27th
A Second Chance Part 4
Jess didn’t notice that the GPS-MP3 player had been replaced with Ben’s old CD player. As Ben slid the Richard Marx CD into its mouth Jess was finally awed with its presence and she still held her hair from her face even though the car’s body completely shielded her from the wind as if she were enthralled with her ability to finally control her hair. And when Jess saw Ben’s sheepish smile as Now and Forever began to play she realized why the CD player was there and where he was bringing her. She realized that they sat in the same spot in Ben’s driveway that they had sat after the concert and she recalled how her body had felt, like wax held over a flame, its core solid as its outside instantly turning to liquid, not even bothering to warm and soften before dripping into the fire. Ben was kissing her and the only thing that Jess could manipulate was her tongue as it found its niche next to Ben’s.
Ben saw the realization glaze Jess’s eyes and smiled because he knew that she would remember because he knew that he loved her and felt ashamed for being too proud to say it because he had never said it to another woman since he was five years old. Jess hadn’t given him those three words either but Ben knew that it was docked on the tip of her lips; long since surpassing the tip of her tongue on the way to his ears and that she was only waiting for him to say it to her first. And when Ben took Jess’s hand under acoustic guitar, he opened his mouth and Jess turned to him and said,
“I love you Ben.” Ben paused and then kissed her. It was of earnest passion but it was terse because Jess had stolen something sacred from Ben when she had said those words before he had a chance to and when Ben finally said ‘I love you’ for the first time in seventeen years a part of him knew that its repetition rendered it fraudulent.
There was a flower shop run by the same old woman every day and sometimes she looked like she had just woken up and it smelled more like cookies than flowers on occasion two blocks from the coffee shop. Ben thought that flowers were something that people get when they’re in the hospital recovering from some illness or accident. He thought that he would bring Jess flowers and that it might make her feel more like he was visiting her in the hospital and less like he was picking her up from an abortion clinic and he hoped that it might make up for the fact that he’d be incapable of telling her that he loved her.
As Ben crossed the street a bus passed behind him and the same wind that had once controlled Jess hair sent the bag containing her doughnut onto the sidewalk. And the groan of city transit caused Ben to realize that his decision had had nothing to do with financial concerns. He knew that there still remained steps to descend and that his life would have kept some semblance and stability even with a child. As the bag lay with its rolled top beginning to expand towards its original posture, Ben asked of himself to admit the truth; he demanded that he voice the real reason he couldn’t be a father and at least let the wind carry it to Jess. But he stood unable and he looked for the voice that had once told him his expression of love was fraudulent but it had gone someplace else and Ben hated it, envious that it was able to hate Jess and he wasn’t; envious because it could hate him. Ben slammed his foot onto the bag and it collapsed as though it were empty and he welcomed the acidic wave of guilt that began in his torso and eventually made even his hair ache. But it burnt through only himself and he remained without the strength of hate.
Roses were ten dollars a stem and when Ben asked for twenty the woman told him that only eight were left until noon and Ben looked at the stapler in her hand and wanted to cave her skull with it. He purchased the eight roses and had them wrapped in clear plastic paper traversed with pink lines.
As Ben returned to the hospital carrying only the flowers he thought the last thing his father had said to him, when the combination of morphine and incapacitating neuropathic pain equivocated waking and sleep to the point where even an EEG was unable to differentiate the two states of brain activity. Both asleep and awake, the man said,
“I’m afraid of seeing your mother.” It seemed like nonsense. Ben thought it was a dream, even though the man looked carefully at Ben, even through the weakness of death, the man still had the ability to look carefully at his son. But it wasn’t nonsense. It took years for Ben to finally realize that his father was terrified that the woman who broke his heart would be on the other side, waiting for him. Because his father never stopped following her. Since she left the two of them, leaving only a handful of flowers in a vase on the kitchen table, ‘leave be’ written on it’s taped side, his father had never excluded her a decision. Despite the fact that the two never spoke again, Ben’s father had factored in the possibility into every single move and was terrified that it had even been factored into his own death. The last thing that a person can do for themselves, perhaps, had been done for someone else. Ben finally understood the terror as he looked at the minimal bouquet in his hand and thought of the words ‘leave be.’
A bus was idling at the hospital’s stop carrying on the bus-driver, who looked down at Ben apathetically as he approached. As he looked at the man, he thought of all the lives the bus-driver has experienced vicariously, driving them from one spot to another in a connection that was as meaningless to him as it was to his passengers. And Ben thought about his father and he tried to fantasize the qualities of how an introduction between he and Jess might have gone. Ben looked at the long bus, an idling empty vessel that could easily be both a means of rape and a means of uniting lost brothers at the same time and he thought of his corvette and tried to picture the day that he had kissed Jess for the first time, ignoring the gear shift viciously prodding his ribcage, but all he could see was Jess sitting in the passenger seat with the same expression that she had carried with her, silently, on the way to the hospital and how awkward she always looked sitting in a seat that never fit the contours of her body and how sometimes it made Ben uncomfortable for reasons he never understood.
The old man that had stumbled earlier approached the bus from the opposite direction as Ben. He carried himself up the bus’s steps using the silver rail and Ben stopped when he was directly behind the gaunt man, hoping that the man might stumble again so that Ben could catch him. But the old man didn’t falter, but sat behind the driver with ease and contentment. The driver looked at Ben as he stood at the base of the steps and this time Ben could see the fatigue that crippled the elasticity of the man’s skin but he also saw the man’s pride and when the driver reached towards the lever controlling the bus’s folding doors, Ben stepped onto the bus.
There was a bus-stop only a block from Ben’s home and as he left the driver and the old man and their connection he saw his garage and a sense of relief actualized for the first time since Jess had announced her pregnancy.
There was an unprecedented stillness in Ben’s kitchen as he opened the cupboard above his oven, acquiring a green vase with longitudinal pink stripes. As he filled the vase at the kitchen’s tap, Ben looked at his watch. It had been forty-three minutes since Jess had departed. After placing the vase on the kitchen table, he unwrapped the flowers. A packet of nutrients tumbled from the stems and Ben added it to the vase before the roses. When Ben let go of the flowers, they pushed against each other and expanded to a mushroom over the vase’s lid.
As Ben shut off the kitchen light, he looked at the flowers sitting on the kitchen table and smiled softly, wondering if he could get into Arizona on one tank of gas and how much money he might be able to make as a car mechanic in New Hampshire. And as he merged onto the freeway with unusual ease, disregarding destination, his corvette was finally a car.
