The car seat in the back of Hailey’s Camry was coated in Cheerio dust. She started the car but didn’t put it in gear. She stared at the steering wheel like it had poetry written on the plastic.
“I told Eric I’d be home late anyway.”
“H-O-R-S-E?” Dan suggested.
“And embarrass you for the millionth time? Wanna just drive for a while?”
He picked at his thumbnail and almost said no. “Of course.”
Pulling out into the square, she took Main Street past the Cattawa. As they neared the river, the streets were deserted except for a lone figure stalking away from the bridge. He had his hands tucked in the pockets of a hoodie, baggy jeans, and a head exploding with crazed dreadlocks. The kind of figure that made you glad you were cruising by instead of walking past during an abandoned hour of night. But when just enough of the headlights spilled over him, Dan recognized the face and wished he hadn’t. He forgot the name, but he was a kid from their high school, a couple of grades older. What he recalled most acutely was that he used to come to school in hand-me-downs and Goodwill clothing onto which someone—probably his mother—had attempted to stitch an A+F logo, Abercrombie and Fitch. Dan remembered this distinctly because once, at lunch, Kaylyn had dared Hailey to go over and compliment him about his “fresh threads.” And Hailey had done it. After that, the two of them never let it go. They sniggered about this lonely skateboarder, who never bothered anyone, for a full year. It reminded him of the entire period in high school when she was dating Curtis, when the maintenance of her status seemed to be all that mattered to her. They blew past this kid, now a man, and he vanished into the gloom.
He’d once read an amateur interpretation of the writing on the Phaistos disc, a claim that it was not a geometric theorem, a prayer, or a war cry but a love poem. According to this random person on the Internet, the last line read: And they will join us in our home these children and dogs. And I will do anything, have no fear, face any obstacle for and with you.
Headlights setting the course, Hailey glanced over at him. “We should go out to the Brew. For nostalgia’s sake.”
He felt that suggestion in the pit of his stomach. “Sounds like a plan.”
They drove with the radio loud, beneath the satellites that delivered the beat, hawked insurance, and carried the cellular signals that ran the world.
The clouds had parted, and the road angled with the river. The trees hung over the Cattawa, lurching across the water like old men with curved spines. During floods, the river could rise halfway to the treetops, and it would run muddy and viscous on its way to Lake Erie. The Brew used to be a stretch of weeds overlooking a dirt cliff face. A handful of teenagers generations before them figured out you could maneuver a car down an old hunting trail and park in the grass, which quickly became dirt or mud as more people discovered the spot. After a drunk couple drove into the river, the county put up a knee-high guardrail and called it the Cattawa Scenic Overlook. Kids never stopped calling it the Brew, likely named for the way the water foams as it comes around a bend (or maybe after all the beer drank there). It was supposed to be the place the country songs were written about, but from what Dan had heard in the last few years it had become a sewer of pills, pipes, and needles. Hailey crept them up to the rail, flipped the lights off, and killed the engine. The slice of moon sparkled off the water and gave the leaves on the tops of the trees an incandescent sheen, like all the thousands of wandering fireflies had been mashed into a paint and spread across each tiny canvas. The outline of the woods, wet and stark against night’s blue-black pool. Stars and moon all swimming out there in the infinite. It made him think that if he could stretch his vision far enough, he could see to the end of it all, where the universe simply trickled back to God’s eye.
They listened to the throaty voice of the river below. The ticking of the cooling engine.
Finally, Hailey said, “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too.” He wondered if this was true.
“I had to lure you with Mrs. Bingham.”
Her eyes had the shimmer of an ocean at dawn. Time and memory surged. Brilliant and violent.
“Why don’t you ever come back?”
He didn’t know how to answer this. He stammered about how even coming back for a night—less than a night—he’d run into too many people they’d grown up with.
“It’s so hard. Just. To not look back,” he tried to explain, feeling numb, feeling dumb. “I’m doing my best to keep moving forward, to keep happy. That’s hard when I’m here.”
Hailey’s brow crumpled into agony, an expression he remembered from when her mother was diagnosed. Or when he told her he might re-up.
“You left,” she said softly. “And you took my heart with you, you fucker.”
He stared at his hands, laced together over bare, bony knees.
“You’re never ever far from my thoughts,” she went on. “And I hate that.”
A contour of starlight put her profile in repose. He wasn’t sure how old you have to be before you know what you feel is not infatuation, that you are not merely dreaming up an idyllic thing; you understand the world differently because of this other consciousness bound to yours. He’d mourned her every moment he’d known her.
“You know,” Dan said, “I think we live these costume pageants with very little control and then fool ourselves into believing we have agency. That’s how I feel about us. Mostly, it was out of our control.”
“Danny.” His name seethed through her teeth. “Maybe you need help. From what your mom says… Maybe you’re not okay.”
There was a simple wood cross hanging from the rearview mirror. It dangled from a piece of fraying twine. He reached out and rubbed the smooth grain between his fingers.
“I’m not PTSDed, if that’s what you’re asking. I have nightmares sometimes.” How solid the cross felt. How he ached for its conclusions. “But I’m over checking the roadside for bombs. I can sit through a fireworks display. Mostly…” He hesitated then tried on a smile. “Mostly my heart’s just broken. But that happens to the best of us.”
“Danny.” She shifted, took his face in her hands. Her fingers ran over the scar by his eye, and she looked into his prosthetic like it could possibly see her. A barb uncoiled in his throat, and he felt tears push at the edges of his eye. Something so deep and so awful tried to rise up then. He felt it battering from below, screaming, and he let go of the cross. It bounced and twirled on the twine. He had to get out. Like the Humvee on its side, fire clawing in the box, he had to get out.
Hailey called after him as he threw open the passenger door and practically fell out of his seat, scraping his hand against the gravel as he caught himself. She called again.
He walked to the rail at the edge of the overlook. He heard the driver’s side open. He gazed into the water, wondered about the fall.
“Danny!” Hailey screamed. “Stop.”
He stood hovering at the edge, looking at the cluster of dark rocks over the drop. The Cattawa murmured by in its river’s whisper. Hailey snatched his wrist and pulled him to her. “Stop it. I’m sorry.” She wrapped herself around him, tight enough that he could feel her heart thundering against her breastbone.
Then the cool of her fingertips grazed his cheek. She pushed him back on the hood and in doing so broke some dense spell. She slipped her tongue into his mouth, climbed onto him, fumbled at the belt until his shorts dropped to his ankles, clattering in the dirt, and the summer night wasn’t nearly as warm. There was the contrast between the skin and the core. She gripped his shoulders, his hair, the muscles of his chest, her hands with memory. He bit the salt of her nipples. She was sweet, slick, sorrowful, and he thought of how time folded in on itself when that bomb erupted beneath him or that bullet connected with his armor. How everlasting those moments could feel. As if he’d lived them billions of years before when the oceans first rolled and lightning first raged and the course of all life was plotted in the murk. Of course, you only ever get a moment, and what lingers after is nothing but threnody, a chilly song for the dead.