A Little Hope(37)

They hear snow geese over their heads in the gray sky, and they both look up to watch. The birds seem to avoid the clouds, keeping the sun on their wings. “Where the hell are they going?” Damon says.

“Away from here. I’m in the first stage of frostbite. My balls are going to shatter.”

“Dramatic.”

The Scotch burns Damon’s throat in a good way. He loves the smell of the cigars, the heavy air. He loves how sturdy his feet feel against the boards of the porch. He looks out at all this land. Even though the acreage is mostly behind the house, you still can’t see the neighbors’ homes through the trees. Their neighbor Albert Fitch used to own all the land around here. He had a small airplane and a landing strip on his property. You could hear the loud engine in town and the buzzing whine of the aircraft creeping above the trees and fields. And then it would zip in for a landing. Damon wonders what happened to that plane. Did it just rust somewhere in Albert’s yard? Albert is in his seventies now. Little by little, he divided off his property and sold some acres here and there. Now he is down to about ten acres of a mostly wooded lot, his house a redwood A-frame. Someone told Damon there is a small lake on the edge of Albert’s property, and now Damon fantasizes about taking the four-wheelers out to look for it.

They are quiet for a minute, and a deer tiptoes past.

“Holy shit,” Ahmed whispers.

“It’s a buck.” Damon doesn’t sip his Scotch. He holds his cigar perfectly still. The deer has a sizable rack, and he steps over the fallen leaves in the wooded part of the yard to their right. It looks around every so often, sniffs the air, and then sees them. Damon doesn’t blink, but the deer immediately turns and bolts away, its muscles rippling as it runs, its white tail bouncing.

“That was awesome.”

“Man, every time I see one, it feels like a miracle.” Damon instantly feels stupid for saying that—men don’t say shit like that, but Ahmed never judges. He could tell him anything. Ahmed’s family moved to Connecticut from Philadelphia when Ahmed was a baby. His brother is fourteen years older, so Ahmed essentially grew up an only child. Damon likes to think they filled in as brothers for each other. He never felt as close to his twin sister as he felt to Ahmed. They always just got each other. One night years ago, Ahmed got off the phone with his dad. They had had an argument, and Ahmed’s eyes were red. “I fucking hate that guy,” Ahmed said, and he banged his fist on the wall of his apartment.

When Damon broke up with Amanda, his girlfriend for a few years after college, he downplayed it to his parents, to his twin, Lara. “Plenty of fish in the big ocean,” he said to them, but he had this lump in the back of his throat that wouldn’t go away. He would sometimes not shower for a few days because he hurt so bad. He would put off paying his bills for weeks because he didn’t have the energy to write checks. Screw it, he thought. Pay the late fee. He remembers going for a walk at four in the morning outside his apartment because he felt so awful and couldn’t sleep and didn’t know where to put himself. He’d walked the dark streets, shielding his eyes from passing cars. It started to rain, and he just wanted to lie down. What was he doing out here in the middle of the night? Why couldn’t he forget her?

Amanda. One night she was sitting up in bed. Amanda with her smooth neck, her long dark hair. He rubbed her shoulders. He shouldn’t have said it, he shouldn’t have because it seemed to pull the cork from whatever this was, and she just erupted in tears. He shouldn’t have said, “What’s wrong, Mands? What’s the matter?” Because she shook her head, and soon the sheets were wet from her crying.

“I have to leave,” she said. “I don’t want this anymore.”

Why did he ask? How devastating that a single question could pull everything apart. In minutes, she was climbing from bed, dressed in her polka-dot sleep shirt he’d gotten her a year before for Valentine’s Day, and it was almost as if she was relieved he’d asked. Like if he hadn’t, she would have just gone back to sleep and stayed forever in that apartment with him, sitting on his parents’ brown couch they used to keep down in the finished basement, eating at the dinette set his aunt Rosie let him have, stocking the old green refrigerator. And he was half asleep, so foolish in his Star Wars pajama pants, watching her stuff bras and blouses and her makeup into a garbage bag.

“We’re breaking up?” he asked, and she glared at him. The same girl who once made him steak, who poured champagne for the two of them into glasses from the dollar store. He used to kiss her freckles. She used to cut his hair sometimes, and he loved it, even if she missed a spot at the top, even if his sister said his neckline was crooked. Are we programmed this way? he wondered. Can we not know we’re unhappy sometimes until someone asks the right question?

Those months that followed after Amanda left turned him into a pile of nothing. He hated everything on TV. His heart jumped every time his cell phone rang. Is this the price of love? he thought one day when he started to dial her number, then hung up because he knew he’d seem pathetic. He tried to remember what his father said about if the train doesn’t stop at the station, then it’s not your train.

But over and over, he hated himself for asking her. Why did he invite that pain into his life? Ahmed was the only person he talked to about Amanda, the only one who seemed to understand. And after that time in his life passed, Ahmed was kind enough to never remind him of it.