Sins of Omission

Sometimes life continues and you stop

 

 

Sins of Omission

 

The ocean spread out before them. The wind, whipping across the mudflats, separated their soft bodies from the depth of the Gulf of Alaska. They sat close, blocking the wind. Although their shoulders touched and their hair tangled, rivers ran between them.

 

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The man who vacuumed out her baby said she was doing great. 

She thought, doing great feels a lot like being fucked.

She lay still on the paper sheet. Until the cold metal touched her… The nurse holding her hand asked where it hurt. She drew a breath, didn’t answer.

It didn’t hurt.

It was something else, something more painful than pain. Suddenly it was more real than it was supposed to be, more real than she let it, back when she was in control- before she was surrounded by strangers, the only one in the room laying down. The metal inside her was not imaginary, pretend, like the child was- a thought, an image, a figment, an inkblot, a blood stain. When the long stainless steel tool slid up inside her, she knew.

She couldn’t see the instruments, but it felt, from the inside, like a long spoon. Like the spoons they served with malts, at the diner where she worked as a teenager. She didn’t think of spoons then, with the noise and the grease, but she did now, this one deep inside her.

Her body warmed the metal and the spoon disappeared. She knew, as a wolf does when the steel jaws sink in and become one with flesh, that she was trapped. 

Then it hurt.

She cried out, but had no words.

She squinted at the faces above her, their concerned eyes and slight smiles fought to reconcile with the unexpected panic burning through her veins. She felt strange rage. The room smelled- hostile. The soft whirl of equipment – electrifying, terrifying.

She jerked, bent, coiled, flexed. The room collided with her animal fear as he scraped. The pounding of her heart absorbed her.

Don’t move.

I’m almost done.

I’m sorry it hurts.

We’ll be done in just a minute, precious. Turning to the nurse, his voice lower, the doctor said, We need to finish. Be sure she holds still.

A needle punched through her skin, scattering her fear. It seems they can’t help it, he said quietly. Always quiet. Always calm. The tigress leapt out of her chest and through her dimming eyes she felt that spirit fade into the tiled ceiling. Lost in a spotlight that grew larger through her clouded eyes until it swallowed her up.

 

When she awoke, the room was empty. The spot light gone. Her hand reached out into the new air and she felt it slowly grow cold and heavy.

She sat up and fell back. The room spiraled around her. As she fell, the spiral wrapped around her, pushing her into the pillow. Pressed deep, she watched the movement and listened to the spinning. Spinning. Spinning. Spinning While Spinning. She listened. Sounds and forms mingled, until there was one, high pitched and fast, that rose out the cacophony. The sound was coming from inside the room, not from the Everything she was swept into.

She looked around the room.

There was a machine covered with a sheet. The cloth muted a blinking red light; it was the only thing in the sterile and silent room that moved. She choked. That was what ate her baby. Because she asked it to.

 

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The two of them sat in silence; the cold sea lay distant across the mudflats. Here, even mud can kill you.

Once there was a couple honeymooning in Anchorage and they went out on the mudflats at low tide.

Maybe no one told them not to.

She started to sink. He crawled, low on his belly, to safety. Search and Rescue came, but they told him the truth, that no one comes out once they’ve gone in. He insisted that the helicopters come, so they did, but the pressure of all that mud against her was too much. The suction wouldn’t release her. She cried when the line they tied around her tore her skin. She had a pipe to breathe through when she first went under. The tide rose quickly and the pipe flooded.

 

The flats are made of tiny pieces of silt, deposited from mountain fed rivers and glacial deltas. Along the protected harbor the silt deposits absorb the tide until each piece of silt is suspended in the Gulf of Alaska. At low tide they stretch out to sea almost a mile, at high tide, they are submerged. The two of them sat on the grass at a park, guarded by wire fence. Protecting them from the mud.

 

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She had been there years ago, as a child.

She ate poison berries off a bush in the park. Beautiful crimson poison berries.

On the long car ride home, lying in the hatchback of the escort, she pressed her face into the old flannel blanket that she lay upon. They left the park and went straight to the highway, so they were three hours into the nine-hour drive before she felt the pain in her belly. The small car filled with kids and stuff flew across the flat lands and started up the mountains. Crevasses in the cream colored interior, filled with dust, trembled as they flew over broken pavement. Each bump jarred her vision, and sharpened the pain in her belly.

            Sitting by the ocean again, she remembered.

I never told about those berries.

I thought I might die.

I knew what they would say; I should have known better.

They would be angry. I would be ashamed. And still sick.

 

Years later, she looked over at the large faded wood sign still at the entrance. Park article 7: don’t eat the poisonous berries.

But they were beautiful red berries and she had wanted them. Even now, she remembered the wanting.

 

            *****************************************************

 

            I was the other man.

 

            She winced.

After a shiver of wind swept through, she relaxed and squinted to see if the tide was coming in. The low clouds rolling across the bay made it impossible to see. She rested her hand in the damp grass and felt the spears between her fingers. Wet. Cold.

 

            I was the other man.

I knew she was with him when I met her. She had moved here to be with him. They were going to be married.  

But I was drawn to her like a magnet. It wasn’t something I could help.

By August she was climbing through the brush to that s****y trailer I was living in. She ended up loving me too. What are the chances?

 

            He spoke like he was compelled. They were both dreamy, traumatized survivors. She looked at him slow, curious. Two strangers sitting together in late morning, the tight lashing they had shared, suddenly removed.

 

            The wind blew his short hair around frantically; beads of drizzle caught between each hair. He sat with his knees pulled up to his chest, arms around his knees. He also looked deeply across the waterless bay.

 

We were in love, but it wasn’t getmarriedandlivehappilyeverafter. It was complicated. At first it was wonderful because it was inevitable, there just couldn’t be any other way. We forgot about logistics, like her fiancé. At least I did. I thought the obstacles would just go away. I had never known anything as overwhelming as this need for her.

I never needed anything.

After awhile though, there was still the Other.

We fought it for awhile. Them. Us. But the reasons were always unvoiced. Nobody said I won’t live like this, Choose. We were all afraid of the choice.

 

She did decide, after a while. She decided to leave, to do some graduate research somewhere far enough from us. She left in late May and I didn’t hear from her until September. She didn’t write to me, but she didn’t write to him either. Mary, at the postal annex, told me that no foreign mail had come through, for anyone.

            When she came back, she was fat. She probably gained twenty pounds that summer.

           

            The girl beside him smiled, wryly- a broad broad abroad. It was funny. It wasn’t funny.

 

But she was beautiful. She seemed more together. It was about a month before she told me she was leaving. Really leaving. Not with him, but not with me either.

She said she would like to be alone, that that would make her happy. She said she didn’t like tug of war. That she wasn’t very competitive, even as a prize. That she loved me. Goodbye.

She didn’t tell me where she was going. Her family lives out East, so I supposed she would go there. I really can’t remember if she said anything to make me believe that. I doubt it. She never lied, said the simplest thing to do is to be straight- anything else will f**k you up eventually.

 

He looked at his hands, so she did too. They were such strange hands for a man like him. They should have belonged to some great pianist, but he stole them to pour drinks at the damn bar where they met. 

 

            She kissed me and stood up. Before she got to the door, I asked her to wait. I asked her to stay for a drink. To smoke with me on the balcony. To just wait a godamn minute before she walked out like she had made up her mind when she had done all of the talking and I hadn’t gotten to say a goddamn thing.

But I didn’t say that; I asked if she knew about the weather, if it was going to rain. If the road was still closed going up to Healy. I didn’t know what to say. She heard me, though, and came over. When she stood near I didn’t fight the future. I didn’t feel her bleeding out of my life. It was impossible that something as clear as her, here in front of me, could fade.

 

As he spoke, it seemed like he could see her now, rolling in on the ocean fog. He grew excited, because of the Great Truth.  

 

She would be with me forever because she was captured in today. We’re like energy. You know, can’t be destroyed. Can’t be created.

            We made love. I guess it was just one more for the road, but I took it. Afterwards, I held her for a very long time. I held her tight, but the tightness was all inside me. I could only touch her lightly or she would pull away once she was asleep. I knew this, from all those nights she retreated, no matter how close we had just been. She barely stirred, but after a while my chest felt heavy. She fell asleep. She took a deep breath. I saw steam come out of her parted lips, the woodstove is in the other room and the door was barely cracked. We were the burning nucleus in a cold room.

 

            He didn’t need to describe the room. She knew it; he lives there now. She smokes on the front porch, like the other woman used to, enjoying the invisibility the willow trees provide, thick between her and the road. Although they are close enough to the highway to feel the semi trucks roll passed, they can see nothing but trees. Driving to his cabin, she often feels like she is ducking for cover. The turnout is overgrown and practically invisible. She never tells anyone where she goes when she visits him; the place is like her secret fort. She knew he moved out of the trailer while the woman was in Ontario. It probably seemed too deep in the woods for him, without her fighting through the underbrush to come to him. He had lived in the cabin for seven years, by her count.

 

            Milo came and pawed at the door, moving it enough to squeeze his fat haunches through, and over my piles of laundry. It was snowing and I watched millions of crystals fall. And none of them were as amazing as what I held. I thought, I can have her forever if tomorrow never comes.

It just always has to be today.

In order to keep today from slipping into tomorrow, I had to stay awake. My eyelids grew heavy; as I gazed at the birch trees they seemed to gather light, like dawn was coming. They would glow luminously, then when I blinked, they would return to dark shadows in the snow. My blinking began to feel like a strobe light kaleidoscope of thousands of dawns, and each time I looked beside me, she was there.

            I fell asleep. When I woke, the early morning light was flat and low. I really could see my breath. And I was alone.

 

            He searched the skyline.

They were not like that. They were not in love. All of this chaos and pain was new. Neither of them mistook it for love. Like passengers in an automobile accident, they clung to each other, but they would return to separate houses, with fences between them.

 

                        ***************************************************

 

            She lay in the dark room for as long as timelessness permits. Then she gathered her strength off the floor and wrapped it tightly around her. With her hand on the chrome doorknob, she paused for a moment. When the door opened, she would no longer be in a dim, sterile room, alone. And that made her hesitate for a moment before she closed her fingers around the doorknob.

 

She marched out of the office. Or she had meant to.

 

He saw her, pale. Unsteady. At the end of the hallway, trapped in a large uncomfortable chair in the lobby he watched her walk towards him. He felt like a coward. He had since she told him, and then left him alone with the idea. When he saw her teeter out of the office, he felt it again. She reminded him of his little sister, the time they were horsing around and he ripped her doll. She hadn’t known that they ripped. The woman walking down the hall had a similar look of awe and pain. She sat down beside him. Tears weld up in her eyes and fell over, but did not change her expression.

They rose and left.

 

            A donut and the park. That’s what she wanted. She knew she couldn’t be alone; she gave that up when she opened the door in the dark room. So she said the park where the open cold air could blow through her for a while. A Dunkin Donuts billboard across the street had a smiling family with a handful of donuts in their sticky fingers, so she said donut. She lit one of his cigarettes, but the smell was overwhelming. She unrolled the window and held it out, watching the smoke filter her image in the passenger side mirror.

She complained that the seatbelt hurt her. She cried when he slowed down for a red light. It sounded like a whimper and he thought about turning around and bringing her back to the doctor. He was going to cry, but his sunglasses protected him from having to acknowledge it.

This was what she said she wanted. He didn’t know how to handle it, so he let her decide and he paid for it.

He was lonely, depressed and tragically over thirty. He smoked too many cigarettes and tried to stay stoned all the time. He was not rough, except on himself and others he called worthless, before laughing a little. He looked at this girl, this woman, fighting to sit in his car. He did not know what to do with her, hadn't known since the day they met. When she waited until the bar closed, until the after party cleared, and went back to his place for coffee as the sun rose on the cold summer morning. They sat on the porch that morning, in the fog.  It was the first of many very early mornings as the solstice sun watched them twenty-one hours a day.

There was a donut shop down the street from the clinic. He came out with a bag of assorted donuts and handed them to her. She put them by the armrest and forgot them. They were almost to the park, she could see glimpses of the gray sea between the buildings, she could smell the rich heavy air.

 

She wanted to cry by the ocean and he had to take her there.

 

******************************************************

 

            I saw her here, about a year and a half ago.

 

            She barely heard him from her seat on the damp grass. Her eyes had crossed the flats to an island, scampered over the island to the next, and escaped the shore she couldn’t.

 

I was working; Gordon sent me down to get some things straightened out for a show. I came out of this dive bar on Second Avenue and she walked by, holding a very little girl’s hand. The two of them walked by, didn't notice me, cracking the ice crusted snow on the sidewalk and laughing as the ice crushed beneath their boots.

 It was cold and after a block, she disappeared in the icefog. My fingers were burning, so I ducked back into the bar and ordered a drink. At the end of the bar there was a really old bum, and he looked at me for a long time since we were the only two in the place. He chewed the ice in his whiskey. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

That will always be the sound of her walking away.

 

Reviews

[K. Aurora]

This was a....really good story... It was sad, yet oddly calming and smooth, even thought the thoughts jumped from perspectives. I felt myself continually want more and more. To find out what would happen in the end.

Yes...a Sad/Smooth feeling... Like a happy milkshake, when you're depressed.

thanks for writing this. I really enjoyed it. :)

Kansas