Nowhere was the cold so pronounced as there, even though we’d battened the hatches and turned up the heat.
We fought with icy hisses, sometimes using the things of the household—dirty dishes, an item of laundry on the floor, magazines out of place—as signs to each other that we had dropped the temperature to where it could no longer sustain life.
At the café table, he taught her new vocabulary: empleado, corazón, verdad.
“El jefe is the boss,” he said, nodding along with himself. “If you’re not used to it, I’m going to help you.”
She pointed at the page with bitten nails. He wanted to loosen her ponytail, teach her words outside the proscribed curriculum.
Toward the top they hiked, hand in hand, one clasping an umbrella, the other a camera. They did not, for a second, think how strange it was to reach out to each other, to touch, to let palm rest against palm after all that had gone between them. They did not, for a second, consider the cracks in their foundation. It was only at the mountain’s summit, when they felt both invincible and so alone, that they turned to each other and let their eyes reveal what would pass between them, back and forth and back again, every day of their lives together.
She awoke like a mermaid, her legs bound by the covers, her hair fanned out against the pillow. Dawn had seeped into the room without their noticing, and she held her breath, held onto the night, fought not to slip under the surface of the day.
At that moment, when the light disappeared behind the hill, she realized just how dark it was around her. Her eyelids could have been closed or open, her hands waved in front of her, but she could not see them. She could have been upside down and never would have known it, unless she listened for the pounding in her head.
She found the old guitar in the attic, its strings stretched thin and twangy, its varnish cracked like it had been draped in netting. There were only two people who could have played it, put it up there, hidden it from view and forgotten it was there, but she did not know which one it might have been. Neither of them seemed the type to form chords with their fingers, to wrap their mouths around a sentimental song.
Later, they wrapped her in billowing fabric and she slept, cocooned against all that lay outside. It was a sleep hard as diamonds, and after she finally woke, she never quite managed to feel that tired again.
100 Proof 