100 Proof

On the road, she clung to routine. A glass of wine before bed, two pillows next to her to make the king mattress seem less spacious, an egg white omelette from room service. But then they started sending her to smaller towns, and in Poughkeepsie, she had three glasses of Chardonnay at the Applebees next to the Hampton Inn on a Tuesday night, which led to a sweaty romp with some guy staying at the Microtel, and then to the McDonald’s drive-through the next morning. Everything had changed, so, somewhere on I-87, she tipped her Blackberry out the window.

He has felt, for days, as if she were a small bird resting in his clasped hands, light as air, heart beating wildly. Sometimes she opens one wary eye, and her gaze darts around the room before landing on him.

When he lifts her arm to apply lotion, her bones seem to have grown hollow. The nurses say they’ve seen this lingering before—it won’t be long now.

“Fly when ready,” he whispers to her before he turns down the light. His fingers uncurl as he sleeps on the pullout chair beside her.

No matter how solid she appeared, he knew there was music there, if only he could find his way in. He could tell from the way she looked at him—behind those wary eyes, there was a small, spinning ballerina of a girl.

He held his ear as close as he could without discovery. He listened for the beginning of a phrase, the small clicking that indicated he had uncovered the solution. He was determined to find the latch, the way into the velvet-lined heart of her.

She compelled herself to sit alone in the dark awhile afterward, the city lights twinkling outside her window, reminding her of the people doing their evening business. She forced herself to keep her hands still at her sides.

The whirl in her head frightened her more than ever, its perpetual motion grazing the inside of her skull. Would you recognize the right thing if you saw it? the voices whispered. If you did, wouldn’t you just run away?

Night is halcyon and lingering, and she vowed to sit, eyes on those lights, as long as it took.

There was no particular reason for the phone call, nothing to be read into the connection. Words, converted to signal, blinked along fiber optic lines like fireflies. Cool, green words, some fast, some slow, some three syllables, some two. There was no time to decode what really came between hello and goodbye.

Sound, bright as pennies, bounced off the red walls as the people stretched and strained for a good start to Friday night. Effervescent, this hope was.

The music, soaring above the winks and dipped shoulders, was heavy on bass, but light on soul.

Nowhere was the weather so pronounced as that peninsula, where the rain blew sideways and the clouds changed as often as the light. Their umbrellas turned inside out against the gale, their shoes never really dried out.

At a certain point, it became useless to ask the question any more. The answer, every time, was, “It’s very changeable. It’s always cold and wet.”