Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (25 page)

She wanted him to take her words, to take them and say them, and believe them. Des wasn’t an artist, or smart like a doctor, or a musician or something
really
important, like a mom, but she realized, she knew people.

She knew that Betty was grumpy and nosy and sharp because all she wanted was to eat meat loaf with Marvin. She knew Sam didn’t want to take care of Sarah because he looked at her and all he could see was a thousand different ways he could lose her. She knew Sarah didn’t really think that Des was some piece of ass to boyfriends, but that it was her way of saying that she wanted someone to deserve her. She knew PJ just couldn’t stand it. Didn’t have words, had never really had words, until he had an instrument in his hands.

She knew, too, that Hefin was falling in love with her, already, and that he didn’t want to because he thought he could stick himself back together again in Wales. She also knew that he really needed to go to Wales.

Not because he needed to stick himself back together but because no man who had parents he loved, and who loved him, should have to go through what he’d gone through and not get a home-cooked meal and sleep in his childhood bed and hear the sea slap against the rocks that made the jetty.

Everybody just got to do that when their heart had been broken. It doesn’t fix your heart, of course, but it makes the heartbreak real when you stand in the place you were born, where everybody knows you and can talk about the bad thing that happened to break your heart.

Des couldn’t imagine not coming home to this neighborhood after her dad died, not standing in her dad’s house, her family home, before they had to sell it, eating casseroles and listening to neighbors and extended family tell Patrick Burnside stories. It
would be like he disappeared without a good-bye, something worse than grief. Like a heart about to be broken, just on the verge of it, that never does.

He didn’t have to go to Wales to put himself back together. He had to go so he could finally break.

She wished she didn’t know, though, could un-see the part about the love. It was the very worst sort of position for his heart to be in. It had needed to break for so long, it had sort of half healed and been ready for sweetness, again. But there was no way he could ever give her his whole heart until it had broken all the way, first.

She would have to let him go. She could absolve him, a little, before he went. Absolve him with his correct percentage of blame and remind him that he had atoned for it many times over. She could kiss him like this, like she had been told that all she could ever do to him ever again was kiss him.

She could slip off his shirt, and inhale his skin, and rub her face into his chest.

She could press into his hard-on with the heel of her hand and listen to his heart speed up under her ear.

She could hold on to his hands and push them under her skirt.

She could hold herself, where the ache was sweet, push herself into his thigh, move against the pleasure as it traded between them. His kiss. Her kiss. His hand. Now hers.

She didn’t bother to protect her own heart from breaking. She could feel it cracking everywhere except the places it had mended before. The old cracks always hold. But there is always a brand-new way to break your heart.

* * *

She tripped over something in the dark and giggled.

“Jesus, Destiny,” Hefin near whispered, “be careful.”

She fiddled with her dad’s old lantern and finally figured out how to get the wick to move up. She hoped the bottle of kerosene she found with it was still good.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

“Light your lantern, first.”

They’d made love on the couch, slow and easy, then moved to her bedroom to
sleep. She’d woken up, a couple of hours later, to his penis hard against the crack of her ass, his hand low on her belly, and his lips on her neck.

Something about how he’d held her hip and slid into her, in one upward thrust from behind, like he’d been lying there, thinking of it, thinking of how he’d fill her, move into her, in just that way, made her sleepless, after. Every thrust had been slow, the slowest at that last little bit before he was all the way in, and that’s when he’d press against her clit and hold his finger there, while pushing himself inside, before sliding away.

She’d had nothing to hold on to but the sheet underneath her and his hip where the muscle hollowed and bunched with those slow, deep, hard thrusts.

It had taken forever and ever, and she hadn’t even known she was coming until those thrusts had gotten even slower, more forceful, and he had to tell her, in a voice that had sounded far away because she was lost in her own pleasure, to let go of his hip and touch herself so he could move his hand by her shoulder and brace himself over her.

She came, and came, her belly against the mattress, her clitoris against her middle fingers. He kept her full of him with shorter penetrations that never completely slid away from her body, all through it, whispering her name against her neck.

It had left her giddy, and feeling something like an echo of fullness and love all through her.

After, she had turned around and wrapped herself around him, their pointy elbows and knees everywhere, and kissed whatever came near her mouth as they laughed. He eventually got serious and held her hands over her head, all her fingers woven through one hand of his, and he kissed her slowly, softly, barely tasting her.

She was glad he had made love like that to her in her own bed. That the phantoms of Des and Hefin loving each other like that would haunt the place that she slept. It would be easier to revisit them in her imagination, later, in the unimaginable future when he left.

He hadn’t wanted to sleep either, so she’d said they should work on her dome.

She couldn’t turn on the back porch light, or Betty’d be onto them, so she dug out her dad’s lantern, the one he used to light during blackouts in the winter, when the lines would ice over where they twisted like crazy from house to house in their chaotic neighborhood.

She lit the wick and placed the glass back over the flame. It gave off just enough light to pool the yard with something transparent and golden and glittery, like instead of
light, the yard was thick with stardust that was bouncing around in light from the moon, from the single streetlight at the end of the alley.

Hefin was crouched in the middle of her dome. She’d been working on it here and there, the process addictive once Hefin had showed her how to weave the twigs. The walls were almost eighteen inches high, now, and she had been wondering how and when to start make the slow slope of the walls so that the structure was a dome, and not just a tube. She had pulled the twigs out of a space to make a way to walk in, and wasn’t sure how that would eventually be the door, exactly.

The light revealed that Hefin had been working on it, even in the dark. He was in his jeans, shirtless, barefoot, and he had dismantled her last row and was reworking it. He looked up at her in the light.

She had opted for a shirt, his shirt, and no pants. So they kinda matched.

He grinned.

She left the lantern on the back stoop and joined him inside her dome.

“Now’s when you best start countin’ a little,” he whispered. “Keep track of how many joins you do all the way around. Do that many for two maybe three rows, then reduce the joins for the next row by however many rows underneath. So if you do two rows with twenty joins, do eighteen joins for the next row. It will start to tip in. When you’ve got enough of an angle you can eyeball, start addin’ a vertical twig every other join or so, like this.” He showed her how he wove it in. “Those will support the angle. At the end of each row where your little door is, do one like that, too.”

She reached over the wall to the pile of twigs she gathered almost every day, dropping from the huge tree. He looked at the stack she made for them to work with, then squinted up at the tree.

“I know,” she said. “It can’t be good.”

“It’s so close to your house, Destiny.”

“I guess Betty’s friend, who’s a gardener, said it was sturdy, it’s just the top new growth that’s failing and falling down.”

He squinted up into the dark branches again. Then looked back down at their work. “You have it, then?”

“Yeah. It’s time to start counting down.”

She shivered, a bit at that. Wondered if Hefin would be around to see her dome all finished. She had joked about them making love inside of it, and now she wanted to. She
wanted to have another place where they haunted around. Maybe she would plant sweet peas all around the base so that this summer, it was covered in pretty vines and flowers. She wanted to see it all heaped over with snow this winter.

They wove twigs together, back-to-back, until they’d get to the door, and have a little kissing break and start again. The night was quiet, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she looked around her yard in the night—the dark thatches of weeds by the fence where her little rotary push mower didn’t go, the fat kettle of the Weber grill she never used, the initials M+B inside a heart in the concrete pad under the stoop. Shiny green eyes looked back at her from the alley. Opossum? Raccoon?

She wondered how many times she’d seen all these details, over her whole life. If she’d ever seen them in the dark, like this. She didn’t think so. She liked it. Liked the pretty halo of lantern light and the beautiful man beside her that made everything familiar feel new.

She counted joins. Snapped twigs into equal lengths. Watched Hefin crouch and weave. Kissed him when they reached the doorway together.

He stopped suddenly, and leaned toward the house. “Destiny? Is that your mobile?”

She arrested, too. Her heartbeat suddenly in her throat. She heard it, too, through the screen door, vibrating brokenly against the kitchen counter.

She raced in, tripping over a corner of the dome, feeling twigs unweave and snap under her foot.

Remembered that the last time she’d seen this yard at night was when Betty had her and PJ here, watching them while her mom was in the hospital. She’d sat on that back stoop, unable to sleep, waiting for her dad. He’d come, eventually, and sat next her, then picked her up and put her in his lap while he wept.

That had scared her more than her mom’s dying. Her dad’s broken sobs into her hair.

Hefin had never been to a hospital, actually. He’d never been more ill than his village surgery had trouble managing, and growing up he had been a cautious and watchful child—not the sort to get up to things requiring stitches or plasters.

Hospitals were awful.

He couldn’t work out how it had been designed to seem quite reasonable-looking on the outside yet nothing but an unintuitive warren of hallways, doorways, and wide-open areas filled with chairs on the inside.

No one walked normally inside this building. They either walked too fast, swinging open inexplicable double doorways placed at random intervals, or wandered confusedly, trying to stop the people walking too fast for assistance.

The colors were dreadful and also without explanation. One area would be a horror of brights in large geometric swaths, and another would be endless expanses of dirty-looking pastels. Finish materials were of the type purchased by contractors in bales and rolls.

There was no accounting for the smells, which alternated between repulsive odors and food aromas so quickly and so without warning that he was starting to form an association.

It was overbright.

It was loud.

It was where Destiny needed to be.

So he was here, sitting in one of the wide-open areas filled with ugly chairs, holding Destiny’s tense and overly warm body against his side and coming up with anagrams using the letters from the unexplainable words
INTERVENTIONIST RADIOLOGY
stenciled over one set of double doors.

Introvert.

Yoga.

Veneration.

Groin.

Togas—goats, for that matter.

For a moment, they’d seen Sarah, a dark head on one end of a rolling gurney, two pale feet on the other, a wreck of tubes and equipment piled in between.

It had been steered by a set of the walking-too-fast people, one of whom was Sam, who was yelling at all the other walking-too-fast people in a hoarse and angry voice.

Hefin wished he had a good excuse to use a hoarse and angry voice.

It was already eight in the morning, four hours since Destiny received a call from PJ,
Paul
, he’d introduced himself as, telling him he was following the ambulance he’d called for Sarah when he found her looking blue and gasping for air after Sam called him to see her because he was stuck at work.

After Destiny had called Sam, and told him to be with Sarah so Destiny could spend time with Hefin.

He squeezed Destiny a little tighter to his side.

Destiny’s friend Lacey was somewhere behind the double doors, too. Not even family was allowed unless they happened to be angry doctors, but Lacey was a nurse and received permission since she “floated,” whatever that meant, at this hospital.

There wasn’t a single place alongside his body where he couldn’t feel Destiny, but she felt miles away. Her mouth had been set in the same position for hours. She hadn’t cried even while her eyes had gotten more and more red. She refused coffee, refused a packet of biscuits he bought from a machine for her, refused even water.

She just stared at the double doors and passively let him hold her against his side.

Paul was in a chair across from them.

Paul was built a bit like Hefin, actually, tall enough, a bit skinny, but where Hefin often felt that he looked like the shore rat he was, raggedy, Paul looked like a film actor.

Paul was even wearing sunglasses indoors and made it look somehow normal.

One might say that both Paul and Hefin had curly brown hair, for example, in the same way one might say that a turned-over packing crate and an Eames were both something to sit on.

If possible, Paul was more quiet than Destiny. Neither had truly said a word, but Paul’s quiet was of the sort that created an atmosphere around him that quieted everything within several paces of where he sat. Also, the man did not move. Not a flicker.