Never Coming Back(63)

Into Adirondack Hardware we went. My feet, even in fake-fur-lined boots, were numb with cold. I stepped on my left toes with my right foot and then my right toes with my left foot, but nary a toe could be felt.

“Now would be an excellent time to amputate one of my toes,” I said to the bartender. We were standing in one of the far back rooms, by a display of Swiss Army knives.

“And why would I want to do that,” he said.

He was still un-question-marking his questions. The un-question came out slightly muffled, as if he had once had a speech impediment but long ago overcame it. I knew why he was talking that way, though. I was talking the same way. It was a form of winter speech impediment known to northerners the world over, the My lips are too cold to form words properly speech impediment.

“Because”—I was going to say, Because five toes are excessive, and who really needs that tiny one on the far end anyway, have you ever taken a serious look at a pinky toe—but instead I put my hands on his shoulders and leaned up, way up because the bartender was taller than me, and kissed him. It was a shadow kiss, a whisper of a kiss, a kiss that neither of us could feel because our lips were so cold from the cold Adirondack pre-winter. But maybe we could feel it, maybe we did feel it, maybe the bartender felt it the same way I felt it. As if an unseen someone had been collecting invisible tinder and invisible twigs and invisible small, perfect fireplace logs for years and years and years, and had built them into a perfect, invisible pre-fire. And our cold whisper of a kiss was a struck match, and now the fire was burning between us.

The bartender took off his mittens and put his hands on either side of my face. I could barely feel them because my cheeks were so cold and so were his hands, but I did feel them. I felt the bartender’s hands, holding my face steady.

“Don’t cry,” he said, because that was what his hands were doing to me, making me cry. “Or do cry. Do whatever the hell you want, Clara.”

I could have said, Apparently I am, or something else like it, and in that way be a smart-ass and also keep working on my reverse aversion therapy, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be a smart-ass. What I wanted had nothing to do with words at all. What I wanted was for the bartender to keep his hands on my face, for me to feel the slow burn of his palms, warming from within. What I wanted was the sound of his voice behind the words he was whispering to me, softly and slowly and over and over: I got you.





* * *





Genetic counseling was recommended if you had a family history and you were considering getting the test. Genetic counseling was strongly, strongly advised if you had a family history and you were a) considering getting the test, and b) considering having children, or c) falling in love with a bartender and projecting into the future by imagining him getting in his car and driving an hour south to visit you in the place you would end up living in sooner than you wanted, sooner than you ever could have imagined, unless a cure was found and found soon.

I made that last one up. It was fake.

But it was the one on my mind.

Because how could I put him through that? Over and over I imagined it: a winter night in January and the phone rang and he recognized the number and his shoulders sagged and before he even answered the call he was mentally preparing for the drive and for what awaited him once he got there. Clara’s agitated, the voice said. We’re having trouble calming her down. The usual tricks aren’t working. And he hung up and put on his winter coat and zipped it up and pulled on his boots and headed out to the frozen car and backed it down the frozen driveway and drove the dark, frozen roads all the way to Utica. Or Rome. Or Syracuse. Wherever I was living, in that faraway far-too-soon imaginary future.

He and Sunshine and Brown would come up with tricks for me. I could hear them now, brainstorming:

“Read to her,” Sunshine would say. “For sure read to her.”

“Read her what, though?” Brown would say. “The word ‘read’ is a very broad category when it comes to Winter.”

“Anything.”

“Not anything! For God’s sake, Sunshine, she is not a ‘read anything’ kind of person.”

“She is now, Brown. Unless you haven’t noticed.”

That was where I stopped with that particular fantasy. So far down the road that any words would do? No. That was a world where I wasn’t. Where I didn’t want to be, because I could see it all too clearly. The bartender would walk beside me wheresoever I went in the hallways of wheresoever I had ended up, and he would talk me out onto that sugar-sand beach, or onto that Vermont peak, or down that desert trail, and then he would talk me back in. At some point he would probably take my hand, and I would probably let him. But I wouldn’t be me at that point, and he wouldn’t be the man he had been with the me I was now.

I needed to know if I carried the mutation, and I needed not to know. It was too hard to contemplate the knowing, and the not knowing, and the not knowing what I would do if I had it.

“Talk to him,” Sunshine said. “He’s your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Why not? For that reason? Because you’re scared of the future?”

I said nothing.

“What would your mother say to that?” Brown said. “What would your mother think of you, being a chickenshit?”