Too flat for sledding, she thought as she dragged a snow tube to the center of the field and lay down in it. She had moved to the cold center of the continent without realizing the magnitude of the trade: here, there was only a snow ocean, and the only sand crunched underneath her boots and tires.
She stared up at the milky sky, heels dug into the drifts beneath her. She imagined driving in a straight line toward either coast until the water accepted her back like a prodigal daughter.
I wanted, more than anything, for the Ringling Brothers unicorn to be real.
I knew it would not be—I was old enough, smart enough, to know foolishness when I felt it. But I hoped anyway, because there I was, stuck in the States, where I had already lost Europe and Africa. On that bleacher seat in the Armory, I knew if I lost the unicorn, my childhood was over.
While unpacking, I emptied a purse I hadn’t used in years, found a receipt from a stop at an Iowa City Kum & Go: 13.2 gallons of gas and a Diet Coke, purchased four months before I asked him to find a new place to live.
It might have been icy that day. My car wheels might have slipped a little bit as I turned into the gas station parking lot. I might have had friends in the car, or I might have been alone. That day, all I knew is I needed fuel for the immediate journey.
I do not say this lightly: One must choose the memories one keeps visible. Some memories, of course, can never go away entirely, but one must take them and box them, wrapped individually in paper, and set them up on a high shelf and forgotten. The rest can be discarded, left at a corner for pick-up by a charity organization or some such entity, where they can be compressed into cubes with the others’ and sent overseas. In the poorest countries, one’s worst memories might still be someone else’s best.
She stepped on the grass as if she was apologizing for her very weight, as if the green blades might cry out beneath her.
“It’s OK that you’re here,” he said, leading her to the back of the yard. “You’re not disturbing anything at all.”
At that moment, time shifted sideways, not stopping, exactly, just carving out a small space that made no sense at all and so much sense, all at the same time. She wanted to put a palm to this new person’s cheek, she wanted to run away from all the people around them, she wanted time to talk and talk and talk until the mystery had unraveled, until the space that had just opened unexpectedly in her heart reordered the words and used them to explain itself.
They shook hands then. “It’s so great to finally meet you,” she said.
“You clearly need to shoot more guns,” he said. “It would make you that much more interesting.”
She didn’t know about that, but she liked the thought of the weight of the steel in her hand. She traced his temple with a finger, considered the eggshell nature of the skull, how porous skin, how suddenly relationships can change when one person holds all the power.
100 Proof 