On Saturday, it was still bright out. Vicky awoke with a sense of frantic urgency. She pulled her hair in a pony-tail and pulled on sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt that said “I’m really excited to be here” in yellow letters. She scurried her way through her apartment in bare feet, surveying, taking inventory. The wood floors were haunted with dust bunnies, she realized, and the green linoleum in the kitchen was sticky in places. The cardboard towers threatened to topple and her bury her in her belongings she no longer wanted.

Tommy had called her only an hour after they parted ways and proposed they meet that Sunday. He asked Vicky where she wanted to go and she said she wanted to see the aquarium, which was true, and seemed romantic in an unconventional way. The next best thing to some sort of boat cruise, which still scared her.

The prospect of their date scared her, too, but she felt electrified by possibilities that had fallen mute these last months. She needed to get things in order. She needed to meet Tommy tomorrow feeling new, clean, free of error.

She began to throw things away. A narrow gravel alleyway ribboned alongside her apartment building and she pulled on tennis shoes and then lugged boxes out to the metal garbage cans lining the alley. At first she took only the boxes she knew were useless, filled with the candles and snow globes and old books she’d never read again. She stacked them against the brick wall, icy air flushing her bare arms. The more she threw away, though, the more she wanted to throw away. She was feeling better and better. She stopped looking in the boxes. She picked them up or dragged them outside and skyscraper by skyscraper, Cardopolis diminished.

When she was finished, she swept the floors and scrubbed the sticky spots on her bubbling kitchen floor. Sweating, she looked over her work. Only a bed, a chair, and her dresser remained. The wood floors reflected the fading outside light. She sat cross legged on the living room floor. It was so empty. The utter emptiness reminded her, somehow, of her father.

Crap, she thought. It’s not even raining, and here I go again.

Her father, Teddy. Dark hair, stubbled jaw. One front tooth gray from some injury, a fight maybe. What had he said to her? She had visited him, only sixteen, just old enough to drive. He was as good-looking and off-putting as Maya had warned. But she didn’t want to move on with her life. She wanted to meet him. He wore an orange jumpsuit, just like in the movies, but he wasn’t behind glass. He was right across from her, at a table, in a room filled with men in orange jumpsuits and their bleach-blond wives and clamoring children.

What was it he had said?

They shook hands goodbye. He told her he felt sorry for her, not to come there again, he felt too sorry.

“You feel sorry?” she had asked.

He rubbed his stubbled jaw. There was a tattoo on the underside of his forearm, cursive words she couldn’t discern from that angle. And by way of explanation he had sighed, “You want me to be someone I’m not.”

That was it. Or close enough. She remembered now, she could swear on it. Almost. He had told her she loved him for more than he was, and she had started crying, crying embarrassing, gutteral sobs. Because whatever he had said or meant was, of course, entirely correct.

 

1 : 2 : 3 : 4 : 5 : 6 : 7 : 8 : 9 : 10