Four Seasons…June

Written by Writer Dad on December 11, 2009 - View Comments
Categories: Writing

(This one not only has naughty words, they start immediately.)

Kkkkkkkk…Kkkkkkkk…Kkkkkkkk…Kkkkkkkk…Kkkkkkk..

Fuck!

Lemmin slammed his palm on the steering wheel just hard enough to add a swatch of purple. “You know you don’t have to swear,” he heard his wife from the passenger seat. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t there or that she hadn’t really spoken. It was what she would have said. After thirty years together, the sound of Sheryl’s voice in his ears was like water spilling from a busted faucet.

He would have tried the engine once more if he’d believed that the forty-eighth time could be the charm, but Lemmin was already running late and knew another try might easily push anxiety to anger. It was his fault in the first place, he should’ve heeded the obvious and bought a battery, the one under the hood was two administrations old.

Lemmin stepped from the car, slammed the heavy door of the old boat, and slipped his key into the front door. “I’m taking the Mini Cooper,” he called, pulling a key that hadn’t been turned in six months from the dish by the door.

“Wait!” He heard the ring of Sheryl’s voice. “I’m coming with you.”

Lemmin said nothing. What was the point? Sheryl had always done as she pleased, and the last six months she’d been hanging over him like a shadow in the longest days of June.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be nice.”

Lemmin was glad he’d listened to whatever whisper had urged him to park the El Camino on the street. He would have wanted to push it down the drive to make way for the Mini about as much as he would have wanted to make the entire trip on foot.

Lemmin unlocked the garage door, flipped on the light, and squeezed his tall frame into the tiny cabin. Sheryl was already inside. Goddamn coffin, he thought.

“I didn’t say it.”

“You didn’t have to.” Cheryl from the passenger seat. “Let’s get going. You’re late.”

Lemmin turned the key and the Mini Cooper purred. Nothing like his Camino, or the Crown Vic that kept him company most of his days along with the occasional night. “What are you waiting for?” Sheryl asked.

“Not sure, exactly.” Lemmin traced his fingers across the steering wheel. “I guess maybe any reason not to go.”

Silence. Then, “You have to go. You don’t get a choice.”

Lemmin didn’t answer. He adjusted the mirror, then backed out of the driveway and into the street. He closed the garage with an absent minded flick of the remote, put the car in drive and headed toward the highway. At the first red, he flipped on the satellite radio that had come pre-installed in the Mini Cooper.

“Can’t we just listen to quiet?”

“Someone should get some use out of it,” Lemmin said. He took his right hand from the wheel and held the tip of his finger against the up arrow on the receiver, scrolling through a long string of titles far too fast to read. He paused at the bank of numbers where he thought he remembered the country stations being the last time he drove the Mini, then moved his hand back to the steering wheel just as the slide of a steel guitar confirmed his instinct.

“Are you trying to agitate me?”  Lemmin grinned. “I figured you were well beyond agitation.”

He could feel Sheryl’s snide smile, but the cabin was otherwise quiet. The only sound was the moonshine rinsed warble coming from the speakers. He reached for the knob and lowered the sound just as he saw the sea of red in front of him.

Sheryl’s voice rang as an echo to his thought, “You’re late.”

Lemmin sighed at the standstill and felt the familiar sense of deja vu slither up his back and settle at the base of his spine for the third time that day. Foot on the brake, he closed his eyes and rocked his head back and forth, letting the cool air from the air conditioner slap the sides of his face.

“You’re doing some weird shit lately.”

“No different than normal, honey pie. Only difference is that these days you’re seeing it.”

Sheryl might’ve snorted. Lemmin’s eyes were still closed, but he imagined her rooting through her purse in search of a cigarette. She considered traffic an invitation to smoke.

He opened his eyes just in time to see the red in front of him fade and the long serpent of vehicles slowly slither to life. The respite was short lived. Ten seconds and Lemmin was looking at endless taillights coming to life. His eyes fell to the dash and the needle flirting with the red. He threw on the blinker, pulled to the right and bounced through a pothole about fifteen miles shy of painful.

Freaking LA, Lemmin thought. The torn roads and congestion clinging to every stretch of concrete were as bad as the smog clinging to the sky above. Fresh roads were rare and clear days occasion for news. From the passenger seat, “We should’ve left the city ten years ago.”

Lemmin said nothing.

One of Sheryl’s favorite fights – she’d been saying “We should’ve left the city ten years ago” since it was actually ten instead of twenty. Truth was, they never would have moved. Moving from LA might have been the only thing more expensive for them than living there.

“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Sheryl said, even though he’d said nothing. “There are plenty of places in this world a hell of a lot cheaper to live than LA. We could have made our home in damn near any one of them. Instead we just rotted away here in this place with plenty of mountains and beach, but not enough soul.”

Lemmin parted his lips, then closed them again.

“And if you have any hopes of that job of yours getting any better, well you can just keep dreaming, they’ve been putting out your fires since February.”

Lemmin swallowed hard at the memory. Not like it ever left, but vented through Sheryl it held a few extra barbs. January could have changed everything. Instead, it was only the start of an unexpected nightmare.

He had come home that New Year’s morning almost jolly, swimming in the strongest deja vu he’d felt in more than half his own forever. He came home to see Sheryl sighing quietly under the sheets, went out running and came back an hour later to make her breakfast. They’d stared into each other’s eyes over pancakes, for maybe the first time in a year as she listened to his parade of promises. Everything would change he said. She believed him. Every single word.

And things had started to change, almost immediately, each great day falling right into a better one. Until the unthinkable happened; the impossible tearing open a wound to the inevitable.

“Looks like traffic’s making itself comfortable.” The words just sort of fell from Lemmin’s lips, directed at no one, except maybe himself.

“You can’t just hand everyone a ticket.” Sheryl snorted the same snort he always hated, yet seemed to almost miss when it wasn’t around. “Bet you miss that siren of yours right about now.”

Lemmin lifted his head to look at the overpass, as if an extra half inch would allow him to see past the hazy glare, through 100,000 tons of steel and into the tangled center of whatever trouble was intent on taking his day from bad to worse. He saw nothing, but figured he could gas up, cross the tracks and grab the freeway a mile up, maybe leaping past the largest part of the gridlock.

A minute off the freeway, Lemmin spied a horse with wings jumping from the center of a faded blue circle, swore to himself that the particular brand of station was long extinct, then flashed the blinker on the Mini Cooper and pulled up next to a washed out pump to fill his dying tank. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He didn’t look at Sheryl or invite her along.

The tinny ding as Lemmin entered the liquor store pulled his thoughts from Sheryl, though only for a second. Stepping behind a guy he probably could’ve smelled from outside, Lemmin’s mind drifted back to thirty years before and the constant thought that he’d always be alone. He’d spent an adolescence waiting for someone to ask him about the scar on his cheek or the one just above his eye. He practiced his answers in the mirror so they would sound polished when finally heard.

But nobody ever asked. Either nobody wanted to know or nobody wanted to be impolite. At least no one until Sheryl, curious as she was brash.

They had known one another for maybe five entire minutes before each was making promises neither could keep, knowing they had just enough in common to keep things interesting. It was another good five years before her two main food groups turned to Slim Fast and Valium, and a decade before long intervals of regular silence papered their walls.

“What can I get you?”

Lemmin lifted his head and the wave almost knocked him over; the deja vu so strong it was like been there, done that shot from a scattergun. The man behind the bullet proof plexiglass rapped his knuckles against the partition and pulled Lemmin from his daze with a bright smile begging for an answer. Lemmin tried to focus, wondering first if this was the real deal or if his mind was playing marionette the way it sometimes did.

Seemed like the guy staring at him from behind the glass had a story Lemmin should know. He seemed somehow out of place behind the fingerprint smudged opacity. He was maybe six-foot-four, with a smile as wide as a bumper and teeth like a fluorescent. His five simple words were filled with friendly confidence. He had to be the owner. No way pretty boy blue was pulling a paycheck in this dump.

Or maybe he was just thinking too much. Lemmin slid a fifty under the bullet proof divider. “Fill up on six,” he said.

“You don’t look well.” The attendant’s kind tone almost made it sound like a compliment.

“I’ve been better.”

“Air’s kinda sick outside. Earthquake weather some might say.”

Lemmin wondered how many times the attendant had delivered that line already, then looked up at the marquee. Almost four bucks a gallon. At least the Cooper only held thirteen. Even on fumes, he had change coming. “Hit me for this too,” Lemmin pulled a Twinkie from the counter and started peeling the wrapper. Half of it was in his mouth before he hit the door.

“See ya’ later,” pretty boy said.

Lemmin waved his hand in back of his head.

Lemmin leaned against the fuming metal, thought about the inevitable discomfort lingering no more than twenty minutes away, and swallowed the hard lump swelling the back of his throat. He heard the click from the nozzle, then squeezed the trigger to top off, filling the air with the sharp scent as gas spilled over and splashed on the ground. $48.16. Not enough left to go back inside for change, but Lemmin felt a beat in his conscience reminding him he didn’t say bye.

What did it matter? He looked up and through the doors. The attendant was tossing him an adios in a sort of half salute, a grin behind it. Lemmin shook his head and smiled in spite of himself, then opened the car door and entered a silence that clung to the cabin for five minutes; down the ugly boulevard that ran beside the sound wall, past the crowded corners and empty parking lots, and back onto the freeway.

Whatever the trouble had been, it was starting to clear. Lemmin could see the empty stretch ahead, flashes of color racing ahead one by one as though a pace car had just pulled to the right.

The silence inside the car felt odd. It wasn’t Sheryl’s nature to stay quiet in traffic. “What,” Lemmin said, mostly to himself, “Finally run out of things to say?”

“Feeling lonely?”

Lemmin imagined Sheryl smiling from the corner of his eye. His knee started to bounce as the Cooper surged for a second before stopping short, maybe a half dozen cars from freedom. Lemmin looked to the left without surprise. The accident was barely a fender bender, but he knew well enough – it took a special sort of human to pass a collision without wanting a ticket to the show. Bad traffic was as contagious as Bird Flu. Lemmin pulled to the front and floored the pedal.

“Did I ever tell you about my theory of Deja Vu?”

“No,” Sheryl breathed through a cloud of cigarette smoke that suddenly appeared as if from nowhere. “Might’ve been the only one you ever missed.”

Lemmin bit his lip, swallowed a sigh, then opened his mouth. “When I was young, I mean real young; maybe four or five or even younger, I remember slipping and falling beneath this big sort a swing thing they had at my pre-school.” Lemmin pulled all the way to the left and lowered his foot.

“The swing was set on this big rectangular sheet of plexiglass with these long cords of fraying red rope where the kids could sit – you know? The swing was the kind of cool they could never get away with in a daycare today, like a merry-go-round I guess. Anyway, this was the ride to ride, you know? One day, I was waiting for my turn for what felt like forever until I was finally next in line. I was so excited I was sort of bouncing around at the edge. I slipped and fell underneath while the kid ahead of me was still swinging. I knew I couldn’t budge or I’d get whacked on the side of the head with the swing. So I just lay still beneath the swing, frozen like Han Solo in carbonite. Then, all of a sudden, I went from trying to stay frozen to being frozen, end of story. I couldn’t move if I tried, and sure as shit I did. But it was like I was just writhing around along the sides of my soul or something because I couldn’t move a muscle. Oddest thing that had ever happened to me, and the first time I remember feeling deja vu.”

Lemmin was enjoying the story. Maybe not more than he’d expected, but more fresh water on a parched tongue than he’d imagined. He smiled and continued.

“Now this is an intense memory, still to this day. Reason being, it was an uncut out of body experience, long before I knew what such a thing was. I could feel the world echoing around me, like I was caught between the ripples from a stone’s throw in a pond. Course I say this all in retrospect. At four, I only knew some strange things were afoot down at the Romper Room. As I got older, I tried to manipulate the feeling, see if maybe I could recreate it on my own. Though I could never make it feel nearly as powerful as it did when it happened on its own, I found I could recreate at least a dim sense of already seen by standing in the same exact spot while repeating my thought and kind of forcing my brain into a hiccup.”

Lemmin looked toward the passenger window. “I had to be about fifteen before I realized I had a theory.”

“And what’s that?”

Lemmin smiled. “Glad you asked. I think deja vu is some kind a flash of something that’s happened before. Maybe like a beam of light in a dark room from a life you already lived or something, or maybe you’re catching a glimpse of some other side of somewhere else. Either way, your brain knows about it and doesn’t want to let it go. It just keeps holding on as long as it can, unwilling to let the feeling fade into some far off forget about it. Maybe it’s a warning. Maybe in some other once upon a time or once upon a right now but somewhere else, I got my head crushed in by some swinging piece of lumber and so I was stuck beneath the swing with some sense of my inner me yelling to stay down, you know?”

Lemmin smiled, glad he’d gotten it out just as his exit appeared at the edge of his vision.

“You’ve had this theory since you were fifteen?”

“Ish.”

“Why are you talking about it now?”

“I guess there’s a whole lotta stuff we never said to each other.” Lemmin chose his words. “And I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately.”

The passenger seat stayed silent.

Lemmin sailed through a yellow, entered the church parking lot, pulled into one of the hundred or so available spaces, killed the engine, and sat.

And there he was again, frozen to the tan leather of the still new Mini Cooper, fixed in place as if by some preternatural pressure. He felt dizzy, thoughts slipping in and out of one another like stitching in a quilt. Lemmin couldn’t focus on a single thread. He was permeated by his own puzzle, just as he had been for days.

Why wasn’t he crying?

His grief ran deep. He’d only just met Libby three months before. Their connection was instant, despite the fact that she could have been the daughter he never had. Or perhaps because of it. He certainly never expected to see her eyes to the sky in a coffin less than one month later.

The first ray of hope he’d had since the death of Sheryl and now she was gone too.

Perhaps he was finally at the age where life elected to take more than it was willing to give. A lonely tear slid down Lemmin’s cheek and the fog lifted. He opened the door, wiped his hands across his spotless suit, and looked at the large crowd of gathered shadows standing in the distance.

“You coming?” Libby said.

“I am.”