Frayed

An aging couple struggles with their deteriorating marriage in the face of loss and conflicting philosophies of grief while traveling through the outskirts of a faded Las Vegas.

“We better get a room for the night,” Greg muttered from the driver’s seat. “Head back to St. George in the morning.”

The voice startled me. Neither of us had uttered a word for nearly half an hour now. I closed my eyes in solitude, exhaling a slow “fine” in response.

“It’s nearly one. I’m tired.”

“I said fine.”

Greg thrust his rugged hands from the steering wheel in agitation. “Fine,” he mimicked, rolling his eyes. “God, Jodie, is there a problem?”

“No.” I looked down at the teddy bear in my palms and flipped it once more, running my index finger along its wiry black smile. The thread was unraveling at the corners, and I couldn’t help pulling at the ruin. “Do you have money for a hotel?”

“I have sixty or so.”

“You’re not going to find anything in Las Vegas for that.”

“There’ll be something cheap. Just got to get out of the city a ways.” He kept his eyes straight ahead, his voice unwavering and heavy.

“Fine.”

The silence loomed again, and I kept to the slowly rotating teddy bear, which still smelled of stale cigarette smoke. It used to belong to my daughter Laura. As I turned it over repeatedly between my palms, I thought of the day she received it, nearly thirty years ago. It had been a gift from my mother then, who crafted it meticulously by hand and presented it to Laura on the day of her birth.

Throughout her early childhood years, Laura accumulated a collection of 67 stuffed animals, but none of them were touched nearly as much or got to see as much of the world as little Pike. She named the bear one day when she was about 18 months old, when she was standing at the living room window and watching a group of boys ride up and down the street on their bicycles. She had the bear in hand, and began screaming the word ecstatically at the top of her lungs, flailing the stuffed animal in the air. She had had other names for it before - just baby sounds, like Daba and Oogi - but from that day onward, Pike became as inherent a part of the bear as the present day cigarette smoke.

She took Pike with her everywhere growing up: into the sandbox at the local playground, to the grocery store with me every Monday, through the creek when Greg took her on a “hiking expedition,” to the top of the ferris wheel during the Utah state fair, where she dropped it to the asphalt below and it landed in a puddle of spilled cheese dip. I couldn’t even estimate how many times I had had to wash him.

In Pike’s more recent years, he sat dutifully atop a forgotten and uneven shelf in the living room of Laura’s Los Angeles apartment. From his perch, he watched Laura for years, observing her (as I imagined) bringing home groceries on Mondays and the occasional unsavory man on Fridays, baskets of washed laundry on Thursdays, cartons of Marlboros on Wednesdays, countless rejection letters from prestigious publishers, and even the long, black and blue checkered scarf she used to hang herself.

And that is how Pike came to be in my possession. After the funeral six months ago, when I was presented with all of the unclaimed residue from Laura’s life and invited to take any of it that I wanted, the forgotten and tattered bear stood out to me from among everything else.

“Thank God we’re getting out of the city,” I muttered, glancing up at the road. It was becoming steadily dimmer as we neared the outskirts, and the only light came from streetlamps scattered intermittently along the highway. “Las Vegas makes me sick.”

“It’s not so bad,” Greg said, his eyes glued to the pavement ahead.

“It’s dirty and gross. And hot! And it’s so crowded.”

“Graveyards are crowded too. You didn’t have a problem when we were there.”

“Greg, how can you say that? Laura’s there. We have an obligation to visit. There’s no reason we needed to be in Las Vegas.”

“I wanted to go, Jodie. You wanted to go see Laura. Makes sense to make it all one trip.”

“Yes, but it just doesn’t feel right, doing it that way. You know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“It just seems to me that going to Las Vegas immediately after seeing your own daughter’s grave is a little…callous. Shouldn’t we be honoring her memory?”

"We’ve been honoring her memory for the past six months. And we went to visit her grave earlier this week. Look, I was just trying to do something to maybe take our minds off her death.”

“You know I didn’t want to go, though. I hate that city!”

“Fine, so I did it for me. Alright? Don’t want to dwell on death. Not my thing.”

“But - ”

“But.”

I closed my eyes, rubbing my eyelids gently with my index fingers.

“Let’s just get a room for the night,” Greg said. I watched his foot tap the accelerator lightly, and we pressed on into the blackness. My eyes darted from the gas pedal to the oppressively persistent colon on the dashboard clock, then to the teddy bear still sprawled atop my legs.

When I finally did look up at the road again, it was because the car had slowed considerably. There was a tall pink neon sign off to the right, flashing the word “MOTEL” with a flickering and nearly sizzled out O. A horde of gnats idled about the blazing letters. Greg turned off the road and into the parking lot under the sign.

The motel was constructed in the shape of a blocky U, the two tips of the letter pointed away from the road. A web of power lines was strung over the building in a jumbled mess. The parking lot was gravelly and full of potholes, over which Greg drove carelessly, shaking the car from side to side. Pike tumbled from my lap to the floor at my feet, where he rested until Greg parked the car crookedly up against the building.

“Be back soon,” Greg said, stepping out of the car. “Get us a room.” He slammed the door behind him and walked along the chipped sidewalk running the length of the building to a warped white painted door, above which yet another neon sign flashed “Vacancy.”

As I retrieved Pike from the grimy floor, I noticed a young man getting out of a deep red van several yards away, on the opposite side of the lobby door. He was dressed in black pants that were too short and exposed his white socks, and a blazer too long for him that flapped against his body as he moved. A half undone tie dangled from his neck as he hopped around the vehicle to the other side. He opened the passenger door and out stepped a young blonde woman in a tattered and outdated wedding dress. Instantly he swooped her up into his arms and sprinted away down the sidewalk, not a care in the world. They seemed so happy to me. So full of excitement and beauty and romance.

Greg returned then, swinging two brass keys around his fingers. The car sunk to his side as he climbed back in. “Room 117,” he muttered. “Around the back.” He turned the car keys in the ignition and drove across the expanse of rocky potholes once more.

We drove along the side of the U, and parked near the tip of the left side. With Pike tucked carefully under my arm, we shuffled out of the car silently, grabbing our luggage from the backseat. We proceeded to walk around the complex and into the courtyard on the opposite side.

There was a gaping cement pit in the center of the enclosure, a swimming pool, empty now that it was mid-November. It was surrounded by a thin, black metal fence, broken at several points and missing altogether in certain places. We walked between this frail gate and the building itself, arriving finally at room 117 about halfway down the side of the building.

Greg slid one of the two keys on his fingers into the keyhole, twisted it, and when it failed to click open, had to jiggle it for a few seconds before it finally unhinged. Wordlessly, we trudged into the room.

Stale cigarette smoke lingered in the air. Trekking through the dark green shag carpeting felt like I was wading through a foggy swamp.

Greg flipped on the light, and with a soft grunt tossed his bag and keys onto the rickety wooden table next to the door. It shook under the added weight. The bed was a queen, made up in an old ugly quilt, a twisted montage of reds, browns, and blues in a strange checkered design. A cheap painting of a modest and cozy Midwestern house was framed in wood above the bed.

“We can leave early tomorrow,” Greg said, kicking off his shoes against the grimy wall and collapsing onto the mattress. “Just need some rest for now.” He picked up the remote from the nightstand and flipped on the boxy television on the opposite side of the room. While he surfed through the channels, he pulled a shabby pack of Marlboros out of his breast pocket along with a lighter. I watched the flame flicker brightly and delicately as he held it to the tip of a fresh cigarette. He inhaled the smoke and kept his eyes glued on the television.

“It’s been a long day. I think I’ll take a shower,” I said, tossing my things onto the side of the bed not occupied.

“Unhunh.”

“Be out shortly.”

“Yeah.”

“Wouldn’t kill you to put the cigarette out,” I muttered, my back turned.

“What’s that?”

“The cigarette - ”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.” I opened the warped wooden door to the bathroom on the other side of the room and slammed it shut behind me.

I flipped on the light switch and watched the yellow glow flicker on and off for about 30 seconds before finally struggling to life. The light illuminated water damaged walls, pieces of which had peeled away and fallen to the tile floor like shards of antique pottery. As I undressed hurriedly, I turned the nozzle on the shower to warm up the water, and I found myself cursing Greg.

It was always those damn cigarettes with him. It seemed to me they were a way out when he just didn’t want to deal with something. Like when I served him breakfast and coffee before work in the mornings. He would flip through the paper with a cigarette dangling between his teeth and ignore my presence at the other end of the table, except to ask for refills. And when he’d come home in the evenings, demanding dinner and clicking on the TV, he’d smoke a couple, ignoring my inquiries about the nature of his day.

It was the little things like that that were upsetting. It was the little things that would eat away at you day after day, year after year, until one morning you wake up and can’t remember how things ever fell apart.

But it was also the bigger things, too. Like when my father died last year, and I spent a week bent over the dining room table with his tear-stained photograph pinned below my elbows. Greg comforted me for a while, but after a few days he’d be back to smoking again. He barely spoke to me that week.

And then even at Laura’s funeral half a year ago, he smoked a total of ten different times that day, trying to avoid the service as long as possible. He smoked as we stood in the graveyard and watched them lower her casket into the ground. When I looked for him after the ceremony, I found him sitting under an oak tree in the corner of the cemetery, gazing at the cloudless grey sky.

I was brought back to the present by feeling the rising steam sticking against my skin. I stepped carefully into the shower and felt warmth course through my body.

I hugged myself tightly, staring down at my nakedness. I cupped my breasts in the palms of my hands. They were so saggy now. I found myself trying to hold them up, not even conscious of the action until I removed my hands to run my fingers through my hair and felt them fall flatly.

Things hadn’t always been this way, I reminisced, running lathered shampoo through my greasy hair. Greg used to care. He used to make an effort.

There was one night back when we had first started dating when he took me out to the open country. We were living in Montana at the time. On a warm summer evening we rode out in his old Chevy pick-up, taking back roads and dirt roads and no roads. Alone in a forest grove, we spread out blankets in the back of the truck and laid together, watching the stars. He held me in his arms and we talked from 10 to 4, holding each other close and sharing a bottle of red wine.

We talked about dreams and childhood monsters and the fancy set of china we’d own someday, about our favorite books made into mediocre movies and my collection of souvenir buttons from every state I’d visited. We talked about the best kinds of coffee and the rise of China, about the surfboard in my bedroom closet that I’d used once as a child and never touched again, but I kept it around because I loved the bright pink floral design. He told me about his mother, who more or less evaporated from his life after his father died when he was 8, and I wanted to kiss him to keep him tethered to me, so that maybe he wouldn’t fade into the atmosphere too.

And most importantly, he listened. In those days, he heard everything I said and asked me more about specifics. He wanted to be a part of my life and I wanted to let him in. He was a lover, a sweetheart, my Greg.

I finished up in the shower and (with a forceful effort) twisted the “H” knob so the water shut off. I dried off with a scratchy towel hanging on the rack above the toilet and slipped my clothes back on.

The blaring TV greeted me as I sauntered back into the bedroom, its lights reflecting flickering hues of blue off the white walls. The lights were off now, but I could make out the rough outline of my bag, which had toppled to the floor along with the hideous quilt. Greg was missing from the bed, too, as if he had suddenly fled while he had the chance.

“Where’d you go?” I asked as if he were there. My hair was dripping and little splashes were hitting my feet as I strode across the room. I thrust open the door to look about the courtyard. The cold night air was especially bitter against my damp skin.

“GREG!” I roared, veering from side to side as I gazed about the courtyard. “Where are you, Greg?!” I stepped out onto the concrete and slammed the door behind me, turning back around when I heard a metallic clink at my feet. The 7 had fallen to the ground.

I scanned the courtyard and found no sign of Greg. Nothing moved in the cool night air. “GREG!”

“WHAT?!” a voice roared back, and I turned aggressively toward the source of the noise. There was a black silhouette sitting at the edge of the empty pool, its back to me. I walked over to the metal gate, stepped over a broken portion of it, and placed my hand on his shoulder.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“Clearing my head,” Greg said.

I sat down next to him, on top of a chipped tile with the number 5 painted on it, and dangled my legs over the edge of the pool. His cigarette was gone, now replaced by a bottle of warm beer he had kept in his luggage. The fluid was sloshing around in the bottle between his palms.

“I thought you were tired. Didn’t you want to go to bed?”

“Yeah. I am. I do.”

“It’s after one-thirty.”

“Yeah.” He took a swig of beer, the bottle clinking against his teeth.

“So?”

“I needed some air.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t if you hadn’t smoked up the room.”

“It’s not that.”

“So what then?”

“Laura.”

I was taken aback by that remark. “What about her?”

Greg turned his head to the sky, staring down the lofty stars. He seemed very small to me in that moment. There was something about the way the moon reflected against his pale face, magnifying the intensity of his deep blue eyes. There was moisture in their basins, a silky layer of wetness coating his vision. He hadn’t even cried at the funeral.

“Everything is hitting,” he said.

“Greg…”

“I didn’t want to face it, and I’m not - I wasn’t. But it just really feels over.”

I lifted an arm to place around his shoulder, but just before it fell, I pulled back, leaving it suspended inches from his bulky frame. It hung limply and awkwardly, as if ice had frozen the veins within. “Where’s all of this coming from now? What feels over?”

“Laura. This whole collection of everything. Don’t know. Changing, all of it. I didn’t feel it when we got the call, didn’t feel it on the drive to L.A. Didn’t feel it in her empty apartment, didn’t feel it at the funeral. Not really even the past six months. It just didn’t hit. It didn’t make sense to me, you know?”

“No, I don’t. Her body was right there before your eyes.”

“But it just didn’t click with me. There was hope, Jodie. I had so much hope. She was still my little girl. My writer. She was going to sell novels. Bestsellers. Awards. They were going to be real and they were going to matter.”

“I wanted that for her too, Greg.”

“I know you did.” He took a sip of beer, nearly finishing the bottle. “How do I forgive myself though? I never saw it coming. How didn’t I see it coming?”

I finally let my awkwardly positioned arm fall to rest on Greg’s shoulders. I felt guilty about Laura’s death, too. “It’s not your fault. She kept us at a distance. After she moved to L.A. we never really heard much from her.”

“Maybe you didn’t.”

“Well, no, like I said - ”

“But I did. We talked every week. She would call me at work, and we’d chat about the weather and her writing and sometimes politics and even the art she was starting to do. Did you know she was taking weekly classes at UCLA? That she was learning to paint?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.” I slipped my arm from his shoulders and down along his back, letting it fall as flatly as my voice. I felt myself inching slowly away from him, the rough edges of the pool making muffled scratches against my jeans.

“She was.”

I stared blankly at the drain at the bottom of the empty pool. It was stuffed full of crumpled brown leaves and snapped twigs. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

Greg shook his head. “No reason. It’s not like they were long talks or anything. Maybe just fifteen, twenty minutes a week max. They were so routine and unimportant that it never even crossed my mind to bring them up. Plus you never asked.”

“Unimportant? You don’t think I would’ve liked to hear about my daughter?”

“You never asked! And I figured she was probably having the same conversations with you, yeah? Like, why wouldn’t she?”

“That’s a good question.”

“Jodie, you can’t be mad at me for something Laura did or didn’t do.”

“No, but I can be mad at you for not telling me.”

“I’m sorry, okay? Look, I am. Truly. But it’s just never been that way between us.”

“What way? We’re not supposed to talk about our daughter?”

“We don’t talk about anything at all! Silence has been our way of communicating for as long as I can remember. God, this conversation is probably the most we’ve talked in the past ten years.”

I opened my mouth but no words came out. The power lines above the pool were swinging in the stale night breeze. After a pause, I found my voice: “Do you think there’s any coming back from this?”

“I’m trying to open up to you now, Jodie. I know I tried to keep my distance from Laura’s death and that wasn’t fair to you. We all grieve differently. I guess silence was just easier for me. But I’m sorry that it - that I, hurt you.”

“I just don’t know how we repair us, after all the brokenness.”

“Let’s talk about Laura, if that’s what you need. It might help.”

“I need more than that.”

“What do you mean? It’s not like I can make her come back.”

“No,” I said, staring at my knees. “No, you can’t.”

In a sudden motion, Greg leapt to his feet and stared down at the empty pool. His gaze was set on the drain too. “I can’t do it. I just can’t.” He tossed his head back and downed the last dredges of his beer, then threw the bottle into the pit before us. I watched it fall in slow motion as it crashed against the clogged drain, broke into jagged pieces and settled in among the dead leaves and chipped plaster with resoundingly hollow clinks.

And Greg was gone, retreating back across the ruined fence and into our room on the opposite side of the courtyard.

 

-

 

In the gloom of the dark motel room, I stared blankly at the red colon on the nightstand alarm clock, blinking intermittently against the shadow. It was a little after 4 AM and my sight had been focused on the time for the past hour or so.

Greg was on his back beside me, snoring loudly between uneven breaths. I wondered what he was dreaming about, wishing I could be sleeping too. But there was too much noise in my mind, too much that had to be done before I could sleep soundly again.

I watched another 5 minutes tick by, thinking time was moving much slower now than it does during the daylight. In the thick blackness of the room I could only make out the silhouettes of things: the bedside table, the TV, the sink over by the bathroom, and the doorframe, which let in a little light at its base. Squinting, I also saw Greg’s keys jumbled atop the table next to the door.

I slid out of the coarse covers slowly and nimbly, cringing when my skin made soft noises against the sheets. I tiptoed gingerly to the foot of the bed, picked up my suitcase and the stuffed teddy bear resting on top of it, and slipped my shoes on as I strode toward the door. The rhythm of Greg’s snoring shifted slightly, freezing me in my tracks, but it soon resumed a persistent pace, as did my feet shuffling across the carpet.

I paused at the table to lift the keys from their resting position. I held my breath while picking them up, moving slowly, trying to keep them from jingling against each other. Such a symphony would be a cacophonous disaster in this room. They were finally gathered tightly in the palm of my hand.

I twisted the doorknob (it stuck at first) and hurried out into the night air, the light from the moon flooding the entryway. The last thing I saw before closing the door was Greg’s foot shake under the blankets.

And I ran, my bag clunking against my hip and Pike tucked tightly under my arm, the keys silent in my clinched fist. I ran along the empty pool and against the vacant, decaying rooms, out into the parking lot and to our car. I slid the key into the lock and tossed my belongings into the backseat and Pike into the passenger, slammed the door shut and got into the driver’s seat, rushing to turn the keys in the ignition. The engine roared to life and I was reversing across the tumultuous asphalt, bouncing up and down in the seat. I didn’t have time to put my seat belt on.

I was off, flying through the night. I steered past the decrepit motel sign, gazing at the flickering O. I thought at first it had sizzled out completely, but just as I turned out onto the open road, I saw it leap back to life in a fiery flurry, if just for a moment. My destination was unknown and my vision was obscured by wetness, my face was red with anxious excitement and my heart pounded with uncertainty. I drove.

The road was quiet and empty given the early hour. I pressed harder on the gas pedal, watching the needle on the speedometer surpass 80 and inch closer to 90 under my weight. The muffled hum of the engine was the only thing I had to drown out the sniffling of my tears.

From time to time I stole sideways glances at Pike as I sped past the dotted white lines flashing bright under the pressure of the headlights. Seeing him sitting erect against the torn upholstery with forever forward eyes and that innocent, permanent smile made me feel sadder for some reason. Pike could take on the world, I thought. He would take everything in stride. Conquer it all with bravery. He already had. And yet I was running away.

I can’t pretend any of these thoughts made sense. I knew perfectly well that Pike was an inanimate object, a plaything of childhood, a weary and worn-out toy, and nothing more. Of course his expression would be frozen eternally, unwavering in the face of external reality. I suppose I was just grasping at anything in those vague predawn hours, seeking out solace in any form it presented itself, comprehensible or not. His entire existence, Pike had faced the world with a determined composure, and I suddenly felt insufficient in his presence. Why couldn’t I do the same?

It was that realization more than anything that forced me to press on the brake and pull the grumbling vehicle to the side of the road. Wiping the moisture from my eyes and cheeks, I directed the car in a slow loop back to where I’d come from.

I had been wrong and frightened, flinching in the face of adversity. It was not Greg I was running from - no, it was Laura, and the mysteries of her absence I thought I had been strong enough to confront before. Despite the unresolved damage between she and I and the daunting irreparability of what could have been, running from my one remaining connection to her was not the answer. I could not fix what had been severed by death but perhaps I could begin to mend the fraying threads still holding life together.

I gazed at the dashboard clock to check the time, but it had faded out while I was not looking, the persistent beat of the colon no longer free to terrorize me. I didn’t know how long I had been driving, but Pike and I pressed on, facing the faint glow of sunrise on the horizon with identical resolve in our expressions.

* Image credit to Daniel Danger