LITMIR.BIZ

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breathing.”

      “What?”

      “Touch me,” I said.

      He lifted a hand and placed it over mine.

      “No,” I said, sliding my hand from under and rolling to my back. “Touch me, not my hand.”

      I took his hand and pulled him so he had to turn toward me. “Here,” I said, placing his hand low on my body. He let his hand rest there. I rolled slightly and brought my lips even to his, leaned in. It was an awkward kiss, his nose bumping into mine, me turning myself to make us fit, and I felt his hand move up and around to my back at my waist. I moved my hand onto his thigh, moving toward him, then reaching back to bring his arm from around me, finding his hand, and guiding it, inviting him to my thigh, and he touched me and the jolt of it roused me to want more. I was letting the covers slide down and away from us. The room didn’t feel so dark now and my skin was white and smooth and I noticed his eyes were closed. I lay my hand on top of his, to guide his fingers deeper to the spot I wanted him to find. Close, nearly there, he stiffened his fingers and pulled away. “What are you doing?” he said. I opened my eyes and his were now staring into mine.

      “I’m showing you what I want,” I said, so very quiet, almost dreamily.

      “Do you have to instruct me?” He pulled his hand away, rolled his whole self away, his back facing me. I sat up, I covered myself with the sheet, stripping it away from the quilt, and sat cross-legged on the bed with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. What swelled up in me at that moment was humiliation. I recognized it, I hated it, and at that moment I hated Pete.

      “Tell me what is wrong with me showing you what I want.”

      “Maybe I don’t want to touch you where you want to be touched,” he said. “I was asleep. I had a long week on the road and I’m exhausted.”

      “So you don’t want sex.”

      “No.”

      “Ever?”

      “I didn’t say ever. Just not now. You don’t know, Cassie. You weren’t up since five a.m. like I was.”

      “And this doesn’t help you relax.”

      “I was relaxed. I was asleep, or nearly asleep.”

      “The kids will be up in the morning with the sun.”

      “We have to wait, Cass. You have to wait.”

      “I am always waiting, Pete. I wait all week for you. I wait, worrying about you on the road, about plane crashes, about not seeing you. I wait for hugs and this and for some love.”

      Pete rolled onto his back. “You don’t have enough to do then.”

      “I am busy from 6:00 a.m. to when they shut their eyes.”

      He did not respond. I filled the silence with a series of ugly conclusions my mind shouted to me. I reached to the floor for my tee shirt and shorts and pulled them on. I left him there and found my way to the living room and the couch and all the words I had imagined I would say to him were no longer necessary because I knew he would not understand with or without the words. There were tears then and a heaviness under my ribcage and an anxious and sudden wave of a physical desire to be touched the way I had gently asked him to touch me. I pulled a pillow under my head, stretched out, and found the crocheted throw folded over the back of the couch and slid it over me. And, while sleep simply could not find its way through my racing heart, fear of this huge fissure cracking the ground between us did. I lay awake. My thoughts went again to that longing for the life I had let be replaced with this one and, although I had not done so in a very long time, I prayed against what my heart was trying to show me until the pale streak of sunrise shone pink through the large windows to the east.

      “There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.” - Vincent Van Gogh

      Chapter 5

      Saturday arrived with ragged edges of tension. I’d had my lions in the house dream again. The dream had visited often since childhood. In the dream I was at my childhood home in the midst of a party surrounded by extended family. But sliding quietly among the guests were lions, pawing up the stairs, lying on the floor in the living room. In my heart was panic. Nobody else seemed disturbed by their presence. I was shushed when I tried to bring anyone’s attention to the danger. I urgently opened bedroom doors to lure them in and closed them off from the rest of the family. There were too many. Outside they roamed the neighborhood too. I knew they could pounce at any moment. The fear awakened me and relief flooded me with wakefulness. Returning to sleep took a long time.

      I left the house and ran around the park, my shins smarting from the impact. I stopped in my tracks when a deer, silent and still, came into view in a brief stand of trees. A lone doe. Eyes on me. How unexpected. How beautiful and peaceful. Its grace was contagious. At my slowed approach, it headed up the gentle slope to a driveway on the road above the park and disappeared. I slowed to a walk for a final loop, returned to the house, and noted the twins in front of the television for the ritual of Saturday morning cartoons. Lila slept on weekend mornings, often until ten, and I did not see Pete so assumed he was showering, which is what I did in the hallway bathroom before I returned to our bedroom to dress. I called through the door and announced that I would be gone for a few hours, would he see to the girls’ breakfast and clean up the kitchen. He asked, “What do they eat?” and that simple question was salt on a wound. I didn’t tell him cereal and bananas and orange juice and a vitamin or that they sometimes enjoyed a warm cup of tea with milk and only a tiny bit of sugar. I simply said, “Ask them.”

      “Where will you be?” he asked.

      “Not here,” I said.

      There were always homeless people at the library, a woman with a very large backpack, a man, long beard on a narrow face with a bright smile of white teeth with one gap where he stuck the tip of his tongue, as though it could fill up that empty space. He brought to mind my dreams of losing teeth I consistently had after Banhi died. In those dreams, it was always a healthy molar, white, clean but loose, and sliding out where my fingers were trying to keep it in place. Out it fell, leaving a gaping hole filling rapidly with purple blood.

      He sat, gap-toothed, greeting the few early library patrons. She, the woman, was not at her usual place on the cinderblock wall. I saw her backpack, a pair of shoes, black, low, laced-up boots, piled there against the wall where she always sat. They were sometimes inside the library, at tables, with magazines or newspapers flat out in front of them, side by side, like a couple. It was odd to see him and not her. I’d never spoken to her, or him, but I did now.

      “Where is she?” I asked.

      “Gone, gone, gone,” he said.

      “Is she nearby?”

      “Gone, gone, gone.” His hands were up above his shoulders, straight out in front. His face turned toward the sky. “Gone.”

      Ten feet away, I could smell the stench of him as he moved his arms. I stepped back. His face contorted and he shouted, spit forming at the corners of his mouth. “Those shalt be for fuel to the fire; thou shalt be no longer remembered; for I the Lord have spoken it.”

      He fell to his knees and bowed his hands to the ground. I left him there, repeating his words, lifting his arms and eyes to the sky, and, with other library patrons, I stepped through the now unlocked door, full of self-reproach for having stirred this in him. His words rattled me. Her absence rattled me. She was always here when he was. Now only her possessions remained, like Ann’s yesterday. His outburst, was it his way of saying he’d seen something? Had she been a victim also? Pressing him did not seem like a good idea.

      I wanted a book. I wanted to lose myself in a story on a bench in the park, but we were not supposed to be outside. I selected a Margaret Atwood novel and checked it out at the desk.

      It was peaceful

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