Mosquitoland(53)

“Guess I should just say that next time, huh?”

The radio is playing a new song, and it’s nice, but if it ended, I would be fine. Nothing like the undertaker song. That f*cking tune left me ravished.

“Where was your dad?” Beck asks.

“What?”

“In your story, at the bank or fish market, or wherever. Where was your dad?”

“He was never around back then.” I pause. “Actually, I don’t know why I said that. He’s always been around, but even when he’s around, he’s not . . . around, you know? Not present. Or at least, not since Kathy ruined everything.”

Something howls in the distance.

“What do you think?” I say. “Coyote?”

“What if you’re wrong?” says Beck.

“Yeah. Probably just a wild dog or something.”

“Not that. About Kathy.”

“What do you mean?”

Beck shuffles, uncomfortably. “Nothing.”

“Uh-uh. Out with it.”

“Look, I’m sure I don’t know the whole story, but you’ve mentioned this bitch of a stepmom more than a few times, and I don’t know . . . you’ve never really given any good reason for not liking her.”

I am Mary Iris Malone and I count to ten with the best of them. A deep breath, one through ten. My face flushes, and for once, I care nothing for Beck’s eyes. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mim, I wasn’t—”

“You don’t.”

Somehow, I’d imagined our first fight would be different. (Something like . . . while honeymooning in Venice, we polish off a tiramisu at some world-renowned restaurant that none of the other stupid American tourists know about. We order a second bottle of Cristal, then argue about whether to open it in the gondola on the way back to Hotel Canal Grande, or wait, and open it from the hotel’s rooftop balcony. Something like that.) The second song ends. Good riddance.

“You still good with the plan for tomorrow morning?” asks Beck. “It’s not too late to back out, you know.”

“Beck. I need you to say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He looks away, and I honestly don’t know what’s coming. He nods once, then says quietly, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

If possible, I feel even worse. For a few seconds, we lie there, not talking, just taking in the sheer distance and scope of the stars. I think about how quickly things have changed for me. But that’s the personality of change, isn’t it? When it’s slow, it’s called growth; when it’s fast, it’s change. And God, how things change: some things, nothings, anythings, everythings . . . all the things change.

“Beck?”

“Yes?”

“Do you know what you want?”

A second’s pause. “What do you mean?”

I don’t answer. He knows what I mean.

“I thought I did,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“I mean, I thought I did.”

“Yeah.”

I always figured, if love was in the cards for me, I’d find it, or capture it—never did I think I’d fall into it. Falling in love is boxes of chocolates and carnations, will-he-or-won’t-he, fumbly kisses, awkward pauses, zits at inopportune times, three a.m. phone conversations. In other words, not me. But listening to Walt’s snores in the bed of a pickup named Phil, I can’t help but think, of course. This is the only way it would happen for me. Imperfect. Supremely odd. Fast.

A love born not of growth, but of change.

Mom’s voice rings in my ear. Are you in love with him?

I turn my head without moving my body. With my good eye, I take in his silhouette, and begin to feel that timeless combination of jubilation, perspiration, and indigestion.

Are you, Mary?

“So,” I whisper. “A junior in college. That makes you . . . what, twenty? Twenty-one?”

“Jeez, Mim. Just like that, huh?”

Too nervous, too cold, too a-thousand-things to smile, I pull the blanket up to my chin. “Willy-nilly. The only way.”

He leans up on one elbow and looks at me, and . . . God, people are wrong when they say eyes are the window to the soul. Windows don’t effect change, they reveal what’s inside. And if Beck’s eyes aren’t changing me—and I mean really stirring every ounce of Mim right down to the bottom of the barrel—then I don’t know a thing.

“What difference would it make?” he asks.

He knows what difference. “Don’t say that. You know what difference.”

Sighing, he lies on his back again, putting one hand behind his head, the other on his chest.

“You do,” I say.

His breathing slows. I see it in the rhythm of his hand rising and falling. I see it in his warm breath, plunging into the night air. I watch that breath take shape, and form two short, lovely words: “I do,” he says.





29


Architectural Apathy

“FIFTY-TWO, FIFTY-FOUR, FIFTY-SIX . . . fifty-eight.”

Beck turns into the driveway of 358 Cleveland Avenue and shuts off the engine. The sun has only just risen; a dim morning mist somehow adds an extra serving of strange to this heaping pile of peculiar. I rub the back of my neck, reminding myself never to sleep in the bed of a truck again.