Lance Olsen: Girl Imagined by Chance

She just wants us to know she’s thinking about us, you say after a while.

Don’t imagine I don’t understand that, Andi says without missing a beat. I do. It’s a natural desire. Everyone knows that.

She feels unexpectedly disconnected from her remaining family, you say. Your father doesn’t talk to her. You don’t talk to your father. Her daughter died too young by decades.

These are all obvious points, Andi says. They bear repeating, of course, but they’re obvious points.

She has nothing to do besides think about how sad it all is.

I think she’s a really neat lady. Who doesn’t? To know her is to love her. She’s been through a lot. She’s generous. She’s strong. Kind. She’s nothing if not kind. Only I wish she’d… what?

Back off a little?

Give us just a bit more room, emotionally speaking. Give us some…. She did that grandkids thing again. She never used to do that grandkids thing. We move, and all of a sudden it’s grandkids, grandkids, grandkids.

She’s searching for sequence.

She has her own friends. Her weekly book club. Her video library.

She’s sensing the end of something, is all.

Go ahead. Make me feel bad.

You shouldn’t feel anything but good. I’m just saying… what? I don’t know what I’m just saying.

Andi deliberates, sipping her scotch.

The sky active with galactic smudges and communications satellites.

I bet she starts calling less frequently the second it dawns on her we’re checking in regularly, you say. That we haven’t, you know, cut off any consequential ties.

Who made you the adult tonight?

Your eyes meet and she withdraws her lips from the rim of her glass and you laugh.

Coyotes erupt into yabbering across Mica Mountain.

You do not think about the pickup truck and the hunters that will end all this.

There is no way to know about that part of the story yet.

Instead, you close your eyes and let the coyotes’ non-language swamp you.

Okay, okay, okay, Andi says. Clearly we’ll give it a try. What else can we do?

You put your arm around her neck, cradle her head in your elbow crook, give her an affectionate squeeze.

That’s the spirit, you say.

What can it hurt, right?

Absolutely.

I mean, what’s the worst that can possibly happen?

Exactly.

No. It’s a question. I’m asking you: What’s the worst that can possibly happen?

You sneak a peek at her.

She continues focusing on the remains of the fire.

Ice wheezes and pops in your glass.

You start feeling the spongy effects of the alcohol.

Now more coyotes, their yabbers sounding like Indians in Westerns made before 1960, high-pitched and juvenilely insane.

All across the valley other coyotes responding.

The wild noise proliferating lickety-split.

Coyotes run in Central Park now. There are documented photographs. In northeastern suburbs. In mall parking lots outside Boston.

But this is different.

Somehow this is different.

Now they fall one-hundred-percent silent and you are left standing there with the impression they never really made a sound in the first place.

Like the aural equivalent of alexia.

Alexia being yet another interesting term.

Like looking at a page of print so long all the black scratches pale into shocking white glare.

Word blindness , the dictionary says. Loss of the ability to read .

Like the aural equivalent of developing a photograph in a chemical solution.

Only in reverse.

Now things start breaking.

The riding mower, for instance.

You climb aboard. You chug ten yards. It kerchunks to a halt.

You hoist yourself off and open the hood as if you have a good chance of figuring out what is wrong inside and discover everything has been haphazardly fastened together with colorful electrical wire and large rusty paper clips.

In the kitchen you find the refrigerator defrosting by itself.

You call the repair people and they tell you it will cost fifty dollars for them to drive out from Moscow to have a look, seventy dollars an hour plus parts after that.

You call Andi who is photographing a softball game in Troy.

Forget it, she says on her cellphone. Wait for me to get home and just forget it.

Which is what you do, watching television.

Watching television helps.

Game shows.

Sitcoms.

The Travel Channel.

You are yourself.

You are not yourself.

Yourself perhaps being too strong a word.

When Andi returns you are waiting in the driveway.

You slide into the car beside her and head into town to purchase a new mower and refrigerator.

The sales people say they will come out tomorrow to drop them off and haul away your departed appliances.

So you step into the shower that evening to relax. You bring a Glenlivet and boom box into the bathroom and put on Miles Davis and light three votive candles.

Three green votive candles.

Humming, eyes closed, you lather your hair and lean into the spray and realize there’s no hot water.

One minute it is working.

One minute it is not working.

You smack the side of the stall.

Something breaks, fine: it is bad luck.

Two things break: it is coincidence.

But three things?

Three things break and there is no precedent for how to feel.

Soap fizzing in your ears, towel around your waist, you descend into the basement. The hot-water heater is sealed and you have no idea how to open it. You tap here, thump there, flip fuses on and off at the fuse box because you have seen people do this on the Home Improvement Channel.

Towel around your waist, caked foam itching, you ascend to the bathroom, take a cold shower, and, tired, shivering, mount the stairs to the bedroom.

Andi is reading a biography of Diane Arbus.

That was some shower, she says without looking up.

Wordless, you crawl in beside her, hoist the quilt, roll on your side, try to fall asleep.

All you can do is blame the previous owner for his negligence and add up how much everything will cost you.

You find yourself anticipating what will break next.

You wonder about the durability of the kitchen range, the age of the roof, the support beams for the porch, the structural integrity of the foundation, the sturdiness of the wiring.

It feels like someone has opened a faucet of epinephrine in your chest.

When you are done wondering, your brain will not shut off, no matter how you try to coax it, so you wonder some more.

You do not have to pee but you get up to pee anyway.

Attempt to pee.

To disrupt the monotony.

You stand over the toilet in the bathroom and attempt to pee but nothing comes out so you return to bed.

This condition is called bashful bladder by doctors.

You lie on your back and watch the light move through various shades.

Carbon.

Ash.

The harder you try to think about something else, the more insistent your mind becomes about sniffing through the residue of the last eighteen hours.

Opal.

Lilac.

The point being that they thought your childhood was a lie, something you made up to impress people.

And this is the thing that gets you.

This is the thing that gets you, even now.

The sky through the wood-slatted blinds seeping toward dawn, you finally spiral into an unpleasant agitated half-sleep.

How in the Ukraine you and Andi from your rented Fiat saw an interesting outcrop behind an off-limits sign and barbed-wire fence on the side of an arid road.

Just as you crawled through the fence to have a look, four Russian soldiers drove up in a battered Jeep and one of them in a single gesture leaped out and began yelling at you.