Headlights(18)

It’s a human tongue.





8



Dark room. Familiar sheets. Familiar side table. I found it at an antique store off the side of the highway on the way to meet up with Josie’s family for Christmas, a couple hours south.

Roadside pit stops, friendly people. So many lives on a planet all the time, so many in a single town. Everyone intimately familiar with a different patch of dust and earth, with a different slice of sky, claiming it for themselves.

I reach over, grab my phone to check the time. But when my fingers wrap around it and tug it free of the charging cord, it … feels different. I blink. Rub my eyes.

It’s not my phone. It’s Josie’s.

My eyes are unfocused, the room unsteady. Did I drink last night? My stomach and muscles start to dissent in a way that makes me think I did. The light infiltrating my eyes through the slit in the curtains and the phone screen in front of me.

An image, blurry behind the password prompt. Josie’s passcode is our anniversary. I type it in, but the phone buzzes in protest. I try again, still no luck. I need to know what time it is, and it’s too small in the corner. Jesus, what did I drink? For the hell of it, I type in 1234.

The phone unlocks.

The image on my wife’s home screen is one of her. And a man. The man is not me. I blink through dry eyes.

Josie and Nat Tillman at Red Rocks, Dead & Co playing behind them, and they’re …

Kissing.

I drop the phone, push myself up and out of the bed. I run to the bathroom, the bathroom that used to be mine.

How the fuck am I here?

I vomit, just barely make it to the toilet. Stand, sway on my feet. This bathroom with another man’s toothbrush. With another man’s … hair products? Fingerprints and toothpaste, spit in the sink, and I’m gonna be sick again.

I stand, and—

Blood, bathtub—

Fuck. Where’s the curtain we installed over the mirror? Why isn’t the fucking mirror covered?

Because Josie took it down. Because I don’t live here, and I haven’t for a long time. And because Nat Tillman does and he’s normal and doesn’t have to cover mirrors, and— The bathroom mirror. My dad.

The Happy Inn.

Everything, all of it rushes in. A torrent of memory, a day that lasted lifetimes.

The woman with the tongue taped in her mouth.

The woman in my old room. Staring at me.

I stumble back through the bedroom, out into the hall and to the living room. Voices sound from the front porch through the open door.

The world spinning, I lean around the corner to find Tillman and Josie sitting there on the other side of the open front door in the Adirondack chairs. Admiring a crisp fall sunrise and talking to each other so casually and comfortably I have to hold the wall to steady myself. Breathe until the framed hall photos come into focus. People I don’t recognize, with Josie and Tillman at the holidays. The happy couple stand with a cardboard sign on top of a 14er.

The woman in the motel room. That look in her eyes.

“Yeah, but is he sick? I mean, going down like that … You remember I had that uncle who had the tumor and didn’t know it. Maybe he’s got cancer.” Tillman’s voice.

“He doesn’t have cancer,” my wife, ex-wife, says. “There’s … It’s just complicated.”

“You don’t have to protect him. I mean, if it’s gonna impede his work…”

I fainted last night. That’s what happened. I passed out, on the scene. Who brought me here? Did Tillman carry me? And if it all did … happen … it’s a mercy, a not insignificant one, Josie keeping my secret even now.

I shove off the wall. Walk as carefully as I can down the hall with my balance off and push the door open. The desk, twin bed that could accommodate guests but really is always just covered with files and romance novels, maybe a half-clean sweatshirt or two. I try not to inhale the smell of her in this room, try not to see her hunched over those files and biting the inside of her lip in concentration, an audiobook of one of those romances playing from her cell phone in the corner, a seasonal over-scented candle lit beside it, flickering.

I step over to the window and undo the latch. My muscles still don’t work the way they should, and it’s hard to push the window open. I’m just able to lift it. I raise one leg and shove it through the opening, have to hop a couple times to do it. None of my limbs going where I think they will. I stick an arm through and pull my torso into the window frame with leverage from my hand on the outside of the house. I duck my head under, still facing the room. Pull my body out, and when I’m just there, just almost free save for one foot, I pause.

I push myself back halfway under, straddling the windowsill.

Under one of the sweatshirts, beside a stack of files. Just sticking out … An old photograph of the two of us. Josie and me, at city hall. Her, smiling in her white dress, my brown leather jacket shrugged over it in the cold, our family and friends. Me in a pearl snap shirt and embroidered suit and cowboy hat, smiling at her. Looking so happy. So blissfully, momentarily weightless.

I am frozen, half in and half out of the house. Staring at the photograph, the one she has out on the bed. The one she must have been looking at.

I hear the porch door open and close. Josie’s and Tillman’s voices carry in from the living room. I swear. Push myself further out the window. My foot, the one still inside, catches on one such over-scented candle, and it falls to the floor with a crash.