He Ran

He ran from her. No. That’s chicken. He ran from how he felt about her – her and her street-smart, sweet toughness – where, fact was, he was terrified to go. So he ran from her.

She coaxed him into her home, but he ran from her. She never asked for a thing. When she first bought her little Cape Cod, the upstairs windows already leaked. He gifted her a gleaming new extension ladder, but she never expected him to climb it, never asked a thing – except maybe his presence.

He ran from her anyhow. To prove he could make his own home, he moved out of his rusty van. He rented an apartment, an old brick-oven studio up off Burnside on steep SW Vista, a block from the Dandelion Pub. Parking up Vista was a pain. And daily, somebody somewhere in the building, their apartment door evidently standing open, pianoed pop tunes. Regularly, a particular melody echoing in the hall made him ache for her. He didn’t know many lyrics. But he knew that refrain. He knew, “It keeps you runnin’.”

Without the anonymous piano, without the fact that his studio apartment didn’t scare her off, he might have called Vista home. As house-warming furnishings, she gave him a little blue-clad, sleepy-time teddy bear and a box of Chamomile Tea - the same little blue-clad bear on the paper lid.

She accepted him. Every bit of him. Dismayed, she asked, “Don’t you know I love you?”

He didn’t know what to do.

Seeing her standing straight-faced outside his door one morning was a shock. He was caught off-guard. He caved. He invited her in. And he left his door open. The tinkling piano echoing through the building surrounded them. Giving her an unsupervised look around, he went in his half-bath and closed the door. The piano melody followed him inside his little sink-less water closet. He wondered why he left his studio door open.

When he came back out, he knew the piano was being played at the worst possible time – when he saw her lying on her side on his floor, curled around the pedestal base of his little white porcelain wash stand!

Eyes closed, her disheveled blonde ponytail straggled down around her face in wisps. He looked down at her tiny, silver-sandaled feet he’d kissed. He thought the skin of the side of her face looked a little washed-out. She worked at night. All the hours she could get. He knew she was single-mom tired. He also knew she’d had to have thoughtfully re-arranged her life just to briefly appear at his sham door; she’d never leave her girls home alone. The heat of her flame told him so – that she’d never drain their little hearts to fill her own. He knew her long, changing work hours, too, by heart – daily he tracked the times when she might be free. In her life, she’d been beaten and cheated and swindled, but he knew she’d never flinched. He knew, even in her battered life, she was a girl way out of his league. He couldn’t remember what he’d done that had gotten her attention, but the first thing she ever said to him was, “That was pretty stupid.”

It was the truth though, and he was starved for the truth from a girl and she fed him every time they were together, fed him sweet bits of herself – coaxed him in out of the shadows, coaxed him with her wonderful, low voice, closer and closer to the light of her fire.

But something he never actually saw – maybe the flutter of a bat wing, maybe the dangle of a spider, maybe the shadow of somebody riding a broom across the face of the moon made him jump and run from her, back into the safety of the mildewed, dark corners of his storage-locker life.

Lying curled around the base of his sink, she didn’t say or do anything. But she was near.

He’d heard about feminine surrender. He’d never wanted any girl to do that to him. He didn’t know her, but he knew her better than to think her lying there was surrender, that in any way at all, she was at his service.

Looking down at her silent figure, it occurred to him that she was waiting – for what, he couldn’t imagine. He looked around him. The walls of his new apartment were beige. The featureless ceiling mud-brown. Out his window were stacked bricks. The echoing sound of the piano haunted. He stepped quietly over and shut his door. The piano x-rayed right through the door.

But she was inside, with him.

He stood still. He listened to the steadiness of her breathing. Just as if he were beside her again in her bed at home, he realized she had fallen asleep. He knew she’d been working most of the night, but that she’d come to him. He knew she needed to sleep. He realized that she was in fact - sleeping with him.

She was waiting.

No question.

He didn’t know what to do – her sleeping on his floor the way she was. He had a fundamental problem with her: the fearless, vibrating life that came out of her eyes and her ear-to-ear, giggling smile and the way she moved - what was a girl like her doing with him? His shredded heart feared her. Lulled by the glittering, beautiful blade of her heat, his heart still feared her edge.

But she had accepted every bit of him.

He crouched down. He touched her face. With a twinkle, her eyes opened and he helped her to her feet and they went out into the hall. He locked the door behind them.

When he realized he’d done it! When he saw he’d gotten her back out of his clean, just rented studio apartment, into a public space!

But success was nothing but a downbeat.

He watched her swing away down the hall ahead of him. He held himself still. He called out something mechanical to her about how he’d maybe follow her in his van soon. Over her shoulder, she smiled happily back at him.

Her car was a little, square, silver Fiat Brava. A tin can of a car. He followed her to it. Watching her get in, he glimpsed again wiring left from a bogus heater repair dangling from under the dash, leaving her hanging.

She waved and drove away, her bent, passenger-side rear wheel wobbling. With a pang of shame, he remembered her a week ago loaning him that same car so he could get to work – the same car she also depended on to get to work. He remembered the night, on his way to work, the wham! of running over a sudden cinder block on a black freeway. Even though he’d left her wheel still bent, she never asked him for a thing – except his presence.

He turned and walked away and went back inside his old, brick apartment building. Ceased, the piano left a hole. He felt the warm residue of her presence leaking out through the gap. He went down his hall and unlocked his door. He stepped back inside.  His eyes went straight to the spot under the sink where she had been laying asleep. He had to. He crouched down and felt. Her spot on the shag carpet was still warm. And with a start, he found her earring – one of her favorites – a kind of tear-drop shaped, semi-opaque blue – fallen from her ear where she had lain exhausted by the night.

He walked over and got his sleepy-time bear in his little, light-blue pajamas and night cap and his box of Chamomile Tea and he followed her home.

*               *               *

Up so high in the sun on her new ladder, hanging off the side of her 1940s Cape Cod, he felt remarkably free. It was an unexpected delight, to peer from up there right down in amongst the branches of the big white birch in her front yard - into a busy Robin’s nest.

At a junk yard, he found a wheel. It was straight. On his knees in her driveway, bolting it onto the passenger-side rear of her little Brava, it felt kind of holy. The cheezy little lug nuts - there were only four - but they were hers.