He understood what she had been trying to say, but at the same time, he couldn’t understand the logic behind it at all. Had she hoped to always outdistance him, and if so, why bother running together at all? For Milo, who was twenty pounds overweight, the challenge had been to just keep pace with his wife, yet unknowingly and unintentionally, he had apparently stolen a source of pride from her. The expected admiration that he thought his wife might feel for his ability to match her pace couldn’t have been farther from reality, and he still couldn’t understand why.

  Nevertheless, Milo had no intention of allowing his wife to finish ahead of him that day. To walk into the house after her would mean facing the awkward silence that comes after a couple has engaged in marital combat and is then forced to immediately resume their daily activities under the same roof. Milo hated this form of vicious, nonverbal warfare, the purposeful absence of words where there would normally be many. If Christine finished the run first, she would invariably be in the shower by the time Milo arrived home, and rather than shouting, “The shower’s all yours!” when finished, she would exit the bathroom without a word, probably donning a robe rather than remaining naked as she crossed the hallway into the bedroom. Standing in front of the dresser, she would begin drying her hair, refusing to even acknowledge his presence as he made his way to the bathroom for his own shower. This stubborn unwillingness to speak, an indication of anger through a deniable lack of words, would persist throughout dinner and perhaps all night unless Milo did something about it. By forcing polite conversation on his wife and preventing a break in the action, he would give Christine no choice but to either resume hostilities with another verbal barrage or stand down. Standing down was her typical response in these circumstances, but either one was preferable to that dreadful silence.

  So with a burst of speed that he didn’t know he had, Milo caught his wife as she rounded the final turn and ascended the two hundred yards of hill leading to the couple’s driveway. He passed his wife over the last twenty yards, then clutched his knees, gasping for breath, in front of their home as she jogged by declaring that she was going for a walk to cool down.

  Whether Christine had meant to cool down from the argument or from the run was unclear, but since she had never walked before, Milo had assumed the former. Aware of the continued threat of silence if the two separated at this crucial moment, Milo adopted his cheeriest voice and replied, “Great! I’ll come along.”

  He had always been good at pretending that nothing was wrong. Expert, in fact.

  So began the tradition of a walk following their run, and what Milo considered to be the beginning of the end.

  Even with the weeks of preparation, Milo couldn’t help but feel a little depressed each time he entered the apartment and was faced with its spartan furnishings. The lamps that he had purchased at the tag sale were sitting on the floor, flanking a sagging futon that Milo had rescued from the basement during the move. Opposite the futon was a television perched upon one of the four wooden chairs from the battered kitchen table, which he had also removed from the basement. DVDs were stacked neatly beside the chair in alphabetical order, with Sigourney Weaver’s first two Alien films (the rest were an abomination) on top and the X-Files boxed set (all nine seasons for just $124.99) on the bottom. Though he and Christine had purchased a number of movies as a couple, both had brought a collection of their own films to the marriage as well, and Milo had extricated his DVDs during the move. He had also taken about two dozen other movies that he had received as gifts or were films that he knew Christine would never want to see again, including the Matrix trilogy, Hoosiers, all six Star Wars films, and the first seven seasons of The Simpsons.

  He had anticipated many lonely nights in the apartment until he and Christine settled their differences, and he had wanted to be ready to fill his time as best he could.

  Milo ate a silent dinner of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches off a paper plate before taking the time to examine the camera more closely. It was a Panasonic, similar to one owned by his friend Andy, with a small fold-out display screen for recording and viewing previously recorded material. The battery attached to the camera indicated a nearly full charge, and there was no tape loaded.

  In the nylon bag, Milo found an extra battery, a charger, and fourteen tapes, each conveniently numbered with a black felt-tip marker. He removed the tape marked “#1” and placed it into the camera. After a moment of fumbling for the right switch, he managed to get the tape to play. The screen was blank for several moments, and then a woma
n’s face filled the frame and began speaking.

  Things would never be the same.

  chapter 2

  “So you stole it?” the elderly woman in the wheelchair asked as Milo reached for the rake.

  “I told you, Edith. I didn’t steal it. It was sitting there for two days.”

  “My husband, Ed Marchand, used to say that if you don’t earn the money, you don’t get the honey. That was his way of keeping me from using my credit cards, but the rule applies here too, I think.”

  Milo sighed. Even though conflagration continued to burn in his mind at an ever-increasing rate, Edith Marchand had a way of distracting him from these inexplicable demands like no other. “Edith, gimme a break or you’re going to do this yourself,” he said without conviction, motioning to the rake and then to the living room carpet. “Besides, I told you that I was going to try to find the owner.”

  Edith laughed as Milo pulled the rake through the maroon shag that stretched across the spacious living room. Even though he knew that it was at his expense, Milo loved to listen to the old lady cackle. In fact, it was essentially what he was paid to do. Although the needs of his clients varied greatly, his ultimate responsibility was to keep each one of them as happy and as healthy as possible while their bodies and minds slowly but surely betrayed them.

  “You’re just trying to find the owner because you saw her on that tape,” Edith said. “If you hadn’t found those tapes, you wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”

  Milo couldn’t disagree. Though seeing the woman in the video had played at least a small role in his decision to seek her out, it had been the frankness and honesty in her voice that had captivated him. It had also sent a streak of guilt through his system, knowing that he had taken her camera, and more important, her apparent confessional.

  Mira died today. This morning. God … like eight hours ago. So I thought I’d finally start doing this. It’s as good a time as any.

  I still can’t believe she’s dead. It was just eight hours ago, but it feels like the whole world has changed. Like everything has been tossed in the air and completely rearranged. I can’t believe that she’s gone, and that there’s no one to blame but me.

  She had freckles spotting her cheeks. That was what Milo had noticed first. Not the round, defined freckles that marked Christine’s inner thighs, freckles that had once seemed mysterious and lusty to Milo but had since become just another part of the marital landscape. These were faint red blotches that climbed the heights of the young woman’s smile. And the woman on the tape was smiling, despite the topic of conversation. Someone named Mira was dead, and she was to blame. And though she was upset … angry, really, downright pissed off, with the trails of tears still visible on her face, she had managed to smile nonetheless. She looked like the kind of woman who could always muster a smile, no matter the circumstance.

  Her round face filled almost the entire frame, her auburn hair framing the image. Nothing else to distinguish time or location. Just a pretty, freckle-faced girl and her pretty voice.

  “Don’t forget to rake under the armchair,” Edith reminded him.

  “I won’t,” Milo replied. “But I’ll never understand why I need to rake under a piece of furniture that never moves.”

  “My husband, Ed Marchand, used to say that it isn’t what’s on the surface that matters. It’s what folks don’t see that counts the most.”

  In truth, Milo had a difficult time understanding why Edith Marchand, a widow for more than two decades, saw the need to have any of her shag carpeting raked each week. Though he had to admit that the resulting effect, with the individual threads all leaning in one direction like the freshly cut grass on a professional baseball field, was strangely appealing, he wondered how she explained this oddity to the members of her weekly bridge game or her book club. Did she really tell these white-haired ladies that the nurse who was paid by her son to visit each week raked the carpet for her? Did they even notice?

  “What exactly did the young lady say?” Edith asked, lifting her feet to allow Milo to rake beneath them. Edith Marchand was in a wheelchair, but she was still capable of walking short distances and raising her legs when the need demanded.

  “Just what I told you. I only watched about fifteen minutes of tape before Christine called. And more than half of that was a kite. Like she was holding the camera with one hand and the string with the other.”

  “So she only talked about her friend dying?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Though Milo had been tempted to fast-forward through the eight minutes of kite aerobatics, he refrained, hoping to catch a spat of unintentional dialogue during its dance in the sky. Other than a couple of gasps and a muttered “Fuck!” when the camera and the string nearly became entangled, Freckles hadn’t said a word. When her face once again filled the frame and she resumed speaking, she was lying in the grass, the camera just inches from her nose.

  This sounds like the worst cliché ever, but I keep expecting to wake up and find out that it’s all a dream. That Mira is fine and I’m going to see her tomorrow like always. I was walking home tonight, past people who were talking and laughing, and I kept wishing that I could be them instead of me. Their lives looked so easy and good compared to mine. God, I was so happy yesterday. How can things change so quickly?

  Finished with the carpet, Milo placed the rake back on its assigned hook in the linen closet and returned to the living room, grimacing in pain as conflagration resumed its persistent torment. With every minute that passed, the word grew in strength and intensity, its viselike grip on his mind ever tightening. Though he had suffered through a week or more with these words before, there had not been many like this, and the pressure was becoming unbearable. He would need to execute his removal plan soon.

  A cup of steaming tea was awaiting him on the coffee table. Milo didn’t like tea very much, but he drank a cup each week with Edith because he knew that doing so made her happy.

  Ed Marchand had once enjoyed a daily cup of tea with his wife.

  “So what is your plan?” Edith asked, dropping a sugar cube in her cup.

  “I dunno. I’m going to watch some more of the tape and hopefully figure out who she is. Maybe she’ll say her name or I’ll see an address at some point.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your stranger. I meant Christine. What is your plan with her?”

  “Oh.”

  Since Milo and Christine had separated, they had spoken several times on the phone, but the conversations had been awkward at best. For more than three years, the couple had lived under the same roof and slept in the same bed, oftentimes sharing the same pillow. More than one thousand days of routine and ritual, not counting the two years that they were together prior to their marriage, was now lost. Milo still occasionally awoke in the middle of the night wondering where he was. And even though they were now living only a mile apart from each other, with every day that went by the distance seemed to expand exponentially. It was almost unfathomable for Milo to envision his wife sitting at home alone while he sat equally unattended in his undecorated apartment.

  Most of all, it made him feel guilty.

  Though it had been Christine who initially asked for space, Milo had apparently misunderstood her request and taken things further than necessary. When he finally decided to move out, after Christine’s umpteenth appeal, he had chosen an apartment close to home, hoping that the two would eventually work things out. A visit to a couples’ therapist was planned in the near future, and perhaps the time apart would do them some good. In fact, Milo had begun looking at the separation as a positive step to improving their marriage. The time away might be good for them, providing them with an opportunity to appreciate what they had.

  In truth, the prospect of living alone, without the need to hide the constant, unpredictable demands like conflagration from his wife, if even for a short period of time, appealed to Milo.

  And since he had moved out of the house, Milo had also fou
nd that these demands were more easily fulfilled. Twice in the past three weeks he had climbed out of the bed, left his house in the middle of the night, and driven to Vernon’s around-the-clock bowling alley in order to fulfill the sudden need to bowl a strike. Bowling a strike was a common and recurring demand for Milo, but it was one of the more logistically difficult needs to fulfill. Inexplicably, it often struck in the middle of the night, when a trip to the bowling alley would have been impossible even though the lanes were still open. Explaining to his wife that he needed to bowl a strike because something inside his head insisted on him doing so was not a conversation that Milo was willing to attempt. He knew that his entire relationship was predicated on his ability to keep his demands concealed from his wife, and during their three years of marriage, he had done this masterfully. Unfortunately, this meant that some demands had to wait longer than Milo would have liked, creating more tension and stress than he could sometimes manage. But he had always found a way of keeping them at bay until they could be fulfilled without his wife’s knowledge. Much of this was accomplished thanks to the freedom of his job and his advance planning. Jars of jelly hidden in the basement in case of emergency, books with their price tags still affixed on the shelves, ice cube trays loaded with ice, and other supplies helped in times of crisis, though Milo sometimes wondered if the presence of these items in his house also caused the needs to arise more frequently than they might have normally.

  Then there were the new demands, the ones that he had never experienced before, which were impossible to predict or prepare for. About six months before moving out, Milo suddenly found himself needing to acquire a Weeble, a plastic toy that was shaped like an egg with a weighted bottom, so that it would wobble when pushed, but never fall completely over. He had played with these toys as a child (Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down!) but could not explain their sudden reemergence in his consciousness. Nevertheless, he needed the toy, and he knew what must be done with it: Place it in the doorjamb, in the space between the hinges, so that when he slammed the door shut, it would compress the Weeble against the frame, exploding it into tiny plastic bits. He had no idea where this need came from or even if Weebles could still be purchased in toy stores, but with a weekend full of planned activities, he had found this new demand especially challenging.