Spring
She liked to lie down slowly, trying to keep everything in alignment.
The excerpt below is from a forthcoming short story.
It was the first time she felt like this. The tightening, yes, but not the digging-in, as though she dangled from the lip of a well. To let go would mean death.
The prior person, the one she’d spent night after night beside, folding boxers and staring into the glare of the television, she had also clung to. But not with her hands.
He was many things. A brain. A comedian. A nimbus cloud. She’d fallen for his glasses and his high school football stories and the way he’d once looked at her. Their clothing regularly assembled itself into found art on the floor, in the rosy haze of new freedom after college. They played at adulthood, consuming cheap wine and crafting political philosophies.
“Come back to bed,” said the man now in her periphery.
His face half-buried in a pillow, Wilson reached out an arm and slowly palmed the sheet where he hoped she’d stay for the night.
She remained at the bathroom sink, scrubbing her skin as bubbles collided and then vanished down the drain.
“Is he gonna be our stepdad?” Isabel had asked in the car that morning.
Her daughter closely resembled Laura’s ex-husband. The cinnamon eyes. The archless feet. The habit of cocking her head to one side when pondering a problem.
Laura didn’t answer the question–merely handed Isabel her lunchbox and unlocked the car door. The bell was about to ring.
When she re-entered the bedroom, Wilson was asleep. Laura wandered into the hallway and stopped in front of a picture he had yet to take down.
His ex was gorgeous. The photo was probably a decade old but hadn’t yet been condemned to the boxes now accumulating in Wilson’s closet. Julia’s golden hair had hung in loose waves on their wedding day, his arm a belt on her slender waist. They looked happy.
The sheets were still warm from when Wilson had taken up her side of the bed. He’d since rolled over and begun a light snore. Laura pulled the quilt up to her eyelids and lay on her back. She liked to lie down slowly, one vertebra at a time, trying to keep everything in alignment.
Peering over the top of the blanket, she assessed a crack in the ceiling several inches long that turned sharply in the middle. Laura held up an index finger to trace its contours from several feet below. Twenty, maybe 30 times, she marked the hieroglyph, sweeping her finger down and then up as her boyfriend inhaled and exhaled beside her. She fell asleep with his blanket as a mask.
Dandelions and bicycle wheels filled Laura’s dreams. She was 5, running down the middle of a vacant street, just after a rain shower.
The pavement was slick. She slid a few times, then flung off her shoes to gain more traction. Under her bare feet, the road began to move, hardly perceptible at first. Then unmistakable.
She ran faster, hoping to reach safety. But the road wouldn’t relent. The pavement kept falling away from her, crumbling under the weight of her tiny frame. Disintegrating. Descending.
When she woke, Wilson had already made coffee, as well as his half of the bed.
They were connecting with some regularity these days, on a physical level if not an emotional one. She often found herself staying late at the office or lingering in another room at night just long enough for him to doze off.
“I’m sorry,” Laura said.
She draped the quilt around her shoulders and approached him, resting her forehead on a nub in his spine.
Wilson’s hands gripped the edge of the granite as he leaned into the countertop. He was quite a bit taller than she, able to fold her easily into his chest and kiss the top of her head. But he wasn’t doing that now.
“What are you sorry for?” he asked.
For sleeping late. For sleeping with him less. For needing him too much. For not needing him at all. For other things.
“I didn’t help you with breakfast.” Laura wrapped her arms around his waist, kneading her fingertips into the soft parts of his belly. A pat of butter skated around the surface of his frying pan beside a carton of eggs.
“There’s still time,” Wilson said, handing her the spatula. A smile, perhaps genuine, crept across his face. His green eyes were bright, framed by constellations of laugh lines.
She wanted so badly to trust him.