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On the way to the reunion Chrissy looks down at her hand on the steering-wheel. The way it’s braced against the leather. The long, tapered tips of her fingernails. The blank space where there used to be a ring.
(A lifetime ago, Jason had picked something garish and gaudy. An intricate knit of gold-spangled nothingness pretending to be a Celtic knot, somehow lacking the spirit of one. Somehow.)
She notices the white flare of her knuckles, and resettles her grip. Blood seeps back in beneath the skin slowly as she checks the rear-view mirror. She adjusts it minutely for something to do, then lets her eyes flick back forward to the empty highway.
In front and behind her, infinite emptiness. The stars are bright over the blacktop, numerous, and she thinks for a minute that the world’s been tipped upside down. That the stars are the cars she should be driving amongst, and she’s trapped in a sky so deeply black it glimmers blue in the moonlight. That everything’s moving somewhere else, somewhere other. That she’s stuck in the dark somewhere all on her own.
A truck rumbles up from nowhere and the illusion is shattered. It passes so close she imagines she could reach out and touch it. She tightens her grip on the steering-wheel again instead, and looks at the neat, red hooks of her painted nails. The blank space where there used to be a ring.
In her last session she said something about the ugly Celtic knot, the invisible brand left by it on her skin. (First by its presence, and then its absence.) Her therapist asked if she missed it.
‘It being there?’ she asked him.
He made a tilted motion with his left hand. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Do you miss it being there?’
‘Not the ring,’ she said. ‘I hated that.’
‘You wore it for years.’
Chrissy narrowed her gaze. ‘Not because I thought it was beautiful.’
‘Why then?’
‘For what it symbolised,’ she said. ‘What it meant.’
He put his hand back on his notebook, the pen caught there by his thumb. ‘What did it mean, Chrissy?’
‘Marriage,’ she said automatically, like he was stupid, like it was obvious. ‘A promise, a vow to—to—oh, I don’t know.’
He moved the pen fractionally, let it roll back. ‘To what, Chrissy?’
(To the wrong man, she almost said. To the wrong life.)
‘To Jason,’ she said defiantly. ‘To our life together.’
Hawkins flares its way onto the horizon. Spills across it like paint or ink. Lights picked out in green and gold, the frost turning the windowpanes to sugared glass.
She turns off the highway and finds her way along the town roads. (A way she thought she might have lost but hasn’t forgotten. Can’t ever forget.) The lake, the wood. A sign still sagging on its hinges. The high school bedded like a knife at the centre.
In the parking lot she lets the car idle. The radio off, the heat still on. Blasting through the grey slats to warm her face, her fingers where they lay still curled around the steering-wheel. The dainty tip of her boot playing the air above the accelerator (ready to slam it down, to run), then settling on the floor of the footwell. (She won’t run. She doesn’t want to.)
Inside the gym hall the same stacked wooden seats. The waxy scent of polish rising from the floor. Streamers hanging from the ceiling, balloons framing the doorway. A photographer drifting about with a glass of punch in one hand and a cumbersome-looking camera in the other. Propped into a hip—then flashed up in Chrissy’s face as she ducks in through a haze of gold and green.
‘Cheese.’
She bares her teeth reflexively in what might be a smile. ‘Cheers,’ she says. ‘I—cheese.’
‘Got it. Enjoy your night.’
She is still smiling (shyly, politely) as she watches the photographer’s retreating back. Her lips slowly settle into something less white and open. She looks around.
There is a punch-cup in her hand she doesn’t remember picking up, and little groups of people gathered around tall tables. Split off, socialising, then remerging into a mass that she knows she should be making her way through, into.
She wants to move, but she can’t—because she’s tired suddenly. Being here, being back. Under her feet the floor feels unsteady (feels like the highway again. Everything upside down, but the blackness is at her centre this time: whirling, ever-binding). She puts a palm to her sternum to calm the beat of her heart, then jumps when a cool hand touches lightly to her shoulder-blade—
‘Sorry,’ says a voice at her back. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’
—and she can smell earth suddenly, she can see the light leaking through the gaps in the trees. She closes her eyes, counts to three.
Her therapist wanted to know what shape that life took. How many sides it had, how many edges. She wondered if she should invent something to shock him. To see the light shift inside his irises, that pen pause in its path across the paper. She considered it for a moment, and then told the truth.
The truth was that there were no edges. Jason was a smooth, sandy-shaded sort of person. Guileless most of the time, good. He didn’t change much from high school. He worked and he coached and he spoke about things like sport with the same earnest passion politicians learned to peddle.
In the leather chair she recrossed her legs. ‘The divorce was my idea,’ she said, because it felt important to articulate that point, to own it. ‘I realised I wasn’t happy.’
‘With Jason?’
She shook her head. ‘With the marriage. The relationship.’
(A lot of it she’d spent on her knees: hovered over the bowl of the toilet, cleaning the kitchen tiles in their condo. Anniversary nights she’d rather forget.)
There was silence between them, coded in a way that made her realise she was meant to continue. So— ‘I realised that I wasn’t happy,’ she said again. ‘I realised that everyone else was happy except for me.’
‘Everyone else?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Jason was happy. His parents. My mom. It all worked out the way they wanted it to.’
The pen moved across the paper, halted. ‘And what way was that, Chrissy?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘High school sweethearts. The captain and the cheerleader. It was just—just a cliché that felt like a choice at the time.’ She looked at her lap, her hands. ‘But then I realised I never really chose it.’ Her fingers knotted together like the roots of a tree. ‘It just became my life.’
(Practice, pom-poms; floor polish pressing into the skin of her knees. Salad in a damp brown bag. Friday weigh-day. Practice, polish, eat. Rinse. Repeat.)
The pen swirled again, then stopped. ‘Became it,’ he said. ‘Do you think there was ever a time it could have become something else?’
‘Probably,’ she said, then— ‘Yes. I think so.’
When she opens her eyes again Eddie Munson is standing in front of her, and he’s different (older, taller) and he’s exactly the same (dark eyes, sharp smile) and she wonders if she expected anything more, anything less.
They look at each other for a moment, the music spilling from the speakers fading to some dim and distant beat in the background. The punch-cup sitting in her hand, the plastic the same colour as her red nails. All the little groups of people around them, the tall tables floating under streamers. The balloons at the doorway, draping it in gold. Her smile frozen somewhere on a tiny film-strip inside a camera. The one on her face now, trembling despite itself; but warm. (So fucking warm.)
His own smile deepens, his fingers stirring on the red punch-cup he’s holding like it’s a wounded animal that wants (needs, always needs) soothing. He raises it to her, and she raises her own to him. They drink a sip and they smile and they are older and they are teenagers again and it’s wonderful. It’s air, it’s life.
‘Chrissy Cunningham,’ he says—and it’s the first time anyone has said it like that (her maiden name; her own name) in an age.
She saw a magazine spread of him and his band years ago. His guitar crystal-edged, the strings exploding by the end of the set. Leather trousers, tattoos spilling out of his sleeves. (That smile, cut sharp even when he was singing.)
In the photograph his fingertips were bare and bloodied. A smear of crimson caught across his cheek where he must have wiped his hair back mid-note, adjusted the keys, then carried on playing. Like a rockstar—the one he was, the one he’d always been.
There was an interview cut up in boxes of small black text around the centrepiece. The band name blazoned across it in fire-tipped letters that she read and then forgot. (It wasn’t Corroded Coffin, she’d remember that. Now, always, she’d remember that.) She traced them with a fingertip (the letters, the lines of his face) and thought: Eddie Munson’s made it big.
He’d made it.
‘I didn’t think you’d be here,’ she says. ‘Back in Hawkins, I mean. At a high school reunion.’
He holds his cup to his lips but doesn’t drink. ‘We’re playing.’
‘What?’
‘Me,’ he says. ‘The band. We’re playing here tonight.’
She laughs, and it sounds like summer, like the sunshine-yellow years of youth. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, you are not.’
‘We are,’ he says. ‘We so fucking are.’
Eddie lets her go backstage, watch him warm up from the wings. (It’s her high school gym, it’s a rigged platform and hastily-hung curtains that she hides herself behind; but she doesn’t care. She’s backstage, even if she’s just to the side of it.)
Prickles rise on her arms even though she’s wearing a high-necked sweater. Her throat feels warm under the soft, black wool. Without looking, she knows that the glow has reached her cheeks. Eddie’s smile when he glances across at her confirms it. A dimple shows to the left of his mouth, and she feels heat blanch along her collarbone.
His fingers work the strings like it’s second-nature to him. Tuning and tweaking, the silver rings punched down over his knuckles catching the stage-lights and turning into stars. She blinks and feels something thick and foreign rising in her throat. It takes her a second to figure it out for what it is—thrill, excitement. The feeling of coming home.
They drink another cup together afterwards, and the feeling stays there. It doesn’t wash away. His eyes are dark on her own, glittering boyishly. She thinks of him with leaves in his hair, safety-pins holding together the denim of his sleeve. She looks down into her cup, then back at him again.
‘You made it to the Garden.’
He smiles. ‘That was a big crowd.’
‘More than five?’ she says—and smiles when he laughs.
‘Just a bit.’ He looks at her through his lashes, mock-shy. ‘You a groupie now, then, huh? Keeping tabs on me?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘I saw a piece about your band,’ she says. ‘In a magazine.’ She lifts her cup, sets her teeth on the edge of it. ‘You had blood on your face. Your fingers.’
He looks at her and his eyes are so dark they seem depthless. Then the strobes shift, and they come alive with stars, with fractured glimpses of something else, somewhere else. Little ladders of light breaking up the black and she wonders how she’s gone this long without looking into them again. Without feeling whatever they contain settle like still-water inside her chest. Bloom there, spread.
‘By the way,’ she says now. ‘You didn’t scare me. You never did.’
Eddie nips his bottom lip. ‘I don’t know about that.’
‘You saved me,’ she says. ‘Just a bit.’
‘With weed?’
Chrissy lets her smile grow white and open. ‘With that,’ she says. ‘With other things, too.’
When work took her (ex-)husband away out of state and she was home alone, she would sit by the window overlooking the green and get out her tobacco. A pouch and papers; a habit she knew did her no good, but that put a bit of flame back inside the cage of her ribs.
She thought of the woods when she rolled a cigarette, and she was home-sick for them. The woods, the light leaking through the gaps in the trees. The bench propped on its carpet of leaves. (They met there again after that first time. He brought her things that let the chaos in her head go quiet. He never let her pay. He never let her down.)
A ritual of memory as she rolled, as she licked the paper shut. The green spilt out in front of the window, gold-kissed by the setting sun. Jason gone and her head full of Eddie (denim and silver, ink on his skin). The magazine open beside her on the coffee table; flame-tipped letters and bloody fingers. (She thought of that sometimes at night when she was home alone. Her hand somewhere on her stomach, then trailing down between her thighs.)
‘I didn’t think you’d be here, either.’
They’re in the parking lot now, leant against the redbrick wall of their old high school. Passing a cigarette between them like kids, feeling the frost start to settle on their skin.
‘Honestly,’ she says. ‘I didn’t intend to come back.’
‘Why did you?’
They look at each other as she smiles through the smoke. ‘Just a feeling.’
‘You wanna—’ and he straightens up as he says it, filter-paper burning down to nip at his knuckles as he gestures. ‘—you wanna get out of here?’ His eyes widen as she cocks her head, laughs. ‘Christ, no. Christ, Chrissy. Not like that. I didn’t mean—’
But she’s shaking her head, leaning forward fully on her feet to crush the cigarette beneath her boot. ‘I know what you meant,’ she says. ‘You driving?’
In the passenger-seat of his (new, similarly tatty) van she watches his hands on the steering-wheel. Lean and strong, the shape of them biting at the leather.
She looks at her own hands. The left one resting on the window. Her fingers splayed, slightly damp from the condensation gathered on the glass. She looks at her fingers and she doesn’t see a blank space, the absence of a ring. She just sees her skin, pale and clean.
(There’s nothing missing; she’s not alone in the dark.)
The trailer is how she remembers it. Small, neat in a cramped sort of way. White-painted wood, a potted plant by the front-door that needs watering. She pauses beside it as she shrugs off her jacket.
On the way over from Hawkins High he told her his uncle left him the place. Now, looking round at the ordered clutter of their life together (seeing it, feeling it), she turns to face him. Waits for him to pull the chain across the door, to look at her, then puts her hand on his arm.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I know I already said it. But I am sorry, Eddie.’
He feels for her fingers in the half-dark, finds them. ‘Sorry about Jason, too.’
‘Jason isn’t dead.’
‘No, yeah.’ He squeezes her fingers gently. ‘You’re right. Still, that’s some hard shit to get through.’
Chrissy lifts her chin. ‘I’m working it out.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ Her head dips in a quick nod, levels. ‘What about you?’
He squeezes again, smiles. ‘Getting there.’
(This is the time, she realises. This is the time she was thinking of when her therapist asked if there was a chance her life could have become something else. This is the time: not now, but then. Her standing inside the worn wood of the trailer, waiting for Eddie to come back. Him returning with a small, plastic twist of bliss. Peace. He’d asked her if she was sure about it, and she’d said not really. In the end, she hadn’t smoked a thing that night; she’d just watched him roll powder into paper. Watched and wanted to kiss him, then gone back home to Jason.)
He puts a record on as she takes off her shoes.
‘You want a beer?’
She looks up from her laces. ‘Sure.’
When he gets back from the kitchen she’s sat on the sofa. Her feet are bare apart from the slippery black sheen of her pantyhose. She adjusts the hem of her skirt squarely across her thighs, feels her hair shift over her shoulder. (A cherry-red fall in the gathered gloom of the lamp-lit room, the strands of it sticking to her skin like a bruise. Electric, achy; violet becoming blue.)
‘Chrissy Cunningham,’ he says. ‘On my couch. In my house.’
‘It’s not like I haven’t been here before.’
He sighs as he sinks down next to her. ‘True.’ He hands her a bottle of beer, then lifts his own. ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers, Eddie.’
She swallows it down, then leans across to kiss him before she can talk herself out of it.
(This is the time, she realises. This is it.)
She feels cool metal on her skin. The smooth glide of his rings as he cradles her cheek in his hand. His thumb rasping over her chin, tilting her head where he wants it. He opens his mouth; she lands inside his kiss.
He tastes fizzy, some blend of beer and chewing gum that for some reason she finds delicious. The fingertips of his left hand are resting against the curve of her throat, the hollow of it. Balanced compass-like as if it’s a map beneath their press, braced lightly as if they’re trying to make sense of it. She pushes up into his hands and he catches her: the bulb of her chin, the bloom of her pulse against his palm.
‘Fuck,’ he breathes. ‘Chrissy.’
She makes a high, reedy sound against the roof of her mouth. ‘Say it again,’ she whispers. ‘Please. Say it again.’
‘Chrissy,’ he says. ‘Chrissy. Jesus Christ—Chrissy.’
Her teeth find his bottom lip, pull gently. Under the bracket of his palm, her pulse balances like a berry. Bounding, threatening to burst. He lets her pull at his lip once, twice, then covers her mouth with his again.
They kiss like there are years between them (hungry, aching years). Like there is hurt, like there is hate. Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t—and maybe it should’ve happened years ago, and maybe it should happen as it is happening here, now.
Maybe this is how it was always meant to be.
The record gets stuck when he is down on the floor between her knees. Her skirt ridden up around her ribs, and his hands holding her thighs. Holding her open, and wet; so vulnerable she feels alive with it, half-mad with it.
His breath mists warm across her clit, but he doesn’t touch it. Doesn’t kiss it. Just lingers there, then drops his mouth to the long muscle stretched taut at the inside of her thigh. Presses his nose into the ache of it, then kisses up and over. Up and over and away from everything she wants kissed.
She starts to tell him that (there, please, please, there) but the words die on her tongue. Flee through her teeth until she can only make a sound: polysyllabic, prayer-like in its blend of names and curses and senseless things. He gives a little groan low in his throat, then puts his thumb where she wants his tongue. Rocks a circle that makes the notches of her spine tighten, lock together.
‘Eddie,’ she manages to breathe. ‘Eddie, please.’
The record crackles and sets itself right just as his mouth opens on her, against her. There is sound and light, but there is nothing in her head. Nothing except for heat, a wave of it, building, building.
After, he asks if she’s okay. She nods. Beckons him toward her with a slow, pale finger. He puts his hands in her red hair and she thinks of the blood in the photograph: on his fingers, on his face. He stills as she takes hold of his wrist, draws his thumb toward her mouth and presses its print to her lips. Parts them like a flower.
He searches her eyes with his black, starry gaze. ‘You sure?’
‘Yeah,’ she whispers around his thumb. ‘I’m okay.’
She rolls onto his lap as he leans back into the couch-cushions. His thumb still notched there against her teeth, the hand he’s got in her hair wearing a hundred fiery rings for every piece of silver glimmering on his skin.
‘You sure?’ he says again—and she nods, spits his thumb out to take his lips. Kiss him down and deep and with everything she can find in her belly, in her blood. ‘Chrissy. Fuck.’
(How he says her name is how she feels when he is inside her. Like there is nothing to be done but breathe through it. Try to contain it: all its sides, all its edges. Try, and then give up. Give over to it. Because there is nothing else to be done. The world is upside down; this is the only thing that feels the right way up.)