He had a stunning mane of wild black curls that fell over his face. He was burly and handsome with strong hands and shoulders and pronounced cheekbones. He sat on the bed of his truck in a faded flannel shirt with specks of sawdust catching the light as he moved even slightly. The top two buttons were undone, revealing dark curls on his chest. He leaned back, crossed his legs and raised an eyebrow.
He responded to my comments with a certain look in his eyes that made me think he was flirting.
His long dark eyelashes were shining. He crossed one leg over the other and swung his foot back and forth. His boots were firm and rugged with holes and different-colored laces on each. His one foot came toward me and receded again. Like a metronome on an old piano.
I sat down on a lingering coffee table. “Sturdy,” I said. It was the sexiest word I could think of at the time.
I don’t know what had come over me, acting like that. As my fingers rounded the edge of the table, they dipped into a slight groove in the wood.
I quickly recovered by throwing something else out there. I told him I liked the finish. I continued to save myself the embarrassment of being so forward.
There was a geometric cube carved into the side. It was stained a darker wood.
I asked inquisitively about the engraving as confidently as I could.
To this day, I do not know what emboldened me in this moment. What force within my body pressed me up toward that man or brought my finger along his table so seductively. To ask such prying questions without hesitation. It was my first experience with bohemia. It felt meaningless, asinine even, but it enlivened all that was numb within me in those difficult days.
He told me it was his logo. A box. After his last name. And then he told me his whole name. Silas Box. It sounded as slick and cool as I expected.
Before Silas came down and greeted me properly, I pulled my finger along the wood once again and yelped out. I recoiled my finger from the table and brought it close to my chest and held on to it with my other hand.
Silas jumped from his position on the bed of the truck and took my fingers in his. His hands were calloused and scarred and manly. His eyes grew large and attentive as he inspected my finger.
He asked if I had caught a splinter, distress creeping up in his throat.
I playfully extended my finger right in front of Silas’s and smiled generously. I was just faking and I let him know it.
Silas’s shoulders fell and he tucked his chin, coarse with stubble, into his chest and shook his head at his own credulousness. His curly hair flopped back and forth effortlessly. He tucked a curl behind his ear as he lifted his head. Those green, alchemic eyes again. As my eyes met his, a grand and flitting feeling rushed into my heart. I hadn’t felt anything in so long. It was glorious.
He asked if I was free for a beer and I told him okay, as casually as I could muster.
There was a time in my life that I considered what it would have been like if I had never made my way across the market. If I had never seduced your father with my long dress and slightly sunburned chest. Or him me. If I hadn’t said yes to that beer. If I had instead veered off this wild road, this directionless detour from my life, and returned to everything I was meant to see and do.
But it brought you to me, my dear Hazel. And I would never take that back. Not for anything in the world. Even if it started to make this mess.
We spent a lot of time together after that first beer. When I began falling in love, or in lust, with your father, I was young enough and aching over the loss of my parents enough to embrace the freedom that came with being in that place. Being with that man.
My relationship with your father was devoid of promises and apologies. Nobody bought flowers or left little love notes. Nobody folded laundry without being prompted or arranged weekend getaways. I never lit candles over a romantic home-cooked meal of Silas’s favorite foods. Silas never came home from his day with something special he picked out just for me. If we wanted those things, we would do them together. Or not. There was nothing needed or compromised over. There was only want and lust and the simplicity of being just ourselves.
At the time, I believed in the expansive potential of my life. That Silas and I could grow into any kind of life together. Fill up the spaces of the world with our honest, naked, uncompromised selves. There was romance, true romance, in that. Togetherness in independence. (You can see how my mind has changed with Cam.)
There is a moment I often hearken back to when I think of that summer. The sun was high and the windows were open. There was no breeze to rattle windowpanes or billow curtains. There was just thick, drooping, hot air saturating the bedroom. White sheets were tangled at our ankles and pillows and bras and shorts and underwear peppered the room (I’m sorry to make you cringe!). My eyelids were heavy and I had my arm stretched across Silas’s abdomen. I could feel his breathing. The rhythmic rise and fall of his belly. I lifted my arm to reach for a glass of water beside the bed and Silas’s skin lifted with it. It was as if our bodies melted into one in that room. I let my arm linger for a moment, Silas’s skin affixed to mine. Your father drew his heavy eyelids open and I instinctively thrust my hand toward the water glass. I knew Silas would not want to witness our bodies connected like that. It surprised me, though, how viscerally aware I was that this scene of skin stuck to skin would violate a sacred condition of our relationship.
It was in this moment that I realized it wasn’t a free-spirited ideal that sustained us. It was the avoidance of all realities. That single flinch of my arm set into motion my scrupulous study of Silas’s gestures. I became desperate for casualties. The conspiracies cloaked in every movement, every word. The way his jaw tensed when we made eye contact. The way his knees turned away from me when we spoke, even casually. The anxious twisting of his hair around his right pointer finger. The empty gaze that would sometimes befall him.
I asked once while we were sitting in his backyard where he went mentally. I put my hand on his hand tenderly.
Silas didn’t blink once as he spoke of his own tragedies in his past.
He told me that he was only sixteen when he met his first love, Torrey, but he was sure that it would last a lifetime. I think I can recite almost verbatim what he told me about her. For many years I played that scene back over and over in my mind. He said that Torrey was an equal but opposite force. Calm and free-spirited. She never paid any mind to the rules but would break them only gently. Torrey got pregnant the year after they met and Silas’s parents put them up in that lake house in Grandor (the one you’re in right now). They redid the whole thing together. They were really making it work. Starting a life. Silas was just starting to earn some money from selling furniture, too. He told me with a sparkle in his eye about the rocking chair he had made for her. How excited she was to rock their little girl in it. I think they were going to name her Ruby. Cute, huh?
Then, one day, as Silas was preparing to meet Torrey for a picnic, the phone rang. It was the hospital. Torrey had gone in with some bleeding and cramps. Before long she was unconscious. They saved Torrey, but they couldn’t save the baby.