You pull, as hard as you can.
What slides out is not a pistol. It is not a gun. It is the metal tip to a pair of broken jumper cables.
*
What if I had done it?
You asked Shawna this question last night, your forehead pressed up against the streaky window.
Done what?
You know. Everything they say I did.
Why? Shawna had asked. Why would you ever do something so awful?
I wouldn’t, you told her. But say I did. Just for a second. Would you still love me?
You had been certain. You had been sure you’d pulled Shawna far enough, that she was ready for the possibility—that she’d been feigning delusion until now, that deep down, she knew the truth. The distaste in her eyes felt like a punch. It was a fascinated repulsion, laced with an unfamiliar suspicion. You had been certain of Shawna’s fawning laugh, her bashful longing. You had been certain of an easy yes.
I didn’t do it, of course, you said, too quickly.
A long pause. You wondered, briefly, if you had blown it. If all the work you’d put into Shawna could implode with this tiny mistake. You tried to backpedal, but her face had already crashed.
It’s all in my Theory, you said, grasping. You’ll see, when you read it. Good and evil are simply stories that we tell ourselves, narratives we’ve created to justify being alive. No person is wholly good, and no person is wholly evil. Everyone deserves the chance to keep living, don’t you think?
The fluorescents were a blinding white. The pimples around Shawna’s mouth made her face look like a bruise.
I have to go, she’d stuttered, stepping away. I’ll have an answer for you in the morning.
*
The officers stiffen at the surprise of your lunge, draw their guns in apprehension, growl their warnings. You stare at the jumper cables, all rusted metal and peeling wire.
You know now what has happened.
The options: You could smash your own head against the window. You could stretch your legs, kick your feet against the driver’s seat. You could start screaming, demand the things you’ve planned for; you could reach, cuffed and stunted, for the jumper cables. The truth is overwhelming, a staggering fact. You are one hundred and eighty pounds of flesh, handcuffed to a vinyl seat, surrounded by five armed officers with military training. You have placed your trust in Shawna, a person you severely overestimated—a person who proves the only thing you’ve ever known about women.
Always, they leave you alone.
Lavender
2002
Lavender spoke to the redwoods, and sometimes they spoke back.
There was a language special for the trees. A whispered understanding. The sound was clearest early in the morning, when the mist curled between rustling leaves and Lavender could still smell the night, lingering smoky in the redwoods’ bark.
Though Lavender did not believe in God, she did believe in time. She had been coming here every morning for the past twenty-three years, and the trees had seen her evolution. They had welcomed her as a girl, broken and wandering in dirty jeans—and they soothed her now, forty-six years old and a different person entirely. The scent always brought her back: to the deck behind the farmhouse, all cedar breeze and alpine sigh. Sometimes Lavender caught a whiff of milky breath, puckered baby lips, tiny hands flailing, and in these moments, she pressed her forehead to the mottled bark and prayed.
Lavender crunched through the morning dim. She slipped past the Spruce building, then past Aspen, Magnolia, and Fern. The main house, Sequoia, stood towering on its hill, a single light aglow in the belly of the kitchen, where Sunshine was already kneading the day’s bread, rolling the dough beneath her scarred red fingers. She slipped past the laundry lines, flapping like clean white ghosts, past the horses, dreaming in their stables. As she entered the forest, Lavender focused on her breath, measuring like she’d learned in group workshop. The fresh cold moved up through her sinuses, igniting her groggy mind.
When Lavender reached the clearing, she knelt at the base of the tree.
Sequoiadendron giganteum—a redwood, massive and existentially untouchable. When she rested her brow against the splintered wood, a wide generosity overcame her. The tree loved her back; Lavender did not take this for granted.
Today, though, she had questions. Today, she thought of Johnny and the farmhouse, her baby boys, a scene now decades in the past but still lingering in her bones. As the breeze sighed through the forest leaves, Lavender asked the question she’d tucked so carefully away—to murmur it still felt like whispering a secret.
What have I done?
The tree never answered to desperation. Lavender pressed her mouth to the bark, the sap stinging raw against her lips.