Fiction

His name is Avery. He sells insurance for the Bobby Goode Insurance Agency of Lake City. He used to sell computers at Circuit City. That’s what he did when I met him.

I was twenty-three. I was in grad school, masters in English. I went in to Circuit City to find a CD I couldn’t find at Best Buy, and he was working in electronics. I brushed him off at first – those salesmen could always be so annoying – but when he saw I was holding a Britney Spears and White Stripes album, he came up to me again.

“I refuse to let you buy that.” He grabbed the Britney CD out of my hand. I blinked, then laughed. He looked frightened. “You’re not gonna pull mace out of your pocketbook or anything, are you?”

“No.” I shook my head and smiled at him. I noticed he was cute. Blondish-brown hair, cut short and slightly curly. His tan suggested he spent a lot of time outside. His blue eyes were so pale they almost faded into his face, but they made me comfortable the first moment I looked into them. They also made me nervous. The faded-out dots reached too deep inside for a stranger. “I would like to buy it, though.”

“You can’t buy Britney. It’s wrong. Just download it from Limewire. No one will ever know.”

I held up the White Stripes CD. “Can I buy this one?”

“I’ve never heard of them. You’re on your own with that one.”

I walked over to the W’s, flipped to the disk, and brought it back to him. “Buy it right now. It’ll change your life. Even if you don’t like it the first time you listen to it, keep listening to it. Especially tracks seven and thirteen. Seriously. You will never be the same.”

“Okay.” He nodded as he clutched the CD. “So, do you like go to college or something?”

“Grad school.”

“Fancy. What for?”

“English.”

“What are you going to do with a degree in English?”

I smirked. “Not work at Circuit City.”

He laughed, a full laugh that came from deep within. It made his eyes crinkle in the corners. I found it disturbingly sexy.

“I’m Avery,” he finally said.

“Nice to meet you, Avery.”

And with that, I left.

Avery raised my daughter. Our daughter. Her name is Ophelia. I didn’t even like Hamlet, but he told me, “We can’t very well name her Lady MacBeth, now can we?” So, we named her Ophelia, because Hamlet was his favorite. I was so surprised he had even read Shakespeare, let alone liked and understood one of them, that I probably would have let him name her Laertes if he wanted.

Ophelia was an accident. I hate using that term, and I would never have called her that to her face. Avery and I always tried to be careful. Condoms, birth control – we thought we had it covered. But I was always forgetful, and taking my pill every day didn’t seem important. We used condoms, didn’t we? One night we got carried away too quickly, and before either one of us realized what was going on, we were wrapped around each other on the couch without a condom. We thought the birth control had protected us until I missed my period.

Oops?

I was twenty-five and teaching at the time. Our school had some moral clause that stated unwed teachers couldn’t get pregnant. So, I quit. Gathered up all my magnets, posters, and books one day and walked out without a word. I really hated teaching anyway. Getting pregnant just gave me the excuse I needed.

I moved in with Avery. He thought it was important for the parents-to-be to experience the entire pregnancy together. I was tired of living alone. Moving in with Avery seemed like a great idea.

One day when I was four months along, he came home with a hand-held camcorder.

“What is that?” I asked, rolling my eyes as he walked around filming me from different angles.

“To document Dot.” He had started calling the baby Dot because it looked like a dot on the ultrasound.

“We can’t afford it.”

“I bought it at work. I got the employee’s discount. Plus, a couple of the guys chipped in some money so we could get it. They said it’s really important to film everything during a pregnancy. Some of them even said they filmed some of the sex they had while pregnant.” He looked half-nervous, half-excited at the prospect.

“Absolutely not!” I yelled. “You are not filming my fat, naked, pregnant ass. So, don’t even think about it.”

Avery was generally old-fashioned. Filming sex wasn’t really his thing, but I think the prospect of having a baby made him realize how old he was about to become. He was thirty. Thirty, unmarried, still working at Circuit City, a college drop-out. I think part of him wanted to hang on to any tiny thread of youth he could.

But that thread did not include my naked ass on camera.

Avery never cried. Even when I didn’t tell him or Ophelia goodbye.

“You again.”

I had returned to Circuit City a few weeks after I first met him. I wanted to buy another CD, and I half-hoped I’d see the cute blonde guy working in electronics again.

“I’m back to buy *N Sync this time.” I held up a copy of No Strings Attached.

“What’s your name?”

“It’s not important.”

“I need to know. I need to know who to thank in my biopic when I talk about the mysterious woman who changed my life with a CD.”

“You listened to it then?” I asked, excited. I put the CD back in the rack; I wasn’t really going to buy it. I already owned it.

“I went home and broke out every Britney album and realized I’d missed my calling as a Britney impersonator in Vegas.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m a funny guy.”

“And modest, apparently.”

“What’s your name?”

“Buy me a Pumpkin Spice Latte, and maybe.”

“I get off in two hours.”

Avery pressed his fingertips into my skin, leaving white circles against pink flesh. Ophelia was asleep down the hall. She was four, and it was her first night in her big girl room all by herself. The rain was soft against the window.

“You have a lot of moles.”

“Thanks,” I replied sardonically. I tried to pull the sheet up to cover my exposed body, but he wouldn’t let me.

“It’s not a bad thing. Just an observation.” He touched one under my arm, on my breast, between two ribs, two on my stomach, on my groin. “We could connect the dots.”

“You are not drawing on me.”

“I wonder what it would be,” he went on, completely unaware I had even spoken. “This is a rectangle…a triangle. There’s more than shapes here, though. It’s like a puzzle.”

“A puzzle of moles on my torso. Sexy.” I rolled my eyes and sighed.

“It’s fascinating. I’m gonna figure it out. If it takes me twenty years, I’m going to figure out the puzzle of your torso.”

“That important, huh?”

“It’s that important, yes.”

And he kissed each mole, then he kissed my lips.

I grew up next to railroad tracks. The trains would come by three times a day and shake the entire foundation of our small house. I got used to it. I eventually could sleep through anything.

I always dreamed of train whistles. I could close my eyes and see white dots piercing the darkness, hear the whine of the wheels, listen for the high-pitched release of the whistle. I would walk on the tracks, towards the train. It would be coming towards me, and I’d be going towards it, and I knew we would meet in the middle like two long-lost relatives embracing after years apart.

Avery told me it meant I missed home, missed my mother and father. He was probably right, but I never told him that.

“You have weird dreams,” he would always tell me.

“All dreams are weird.”

“But yours are detailed.”

“I’m creative. I’m one of those right-brained people. I dream in color and all that.”

“I think it’s weird. No one should remember their dreams that vividly. I think you make it up.”

“Maybe I do. You’ll never know, will you?”

“Would you lie to me?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I trust you either way.”

Avery had big hands. They were my favorite thing about him (after the eyes). The veins were prominent, blue roads leading me to his secret places, like a map into his life. I loved feeling them spread across my back, holding me close. I loved watching them wrapped around a baseball bat right before the crack of ball meeting wood.

I would wake up some mornings, and Avery would have his hands pressed against my body – thigh, shoulder, back, elbow, butt. He hated not to touch me, like he was afraid I would disappear.

“Marry me,” he whispered one night. I was lying unabashedly naked on his bed, six weeks pregnant and enjoying the last days when my body would look pre-baby. He was stretched out alongside me, sheets pooled around his feet. A thin sheen of sweat was drying on his naked hip, and the light from the moon was reflecting off it.

“Are you insane?” My answer.

“I’m serious.” He propped himself up on his elbow, rested his chin in the palm of his hand. He looked down at me with those pale blue eyes, searching inside me for something I wasn’t ready to give. I wanted to, I wanted to give him everything, but I couldn’t.

“No…” I started. His eyes had me tongue-tied. They were intense, neither kind nor cruel. He had a disturbing way of looking completely neutral, or maybe it was indifferent. He could wipe all emotion away from his face and just use his eyes. It scared me. It scared me in the way that I had no clue what was going on behind them, inside that brain of his. He gave no clues, no hints for me to react on. It was just endless, faded blue dots.

I took a deep breath and looked out the window. I thought I heard a train whistle in the distance. The sky was full of shining white dots, smaller than his eyes, but no less intense. I wondered if I could take his eyes and place them in the heavens, make them into stars and preserve them forever. When Avery died, the world would lose something. No one had eyes like he did. Maybe that’s what stars were. Maybe the astronomers got it wrong. They weren’t gigantic balls of burning gas light-years away; they were eyes plucked out by greedy lovers who never wanted to let go, and who flung them into the heavens for safe-keeping.

I glanced back at Avery. I wanted to marry him. I wanted to be with him forever. I didn’t care that he still worked at Circuit City. I didn’t care that he thought the word quixotic had something to do with being fast. I wanted to own those faded-out blue eyes, never let them look at anyone else like they were looking at me that moment.

If I could have breathed, I might have said yes.

Instead, I laughed awkwardly, kissed him, and mumbled something about him being crazy. I got up to go to the bathroom before he could protest.

Ophelia was three. She had her daddy’s blonde curls and her mother’s brain.

“Thank God she got your brains,” Avery said. “If she’d have turned out as dumb as me, we may have had to give her up for adoption.”

“I’ll make sure to tell her you said that. Maybe when she’s old enough, she’ll give you up for adoption.” Ophelia was inside her red toy box, almost just like the one I had when I was a kid. I used to dress up in my mother’s nightgowns and perform concerts on top of it. I kept waiting for Ophelia to be old enough to do that.

I loved watching Avery’s big hands hold Ophelia. He would lift her up like she was a feather, and he would fly her through the air like Superman or hold her high and blow raspberries on her tummy. She would giggle so loud it sounded like she was shrieking. She was a happy baby.

Whenever he held her, I watched the veins in his hands, the muscles in his arms. I had always thought men with babies were sexy, but Avery made my knees weak. I knew we hadn’t intended to have Ophelia, but it was the best thing that had ever happened to us. I had never seen Avery so happy. He glowed every time we were together. His face was rarely without the crinkles around the corners of his eyes; those pale eyes seemed to burn from inside of him. Sometimes I wanted to freeze them like that forever, freeze them in the rarity of a perfect happy moment.

“I’m glad Ophelia got your eyes,” I said one day.

“But you have beautiful eyes. I love your eyes,” he argued. I shook my head. I looked at my baby girl, a spitting image of her father, and said a silent thank-you prayer. She concentrated very hard on a bug moving across the table, her faded blue eyes narrowed as she watched it inch slowly towards the edge.

“Your eyes are better.”

“I think you’re nuts.”

I didn’t tell him that his eyes were stars, two dots that would one day scatter the sky. I didn’t tell him that our daughter had star eyes, too.

Avery was afraid of trains. He would get nervous whenever he heard the chug-a-chug-a-chug of the engine, feel the earth vibrating beneath his toes. I felt at home.

I took him to the tracks one night, the ones down by where I grew up. The house I lived in was torn down years ago to make room for a subdivision, but the train tracks are still there.

“I’m not setting foot on those tracks.” Avery stopped yards away from the gravel, arms crossed as he adamantly shook his head.

“You’re such a baby.” I left him there in the dark and ran up the steep incline, pebbles shifting and slipping under every step. When I got to the tracks, I stepped onto the metal, then down onto a cross tie. It felt like my dream.

“Come down from there! You’re gonna die! Didn’t you see Fried Green Tomatoes? Every girl has seen that movie, and that dude dies in the beginning because he was playing on the train tracks. That will be you!”

“I’m not gonna die, fool!” I couldn’t see him in the dark, could only stare blindly in the direction of his voice. I turned around in a circle, arms held wide like propellers. “If I turn fast enough,” I shouted, “I wonder if I could take flight.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No. Are you?”

“No.”

“Get your ass up here.”

“I hate trains. You know that.”

“Face your fears, Avery. No time like the present!”

“I would like to keep the present the present, thank you very much. I’m not going to get run over by a train.”

I walked down the tracks about half a mile before I turned back. When I got back roughly where I started, I came face to face with Avery. He wasn’t happy with me, but I didn’t say a word. I just kept walking on the train tracks.

This time, he followed.

I left the house like any other day. It took me longer to get ready because Ophelia was crying; she had her first nightmare in her big girl room. It was only her fourth night in the room. After I calmed her down, I was running late, so I rushed out with just a wave, got into my car, and headed to work.

Then everything went blank.

I thought it was odd when I woke up later on a train. I hadn’t remembered getting on a train. The train was peaceful though, and warm. The car was empty and had an ethereal yellow glow. I thought about how much I wished Avery and Ophelia were here with me. I wanted Ophelia to like trains. She needed something from me other than my brains.

I looked out the window as the train rolled past another train in a long, endless dark tunnel. Through the vast windows, an array of irrational images. Images so close I could almost touch them. Avery and Ophelia. They were in our car, wearing all black, and Ophelia was crying. I banged my fist on the window, trying to get their attention.

In a flash, they were gone.

A new train car. Avery was carrying Ophelia to school dressed in a new pink dress and her hair in pigtails.

Avery teaching Ophelia how to ride a bike.

The Christmas tree Ophelia picked out with her mommy’s star on top.

Avery’s first date after.

Honor’s day at Ophelia’s school where she got best in every subject.

Avery’s first day at the new job and the lunch Ophelia left him on the counter in a Spiderman lunchbox.

Ophelia crying because she had to get braces.

Ophelia’s first boyfriend that Avery hated.

The car for Ophelia that Avery worked overtime and saved for.

Avery showing Ophelia the tape he made of my pregnancy when she turned sixteen.

The fog on the train window as I wiped away twelve years of tears.

I was leaning against the hood of my car when he walked out of Circuit City two hours later.

“Have you been standing here this whole time?” he asked. I rolled my eyes.

“I went to Target. I wouldn’t stand around for two hours for a complete stranger. I’m not desperate.”

“You just really want that Pumpkin Spice Latte.”

“Pretty much.”

“Do you want to walk? It’s not that far.”

“Sure.”

I fell into step beside him. I suppressed my giggle. I wasn’t even sure what I was doing. I had a boyfriend, but there was something about this guy. I just knew it.

We crossed the empty parking lots towards the Starbucks, the only thing left open this late in the shopping center. He cleared his throat. I looked at him. He smiled, all the way to his eyes, the way that made them crinkle. My heart skipped a beat, and he dug into me with those faded-out eyes again. He shyly slipped his hand into mine.

I heard a train whistle in the distance.