Still Life With Snow

The window was leaking again. Streamers of dirty water crawled over the wrong side of the glass, pushed sideways by centrifugal force, or velocity, or was it  – well, whatever. It meant her right elbow was wet and cold, that was what mattered. Rain spattered the windshield, drummed on the roof with a hollow, insistent mutter, pushed its way past glass and metal, a steady irritant to her already on-edge mood, an erosion of what self-restraint she could still claim. Shelby sat in a thin-lipped silence as unrelenting as the rain and glared out at neon brake lights, shop windows full of glitter and promise. Beside her Mark navigated Portland’s rush-hour maze with jerky, too-sudden stops and starts, his familiar and altogether juvenile response to arguments launched while in transit.

Like a four-year-old, Shelby thought, not for the first or even the hundredth time. They didn’t need to have children. She had married one. Holding herself utterly still to display her indifference to Mark’s mantrum, as her mother called it, she stared at shoppers huddled under umbrellas and ducking under awnings. More and more lately she found herself ending their frequent spats not with shouts or pleas but this cold silence, which held words more like weapons than speech: words dismaying in their malice. Words she wouldn’t be able to pretend away the next day when routine dampened their anger, and prudence reinstated the veneer of affection that was, she thought with an indifference that chilled her, about all they had now. A thin polish over a deep, roiling discontent: like the hard lump under her navel, that leached all the compassion from her.

The words crowded in her throat, making her teeth ache.

A jolt, as they missed the car in front by a margin of inches. Her seatbelt locked, pinching one breast and squashing the other. Shelby completed the involuntary forward swing of her left arm by switching the radio on, not acknowledging Mark’s furtive little did-that-scare-you glance.

Toddler.

She didn’t care. When had that happened? Eight years; two miscarriages, laughter and tears, confessions and fights and familiarity that could soothe or slice, sex that grew more and less frequent and more and less imaginative in odd cycles she had long since given up trying to understand, and now she felt – nothing. It should have scared her.

It only made her tired.

The rain slowed, became a timid patter. Low music issued from the speakers. It was one of Mark’s stations. She hit the next button without waiting to hear what the song was, a petty gesture little better than his staccato driving. Jingle Bells – ugh. Next button.

How she loathed the holiday season, with its polish and shine, its same-old-songs, its sugar cookies, its credit cards and its lies.

Next and next. Mark hated it when she did this, flipping through station after station without pause. She stabbed at the buttons with smug satisfaction, knowing he wouldn’t speak until she did, and she planned to spend the next half hour barely breathing for quiet, hoarding accusations like a dragon with a pile of poison gold. Electric guitar wailed out at her, a mournful rocking blues beat that made her pause in her wordless antagonism; she sat back as Mark cut another glance at her and dodged a charter bus, heading for the on-ramp. After a moment he reached for the radio, and Shelby felt an outraged anger she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of a moment ago shoot up her spine, thinking he’d sunk to a new low in their little war and was going to switch the channel. Her hand shot out of its own accord and closed over his; she jerked it back with a little hiss of irritation meant to tell him it wasn’t a conciliatory gesture, having broken her silence without a word, damnittall! She turned to the window, sullen and shocked at the fury in her, all out of proportion to its cause. Spite choked her.

Mark turned the volume dramatically, blaringly up – more pathetic childishness. Queasily sick of that response, Shelby couldn’t muster indifference this time. She bit her tongue until she tasted blood, wishing for distraction: a jackknifing tractor-trailer, a high-speed car chase, a plane falling from the sky – anything to end this moment, bring back the apathy that had gripped her, which from the perspective of her sudden rage (and the long lonely hurt shivering under it) seemed like blissful peace. The road blurred by outside the glass. Glare of headlights, faint honk of horns; the water on the wrong side of the window ran into her temple and streaked her cheek. Acid rain, she decided dourly, and had to squelch an inexplicable impulse to press her tongue to the glass, to swallow that industrial venom into her. Her ears were battered by the music.

Too bloody accurate. She resented the coincidence, the clichéd Hollywood timing, even as she felt her chin begin to tremble. Stupid, tiresome reaction, a cliché in and of itself.

With little left of dignity to cling to, Shelby lunged once more for the buttons, but the sight of Mark’s expression, the tears on his face, red in the brake lights of other cars, froze her in place.

She stared. The refrain seemed to come from outside the glass: from the dark and the rain, the halos of headlights and the hum of the wheels.

Shelby sat back, all her anger draining into the asphalt rolling away underneath them.

Mark flicked off the radio with a practiced swipe and knuckled his eyes like a child. He didn’t look at her, pretending to be engrossed in the mechanics of driving, transparent as the toddler she had silently compared him to; and in fact she could, for a moment, see the boy he must have been in the jut of his chin. The hard lump under her navel was suddenly, almost painfully, present.

“He’s yours too,” she said, not knowing she was going to speak until the sound of her voice, so loud in the stillness, frightened her. She had to get a breath before she could finish the thought, past pride or shame, she wasn’t sure. Mark looked over and nearly wrapped them around the exit ramp sign. It was hard to talk around the uglier words she didn’t now need. They would probably sit in her forever, waiting until she thought she did need them; a darker sort of creation, but just as much a product of the two of them as the cells dividing endlessly under her skin.

Tears stung her own eyes, and she gave a watery sniff, resigned to hope, which was terrible, but better than nothing – bitter and sweet. “What do you want to name him?”

Mark gave a small sigh, still a little watery himself, and took her hand without looking away from the road ahead. White drew her eyes back to the window.

Outside the cold grew colder, and the rain found another thing to be.

lyrics from Bittersweet, by Big Head Todd & the Monsters