“Hello?” he says. “Helllloooooooo?”
“I can hear you,” she says, “I’m right here.”
“Hello? Hello? Goddamnit,” he says, and hangs up.
“Okay, um, I’ll try back later,” she mutters, and hangs up too.
She slips the phone back into her purse, but stays pressed to the wall.
Around her, the hallway still pulses red. She steps back out into the bar, where all she hears is bass. Whatever song is playing is lost in the belly-deep thump at the bottom of everything. The room is so dark, she can barely make out her table in the distance, where Mallory is now whispering in Nathan’s ear, and Marcus is wiping up a spill with a wad of paper napkins, the new arrivals waiting at the bar for drinks. She looks up at the clusters of colored lights hooked to the ceiling’s wooden beams. Up there they glow, white, orange, and blue. But the lights don’t make it down to the floor. Nothing makes it all the way down to where she can reach it. She strains to make out any one sound amid the swirl of voices, the bass, and the clanking of glasses. It all blends together into a grinding whir, and she stands there, alone, camouflaged by the crowd, and remembers her seventh birthday, the one she spent locked in a shed in the backyard, listening to an old radio she’d found there, because she was too shy to be out among the other kids. She’d only meant to escape for a few minutes, to be alone with the music and the radio waves that she imagined she could see bouncing incessantly across the atmosphere, snaking around her in streams of electric blue, but then she heard the loud crack from the yard, and the waves stopped moving. The air stopped short, and hung in place.
She shakes it off, and re-focuses on the room she’s in right now, the thump of the music, and how early it still is. She slides back into her seat at the table and takes note of the firmness of the wood beneath her, of the chill in this pocket of the room. She takes the last sip of her beer and rolls it around in her mouth, a little warm now, yeasty, and with a hint of orange. She squeezes the empty glass in her hand.
“I came back,” she says into Marcus’s ear, smelling his hair gel, and he gives her a half-smile.
Mallory pushes a shot across the table.
“Drink this.”
“What is it?”
“No questions.”
Iris eyes the brownish liquid in the glass, sniffs it, and pours it down her throat, bracing herself for the whiskey burn.
The boys at the table cheer and Iris feels nauseous. She asks Mallory for a cigarette and excuses herself to the patio. Mallory gives Marcus a little kick under the table, and he gets up and squeezes his way up to the bar.
Iris finds an empty nook against the patio railing and finds a candle to light her cigarette. Several feet from her, a couple is fighting, and Iris listens without looking up at them.
“No, you listen,” the woman says, “I didn’t come here to be humiliated.”
“I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to please you when I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about,” the man pleads.
“Shut up,” she hisses, and he does. Iris listens for a break in their silence, and glances casually in their direction, but they’re lost in the crowd now. They could be anyone she sees, talking about anything.
“Hey,” Marcus says, coming up behind her, and Iris spins around to face him, startled.
“Hi.”
“Do you have another?” He indicates her cigarette.
“Oh, no— I got this one from Mallory.”
“Ah, okay.”
They stand facing each other for a moment, neither one thinking of anything to say to the other.
“Could I get a drag of that one?”
She passes him the cigarette, and he takes a quick puff before passing it back.
“You don’t like going out much, do you?” he asks.
Iris looks back at him. “I guess it’s… a little loud.”
“But it’s your birthday,” he says brightly, and it sounds ridiculous to her, a sentence without meaning.
She opens her mouth to give some kind of answer, but she’s struck by a sudden image of the view from the shed’s dirty window, where she’d looked to see if the great crack from the yard had stopped the air outside the shed too. She’d stood on her toes, and peeked out to see her father drop a stack of paper plates onto the grass and take off running toward the crowd circled around the base of the fig tree. She saw her mother racing over from the driveway, dropping a paper grocery sack in the dirt and pushing through to the center, bodies parting to make way for the two of them, Sebastian howling in their wake. She remembers ducking then, and staying crouched there for a moment, face pressed to the dark wood. When she looked up again, she watched her brother climb down the tree, all eyes following him until the other mother, who must have been alerted somehow in her house just at the end of the road, whose wild eyes telegraphed the severity of what she saw before her, came rushing through, collapsing in a heap over her boy’s limp body. After that, she didn’t see anyone’s face. All she saw were backs and profiles. All she heard was the wail of the ambulance, and the long silence that followed.
Iris puts the cigarette out in a glass ashtray and looks down at the patio’s wooden floor, scuffed almost to a shine. She looks up at Marcus again, and he seems closer than before, though she can’t say for sure. She hasn’t been looking at his face, but in his general direction, taking in only the shape and general color of him, the pattern of his shirt. He picks up a glass of red wine from the table beside them and holds it out to her.
“Are you giving me some stranger’s wine?”
“No, god— I set it down there. I don’t know why I didn’t give it to you right away. Sorry.”
She takes a sip, and it coats her mouth in warmth.
“You should be happy,” he says quietly, and Iris looks away.
Iris feels a growing chill against her arms then, and looks up to find the nearest heat lamp extinguished.
“I’m gonna go inside,” she says, “it’s kind of cold.”
He nods, and Iris approaches the back door with him following a few feet behind.
She quickens her pace, bypassing the table and making a beeline for the ladies’ room. She closes herself up in the stall farthest from the entrance and stands there, leaning her forehead against the door. Her fingers graze the hem of her dress, and she feels a rush of embarrassment at its shortness, its gaudy shine. She feels like a mouse trapped in the body of a flamingo. Then she remembers stepping out of the shed that night, into the dark, with no clue as to how late it was. The yard was empty, and in the distance, she could see the kitchen windows lit. She walked up to the tree and looked around. She saw the snapped branch on the other side and crouched down to touch its smooth, silvery bark, until her mother’s voice came calling from the house.
“Iris, are you ready to come inside? Come here!”
She looked back, still crouched.
“Iris, get away from there, please!”
She looked back at the house, frozen in place, in her folds of bright yellow chiffon, neon in the colorless night, the sash untied and dragging in the dirt. She gripped the cold, loamy branch in her small hand and wondered, where could he be now? She’d seen the boy earlier, poking around near the shed, and she’d wondered if he could hear the music, if he would open the door and find her hiding place. Where did they take him?
“Iris, please!”
And the desperation in her mother’s voice snapped her out of her trance. She walked slowly up to the kitchen door and her mother pulled her sharply inside by the arm.
“Change out of that honey,” she said.
“Iris?”
Iris opens her eyes in the bathroom stall, collects herself, and steps out.