Melusine

Michele Coppola

The Wreckage

All of her friends say get out there. Meet people. Distract yourself. Then one morning, you’ll wake up and think about those banana nut muffins at the coffee shop where you stop after your run, instead of how he came over and slept in your bed the night before the day he knew – had planned – that you would run into his new girlfriend. There had been plenty of deep kissing, gentle caressing and that horrific lie: I love you. Then the next afternoon, while he was recovering from hernia surgery, there was this woman. She was rubbing his teenage daughter’s back, comforting her. She could have been an aunt, a close friend.

But no: This is the woman he’s been seeing for two months, a woman already so ingratiated with his family that she picked up his mother, in the car he wouldn’t let you drive, to bring her to the hospital. She has a very flabby rump and looks like the messy kind who would cry if she knew that the man whose family she is so lovingly caring for was in another woman’s bed just fourteen hours ago, cupping his hands around a taut ass buoyed for his benefit with hours on the elliptical machine. He is 48, with a successful business and children and the ability to be a decent human being, but not the desire.

“I’m sorry, Becca,” was all he had said, sitting in a recovery bed hooked up to an IV delivering pain medication and knowing, so sure, that she wouldn’t make him pay for his crime, not here, not now. She said nothing. Well, maybe she said something, but she can’t remember what it was. Ten minutes later she was in her car. Thirty minutes later she was at the county line and it was dark, and she was still driving, her mouth sticky, her hands white on the wheel.

The club where Becca is meeting the singles group is already crawling with boys in white and striped long-sleeved shirts, deliberately untucked over well-fitting jeans. They hold their beers by the neck in that casual three-finger way with thumb opposed and look at her when she walks in, notice the long legs and silky hair. Then they see the well camouflaged could-be-forty face and turn away. She doesn’t care. It has been three months since she saw Victor at the hospital. His hernia has probably healed up a bit now so he can get his own coffee. Not that he will, of course. The new girlfriend will be waiting on him still while he tells her that no one has ever made coffee just the way he likes it, the way she does. A dollop of cream, a shake of cinnamon, boiling hot.

“I’m sick of the games,” says the guy sitting across the table from Becca, shaking the ice in his glass. “I’ve got six kids. Well, she’s got ‘em now, but still. No time for it.”

The corner of Becca’s mouth lifts. “I hope you don’t lead with that,” she says. “The six kids, I mean.”

He looks at her and with a quick raise of the eyebrows, turns to the hopefully softer woman to his right. Obviously he is new to the group; the sharing of inappropriate details doesn’t usually start until many drinks later into the evening.

“I was settin’ off fireworks with my boys at the family 4th of July cookout, and she was lightin’ up my brother in the backseat of our Taurus,” said James at an organized game night two weeks ago. “They can kiss my ass if they think I’m goin’ to the wedding.”

A couple of months before, the best confession had come from Allison, a teary new arrival who found out her husband had spent over twenty-eight thousand dollars on internet porn. “And it was disgusting, not just people screwing, but doing it in furry costumes!”

“What do you mean? Like bears and gorillas and stuff?” Becca had asked incredulously.

“Yeah, and cartoon characters! Oh my God – I can never go to Disney World again!” The table erupted, and Ace, one of the group regulars, took the opportunity to reach over and gently squeeze Allison’s shoulder. Becca knew from experience that Ace, a good kisser with intentionally messy brown hair and a syrupy voice, could be very good for taking the edge off. Hopefully he had made poor Allison feel like less of a blown-up mess that night, although she hadn’t been to another event since.

Becca smiles to herself. There’s lots of new people here this evening, so there’s likely to be some fresh material, but what she really wants to do is dance. It’s the one time she can free herself from the weight, the heavy chunks of regret and shards of fury that weigh down her arms and legs and sit in her stomach, filling it, making it impossible to eat much since Victor had surgically removed her from his life. The man could dance, she had to give him that, and it’s one of those things her mind can’t accept that she’ll never do again: moving her hips in time with his, feeling his warm fingers drumming on her backside.

She’s sitting slouched back in her chair, hand tapping along her thigh to the beat of the music… some '80s song she used to like, her wine glass full and warm in her other hand. She doesn’t really like wine, but likes the men who like women who like wine. Or at least she did, before she found out that they will lie to you, too.

She feels the wet breath of someone too close to her ear. “Man, this is just pathetic,” he says, sliding into the seat next to her. She looks over her shoulder at him, taking in the quirky glasses and boots. He would have been just her style twenty years ago – ironic, maybe works in tech support, fun in bed.

“You talking about the Island of Misfit Exes here or the Kajagoogoo?”

“Oh, is that who it is? My mom used to listen to this song all the time,” he says, slightly bobbing his head and smiling.

Becca takes a sip of her wine, wincing at the bite on her tongue. “I’m hoping you think I’m younger than I am, because otherwise you’re not getting laid tonight.” Usually they get up and walk away when she cuts them, but this one just smiles. Drunk, Becca thinks.

“Dean,” he says, sticking out his hand. “Wanna dance?”

“Okay, but you’ll have to work around my walker,” Becca stood up and brushed nothing off her jeans, then followed him to the dance floor. Fast songs don’t require touching or eye contact, even though Becca found herself wanting to do both. Instead, she closed her eyes and swung her hair around, letting her hips rock and sway and take her back to 28, before there was so much debris littering her mind, blocking her vision. Or even back three years, before that man with his poetry and bad gut and two sad kids had conned her into thinking she mattered to him.

“I wish I’d met you later. You’re not supposed to be here yet,” Victor had said to her one night when she was over at his place for dinner. They stayed in most weekends to save money. He told her that with child support and alimony and making the house payment on his own that things were tight, and he wasn’t going to take her out unless he could pay.

Becca turned from the sink where she was cleaning plates. “What do you mean?”

“Just that, after my divorce, I wanted to be free for a while. I was married for 20 years. Then you came along, and I’m back in a relationship again, you know?”

There it was, Becca thought. That was the moment I should have known. She squeezed her eyes together, feeling the burn of tears. No more drinking tonight.

“Hey! You okay?” Dean put a hand on her shoulder, dragging her back to the moment, this moment when it’s already over and she’s dancing with this guy who probably has never known a time when you didn’t carry a phone with you everywhere.

“Yeah, just tired,” she says, looking up at him. He’s actually quite adorable, really. She manages a half-hearted smile and heads back to the table. He follows, and even pulls out her chair.

“You’ve done your good deed helping old ladies across the dance floor,” she tosses as she sits down. “You’re free to move on.”

He shakes his head and laughs. “What are you, 40? 42? Not that you look it,” he says. “But I can tell you are anyway.”

“Yeah, the Kajagoogoo reference always gives me away.”

“No, the bitterness does,” he says, getting up to leave.

Later that same night she finds herself on the road at 3 a.m., just blocks from Victor’s house, wanting to drive by, knowing she will. She is sleepy, so sleepy, her eyes open halfway, and she can see the clumps of volumizing mascara in her lashes. As if thicker lashes or a tight ass will get me what I want. What she wants is to drive by and be pleasantly surprised that his house has burned to the ground.

The wheel jerks from her hands. Squeal then…crunch. The radio stops. There is a tree in her face and her forehead throbs but there is no pain, just the taste of iron and salt in her mouth. Blood.

Someone’s knocking on the window. Hey, hey, you alright? You alright, lady? It echoes in her head, she thinks she’s shaking her head yes, but she can’t be sure. Looks like she might be hurt. There is the screaming of steel as it protests being ripped away. Everything is blurry and then she feels herself lifted up and down, strong, warm male hands running under her thighs and back. Ma’am? Ma’am? Can you hear me?

She turns her head to the right and it throbs, but she can just focus, barely, on the sad wreckage of her car, embracing a large jaded oak tree. She loved that car. The day she’d bought it, Becca had been so proud: Her first new vehicle after a lifetime of pre-owns whose new car smell had faded away years before. The custom midnight blue metallic paint glitters even now, just like the diamonds of windshield glass on the pavement. The sporty sedan’s crushed-in face embraces the stoic trunk of an old suburban oak, headlights still blazing in shock and illuminating the street sign on the corner. Becca feels a tear slide down into her ear as she is lifted into the ambulance. She is too far away. He won’t hear the sirens from his bedroom, the one she helped him repaint last year. She almost died for him tonight, and he is still undisturbed and dreaming.

Michele Coppola is a veteran radio personality living in Portland, Oregon who has been copywriting professionally for business and broadcast for nearly 20 years. Her most recent fiction and creative non-fiction work will appear in the feminist journal So To Speak and the regional literary magazine Perceptions in early 2010. When she’s not writing, her hobbies include bad karaoke, non-uphill hiking, attempting to train her dogs, political arguments with her deluded right-wing husband, and deep-fried food.