Visiting Hours by Amy Butcher

Author:Amy Butcher
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

8

THE IOWA WHERE I ARRIVED was a flattened valley, hot and yellow. I’d been promised acres of Midwestern farmland, valleys that stretched and rippled out for miles, but all I could see were mountainous black clouds and their violent streaks of lightning, infinite and boundless as they stabbed the dry, flat earth. My car sped across the highway, the interstate disappearing somewhere beneath me, the trees snarled along the steep embankments from where the worst summer storms had struck.

Those first few weeks I was alone, unloading boxes by myself late into the evening, swigging cheap beer bought from the convenience store a block away. It was August, and through the open windows the wind blew hot and wet. Iowa City’s town population doubled when school was in session, but that was still a month away. Everything was quiet, lifeless in a way I’d never known. The silence was punctuated only by the occasional thunderstorm, which rattled life from the darkness, each more powerful than the last. The Midwest was a constant buzzing siren that summer, the tornado alarm sounding once or twice a week from a pole mounted in a park a block away, and I was alone amid those storms—both literal and metaphorical—because I’d wanted it that way. In the weeks leading up to my Iowa move, I’d increasingly withdrawn from Keith, insisting he not feel pressured to move halfway across the country. What had once been a barrage of insistence became a tempered, quiet understanding.

“We can try long-distance,” I’d suggested, “so you don’t have to uproot your entire life.”

But alone those first few months, I found myself paranoid and scared, more lost in my thoughts than ever. In Boston, Keith worked nine-hour shifts and went for runs along the Charles. He called at night to give me updates on his mileage or the weather, the coffee shops he was visiting, how they roasted their own beans or sold almond biscotti in the shape of crescent moons.

“They’re topped with lemon zest,” he said, and from my place a thousand miles away, I listened to his report, waiting for my chance to speak.

“You wouldn’t believe what I’m reading,” I’d say, but what I meant was always thinking—how I was imagining an intruder holding a knife, the metallic blade catching the glint and eerie green of the glowing Midwestern moonlight.

But every time I spoke, Keith only grew silent or cleared his throat. “Why do we always have to talk about Kevin?” he’d ask. “What’s the sense in this rehashing?” He reminded me that people were always changing, adapting, that it was only natural to grow apart. “You should allow yourself,” he said, “the luxury.”

Later, after we’d hang up, I’d undress and stand in the shower until the hot water ran cold. I liked to feel it rush over me, imagine what was wrong as something that could be scrubbed away like dirt. My fear, panic, all that confusion—I imagined it diluting and draining downward, spiraling, traveling through a complex network of pipes and into rivers.

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