Boris Fishman - Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

“So that’s the deal here. I’m going to leave you here for a minute. I don’t have a shovel but just picture it, it’s right under you. Something you want to get rid of. That’s my happy birthday to you.” He searched out her eyes. “You think it’s hokey?” he said.

“You’re still smoking.”

“Be the better version of me I never managed.”

“That’s for your daughters. It’s too late for me.” She wrapped herself more tightly. “What if it isn’t something I want to get rid of? What if it’s something I want? Will it still work then?”

“It takes all comers.”

“Don’t walk away, please,” she said. “I’m too scared to stand here by myself.”

“I won’t step away if you say so.”

“Just another minute, stay. It gets colder and colder?”

“People camp here through the winter. Some people seek out wildness at all costs. And God blessed you with your own supply.”

“Did your mother know?”

“I loved my mother. She never asked me, never put me on the spot like that. I don’t know what all they discussed with each other. But there was one time when she came out of the kitchen as my father was packing the car, and said, ‘Marion ain’t going with you this time.’ Said she needed help in the basement and whatnot. She didn’t ask — she said. He looked up at her for a while — I remember that look. And then he nodded just the tiniest bit and went back to packing, not a word. I stayed back.”

“Okay, don’t go far.”

“Ten steps.”

“I won’t see you.”

“But you’ll know I’m here. In a minute I’ll come back to get you.”

Marion was eaten up by the darkness with his first step. Maya breathed a long, settling breath, in and out. Then another. At some point, the ache in her rib cage had gone. If she breathed in and out thirty times, each breath a little acquittal, Marion would return. She only had to hold out thirty times.

It was so clean up there, in the whistling emptiness where the rock peaked. She was able to imagine it effortlessly, the way a room stays lit in the mind for a moment after the light goes off, the way she knew Alex’s face without needing to look. During the afternoon, she had felt rock that was as rough as sandpaper; and as knobby but lustrous as glass; rock that crumbled in her hands; and rock that looked as if a jackhammer could not take it, let alone time. What a jackhammer could not do, water could, however, over a million years.

Maya didn’t know in what direction she faced, so she may very well have been giving her rump to her sunk giant, but it was intention that counted. He was watching her even when she wasn’t looking. Could he really allow her to come to harm? She doubted it, and even experienced a flash of arrogance — there was nothing to fear out here, not under his gaze. She was a protected woman, a tended and prized woman.

She looked at the hole in the ground — or where she thought it must be; really, she could see nothing — where Pierre and Marion Hostetler had deposited things they no longer wanted, and asked forgiveness for having allowed her family to dispose of something they had no right to take away from their son. Then she asked the universe if it had enough mercy for her, despite all her errors, to grant her a second sighting. Grant Marion Hostetler a second love, and grant her a second sighting of Laurel and Tim. She tried to conjure them the way she had conjured Marion out of this sorcerous earth.

Marion’s voice was at her side. “Ready or more time? I didn’t want you to think I had vanished.”

“I knew you wouldn’t vanish,” she said. “I didn’t worry about it for a moment.”

They walked back to the campground slowly — now she wanted the way to be longer. By the time they returned, the subfusc prologue of the morning was pushing up the black sky with impatience.

After a turbulent night — turbulent for one — the Rubins awoke to a scouring beauty. The sun, risen before them, sent down blasts of light. The warmth called up from the ground a powerful mist tinted gold and rose and even, if you squinted in a particular way, aquamarine. Alex stood with his hand sleeved above his eyes, marveling. Maya stared at him, feeling a parent’s vindication and a wife’s penitence.

“The air smells like someone’s cleaning you out with a brush.” Alex smiled hesitantly. He had coffee grounds out and set to fiddling with the portable burner that Maya had bought along with the tent, even whistling as he did so, occasionally calling out to Max for implements. Maya watched Marion climb out of his tent and pat himself down for a cigarette. He looked in her direction, stopped moving, gave a shy wave.

When Alex had woken, Max had woken, so Maya had no hope of continuing to sleep, though she had climbed into her sleeping bag only two hours before. An electric hum sounded between her eyes — two nights of bad sleep. They did experiments on this type of subject. How many days did it take to reach full-blown madness? Perceptions registered, but to form impressions about them she had to coax forward something that did not wish to be coaxed.

Little by little, the inhabitants of the stranded encampment crawled out of their tents, stretched away the kinks of the night, rubbed their eyes, and looked enviously at the energetic settler who had already started his coffee. Maya gazed on them, too, as fellow survivors who had made it through the defenselessness of the night. She fished Marion’s thermos from the folds of her sleeping bag. She had slept with it between her legs, an obscene gesture, but its heat, after he refilled it with hot water, had bloomed through her hips and thighs and sent her to sleep.

Alex watched as she filled it with coffee, then three spoonfuls of the sugar that he had had Max hunt down in their luggage. Maya stirred endlessly, fixated on the spoon. Closing the thermos, she walked over to Max and laid a kiss on his hair. Max wriggled out — he was busy setting up breakfast: bread, butter, and jam, surrounded by utensils, napkins, and plates. Did he relish this reduced simulation of breakfast at home?

Feeling Alex’s eyes on her back, she walked off toward Marion’s tent. Marion tried to hide the happy surprise in his face. The fingers he closed around the thermos were crab-colored from the cold. She wanted to wrap hers around them.

Before she could warn him, Marion unscrewed the cap of the thermos and took a long swig. He shut his eyes in pain. “Sweet mother of God. Your husband knows how to boil water.”

She laughed, a bird’s snort of a laugh, swift and sudden. “The girls are still sleeping?” she said.

“First to fall, last to rise. It’s called youth. It’s all right — they’ve got five hours to drive back to school. In this regard, they went after their daddy — they like the road.”

“Is there a choice?” Maya meant the vastness around them, the gray line of 377 cutting submissively through it.

“I guess not,” he said. He looked past her shoulder, and his eyes lost their mirth. “Breakfast is getting cold for you,” he said.

She wanted to stand in front of him like this and talk more, a lot more, about anything. It was so small, this want, and she couldn’t have it. She felt Alex’s eyes on her. He was making oatmeal, his activity drawing fresh glances of envy from the slow-moving campers, most of whom were only starting on coffee. The oatmeal’s creamy aroma invaded the clean, hard air of the campground with the smell of their kitchen at home, of all the kitchens of her life. Oatmeal was made in America — she had seen an enormous pot bubbling at the diner the previous morning and with her amateur cook’s nose gave it ten minutes before it started to burn — but to Maya it remained a Russian smell, the smell of early mornings and starched school uniforms and the dinged kitchen in Kiev with its fanlight window out of which her mother smoked her first cigarette of the day while Maya put away the buttery, raisin-flecked porridge that scalded the roof of her tongue. “Slower, darling, slower,” her mother would say distractedly from the window — she was busy devouring her own satisfaction.