Proof
Alison Gadsby
He was standing at the corner of Loudon and North Main with a backpack tucked between his feet and the hood of his parka pulled almost entirely over his face. A string of earphone wire dangled down the front of his coat and every time she drove past he seemed to be pulling out his music player and changing the song. She circled around five times, cutting back around Storrs St. so she could look at him again. He was sticking out his thumb, but only slightly, like he was asking that someone stop and pick him up, not demanding it. He was rubbing his knees together, either a little dance to the music or the hopelessly stupid human trick to keep warm. She never asked.
He was on the wrong side of the highway. The entrance to the 93 was on the opposite side of the bridge. A driver would have to go out of their way to pick him up and only a murderer would do that. He didn't know what he was doing. If this guy wanted to get out of this shithole town, she was his best option. Calypso had to stop.
She rehearsed what she was going to say when he got in. If he got in.
“Just heading up north to see my sister. Not out of my way at all. I’ve got all the time in the world. I love driving. In the snow. It’s wild and sexy.” Would she say sexy? What would this guy think if she said she was turned on by the snow? It might turn him on too. Immediately, she saw them screwing in the back seat. The snow pummeling the car to the rhythm of their passionate pounding.
Snowflakes fell, big as clumpy wet cornflakes, against the car. She turned the wipers on and they swooshed the snow into slushy piles at the edges of the windshield.
She made a deal.
One more turn.
If he was still there after she drove around the seventh time, she’d stop.
But with each circuit things got less sexy. He was a little guy, but maybe underneath the hood he was hiding a sadistic smile and he'd thank her for stopping, then say: Slit your throat? Don't mind if I do.
But she could take him. Reminded her of Mark Storto, who once accidentally jammed his hand down her track pants in gym class in the fifth grade. She’d grabbed him by the throat and squeezed so hard he fell to his knees and Mr. Cull had to drag her off him.
As she came around the sixth time she took the videos on the front passenger seat and threw them in the back. Her mother was waiting for Eddie Murphy at home, spread out on the sofa, or over the sofa, in the sofa, around the sofa, however you might describe a four-hundred-and eighty-five-pound woman sitting on a loveseat like it's a chair. If her father was alive, he'd be the one to go to Blockbuster, mow the lawn, make her tacos, massage her swollen purple feet. But he was dead. Buried beside his brother at Mt. Olivet. Calypso liked to think he was asleep cushioned in all that purple satin, but on days like this, she didn’t like to think of him at all.
All My Children wouldn’t be over for another twenty minutes. She could get this guy to Manchester, easy; it’s on the way, if he’s going that way, or New Hampton and back if he goes north. She would be a little late, but it mattered less with videos. If she’d been sent to Burger King, and the Whopper got home cold there’d be hell to pay.
Calypso told people she felt bad for her mother, that her mother was abused by her own father and then by her husband and that she suffered, you know, really suffered, and that the only time her mother was happy was the seconds after she ate something. When her face was fatter because of the cheeseburger or pizza slice that had just been shoved in her mouth. She almost looked like she was smiling.
Calypso told other people she had no mother. Said she lived in a little bungalow alone, that she was between jobs, that she was married once but her husband died in a tragic car crash, or that he was in Afghanistan, where he was killed by an IED. She changed her story depending on the audience. She once told a bra-fitter at the JC Penny in Claremont that she killed a member of the Montreal mafia and was now in the witness protection program. The woman barely spoke English so probably only got half the story.
Her sister Candy didn't get why Calypso couldn't be fucking normal for one minute of her goddamn life. Canada didn’t have the witness protection program and if they did, why would they hide someone in Pittsfield goddamned New Hampshire? Candy was a professor of something super-duper important at one of the universities in Montreal.
Calypso hated that Candy was just fine living inside life as it was. Calypso could only breathe when she was living outside of it.
He didn’t do himself any favours looking like he’d never hitchhiked in his life. He was wearing sneakers and jumped up and down, like he was warming up for a race. Calypso should have gone straight home.
Her mother was a bitch just like Candy. Said she had a right to be because things hadn’t gone right for her. Her mother told stories about a creepy midnight-crawling cousin and said she wasn't toilet trained until the age of seven. It was all too pathetic, too dramatic. Calypso put her mother’s stories into the same book of fiction she herself was writing. Truth was Calypso had no idea what was wrong with her mother and why she stayed living with her. The best part of every day was when Calypso got in the car, cranked the radio and drove somewhere.
She’d been to every fast food restaurant, but Calypso had never been to the Blockbuster in Nashua. They were taking that “Best place to live in America” vote and running with it. When they won it for the second time, every goddamned store and restaurant put a sign up and gave shit away with every purchase. Like a McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken contributed to the town's profile?
She couldn’t blame the guy for wanting to get the hell out.
On her seventh go around he was still there. Calypso stopped beside him. He jumped in before she rolled down the passenger side window. He was shaking. He had no gloves and no hat, so after he turned off his music and pulled out the earphones, he shoved his hands in his pockets and kept his hood up. He had long brown hair hanging out from under it.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Where are you going?” he said.
She lied and said she was driving to Montreal to see her sister.
“I’d like to get to Burke Mountain, if that's okay.”
“St. Johnsbury?”
“It’s on the way isn’t it?” he said.
“Oh ya, for sure,” she said.
She drove under the highway and did a U-turn to get on to the 93 North. It was awkward, but Calypso maneuvered the gearshift, the clutch and brake like a master driver and she wondered if he was watching her. She wanted to tell him she taught herself to drive standard and that she bought the car as a self-improvement challenge. She wanted to say not many people know how to drive stick anymore because they just want things to be fast. They want life to be easy.
“Who’s at Burke Mountain?”
“My brother.”
“Does he work there?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ma’am? You don’t have to call me ma’am.”
She saw his young face peeking at her through all the hair.
“Sorry. I thought you were old,” he said.
“How old do I look?” she said.
“Well, now that I see your face, you don’t look old.”
“Well, how old do I look?”
“I dunno, 25 maybe.”
“That’s it, you guessed it.” Calypso laughed. He didn’t.
After she merged on to the highway, she moved directly to the left lane. This would take a bit longer than twenty minutes and she thought of her mother being forced to watch another soap instead of one of the three movies in the back seat. She’d have to drive fast. She’d be so close to Montreal by the time she dropped the guy off, she could go up and see Candy. It was only a couple of hours to St. Johnsbury and then another two to Montreal. But Candy’s face came alive in the rearview mirror, her voice a mix of polite derision saying, “Calypso, what a surprise,” followed by, “what the fuck are you doing here?"
Candy was living it up in Montreal. Great paying job, a doctor husband and all the money their father had when he died. Calypso was left the house in Pittsfield and the shares of the sugar shack her dad once co-owned. She only had to wait for the other owner, and her mother, to die. Until then, it was Burger King and foot massages. Calypso wasn’t mad. After she quit the volleyball team for no apparent reason and her scholarship was rescinded, her Dad reluctantly paid for the rest of her degree at Dartmouth. She used to be smart. She told some people she got a diploma from Colby Sawyer in medical administration. It was easier to fly low instead of explaining how she'd fallen from so high.
She’d drive to Burke Mountain and return home. If she drove fast, she'd be back before dinner. She’d shovel the snow, check the mail and then go inside, pop one of the videos in and say she got sidetracked. Her mother wouldn’t hear her. Any shit that happened to Calypso didn't matter as much as the hum of the microwave and the smell of three hungry-man dinners spinning around.
“How old are you?”
“Um, nineteen.”
“Oh ya? How old’s your brother?”
“He’s gonna be twenty-one tomorrow.”
“You going up for his birthday?” Calypso said.
“Ya.”
“You planning on staying or you gonna head back home?”
“I'm never gonna set foot in that fucking place again, as long as I live,” he said.
“Sorry for asking.”
“Sorry for my language.”
“No worries" Calypso said, "I curse quite a bit actually, so if you feel like talking about it, you can throw a few invectives in there. It usually makes me feel better.”
“Invectives? I really don’t feel like talking. Do you mind if I listen to music?”
“Go ahead.”
He put the left earphone in.
“My name’s Calypso,” she said.
“I’m Bob.”
“Bob? I don’t think I’ve ever met a Bob.” He was lying, for sure.
“My mother named me after a Harlequin heroine. My father was probably too drunk to argue for something more fitting like Ashley or Amanda. I mean, there must have been a few Ashley’s in the romance novels she was reading at the time, but my mother took it as a sign from Jesus Christ that her first contraction came when Calypso Durrant touched Jake Ferrer's bulging manhood. We all know how much Jesus loves big manly bulges.”
“Calypso’s a nice name,” he said.
“You think so?”
“Sure.”
“What do you like about it?”
“Pardon?
“What do you like about my name?”
“It suits you, I guess.”
“She’s a goddess,” Calypso said.
“I figured,” the guy said.
“Why? Because I’m so beautiful?” Calypso reached over and squeezed his knee. He tensed. His quads were muscular.
“Do you play some kind of sport?” she asked.
“Pardon?” He’d put the earphones back in.
“Just wondered if you were an athlete.”
“I play hockey.”
“Really? That’s cool.”
His jeans were tighter than the current trend. She leaned forward and tried to steal a side glance of his crotch. What did he look like under the denim? Calypso thought of Devis Montero. Lying in the grass with him on top of her, dry-humping under his parent’s pergola of grapes when she was eight years old. He said he wanted to touch her so bad when they played strip poker under the stairs in his basement, but he knew it was wrong and he didn't want to have to confess it in church on Sunday. So, he just smashed the crotch of his new Wranglers against her over and over again, until she had a sore that became a scab.
The guy took his hands out of his pockets and scrolled and clicked through his iPod. He put the earphones back in his ears and lowered his hood behind his head. He had a gorgeous head of hair and a clean face, like he’d just shaved or didn’t have that much hair. He was only nineteen. Maybe a couple of years away from the testosterone that causes all the disgusting hair growth. He had long fingers and muscular hands, like one of her mother’s literary cowboys.
Calypso fiddled with the radio. Heading through the White Mountains she lost stations and was patient through the static silence. Normally on long drives she talked to herself, or an imaginary passenger, about how life can sometimes just slip through your hands. How you can twist your dreams around your fingers and hold on tight, but the pain of holding on can be unbearable. After college, Calypso didn't do anything. She ended up in the hospital because her father thought she might hurt herself. Those four years at Dartmouth were supposed to be the time of her life, but it felt more like walking through mud. After her sophomore year, she started every new semester with a fresh layer of clay caked around her feet until it, until life became too heavy to lift.
His phone started ringing, but he didn’t move. She tapped him and made the phone sign with her hand to her ear. He pulled it out of his chest pocket but didn't flip it open. His hands were shaking.
“What if your brother calls?”
“He won’t. He’s not expecting me.”
“Oh, it’s a surprise? Very nice.”
He looked at her and his face held the question, anything else before I put my earphones back in?
“Are you in school?” she said.
“Not anymore. I quit.”
“What were you taking?”
“What do you mean, taking?” he said.
“I mean what was your major?”
“No major.”
“Oh, were you just there to play hockey?”
“Yup.”
“UNH?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you quit?” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s kind of sad.”
“Why?” he said.
“I was, well, it’s just sad, you know. College is supposed to be the best time of your life.” Calypso said.
“It wasn’t.”
“You planning on staying at Burke?”
“Yup.”
“I remember when I was eighteen and life just seemed so great, you know. I had a boyfriend and I played volleyball and I just thought, this is so fucking great. It’s sad that you have to run away from all of that.”
“Okay.”
“I guess you can put your music back on. Sorry.”
“It’s just, I don’t wanna talk about it, you know, with a stranger,” he said.
“Right, no problem. Talking to strangers is bad.” She laughed. He didn’t.
The drive was excellent and the roads stayed clear right past Franconia. When the guy fell asleep to the thrumming bass sound in his ears, Calypso watched his legs fall open. She opened her own, slightly.
A sudden snowstorm hit just before the 91. Again, her masterful driving was to be praised, but he slept through it all. When they arrived in St. Johnsbury, she got off early and added another half hour to the drive and when she got on the right road, she deliberately overshot the Mountain Rd. When he woke up she pretended like she was lost and turned back toward Burke.
“I think I figured it out,” she said.
He removed his earphones and pulled up his backpack from where it lay at his feet. He pulled out a little scrap of paper with a phone number. He opened his phone and punched in the numbers.
“Hey, it’s me. No. I dunno. I’m not home, so I dunno. He won’t find me. Cos I’m here. At Burke. No. Please. I promise, I won’t. Okay. Yup. K. Bye.”
“What’s going on?”
“He put the key in some old ski boot at the door.”
“Okay. Where do I go?”
“When you get to the main entrance you go in and then around to the back. There’s a building where all the ski-patrols live.”
“Got it. Who’s looking for you?”
Calypso drove around the main clubhouse waiting for him to answer. It felt like she’d been there before. Déjà vu. She got to a building that looked nothing like the hotel across the street, a kind of slum for the workers. When Bob got out, she opened her door and followed him up the stairs to his brother’s apartment. He looked back at her from the threshold and, sadness, or more, defeat, fell over his face. She shouldn't have followed him in.
She should not have followed him in.
Inside, he removed his jacket and she could see his shoulders, broad and strong.
“Do you want a drink or something?” he said.
“Sure, what have you got?”
“Do you want a drink of water?”
“No thanks.” Calypso removed her jacket, her sweater. She pulled her jeans up high and tucked her t-shirt in tight.
He noticed her braless boobs, for sure.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” Calypso said.
“Um, sure,” he said.
“Do you want to have sex?”
He looked at her for a moment and then down at his boots.
“Like as payment for the ride?” he said.
Calypso should have been upset, she should have said, ‘No, not as payment moron, as a free fuck, plain and simple.’ But she didn’t say that. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Sure. Payment.”
She moved toward him and tugged at his pants. He was scared. He didn’t touch her. She put his hands around her waist so he could feel her. She lifted his shirt over his head and unzipped his pants. She didn’t really notice his tears in that moment because she was annoyed he kept stepping away from her urgent hands.
She asked if he was really nineteen. She could have gotten the hell out of there without ever knowing.
He hesitated.
“Fourteen.”
His lips closed tight around his fear. Calypso knew those tears would burst out the second she left the room. They were sitting there, pooling in the corners, blurring his vision, promising to drown his visual memory of this moment, but she knew how this worked. Nothing would erase it from his mind. And when Calypso released him, she knew her hand would still be there when she left. Her hand would always be there. The strength of her grip, and every time he was with someone else, a bit of him would return to Burke Mountain.
In the car on the way home, tears fell steadily down her cheeks, merging with the snot coming out of her nose, and down her neck. Calypso needed to pee badly and she didn't care if she soaked the driver's seat. There was a big chunk of pain in her throat like someone had punched her in the neck. She hit worse traffic and more snow. Sheets of it covering the windshield.
When she’d pulled her sweater back on and lifted her jacket from the floor, he said, “I won’t tell anyone.”
That was a lie. He’d tell this story a hundred times in his life and with every telling, he’d try to make it less than it was. She won’t have placed his hand down her pants, on her steaming wanton womanhood. She won’t have lunged at him or clutched his throbbing member.
Since the day she staggered hungover and half naked out of the big white house, Gamma Delta Chi, she’d retold her story in a bunch of different ways. She could revise history whenever she wanted, exaggerate it, lie about it, but she couldn’t delete it. And now he’d try to do the same, but she was there. Trauma is like DNA, the evidence or proof one cannot easily clean up. She'd live in his mind forever, her smell, the hardness of her lips when she tried to kiss him, her breath on his cheek. Her hungry hands.
The road was clear of cars because most were either in the ditch or sensibly parked at home. As she came to a bridge Calypso wondered what it would feel like to fly right over the edge. Every memory she'd redacted from the story of her life was more vivid now. She didn't want to remember it that way. It's too pathetic. Too dramatic.
Alison Gadsby
He was standing at the corner of Loudon and North Main with a backpack tucked between his feet and the hood of his parka pulled almost entirely over his face. A string of earphone wire dangled down the front of his coat and every time she drove past he seemed to be pulling out his music player and changing the song. She circled around five times, cutting back around Storrs St. so she could look at him again. He was sticking out his thumb, but only slightly, like he was asking that someone stop and pick him up, not demanding it. He was rubbing his knees together, either a little dance to the music or the hopelessly stupid human trick to keep warm. She never asked.
He was on the wrong side of the highway. The entrance to the 93 was on the opposite side of the bridge. A driver would have to go out of their way to pick him up and only a murderer would do that. He didn't know what he was doing. If this guy wanted to get out of this shithole town, she was his best option. Calypso had to stop.
She rehearsed what she was going to say when he got in. If he got in.
“Just heading up north to see my sister. Not out of my way at all. I’ve got all the time in the world. I love driving. In the snow. It’s wild and sexy.” Would she say sexy? What would this guy think if she said she was turned on by the snow? It might turn him on too. Immediately, she saw them screwing in the back seat. The snow pummeling the car to the rhythm of their passionate pounding.
Snowflakes fell, big as clumpy wet cornflakes, against the car. She turned the wipers on and they swooshed the snow into slushy piles at the edges of the windshield.
She made a deal.
One more turn.
If he was still there after she drove around the seventh time, she’d stop.
But with each circuit things got less sexy. He was a little guy, but maybe underneath the hood he was hiding a sadistic smile and he'd thank her for stopping, then say: Slit your throat? Don't mind if I do.
But she could take him. Reminded her of Mark Storto, who once accidentally jammed his hand down her track pants in gym class in the fifth grade. She’d grabbed him by the throat and squeezed so hard he fell to his knees and Mr. Cull had to drag her off him.
As she came around the sixth time she took the videos on the front passenger seat and threw them in the back. Her mother was waiting for Eddie Murphy at home, spread out on the sofa, or over the sofa, in the sofa, around the sofa, however you might describe a four-hundred-and eighty-five-pound woman sitting on a loveseat like it's a chair. If her father was alive, he'd be the one to go to Blockbuster, mow the lawn, make her tacos, massage her swollen purple feet. But he was dead. Buried beside his brother at Mt. Olivet. Calypso liked to think he was asleep cushioned in all that purple satin, but on days like this, she didn’t like to think of him at all.
All My Children wouldn’t be over for another twenty minutes. She could get this guy to Manchester, easy; it’s on the way, if he’s going that way, or New Hampton and back if he goes north. She would be a little late, but it mattered less with videos. If she’d been sent to Burger King, and the Whopper got home cold there’d be hell to pay.
Calypso told people she felt bad for her mother, that her mother was abused by her own father and then by her husband and that she suffered, you know, really suffered, and that the only time her mother was happy was the seconds after she ate something. When her face was fatter because of the cheeseburger or pizza slice that had just been shoved in her mouth. She almost looked like she was smiling.
Calypso told other people she had no mother. Said she lived in a little bungalow alone, that she was between jobs, that she was married once but her husband died in a tragic car crash, or that he was in Afghanistan, where he was killed by an IED. She changed her story depending on the audience. She once told a bra-fitter at the JC Penny in Claremont that she killed a member of the Montreal mafia and was now in the witness protection program. The woman barely spoke English so probably only got half the story.
Her sister Candy didn't get why Calypso couldn't be fucking normal for one minute of her goddamn life. Canada didn’t have the witness protection program and if they did, why would they hide someone in Pittsfield goddamned New Hampshire? Candy was a professor of something super-duper important at one of the universities in Montreal.
Calypso hated that Candy was just fine living inside life as it was. Calypso could only breathe when she was living outside of it.
He didn’t do himself any favours looking like he’d never hitchhiked in his life. He was wearing sneakers and jumped up and down, like he was warming up for a race. Calypso should have gone straight home.
Her mother was a bitch just like Candy. Said she had a right to be because things hadn’t gone right for her. Her mother told stories about a creepy midnight-crawling cousin and said she wasn't toilet trained until the age of seven. It was all too pathetic, too dramatic. Calypso put her mother’s stories into the same book of fiction she herself was writing. Truth was Calypso had no idea what was wrong with her mother and why she stayed living with her. The best part of every day was when Calypso got in the car, cranked the radio and drove somewhere.
She’d been to every fast food restaurant, but Calypso had never been to the Blockbuster in Nashua. They were taking that “Best place to live in America” vote and running with it. When they won it for the second time, every goddamned store and restaurant put a sign up and gave shit away with every purchase. Like a McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken contributed to the town's profile?
She couldn’t blame the guy for wanting to get the hell out.
On her seventh go around he was still there. Calypso stopped beside him. He jumped in before she rolled down the passenger side window. He was shaking. He had no gloves and no hat, so after he turned off his music and pulled out the earphones, he shoved his hands in his pockets and kept his hood up. He had long brown hair hanging out from under it.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Where are you going?” he said.
She lied and said she was driving to Montreal to see her sister.
“I’d like to get to Burke Mountain, if that's okay.”
“St. Johnsbury?”
“It’s on the way isn’t it?” he said.
“Oh ya, for sure,” she said.
She drove under the highway and did a U-turn to get on to the 93 North. It was awkward, but Calypso maneuvered the gearshift, the clutch and brake like a master driver and she wondered if he was watching her. She wanted to tell him she taught herself to drive standard and that she bought the car as a self-improvement challenge. She wanted to say not many people know how to drive stick anymore because they just want things to be fast. They want life to be easy.
“Who’s at Burke Mountain?”
“My brother.”
“Does he work there?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ma’am? You don’t have to call me ma’am.”
She saw his young face peeking at her through all the hair.
“Sorry. I thought you were old,” he said.
“How old do I look?” she said.
“Well, now that I see your face, you don’t look old.”
“Well, how old do I look?”
“I dunno, 25 maybe.”
“That’s it, you guessed it.” Calypso laughed. He didn’t.
After she merged on to the highway, she moved directly to the left lane. This would take a bit longer than twenty minutes and she thought of her mother being forced to watch another soap instead of one of the three movies in the back seat. She’d have to drive fast. She’d be so close to Montreal by the time she dropped the guy off, she could go up and see Candy. It was only a couple of hours to St. Johnsbury and then another two to Montreal. But Candy’s face came alive in the rearview mirror, her voice a mix of polite derision saying, “Calypso, what a surprise,” followed by, “what the fuck are you doing here?"
Candy was living it up in Montreal. Great paying job, a doctor husband and all the money their father had when he died. Calypso was left the house in Pittsfield and the shares of the sugar shack her dad once co-owned. She only had to wait for the other owner, and her mother, to die. Until then, it was Burger King and foot massages. Calypso wasn’t mad. After she quit the volleyball team for no apparent reason and her scholarship was rescinded, her Dad reluctantly paid for the rest of her degree at Dartmouth. She used to be smart. She told some people she got a diploma from Colby Sawyer in medical administration. It was easier to fly low instead of explaining how she'd fallen from so high.
She’d drive to Burke Mountain and return home. If she drove fast, she'd be back before dinner. She’d shovel the snow, check the mail and then go inside, pop one of the videos in and say she got sidetracked. Her mother wouldn’t hear her. Any shit that happened to Calypso didn't matter as much as the hum of the microwave and the smell of three hungry-man dinners spinning around.
“How old are you?”
“Um, nineteen.”
“Oh ya? How old’s your brother?”
“He’s gonna be twenty-one tomorrow.”
“You going up for his birthday?” Calypso said.
“Ya.”
“You planning on staying or you gonna head back home?”
“I'm never gonna set foot in that fucking place again, as long as I live,” he said.
“Sorry for asking.”
“Sorry for my language.”
“No worries" Calypso said, "I curse quite a bit actually, so if you feel like talking about it, you can throw a few invectives in there. It usually makes me feel better.”
“Invectives? I really don’t feel like talking. Do you mind if I listen to music?”
“Go ahead.”
He put the left earphone in.
“My name’s Calypso,” she said.
“I’m Bob.”
“Bob? I don’t think I’ve ever met a Bob.” He was lying, for sure.
“My mother named me after a Harlequin heroine. My father was probably too drunk to argue for something more fitting like Ashley or Amanda. I mean, there must have been a few Ashley’s in the romance novels she was reading at the time, but my mother took it as a sign from Jesus Christ that her first contraction came when Calypso Durrant touched Jake Ferrer's bulging manhood. We all know how much Jesus loves big manly bulges.”
“Calypso’s a nice name,” he said.
“You think so?”
“Sure.”
“What do you like about it?”
“Pardon?
“What do you like about my name?”
“It suits you, I guess.”
“She’s a goddess,” Calypso said.
“I figured,” the guy said.
“Why? Because I’m so beautiful?” Calypso reached over and squeezed his knee. He tensed. His quads were muscular.
“Do you play some kind of sport?” she asked.
“Pardon?” He’d put the earphones back in.
“Just wondered if you were an athlete.”
“I play hockey.”
“Really? That’s cool.”
His jeans were tighter than the current trend. She leaned forward and tried to steal a side glance of his crotch. What did he look like under the denim? Calypso thought of Devis Montero. Lying in the grass with him on top of her, dry-humping under his parent’s pergola of grapes when she was eight years old. He said he wanted to touch her so bad when they played strip poker under the stairs in his basement, but he knew it was wrong and he didn't want to have to confess it in church on Sunday. So, he just smashed the crotch of his new Wranglers against her over and over again, until she had a sore that became a scab.
The guy took his hands out of his pockets and scrolled and clicked through his iPod. He put the earphones back in his ears and lowered his hood behind his head. He had a gorgeous head of hair and a clean face, like he’d just shaved or didn’t have that much hair. He was only nineteen. Maybe a couple of years away from the testosterone that causes all the disgusting hair growth. He had long fingers and muscular hands, like one of her mother’s literary cowboys.
Calypso fiddled with the radio. Heading through the White Mountains she lost stations and was patient through the static silence. Normally on long drives she talked to herself, or an imaginary passenger, about how life can sometimes just slip through your hands. How you can twist your dreams around your fingers and hold on tight, but the pain of holding on can be unbearable. After college, Calypso didn't do anything. She ended up in the hospital because her father thought she might hurt herself. Those four years at Dartmouth were supposed to be the time of her life, but it felt more like walking through mud. After her sophomore year, she started every new semester with a fresh layer of clay caked around her feet until it, until life became too heavy to lift.
His phone started ringing, but he didn’t move. She tapped him and made the phone sign with her hand to her ear. He pulled it out of his chest pocket but didn't flip it open. His hands were shaking.
“What if your brother calls?”
“He won’t. He’s not expecting me.”
“Oh, it’s a surprise? Very nice.”
He looked at her and his face held the question, anything else before I put my earphones back in?
“Are you in school?” she said.
“Not anymore. I quit.”
“What were you taking?”
“What do you mean, taking?” he said.
“I mean what was your major?”
“No major.”
“Oh, were you just there to play hockey?”
“Yup.”
“UNH?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you quit?” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s kind of sad.”
“Why?” he said.
“I was, well, it’s just sad, you know. College is supposed to be the best time of your life.” Calypso said.
“It wasn’t.”
“You planning on staying at Burke?”
“Yup.”
“I remember when I was eighteen and life just seemed so great, you know. I had a boyfriend and I played volleyball and I just thought, this is so fucking great. It’s sad that you have to run away from all of that.”
“Okay.”
“I guess you can put your music back on. Sorry.”
“It’s just, I don’t wanna talk about it, you know, with a stranger,” he said.
“Right, no problem. Talking to strangers is bad.” She laughed. He didn’t.
The drive was excellent and the roads stayed clear right past Franconia. When the guy fell asleep to the thrumming bass sound in his ears, Calypso watched his legs fall open. She opened her own, slightly.
A sudden snowstorm hit just before the 91. Again, her masterful driving was to be praised, but he slept through it all. When they arrived in St. Johnsbury, she got off early and added another half hour to the drive and when she got on the right road, she deliberately overshot the Mountain Rd. When he woke up she pretended like she was lost and turned back toward Burke.
“I think I figured it out,” she said.
He removed his earphones and pulled up his backpack from where it lay at his feet. He pulled out a little scrap of paper with a phone number. He opened his phone and punched in the numbers.
“Hey, it’s me. No. I dunno. I’m not home, so I dunno. He won’t find me. Cos I’m here. At Burke. No. Please. I promise, I won’t. Okay. Yup. K. Bye.”
“What’s going on?”
“He put the key in some old ski boot at the door.”
“Okay. Where do I go?”
“When you get to the main entrance you go in and then around to the back. There’s a building where all the ski-patrols live.”
“Got it. Who’s looking for you?”
Calypso drove around the main clubhouse waiting for him to answer. It felt like she’d been there before. Déjà vu. She got to a building that looked nothing like the hotel across the street, a kind of slum for the workers. When Bob got out, she opened her door and followed him up the stairs to his brother’s apartment. He looked back at her from the threshold and, sadness, or more, defeat, fell over his face. She shouldn't have followed him in.
She should not have followed him in.
Inside, he removed his jacket and she could see his shoulders, broad and strong.
“Do you want a drink or something?” he said.
“Sure, what have you got?”
“Do you want a drink of water?”
“No thanks.” Calypso removed her jacket, her sweater. She pulled her jeans up high and tucked her t-shirt in tight.
He noticed her braless boobs, for sure.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” Calypso said.
“Um, sure,” he said.
“Do you want to have sex?”
He looked at her for a moment and then down at his boots.
“Like as payment for the ride?” he said.
Calypso should have been upset, she should have said, ‘No, not as payment moron, as a free fuck, plain and simple.’ But she didn’t say that. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Sure. Payment.”
She moved toward him and tugged at his pants. He was scared. He didn’t touch her. She put his hands around her waist so he could feel her. She lifted his shirt over his head and unzipped his pants. She didn’t really notice his tears in that moment because she was annoyed he kept stepping away from her urgent hands.
She asked if he was really nineteen. She could have gotten the hell out of there without ever knowing.
He hesitated.
“Fourteen.”
His lips closed tight around his fear. Calypso knew those tears would burst out the second she left the room. They were sitting there, pooling in the corners, blurring his vision, promising to drown his visual memory of this moment, but she knew how this worked. Nothing would erase it from his mind. And when Calypso released him, she knew her hand would still be there when she left. Her hand would always be there. The strength of her grip, and every time he was with someone else, a bit of him would return to Burke Mountain.
In the car on the way home, tears fell steadily down her cheeks, merging with the snot coming out of her nose, and down her neck. Calypso needed to pee badly and she didn't care if she soaked the driver's seat. There was a big chunk of pain in her throat like someone had punched her in the neck. She hit worse traffic and more snow. Sheets of it covering the windshield.
When she’d pulled her sweater back on and lifted her jacket from the floor, he said, “I won’t tell anyone.”
That was a lie. He’d tell this story a hundred times in his life and with every telling, he’d try to make it less than it was. She won’t have placed his hand down her pants, on her steaming wanton womanhood. She won’t have lunged at him or clutched his throbbing member.
Since the day she staggered hungover and half naked out of the big white house, Gamma Delta Chi, she’d retold her story in a bunch of different ways. She could revise history whenever she wanted, exaggerate it, lie about it, but she couldn’t delete it. And now he’d try to do the same, but she was there. Trauma is like DNA, the evidence or proof one cannot easily clean up. She'd live in his mind forever, her smell, the hardness of her lips when she tried to kiss him, her breath on his cheek. Her hungry hands.
The road was clear of cars because most were either in the ditch or sensibly parked at home. As she came to a bridge Calypso wondered what it would feel like to fly right over the edge. Every memory she'd redacted from the story of her life was more vivid now. She didn't want to remember it that way. It's too pathetic. Too dramatic.
