Claire Watkins - Battleborn

He sat breathing hard, surrounded by heavy, worthless minerals. He took his wrecked fingers into his mouth. Then he fished his Zippo from his pocket and lit a cigarette. He breathed in. Out. The Ram shrank to the blinding white of the lake bed. He stayed there for some time, smoking among the hot alluvial debris, the silt and clay and rocky loam. He watched a fire ant stitch through the gravel and into the shadow of the overturned wheelbarrow; then he watched the truck. A pale cloud of dust behind it swelled, then settled, then disappeared. She was gone. And all the while Milo’s unceasing yowl ricocheted through the valley, returning to him as the boom of the fireworks, the levántate Magda never whispered, the twin cackles of the Hastings brothers bounding over the cattle range, as every sound he’d ever heard.

There was no salve for the space he left. If there had been—if science had developed an ointment for heartache or a pill for the lovelorn—I wouldn’t have used it. I wanted pain. I wanted cataclysmic anguish. For that, our old ritual.

So every night I’d get home from my job as a clerk at the public library and draw a bath with water as hot as I could stand. On the kitchen chair beside the tub I’d put a cheap bottle of cab, a book, a pack of cigarettes, a joint and a sleeve of peanut butter cups I’d bought at the Winner’s around the corner, where I bought the wine.

One night, especially plowed, I called my older sister, Carly. I told her Ezra and I were through. I said, “For real this time,” which I said every time. She said she’d be right over. “Bring the baby,” I said.

I waited for Carly in the bath, drinking wine from my blue-flecked enamel camping cup. Once, Ezra called the cup my cowboy mug, and with him gone I couldn’t stop seeing it that way. I felt insufferably rustic whenever I drank from it, and yet I didn’t stop drinking from it. That’s what he did to me: permeated, saturated, submerged me in him. Now, I submerged myself. I surfaced, took a cigarette, and breathed him into my foolish hungry lungs.

I started smoking the night we met, when Ezra stood up from the bar where we’d been playing video poker, said, “I’m gonna go outside” and put two fingers to his lips, that smoker’s sign language. It looked like he kissed them softly, the thick pads of his fingertips. I had a good man at home, waiting for me. I said, “Me too,” followed him outside and smoked the first cigarette of my life. I was twenty-six. The street was dark except for a Winner’s down the road, glowing like a beacon. Ezra leaned in and gave me a light. Then he pushed my hair back from my face. “I give this a week,” he said. “You?” “Two,” I said. “Tops.” He smiled this absolutely lethal smile and we smoked silently against the quaking of the freeway and the darkened machinery of the recycling plant across the street. I asked my boyfriend to move out the next day. I knew then that I would follow Ezra anywhere he’d let me.

Carly let herself into the apartment and called for me. The baby squealed. Carly lost one of her fallopian tubes to an ectopic pregnancy when she was my age. Between that and her husband Alex’s reversed vasectomy, my niece is a regular miracle. I love her more than a person ought to love one thing.

My sister came into the bathroom and said, “Oh, honey,” her face creased with empathy. She set the Miracle on the floor beside the tub and surrounded her with pastel toys, which the baby ignored. The Miracle played exclusively with adult things. Keys. Eyeglasses. Cell phones. Just a year old and already she was a severe child.

Carly had lately taken to gathering the Miracle’s feathery blond hair into a ponytail at the top of her head, a hairdo which resembled nothing more than the sprout of a cartoon turnip. The Miracle seemed not only aware of this resemblance but appropriately suspicious of it. She eyeballed me where I sat in the tub.

Carly discreetly removed the wine and pot from the chair. She left my cigarettes, the peanut butter cups, a National Geographic and the cowboy mug, which I discovered was inexplicably, disappointingly empty.

I listened to her in the kitchen, recorking the near-gone bottle and placing it on top of my refrigerator. “Red wine contains resveratrol and antioxidants,” I called to her. “It’s good for the heart.”

Carly returned to the bathroom and sat on the closed lid of the toilet. She crossed her legs and unwrapped a peanut butter cup. She looked like our mother, sitting that way. She had our mother’s legs, her long fingers. She touched her mouth the same way our mother did in pictures. Our mother was a beauty and an alcoholic. She died when I was ten and Carly was fifteen. She drove drunk into a power pole near Reno High at ten o’clock in the morning. For as long as I can remember, my sister has wanted to be the good mother we never had.

Carly folded the peanut butter cup in two and offered half to the Miracle. “Don’t tell Daddy,” she said.

“Thank you!” said the Miracle.

Carly said, “You’re welcome!” Then, “I know you miss him, Nat. But you can’t stay in the bath smoking pot for the rest of your life. You’ve got to keep moving. Get a hobby. They’re starting a volunteer docent program at the museum. That would be perfect for you.” She nibbled the edge of her peanut butter cup. Carly had never met Ezra.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Do,” she said. “Meet me for lunch. I’ll introduce you to Liam.” Her boss. Single, she’d mentioned more than once. She gave my foot a chipper little pat. She was happy to have a project.

Ezra and I lasted a year, barely. Every night, I would unlock my back door and get into the bath. I’d drink, read and wait for him. Some nights he never came. Those nights I would stay in the bath until the water got cold and there was no more hot water to warm it. On nights he did come—often from somewhere that left his pupils big and his hands trembling—he’d let himself in through the back door, come into the bathroom, touch the top of my head and sit on the lid of the toilet. I’d prop my foot on the faucet and he’d silently loop his index finger around my big toe. We’d read—me National Geographic and histories and remarkable true stories of people surviving plane crash, shipwreck, avalanche; him the local newspaper and slim volumes of plays. We’d talk and he’d roll us cigarettes. In flush times he would roll me joints too, with little strips of paper rolled up in the end so that I wouldn’t burn my fingertips when I smoked them. Ezra was mostly into booze and coke. He didn’t smoke pot unless he was already especially fucked up. This was also the only time he ever said he loved me.

Weeks passed, and I moved though the world perpetually bewildered, in the way of the shell-shocked and the heartbroken. Some days I did my best. Eventually I even met Carly for lunch, as promised. I waited for her in the gallery, where I was reminded why I disliked art museums in general and the Nevada Museum of Art in particular. The rooms were too well lit, and I didn’t care for the way sound behaved in the place. There was a rooftop terrace where Carly hosted cocktail parties for members and prospective members. It was bloodless. My high school friends had their wedding receptions up there.

Car and I walked to a deli and ordered Reubens. At one point, and out of absolutely nowhere, she said, “Liam went to Yale.”

“Cool,” I said, through a mouthful of dressing-sogged rye. Carly looked at me for a moment, pained, then plucked a translucent shred of sauerkraut off my chin.