Amie flirts with the subway guy enough that he lets her ride for free. When her wink is just right, or when she’s not wearing anything over her bikini top, he lets both of us through the handicapped entrance. There’s a 25 yard ramp down to the train platform and I wonder if it’s to make it handicap accessible or just so we could race down it. Everything feels that way, made for us. This sky above, this city slowly making its way closer out the train window, this rocking action of the train that puts Amie to sleep on my shoulder, the damp darkness of the subway tunnels as we head underground, all of this is for us.

We liked Oak Street Beach because it was pedestrian only. No parking lot, only city dwellers. The night before, we listened to an album called Endless Summer and I listened and loved it and not because of the music. I thought if we sat and just played it on loop it would somehow make the dusk last longer and into the night, that we could be back porch sitters until the end of all things. She told me that night that she never waits to get her toes in the sand, that she loses flip flops that way, that she still gets upset when she sees any real shoes at the beach and we should go tomorrow.

Sure enough, when cement became sand after crossing under Lake Shore Drive, the flip flops flopped off and were left behind, me watching, as she ran flicking sand behind her, dropping bags and towels haphazardly as if she needed to get to the water before her next breath. Amie took pride in being a Great Lake Swimmer. She called it her tribe, a sense of belonging that the ocean-front dwellers would never understand. She’d say their water is too buoyant, that you don’t even have to try to stay afloat. She liked the metaphor of working to stay up, “like Carl Sandburg’s Chicago,” she’d say, “even our leisure time we muscle through.”

Her hair tangled, she made her way to the towels I laid out, collecting her discarded belongings on the way.

“The water’s cold,” she says.

“I read something about how it never really gets above 70,” I say.

“I like that I feel it everywhere. I like this I feel this everywhere.”

She sat across the table thumbing at the handle of her cup of espresso, reading over the local news paper, a school graduation, a street rezoned. I stare over her shoulder at the men across the street sorting out tree branch from power line up in a crane. I want to tell her about how as a kid, there were two trees in my front lawn, and only one of them I could climb to get above it all. I want to tell her about how when I finally started wearing jeans instead of sweatpants to school, how sad I was when the men came to cut the lowest branch off so the cars could park , the first arm hold, and it wasn’t that I could no longer climb the tree that got me, it was that I was embarrassed for the tree, looking all awkward without its missing limbs, abandoned circles cut out. It looked like it could never fully yawn.

I want to tell her how as a kid, at the start of every soccer game, I had a ceremony where I would eat a blade of grass because I thought it got me more in touch with the field. Maybe about how I felt like more than winning every game, if I could get every kid on the team to score in the season, then the record didn’t matter to me. Or about how I took a punch to the kidney that bruised and hurt for a week because I didn’t want to watch Josh Martin shove Christopher Henry into the bushes anymore just because he was slower than everyone else.

I want to tell her about the year the cicadas came out and left their shells everywhere and Jeff Harris across the street used to cook them on the grill and talk about how much protein each one had. There were so many shells that the sidewalks were covered and the lawns and the trunks of trees got piles around them and I used to try to avoid stepping on them on the way to school because it seemed disrespectful. All the other boys would stomp on them for the crunch they made.

I want to tell her about how every time I heard a fight in the kitchen over homework or boyfriends or work schedules or just because people fight, I would hide in my room and put my arms around the dog petting her telling her it’ll be ok. They’re just upset. It’ll be ok. And Molly would look up at me telling me the same things and then I couldn’t hear the shouting as loud.

I want her to know about how Eve Winnepe would take off her shoes in math class and how much it bothered me because I didn’t think the teacher would like it, and then I started to realize just how long her feet were and how they didn’t have any veins like mine and I would watch the way she moved her toes and it didn’t bother me anymore. And then how bad I felt when I did bad on those math tests.

I want her to know about the time that I first realized that sadness was temporary and that we often need to remind each other of that.

I ask if she sees anything interesting in the paper. She says the town council is debating whether or not a Lane Bryant should be put in on River Street. She says people are worried that it would detract from the artist district around River Street and how they don’t want anything so corporate.

I want her to see my sister crying at the kitchen table and how she never made any sense and I never knew what to say so I’d just sit with her and let her cry. She’d talk sometimes and then would keep talking and talking and I’d just watch and let Molly tell her it’d all be ok. But I’d sit and even after she left to go upstairs and close her door, I’d still sit and I’d see that she wouldn’t brush her teeth but I wouldn’t tell anyone.

I wish I didn’t remember when Eric Lansing took Beth Kobie home after fixing her his special drink and how much I liked Beth Kobie. She wore a prairie dress in the school play and I thought she looked like the most beautiful woman who ever walked.  I left flowers on her locker and wanted her to go see The Truman Show with me one weekend but she said she couldn’t and I saw Eric take her in his car and the next morning how Beth didn’t wake up. Or about the bleach, or the roulette, or how hard grace is to find.

Maybe I’d tell her about the time my sister picked me up from an Indiana jail cell at three a.m. because I gave the cops her number as my legal guardian. She went with it and drove me home. We picked up donuts on the way back and I bought her a cup of coffee with the change in our parents’ car to say thank you. She never mentioned it again.

I want her to know about test after test after test and how it all opens to light. I want to tell her about how I’d walk barefoot in the park by my apartment complex in New York every autumn just to feel the crunch of leaves under my toes. Or about how big the sky gets anytime you head south and how vast horizons over oceans are. I wish I could just show her a morning without an alarm clock or how good it is to lock the door and rumple the sheets.

But I end up saying something like Yeah, but I bet all the revenue something corporate would bring in would be good for taxes. She empties her cup and asks me if I’m ready. I start to get up but then say In a second. I have to tell you about the two trees in my front yard.

The first therapist Rita sees is in college, the free one at health services. During the first appointment, Dr. Picard asks Rita if it’s alright if she has a cigarette while they talk. When Rita asks if she has any relation to the Captain, the doctor lights up a second.

Elie gets upset with Rita for what he calls trying to please too hard and he’ll say it over and again. Baby, why are you trying to please too hard again? She’ll apologize and go out for a cigarette.

One night, when Elie gets home late from a gig, Rita is there with dinner ready. She stayed home that night after too much office gossip and celebrity stories from coworkers and two cigarettes into the evening at home, regretted not being there to support. Elie comes home to fish and two vegetables, which is his go to when he’s trying to get his life back in order. Elie gets upset, uses the bathroom, staring at himself too long in the mirror and yells at Rita saying again, this is her working to please too hard. Then he leaves. Rita wonders if she’d be asking too much if she could just try too hard to please. Just once, switch the damn word order, say it right. She decides that yes, she’d be asking too much.

Elie sent Rita to Dr. Picard because he decided she needed help. Her anxiety gets unbearable when Elie starts asking her who she is attracted to and getting mad no matter the answer. If she said no one, Elie would say that she shouldn’t just say what she thought he wanted to hear, that she was trying to please too hard and she should just tell him. If she said Luis, or even Johnny Depp, Elie would get distant and cold and bring it up any chance he wanted to make a situation awkward.

Rita gets told by strangers she has to speak up. Every time at a restaurants, she has to say her order three times, too quiet for the waitresses to hear.

Rita tells Dr. Picard about Elie and Dr. Picard says she wants to meet him. Elie agrees and during the appointment, they all have cigarettes together. Elie tells Rita she should hold her cigarette the right way. Dr. Picard makes a comment about how Elie makes Rita second guess herself, that his aggressiveness makes her nervous. After the appointment, Elie says to stop seeing Dr. Picard because “she’s just not working out.” Rita complies.

Elie’s mother is leaving the agency to start a private practice. Elie decides that he and Rita should go see his mother together for couple’s counseling. Rita complies. When they get to the office, Elie lets them in with his key and helps himself to a Diet Pepsi in the office fridge. During the session, Rita sits there and listens as Elie and his mother talk about her issues communicating and how she needs to learn to express herself. Rita can’t bring herself to tell his mother about how her son told her to stop seeing her friends or how he sometimes doesn’t come home after a show and the next morning smells like someone else. She just sits there.

That night, Elie asks Rita to rub his back. He’s sitting at the kitchen table they got from Rita’s parent’s garage and he complains about the wobbly leg as he thumbs at an empty box of Marlboros. She continues to massage his shoulders. He asks her if she liked the session. She says yes, that it was helpful. They’re right. She should work on finding her voice. He taps her hands and says, “Good. You did well today.” He goes upstairs and gets undressed.

She stays and sits on the uneven kitchen table, rocking it back and forth wondering how long the ride will last before it all comes crashing beneath her.

Richard is trying to figure out the profound meaning of having the ocean closer to his bed than the bathroom. He’s taking it deep talking about “the soul of man’s desire” and I think that phrase only came out because he’s gone through two limes now on Coronas alone.

“We want conveniences,” he tells me, slapping a mosquito, “just a carefully packaged substitute for what’s real. Modern amenities are such bullshit.” With that, I make it a point to accept any argument that ends with fill-in-the-blank is such bullshit. Well argued, Richard.

He goes on talking “back to nature” and “back to ourselves.” I feel my bare feet on the wind-battered wood looking down to see the sand still wedged between my toes. My skin feels like raw hide and I don’t remember the last time I saw a mirror. Richard sees me looking off and says, “I mean, you get it man, right?” Slap.

I give him a “yeah yeah” or maybe a “the simple life” and I think I threw in a half-mumbled “but Richard, amenities don’t kill people, people kill people.”

We’re sitting at Mateo’s bar and Mateo is flicking wine glasses dry next to the tiki torches. He’s wearing plastic shoes and still has his sunglasses resting atop his head despite the fact it’s nearing one in the morning.

I start ripping the label off my Tecate and Richard sees I’m more in the stars above the roofless bar and less with him. “Hey Mateo,” Richard says. “Whaddya think? Are we digging our souls an early grave?”

“Interesting,” Mateo says, “that given the choice between finding truth and talking about finding truth, most of us prefer the conversation.”

I balled up the Tecate label and wished the long walk home was just a little bit longer.

Joel moved out to California expecting something and after a year moved back to the east coast. “I liked it fine,” he told me, “but I mean c’mon, not even one tremor… Is it too much to ask? I want the earth to move.”

I commented on it, and he said that he seriously didn’t mean the metaphor.

To each his own I suppose.

I remember wishing as a kid and I’d wish on anything. I had a rule about red cars; they needed a wish each. And stars, but that’s a given, and sometimes planes in the big city, as planes took the place of stars. And I’d look to the sky and pray on that, a wish here, a wish there, the tops of buildings, a lighthouse on the lake. I wish upon that broken playground swing that I’ll get my new baseball glove, or an extra $20 for mowing the lawn, or that my brother will stop tickling me to tears, or that my sister will stop practicing her trombone late at night. I’d wish that Quinn would get the bike he wanted or that Claire would just disappear because it’s torture, absolute torture, to sit next to her in class.

All that wishing and to what end?

And then later, when I needed it, I’d wish on the fuzz of the TV screen in between channels. I’d wish the sickness gone or the fighting to stop.

And now even later, Claire closes her eyes to pray upon tears that the heat will turn back on. That she’s just too cold to do this anymore. Cold in her lungs and her fingers are losing feeling. She said she lost her heat, that it wasn’t coming back, and she’d drink coffee and warm her face to the steam and you could see the color come back to her skin and then leave again as the cup emptied. I tell her to stop sleeping on the floor, and to start sleeping more at night. I tell her that the Native Americans used to say that any hour of sleep before midnight counted for double. She asks if 6 a.m. counted as before midnight. I say that I made that bit up, about the proverb.

She says the heater is broken, broken, broken, three times like that, and she’s waiting for the repairman to come fix it, but hadn’t called him yet and doesn’t want to look the number up or tell the landlord that it’s all just too much work. I offer to take a look at it, and she says it’s useless.

I run my hands through her hair and tell her the thing I used to have with red cars, like an omen toward something coming my way. I tell her it was nice to be so sure of something, even as irrational as it was. She wants me to list all the things I’d wish for now, and I say I don’t really have any, that we all learn at some point to accept and that’s fine, that wishes were for the mystics and life has taught us all a few too many lessons. I go on about how hope doesn’t die, it just gets dim and I go on and she falls asleep right there. I know that if I can just get this damn heater to work, it’ll all be okay. I just know it because you know what you know because you know it. Just get the damn thing working.

He handed me 30 cents he had in his pocket. “For tolls,” he said.

Small, yes, but it’s nice not to have to pay all life’s tolls yourself.

We drove further and further away. One day, he said, I’m-a make a book outta her.

Until then, I said, Seattle or all the way to Vancouver?

I let her have the umbrella as she ran around to the driver’s side. We had come out together in the rain, each with one hand on the handle and we ducked instinctually and ran out low. We were close and I remember thinking it was the first time our fingers had touched in a while.

But I was wet now as she fumbled for her keys in her purse. She said sorry and tried to explain something but the police siren down the road drown her out.

“It’s okay,” I said and was still warm from the bottle of Malbec inside. She fumbled some more and apologized again and I was fine in the rain. I watched the cars go by splashing and my hair was dripping now. The street light reflected the rain clear and transparent and the gutter of the street was filled with everything it was taking away.

“I swear, this is the problem with big purses,” she said.

“It’s alright,” I said.

“I’m ruining a perfectly decent evening,” she said.

I said she wasn’t and not to worry, and I felt the water in my socks now. She was trying to prop the umbrella up on her shoulder so she could look with both hands but the wind took it and she was wet now too.

“I can take the metro home if it’d be easier,” I said and I was not sure why.

“I can find my fucking keys,” she said. “Just gimmie a minute.”

I went back to watching the cars and the gutter but they seemed less interesting now. I went to grab the umbrella from the street and held it above her head and she looked up at me and then back down to her purse.

“I found them,” she said, unlocked the car and got in. I closed her door and walked back to the passenger side. We were both wet now and she was frustrated and I wondered when rain stopped being something to celebrate.

“I blame it on you,” she said with her hand in my back pocket. “If you hadn’t spun that ash tray on the counter…”

“Sure, just go ahead and let the ash tray off the hook,” I said.

I don’t know when being asked to leave became a badge of honor for us, but tonight was nothing new.  We had tried to talk each other down. This is a small town, we’d say. We can’t just go all willy nilly.

Leaving New York makes you appreciate the honesty of strangers, albeit brutal.

But it was late for here, and the streets were quiet. She stumbled on the curb and for the first brief second, it seemed contrived. Her laughter ricochet off nothing and I felt a shhh come to my lips.

That night, I opened and closed the medicine cabinet in the bathroom just to hear the hinges creek. Open, close, open, close, each time catching my own eyes in the reflection. Go back to bed, I thought. And the night got long, quick.