Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(72)

Evan Carlisle-Ford, in particular. In my confusion since our afternoon together, I looked him up in the campus directory, looking for little pieces to put together. Obviously, he didn’t use the hyphenate of his name at work, or maybe he didn’t use his given first name with his family. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have enough to put together from the beginning, not enough data.

I wondered if I had all the data now.

I had this hypothesis, about love, about living, but I wasn’t sure how it would be proven.

“Jenny?”

“Yeah?”

Dr. Allen sits down across from me, puts down my chart between us.

“We need to talk.”

*

I was so good.

I listened.

Asked questions.

Looked at Dr. Allen’s numbers.

Just rough percentages, she said, but too much loss of peripheral than she is comfortable with inside the time frame.

Answered her questions about my functionality.

Discussed therapy, again, my wholehearted participation in it.

She smiled at me and gave me a hug.

I hugged her back, just like I always do, tight, with my whole heart in it.

It’s snowing and the sky’s dark with it. The flakes are tiny, and coming down fast, the kind of snow that will drift in huge piles. I’m starting to get a sense of the snow, a crash course in it. I’m starting to be able to look at a snowflake and see the snowfall.

The snow that had been so pretty last week, that had been such a pretty backdrop to my shopping, to desperate kissing, had given over to intermittent storms.

Tomorrow, the city will be a mess. Children’s schools will close, or be delayed, traffic will slip and slide over the freeways. If it’s still snowing like this, the plows might even wait it out, conserve their salt and their gasoline until it lets up, until the sun breaks and gives the dark asphalt a chance to help them out.

It feels good, out here in the snow, the air cold enough to break open my lungs and let me breathe. There is never anyone in this courtyard, and there hasn’t been anyone here since it started snowing, most everyone has left for the winter break—no footprints.

Just the white blanket over everything.

Covering everything up.

I want to mess it up.

I want it to look dirty and gray and salted and torn.

I want the red bricks to show through and the black ice to take over.

I want it to look as awful as it really is.

I start on the outside edge of the courtyard, and drag my boots as I go, sliding in the ice that never fully melted underneath. I keep walking, like I’m doing one of those meditation labyrinths my mom always took me to, a maze, except with no dead ends, outlined in pebbles in some beautiful garden, something that was supposed to remind you of the path of life, of its twists and turns and continuity or some f*cking-stupid bullshit.

Some f*cking-stupid thing.

Because this isn’t twists and turns, this is skidding and ugly and my feet catching in bricks and the falling snow covering my progress before I am even close to the middle.

I’m not meditating, I’m falling, and getting up and I’m sobbing, right out here in this f*cking-stupid empty courtyard and my rough sobs echo off the brick walls all around me, and there is something about that, anyway, about the sound of my ugly crying bouncing around while I fall and kick and skid in this f*cking-stupid snow that is right, finally.

The whole world should feel how dumb this snow is, how it covers everything up, how you can’t f*cking see anything, how cold it is, how it stops everything, keeps people from living their lives, going to school, going to work, how it can hurt people.

I kick, and I cry, and I even run, my circles smaller and smaller, and then I fall again, a really hard fall, on my side, it takes me right out, shocking me with a whomp of pain and a sudden loss of control.

I’m breathing hard, and my whole side is throbbing, so I just curl up, right where I am, wrapped up in my giant green coat, on the ground, in the middle of the courtyard, and I listen to myself cry and cry, hoarse and loud in the empty courtyard, the snow and crumbled ice painful against my face, the bricks hard and cold against my hip.

And then I’m not alone.

I can barely see him, my eyes so swollen and streaming, and I can’t even process that he’s here, anyway, on the ground next to me, pulling me into his stupid arms, pulling me close to his body and scooting a leg under my hip so I’m not really on the ground anymore.

It’s awkward, and our scraping and hitching and scrabbling against the ground and the broken-up ice is loud, but then, it’s just Evan, all around me, tight and warm.

On the ground, in the courtyard, the snow coming down on us like it means to cover us up in a drift.

I don’t stop crying.

I can’t, I can’t.

But every time I hunch around another sob, he pulls me tighter, and now he’s rocking me, rocking me in his arms, on the ground, the ground I kicked and ruined, and I can feel snow landing in my ear, but nowhere else, because he’s holding me so close to his body, away from the elements.

“Shhh,” he breathes, but I can tell he doesn’t really mean it, it’s just something you say to someone you find weeping on the ground in the middle of a snowstorm. He actually means I can cry as long as I need to, and he’ll weather it with me, right here, right where he found me.

Right where I’m at.