Mikey and the Chickadee Ch. 06

"I see. Well, I hope you have a good trip to Boise. Do you like it there?"

"It's okay," he said. "It's a lot smaller than here. I don't mean Fern Hill-small; it's just not a big city. Some strange in-between size, I guess. But it's clean and the people are nice."

I nodded and we lay listening to the sounds of the night spilling in from outside. I made up my mind to appease my curiosity about something.

"Mikey, I've been wanting to ask. How did your parents die?"

"Car accident," he said. "A truck driver fell asleep and hit them head-on."

"Oh," I said. "Sorry to bring it up, but for some reason I wanted to know."

"That's normal. I told you they died but I didn't tell you what happened." He paused. "It was a bad accident so I don't think they suffered."

I folded my arms across my chest. "I'm glad they didn't suffer."

He cleared his throat, pausing for a few seconds before saying, "It's been almost four years. After all that time...I don't feel like I expected I would. It still doesn't always seem like they're gone. It's like they're still around. Somewhere."

I turned his statement over in my mind a few times. "Do do think they really are? Like, somewhere else?"

"If you mean, like, an afterlife type of thing, then I don't know." He turned onto his side, facing me. "I don't have any specific beliefs about that. I guess I don't really think that way."

"I don't, either," I said.

"My aunt always insists they're in heaven. She says that's why I feel the way I do. I've told her that those beliefs aren't...I don't know...a part of me."

I rubbed my eyes. "My mom and I have the same kind of conversations. She's convinced that life must be empty and sad without believing in an afterlife."

Mikey moved once again to his back. He seemed to choose his words carefully before saying, "I would rather be miserable than take something like that on faith."

I turned and looked at him. "That's how I think about it, too."

"I mean, yeah it's sad. It's pretty fucking depressing sometimes," he continued. "It's supposed to be-you know, not knowing."

I nodded, but didn't say anything.

Mikey got up to close the window. "I'm finally feeling a little cold," he said. "I'm going to put on my shirt again."

I did the same.

We lay together again, wandering through our own minds for a while. Eventually I turned to Mikey, observing his eyes as they darted around the room, lingering in one place for no longer than a few seconds before shifting to the next.

"You look very occupied by something," I said.

He sighed. "Not any one thing. And nothing that I can really put into words."

"What time do you have to head out tomorrow? I don't want to keep you up."

"Around the same as usual. I'll be fine. We'll leave soon and get you to bed, though."

We faced each other, a safe distance between us, and my eyelids began to feel heavy.

"When I focus on you," he said, "I stop thinking about anything serious. It's nice."

I wasn't sure if Mikey referred only to this moment, together on the bed, or if, when we were apart, he also calmed himself with thoughts of me. I just smiled at him.

We both grew increasingly drowsy over the next several minutes, and I said, "I don't want the night to be over, but I'm going to fall asleep if we don't go now."

He lingered for just a second and suddenly I contemplated alternate circumstances, in which I did not report to work early the next morning and Mikey did not embark on a day-long drive to some distant, unimaginable city. We would not be bound by time; we would drift off to sleep in each other's presence and we would come to remove our clothes, crawling under the covers to spend the night together. I wondered if Mikey had considered it, too.

"I don't want it to be over, either," he said. He lifted himself up and crawled off the bed. "I guess four days isn't very long."

"It's not," I said, walking to the living room and gathering my coat and tie. "The work week will go by quickly."

As we traveled home I felt such an unexpected and profound peacefulness that I fell easily back into a state of fatigue, fighting off sleep more than once.

Mikey noticed and insisted that I close my eyes. "I promise I am far from sleep," he said. "Driving does that to me."

I rested my head against the window, abandoning the waking world for at least a few minutes. At some point I had become aware again but kept my eyes closed, absorbing the hushed vibrations that traveled up from the road through the frame of the car and spread into my side. For a fleeting moment I detected, unmistakably, the back of Mikey's hand meeting with my cheek. It ventured up the edge of my jaw and brushed against my ear before departing. I showed no sign of awareness because I did not want to embarrass him, and because I hoped that it would happen again. It did not, and before long he guided the car off the highway and up the road to my apartment building.