Roundabout

"Yeah, yeah, I'm coming..."

Oh fuck... it's Shirley...

+

"Aaron? Are you okay? The ski school called this morning and couldn't get you. Pepi called and asked me drive up and see if you're okay..."

"I got sick last night...some sort of stomach bug..."

"Yeah. Smells kinda like the Jose Cuervo bug. Heard it's going around lately."

"Usually does, this time of year."

"Hey Terry," she said, and the pup leapt into the air. "How ya doin' girl? Need to go outside?"

"No! No, wait..."

But Terry was out the door, running for the street...

He ran after her, barefoot through the snow, slipping as he ran up the driveway...

He heard a car, heard it breaking, then accelerating down the hill...

He got to her, saw her in the snow off the side of the road...

+

Oh God no...

Blood...blood everywhere...

She...she's looking at me...

I'll wrap her in my shirt...

Careful...careful...

Shit...the FJs at Pepe's...

"It's alright, Girl. It's alright. We'll make it all better..."

+

He had her now, wrapped in his shirt, and he carried her gently back to the house, Shirley running up to him, crying when she saw all the blood...

"How'd you get up here?" he asked.

"Taxi," she said, her eyes wet and red.

He walked to the second garage and keyed in the code; the door opened, an ancient Porsche 911s sat there, and he went for the keys hanging on the wall.

"Come here," he said to Shirley, handing her the keys. "I hope you can drive a stick..."

She could. She drove carefully down the snow-covered road while he cradled Terry to his chest, then they drove out 82 to his vets office; he carried her in, taking care not to jostle her, looking her in the eye, talking to her in calm, reassuring tones. The receptionist recognized him when he came in the door, saw the bloody bundle in his arms and called Polson, told her to get up front "STAT!"

Linda Polson got there quickly and prodded everywhere she could, then led them back to what looked like a trauma room, she helped Aaron get Terry on the table then began examining her more closely.

"My first question's a simple one, Aaron. How 'heroic' do you want me to go with this?"

"She lives, doc. That's it. I don't give a damn what it costs. She comes home with me."

Polson nodded. "Okay, got it." She turned to her assistant. "Cancel or transfer all my appointments through the afternoon. Call Dale. I'll need him on this one." She looked at Aaron. "I'll call as soon as I have a good idea what this is going to cost, Aaron."

"Linda. I don't want her to suffer, but I can't handle it if she goes. Don't let that happen, please. Please, don't..."

She looked in his eyes, saw the grief and terror and took his hand. "Go home. I'll call you when I know more, but I'll do everything I can."

He nodded and turned to leave, and the vet turned back to the table and got to work.

Shirley was sitting in the waiting area, and she appeared to be in shock. He went and sat beside her, then noticed he was in his pajama bottoms -- and nothing else. He was wet -- with snow and Terry's blood -- and though he knew on some level he should be cold...he wasn't. He simply felt empty, like he was numb inside. Or hollow. Hollow -- with fear, and denial, then something about last night's dream hit him -- again.

Time.

The arrow of time. An arrow traveling only one way...

+

If I hadn't gone last night...if only I'd stayed at home, stayed with Terry last night...

...I wouldn't be here now.

What am I doing here? With Shirley?

What was I doing with Betty last night?

What was I thinking?

What am I doing with my life?

And why is Shirley here? Why did she have to come back to the house?

+

"Do you want me to drive you back to work," he asked, putting his hand on hers.

She looked up, startled, her eyes still lost in grief -- and fear. She shook her head, looked away, and he stood, helped her up. He kept her hand in his and they walked out to the car. Without a word he helped her in, then walked around and climbed behind the wheel. She'd left the keys in the ignition, and he grimaced inwardly, started the engine and let it idle a minute, then he turned onto 82 and headed back into town.

He saw Terry's blood on the roadside when he drove by, and after he parked the car he took a snow shovel out to the road and scooped it up, gently laid it on the ground by a spruce tree he'd planted a few years back. Shirley was still in the car when he walked back, and he helped her out and into the house. She was limping again, obviously in pain, and he walked her back to the Japanese bath and opened the hot tub. He helped her out of her clothes, out of her brace, then he wrapped her in a towel, took her hand and led her to the water's edge. She kept hold of his hand, held it fiercely, possessively, as she walked beside him -- without saying a word. When she sat in the water he disappeared and got into a swimsuit, then joined her.

She looked at him as walked into the water, as he came to her, and she lay her head on his shoulder when he sat next to her -- then tears came and she broke apart, drifted to the million waiting spheres floating on the water -- some bouncing away to nothingness -- some fusing, growing larger. He felt her drifting away, felt her breathing slow, and he held her while she slept.

He drifted within visions of the night before, at times excited by the jarring memories, at others almost ashamed of himself, then he wondered if what he'd done was really so out of character. He looked down the arrow, back at the last few years, at the never ending stream of one-night-stands and gentle betrayals that defined his time. Reading from the same script, over and over again; Terry, the unwelcome reminder of how it all began. How, he knew, he could never have the girl he wanted, so he drifted from one girl to the next, each new girl a pale imitation of the anticipation he felt when he thought of Terry. Each inevitable dissolution reinforcing his isolation, and his lovelorn denial.

The secretaries at work, the wives of philandering husbands. A woman he met skiing once, who called him months later to tell him she had been pregnant, and wanted him to know. She'd had an abortion, she said, and he hung up the phone -- awash in Terry's despair. He drifted away from the women he really knew, floating on random currents to encounters that became ever more superficial, less and less meaningful, until he turned his back on that life and ran away. He bought the truck, put the camper on back and drove away from everything, running from his past, running away from the impossibility of Terry -- only confirming her hold on his life.

He found her by the side of the road. The little white dog with one black spot around her left eye. The white eyelashes against the black spot shocked him at first, but the incongruity only pulled him inward, into her eyes, and for the first time in years he felt a sudden peace -- in this little dog's eyes. The pup was starving to death and he fed her, she wanted love and he filled her soul, then when she went poo that first evening he found her stool full of worms.

He remembered going to a vet's clinic in Great Falls. The fear in her eyes, the pain he felt when the old man drew blood from her arm. Torn apart, he bought her the best food, bought her a little bed and filled it with toys, and everywhere he went she was with him, always by his side, and he grew to depend on the love in those eyes like he depended on the air that they breathed -- and then, he moved into the house. He started to work, they spent more and more time apart and she became rebellious, anxious. He brought women home and she doted on the attention -- at first -- then she grew sullen when the women never came back.

Now he knew, he finally understood. She saw Shirley and was shocked, overjoyed at the woman's return, and she'd rocketed to high spirits, spun like a kaleidoscope as colors filled her heart. She'd seen him falling and falling for so long, and she'd just seen hope and was lost in the feeling when...

He looked at his watch, looked at the time that had passed him by, and he pulled free of her and walked to the shower. She was looking at him when he came out to check on her, and he held a fresh towel up for her...

"I need to drive over to Pepe's and pick up the FJ. Would you drive me down, follow me back up?"

"If I could buy you lunch?" she said, smiling.

"Sure."

"Okay then. Help me up?"

She showered and he checked his phone while he waited. Several calls from the ski school, another from Betty McCall, and a text from Terry.

He opened the text.

"I'm so confused," he read. "I don't know what to do."

"Follow your heart, Terry. Get him well. Take care of your kids. Goodbye," he wrote, and his finger hovered over the send button...

'Erase it! Don't do it!' he heard himself saying, and he erased the word 'goodbye' then sent it; he listened to the voicemail from McCall with dread in his heart.

"Hi...hope to see you tomorrow morning on the mountain," and that was it. Nothing about last night. No guilt, no shame, no -- 'Gee, wasn't that fun...' -- like what happened last night was par for the course, just another night of tequila and, what? -- fun?

"Aaron, could you help me with my brace?"

He went back and helped her, but she rubbed his head when he knelt down, and he looked up when he was done, looked into her eyes.

"I can't believe you don't hate me. After..."

"It wasn't your fault, Shirley."

"Yes, it was."

He helped her up, walked with her out to the car, then they drove across town to Pepe's and went inside. "You look better this morning than you did last night," Pepe said as he took them to a table far from the night's debaucheries. "I'll go get your keys," he said as Maria smiled at Shirley, as she put chips and salsa on the table. Then she turned to Aaron. "No tequila for you today?" she asked.

"Never again, Maria. But guacamole would be nice. Please."

She smiled and walked away, leaving Shirley to speculate about what had happened.

"Must have been some night," she said after a polite interval.

"Legendary, I think, might be the word for it."

"Wanna tell me about it?"

"Not in a million years."

She laughed, hurt; Maria brought her bowl of avocados to the table and made guacamole, and she put two glasses of iced tea on the table, winked at him before asking them what they wanted for lunch. "Carne Asada," Shirley said. "Flour tortillas, please."

"And you?"

"The same, with a side of humility, if you please."

Maria laughed, nodded her head. "Flour or corn?"

"Just a couple of grilled jalapeños, Maria."

"So, what happened?"

"I really don't want to talk about it, Shirley..."

"Not last night. What happened to set you off?"

"Just another broken dream, kiddo."

"Could I ask you a serious question, maybe get a serious answer?"

"Sure, fire away."

"Would you marry me, let me take care of you?"

He blinked, looked at her, then smiled. "Now there's a serious question. Where'd that come from?"

"It is. Yes, it is. Would you?"

"I thought I was supposed to ask that kind of question..."

"You'll never do it, Aaron. Whoever she was, she hurt you too much for that kind of commitment, but I love you. And you need me."

"Do I?"

She put some guacamole on a chip, then drizzled some salsa on it, and a little lime. "Yes, you do," she said as she fed him the chip. She watched the surprise in his eyes, then she leaned over and kissed him. "Sorry I had to be the one to break that to you," she whispered.

Maria came with plates and they ate in silence, but he looked over at her every now and then, knowing she was serious but not knowing what to make of her chance familiarities. He paid the bill when they finished, over her protests, then had her drive the FJ back up to the house while he led the way.

"Are you going to answer my question," she said as he helped her out of the Toyota.

"I'm going to think about it," he said, smiling. "First, I'm going to drive down to the clinic, check in with Polson."

"Did you hear something? Did they call?"

"One of the assistants just called. Asked me to come by."

"We'd better go..."

He nodded his head. "Okay. If you feel up to it."

He helped her into the 911, drove across town not knowing what to feel anymore. He was sure Terry was gone, he'd heard it in the girl's voice and he felt sour inside, like acid was eating away at his soul. He pulled into the little parking lot and got out, almost forgot to help Shirley but went back for her, helped her in. The receptionist called Polson when he stepped inside, and the girl smiled at him.

"Aaron?" he looked over, saw Linda standing there. "Why don't you come with me?"

He nodded, walked behind her into the trauma room.

Terry lay there, very still, and he walked over to her.

Her eyes were open, her tail thumped slowly.

"Her left leg was the worst. We pinned it, and she's got a few broken ribs, but there's no internal bleeding..."

He wasn't listening anymore. He was leaning over her, kissing Terry's nose, scratching her ears, and he heard her tail thumping away on the bed when he looked up at Polson...

"I think we'll keep her here tonight, maybe tomorrow too, but she should be strong enough to go home in a couple of days." She handed him a box of tissues, put her hand on his shoulder, again, then left the room.

"Did you hear that, girl?" he said, trying to breathe. "You're coming home..."

She lifted her head, licked his chin and he laughed, then he sat in a chair by the bed and held her hand, just looking in her eyes. Some time later she closed them and he watched her breathe, not letting go of her hand, and when she was sound asleep he stood quietly and left the room.

Polson was standing in the hall outside the room, waiting for him. "Aaron, she's going to need a lot of care, for weeks. She won't be able to go to the bathroom, won't be able to walk normally for eight weeks. Are you sure you can deal with that?"

"Whatever it takes, doc."

"You may need to take some time off work, then."

"Okay. I'll let 'em know."

"She means that much to you?"

"She's the love of my life, Linda."

"Where'd you find her? I forgot?"

"Up near an Indian Reservation, in Montana."

"Uh-huh. Well, you know what's best, I guess."

"I can't thank you enough, Linda."

The vet nodded. "Come by in the morning; we'll go over what you'll need to have on hand when she comes home."

He thanked her again, went to get Shirley and they walked out to the car.

"She's okay?"

"Yup. Banged up, going to need some serious one on one for a while, but she's coming home."

She leaned into him, put her arms around his neck. "Have you ever been in love, Aaron?"

"Once. A long time ago."

"Do you think you could love me?"

Snow was falling on them, on the car, and he felt a chill run down his back.

"Anything's possible, Shirley." He felt her head nod once, and she hugged him.

"Can I come up for a while?"

"Sure, but I'm not going to be much fun."

"That's okay."

Once he was home he started in on the backlog of chores that had built up for days, then he went to Google and read about taking care of canine fractures at home. These were engineering problems he could relate to, not people -- he said to himself with a laugh. He stopped reading and looked at Shirley sitting across the room, and he had to admit he increasingly found people, more accurately -- women, completely incomprehensible. Or maybe the world had changed, and women with it, while he drifted away from all the changes shaking the world. What happened last night would have been an impossibility twenty years ago, and when he was in the middle of it all he felt he was surrounded by women who had lost all inhibition. Twenty years ago, he said, lost in images of that world, he would've been ecstatic. Now, he had to admit, the entire experience had been unnerving, but what troubled him most was not their reaction, but his.

Was he getting too old to relate to such indifferent excess, or was it the complete absence of emotional intimacy he found so off-putting?

He wondered if that qualified as irony?

+

But that's what life has been -- for the last five years, anyway.

I've been lost -- on a roundabout, driving through the sound in and out the valley.

What's changed? Did seeing her again change the way I look at the world? At myself?

At my place in the world? At the rhythm of the circle?

Or did seeing her kids change the view?

How have I been so blind? So blind, after so many years in the light?

Or -- was I just turning from the night?

+

His phone chimed. Incoming text.

Terry.

"Okay. We have to talk, and I'm not doing this over the phone. I'm on United, will be on the eight thirty flight, in the morning. I love you."

He tapped the keyboard and looked at those last three words again and again.

"I love you too," he wrote, and his finger hovered over the 'Send' button. He looked at Shirley, thought about all she'd said during the day, all she wanted from life, and he shook his head.

She was looking at him now. She was looking at him with so much love in her eyes, and it broke his heart.

"I need to take you home now," he said, and she nodded her head.

"I'll get my things."

He hit the 'Send' button and looked at his reflection in the window, watching his life unfold between the mountain and the sky. Then he looked at his hands and started to cry.

+++++

She sat in the FJ, fidgeting in her handbag as they drove through town, looking at snow covered pines and the sun setting down-valley. He drove just in silence, knowing he had hurt her -- yet not knowing what to do about her kind of pain. He had to admit he more than liked her, and had even enjoyed her company that afternoon, but he couldn't in all honestly tell her that he loved her -- not the way she wanted love, anyway. He had never felt that way about her, and despite his minor ambivalences she persisted in settling on the notion that he did love her, he must love her, for if she felt love he must too. Now he looked at her arms -- crossed protectively over her heart -- and in that moment he saw something unsettled in her movements, then he looked at the reflection of her face in the glass. He saw tension there, a question in the glass, and he felt he'd unmasked a deeply rooted melancholy -- a misery she'd always managed to hide -- just out of sight.

Hard to reconcile the differences, he thought, between girls as strikingly dissimilar as Shirley and Betty. He doubted the word 'love' was even in McCall's tendentious vocabulary, while Shirley seemed completely bereft at the slightest possibility he wasn't madly in love with her. This wasn't two sides of the same coin, he mused; rather it was like these two women inhabited parallel universes!

Still, he had to admit that the one woman in the world he loved, or thought he loved, the woman who'd just expressed love for him in person -- and in writing, in fact probably didn't. He doubted her ability to love, just as he doubted his inability to love anyone but her. After thirty years they hardly knew one another -- beyond the vague commiserations of a shared experience so distant in time it hardly mattered anymore. Yet it did matter, he said to himself again and again. Maybe it was the only thing that really did matter anymore, because that love was so pure. Almost as pure as the love he felt for his shattered pup...

"Aaron?" Shirley said, breaking through the silence.

"Yes?"

"Are you happy? I mean, generally speaking, are you happy?"

"Well, generally speaking, yes, I am. But -- today? That's not the word that comes roaring to mind."

"What does?"

"Confusion -- at least earlier today. But now, after Terry and all, I don't know. Empty, I think."