Jackie Brown

Sprawled out before, tentacles reaching in every direction is the Sunday paper. I always read it this way, taking it apart section by section, before reading so much as a single headline. I do this to avoid missing anything; any of the good bits often hidden in the bottom corner or the back side of a page. Reading the Sunday paper while sipping a freshly brewed cup of bean-to-grind coffee is the crux of my Sunday ritual. My new Sunday ritual. It’s what keeps the arms of the loneliness that creeps alongside me since Jeb slipped below the surface from wrapping around me and squeezing. 

Jeb has been gone six months. For six months, I have been forgotten; left behind to live in a  world where I am a stranger. Every step I now take is heavy; every lost moment leaves a scar on my skin. Each day in this land where memories don’t exist is a trudge through the mud of my grief. Each day, a cruel reminder that my past is gone. In six months, thirty years have been erased. In their place sits a blank space that will never be filled. 

On my best days, I imagine what it must be like to be Jeb: how he now sees me - a blurry face pressed against the glass; indistinguishable features staring into the aquarium of his prison. A no one. A ghost. On my worst days, I fall backward through space and land inside a version of myself I hate. A me that is causal and unencumbered. A woman who believes time is negotiable. A woman who treats time as though it is expendable. I want to scream at that woman. I want her to know everything she will soon lose.

Today, I sit at the kitchen table, at our kitchen table stoic. Determined to find something to anchor me, to keep me from giving way to the gravity of time. I reach for my coffee mug. Eager for the grounding effect the caffeinated concoction offers. Before the mug touches my lips, the smoke of freshly lit cigarettes coils like a snake into my kitchen. Annoyed, I follow the scent trail to the crack in my window. Certain I’ve cornered my prey,  I peel the curtain back and peer outside. Beyond my front porch and across the road barely wide enough to be called a road, is a couple. They are standing close enough to each other to indicate a history but far enough apart to suggest a questionable future. My eyes are drawn to the man. His back is to me, his face a mystery, but something about the bleached denim of his jacket and the loose cut of his curly dark hair is familiar. Not in a, we met at a party last month, way, but in the hazy, fuzzed-edged way dreams can masquerade as memories. Maybe it isn’t him that I know, but rather the way everything about him is speaking, in unison, one message. The forward lean of his torso. The jut of his head. His visual commitment to a point somewhere in front of him. The employment of the cigarette burning down between the fingers of his right hand as a guard dog whose only job is to keep his female companion off the private property of his personal space.  All of it says I’d rather be anywhere than here. I know the feeling. 

The woman is of a different animal entirely. She stands perpendicular to her male friend; open, waiting. From the spy nest of my window, I can see the crescent moon of her face and a sliver of her body. There is an urgency nesting in her brow and in the line of her lips. Her long brownish-blond hair shifts from side to side as she twists her head from the man’s distant point of focus back to his face. The movement, jerky and uncertain, makes the cigarette she is holding dance like a 4th of July sparkler. She too is speaking, in unison, one message: See me. I know the feeling. 

Careful not to make a noise loud enough to find its way across the road, I place my fingers on the frame of my kitchen window and push upward, transforming the crack into a gaping mouth.  I narrow my eyes and train my ears. I need, for reasons absurd even to me, to hear their voices. I need to prove they are familiar - that they are known. That they exist.

I hear the chirping of the chickadees and the chirring chatter of the squirrels. Then, letter by letter, the crest of the same wind that blew the cigarette smoke into my kitchen carries their voices. I lean closer to the window. I hold my breath. Nothing coming in is whole.  I strain to assemble the broken bits of sound into actual words and complete sentences. It is of no use. Their distance is too far and the ping-pong pace of their exchange is too fast to follow. A soft chuckle pushes its way through my lips and cracks against the empty corners of my kitchen. Had I really thought this couple, these two people, would be the salve I’d been searching for? The remedy to save me from the algesic reality of my existence? I am not part of their world, nor are they of mine. They are strangers. Nothing more than a hypnagogic hallucination in a long dream of everything lost.  

I drop my hand from the window casing. It is time to return to my paper and my now cold cup of coffee.  I start to move. I stop. Something is happening. I can feel it more than I can see it. A soft breeze is changing the direction of the mood. A wisp of emotion slips through a crack in the wall separating them.  

She’s said something. 

Her words, slightly, ever so slightly, shift his head toward her, filling his gaze with something other than the distance.

She says something else. But it is too much. Too soon. 

He lets her go, leaving her to drift, and returns his attention to the green expanse. 

The hairs on my arm stand rigid, attention full. I can feel the tic of time brushing against my skin. “Now,” pushes against my lips.

She turns her head. She looks right at me, through the window, past the curtain, and into my eyes. She has heard me. She has felt my will.  With a nod, she raises her arm. It hovers over his shoulder like a helicopter waiting to land. Her fingers brush the shoulder seam of his denim jacket. 

His shoulder hops. Her fingers jump. Her face falls. 

My eyes shutter. I grip the corner of the counter, willing myself to stay put. I begin to sway. My grip loosens. The smell of cigarettes fuses with the cloying smell of sea life and morphs into the unmistakable scent of low tide. A chill skitters up my arms. It is cooler than predicted. I reach for my sweater and slip it over my shoulders. I am glad for its warmth. I wrap it around myself and pull the sash tight against my body. I watch Jeb, who is sitting next to me on our blanket, twist his wedding ring with his right hand. A habit, he says, nothing more. But I read into things. I see images where there are only blank walls. He’s leaving me, I think. He’s finally made the decision. He’d said he wasn’t certain, that it wasn’t what he wanted but he wasn’t sure how many more fights he could survive, we could survive. I didn’t disagree. I didn’t dare. If I opened my mouth, I was certain all that would come out was a scream. We’ve been married too long for uncertainty - to think of himself as separate, apart from me, is the end.  My mind flashes over the worst of the last few weeks, of everything we’d said, I’d said. It is a miracle we are here, that we still came after all of the ugliness we’ve spilled and splattered. 

Every day, I tell myself, Not today, but I can never see it through. My intentions wash away like a sandcastle exposed to the tide. Jeb is right; I am rigid. Unyielding. I watch the ocean and long for its ability to ebb and flow. I want to wash in and out, uninterrupted and unbroken. But I don’t. I can’t. I move in stops and starts. I turn in hard, sharp angles. I cut the soft sand beneath me. Jeb knows this, he accepts this, but he will never understand it and he will never forgive it. Saying his name reminds me he hasn’t yet gone, that there is time. He is next to me still, leaning on his elbow, feet digging in the sand, eyes fixed over the ocean. I want him to look at me, to reassure me with the softness of his gaze, but all his attention is given to the sea. I follow his eyes and spot the seagull he must be watching. It glides on the current of the wind. Effortless. Fluid. He’s still here, I repeat to myself. I steady my breathing and bring my emotions into a tight circle near my chest; readying them to evacuate if everything goes badly. 

“Jeb,” I say, my voice creaking like an old chair.

Without a moment of hesitation, he drops the bird from view and turns his attention to me.  

“I…I want you to know how-”

“I know,” he interrupts, taking hold of my hand.  “I know.”

I tumble backward, into my kitchen. Jeb is gone. I can feel his absence. It is like a weight, threatening to crush my bones. I breathe into the pain, searching for an escape route. A glint of light bounces off of the window and lands in my eye. I follow its trail until I find the couple. They are still standing exactly as they were when I left them. His back is still to me, his face still a mystery. I shift my gaze, hoping she can fill in all that I missed.  I squint and home in on her features. I think her expression has changed. It looks placid; the urgency has left her lips and her brow, but my fifty-five-year-old eyes are no longer reliable narrators. What they see and what is are not always operating in concert. 

I need to know. For my own peace of mind, but for Jeb, too. Before reason can take over, I move, cold coffee mug in hand to my front door. I gently pull the door from the grip of its eighty-year-old frame and slip quietly onto my porch. I walk to the far end and kneel down next to the potted plants lining the perimeter. Plucking brown petals and dried buds from the pots, I pretend to be the type of woman who prunes her plants, who tends her garden.  I scoot a few inches closer to the porch's edge, positioning myself as close to the couple as possible without crossing the road and wait.   

Minutes go by. They are not moving. They are not speaking. A sickening feeling takes seed in my belly. The silence is the water it needs to grow. Speak, I say, willing her to listen.  

Thump. 

The sound startles me. I jerk, and fall back onto my heels. I reach for the rail and steady myself. The man has dropped his leg, hard, from the fence. His weight has shifted. He is leaning away from her. For a terrifying moment, I am certain he is readying to leave. My breath catches in my throat. I close my eyes. Jeb floats to the front of my mind. “I’m not sure if we’ll ever workout,”  he says, his mouth dropping into a defeated frown. I open my eyes and sweep the memory away before he can close the door behind him.  I stare at the man across the road, tightening my grip on the rail, bracing for his departure. It doesn’t come. Instead, he raises his hand to his mouth and takes a slow pull from his cigarette.

“Speak,” I say again, this time out loud.

She ignores me. The soft placidity of her face crumbles away exposing the flat surface of a rock. Agonizing moments pass. Then, through a barely visible crack in the hard line of her mouth, it is broken. 

“You’re so sensitive,” she declares, raising her hands until they are level with her shoulders.

“I can never tell if you are serious,” he replies with a shoulder shrug perfected by a man familiar with bewilderment. 

“That’s why they call it fucking with you,” she retorts.

He says nothing, eyes trained once again on the green expanse. 

I freeze. Afraid for her. But she isn't afraid. She understands something I do not. She leans into him, bucking him with her shoulder, and jabbing her finger rhythmically toward his face.

“What?” He looks exasperated, but even from my spot on my porch, I can hear the amusement coating his words. 

“What movie is that from?” she demands, still jabbing her finger.

He waves his hand dismissively. Takes a long drag off of his nearly spent cigarette and holds the contents in his lungs. Slowly, he exhales. The smoke wraps itself around his voice and through a grey cloud spill the words, “Quentin Tarantino, Jackie Brown, 2010. Said by Samuel L. Jackson when talking to Chris Tucker.”

“See?  See?” she says.

“See what?” he says.

“We’ve still got!” she replies while driving her hand upward, readying herself to catch his half of their high five. 

Without saying any more, he meets her in the middle, his hand melding with hers.

He smiles down at her before looping his free hand around her waist. She leans into him and rests her head on his chest. 

My shoulders fall. Like the tide leaving the shore, the tension washes from my body. I quiet my breathing and wait for Jeb to speak. I want to hear him even though I now know what he will say. From our place on a blanket, on a breezy evening on a beach not that far away, he takes my hand in his, leans in close, and whispers, I know, into my ear.