throat, reducing my voice to an animalistic whimper. “No. No.”
Then something inside me snaps into two pieces—maybe my mind compartmentalizing, stowing away the grief and horror in a steel vault until I can gain perspective and cope. Suddenly I’m looking down on the scene, not dispassionately, but through a cool veil. Separate. Other. Not part of this. Not part of this at all.
“Let’s clean her up,” I say.
Detached.
I stride down the hall in the direction of the broom closet. Bucket-and-mop time. Someone has to clean the Morris mess.
It’s me who lights the match that burns my friend. I try to pretend I can’t smell her body cook. When she’s reduced to the contents of an ashtray in a dive bar on a Saturday night, I let myself into Nick’s room and pull his letter from my pocket. The envelope’s edges are worn now and the paper brittle from the cold. This room smells like him, like sunshine and citrus still, although there’s nothing of his left in here. Not that any of us brought much. A person doesn’t need a lot of stuff for survival in a temporary home.
That Nick smell intensifies as I lift my feet off the floor and sink into his bed. I close my eyes and rifle through my memories, searching for the perfect image.
I remember him. I remember us. The things we did. The things we talked of doing back when I had no idea how little time was left for us. A mixture of anger and lust builds inside me. How dare he go without giving me a choice? How could he make that decision for me? I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be safe. I can’t exist on some fucking pedestal like some precious
My hand slides down the flat plane of my stomach, down, down between my legs, and I remember everything good until I’m biting my lip to stop from calling out to him.
Sometime between the storm and the calm that comes afterward, I slide Nick’s letter back into my pocket, unopened still. And I know that I am leaving.
The librarian would understand: I tell myself that as I tear maps of Europe from her precious atlases. She would understand.
The week whittles away.
Monday creeps. Tuesday crawls. Wednesday stumbles by like a drunk searching for the perfect gutter to piss in. Christmas never took this long to arrive.
On Thursday I hear a familiar rumble. The bus sounds close, but it’s still blocks away. Nonetheless, I pull on my boots, grab my backpack, and run, leaving my good-byes to float back over my shoulder. The well wishes fly at my back like arrows. They hit true: right at my heart. It’s all I can do not to turn back and look at what’s become my family. But I have to go. I have to find Nick, if he’s still to be had for the finding.
The morning air takes a crisp bite out of me like I’m a chilled apple. I jiggle to stay warm.
The bus hisses to a stop. The doors whoosh open. Same guy behind the wheel.
“More questions?”
“I need a ride.”
He chews on this a moment. “Where to?”
“The airport.” I slide the backpack strap off my shoulder, offer him payment: a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He snatches them from me, stashes them between his heavy legs.
“Where else?” he mutters.
Shocks whine as we take the first corner. The old school disappears from my view, probably forever. In the round mirror mounted high at the front of the bus, I see the driver peel the foil from the candy. He meets my eyes and something primal creeps across his expression as he chews furtively.
I slide my hand into the backpack’s front pocket, finger Feeney’s soft fabric, and hate that the world has become every man for himself.
TWENTY-ONE
The easiest distance between the two towns is a highway. The shortest distance is whatever road our feet can make for themselves. My biggest problem with the former is that it’s so visible. Our every move is out there for the Swiss to see.
I remember his too-healed wound and wonder if he used this same voodoo to overcome the death I gave him.
The battle rages in my head. Take the high road and hide, or take the highway and risk open warfare?
“You cannot walk the mountain,” Irini says. I know she’s right. Neither of us is as sure-footed as a goat.
I nod. There’s nothing else to say. At least if we’re in the open, our enemy is, too.
We are turrets with feet, so tightly are we concealing our respective pain, following Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice, doing the things we think we cannot do. I lose myself in thoughts of Nick; he is alive there in perpetuity.
The numbers parade through my head. I divide the total distance into palatable chunks that we can safely chew in a day. One hundred and forty miles. It’s nothing compared to the trek across Italy, but the funny thing about the past is the gloss with which it paints itself the further it is removed from the present. Those miles passed seem sweet and easy, walked with a calm and luxurious gait, while these are fraught with tension and peril. Maybe because the Swiss walked with us instead of chasing behind us, when he should be good and dead.
My feelings divide themselves in two teams: one berates me for not waiting until his body cooled on that cot bed. The other gleefully wipes the black smudge from my soul with a ragged sleeve edge. In the middle is my heart which stands up for what it believes: we would be safer with him deep in a hole in Greece’s rocky earth.
The sun moves faster than we do, waving as she climbs overhead and sails by. By the time a small arrangement of stones shimmers on the horizon, my shoulders have crisped to bacon. My face stings. Thank whatever deities are listening that I don’t possess a mirror. I don’t think I could bear myself.
With her naturally olive skin, Irini fares better. Her hues deepen while mine fluoresce. She lifts her arm to point at the distant heap.
“Do you believe in God?”
“Right now, today, I believe if He exists, He’s an asshole. If we survive, I reserve the right to change my mind.”
Her head tilts so, using crude sign language, I explain. Her mouth attempts a smile, but I can see by the way she presses her fingers to her scars that it hurts. So I change the subject. I don’t want this kind woman to feel pain. She’s had enough.
“What is that?”
“Is a shrine to
I nod. “We call her the Virgin Mary.”
“We will stop. I will pray to her for your child.”
“Thank you.” My belief system is broken, but hers is not, so perhaps that’s enough.
We walk on, our steps making strange sounds on the blacktop. The heavy fall of my boots. The soft shuffle of Irini’s rubber-soled espadrilles. Esmeralda’s keratin-thick clops. The shrine slowly comes into focus, its blurred edges sharpening until it’s crisp and real. Someone has taken care in building this monument, choosing stones carefully, pressing each layer into thick mortar, treating each to a slather of whitewash. Inside the arched hollow, a gilt-rich portrait of the Virgin Mary smiles as though she knows good fortune awaits. I wish I shared her optimism. I
