Window to Heaven
Maybe you’ll remember Marlena? Maybe you won’t? Does it matter? Have you never lived with the regret of a woman lost? Have you never stepped around a corner and everything changed, changed utterly? Story begins with the next breath. When does it end? Let’s not talk about endings just yet.
I
Spilled Whisky
Hardin Rolf should have stopped at the first hotel room he could find to shower and change. He needed to get rid of the fresh reek of Bourbon. Aside from stripping his ruined tie — a silk red and blue regimental affair he’d had since he was a young man — and tossing it on the bench seat of the reconditioned Ford diesel pickup, he did nothing.
To be on the road smelling like spilled whisky was asking for it. Any police officer who stopped him for almost any reason, and he’d have more explaining to do than he’d likely be able to pull off.
When he showered, that might mean the final symbolic break with Marlena. The roar of the International diesel engine soothed him. Knowing better, he just kept heading down the Shenandoah valley. The mountains outlined the valley in the distance on both sides of the road, the same sight the earliest settlers heading West to that great untapped interior would have seen, but unlike those early settlers he wasn’t going to something new. He was returning to a life, a history, the pull of home stronger with each mile.
Getting Marlena out of his mind was going to take some time, if he ever did. Maybe he didn’t want to. If he was pretty sure he’d never see her again, he wanted to save the memory, keep it like a little saved pebble.
He wanted to tell her how wrong he was. How would that go? I’m sorry I’m the man I am. I meant to be more. I just never managed. And then there was the imbalance he couldn’t talk about. As far as he could tell, he had zero remorse for his sudden turns into violence. He saved his remorse for the little discourtesies he might have sidestepped. He wished he were a better liar. He wished he could have kept up the illusion longer that he was more than he was.
Her body, her fluid, remarkable body in motion had marked him. Those tiny characteristic feminine gestures: would time rob him of the memory? If lying to a woman as perceptive and intuitive as Marlena was a losing proposition, and a matter of time before she took her measure of him, he couldn’t regret a second with her, if it did feel like stealing from her life to add to his.
He’d tried to explain it to her, meant to explain, wanted to explain, but he knew before he started that she’d never understand. Maybe she could understand. Maybe it was his fault that he didn’t have the words, words he’d never find, not really.
She was alive in a way he couldn’t be in those little restaurants, on those streets, in that little apartment. And in the end, she’d ask questions he could never answer.
He hurt for Virginia. Driving across his state reminded him too much of what was lost. The logging trucks daily carried away the vast forest that had covered the state to leave the hallowed ground of the great forest receding into tamed nothingness. Crossing the bridges reminded him of the polluted waters, once filled with fur and fish, and shaded by heavy timber. Only in its special corners was it the same as it was before. Even then, it wasn’t. The chestnut was gone. In his childhood, he remembered the great hollowed out chestnut logs and the stumps. He played in them, hunted from them, slept nights in them, all killed by a blight that hit before he was born. Sometimes the chestnut sprouted, but they never took, dying young. Now, the stumps, those remnants, were mostly gone, rotted into oblivion.
Once a thing was gone, it was gone. He stayed with the Interstates. They weren’t faster than going down 460 and 24 and the center of the state, but they avoided Appomattox Courthouse. A way of life had been lost there.
Some things were to keep. Truth could be the greatest cruelty.
It was only a few years ago when everything changed. When he had nothing, was nothing. Since then, he had become less than nothing. If he couldn’t talk of the moment, he relived it often enough.
