Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/214077
arts the works is time. Te waves rush in, linger on the pebbled beaches of your brain. If you can keep your lips perched above the water long enough to keep from drowning, the tide recedes back into the distance just long enough for you to dry of. You always feel them, the waves, and know they'll come back, but there's the promise of a peaceful remission for days or weeks, maybe even months, that makes it okay to suck in the salty air of life for just a little while longer. I tell him I'm on my way, and then I take a minute to stand in the frame of the bedroom doorway and watch Lisa sleep. Her toes stick out of the sheets like tiny edible oferings, and I would kill to have them running across my sweaty calves. "Listen," he says. He pushes the gun into my grip. "I need you to do this for me." T he frst time I saw Lisa she was walking down Miller Road reading a paperback. Jack and I were up on his roof, scraping slate shingles to the ground, and she walked right by the house without ever looking up. She let a strand of ember-red hair slip over her eyes as she walked, just let it play on her face like it didn't even tickle. I would have traded everything I owned to be the one she'd let tuck it behind her ear. "Girl like that'll make your eyes hurt," said Jack. He had looked up to see me gawking at her. "Listen," he says. He pushes the gun into my grip. "I need you to do this for me." T he gravel of my driveway clinks against the underside of my S10 as I pull onto the fve-minute stretch of Miller Road between Jack's house and mine. I imagine Jack standing in the middle of his wood-paneled den, staring down the second hand of his ticking wall clock. Five minutes is a car teetering on the clif's edge. Still, I drive slowly, knowing that I'll never be able to say the right thing. "Is there a right thing?" Lisa had asked me. We sat on a park bench down by the river and watched the green water lap against the shore's debris. She held a vanilla cone and looked as defeated as the melting ice cream coating her knuckles. I let my knees rub into hers, but that was all I could ofer. If I could have choked out the words, I would have told her that we would be okay, that we would someday be strong enough to smile again. Just look up, I wanted to say; just keep your lips above the water. But I couldn't say that, and so we struggled in silence, the heat of the day wrapped around our shoulders like winter coats. When I kill the engine outside Jack's house, I look up to see him sitting on the porch swing, tapping the butt of his shotgun on the ground to the rhythm of the swing like a metronome. I step out of the truck and approach with caution, as I always do. "Hey, Jack. It's me," I say. Even when it's daylight I know he can only see me as an opaque fgure, something like a blot on a Rorschach test. Te melanoma spread to both eyes and devours his vision more each day. He takes a drag on a joint and then extends it out to me as I climb the porch steps. I wave it of and then remember he can't see me. "Hot out here tonight, huh?" I say. Tis is the kind of small talk Jack hates, and I wish I were better at avoiding it. Te glint of the streetlight shimmers of the barrel of the gun each time he swings forward out of the shadows. "How's Lisa?" Jack asks. "She doing any better?" Like everybody else, Jack asks about Lisa every time I see him. Tey never ask about me, about us. Tey all need Lisa to feel better so they can move on with their lives. It's been over nine months since it happened — longer than a gestation period, I'm reminded — and they all want to know when it's okay to tell us to have another baby. Te pressure hangs on Lisa's back like a playing child, and it's too much. Jack rocks the swing back with his heels, and I notice he has on mismatched shoes. Tis is exactly the kind of thing I shouldn't joke with him about, but I just don't have the courage to say anything else."Sheesh. It's like you let a blind guy dress you or something." I tap my shoe against the soles of his. I laugh, but he stops swinging. 96 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 12.13 "If you look hard enough, sure." I knew I couldn't talk to her like I was, shirtless with Kentucky summer grime smeared across my face. I just prayed that Jack wouldn't try to talk to her frst. Jack slapped me on the back, an acknowledgment of an unspoken contract, and went back to work. But I just watched her as she foated down the road, the sunlight dancing in waves around her silhouetted body like it knew it could only get so close. Lisa says the frst time we slept together was like a consensual accident, that I fell into her in a sort of awkward stupor the way a tottering child might fall into her frst busted lip. We drove my S10 into the middle of an empty feld, never even thinking about the ruts the tires dug into private land. Lisa brought along a ffth of Maker's Mark and swigged from the open bottle. Te bourbon sparkled on her lips like the stars above us. "You think God ever regrets us?" Lisa asked. She gazed up at the sky with her head resting in my lap. "Regrets us?" I asked. I brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. "I mean, wasn't the world better before we were here?" she said. "Just look up there. How could we ever make that any better?" We passed the bottle between us like small talk. Te liquor ate our insides the way that it will, and Lisa said she wanted to have my baby, a boy if I could swing it. It's magical to think we conceived that night. We probably didn't, but we tell each other we did. We rolled, felt, hurt and screamed our way into the next four years where our world became a sort of fool's-gold fantasy, the pendulum of our happiness swinging recklessly forward to the point that we knew it would have to come crashing back through the equilibrium. Tyler Alexander had gray eyes and perfect waves of auburn hair, so perfect that Lisa said she ordered him from a catalog. I slide my palm down the smooth metal of the gun's barrel as I study the glaze over Jack's retinas. Tis moment has been simmering for the past year, ever since it happened. I fick the barrel with my fnger and let the ping of the metal jolt us back to the moment. "You know you can't ask me to do this, Jack." I grasp the gun and step back out of his reach. He rocks back on his heels and starts to swing again. "I can't do it myself, John. I've tried. I need you to do this for me." "It's not fair," I say. "To you or me." "Look, I've written the note," he says. He pulls a sealed envelope from