Cosmic Love

This is the continuation of “The Wind Cries Mary”, a short story you can find here. This part is inspired by the song “Cosmic Love” by Florence + The Machine.

            The eerily vacant streets marched past one by one as Mary guided their car east towards her father’s house. That had been an easy decision, hardly a decision at all actually. At mom’s there would be too many questions. Every so often she’d glance into the mirror and catch a quick glimpse of her reflection, her eyes flitting away when she saw the hardened look of determination still clutching to her flushed cheeks.

            At this hour, only the occasional traffic light impeded her progress. Eventually she made it onto the interstate, joining the sparse group of travelers headed for JFK and graveyard shifters skittering to work. The trip out to Islip usually took forever, but this night she managed to arrive so fast she never got around to turning on the radio. She parked on the driveway behind Judy’s latest BMW truck and sat motionless, wondering which one of them would freak out more at her unannounced 5am visit: her father or her father’s trophy.

            As a concession, she walked around the house to the backyard to wait for them to at least wake up on their own. The snow here hadn’t yet accumulated, so the side-yard fence swung open easily enough, groaning meagerly in rusty middle age. It was still bitterly cold, though the air was far less biting than it had been in Queens. Plus, her fashionable winter garb - red pea coat, black leather gloves, Burberry scarf, and purple knit beanie - kept her warm enough. She found a surprisingly clean and dry Adirondack chair on the back porch and settled in, the familiar yet odd angles providing a sense of comfort. Despite the lack of padding.

            There wasn’t much to look at, just some trees caught in the city’s visual pollution. It was apparently an overcast evening, the sky pitch black but for the soft orange haze of streetlamps. No stars, no moon. And the sun wouldn’t rise for a few hours yet. They’d been up all night arguing, fighting dreary battles destined to fail the both of them. Still though, no dawn, no day. Just stuck in a droning blank starless twilight.

Mary had barely passed Dr. Plotkin’s poetry course (was it already three years ago?), but for some reason she vaguely remembered a line from Masefield… “twilight it is, and the far woods are dark” or some such thing. The idea of twilight had been tugging at her for months, but this particular night coalesced her thoughts into a sluggish epiphany. You always picture twinkling stars and a spotlight moon when you hear that word. But when the sky is utterly blanketed it doesn’t feel the same. It didn’t feel like clouds were obscuring them so much as that they’ve been snuffed out, as if some celestial extinguisher laughingly erased the beauty of the night sky. Some kind of cosmic joke.

It was Jim, she realized suddenly, alarmingly. He’s the one who blanked out the luminosity in her life with his stuffy routines and seemingly ceaseless tirade of peeves and complaints. Mary hugged herself against the cold, musing on that thought. When they first met, he was a comet shooting across the sky. He was funny and warm and bright and daring and dangerous. And he wanted her. He wanted to bring her on his sophomoric campus escapades, breaking into the library at night to put Ché stickers on econ textbooks. The first time he had taken her was deep in the stacks, their passion radiating out from atop the timeless pine table, echoing across the long empty corridors. In those days Mary could barely keep up, blinded by the light in which she happily bathed.

But as any shooting star, his ephemeral brilliance faded fast. College ended, real life began. Rebellion turned to résumés, risky excitement to a frantic search for a steady paycheck. The wide expanse of lives that could be had collapsed to a tiny vapid dot in the span of two years, but shrunk so gradually as to escape notice.

 The past months had been, if anything, a looping series of starless nights. No passion, no excitement. It all seemed so trite, the completion of the actual honeymoon neatly marking the beginning of the end of their romantic life. There came moments when she hated herself for getting swept up by him, for not leaving him before it got so far, for going ahead with everything despite that sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that something as terribly wrong. Those moments starting to come faster and faster, but he’d never given her a definitive excuse to quit.

“Mary?” The heavily muffled voice startled her out of her thoughts, and half out of the chair. “What are you doing out there?” her father asked from behind the winterized screen door, sounding as if he were worlds away. “It’s freezing out there, come on in.” He looked ridiculous dressed in the cold-weather jogging attire of a much younger, skinnier man - all sheen and stretch. If it had been green not black, the outfit would befit only Andy Serkis. This silly image gave Mary her first smile in a day or so, and she eagerly clamored out of the Adirondack and into the kitchen.

“Hi dad, sorry.” She stamped her boots on the mat and shrugged off some of the cold. She leaned in to let him give her a hug, and he happily obliged.

“So what’s my little Mare-bear doing out in the boonies?”

“I kinda don’t want to talk about it,” she replied in an impish, almost ashamed tone. “I think I just need to crash.” It was a pitch perfect impression of herself at thirteen, an act for which her father had no defense whatsoever.

“Sure sure, I’m just going for my run. Obviously.” He gestured towards his gawky body with a neoprene-gloved hand. “Saw your car out front,” he added matter-of-factly.

She just stared back, saying nothing.

“Well, don’t let me keep you. The spare room is all yours.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek and, after holding a peering glance with his little girl’s deep brown eyes for a lingering moment, trotted off warily and left Mary alone in the cool fluorescent light of the kitchen. She debated making coffee or having a bagel, but could barely keep her eyes open. Instead, she took off her boots and climbed into the bed in the yellow bedroom upstairs.

For what felt like a long time, she couldn’t calm her mind enough to even consider sleep. Conversations, both past and potential, burst by continuously. Jim hadn’t actually asked why? when she told him she was leaving, preferring to fight it rather than try and understand. Mary had worked over the question a hundred times, with a hundred different answers each less satisfying and convincing that the last. At times she wept a little, mostly when she thought about telling her mother. Eventually her mind gave in to exhaustion and let her drift off towards a shallow slumber.

Just at that inflection point between wakefulness and sleep, Mary sensed something comforting yet distant in the doziness. It was a soft pounding both felt and heard, the unmistakable rhythmic double-tap thrumming of a heartbeat. She reached over to the other side of the bed, where he was not. With dream-logic she knew he was both miles away in their drafty apartment and right there next to her, his pulse gently keeping time as she fell asleep.

But then the beating stopped, and she was alone again in the darkness. She felt its absence like a shock, and her dream-state ended abruptly with the instantaneous terror of falling. Her mind jumped back to Jim, probably lying awake in the dark of their apartment mulling over his mistakes and faults. She could almost hear him grasping for reason as his denial turned to bargaining. Like all men, he would need to understand and solve everything, this most of all. Maybe it could be fixed, Mary realized, but she didn’t want it to. One of those could-be lives blotted out by their marriage was the right one, that was a stone cold fact she felt keenly in her heart.

Pity welled up in her, along with a few thick tears. Jim wasn’t a bad husband, or a bad guy. He did nothing to earn being yanked around like this. He wasn’t a mouse and she wasn’t a cat. They were, supposedly, adults now, and with that came some modicum of responsibility. She made up her mind then to give him closure, somehow. She didn’t quite know how to pull it off, but he deserved it. The thought comforted her, and at last she was able to relax enough to fall asleep.