Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

all at once, decisively but without urgency, moved away from the door and approached the other side of the bed. There she removed one shoe, then the other, but left her white socks on. Then she unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down her hips and stepped out of them. I looked at her bare legs. Then she removed the flannel shirt and did that trick women do and removed her bra without removing her shirt. All that remained was her black turtle neck that stopped just below her navel and lavender panties with a white flower trim.
    Her long legs were smooth and still tanned, tight from her tennis playing. She pulled open the covers of her half of the bed and climbed in under them. She lay on her side. Then she draped her left arm and leg over me. Her left hand lay flat on my chest.
    Her face was inches from mine but I didn’t dare make a move. We looked at each other for a while, and then she lowered her head and rested it on my chest, settling into me.
    “Get some sleep,” she said. “If I’m not here when you wake, I’ll be downstairs. But I won’t leave, okay? I won’t leave. So go ahead and get some sleep.”
    But I didn’t sleep, not for a while anyway, and neither did she. We did a good job of not lying still, but there was no fooling each other; our breathing gave us away. Still, we just laid there together, unable for a dozen reasons not to act. I ran through them all in my head, but she was still there, beside me and awake, when I was done. Then my physical state got the better of me and I started to drift off. The last thing I knew was her breathing, which still held the element of consciousness to it.
    He lies propped up on pillows in tan chinos and a white T-shirt, the perfect middleweight, on his back, smoking. He is a young man with sleepy eyes and a sharp jaw, and I am a boy of seven, motherless in a world bigger than I can comprehend. He is smoking on a bare mattress by an open window in a room of a hotel that has never had a heyday. I remember the crack lines in the plaster walls and the smell of overcooked grease coming up through the floors. It is his day off and I watch him smoke, all day, watch the curls of dirty white that look somehow almost liquid rise to the yellow-stained ceiling. It disappears and I wonder where it goes but never ask. His eyes squint as the smoke rises past them, drifting lazily from his nose and mouth in puffs, like smoke signals. I think that maybe they mean something but cannot figure out what. I sit on my cot and watch him for hours as he smokes and looks out that window at whatever comes and goes on the main street of Riverhead. After a while he naps for a bit, and so do I. When he awakens, I wake. I feel safe and entertained and contented. He shrinks the world down to this single room and makes clouds with his mouth. Even then I take the silence between us as a good thing.
    Now we are in a dark room, maybe a bar. He approaches me from the other end of the room as if he has come back for me. He walks on the balls of his feet. I can barely see him in the dark. Now he says something I cannot hear. His hard, bony face hangs long. I wonder if this is concern. I do not know him well enough to tell. It hits me now that I am not a child but an adult. I see that he has aged, that there are lines in his face that remind me of the cracked plaster. His eyes are focused over my head and behind me. I turn but see nothing.
    I hear sounds, the rush of someone coming up to me quickly. Before I can look to see who it is, I hear a long forgotten voice whisper in my ear. It is my father’s voice, urgent but assured.
    “Wake up, son,” he says. “Wake up.” I feel his breath in my ear, I feel its warmth spiral into me. “Wake up son, we’re in trouble.”
    I awoke to the weak blueness of twilight. I had lifted my head off the pillow before I was even completely conscious, and I knew at once that was a mistake. For a moment I couldn’t breath. I lay my head back down and stared at the flawless ceiling above. I felt for a while like I had a foot in two different worlds. I wasn’t sure which one I wanted. When my mind cleared I thought of how I could not remember the last time I had dreamed of my father and the hotel room we had called home after my mother died. It didn’t dawn on me till just now that it was then that my father became so silent. Of course I see now how lonely he must have been.
    There was a rim of unpolished metal along the horizon, and above that, like