Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

Neil yanks the Bluetooth out of his ear and throws it onto the backseat, thankful for the static that ended the conversation with his sister. These conversations always go the same way with Iris. She’s sad or guilty or unsettled about something and will never say what it is. She expects him to say it for her. He stopped going to therapy at sixteen because he was sick to death of talking about it, of being probed for more feelings he wasn’t sure he had. But Iris was spared all of that because she didn’t see it, wasn’t really there. Their parents figured she couldn’t have been damaged like he must have been. They weren’t scared for her. Of her. They left her be.

Driving home, it strikes him that he is always driving, though rarely home, to his twenties-era cottage apartment, the coziness of the set-up wasted on him. This is the first time in three weeks. It’s the reason why he can’t have any pets, or plants, or a wife. They would wither from his neglect. I meant it this way, he thinks. I choose this over and over again. He drives because he likes to drive, the rumbling feel of the road rushing beneath him like a current.

The freeway stretches out before him, free of traffic. He can go as fast as he wants. He tries to quell his growing aggravation at Iris. He feels his foot pressing harder on the accelerator and eases up. It’s not her fault. But he tightens his grip on the steering wheel. He can’t help it.

He’s pared his memory of the accident down over the years, cut out the preceding afternoon, cut out the scavenger hunt and the other kids running like clumsy hooligans through the yard, and his mom asking him to keep an eye on things while she went to get more ice cream, and he’s cut out his father going to look for Iris who had wandered off again, who was always disappearing in plain sight, and he’s cut out the boy’s sharp animal cry as the branch finally snapped, the long moment as his small body hurtled against the lower branches, and the circle that formed around the tree, and the silence that consumed the place like nightfall and most of all he’s cut out the weeks that followed, the watching eyes, the constant whispers, so that the whole drawn-out nightmare is signified by one thing, the worst thing, the only part that bears remembering: the hollowness in the boy’s face when Neil looked down from his branch, cradling his own scratched and splintered hand, seeing, instantly, even from that height, that there was no one in there anymore. And then the crowd appeared.

But he hasn’t really cut any of those things out. He just tells himself he has. The only part he can’t and could never recall is how long he was up in the tree before he noticed the growing strain at the base of the branch the other boy was sitting on, and what moved him to climb up there in the first place, no matter how many times or how pointedly he was asked.

Briefly, he flashes back to his last session with the therapist. He was sitting on the dark green velveteen couch, looking down at the parking lot. It had been raining on and off all day, and the pavement was slick and glittering. He had an urge to slide his hands along its surface.

“Is there anything you want to talk about today, Neil?” the therapist asked, and Neil shook his head. Was this the only qualification necessary to become a therapist? Asking people how it’s going? It seemed suddenly so absurd, that his mother would drive him twenty, thirty, forty miles outside of town— sticking with the same doctor, though they could never settle on a home for long— just to talk to this guy in a pilling argyle sweater who barely ever said anything. And since Neil barely ever said anything either, the hour passed slowly, he occasionally looking away from the window and back to the therapist, who was always already looking at him. Finally, he spoke: “So… what’s the point of all this?” he said. “What do I have to do?”

“You don’t have to do anything, Neil,” he said, just barely smiling in the exact same way he always smiled, tilting his head as if to say, ‘hey, come on, you know I get you, right?’ which of course wasn’t true.

Neil turned back to the window.

“So, I don’t have to stay here, then?”

“It’s absolutely up to you, always has been.”

So he looked back to the therapist, stood up, and slowly crossed the room, expecting at any moment to be stopped, for the therapist to say, ‘now hang on, we still have a lot of ground to cover.’ Or, ‘of course I meant that in a figurative sense.’ But he didn’t say anything. It was like he was giving his blessing, somehow, and Neil maintained tenuous eye contact with him as he opened the office door and stepped out sideways.

For the next forty-five minutes, he wandered the medical building, reading through lists of names on directories, riding the elevators up and down, and then out to the parking lot, where he dragged his fingertips against the wet backs of cars, taking his place at the building’s entrance just before his mother pulled up in the station wagon with Iris asleep in the backseat. He climbed into the front seat without a word.

“Same time next week?” she asked, looking out the windshield in her caramel-colored sunglasses as she made a circle around the lot to get out.

He nodded, and in the backseat, Iris tossed and muttered in her sleep, her torso tangled up in the seatbelt.

He exits the freeway, but thinks briefly, as he always does, that he doesn’t have to go home. He could keep going. No one will know if he keeps driving on through to the state line and beyond. He is not accountable to anyone. No one, in fact, has any idea where he is. He repeats this thought: No one on this planet has any idea precisely where I am right now.

And it calms him enough. It draws him home, like a beacon in the fog.

Iris walks up the stairs to the office, but she hits a roadblock at the landing between the two flights: a baby grand piano. Four men are trying unsuccessfully to carry it up. One man, in canvas overalls and a backward baseball cap, is wedged in between the piano and the wall. They push and grunt, but the piano is stuck; the man is stuck too. Iris stands below them and stares.

Suddenly, the man nearest to her turns his head and calls over his shoulder.

“Why the hell is there no service elevator in this building?”

“I don’t know. Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault— didn’t mean to snap.”

“Motherfucker,” the stuck man stage-whispers.

“Okay,” the first man says, “everybody, very slowly, set it down.”

Gently, they crouch down, letting the piano rest at an angle, half on the landing and half on the top flight of stairs. The men breathe heavily. The stuck man removes his hat and tosses it up the stairs. His thinning brown hair is pasted to his forehead.

“Who needs a piano so bad?” another of the four men says, rubbing his face with one hand, the other still clutching the bottom edge of the piano.

Iris wonders how she will get up the stairs. There is no other way up, unless she is willing to go outside and enter the hair salon next door, climb the stairs to their roof if they have stairs to their roof, leap across to her roof, and hope that she can get in some way. And hope that she can make the leap in the first place. She doesn’t move.

The man who spoke to her digs through his pockets.

“Who has the delivery slip? I need the suite number.”

One of the other men finds a folded piece of yellow paper in his pocket and hands it to the first man, the apparent leader, who reads aloud.

“Okay… 1137 Hearst Place… Suite 2B. Would someone go knock on their door?”