Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

“Growing up, Marta,” Dean said, “is not synonymous with growing miserable.”

Marta felt weak. She clutched her waist. “I’m not asking you to be miserable, Dean,” she whispered. “I’m just asking you to be real.”

Alex and Alex clung to one another. Ventura stood off to the side and raked his fingers through his beard, satisfied. Marta gave a cough and fell to one knee. In an unexpected moment of concern, Dean dropped down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder, but Marta removed his hand and put it over her chest. Then she placed her hand on him, right above his first buttoned button and looked him in the eye.

“What’s happening?” Dean asked.

“What’s supposed to,” Marta answered.

For a moment, Dean and Marta simply stared, then without warning, their heads pitched back in violent ecstasy before swinging forward again in unison. With their eyes locked, a noise between groan and moan materialized from Dean. A screech of excruciating pleasure burst from Marta. There was a frozen moment of communal panting, until, frenzied, they plunged their hands into one another’s chests and withdrew two shimmering stones. Dean held up Marta’s and Marta held up Dean’s. His was the size of a grapefruit. Hers was the size of a gumball. Both were the color of polished ebony. Tears poured from Dean and he shook with noiseless sobs. Sweat poured from Marta and she quivered with quiet laughter. Dean handed Marta his stone and he picked her up in his arms. He carried Marta and Marta carried the stones, and glowing they went back to their cabin, followed by the sound of quiet, reverent applause.

The next morning, Marta woke to the far-off sound of a plane. She lay in bed and watched out the window, in the apricot sky, for a plane to rise like a silver X above the silhouetted trees. She imagined planes full of cats and smiled. She imagined planes full of cats full of peanuts and laughed. Last night, she’d given herself to Dean as she always did, but for the first time Dean had realized it was not her body she offered, but her soul. Marta rolled over to face Dean, to show him her joy, but he wasn’t there. Marta called for him. She crawled from the bed and put on her robe and looked in the bathroom. She looked in the closet. She looked in the tiny sitting room. She peered out the window again to the porch. When Marta realized he was gone, she began looking for the stones. She looked for the grapefruit-sized one and the gumball-sized one. She overturned their suitcases, the trash cans, until panic began to form between her breasts, a fear that was brown and round and ready to begin again.

Marta threw on her unlaced sneakers and burst from the cabin. She ran down the gravel driveway of Forever Together, in her robe and loose shoes, clumsy and emotional. “Dean?” she cried. “Dean! Where are you?”

She passed the cabins where couples sipped coffee and stared, the Forgiveness Hall where Ventura raked his beard. She passed Alex and Alex out on a morning walk. Both were dressed in white and both nodded at Marta as she ran and ran and ran. She ran across the damp front meadow, out the front gate of the retreat, and up the small ridge of the airfield. The morning was almost past the moment where anything was possible. Soon the sun would rise, high and bright, to kill the day’s potential. The heat would arrive and things would return to how they always were. Marta crested the small ridge. A plane flew overhead. Marta couldn’t tell if it was a toy or real. Further down, at the edge of the runway, Marta saw Dean in the morning mist, looking up. Marta trudged through the last swath of bluegrass to get to him.

“Dean,” she said, breathless. “What are you doing?”

Dean didn’t look at Marta. He didn’t answer her either. He had on his flannel shirt buttoned back to the top, his boots laced and tied. His left hand was jammed deep into the pocket of his shorts. His right hand shielded his eyes from the early sun as he watched the plane gain altitude.

“Have you seen the stones?” Marta said. “Our stones? Please tell me you know where they are.”

Dean took a moment, then he pointed to the plane. “They’re up there,” he said flatly. “In the plane.”

Marta stood damp and winded and squinted up at the sky. Then she looked around the runway, down one end and then the other, to see if she could see who was flying the plane. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

“I’m serious,” Dean said. “Like you’ve always wanted me to be.”

Marta choked. “But we need the stones, Dean. We can’t get anywhere without them.”

Dean took his right hand down from his face and crammed it deep into his other pocket. He shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, Marta. Those stones,” he sighed. “We can’t get anywhere with them.”

Marta looked at Dean and then up at the sky. The two of them stood there watching the plane, Dean with his hands in his pockets, Marta with hers over her mouth in disbelief. The plane whirred, sputtered, returned to whirring, circled and rose, like a plant growing toward the sun. Marta imagined the stones inside it. Her small one and Dean’s large one, sprouting, unfurling, intertwining until the plane nearly burst open. She saw wheel-sized blossoms opening up wide and humid against the windows, like lovers’ palms pressed. Marta closed her eyes and listened. The plane’s whir grew faint and then it returned, it grew fainter still and then returned a second time. She couldn’t tell if it was retreating or coming home. She couldn’t say if the plane would circle back and land at their feet or disappear before they’d even had a chance to eat breakfast.

Dean held out his hand to Marta. “Ready to go back?” he said.

Marta opened her eyes and searched the sky for the plane’s tiny X. She didn’t answer Dean. She didn’t take his hand. She just stood and waited, straining her eyes and ears, until she hurt all over with love.

SPENCER WAS LEAVING his wife, Cassandra, and their two children, Melody and Levi. Melody was twelve, chocolate-haired, and accomplished on the violin. Her favorite color was mauve, and she found eggs, scrambled or otherwise, revolting. Spencer felt confident that Melody was the sort of girl who’d be prudent and prudish, at least until she was legal. Levi was blond and seven, toothy and not too sharp, bewitched by trucks and trains, transportation in general, as well as ice cream, which he could never manage, whether it came in a cup or cone. Cassandra, well. She was busy. Eternally occupied, rushing, thinking, scratching out and scratching through ballpoint lists, staring off into a place in space that was composed of dental appointments and vaccinations and reupholstery. But still, in the ways that seemed to matter to everyone else, Cassandra was near perfect. He knew it. She knew it. But none of that mattered. Spencer was leaving them, all three of them, with the two-story brick in the good school district so he could move into a one-bedroom apartment in the bad one.

What difference did it make where he lived? It wasn’t like he was going to school. He didn’t need a science lab that promised no less than one microscope per two students. He wasn’t going to get remarried and have more kids who deserved a cap on class size or a cafeteria that composted or a jazz band elective. A one-bedroom that backed up to the reservoir, to a sagging fence woven with windblown grocery sacks, was all Spencer required. That and a leather couch and a mattress on cinder blocks and a premiere cable package and a couple of bars of Zest.

Spencer had no use for a plaster birdbath or matching nightstands with brass claw-and-ball feet or a toile camelback sofa like the one he’d been living with for fifteen years. It wasn’t like he’d miss the salmon bath towels that advertised CFW (her initials, not his) or the tissue box made of mother-of-pearl that held little more than something he was going to snot on. And he could certainly do without the carp-shaped windsock and the perky pineapple flag and Cassandra’s “Melody has a tap recital and Levi has a soccer banquet and don’t forget that next weekend we promised to go see so-and-so who just gave birth to such-and-such.” Spencer was just fine making that whole song and dance go away. The sheer madness of self-made madness had just become more than he could bear. So, Spencer had made up his mind to leave. All he wanted now was to run the numbers all day and come home at 6:45 to an empty apartment that smelled of old, sculpted shag. He wanted to walk in the door with his Mexican carryout and sit on the couch and watch Bonanza Gold Diggers and eat queso and chips and drink warm, dark, Irish beer.