At Some Point She Became Separated

At five o’clock I kneel close to the television and look into his pixilated face.  His skin is gnarled and pocked.  His nose and mouth and chin sag.  His eyes are sharp blue.

I touch my nose to the static screen and his murderous head is the size of mine.

*

We were in our cinderblock dorm room listening to Patsy Cline.  Patsy was crazy, she was crazy for feeling so lonely.  You lay on your back on your red quilt, toes in the air; I sat Indian style on my green blanket.  You put Patsy on repeat and giggled every time she started up.

“Worry,” you sang.  “Why do I let myself worry?”

You liked to kiss other girls’ boyfriends.  You liked to throw up.  You liked to get drunk and place a hand over your stomach and say, “I’m a murderer, you know.”

Sometimes I said, “No, lower.  It lived lower when it lived,” and we laughed this terrible laugh and we listened to Patsy and sang:  “I’m crazy for trying and crazy for crying.”

*

WXAY says you scratched his arms so deep he needed stitches, but I cannot see the sutures.  He wears a striped blue shirt and khakis.  He sits at a long wooden table.  Men in cheap brown suits touch his wiry arms, whisper in his ear.  He takes notes on a yellow legal pad.  He sniggers.

The medical examiner testifies that you were struck by a blunt object, that your neck was compressed.  She says she cannot determine which objects blunted or compressed you.  I think it was a cold gray rock; I think it was his frozen fingers.  They wrap around my throat.  I hold my breath.

*

We watched the Christmas tree lighting on Steeple Street.  You and me.  It was snowing like mad.  We held our mittened hands over our noses and watched our white breath vanish.  The tree was magic.  We clapped and hooted and shivered.

Inside, the bar was all brass and polyurethane.  It glowed.  The beer was ruby in our pint glasses.

The crowd beat our ears.  “What?” I said.

“Melissa and Beth,” you said.  “Over at Mike’s.  That dive.”

“Chuck is doing darts.”  I point.

“Okay,” you said.  “You stay.”

“You sure?” I said.  “I’ll go with.”

“No,” you said.  “Stay.”

Your cheeks were pink.  I gave you a bear hug and you pulled your phone out of your puffy coat.  You turned.

*

It is late and I am shuffling down Main Street through powdery snow.  The lake hovers over me.  The mountains squeeze my ribs.  My fingers are numb inside my green mittens.  I pass the bank and the security camera takes my picture every five seconds like a flip book.  And I am you, staccato, looking up at his sour face, giggling, running long fingers through my red hair.  You’re already dead and I can’t even warn you.

*

In one version you smiled at the bouncers in black t-shirts, threw yourself against the heavy wooden door, poured out into the blue light.

In another the bouncers saw you.  They liked your walk.  One jumped off his stool and held open the heavy wooden door as if it were driftwood.

Maybe a couple fought over holidays.  “You got Christmas last year,” the man said.  “Your mother rocked that Santa sweater.”  The man held the door for you and his wife.

Outside, the man in front of the line wore a red jacket.  Maybe he towed open the door.  He could see you walking through thick glass windows.  He hoped it was his turn to enter.

Or a gaggle of drunk girls waddled toward the door.  “Quack, quack, quack,” they said.  They stumbled into the starry air and you slipped out behind.

I was watching Chuck do darts.  I didn’t see you take off.

*

I am by the lake.  The ice has scales.  The weather reporter said “Nor’easter,” and it is light and fluffy, laying a lumpy blanket over the fish.  I am sitting on a swing.   I push off with my feet and the swing groans.  Squat granite pillars and angry boulders lie between me and lake.  It is very cold.

*

Your brother knocked.  You were late for lunch.  Melissa and Beth knew nothing.

“Where did you leave her?” I said to Melissa and Beth.

“What do you mean?” they said.

“After she met up with you,” I said.  “Last night.”

“She never met up with us,” they said.   “She was with you.”

I closed my eyes.  I placed my phone on the metal desk.

“No one knows where she is?” your brother said.

“I’m sure she’s here somewhere,” I said, looking around as if you were a lost earring.

*

I want to make an angel but I feel too old.  I sit Indian style and shiver and watch the snow fill up the bowl of my legs.  Soon it is spilling.  I lie back and the sky is thick and gray, a sweater.  I think if I lie here long enough it may cover me.

*

The news asked everyone to poke with sticks.  Shovels, too.  Rakes.  You could be concealed anywhere, they said.

I walked for hours, kicking and stabbing white mountains forced up by plows.  The sun was blinding.  Each snowed-in dumpster was a burial ground, every woodpile a cross.

You weren’t tucked in hedges.  You weren’t in alleys.  You weren’t packaged in a brown box by the liquor store.

I placed a green mitten on white lattice and called your name as if you were a lost cat.  You weren’t curled beneath anyone’s porch.  You weren’t in a tool shed or two-car garage.

I marched back up the hill in blue light, fingers and toes numb.  Our dorm room was so warm it made my skin itch.  I peeled off boots, mittens, and pressed my hands and knees into gray carpet.  You were not under the beds.

*

I am drinking from your hip flask.  It was still under your mattress.  I also took the gin from beneath your bed, the cigarettes and Zippo from the shelf.

The snow will not catch fire.  This is funny.  I take my mitten off to pop the Zippo’s mouth open and shut, open and shut.  My mitten won’t catch fire either.  Too wooly.  I wish something would catch.  I practice stopping, dropping, rolling.  The gin burns my stomach, tastes like Christmas trees.  I hate smoke.  I want to keep your cigarettes.  I crush them in my pocket and zip it shut.  The wind blows the snow just below my knees.

*

Hikers found a body near the gorge.  It was in a crevice, folded like laundry.

The body was tentatively identified as:  you.

The manner of death appeared to be:  homicide.

The police were prepared to name him as a suspect in your:  disappearance.

The police said he had been arrested and was currently in custody on charges unrelated to your:  disappearance.

Disappearance.  As if you’d evaporated.  As if they didn’t have your tentative corpse sealed up in black plastic.

I tried to sell them my pronouns but they weren’t buying.

“Me,” I said.  “I.  It was my.”

“No, no,” the police said.  “His.  It is him.  It was he.”

I offered my wrists but they wouldn’t cuff them.

*

(I hibernate in the snowy dark like constellations.)

*

The news was:  “At some point she became separated.”  From her friends.  From Me.  As if no one knew I let you step, alone, out into a bruised night.  Your damn parents pretended not to know.  They cupped my face with wet hands.  “You loved her,” they said.  Though mine was one of the boyfriends you kissed.  You were always so fucking drunk.  I think I hated you.

*

There is a swishing like my ear to sand when something’s leaving the lake.  I do not move.  My blood is full of icicles.  They carve.  Whatever it is, it’s getting closer.

*

I wanted to see what you saw.  Feel what you felt.  His eyes.  His hands.  Even if only through colored glass.  But it was so much.  Knowing what was stitched beneath those blue stripes.  The blunting, the compressing.  I had to get out of there.  No matter the weather.  Or maybe because of the weather.

*

“Are you Officer Friendlys?” I say.  “I miss them.  Please be them.”

Officer Friendlys pick me up and take turns carrying me to their black and white four-door.

The siren sings and we slither all the way up the hill.

*

For a minute I was at the beach, but soon the ocean’s tone was too mechanical, its waves too white.

“It’s a sound machine,” the man in blue pajamas says. “Confidentiality.”  He puts his hand on my wrist for fifteen seconds, scratches his metal chart.

I ask what time it is and pajama man says five a.m.  I want to go home and put my nose to his nose again.  It’s the least I can do.  “Please?  I’ll be so careful,” I say, as if I’m asking to borrow his car.

The man in blue leaves, and women in short white coats stream in.  They ask a series of questions regarding my mental state.  That’s fair, though I’m not really sure if I meant to do myself harm.  Maybe I did.  “Is that crazy?” I say to one.

She nods as if she understands and she jots and she asks the nurse with Christmas trees on her pajamas to grab me another heated blanket.

*

It is late afternoon.  I sit on your side, pulling red strands out of the sweater you borrowed, watching them sink to the gray carpet.  All the TVs are broken.  Even in the lounge.  I think you broke them.  Maybe it was the storm.

The sun is dropping behind the mountains.  The lights are on.  I stand and press my nose to the window.

Next door, kids are rolling a snowman in the yard.  They wave to me and I wave back.