The rain is sluicing down sideways over the cracked window of my Dad's blue minivan; dry heat is blasting through the air ducts. My brother is driving and the long black extensions of his girlfriend's hair trail over the back of the seat and I think about tarantula legs, skittering.
We're going to a wedding, my brother and his girlfriend and Corey and I, and the four of us are a strange concoction of genetics and a sketchy internet dating site. My son sits engrossed in the very back seat, enamoured with WallE and Eva through the ting of my battered white macbook.
Over the whir of the heater and the hum of staticky radio, we're talking about Corey's apartment. He and I spend every waking moment together and it makes no sense to have two places, and besides, we just want to be together. We're talking about sub-letting his apartment, until his lease is over.
"I know someone who could rent it to film porn,"says my brother's face from behind his giant hair and I know he does not know anyone in porn and so I say,"Who?" and he looks meaningfully at his girlfriend and I can see her cool blue eyes even though she doesn't turn around. I look at her black spider hair and she says: "We could get it rented, no problem."
Corey looks at me and shrugs and I stare at him blankly and all I can think of to ask is wildly useless:"What kind of porn?"
"Oh, hardcore,"she says and Corey and nod, feigning nonchalance. He and I spend the next two days discussing the definition of hardcore porn and whether I am more judgmental than I like to think.
The next day he gives her the keys and we contemplate sending a warning note to his neighbour but we do not. Corey's apartment is the featured locale in some hardcare porno, coming to a shelf near you.
***
I stand in the kitchen, hands on hips, inspecting the top of my pan drawer which always has blackened chards of oven shrapnel: petrified potato bits and spilled over casserole and god I'm so clean on the outside and jumbled and scattered on the inside, a human replica of my kitchen. I take a step back and I bump into him and I laugh, nearly falling over.
He's just woke, and his eyes are cat-like, green and with sleep in the corners. His hair is spiked in little-boy cowlicks on either side of his head and he is wearing a shirt that has pre-schooler remnants on it: could be chocolate or dirt, likely a little bit of both. He looks like a wildly handsome suburban housedad, rumpled and affable and I love him so much I want to cry.
I back into him and his arms fold around me and this is tangible proof of the power of a year. I close my eyes and see the scars on his arms and I see the people who trampled him and stole from him and I will the clear liquid bottles and white crystalline balls away into a dream. I see him wavering on the cement balcony in the pouring rain, contemplating, what would it be like, just to jump, just to do it and this was his life and I almost didn't meet him. I bite my lip and taste blood and stare at the crumbs on my oven floor.
***
My heart is racing so hard I can feel it in the back of my throat, against my uvula, urging vomit. This is deja vu but there is more adrenaline and even more at stake and I buy just one and go out to my Jeep, sit shuddering with the door closed and shallow breathe to avoid the smell of crumbled goldfish and apple cores.
I sit with the double bag in my lap and suddenly, overwhelmingly crave a cigarette but instead I stash the plastic bag on the passenger seat and run back into the drug store and stand in the same aisle, looking over the blues and pinks, plusses and minuses, and I buy another one, a different brand. I don't make eye contact with the high school cashier with wire rimmed glasses and apologetic lips.
It wouldn't be bad, I reason with myself as my car drives itself, on instinct, autopilot engaged. The autumn has rolled in and the slate grey cove below is covered in a layer of mist and the DJ on the radio is talking about Chris Brown being a douchebag and I marvel about the banalities of life that we focus on in order to take emphasis off the dire.
My brother's yellow truck is still missing a sideview mirror from the accident last Christmas, and there's a little girl's bike in the front yard and one of my son's shoes in the garden out front. My neighbour with the limp and the frizzy grey curls ambles by and nods affably; I smile. Her dog lifts its leg to pee on my Jeep tire and I run into the house and shut the door behind me. No one is home, but I close the door to the bathroom anyway and take the first kit out of its bag and hope for one blue line.