Phoenix Noir

Cheryl was everything I expected, a plain girl like myself, quiet and superficially ingratiating, with still eyes that reminded me of my friend Bishop from back in the halfway house, or of walls spackled with unreadable graffiti.

Collins took me in and introduced me, then discreetly withdrew.

What can I say? I told her how I had come to pass the middle years of my admittedly short life. I talked about not carrying forward regrets, about simply getting on with things. Halfway through, it occurred to me that what I was saying sounded not at all different from the harangues that hundreds of teenagers suffer daily from parents. We all think we’re special, somehow exempt. When the real lesson’s how much alike we all are.

I told her I’d check back with her later, that she shouldn’t hesitate to call me if she needed to talk, anytime, day or night. Wrote my name and number on the back of a deposit slip, the only piece of paper I could find in my purse.

“Miss Rowan?”

To that point Cheryl had given no indication she was listening, not the least register of recognition, as I spoke.

“Yes?”

“Where are they going to take me next?”

For her, I well knew, the world seemed at this point little more than a congress of theys, dozens of theys shoving her about like a pawn on the board, forever testing her survival skills. Pawns were things one sacrificed, things that were captured and went away.

“Some kind of holding center would be my guess. You’re overage for the state juvenile facility. They’ll probably try for a shelter of some sort. Depends on what’s available. I’ll call in later, find out where you are. Maybe we can talk then.”

She nodded. For a moment, before they became still again, things struggled to surface in her eyes.

That night after dinner with Collins, upon which he insisted, I came home, poured a final glass of wine, and drank it standing at the front window, looking out at my neighbors’ shrouded, brightly lit houses.

As I drew the shower curtain closed, I felt safe in a way I never will outside, and as I washed, I considered how I’d always thought of the scars as something I put on, like clothes or a hat, not part of me at all, nothing to do with my essential self, and remembered the first man in my bed, the first man I’d let see them.

Memories are the history we carry around with us, a history that’s mapped out upon our bodies, pressed into the very folds of our minds. So that night I remembered. Just as I go back to the mall at every opportunity, an immigrant returning to the homeland, and feel safe there.

What no one understands is that, lying in the box under Danny’s bed, miraculously I was able to stop being myself and become so much more. I could feel myself liquifying, flowing out into the world. I became numinous. Sometimes, though ever less often as time goes by, I’m able to recapture that.

“Thanks again for touching base with Cheryl,” Jack had said as we settled in. The restaurant, Italian, was Mama Ciao’s on McDowell, recently relocated to the abandoned shell of a Mexican establishment and demonstrably in transition.

“I only hope that eventually it may do some good.”

“What we all hope. You never know.” He sipped a couple ounces of draft. “Have to tell you this one thing.”

“Okay.”

“I have an ex-wife—not really ex, I guess, since all we are is separated. Divorce’s been in the works awhile. We have a daughter.”

I waited.

“Just wondered how you felt about it,” he said, “that’s all.”

“What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Deanna.”

“You see her often?”

“I used to, when she was young. Had her for weekends, half the summer. As she grew up, less and less.”

“Just how long has this divorce been in the works?”

“Little over ten years.”

“You check with Ripley, see if that’s some kind of record?”

“Think I should?”

“Probably.”

His eyes were bright with good humor.

“We all have to decide what’s important to us and fight for it, Jack. Sometimes the best way to fight is to do nothing.”

“Friends I have left say I’m living in the past, trying to hold onto something that’s no longer there.”

“The past is what we are, even as we’re constantly leaving it.”

“You know what? I have no idea what that means.”

“Neither do I,” I said, laughing. “But it sounded good.”

“What’s important to you?” Jack had asked as we walked out. Night was settling in, last tatters of daylight become pink banners riding low in the sky. When he took my arm to gently guide me left, our eyes met.

“Everything,” I told him.

VALERIE

BY KURT REICHENBAUGH

Grand Avenue

All I had left was that look on Valerie’s face as she watched Cooper bleed out onto the stained motel carpet. That’s the last picture of her.

My mind worked like that when it came to Valerie. A mental slide show of her. Snapshots that I’d arrange in ways that pleased me differently each time. And this was the last one. The one of her standing above Cooper, legs apart, that cut across her right cheekbone, a teardrop line of blood trickling from it.

My arms and legs were cold.

I couldn’t move.