“Jesus,” Mallory says, “I thought you’d passed out or something.”
“I’ve got to get out of here…” Iris says, stepping out of the stall, realizing all at once that she’s drunk.
“Seriously?” Mallory pouts.
“How are you getting home?” she calls after her, but Iris has already left the bathroom, the door swinging behind her.
She sees Marcus hovering near the bar and grabs his arm.
“Can you take me home? Now? It’s too far to walk back in these shoes and I— ”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he says, and follows her out the door, nodding at his friend on the way out. When he gets outside, Iris is marching lopsidedly in the wrong direction. He takes her elbow and steers her toward his car.
When they pull up to Iris’s building, Marcus turns off the ignition.
“So, this is you,” he says, and brushes a finger down her forearm.
He lingers there, and Iris, sobered a little by the ride, can feel him inching closer. She’s unwittingly sent a signal, she figures, and isn’t sure whether or not she wants to take it back. He brings his face in to hers, and though startled, Iris lets him kiss her for a second. She keeps her eyes open, taking in his pores, the boyish peach fuzz on his upper cheek, and breathing in his thick, vaguely sweaty, but not unpleasant, scent. He slowly eases his tongue into her mouth, and she closes her eyes, and wonders how far this might go if she lets it. Her skin buzzes with the proximity and she surrenders to it, unnerved by the electricity that seems to be running through her. Then, abruptly, he pulls away.
“Okay, sorry,” he says. “You’re not into this. I get it.”
“Oh. Oh.” She doesn’t know what she did.
“It’s okay.” He looks straight ahead, his cheeks flushed, hands on the steering wheel.
“Sorry,” she says, and gets out of the car. As she’s unlocking the front door, she looks back to find him still there, phone pressed to his cheek.
When she gets inside, she pauses on the stairs to her apartment for a moment, then turns back down toward the garage instead. She walks to her car, the clacking of her high heels echoing on the greasy pavement, lets herself into the passenger side and plunks herself down, feeling the exhaustion of standing on stilts all night. She opens up the glove compartment and pulls out the note.
It is later, and I’m not here. But you are.
She reads it several times. She leans her head back on the seat and closes her eyes, drowsy, heavy.
She drifts back to the kitchen doorway then, her mother’s hand yanking her inside.
Change out of that honey, please.
She nodded, and walked down the darkened hallway, running her fingers along the wall. She stopped then, when she saw her brother’s bedroom door standing open. She moved toward it and stepped inside, but he was nowhere to be found. The only thing she saw was the open window, and the curtains stirring in the breeze.
In her car, Iris opens her eyes and reads the note in her hand again.
I’m not here. But you are.
How would he know? How would she? She tucks the note into her clutch and steps out of the car. She climbs the stairs up to her apartment, trying to feel the presence of her body in the air, but all she feels is the hang of her dress, as though there were no body inside it.
DRIVE
Neil yanks the Bluetooth out of his ear and throws it onto the backseat, thankful for the static that ended the conversation with his sister. These conversations always go the same way with Iris. She’s sad or guilty or unsettled about something and will never say what it is. She expects him to say it for her. He stopped going to therapy at sixteen because he was sick to death of talking about it, of being probed for more feelings he wasn’t sure he had. But Iris was spared all of that because she didn’t see it, wasn’t really there. Their parents figured she couldn’t have been damaged like he must have been. They weren’t scared for her. Of her. They left her be.
Driving home, it strikes him that he is always driving, though rarely home, to his twenties-era cottage apartment, the coziness of the set-up wasted on him. This is the first time in three weeks. It’s the reason why he can’t have any pets, or plants, or a wife. They would wither from his neglect. I meant it this way, he thinks. I choose this over and over again. He drives because he likes to drive, the rumbling feel of the road rushing beneath him like a current.
The freeway stretches out before him, free of traffic. He can go as fast as he wants. He tries to quell his growing aggravation at Iris. He feels his foot pressing harder on the accelerator and eases up. It’s not her fault. But he tightens his grip on the steering wheel. He can’t help it.
He’s pared his memory of the accident down over the years, cut out the preceding afternoon, cut out the scavenger hunt and the other kids running like clumsy hooligans through the yard, and his mom asking him to keep an eye on things while she went to get more ice cream, and he’s cut out his father going to look for Iris who had wandered off again, who was always disappearing in plain sight, and he’s cut out the boy’s sharp animal cry as the branch finally snapped, the long moment as his small body hurtled against the lower branches, and the circle that formed around the tree, and the silence that consumed the place like nightfall and most of all he’s cut out the weeks that followed, the watching eyes, the constant whispers, so that the whole drawn-out nightmare is signified by one thing, the worst thing, the only part that bears remembering: the hollowness in the boy’s face when Neil looked down from his branch, cradling his own scratched and splintered hand, seeing, instantly, even from that height, that there was no one in there anymore. And then the crowd appeared.
But he hasn’t really cut any of those things out. He just tells himself he has. The only part he can’t and could never recall is how long he was up in the tree before he noticed the growing strain at the base of the branch the other boy was sitting on, and what moved him to climb up there in the first place, no matter how many times or how pointedly he was asked.
Briefly, he flashes back to his last session with the therapist. He was sitting on the dark green velveteen couch, looking down at the parking lot. It had been raining on and off all day, and the pavement was slick and glittering. He had an urge to slide his hands along its surface.
“Is there anything you want to talk about today, Neil?” the therapist asked, and Neil shook his head. Was this the only qualification necessary to become a therapist? Asking people how it’s going? It seemed suddenly so absurd, that his mother would drive him twenty, thirty, forty miles outside of town— sticking with the same doctor, though they could never settle on a home for long— just to talk to this guy in a pilling argyle sweater who barely ever said anything. And since Neil barely ever said anything either, the hour passed slowly, he occasionally looking away from the window and back to the therapist, who was always already looking at him. Finally, he spoke: “So… what’s the point of all this?” he said. “What do I have to do?”
“You don’t have to do anything, Neil,” he said, just barely smiling in the exact same way he always smiled, tilting his head as if to say, ‘hey, come on, you know I get you, right?’ which of course wasn’t true.
Neil turned back to the window.
“So, I don’t have to stay here, then?”
“It’s absolutely up to you, always has been.”
So he looked back to the therapist, stood up, and slowly crossed the room, expecting at any moment to be stopped, for the therapist to say, ‘now hang on, we still have a lot of ground to cover.’ Or, ‘of course I meant that in a figurative sense.’ But he didn’t say anything. It was like he was giving his blessing, somehow, and Neil maintained tenuous eye contact with him as he opened the office door and stepped out sideways.