Better That Way

Chapter 8 - Delaney

Nine days is a long time when you are eighteen and have nothing to do.

I worked ten to four handing out kickballs in a rec center that smells like floor varnish and hot rubber. I went to Marissa Tolliver’s graduation party and stood by the chip table for ninety minutes with a red cup of something I didn’t drink, agreeing my way through conversations I do not remember one word of. I let my mother put me in the car and drive me over to Charleston to look at extra-long twin sheets, which are a real thing colleges make you buy. I stood in a Target aisle holding two identical packages of gray sheets while she asked which one I liked.

I could not tell you which one I picked.

I reorganized the folder. Twice.

And the entire time, underneath all of it, running like a faucet in another room: he has not called me, he has not called me, he has not called me.

He did not have my number. There is no version of those nine days in which that man could have called me.

Dale Cutler’s garage is in the phone book. It is painted on a sign out on Route 9. I could have had that number inside of four minutes.

I did not go and get it. Going and getting it would have meant saying out loud, in my own kitchen, that I wanted it.

Which was fine. It was fine. We got arrested together. That is not a relationship. I had a plan, and the plan did not have a boy in it, and it certainly did not have that boy in it.

And if I said one word of any of it out loud in September — in a dormitory six hundred miles from here, to a roommate I had not met yet — it would sound insane.

I am aware of how this sounds. I was aware then. I had one night with a person and I was behaving like something had been taken from me.

On the ninth day I drove out there.

I told myself I was going to look at the airfield. Like a landmark. Like a woman visiting a historical marker.

**********

I went under the fence by myself in the dark.

It was harder alone, with nobody to hold the wire up. I had to do the thing where you lie on your back and shove with your heels and shimmy under. The wire came down on my collarbone twice, and I said something out loud that I am glad nobody heard.

I got a stripe of chain-link rust down the front of a white shirt and a scrape on my left hip I found later in the shower.

Filthy and victorious, I walked out to the mowed line, that same spot, and sat down to wait.

It came at eleven-forty, like he said it would. I did not scream this time. And it was …

It was nothing. It was a plane.

It went over and the noise went with it and left me sitting in the dark with my ears ringing and mosquitoes finding my ankles.

I sat there in the wet grass in a ruined shirt and did the arithmetic. Eleven miles, at eleven o’clock at night, to look at a piece of machinery I don’t care about.

I was not a person who did things like this.

I didn’t know when exactly I had stopped being that person.

Then something took hold of the chain-link down at the low corner and shook it, and my whole body went stupid — hands gone cold, something dropping fast behind my ribs — because for one full second I was certain it was Machen.

It was a person coming under the fence. On his back, shoving with his heels.

He got up and stood there a while at the bottom of the field, a good way off, not coming any closer. Long enough that I started to feel ridiculous.

Then he started walking.

**********

He came out to where I sat, stopping about six feet off.

Rubbing the back of his neck, he looked at the hangar. And the windsock. And a patch of grass somewhere off near my shoe. Then he wiped his palms down the thighs of his jeans, which did not need doing.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.”

Silence. A long one. Wes Cutler silence, the kind you could park a car in.

So of course I filled it. “I was driving by. Which is a lie, nobody drives by here, there’s nothing past here but the reservoir and I wasn’t going to the reservoir. I came out here on purpose to sit in a field, alone, at night, like a person with a serious problem. You can say something whenever you’d like.”

He looked at the shirt instead of at me. “You got rust on your shirt,” he said.

“I’m aware.”

“There’s a gate.”

“There’s a —” I stopped. “There is?”

“Mm,” he said, and sat down. He did it slow, the way you sit down near a dog you don’t know. Not next to me. About three feet off.

Close enough that I could see the shape of him and not close enough for anything at all.

We stayed there until the mail run. He didn’t touch me and I didn’t touch him and I have never in my life been so aware of three feet of grass.

When it was over he walked me down to the low corner, held the wire up while I went under, and came through after me on his back.

We went up the shoulder to my car without saying anything. He stood there while I got the door open, one hand up on the roof of it.

“You working tomorrow?” he said.

“Ten to four.”

“Okay.”

He knocked twice on the top of my door frame with two knuckles and walked off toward his truck.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. He said okay and got in his truck.

I drove home doing about forty in a fifty-five with the radio off and both hands on the wheel, and I was smiling so hard my face hurt, over a man saying the word okay.