Fingerless Gloves (13 page)

She didn’t answer on the first ring, or the third, but on the fifth. I had no idea why her phone was set to ring so many times. I was always a fan of the quick move to voicemail. My cell only rang three times before it moved to my automated, vaguely professional, voicemail message. I remember the day I updated it from a rambling, goofy proposition to a stately, well-rehearsed greeting. Judging by the sound of Beth’s voice on the other end of the phone, I had woke her from a coma. At first, I heard the fumbling of the device in her clumsy hands. Then, before she spoke a word, I heard breathing, then a prolonged sigh. Her voice sounded cloudy and full of sleep.

“Are you okay?…is it an emergency? What time is it even…Anton? What are you doing?”

There was still, as odd as it seems, a certain affection I had for her voice in the middle of the night. Many drunk-dials, weird desires for conversation, and ramblings had been appeased by that sleepy voice. It had been a long time since I heard those breathy, unfinished sentences and hastily formed questions. There had been many occasions, after being stoned and gorging myself on Chinese food, that I had called her without checking the time. The reaction never varied.

“Beth, relax. I’m fine and sober, for the most part. Things have taken a weird and unnecessary turn. Long story short, I have a bottle of very good vodka…it’s about half full and requires a powerful chaser. Despite what you might be thinking, I didn’t drink the other half…I was wondering if maybe I could bring it by. Drinking alone while driving is a bad choice.”

I heard her breathe heavy into the phone, then she must have either leaned over or put me on speaker, because I heard the sound on her end open up…then there were a few seconds of cracking and waiting as the air moved through the receiver. I heard her voice, conscious as ever, say “Text me when you’re here. Try to give me ten minutes…I don’t know where you are, but ten minutes would be nice so I could get dressed.”

Butterflies, like they were on display for a bunch of kids on a class trip to a conservatory, were released into my stomach and freed to do whatever butterflies do …you know, barely flying, showing off their colors trying to impress each other, moving in every single conceivable direction except straight ahead. To Beth’s credit, she’d put up with a lot from me. I don’t just mean the pot and the idiotic thoughts I had when I was high, which I’m sure didn’t exactly thrill her or stimulate her intellectually. There were times when I should have made a dinner reservation and, instead, we ended up with some greasy box of chain pizzeria pizza and a season of a TV show that I wanted to watch. There was the time when she came clothes shopping with me and I insisted I needed to find and purchase an ugly Christmas sweater that I could wear to a house party she couldn’t attend because she was having dinner with her family. There were broken down cars, postponed trips, promises broken, long periods of time between jobs, weight gains, weight loss, drunk texts, drunk phone calls, drunk visits, smelling like fast food, not keeping my car clean, not doing anything productive with my weekends. There was the way James and I, inadvertently, kept her out of our inside jokes not because we didn’t like her, but because we couldn’t help it. She dealt with compliments that came too few and far between, my sometimes-shady friends, my selfish choice to stay home to go to college rather than go to school with her. There was my homeless-chic style that never seemed to catch on, not just with her, but with anyone. I’m not a bum, just a guy with some things left to learn. I owe Beth for realizing that fact about me and for never judging as harshly as she should have. In the end, I should have known she’d cheat. She gave me enough chances to figure things out…I just missed every one of them entirely.

The LCD silently clicked to read 3:10am. I was sealed up inside the Escape, not wanting to get to Beth’s too early. The heat was on low, so was the radio. I heard the faint, DJ-less sounds come over the airwaves. On the other end of the radio, there was an empty studio…dark except for the lights on the boards - a fully functioning autopilot, pushing music out to the handful of derelicts still carousing around. The one hitter, without me even realizing it, was in my right hand. I produced the bag of pot from my hoodie pocket, where I don’t remember putting it. I rolled the cylinder around the thick, cloudy bag and lifted the metal to my mouth. I used a white lighter, the universal symbol of bad luck. My thumb was sore, and the side of my face was still throbbing and pulsing in a weak attempt to heal itself. I had hoped that the pain would subside, along with the washing machine-feeling going on in my stomach. I was nervous, hungry again, and, with a few deliberate and drawn out, held-in hits, a bit stoned. I didn’t keep smoking, for fear of not being able to hold a conversation with Beth. Well, that and the fact that she absolutely hated the smell and the smoke…she’d never forgive me for dragging her out of bed only to show up high. It’d probably cost me any chance of a conversation with her. I locked the one-hitter and the baggie in the glove compartment of my truck. I never took that precaution before…locking up the illegal drugs and the paraphernalia. I contemplated, for safety reasons and for a sudden fear of the police, making it a part of my routine. Then the hunger came…first as a low-tide wave, then building into something more ferocious.

I searched the car for candy, soda, crackers, crumbs, wrappers with cheese remnants, anything. I bent over and checked the back seat, the passenger’s seat, the center console. I finally found, lodged under the passenger’s seat, a Hershey’s Kiss…one, half-wrapped, Hershey’s Kiss. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever had a piece of chocolate that tasted so good. I unwrapped it like an animal, digging into the foil, getting chocolate under my nails. People make the mistake, with small pieces of candy, to immediately bite in and start grinding it into the cracks between their teeth. This is the wrong approach. It’s about how you make it last. I sucked that Kiss in a way that would make the Red Hot Chili Peppers so proud. In my mind, which was now clouded with a layer of smoke, I could feel the granules of sugar washing over my teeth, rotting them in a decent, respectful way. Layer after layer of chocolate made 15 seconds feel like an hour. My throat and tongue were dry and sour, and that taste mixed with the chocolate to form a pretzely contentment. I sat back in the Escape and contemplated the cold, hollow feeling in my chest. Beth’s house was close, and I owed it to her to show up as sober as I could… which, at this point, was looking like a rather grim prospect.

Ten minutes passed, then 15… I knew it was time. Something about this whole scene was like driving to surgery: you know you’re scheduled to go, but the drive is absolutely endless. When you get there, to the hospital, to surgery, you always get a great parking spot right before your legs fail to bring you through the front doors. You’re walking in sand up to your waist…just fighting to take small steps. Thoughts were crossing my head like the inner workings of the internet, whatever binary insanity that looked like. “What if I get pulled over” intersected and blew past “What if Beth knows I’m high” and so on. I wanted more candy, a roomier car, the next morning to come sooner rather than later, to finish the game of Madden I started. There was laundry, in this gigantic pile, sitting in my room…smelling bad. I kept thinking that I couldn’t care for anything, not even clothes.

The drive to Beth’s house was impossibly short. I had wished for more distance between Nichole’s mess of a rescue and my picking up Beth…I wished for more square miles in our town to separate me from certain things. There I was, in front of her house in no time at all. There was the Fallow house, eerily dark and absolutely silent. I remembered so many talks in her driveway. There were good talks, bad talks, silent talks, and talks that we should have never had. We discussed us, the future, college, where to get dinner, how much we cared about one another, how much we couldn’t stand each other. Her car was in the driveway, flanked on each side by her parent’s cars. Mr. and Mrs. Fallow, while never overtly accepting of me as a boyfriend, were still nice enough to put up with me on holidays, proms, and Valentine’s Days. They were just as skeptical of high school me as they were of college me, like they had made a decision about the way I was long ago and stuck with it. They drew certain lines. I never accompanied them on a family vacation, was relegated to the couch on nights they knew I was sleeping over, and, even when Beth and I were home from college, a strict open-door policy was enforced. It got dicey, but as all kids do, we worked around it. I cherished the nights when the Fallows were with friends, out to dinner, out at the theater, heading to the city, or running an impossibly long day of errands. Given Mrs. Fallow’s love of crafts, the wreath on the front door was ever-changing. Just from the shadowy outline and shape, I could tell this was the “A Heart Stays with the Home” number with the fake berries and leaves. Unless her mom sprung for a new door piece, I had the rotation pegged.

I scrolled through my phone until I got to “F”…I had long ago taken Beth off my speed dial list. I used to just hold “5” and it would dial her number…not anymore. I was slow to put the phone up to my ear. I heard the ringing cut through the dense oxygen before the speaker even got to my face…the same oxygen doing its best to balance out the air in my lungs. The phone rang exactly twice and, as soon as the phone was up to my ear, Beth was on the other end, speaking in a palm-muted whisper I could barely understand:

“Two seconds…give me two seconds. The alarm beeps when I leave the house… I’ll wake them up. Just let me figure this out.”

That same alarm beep, on more than one occasion, had saved us from certain disaster. Whenever it went off, my pants went back on, usually unzipped…doors were flung open, and televisions were cranked up to high volume. In high school, right when Beth and I started dating, her father had a breakdown and a safety crisis. Typically, this happens to dads when they fear some heathen is taking advantage of their only daughter. When a house two towns over was robbed, for some reason, it made the front page of our local paper. Couple that with Mr. Fallow’s existing crisis and that was that. The alarm system was installed the next week. It featured multiple keypads, a central nervous system in the basement, and passcode combinations. Every time the door opened, a beep sounded to warn the maiden of the house when her parents had returned.

The front of Beth’s house was so dark, and it was so set back on the property, that you could barely tell a house was there at all. When the front light was on, I could catch a small, distorted swath of the front hallway whenever Beth opened the door. I heard something in the dark, then I could barely see her moving across her front lawn…just this shadow approaching my car. As she got closer, and I squinted out the window as she began to come into view. She had on gray sweatpants with her alma mater emblazoned down the right leg in big, block font. She was wearing a faux-fur-lined zip-up, no doubt purchased from some chain outfitter in the mall. Her hair was messy and floating around. Most of it was pulled back in a half-eaten bun. I had failed to realize, until she started knocking on the window, that I never unlocked the car doors.

“Were you sleeping?…You look like you were sleeping,” I asked as she climbed into the Escape. She nudged the bottle of vodka with her moccasin, sending it rolling around her passenger side.

“Yes Anton…and so were my parents, and my dog, and the rest of my block, and just about everyone else in the town…except you. You look good…stoned, but good. This car still smells like a burrito…you know, beef, cilantro, sour cream…which is rather unfortunate.”

I hadn’t noticed the lingering smell of beef and cheese. Why should I have noticed it?…it seemed like I ate that Border Blaster burrito three days earlier. My car, with its cloth interior, held onto scents much longer than the typical car. Regardless, Beth looked good and she smelled even better…like she rolled around in cherries and flowers and every other vaguely female, nice-smelling things. This all reminded me of the too - few mornings I got to wake up either next to her or at the same time as her. She carried the girl morning scent, which is infinitely better than the boy morning scent. Girls smell like they just woke up in the middle of the best shower of their lives…or like they spent the night tucked away in the back room of the most romantic florist any romance author could imagine. Boys wake up smelling like a gym. Not just any gym, but the gym on a Monday, in fact, the Monday after New Year’s, when everybody is at the gym. We wake up sweaty, with extra-baggy, heavy eyes, and with the gel not washed off our heads, remaining caked in our greasy hair. For that reason alone, I was instantly attracted to Beth again. I remembered her flower mornings spent unafraid of going without makeup. I remembered the graceful way she ate cereal by the serving size, like a normal person, instead of out of the beach bucket/bowl hybrid that I used. She never said a word when I ate Count Chocula by the pound, consuming a whole box in two sittings. Beth Fallow also had the widest array of cute, flattering pajama and sweat pants I’ve ever seen.

As the interior light in the car began to fade out, I asked Beth, “What do you feel like doing? You want to go to The Hitch? I think that’s a pretty quiet place. The roofs might be rotting though…it’s been raining the past few days.”

Her face glanced sideways. “That place is creepy Anton. You’re lucky I’m feeling weird…like tonight is as good a night as any to go to the awful Hitch at 3am with my ex-boyfriend. I feel like some bad cliché but as long as you’re not too stoned to drive…we should go.”