100 Proof

It was a relief to ignore other breakfast options, to decide on a bagel with lox, tomato, capers, no onion.

What kind of bagel do you want? asked the clerk.

The question paralyzed her. Plain seemed too harmless, Everything too much. What kinds do you have?

Plain, Onion, Wheat, Cinnamon Raisin, Poppy Seed, Everything, said the clerk. Her hand hovered over the cash register keys. Customers shuffled back and forth in line.

Plain seemed too harmless, Everything too much. But Cinnamon Raisin was the only obvious discard.

Poppyseed, she said. It didn’t feel right, but neither did anything else.

Sometime before lunch, she took his hand in hers. You’ve bitten your nails to the quick, she said. Such a bad habit.

After lunch, when the paramedics tried to revive him, she again took his hand in hers. This time, it was so much colder than before. This time, she said what she wished she had earlier, what she had really meant.

I’m worried about how stressed you’ve been, she should have said. I love you.

When he came around, she felt her heart two-step, its quick quick, slow slow rhythm turning her in circles. She knew better than to tell him—he was more trouble than a last-call drink, and smoother than a slow country waltz.

She did the best she could to keep her eyes from him when he circled the floor with other women. She chose not to tell any of her friends, no matter how much whiskey she kicked back. She consoled herself, some nights, with the thought that a dancehall secret is better than none at all.

He wondered how wind might shift the direction of things, sculpt paths differently, smooth the world’s edges. It seemed the only fair trade, he thought, as he walked headfirst into the pressure of air. If his eyes had to dry out until they ached, there ought to be a benefit, even if the change took years.

He was open to carving. He was open to gust-hewn paths that didn’t yet exist in this town where weather arrived brutishly, without apology.

She had hoped to remember the experience, the way things felt when he first touched her face, but later, she was only able to tell it as a story, words that wrapped around her like his arms did, but that only felt like shadows of his actual presence.

She tried to tell him the story the way it lived in her heart, but he remembered something different, still tender, but not the same. That was the moment he first disappointed her. That was the moment her heart began to break.

She learned this during his deployment: there are several kinds of missing, some sharp as glass shards, others deep as a slot canyon. She also learned missing arrives at different times of day, depending on when it is least wanted. Sometimes it burns a little, sometimes it stings, sometimes it becomes something dark and grasping, pulling with a force like a vortex, spinning and drawing down on threadlike currents. Lacking distraction, she counted the nights, dozens on dozens of them. She sat in the park, wondering whether she missed the man who left, or the man who would return.

She had walked to the end of the long, dark pier, and listened to the water lap its base. She settled down onto damp wood beneath stars, beneath bats wheeling overhead. This was just the sort of place she had been told was unsafe for her to be alone.

But she found comfort in the inconstant nature of this spot, in the quiet tempered by night noises, in the fact that everything could change at any moment. After all, she knew he would not find her there, even if she had told him exactly where she would be.