Monthly Story (August '23): Birches
Fiction
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
Rob’t Frost
He is set down after dark, on a walkway of fallen leaves. He knows, or knew, this place. The Birch Grove on the Mall. Marshfield. His college.
He finds himself shuffling onto Academy Street behind Greg and Carl. And, yes. His eyes adjust. That’s tall Alice up ahead. The three of them, he sees now, were skinny, shaggy teenagers really. Always so sure. So far ahead of him, as if they’d done it all. Especially Alice.
Whatever became of her? Gregg and Carl. He knows how those stories end, but Alice? He never found out.
For now, though, in this unexpected, set-me-down-again moment, he turns his head and there by his side, head bowed in shy reverence for her elders, walks Karen, Carl’s little sister. Snug jeans and bulky sweater, a scarf rakishly draped round her neck and over the shoulder. Wispy blond hair in a tomboy cut. He sees why he had been attracted.
He stirs the leaves underfoot, like always. Enjoying the moment. Placing it. Letting it unfurl detail by detail.
“Déjà vu all over again,” he chuckles to no one.
“What?” She looks up.
Ah, yes. That nasally, slightly mocking voice. He almost laughs out loud at how something like that can bring everything back. “Oh, nothing,” he says. “You know. Felt as if I’d been here before. You know.”
This night comes back to him, had often actually. Haunted him. Did he truly remember or did his mind play tricks, invent, conflate. But then the front three peel away and he and Karen are alone, heading toward the apartment, just as he’d remembered.
He stares at her in the dim circle of a street light they pass through, puzzled by the contempt he had felt for so long and then, finally, thank goodness, let go of. They are young again now. Fresh. It could all go differently.
Ovulating, he thought, finally hitting on why this night comes back so easily. Must have been. They climb the stairs to the apartment. He fumbles and finds the key in his pocket, for the first time glancing down at his shoes and pants. Bell bottoms, for Christ’ sake! Those damned suede half boots. He runs his fingers through a full head of hair. “Now that’s something I’ve missed,” he says.
“What?”
That nasally voice again.
He unlocks the door and stands aside for her. She is still waiting for an answer and gives him a look as she passes. The apartment is neater than he remembered. Nobody ever took the trash out, he always told people. Or washed the dishes. Carl’s giant poster of Che hangs over the mattress folded into a couch. Somebody has emptied the ashtrays on the heavy wooden buffet they’d butchered into a coffee table. He shakes his head in disgust. Imagine ruining a good piece like that now.
Karen drops her scarf on one end of the mattress and plops down on the other. “Somebody cleaned this place up,” she says. She watches him looking around himself in the middle of the room. Her lip curls mischievously, an expression he’d once thought cute, but had come to loath. Now? Well. As their marriage rotted, she’d only been defending herself from his demons.
She waits for him on the couch. It comes back to him now. He had taken the trash out, washed the dishes. Gregg and Carl were catching a ride to New York that night. He and Karen had the place to themselves. But then something happened. Somebody arrived unannounced. He stands there trying to recall.
“Put some music on,” she says.
Yeah. Set the mood. You know how this is done. Better than you did then, that’s for sure. It’s your brother who shows up unannounced. Hitch-hiking with a full backpack. He raps on the door in about an hour and the two of you have to scramble to jump back into your clothing. Karen runs naked into the bathroom to dress.
“The White Album,” she says.
For years now that voice, if he goes through with it. He’d promised himself not to make the same mistakes if he could go back, but they are both young again now and everything can turn out differently, right? And the child—the boy grown now, a father himself—that life was no mistake, no accident. He had never loved anyone as he loved his son.
He turns and puts on the White Album, knowing they are not a match, pretending his own demons have been put to rest. He could deny all three of them the misery, then the whole bitter mess with his best friend. But there she sits, fresh and young, ready to give herself to him. How they had loved their little boy. He sits down beside her, gently takes her hand, an old man in a young body, as weak now as he’d ever been. What could his life have ever possibly been without this moment?