And David had cancer, his mind piped up, did you get that part?
Erik turned off the radio and drove out of the parking lot. He kept his eyes on the road, steered, braked, signaled. Somehow he got home, but he had no recollection of the route. In his head, the refrain of “The Man I Love” echoed, swelling violins and woodwind arpeggios. Instead of the road, he could only see the pas de deux. Daisy in a poppy pink dress, running half the length of the stage and leaping onto Will’s back, transforming momentum into crystal immobility.
He couldn’t be here.
“No shit,” Erik said to the windshield.
Other than, “I was in the lighting booth with my boyfriend,” Daisy hadn’t a thing to say about him.
Not even his name.
It hurt.
But her voice. Out of the past, through the speakers of his car, he heard her talking. It seemed incredible she was out there, real, flesh and bone, with a voice sounding exactly as he remembered. Amazing how all of them were still out there and real. Will and Lucky, Kees. John. Even David. All of them there in Lancaster, just last week, while Erik was here in New York, safe beyond the charred and smoking struts and beams of his bridge.
Daisy’s voice. At one point it had fractured into little slivers of pain.
“The shooting changed me,” she said. “It changed who I was and I didn’t like her.”
She described part of herself as haunted. Spoken of things she lost she would never get back.
Me, Erik thought when he heard it, leaning forward, his head practically touching the dash. Fingers reaching to caress the radio in a transfixed wonder. The tiniest thawing in his heart. A shift in his atoms he could not prevent.
She means me.
But she didn’t say his name.
Melanie was waiting for him at the steps to the kitchen door. She had left Brockport State, landing a plum job as a music teacher at a private school. She had to commute to East Rochester every day, but the money was good and she loved the work.
“Were you listening to NPR?” she called out before he was out of the car.
“I was.”
“Did you hear it? The thing about Lancaster?”
“I heard it,” he said. He kissed her and went inside, crouched down to be greeted by Harry.
“They barely mentioned you,” she said.
“You think so?” he said, scratching the dog’s ears and neck. “No, they talked about me.”
“Not much, though.” Melanie had pulled two beers from the fridge. She popped one and gave it to him. “Cheers, baby.”
“Sk?l.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
He sat down. “Go where?”
“To Lancaster. To the ceremony.”
“I didn’t know there was one.” Erik took a long drink and let the day fall away from him. Harry put his head on Erik’s knee.
“What do you mean you didn’t know?”
“I didn’t know.” He drank again, running his hand along the dome of Harry’s head, lost in thought. Finally he looked up again. “What?” he said to Melanie’s incredulous expression.
“It’s the ten-year anniversary and nobody called you?”
He shook his head.
She took a pull of her own beer, looking expansive. “How many questions do I get here?”
He smiled at her. She was getting better at respecting the sore spots of his past, not probing. It had been her idea to set limits on how many questions she could ask in a given situation. “Two,” he said. “For a blow job, you can ask three.”
She rolled her eyes. “Have you been back to Lancaster? Ever?”
“No.”
“In ten years, you have never gone back and you’re not in touch with anybody?”
“Mel, those are questions you already know the answers to. I told you what happened and why I had to leave. Nothing’s changed.”
“It’s… I’m sorry, I’m not invalidating what you felt at the time, but it just seems so extreme.”
“It was an extreme situation.”