Matt Izzi
Fiction
Matt Izzi was born in Rhode Island and lives in East Boston. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Carolina Quarterly, Post Road, Shenandoah, Third Coast, and other journals. This is his second contribution to Baltimore Review.
All Ruinous Disorders
The summer I met Lucas, my last in Boston, I volunteered as prop runner for a new comedy at the Footlight Club. On trash days I combed the rolling sidewalks of Forest Hills, in the valley of the triple-deckers. Boston was a lovely town for garbage-picking. The century-old buildings had the façade of permanence, with all the accumulated multigenerational junk of families who had settled there before the Wars. But what did I know about permanence? I’d returned from London to an expiring lease and a summer full of funerals.
It was 1984, a year of death: three ancillary friends in March, a fellow actor in April, and later, in December, from unrelated causes, my mother. That May, I’d escaped my stateside sorrows by blending in with the rouge-cheeked New Romantics who used Piccadilly for a catwalk. My acting troupe had been invited to stage a joint production of King Lear—in drag, like the original. I played Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, one of the few who survive to the curtain. What that said about my resiliency I don’t know.
The Footlight comedy required an old-fashioned icebox that was, for some reason I now forget, crucial to the third act. I never buckled under a challenge, and anyway I liked being seen back home in my dolman jacket and tricornered hat. If strangers mistook me for a colonial reenactor, so be it. By chance or fate, one afternoon I stumbled upon my prize: a chest-high icebox with claw-footed legs. I walked it home eight blocks up Washington Street, in the shade of the elevated tracks, tilting the icebox forward on one leg then repeating with the opposite.
My building was serviced by one of those narrow elevators with a maximum capacity of two malnourished children. If you came home with too many groceries, you had to send up the bags unaccompanied and take the stairs to meet them on your floor. Naturally the icebox wouldn’t fit. For several impotent minutes I perspired at the foot of the stairwell, envisioning each tight bend of the four flights ahead. It was in this glamorous pose that Lucas, exiting his ground-floor apartment in acid-washed jeans and a yellow T-shirt, found me. I was so struck by his biceps that I hardly noticed how short he was—under five and a half feet. He looked like he’d labored his whole life at a loading dock. Briefly I fantasized about inviting him upstairs to rip my phone book in half. But I didn’t need a ruse: together we hoisted the icebox up all fifty-two steps and lugged it through my studio door.
I never had men over in the daytime—due to my awful luck or taste, or both, they only wanted my company at night. Lucas was clean-shaven, unlike the men I dallied with. He’d moved into the building while I was abroad. When he wiped his brow, I observed his ink-stained fingers and, not without jealousy, a gold wedding band. His gaze flitted from my modern fridge to the icebox and back, then he asked why the hell I needed two refrigerators. I explained that it was a prop and he was excited by the idea that I worked in the movies. Wrong coast for that, I told him. But the truth did not disappoint him. During the few months I knew him, he seemed unabatedly cheerful, a man incapable of disappointment, a man nothing like me—a notion I am only disabused of today. As a token of my gratitude I offered him free tickets to the play, where he could see the icebox in its starring role. Later that week I slipped an envelope under his door with two tickets (and, in a puckish moment, a dab of Kouros). He never showed.
That summer I kept odd hours: mornings cashiering at a thrift shop, evenings at the J.P. Licks ice cream parlor. I’d also renewed my affair with Max, a Northeastern undergrad with an immoderate taste for gin and Jeeves novels. He roomed with three finance majors in Mission Hill. Our relationship was nonexclusive and contentious, partly due to Max’s drinking and partly because I was leaving in August. Back then I rarely drank to excess. I had yet to discover sherry, and besides, there were more popular forms of recreation. Those were marvelous days for dancing. Music had a new sound that seemed beamed in from outer space, and everybody flashed like comets, swinging through my orbit and exiting with a trail of stardust. I never saw my own clock at midnight. If I returned at all, I slunk back at dawn, bleary-eyed, saluting Lucas as we crossed paths in the foyer, he the bright living and I the undead.
From our brief encounters, I pieced together a composite of my new neighbor: industrious and wholesome, he ran a silkscreen T-shirt business from his one-bed apartment. At twenty-four, he already had a family to support: a pretty but reticent Vietnamese wife, several years older; and two children, a chirpy boy of nearly four and a newborn daughter. Sometimes I would spot them on their way to picnic at Jamaica Pond or stroll the Arboretum. It was nice to have an acquaintance in the building, someone I knew beyond a name on a mailbox. Lucas would ask me about acting and showed particular interest in my recent London trip. He had never been overseas and was impressed I had gone there for work and not as a tourist. Though our conversations did not become intimate, I began to consider him a friend. My actual friends were all like me—city-hoppers and people-hoppers and itinerants. Despite myself, I began to admire Lucas for his steadiness. It cast doubt over the way I’d spent so many years.
Too many of my friends were dying; that I survived was pure chance. I’d lived just as riskily and never caught anything, though I wouldn’t be certain of that until much later. A blood test wouldn’t exist for another year, and they’d only just given it a name. In those early days I survived through denial, and perhaps I deny things better than most. But I don’t cast any importance on my longevity. Often I think the people who matter are taken away first, and those who stick around live in the service of memory. There are a thousand counterexamples, but as a consequence of outliving everyone, most afternoons I’ve only myself to debate, over a glass of Emilio Lustau in a low-light café on Polk Street. I’ve never been able to bear the idea of being forgotten, and time has taken care of that for me.
Only once did I enter Lucas’s apartment: a disastrous episode in late August, right before my lease ended and I jetted back to the Midwest, drawn home by my mother’s illness. After seven years, I’d never felt settled on the East Coast; not only my relationships but my possessions, too, seemed transient. Like props. But this had a way of making exits easier. I thought my farewell to Lucas would be uncomplicated, but when I mentioned, offhand, my imminent departure, he surprised me by inviting me to dinner.
Louse that I was, I showed up drunk. I’d broken up with Max a week earlier—nonetheless, we’d gone dancing the night before at our usual club. That morning I’d buried another friend, and Max, the dear simple fool, had invited me out to blast my grief with synthesizers. After the club we went back to his place, where he embarrassed himself by drinking a half-fifth of Beefeater and punching a grapefruit-sized hole in the kitchen wall. Banished by his roommates, we staggered toward Center Street, trading insults and gin until four in the morning, when I fellated him behind the Woolworth’s. It was the last we saw of each other. I walked home alone in the penumbra of dawn, carrying the remains of the booze. Midafternoon I awoke hung-over and drained the bottle of gin to bring myself back to equilibrium, then took a long shower during which I felt, for the first time in my life, like an old man. I was thirty-seven. In the elevator down to Lucas’s flat a thought blindsided me: I could go up and down a thousand elevators, as hapless as a sack of groceries, and when the doors opened there would never be anyone waiting for me.
Lucas’s apartment was hardly bigger than my studio, but it had a good-sized kitchen that could fit a table. Every cupboard and appliance was finished with tacky woodgrain. I handed him a pint of strawberry ice cream and my last bottle of ’81 Seyval blanc, cheap but exotic—realizing as he thanked me that he surely did not drink. His wife had prepared a vermicelli bun with curried chicken: thin rice noodles and unfamiliar spices that made my nose run. Lucas must have told her of my fondness for the tamer curries I’d tasted in London. Talk was minimal. Even the boy, Phil, conducted himself admirably. At intervals, an Orange Line train rumbling down the elevated tracks shook the glassware in the cabinets. I apologized repeatedly for wiping my nose at the table, and once while sneezing caught Lucas’s wife flash him a worried glance.
After supper we repaired to the living room, which doubled as Lucas’s workshop. Several boxes were stacked on a latch-hook rug, and in one corner sat a tabletop printing press. The room reeked of dyes, which did no favors for my headache. A black trash bag covered the lone window, blocking out the late sun. That helped some. I ensconced myself in a gold-colored loveseat while Lucas sat on one of the boxes. Half, he told me, contained blank T-shirts; the remainder held finished prints. But he never opened one to show me. I should have known then that although he was a man who seemed to reveal everything, like anyone he was a man of secrets.
The sole object of entertainment—they did not own a television—was the front half of a bicycle, upside down on its handlebars so the lone wheel could spin freely. It was the kind of prop I would have salivated over. Now and again Lucas lifted a socked foot to spin the wheel while Phil, to his endless and private amusement, wedged various objects between the spokes: rolled-up issues of Cracked magazine, a plastic spork, the cardboard insert from a toilet paper roll. The boy reminded me, in his purple T-shirt, of a miniature prince. Unrequested, I recited a bit of Lear:
Methought thy very gait did prophesyA royal nobleness. I must embrace thee.
Let sorrow split my heart if ever I
Did hate thee, or thy father!
The boy was a budding critic; he ignored my antics. In the kitchen, Lucas’s wife nursed the baby. Her shyness was so pronounced that she never spoke in my presence. I suspected she was embarrassed by her English. The infant never left her breast. On the one or two occasions the girl’s face unbosomed itself, I caught sight of long, lovely eyelashes. To this day they flutter at me in dreams, superimposed on dogs’ faces. All in all it was a happy domestic picture. The absence of conversation bothered me only slightly. I wondered if my presence muzzled them or if they spent every evening as mutes. But I would never know. I was their guest for one evening only, which seems to me now such a strange thing. One night out of all the nights in my life—it is surprising where you find yourself sometimes, and with whom.
I was suddenly weary of everything. I thought I’d come down with a bad case of self-mortification, that this dry and domesticated evening was penance for my tawdry summer. For the next thirty years I would ricochet off lovers and cities and never come to a rest. That night was the closest I’d ever come to peace.
So of course I had to sabotage it. Soon the baby began to fuss, and Lucas’s wife withdrew to the bedroom all four of them shared. I took her seat in the kitchen, by now miserably sober. The Seyval blanc lay untouched on the counter.
“Is there something we could open this with?” I said.
“Maybe up there.” Lucas, following me into the kitchen, pointed to a cupboard above the fridge. It does not escape me now that our relationship began and ended over refrigeration.
“You get it,” I said, knowing the cabinet was too high for him to reach. “I never rifle through people’s cupboards.”
He dragged a chair to the fridge and stood on it. The cabinet was filled with loose metal gadgets. As he dug through them, his jeans were tight against his ass. Eventually he found something: a keychain bottle opener shaped like a lobster, one of those knickknacks sold at Quincy Market. He held it down toward me, but his feet slipped—he was still in socks—and he tottered on the chair. What I did next can’t be explained as simple desire, though I might have thought so at the time. Perhaps I wanted to prove that no man could be so at peace with his life. Now, reflecting on our odd and improbable friendship, I see that I was afraid Lucas would forget me, and it was in my power to make a memorable exit.
“Let me help you down.”
I clutched his hips. His body felt firm and compact, like I’d always imagined it, like a thousand springs primed for release. At that moment another trolley rumbled overhead, and as he dropped to the floor, I slid my right hand across the front of his jeans. The touch was thrilling, dangerous—too drawn out to have been an accident, but brief enough to pass off as a joke. The bottle opener clattered on the tile, and Lucas landed in a half-crouch, flexing his magnificent biceps. I used to make passes at straight men all the time, and I feared—perhaps even hoped—he would strike me. I laughed, thinking he might follow suit. Instead he backed away, staring at my right hand.
A thin line of blood glistened on my knuckle. The bottle opener had nicked me. Lucas inched backward, his face crimped with fear. It was the smallest wound the world had ever seen. I was clean, I was sure of it, though I had no proof and no reason for my certainty. None of that mattered. He spoke softly but firmly.
“I think you should go.”
“Lucas, it’s just a scratch.” Although the blood didn’t drip, I wrapped a napkin around my finger for show. In the bedroom, the baby wauled.
“Please go.”
“I’m not—I don’t—I’ve never been sick a day in my life.”
Under his gaze I felt all the lines of my figure dissolve. I was no longer a man standing before him: I was a threat. I’d felt no shame in the kitchen but it touches me now, thirty years on—shame not like a slap to the face, but like unwelcome, groping fingers. What choice did he have? I retreated into the living room, Lucas two steps behind, herding me through the stacks of boxes toward the door while I hunted for an excuse to linger. Phil was still playing with the bicycle wheel. As I put on my shoes, I asked the boy, idiotically, where the other wheel was.
“Here,” he said, puzzled.
“Why is there only one wheel?”
“Because,” Phil said, and faltered. He was at the age when boys begin to explain things, interjecting because, because, because as often as they ask why.
“Please go,” Lucas repeated. He crossed calmly between me and his son like a squat tank defending some unseen border. At the time, I thought: here is a common life carried out with uncommon strength. I reached for the doorknob with my injured hand—an instinct—which was when Lucas finally panicked. He wouldn’t let me touch anything. Not his family, not the careful arrangement of his life. The border had no end. He kicked the door open and said, “Now.”
I was two steps into the dim foyer when I heard the boy’s answer.
“Because there’s only one,” Phil said, spinning the wheel. “Because daddy found it like this.”
Lucas, seeking some protection to close the door with, settled on a blank t-shirt, which he wrapped thickly around his right hand. He seized the knob, shut the door, and threw the deadbolt.
I suppose it was naiveté that fixed one image from that night in my mind: the father spinning a bicycle wheel, the son resisting its motion with a strip of cardboard. When I left Boston, whatever I thought I was leaving behind had already vanished. My friends were dying in shame and secrecy. My mother was dying of loneliness or some other curable disease. But all these years I believed Lucas was holding on to something, or someone, permanent.
After my mother died, I jumped from city to city, though never again to Europe. I gave up the theatre. Who was left for me to play? Not Lear. Though in my private life I’ve often acted the naked old fool, bestowing my favors on flatterers, I’ve never demanded loyalty from anyone. I ended up in San Francisco, and whatever course his life took over the next thirty years brought Lucas to California as well. Like me, he came alone.
At my age one forms a daily habit of checking the obituaries. I almost didn’t recognize his photograph. It was shot from below, giving him the illusion of a stature he’d never possessed. Obituary photos are the last fib anyone can tell; I’ve already chosen mine. But the dry facts of a life look the same in any typeface: Lucas had been survived by three former wives, scattered across the country, and a daughter of Boston, Massachusetts. The ex-wives were shocking enough, but what of the boy? I kept reading: He was predeceased by his son, Phillip. The services were private.
Perhaps at my age, entering that second childishness, I’ve stopped asking questions of everything and begun, when I should know better, to try to answer them. So Lucas had abandoned his family, forged a new life for himself, perhaps in the aftermath of a sudden tragedy that unraveled the dream he’d woven when one imagines so much time ahead. Did it matter how or why? My mother, ten years into her marriage, had been tossed to the curb like an old appliance. She and my father had fallen into the eternal pattern of remarriage and divorce, and Lucas was no better off. And I think to myself, how stupid. How very stupid. This common hope of constructing a life out of things and people that won’t change—this wishful thinking—is the most damning and painful kind of foolishness. I’ve renounced such pain my whole life. I’ve pursued life and people in stints, cameos, disposable weekends. Because to do otherwise would be to build a stage set from stone and steel. And if I am now forgotten? Lucas, you stupid beautiful man, you dreamer—how very fair we’ll end up in the same place.
“ The title comes from Gloucester’s speech in King Lear (I.ii):
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son
and father. . . .
. . . We have seen the best of our time:
machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
graves.
”
Matt Izzi
Fiction
Matt Izzi was born in Rhode Island and lives in East Boston. His short fiction, drama, and humor have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Post Road, Shenandoah, Third Coast, and other journals.
Dead Weight
We were heading back from a Vermont wedding with a frozen side of beef in the trunk of our rental car. An impulse buy, direct from a cattle farm outside Stowe. My wife and I had recently purchased our first house, and the basement came with this vintage freezer the size of a minivan. The walls must have been built around the damn thing. We couldn’t get it out and we had nothing to put in it. When I saw the farm’s roadside sign, something clicked. Maybe it’s what a painter with a blank canvas feels when he sees a landscape from a new angle. It was what we’d been waiting for without knowing why. That was the empty space—shaped all along like a three-hundred-pound side of beef.
Late afternoon we stopped off at a pizza joint in some downtown nowhere, New Hampshire. We were still a few hours from Rhode Island, but Lisa had to pee and I figured an extra half-hour of thawing wouldn’t spoil the meat. While she hurried to the bathroom, I ordered a ten-inch margherita, took two cans of seltzer from a cooler, and busied myself with the autographs on the back wall: glossy eight-by-tens of old-time pugilists, newspaper cutouts and framed promos of fights from the eighties and nineties. Pictures you’d normally find in a barbershop. By the time Lisa returned, I’d found one of Vinny Pazienza signed “from your world champion.” Paz was a big deal in our little state, and I was eager to tell her about the time my father and I saw him posing with customers at a McDonald’s in Warwick. This was after the car accident that derailed his boxing career. My father asked if I wanted a photo with the Pazmanian Devil, and I said no. It wasn’t out of respect for the man’s privacy or anything. He seemed plenty happy with the attention, probably thrilled his fans were rooting for a comeback. But what good would a photo have done me?
Lisa popped open her can of seltzer. She didn’t care about photos any more than I did. She didn’t have any of me in her classroom; I didn’t have any of her in my wallet. We’d never made a wedding album. Anyway, a photo wouldn’t have captured what was special about Lisa. Her face, like an anthill or an ocean, never kept still. Her eyes were always shifting, as if something remarkable were unfolding in every nook of the world. Like she was a witness to all the billions of stars being born and dying every second.
“We’ll freeze the meat till November,” I suggested, “and make enough beef stew to last us all winter.”
“I love beef stew,” Lisa said, “but I don’t want to eat it every day.”
“Well, we’ll make some beef stew,” I said. “We’ll use some of it for that and some of it for meatballs and some for steak.”
Honestly, the thought of all that red meat made me queasy. But I didn’t want to tell Lisa that. I was afraid to pursue anything when I couldn’t see a clear ending. She believed in tangents and loose ends, while those same things made me feel out of control. I was starting to regret everything—the beef, the freezer, the house—from the smallest decision up to the largest. Something the maid of honor had said up at Lake Champlain came back to me: “Love is the only risk most people take.” In that first year of marriage, every day with Lisa felt like we were renewing the same risk.
“I have an idea,” she said, and she didn’t just say that all the time. When she had an idea I paid attention. Her last one was to rent a cabin instead of staying at a fancy hotel with the other wedding guests. No Wi-Fi, no TV, no mini-fridge. With the money we saved, we booked an extra night, bought a half-wheel of sharp Cabot cheddar and a liter of mixed red wine, and taught ourselves to play Parcheesi. A housewarming gift we’d never opened. We messed up the rules and the game took an hour longer than it should have, but that was typical for us. Like we didn’t know the rules to anything. I would never have thought of the cabin.
“Let’s have a cookout,” she said. “Labor Day weekend. We should have the house and yard settled by then.”
I nodded noncommittally and drank my seltzer because I didn’t want to let on how excited I was. Right then a teenager walked in and asked for a bottle of water. A dark green Chevy idled outside the big picture window. The kid looked nervous, lanky. He said his friend was sick and he couldn’t pay for the water. The cook, barely out of his teens himself, shrugged and thumbed at the cooler.
“That’s perfect,” I said when the kid walked out with his free bottle. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do with all that beef. We could feed two hundred people.”
Lisa laughed.
“We don’t know two hundred people, and we couldn’t fit more than twenty in our backyard.”
“Even so,” I said. “We’ll invite your sister and her kids and the neighbors and everybody. We have a house now and it’s time we had a cookout.”
It was thrilling to see everything link up, no matter Lisa’s objections to that way of thinking. We had a freezer in the basement with nothing to fill it. We bought the beef for the freezer with no plan for it. Now we’d have a party with the beef. It really was a preposterous amount for two people.
“We’ve never thrown a party before,” I said.
“Not a party,” Lisa said. “A cookout. There’s no pressure with a cookout.”
“This is one of your best ideas.”
I was madly in love with her right then, and because I only feel love in moments and not as a kind of continuous state, I wanted to sustain that moment for as long as possible. The last time I’d felt it was during the game of Parcheesi, and that had lasted until checkout.
The cookout was a particularly special idea because Lisa and I met at one. I was twenty-four, a social disaster, planning an early exit when she walked onto the back deck. I couldn’t take my eyes off the single braid that looped over the left side of her head. The asymmetry just shook me up. A braid like a fault line. She raised a ’Gansett tall boy and announced that she was going to run around the block and challenged anyone—man, woman, or dog—to race her. To prove she was serious, she kicked off her flip-flops and marched barefoot into the driveway. Four or five of us followed. I hadn’t run more than ten feet since high school, but I took off at a dead sprint and held the lead for three turns. On the final straightaway, I tied up and Lisa passed me, her ponytail jumping from shoulder to shoulder, and then the whole field went by. Luckily I kept down the half-dozen Swedish meatballs I’d eaten, or Lisa might never have agreed to a date. Later she admitted she’d never worried about winning. She’d run the eight-hundred in college and still jogged four miles a day.
A fifty-something guy walked into the pizza shop. Well-tanned, rhinoceros-necked, in a loose Hawaiian button-down. He started giving orders right away.
“Call an ambulance,” he said. “There’s a kid out here OD’ing.”
The cook stood there with our pie on the peel, ready to dish it into the oven.
“I’m not kidding around.” The man straddled the threshold, one foot inside the restaurant. We looked out at the dark green Chevy. Both doors were open wide. The teen who’d asked for water was leaning over a pair of stiff legs in the backseat, like he was administering CPR. The cook lifted the phone off the hook, and the man went outside and gave the rundown to another concerned passerby, a woman who looked like all of my aunts rolled into one.
I didn’t know how we could help. Enough good Samaritans were already on the scene. The cook was dialing 911. Still, I wondered if our inaction said anything about our characters. If Lisa hadn’t been there, would I have done anything differently?
“OxyContin and meth,” the man said, re-entering the shop. He had such a presence of authority that I assumed, wrongly, that he was the owner, or maybe the mayor. Confidence always impressed me. It was why I couldn’t be a teacher and why I marveled at Lisa being one. I couldn’t fathom imparting wisdom to the next generation. Never mind being a father. Most days I felt like that Dylan song “Idiot Wind.” It was a wonder I could even feed myself.
“The driver said his friend was sick,” Lisa said. “He just needed a bottle of water.”
The man barked at the cook.
“Did you call yet?”
“I’m on the line now.”
“Tell them to hurry.” The man glanced at us. “Bullshit he was sick. He was just covering his ass.”
“Is he breathing?” The cook covered the mouthpiece with his hand. He asked it in the same voice he’d use to say, “Are we out of pepperoni?”
The mayor and the auntish woman began to relay information between the sidewalk and shop. A game of telephone with serious stakes.
“He’s unconscious,” I heard the woman call out. “He’s not responsive.”
“He’s not responsive,” the man repeated.
“What kind of car is it?” said the cook.
“What kind of—who the hell cares what kind of car it is? The kid’s dying. Tell them to come to Angelo’s Pizza, they know where it is. He’s right outside Angelo’s Pizza!”
“I’m just asking you what they’re asking me,” the cook said, getting defensive.
“Tell them to send a goddamn ambulance.”
“They sent one. They want to know what car to look for.”
“Asking me about the car,” the man muttered. He went back outside.
“It’s a dark green Chevy,” Lisa said, trying to be helpful.
“A dark green Chevy,” the cook said into the phone. Then, to us: “Why’s he yelling at me?”
Lisa exited the shop, and I followed, not because I thought we could help, but because watching the scene through the window made it seem like TV, and I wanted it to feel real. I didn’t know what would change, being inside or out. But on the sidewalk everything went into supreme detail. The caterpillar-sized scar on the small of the driver’s back, where his T-shirt had hiked up. The red high-tops, laces undone, poking out the passenger side. The Chevy’s tires caked in mud. The teens must have gone off-roading to get stoned. The dying kid in the backseat—perhaps the already dead kid—looked, if you didn’t know any better, like some innocent child taking a nap.
Lisa took my hand, the way she always did, linking all our fingers.
“Oh my god he’s going to die,” she said.
“No, he won’t,” I said, though it seemed likely. We heard the aunt say, “He’s turning blue.”
“The driver’s on the same stuff,” Lisa said. “He’s fucked.”
“I don’t think he cares,” I said. “I think he just wants his friend to live.”
“He should’ve driven him to the hospital then. Not Angelo’s Pizza.”
The first siren pierced the afternoon. A lone cop pulled up behind the Chevy and got out with the lights flashing. She rounded the passenger side, took one glance inside the car, and radioed for backup. I heard a second siren in the distance, this one belonging to an ambulance. It was then I realized that the driver, who moments ago had been rooting around in the backseat, had vanished.
The mayor gestured wildly toward the cross street, where we’d parked. The kid was scuttling down the road, testing the door handles of every vehicle. Someone might have said, “He’s getting away,” or perhaps the realization went unspoken. But it was plain as anything. The driver hadn’t been helping his friend at all. He’d taken the stash and was now hightailing it from the cops.
I don’t know why anyone tries to escape trouble by committing another crime. Maybe the kid didn’t plan to steal a car. Maybe he only wanted to hide the pills and return for them later. But I couldn’t take that chance. I hadn’t locked the doors. When I saw him closing in on my Toyota Yaris parked two blocks away, I went running after him.
My first worry was for the beef. I imagined the car turning up a week later in a supermarket parking lot, a mortgage payment’s worth of spoiled meat in the trunk—or maybe the kid would offload it in a ditch, not knowing what the hell it was, only that it was dead weight. My next concern was for the car. I’d waived the liability coverage. What would it run me if this dopehead stole my rental and totaled it a half-mile down the road? These scenarios burst and faded like fireworks in my mind, but neither came close to what happened. I’d only gone half a block when Lisa passed me at a full sprint. I was in worse shape than the day we met, five years earlier. Except this time, when she took the lead, I didn’t feel any blow to my pride. I was scared. None of my previous fears compared, in brightness and spectacle, with the finale, the all-too-possible idea that the driver could be armed—and what were we doing, beelining toward an unknown threat?
I called her name. I shouted, “Stop.” It got the driver’s attention instead. He’d reached my Toyota and was jimmying the handle when he finally noticed us. Really, he saw Lisa. She was ten or so yards away and I was half a block back. I didn’t know what she would do, and the kid decided he could live without knowing either. He released the handle and split, abandoning whatever plan he had for the car. He’d never outrun Lisa, but she just wanted to scare him off. All I cared about was her safety. She would have been all right, too, if she’d stopped two seconds sooner.
I saw it happen at the moment I thought everything was OK—with Lisa, with the car, with the beef. A black Honda was parked directly behind our rental. It hadn’t been there twenty minutes earlier. The driver must have been rifling through the glove compartment or listening to the end of a song, otherwise why did he delay getting out? He hadn’t seen the drugged-out kid fleeing down the street, he’d only checked the side mirror for oncoming vehicles, and maybe Lisa was in his blind spot.
She must have seen the door, too, in the split-second before the collision, because as it swung open she put a little hiccup in her step and dodged left. But she reacted too late. Her hip rammed into the door and the sound was a loud pop, a lone firecracker going off after all the duds. She spun awkwardly, like a figure skater under-rotating a jump, and landed face-down on the asphalt. My whole body and mind spun with her. The next thing I knew I was crouching beside her, stroking her forearm, touching and resisting touching because I didn’t know how to fix her. I was useless, unaware I was shouting for help. The driver of the Honda dialed 911 with his cell, oblivious to the ambulance down the road. I was afraid to look below Lisa’s waist. But the watery fear in her eyes was more terrifying than my imagination, so finally I built up the courage. Her pelvis was gashed open. I vomited a little in my mouth and swallowed: an acrid mash of soda, wine, cheese.
The only thing I remember about the ride to the hospital was the EMT, a girl whose pink braided hair I found oddly calming. Lisa was sewn up but had to stay overnight while the nurses monitored her for internal bleeding. I slept on two armchairs in the ER waiting room. Our rental was towed, and when I retrieved it the next morning the meat was rancid, our dreams of a first cookout spoiled, but that no longer mattered.
That afternoon I brought the Parcheesi set to the hospital. Lisa’s face had some kind of temporary paralysis. At first, that was the worst of it for me. All the restless life gone from her face. I couldn’t come to grips with it. We played without enthusiasm, the board balanced on the sheet over her legs, rolling the dice like gamblers who’d stayed too long at the roulette table. I felt busted inside and guilty for feeling that way, since she was the one in the hospital bed; she was the one with six months of in-home rehab ahead of her. But nothing connected. Marriage, a house, an empty freezer, a side of beef—a broken hip? I couldn’t reason a future from a present that defied logic. I thought I would never feel more disoriented, but I was wrong. As I went to capture one of her pieces, she intercepted my hand, drew it to her bandaged pelvis, and told me she had miscarried.
“What do you mean?” I said, like an idiot.
She had been three weeks’ pregnant. She hadn’t known until the surgeon told her. She linked our fingers over the bandage. Her face didn’t betray any emotion; how could it? We’d talked about having children, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready. Maybe we were like those pieces, moving toward a home square but continually being kicked back to our starting point. But, no: in the game, we were opponents. In everything else, we were on the same side. She cradled my head and then the nurse came in with discharge papers and said Lisa could go home.
A week later, I saw mugshots of the teenagers online. The kid in the backseat survived. Of course, there was no mention of us—no story, no photos. We didn’t have any from the trip. And the freezer remained, empty and looming in our basement, until the New Year, when I paid some guys I found on the internet to splinter it with pick-axes and slide the debris through the ground-level window. After it was gone, I realized I’d never taken a picture of the freezer either, and now we had even more space to fill. In its place, I hung up the heavy bag Lisa bought me, as a joke, for Christmas, with a signed photo of Vinny Paz taped across the middle. Next to that we installed the treadmill for her rehab. There were rules for getting better; there was a sequence for improvement. Together we could learn them, no matter how many tries it took. We ran and punched side by side while the snow built up outside our basement window, until the daylight refracted through the white crystals into a kind of purple dusk and, finally, there was blackness and the long winter ahead and there, dark underground, the joint steam of us exerting ourselves, testing ourselves, wearing ourselves down and building ourselves back up again.