Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

Except you could tell almost immediately it was not Grannam.

You could not tell who it was, but you could tell almost immediately it was not her.

Andi said nothing for a long time after she lifted the receiver and when she did say something it was a series of very short words broken by very long pauses.

When she put down the receiver she stood and began to dress like she only this minute remembered she had never officially quit her job in Teaneck and had to get to the office right away to tell her editor.

What? you asked from bed.

Andi was in a hurry.

She tugged on her jeans and tugged on one of your gray t-shirts and slipped on her clogs and headed out, face grim as a Navy SEAL’s on the way to a drop zone.

What? you asked from bed.

Only no one was in the room to answer anymore.

The magpies screeching.

Andi on the stairs.

Andi on the stairs and Andi in the foyer.

Andi was going, it occurred to you.

Andi was going.

Andi was gone.

You caught up with her halfway down the driveway.

You still zipping your fly when you pulled abreast.

Your All-Stars all untied.

You were not wearing a belt but your jeans fit snugly enough on your hips that this did not present a problem.

The October air early-morning cool.

Sand dry.

The sun orange as a LifeSaver lifting over the mountainy horizon.

Light changing heartbeat by heartbeat.

What? you asked, walking beside her. What?

Andi moved quickly, head down, arms clutched across her belly, holding her organs in place.

The autumn earth the color of potato skin.

She must have fallen during the night, Andi told her feet. Karla found her wedged between the bed and the wall when she stopped by on her way to work. She called the ambulance. Imagine her there, stuck.

I’m so sorry.

All night.

It’s beyond imagining.

She couldn’t reach the phone. She couldn’t unstick herself. What do you think she thought about in the dark?

Even if I tried, I couldn’t imagine.

At the bottom of the driveway Andi turned left.

Sunshine fidgeting through pines.

Light thinning, clarifying, whitening, concentrating around powdery branches.

You kept changing dreams.

Andi recalled how when she was five Grannam used to get down on the rug on all fours and Andi would climb up on her and they would play horsey until her father had had enough of all that guffawing and told Andi to put a lid on it and Grannam would stop and Andi would dismount and everything would grow severely still but then Grannam would wink at Andi from across the room quick as that and everything would be okay again.

You passed Jack’s place and kept walking.

No one was outside this early.

Andi said there would be no funeral and that is when she started to cry.

It sounded like her diaphragm had ruptured.

She looked like a leaking balloon.

She kecked and sucked runny snot up through her nose which she wiped with the base of her palm.

Bosch.

Monet.

Bacon.

You crossed the wooden bridge that arched over the abandoned railroad tracks and kept walking.

Andi said Grannam used to say she did not want to allow death to put on a show and then Andi cried harder.

Her arms dropped to her sides and her shoulders heaved but she would not stop walking.

She hung her head and aged ten years.

She descended to the abandoned tracks and turned left and kept walking.

She entered a small ravine and kept walking.

The small ravine opened out onto pastureland and hilly woods and she kept walking.

Andi told how Grannam would always slip her a five-dollar bill when she was leaving at the end of a visit. It became their secret game, as if Grannam thought the cash stood in for her love.

Here is the hardcopy version of my heart, she said with her eyes, handing over the money.

Andi once heard her mother tell Grannam she should not do that and Grannam promised she would not and next when she was about to leave Grannam hugged Andi and Andi felt Grannam’s hand slide into her back pocket and when she checked her jeans later there was another bill.

Crying, Andi told how once, when she had accidentally knocked into her glass of milk at dinner and it fell off the table and broke and her father sent her to bed without supper Grannam snuck up to her bedroom with a Snaggy Scree bar and split it with her in the gray-blue dream light and Andi asked Grannam what was the worst thing she had ever done as a child and Grannam told her about how she would sometimes eat sandwiches without removing her white gloves and that got them both laughing so hard her mother discovered them and would have been angry but they were laughing so hard she simply joined in.

Bear scat chocked full of huckleberries on the tracks.

Clumps of tall dry grass between ties.

Bear scat and spent yellow shotgun shells.

Crying, Andi told how Grannam wanted to be cremated and how Karla would display her ashes to the Atlantic on the Jersey shore without fanfare.

That is how Grannam envisioned it.

That is what she wanted.

Anita always wins, Andi said, crying. Do what you want, Anita always finds a way in.

She never gives up.

She is always waiting at the door, looking in at the window, cradling her box of super-rich cookies.

The day heating up around you, but less than you expected, like it could not quite catch its summer breath anymore.

You walking by the old Deary silos.

Behind the motel comprised of a long rusty white trailer subdivided into five or six rooms.

Breaking off from Andi, backtracking, you jogged down Main Street by the Mercantile to the White Pine Grocery Store and bought two bottles of water.

Jogging back, you handed her one and asked her to drink.

When she was done, you handed her the second bottle and asked her to drink that as well.

She kept walking and crying and drinking until ten when she halted and lowered herself onto the iron rails and you sat beside her and she started sitting and crying and drinking.

Twenty minutes there, and it was over.

Twenty minutes, and she was already someone else.

Twenty minutes, and she stood and you stood and then you walked home side by side.

She did not say a word on your return journey.

Your pace almost lazy.

She just climbed the porch steps and swung open the front door and cut through to the basement, which is where you did not pursue her because before descending she presented you with an expression that said this would not be a wise idea.

And so you climbed to the loft and sat down and made yourself as comfortable as possible and reached for the remote.

Hearing the first item break.

Hearing the first item and then the second.

The blue digital clock on the VCR atop the console says 3:33 when you finish hugging her.

By 4:04 you are on the road to Wenatchee.

Because sometimes traveling is the only response to a situation.

Duran Duran singing about being lonely like a wolf and you staring straight ahead at the vacant dawn road in your high beams.

Lonely or hungry.

You forget which.

Andi slouching beside you, seat reclined, exhausted, sleeping with such ferocity her fingers twist and poke as if they are using an invisible ATM machine in her lap.

Out east, people think Washington State is a synonym for lushness .

Say those two words, and people out east picture waterfalls, evergreen forests, and snow-capped peaks piercing vast oceans of woolly gray.

But that is only one channel.

There are many others.

Central and southeastern Washington is windy desert, haunted windy desert, trench-like canyons, scablands where patches of hard lava rock lie on the surface like geologic bedsores.