Not Any Easier (fiction)

 

I sat in the ancient convertible, its usually noisy idle drowned out by jet planes, shouts, and the general hubbub of airport travel. Jada finished squeezing Calabrese, and slid into the passenger seat beside me. Together, we peered through her window, following his slender frame, as he moved through the sliding doors, into the dark, cool warehouse of a building, until he was gone.

Jada delicately wiped her eyes. She asked if she could put on a song.

“Of course,” I said while, with dry eyes, I pushed the little car from first, to second, to third gear. I felt nothing in particular as the song played, though Jada’s sadness swam palpably in the air—no stirring of my well-springs of emotion, no tugging at my heart. I told myself that this was because I had said goodbye to Calabrese so many times before, that this dear friend departing was, to my life, like the wave receding from the beach; I knew it would return. Yet, at a level of higher internal security clearance—that is to say, at a level of thought that I hardly made available to myself—I worried that I continued to be somewhat emotionally stunted. 

I dropped Jada off at the office and returned home. I paced the length of my attic bedroom, the air conditioner’s rumble in the window providing a meditative, background white noise.

“Monday, Monday, Monday,” I said out loud, not meaning anything by it. “Monday, Monday, Monday,” I said again. I suppose there could have been stranger phrases to say repetitively, for this day was, at least, a Monday.

My phone rang.

“Hello?”

“I’ve forgotten my passport,” Calabrese said in a tone that carried urgency, but not surprise. I suppose scatterbrains cannot afford to be suprised by their own scatter, otherwise their lives would be endlessly shocking.

“How long til boarding?” I asked, feeling, like switches being flipped in a cockpit, my emergency instincts come alive.

“Forty-five minutes,” he said.

In the car again, I shifted clunkily with phone in hand.

“Jada,” I shouted over the engine, “Calabrese doesn’t have his passport.”

“Gosh,” she said. “Where is it?”

“That’s the thing. He doesn’t know. Says he hasn’t actually seen it in months.”

Jada went quiet, as I hoped would happen. I drove down Metropolitan, not heading anywhere in particular, but moving with haste nonetheless. I knew Jada was up in her mind palace, racking her way through reams of photographic memory, searching out the passport. I dared not disturb this delicate art. 

“Try the old house,” she said after only a moment, “under a stack of books on the fireplace mantle.” 

Why the passport would be at the old house, I could not fathom. We had all left that place with a kind of finality and determination. It was hard to imagine that something so important as a passport could be left behind. However, now was not the time to question Jada’s memory—not that there ever was one.

The house looked more or less like it had months before. The second floor balcony was still loaded up with plants, and squash and bean vines crept down over the edge, reaching for earth. It didn’t look like anyone had cut the lawn since we left. That had been my job, and evidently, for all intents and purposes, it still was.

“Carrie—” I started, when she opened the door.

“I know,” she cut me off brusquely, still in her bathrobe, looking all in all displeased with my arrival. “Jada called.” 

I was in the rush of a lifetime, but I could not help notice how ill Carrie looked. And I could not help but feel a certain degree of guilt with this observation. I had not seen, called, or, to be entirely frank, so much as thought of Carrie Hilferd since the day we moved out. She hardly left her room as Jada, Calabrese, and I carried bed frames and cardboard boxes down into the U-Haul. But she had come down at the end, as Calabrese was starting the engine, to wave goodbye. 

“Carrie, how are you?” I heard the words slipping from my lips.

She sighed. “One of the new people smokes a pack a day in his room so the whole house reeks. Can you smell it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can. I’m sorry.”

There was a pause, where she seemed to be studying me, and during which I began to feel a trickle of ants in my pants. Calabrese’s long awaited escape from America was precious moments away from deferral.

 “Lola’s in the vet,” Carrie said. “They think it’s just kidney stones, but it might be cancer.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, looking over her shoulder into the dark living room. I could just make out the mantle, spilling over with books and old mail.

“And Jane? You remember Jane, right?”

“She’d be a tough one to forget,” I said, now truly regretting asking anything at all, much less something that could open the Pandora's box of Carrie’s miseries. Her life, it seemed, was always on the edge, and she didn’t need much of an excuse to get going on the topic. 

“Well Jane breaks up with me on what I’m coming to suspect is a three week interval. It’s like clockwork. She gives us just enough time to start piecing things back together before tearing it all apart again.”

The ants in my pants were really making themselves known. It was as if, over the course of this very brief conversation, one of the worker ants had discovered food somewhere just north of my kneecap. She'd sent word to the colony, and now a march had begun in earnest.

“Carrie,” I said, “I didn’t ask you what was going wrong in your life. I asked how you’re doing.”

“Oh,” she said, considering this with sincerity. She looked up at one of the bean vines that drooped above us. “I’m doing pretty well actually. Certainly better than when you lot lived here.”

“Jada, you’re a genius!” I yelled into the receiver.

“What?” she asked. “I can hardly hear you.”

I looked at the speedometer. The needle approached 100 mph, and the little car’s straining engine was appropriately deafening. “It was right where you said it’d be,” I yelled louder, almost giddy. “Right under some books on the goddamn mantle!”

“Oh,” she replied. “Good.” But it didn’t sound like she meant it. It sounded like she wished she’d kept her exceptional object-permanence skills to herself and let the passport be disappeared into a past we’d all left behind.

“You know,” I said, “he’ll be back.”

“I know,” she said. “It doesn’t make it any easier though.”

Calabrese stood on the arrival-departure platform looking up absently at the thirteen-million dollar roof the city recently, and controversially, erected over the platform to protect travelers from the rain. Hearing the unmistakable sounds of the convertible, his eyes drifted down to me.

“Thank you,” he said, grabbing the passport from my outstretched hand, plopping a kiss on the very tip-top of my head, and swinging back around towards the airport in a single, fluid motion. I watched him, sprinting, disappear again through the sliding doors.

I sat in the airport hubbub, still feeling, from Calabrese’s kiss, a light pressure on the top of my skull. It was at the point from which all the hairs go different directions, the point from which some men start to go bald. I wondered if I would be one of those men.

A shrill whistle pierced the air, and I looked up to see a traffic cop, whistle in mouth, energetically  gesticulating. The gesture, there was no two ways about it, meant, “Get a move on, kid.”

So, for the second time that Monday, I pushed the convertible from first, to second, to third, rolling it out from under the thirteen million dollar roof and into the heat of the summer sun.