Roughly a year before this night, Cole had taken her out to one of the access roads near the cornfields where the first wave of wind turbines had gone up. This was when they still seemed positively alien, swooshing in the dark, those distant lights at the towers’ tops blinking simultaneously. They’d sat on the hood of his car and watched them wink.
“These things are crazy. Just really nuts,” she’d said. She could tell he was nervous, trying to cut through his own anxiety and instead sitting without saying anything.
Maybe she knew what he was about to do. She couldn’t remember except that eventually she’d asked, “What’s on your mind?”
He launched into it then. A speech he must have rehearsed for weeks, maybe months. “I know you can do better than me probably, Tina. I know you got guys coming at you from all sides, but sometimes I think you let them use you. You know, take what they want from you and don’t really respect you or nothing.”
“Maybe that’s my choice,” she snapped. More harshly than she’d intended. You could recognize something was true, see it in a man like Travis of the electronics department, and still do nothing about it.
“No, I know. Alls I’m saying is that I’m not that guy. I’ll never be the most impressive guy you could be with. I got a job I’m really good at, though, and I think you’re amazing. It’s not just that I want to take care of you, but—I don’t know—I think you can take care of me too. Sometimes I’m just like—it’s a feeling like it’s the last day of school before Christmas but you gotta get done with a math test first. That feeling. Like you’re going to burst and you can’t believe you have to sit there and do it. Only it’s like that all the time with me. The only time it’s not is when I’m with you.”
Then he was holding a ring in front of her. It was thin with a small diamond at the top. “This was my mom’s before she died.” He didn’t look at her but instead considered the ring pinched between his fingers. The turbines caught the cool wind and the blades whipped on, backlit by the stars.
He sat watching her.
Before she discovered she’d say yes, she first thought of 56, and a plan—a daydream, really—that had grown to occupy so many of her idle moments. She thought of what she’d have to do if she ever wanted to close that chapter of her life, which would forever threaten everything Cole promised, which kept her sad and hurt and fearful, which kept her going back to the Travises, which kept her perpetually haunted by a life she never got to have and that, the deepest part of her knew, was nothing more than a drowning fantasy in the first place.
Fifty-six moaned sleepily and his eyes fluttered. He had to breathe through his nose and the change led him to stir. Now came the hard part. From the trunk she retrieved the Terrain Deer Drag Sled ($39.97 at Walmart) and placed it on the ground by the door. She lifted his legs out of the car, which were heavy enough. She had to throw her whole back into grabbing his torso, and even then he felt impossibly dense. A hunk of granite she was trying to heave bodily. Straining, she managed to more or less topple him out of the car and onto the sled. His shoulder landed first, but his head thumped against the plastic and this briefly roused him. His eyes fluttered open and she heard the sticky crinkle of the tape as he explored its confinement. Facing away, she wrapped both arms around his legs, used her hip as added leverage, and heaved the rest of him onto the sled. She took the rope around her chest and began dragging him across the field. Once she’d pulled him away from the car, she had to stop and rest. She looked around. Other than the crickets, the meadow was empty. She went back to the trunk, grabbed a plastic Walmart bag and another item: ammonia inhalants.
She’d found out about them when she googled smelling salts on her parents’ computer. They were for “arousing consciousness.”
She tucked the bag into the back pocket of her jeans and walked back to 56. He lay on the sled, struggling against the tape and the G, his eyes twitching. She stripped one of the salts from the package, knelt down, and held it to his nose. He muttered his head away but didn’t come to.
It took her three more salts before his nostrils flared, and he was able to overcome the drug. His head whipped back, his eyes popped open, and he surged against his bonds.
“Shhh,” she said, putting a hand on his face. She caressed the stubble on his cheek. “Hold on, babe. Hold on.”
He shouted into the tape, muffled barks at her, and she remembered the power of his voice when he called for a last-second shift in the defense. “Just hold on a minute, babe. I just need to… I just need to talk to you for a second.”
He kept screaming through his gag, eyebrows writhing in fury. He bucked against the tape. She shushed him again and stroked his chest.
“Just listen for a second.” Finally, he ceased, but he kept his head off the ground, glaring at her. Breath pulsed furiously from his nostrils. “Just listen.”
She kept stroking his chest and the gut he’d grown since high school.
“I want you to know…” She stopped and thought about how to restart. All that time in the car. All that planning and she still had no idea how to describe what she felt. “This was the only way to see you. To get you to listen to me. I knew if I just called you or showed up at your door, you’d think I was insane and still in love with you and… Okay, I mean I am still in love with you. You know? But I knew I’d never get you to listen unless I did something drastic, okay? Don’t be scared.” Her fingers crept under the rim of his jeans where she hadn’t constricted him with the tape. She felt the patch of his pubic hair. Felt him stir. The fury in his face twitched in the oddest way. This wasn’t at all what she’d thought she’d say. Even after all this time, all the perspective she thought she’d gained, a ghost remained inside of her. “It was just you never let me talk to you after you ended it. You never really explained, and I never believed your reason. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I want you to know…” She undid his belt buckle, undid the button on his jeans, unzipped the fly. “I loved you, Todd. I loved you so, so much.” Despite his situation, he helped her lower his pants by tilting his hips off the ground. His eyes went from pure fury to that pure longing. She’d seen it so many times before. In the cab of his truck. In Ostrowski’s basement while his best friends had her two at a time. He was hard instantly. With experience in the years since high school, she knew how enormous, how aberrant he was. She spit into her hand and began working it. The way he’d taught her. “If you had just explained to me what happened, maybe I could have done something to fix it. And then maybe everything would have been different, you know? Maybe you would’ve had me to care about you, so you wouldn’t have gotten into all that stuff you did at OSU and Mount Union. You would’ve stayed away from drinking and the pills and whatever else. You would’ve played like you should have played and you would’ve gotten drafted.” Tears came to her eyes, but she’d expected that. “And we could have had everything. Our kids would’ve grown up without worrying about anything. I could have had kids in the first place. You know I can’t? I can’t get pregnant anymore. My uterus is damaged. But I don’t think it would’ve been, you know? If you’d just stayed with me. Everything would’ve worked out differently.” His eyes closed and his head tilted back on the ground. He heaved breaths through his nose. She worked her hand up and down faster. She lowered her face and met him with her mouth for a moment or two, just to keep it wet. “I’m getting married now, though. His name is Cole.”
Fifty-six did not appear to hear this. She put him back in her mouth, savored him. A moment later, he came, an impossible amount of that salty male fluid erupting over her tongue and spilling onto her hand, arching into the air as she pulled her head away. His spine curved toward the stars, and he made a pleasured sound beneath the tape. That sensation of trying to gulp, choke, and spit all at once reminded her of her first time doing this while the others looked on, hip-hop pulsing in the background. Slowly 56 came to rest on the sled. She wiped her hand on his jeans, crawled on top of him so that she straddled him. His chest was so broad her knees barely touched the ground on either side. She peeled the tape back from his mouth.