"I don't know if I can move forward anymore," I said, staring at the radios and the nests of wires in the study.
"You can move on, Milt, and even if she's not dead to us, Liz is gone. She moved on of her own volition, and now so do you. You have the camera footage evidence, and that's all you need. We'll have her status moved from missing to deceased. It won't take too long, Milton. And in a few months, in a few years, you'll have a new life, a better one."
My eyes burned and ached. My right leg was completely numb, and my body was twisted and knotted up, shoulders and neck stiff, back tight and twitching. "Maria?" I asked.
"Yes, Milt?"
"Why do you think she left?"
"I don't know, Milt. I really didn't know her except for that day when you, you know, walked out of Veronica's. But, like I've said before, when I spoke to her, it's like she was there but not there, like she'd look at me but she was preoccupied with something, like something always going on behind those eyes. I think—I think some people just need to be elsewhere, no matter where they are. They need to keep moving toward something. She didn't hate you, Milt. Sounds like the opposite, but I think if she'd stuck around, if she felt tied down by you, she'd start resenting you. She probably left before it turned to that."
I inhaled deeply, then exhaled, lungs aching. "Thank you, Maria," I said.
"For what?"
"Everything," I sighed. "Everything. From when you stopped your brother from beating the hell out of me, to driving me home, to just . . . being there. I've no idea why you give a damn about me."
"Maybe I'm just a nice person," she said. I thought I could actually hear her smiling through the phone line.
"Maybe you are," I said. "Maybe you are."
After I'd hung up, my eyelids became heavy, and I sagged from exhaustion. I lowered myself from the chair and onto the floor where I slept into the night, my body surrounded by clouds sketched by a woman who was now among them.
***
I awakened in the study around midnight. The tabletop radio buzzed on the open frequency to which it was tuned. I lifted myself off the floor and listened to the background static through the speaker. I listened and listened until I lowered my head, reached over to the main power button—
"Goodbye, Liz."
—and switched it off.
***
Outside, spring stars pulsed in the sky. Vapors walked the streets, and wisps bounded lightly through the forests. Mouthless voices floated in the shadows. And somewhere someone was placing candles around a makeshift shrine to a martyred saint, lighting them, then walking away.
I dreamt through the night. I dreamt of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in black who waved to me beneath antennas high above a river. I dreamt she held my hands with her porcelain-perfect fingers. I dreamt she pulled me close, kissed me, then held me until the sun and the stars went black.
Epilogue
There are only brackets where the antennas once stood, holes where the cables and wires once hung. The winter is coming, and I am filling them with wood putty and with paint. Sometimes as I water the spruce we planted out front, I think I hear you on the winds, but know it's not you. But I wonder how the winds blow where you are. Do they warm your skin or flow through your hair as my hands once did? Do they churn into cyclones that carry you through the clouds? Do they scatter you over the earth's curve, and do you reform over grasslands that I'll never see? When they spin the new wind vane that I've mounted atop the roof and point the rooster's black iron beak, I wonder if they point to you. I wonder if you're in the hills or over the horizon, if you're watching me or forgetting me.
Sometimes I speak to the winds. I ask them: When you walked beside me and you looked at the sky, what did you think? When you swung our joined arms like a jump rope, then pulled me close and made me slow dance with you in a circle, did I dance well enough for you, even though you knew I never danced in my life? When you made me look into those obsidian eyes and put my arms around you while you spun us slowly in place, my feet shifting randomly, yours stepping gracefully around mine, and told me that it was the man's job to lead, did you hate me when I didn't know what to do?
I ask the winds so many questions, but I don't get answers. So I move through the days, the weeks, the months as I've always done—as best as I can.
This week was my birthday, but you knew that. I was going to stay home, sit in the study, work on essays for the Banner, but there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and Maria said she was arresting me, and took me back to the Banner offices where they'd planned a party. Someone bought pizza from the town of Old Forge. Someone else bought cake from Veronica's just down the street. Claire smoked indoors and didn't care if it bothered anyone. Bentley drank too much and didn't care if he spoke too loudly. And when I began staring out the windows at the antennas over The Heights, Maria would pull me back to the group of writers and layout artists and editors, and they'd toast me, my essays, my stories, my life.
Maria drove me home afterwards, and we sat on the back porch and talked while wisps lit up the Lackawanna, talked until the early morning.
This week I wrote an essay about the shrine to Blessed Mary of Jesus Crucified that appeared last Friday. The shrines are appearing more quickly this month, as they usually do before Christmas.
Last night I sat in the study, and I thought of you again and smiled, and I wondered if, wherever you are, that when you think of me, you smile.
Last night I turned on the computer in the study and began to type an essay. For now, it's just for me. It's about a woman, short and beautiful, dark haired and dark eyed. A woman who saw something in a man who thought he had nothing. A woman who, one day, vaulted to the clouds in a flash of white and blue. A woman who still inhabits my dreams and whom, she said, I'd see again someday.
A woman named Elizabeth who was once my wife and who, one day, became electricity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vincent C. Martinez was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and obtained his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He currently lives in the southwestern United States.
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