I’m kneeling in my pathetic excuse for a garden— a patch of dirt that isn’t even mine, really, in the lot behind my apartment complex—when my phone starts chirping in my pocket. It’s Hans, my boyfriend of the last two years, but he’s barely started talking when the call waiting chime starts up. I tell him I have to go.

     Call waiting says so much about what we’ve become. It just means, don’t invest yourself in any one moment; there will always be more. I’ve gotten so used to the sound that I’m starting to imagine that I hear it when moments get too unnerving for me, the same way my fingers flex to hit edit, undo with a mouse after I’ve said something stupid. 

     I look at my phone—it’s Rowan, Hans’ best friend, but mine first, going all the way back to the first grade. “Hello?”

     “Hey, it’s me.” Rowan lets out a sigh. “Listen I’m sorry but my fucking truck blew again. I’m stuck on Prairie, over by the 7-Eleven, and I’d call my brother but he just helped me out three weeks ago when the transmission went out and I can’t ask him one more time.”

     I peer at the sky. It’s darkening fast and I imagine Rowan trapped in his ramshackle pickup under a downpour. “I’ll be right there,” I say. I lean over to take a last look at my tomatoes—as dry and shriveled as they were this time last year. “You want me to use my Triple A card?” I ask Rowan as I brush the dirt off my pants. “Did you call somebody yet?”

     “Yeah I got it. There’s a tow truck coming. I just want you to get me out of here when it comes.”

     “Okay. I’ll see you in a minute.”

     I close the phone and in the car I hold it between my knees as I drive toward Prairie, the endless side street that runs parallel to the old Indian trail that cuts through Villa Park. The trail is the one thing left here that’s still green. I said that once to Hans and he laughed and told me I was sappy. But it’s true. There’s an Illinois law that you can’t touch the grass or the trees around the path because the path’s a historic site. It runs straight to the Mississippi River, its smoothness interrupted only by the inevitable highways and roads, and there are all kinds of stories about the American Indians, how they used it to transport things and move from camp to camp. I don’t know the stories exactly. Maybe they are made up. All I know is that everything else here is built to look like something other than what it is. Like the donut shop on St. Charles Road with the lighthouse roof.

     I can see Rowan’s truck ahead—dark green paint peeling all over the place, license plate off-kilter. He’s had the thing since we were in high school but he’s a boilermaker and there’s no way he’s getting a new one anytime soon.

     I pull up behind him and get out, moving around to the passenger’s side of his truck. “Hey,” I say as I climb in. I can smell oil.

     Rowan looks kind of pale but he grins over at me. “Hey. You going to sit with me til this tool shows up?”

     “It’s what I’ve been wanting to do all day.”

     We lock eyes for a second and then he looks away. He starts pulling CD’s out of the console and sorting through them, and I watch his hands. It doesn’t seem to matter how many years of manual labor he does. His hands have a certain gentleness about them—it’s in the way he really touches things with his fingertips, and doesn’t just slap his hands against them when he picks them up.

     “So how are things,” he says, still rummaging.

     “Oh great. Hans will be a CPA in a matter of weeks. According to him he’s going to be rich soon.”

     “Fantastic. He going to pay for you to go back to college and finish your art degree?”

     “Ha, ha,” I say. “Because I was really going somewhere with that.”

     “That’s funny, Callie, because I kinda thought you were.”

     I shrug. “Anyway that’s what he’s up to.”

     “I know what he’s up to. He keeps people pretty well informed. How’s work?”

     I’ve got a job as a receptionist at a pediatrician’s office in town. It pays enough that I can keep my own place and not move in with Hans—something that would send my Catholic parents into church to say a series of litanies meant to save my soul. Granted this is not what I had planned. In college I thought I’d be teaching art to high school kids by now. It’s not a bad job really, but I do hate staring at a computer, and looking at patient records and seeing the awful things some of these kids have wrong with them.

     “Work’s fine,” I say. “I’ll get a raise next month. It’s been busy as hell lately with all the allergies and stuff.”

     “Right . . . how are things with Hans lately? I mean—”

     Again that awkwardness. In my head, I practice answering honestly: “I finally understood a week ago that we don’t belong with each other anymore.” It sounds dramatic, so I say nothing. But it’s true.

     I was in my kitchen last Wednesday morning, making toast, when Hans dropped over. Spread across the table were my carving tools and paints. I was halfway through inlaying an oak box and waiting for the paint to dry on the sides. Blue and gold shells bobbing in the sea. I don’t know why I made it. I just woke up needing to.

     So Hans walked in, in his gray suit, practically shaking with frenetic energy like he always is these days, and holding a silver thermos of coffee.

     “Hey hon,” he said, perching on the edge of the table. “You weren’t answering your phone so I wanted to drop by and let you know I can’t do dinner tonight because I’ve got this thing I have to go to that I wasn’t expecting, okay? I promise tomorrow night? This is just a crazy time, but pretty soon things will be back to normal.”

     I hardly heard him. He had set his coffee thermos down on top of the oak box. Without a word, I picked it up and set it down on the table.

     “So okay?” Hans pressed, drumming his knuckles against the table.

     “Yeah. It’s fine.”

     “What’s this you’ve got here?” he asked, leaning over to peer at the box.

     “Nothing. I made it this morning—it isn’t done yet.”

     “Nice,” he said. Before I could say anything, he had picked up the box, and then quickly dropped it—his hands came away smudged with blue paint. “Oh shit, I’m sorry,” he said. “Shit.” He jumped off the table and went to the sink, squeezing a dollop of detergent onto his hands. As he washed off the paint he started talking about work again.

     When he’d finished, he turned and said, “Are you even listening, Cal?”

     I said, “Yeah, I’m sorry,” but I wasn’t. I was thinking that sometime during the last year we had become two people who just didn’t understand each other anymore. After Hans had left, taking his coffee with him, I sat back down at the table to finish the box.

     Rowan says, “Should I change the subject?”

     “I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know if I could really explain what’s going on with us right now. I’m not sure I get it myself.”

     “Yeah,” Rowan says. “I understand, it’s okay.” He’s really looking at me now, and when a streetlamp above us flickers on, it catches the blue of his eyes. He looks so young to me. Maybe it’s just memory transposing itself across his face. I don’t know.

     What I want to do is tell him about the actual fight Hans and I had, about two months ago when I told him I wanted to stop taking my birth control.

     “Are you crazy?” he’d demanded. We were in his living room, and I was standing against the front door as he paced around.

     “We’re going to have money really soon, you said it yourself,” I said. “I’m assuming that you’re thinking in terms of having some kind of future with me.”

     “Don’t get absurd. Of course I am. But I was thinking I’d get set and then later down the road—”

     “We’re halfway down the road already. I’m almost twenty-four and my career plan was done with before it started. It took my parents years and years of trying to get pregnant. That could be us. I don’t want to take this stuff anymore. I want a baby.”

     “You do realize your parents would go crazy, too, right? Anyway you just think you want one, Cal. It’s probably that biological clock nonsense—”

     “No, Hans, it really isn’t, it’s—” 

     My voice had trailed off. I didn’t know how to explain it, how badly I wanted it and why. How much I’d come to hate the little pink tablets that tipped the chemicals in my body just enough that I could pulverize a child before it was made. It was starting to haunt me. I could feel my face and body changing. Things had even stopped smelling the same. Lilacs were sickly, heady. I was beginning to feel like a stranger to myself, and I had a vague sense of violence every morning when I swallowed the things. I had gotten in the habit of talking bitterly to myself when I took them: “Good morning, Pink. Do your stuff. Annihilate something tonight.”

     Hans ended the conversation: “You’re not going off the pill. That’s insane. We’re not ready. I’m not going to be ready for a few years. We’d never get ahead.”

     I was tired. I let it go. But I knew that the next morning I wouldn’t be taking that pill, and that was when I stopped. Hans doesn’t know about that, but we’ve been going cold since that fight anyway.

     Rowan is quiet. He doesn’t press me; he never has. He settles back in his seat and squints at the rearview mirror. “This is taking forever. I’m so sorry about this, Cal. You hungry or anything? You could go get something to eat and I’ll wait.”

     “I’m all right. I don’t want to leave you here anyway,” I say. I pick up a CD from his pile and slip it in. It’s one of those smooth rap CD’s we loved in high school, music we used to dance to in our friends’ basements when we were hiding alcohol from our parents.

     It was a couple semesters into my so-called college career that I started seriously dating Hans, and part of the reason it happened was that he and I were the only ones out of our group of friends who stayed in college past the first few months. Rowan was out after one semester. He said he couldn’t concentrate, that he just wanted to work. And while he was working—trying out apprenticeships roofing, painting, woodworking—I was with Hans, commuting to the University of Illinois in the city. I talked less and less to Rowan.

     Then two of our friends, Mark and Drew Calligan, died during my second year and I think that was what first changed things with Hans. They were in our class at St. Paul’s, and Drew was Hans’ closest friend after Rowan. One night in December, they parked Mark’s car on the railroad track and waited for a train. The freight that hit them dragged the car half a mile and then the car went spinning off the track and crashed into the side of a Walgreens. They both died on impact.

     None of it seemed real until the funeral, where we all heard the whispers of “suicide,” and that was when Hans cut his hair—for the service.

     Things seemed to barrel-roll downhill after that. Rowan was fired from two jobs and ended up learning boilermaking from his uncle—a job he hated. I quit school, because I was terrified about the debt I was accumulating, but more because I was losing the passion for it. It was becoming a real strain, thinking of things I actually wanted to do. Meanwhile there were more crises among our friends—arrests, accidents, jobs that vanished, parents that had had enough and locked their front doors.

     The parties started to change in tone. I think we were all becoming more than a little disillusioned. We usually ended up sitting around tables in people’s basements, talking late into the night. Hans was becoming more and more fastidious about school then, and he had a way of making our friends, even Rowan, feel stupid when he talked.

     One night, in Tom Pederson’s basement, conversation somehow turned to the Church.

     “It’s the only real community we’ve got left,” Rowan said. He wasn’t drunk yet but his face was suffused with color. “I mean when everything else is coming apart.”

     Hans overheard him and sat down across from him. “Not this again. Seriously Rowan. Don’t you realize that religion is a giant scam made to get you to forget the things you deserve in this world?”

     “I’m not the only one who’s repetitive,” Rowan muttered. “I’ve heard this opiate for the masses shit from you before. Don’t do this, man.”

     “Well it’s true. Half this hypocritical little town is in your so-called community and it seems to function really well when people need an excuse to be junkies and welfare recipients. They’re in God’s community so they don’t have to contribute to this one.”

     “That’s a non sequitur,” I said.

     Hans shot a look at me. “It isn’t,” he said. “And I’m not just talking about laziness. I’m talking about the belief that somebody other than you is going to protect you and carry you through everything you do. That’s just not how it is. Jesus isn’t holding anybody’s hand. If you don’t take care of yourself, you’re fucked.”

     Rowan stared at him. “You’re the one who’s fucked up. Going around taking people away from the Church.”

     My whole body tensed. He was talking about me—I’d stopped going to Mass some months before.

     “Excuse me?” Hans was starting to get up.

     “You know what I’m talking about,” Rowan said quietly. “Making people believe there’s nothing in this world beyond what you can give them.”

     “In this world? Probably not. In Villa Park, yes,” Hans snapped. He looked at me again. “I’m leaving. Are you coming with me, or staying here?”

     The entire room had gone silent. Tom Pederson was watching from the stairway, poised to jump in between the two of them. I looked at Rowan. His eyes were wet under the light of the single bulb above the table. There was something pathetic about him.

     “Yeah, I’m coming,” I said. The words seemed to boomerang back to me and hit me in the stomach. Or maybe it was Rowan’s face.

     Holding my elbow as we left, Hans said to me, “We’re not going to be like that. Don’t ever think you have to end up like any of them. We’re getting out of Villa Park and moving into Chicago as soon as I have money.”

     “They’re not all messed up,” I said. “And you like them as much as I do.”

     “Yeah they are. Or if not, they’re getting there. I love Rowan but the sad truth is that he’s as fucked up as the rest of them. His family’s a mess, he’s got no steady job, you know he’s going to be an alcoholic. And he’ll keep telling himself that because he’s got God, he’s got it together. It’s a lie. Sooner or later the same shit that kills everybody in this town is going to knock him down, too, and he won’t have seen it coming.”

     I had nothing to say to that. I couldn’t sort out my own emotions that night, couldn’t decide which of them—Hans or Rowan—had been the hero of that ugly conversation. But I know that I was afraid, and that Hans’ hand at my elbow seemed the only way away from the things I feared.

     The rain has started and Rowan and I watch it slide down the windshield in blue rivulets.

     “Remember when the cicadas last came?” Rowan asks out of nowhere.

     “Hell yes,” I laugh. “My God, they covered everything. That feels like a million years ago.”

     “Remember how we tape-recorded them, that one day? What were we, like, twelve?”

     “Maybe younger. Yeah. You still have that tape?”

     “I thought you had it.”

     “I don’t know.”

     Suddenly I can see them, feel them as they were, years ago: bodies smooth and coal-colored, their beady eyes, their clingy legs, their fragile wings veined with black, beating the wind like tiny oars in water.

     I remember walking along the Indian trail with Rowan and seeing the cicadas in the dust, and laughing at the way their heads got chalky after they had landed on the trail. Lying on their backs, they were helpless as overturned turtles, their legs waving in the air, wings flapping uselessly against the dirt. It seemed that they would die if they stayed under the scorching sun like that, lying in the middle of the path. Rowan and I made it our mission to right them. We’d bend over and hold out our fingers to them until they curled their legs around our knuckles and held on.

     I remember there was one that just fell in love with Rowan and would not let go. He blew on it, talked at it, but it would not go.

     “It’s pinching me, it wants to stay so bad,” he yelped.

     “Put your hand down in the grass,” I suggested. But it wouldn’t go, and Rowan walked me home with the thing still on his hand. Back at my house, Rowan sat down at the piano and started playing. I laughed myself breathless: the cicada stayed where it was, bobbing with his hand, and I swear its eyes were on the sheet music.

     But the really crazy thing was that after a few bars, it started to sing. Listening to a thousand cicadas trilling in tandem was one thing; this was something else. Rowan stopped playing and stared. The cicada stopped singing.

     “He probably wants to get outside and be with the other ones,” Rowan said. Without another word he slid off the bench and went out the back door. I followed him, and when the cicada at last marched off his hand, I put my own hand down where the cicada had been.

     I look at Rowan. His eyes are on the water trickling down the windshield and he’s smiling a little.

     “What made you think of it?” I ask.

     “I have no idea.”

     “That memory makes me feel more alive than I think any other one I have,” I say. The thought surprises me.

     “Yeah, me too, me too. I should find that tape. It seems like life was pretty good, that summer.”

     “I know what you mean. But isn’t that what everybody says, though? Life was better when it was simpler?”

     “Don’t do that, don’t make it a cliché. That’s Hans talking.”

     I go silent. I listen to the rain. Its soft music against the windshield sends tiny chills down my spine and I curve my arms around myself. I really meant what I said about that memory. I feel very much alive.

     The thing is, I found out four days ago that I’m pregnant, and I know it’s his. Rowan’s.

     There was only one night it could have happened, and that was a month ago, after I’d quit the birth control. It was a Tuesday and Rowan called me sometime after midnight. “I’m sorry to wake you up but can you come over and not say anything to anyone? I need help, I kind of got hurt and I don’t want to go to a doctor.”

     I went to Rowan’s apartment and found him in his bathroom, leaning over a sink filled with blood. His left eye was swollen and there was a cut along his cheekbone.

     “Rowan what the fuck happened!” I cried.

     He shrugged one shoulder, still bent over the sink. “It was a stupid fight. I got into a stupid fight at O’Connor’s. It’s not as bad as I thought.”

     I smacked the doorframe with my hand. “Are you kidding me? Who were you with?”

     “The usual.”

     “Tell me there was some good reason.” I knew there couldn’t be one, but I waited. I felt like hitting something and my fist tightened around my purse strap.

     “There isn’t. Fucking T.J. was there and somebody said something to piss him off. Next thing I knew, I was standing next to him. There isn’t a good reason. It was just stupid.”

     T.J. is Rowan’s younger brother. He’s eighteen or nineteen and he’s been an alcoholic pretty much since he started high school.

     “You know his Irish temper,” Rowan said, as if reading my mind. He swiped at his cheek, rubbing away blood, and tried to smile.  

     “Yeah I know about his temper. How nice to have that excuse. Is it yours, too?”

     Rowan said nothing. I took the bloodstained wad of toilet paper he had in his hand and dropped it into the trash. “Let me guess,” I sighed, “you have nothing I could clean this up with?”

     He shook his head.

     “I knew you wouldn’t. I brought my First Aid kit from my car,” I said, unsnapping the box and pulling out gauze. “I even have Neosporin in my purse. See, we were made for each other.”

     Rowan laughed a little as I started cleaning the blood away from his cheek. “This is so ridiculous. We’re twenty-three years old and you’re putting Band-Aids on my face.”

     “Well that’s Villa Park,” I said. “And Villa Park backwards is—”

     “Crap alive.”

     We got quiet as I worked but I know we were thinking the same thing—how almost everybody we knew seemed to have fallen apart. Our little graduating class from St. Paul’s, which then became the graduating class of Immaculate Conception High, went from a school-picture-perfect group to a wretched lot of failures. Sandra Billings drove her car over a guard rail and killed herself. Mike Thomas assaulted a guy at a party and ended up in jail. Dan Kelly dropped out and later we all heard he was into heroin, and he wasn’t the only one for long. Then Mark and Drew. I can’t even remember the names of the ones who had done all right, who had stayed in college or left for good; it just seemed like everybody met with disaster, like we were all born to it. Except Hans, of course. To me he seemed to exist on a safer and cleaner plane than the rest of us; the curse couldn’t touch him.

     At St. Paul’s, none of us knew this kind of shit would happen. There were twenty of us wearing blue and white, the girls weren’t allowed to wear makeup, and the boys thought there was nothing funnier than to “dumpster” each other on the playground when the monitors weren’t watching.

     Hans entered the school when we were in the seventh grade, so he made twenty-one. But we were already a tight group, and I had decided in the second grade that I loved Rowan Cavanaugh and that was that. He was beautiful when we were kids. He really was. And he hardly looks any different now at twenty-three. Same cowlicky hair and bright eyes. The only difference is that back then, he didn’t look tired when he walked.

     I passed him a note once, in Religion, while Sister Agnes was walking up and down the aisles. That was in fifth or sixth grade, before Hans came. It said, I love you. Do you love me? I watched Rowan read it. His face went pink. He folded the thing in half and I saw him put it in his pocket. For a minute he leaned back over the worksheet on his desk, his pencil held poised to write, and I felt my heart plummet. But then he pulled the little paper back out again and wrote something on it and reached under my desk to slip it to me.

     Sister Agnes was coming but I snatched the paper before she saw it. I read it cupped in my palm, close to my lap. Rowan had written, of course.

     Of course, that was years and years ago. And when Hans came, I think we both fell in love with him for awhile, because he didn’t belong here.

     “That feels a hell of a lot better,” Rowan said as I finished with the gauze. The swelling on his eye was already going down. It was probably one or two in the morning. I kept my hand curved around his face and looked at him.

     “Why don’t you talk to me anymore,” I said. “Why do you only call me when something’s wrong or you have no choice. I’m right here.”

     Rowan blinked and started pulling back. “That’s not true. We talk all the time.”

     “No we don’t. Not really. I don’t even know what’s happening with you anymore.”

     He must have been tired; he must have been in pain. Because the last thing I imagined Rowan doing was crying and talking to me the way he did.

     “The thing is I don’t want to hate this place. I don’t want to hate my brother or my parents. I don’t want us to not talk and hate each other like we do now. You know, I want that house when my mom and dad are gone. I want to have a family there. I hate this fucking town but it’s home and I want my kids to grow up in that house. My great-grandparents built that fucking house. It’s got Cavanaugh carved into all these secret spots only my family knows. But it seems like that kind of thing can’t happen here anymore, you know? Like we have no choices—like we’re all stuck in the same fucking spiral that ends up in the same place when it’s all over and none of us can ever make anything or do anything, there’s something missing, it’s a goddamned desert—this is coming out so stupid, I don’t know how to say it—”

     The next thing I knew, I was kissing his face below where he was cut, holding the back of his head with my palm, and he was saying that he didn’t know how we’d ended up like this, and I thought he meant, how he was a boilermaker with a busted-up face and how I had given up school and art and was with a man who we both knew wasn’t right for me, and then I realized he meant that he didn’t know why we weren’t together. And I didn’t know either.

     Making love with Rowan took me out of time that night. I remember that the dawn surprised me, like I had expected all the expected things to withdraw from the world the way we had. When they went on with their business, I was afraid of not doing the same. I got up and got dressed. Rowan watched me for a minute and then rolled off the other side of the bed. He left for work; I went back to my apartment. We still haven’t talked about it.

     I look over at Rowan’s face; he still has the scar, though it’s faded to white. I open my mouth and close it again. Sharing silence with Rowan feels too good, knowing he’s remembering a lot of the same things. It occurs to me that we have many of the same fears, too. It seems like fear has been hovering over us for a long time, like a patch of dark clouds lingering in one place.

     The rain is pounding the windshield and the CD has ended. I look over at him again. He’s completely turned toward me in his seat, and his eyes are on mine. I imagine that he can feel, from across the cabin, the life that’s inside me. And as if he really does know, he stretches out his hand for mine. I stare down at our hands; there are still grass stains and traces of soil in my skin from the garden.

     “Callie,” he says.

     There’s a bright orange flickering in our periphery and we both turn around. The tow truck is behind my car, engine running, and through the rain I can see a heavyset man climbing out from behind the wheel.

     “Well there he is,” Rowan breathes. He pulls his hand back, takes the keys out of the ignition. I pull on the hood of my sweatshirt and jump out of my side of the truck.

     When I circle around, Rowan is standing next to the driver’s seat door, getting soaked by the rain as he digs into his jacket pocket.

     “I don’t know what I did with my wallet,” he mutters, shaking his head. He steps back from the car and starts shaking out his jacket. I don’t say anything. His eyelashes are blue-black, beaded with rain. I realize I’m staring and I look away.

     The lights of a car materialize out of nowhere and hurtle right at us and Rowan, now searching through his jeans pockets for his wallet, doesn’t see; he’s standing in the middle of the road. I don’t think; I just wrap my arms around him and spin him backwards, pushing him up against his truck. It takes all of my weight because he’s so much bigger than I am. But the car rushes by, just inches away, and in its passing glare I lean back a little and see the stunned look on Rowan’s face.

     I don’t let go. I move my arms up around his neck, and when I feel him holding me I look over his shoulder, through the truck windows to the Indian trail. Nightfall has made it black, but I know how green it is. Our breathing slows together. Rowan’s hand is pressing against my lower back, bringing my belly tight against his. Right now, there is only this moment, with the trail beside us and a life between us, and I try to hold it where it is.

	About the Author: Elizabeth Genovise is a recent graduate of the MFA program at McNeese State University. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Pinch, and Relief.

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