Out of Peel Tree

Knot: Billie

123 Knot Billie “My forehead is strange to me now.” Curtis rubbed the paleness that stretched above his eyebrows. Billie pulled him away from the mirror and back to his bed. She ran her lips over his scalp’s orange fuzz, savoring the sparse velvet. Her fingers fluted over his ribs. He was so thin now the ripples of ribs appeared wing-shaped. She licked his nipples into tight buds. His blue eyes blazed in the early morning light. They used to jabber to each other when they made love, but now they were quiet. He never used to moan, but today he did, and the vibration nestled in her ear. His breath was as private as shared sweat. She thought, “When we were born, our skulls were soft and small, like this moan.” They half-dozed, naked and on their backs, her leg slung over his so her calf rested on his shin. His bedroom was white and bare, and the rice blinds made the Austin sunlight shimmer like water on the wall. “Just another half hour of sleep,” he murmured. “Then we’ll scamper off to the Miracles R Us.” Billie turned on her side and doodled her finger on his arm. She stared at the two parallel scars, an inch and a quarter long, on the knot 124 right side of his neck, serrated like miniature tire tracks, pink like bits of fresh earthworms. The tumor—a little monster, a parasite, a fluke—had been cut out in March. His prognosis was good. In December he would go into remission, forever. Today, the first of September, he would check into the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for another round of chemo. They had agreed a year ago to get married, but then the knot appeared , and they quietly postponed their plans. Neither had big or nearby families, and both had been married before. As the noon sun burned a hole in the sky over their heads, Billie drove the now-familiar 164 miles from Austin to Houston. Curtis talked patiently, almost musically, into his cell phone, helping his partner in their computer business figure out how to defragment a hard drive, and zap an app back into some connectivity portal. She felt the miles pour through a hole in her chest. The emptiness of the highway, the flatness of the land, and the ship-like clouds in the sky funneled into her and out her back, serenely reappearing behind the speeding car. The land between Austin and Houston was incredibly empty—treeless fields, an occasional house with a clutter of big trucks and withered hedges in the dirt yard, and a couple of barbecue joints. It was a shock, every time, to pass under the first freeway pretzel. She loved the adrenaline rush when she zipped into the crowded Houston lanes. They settled into Curtis’s room for the one-night stay. She was used to the hospital’s smell of bleach, the too-bright flowers on side tables, the beeping machines. She slept on a cot next to him. The next morning, they held hands and half-watched a silly game show on the television that hung from the ceiling. They were a prematurely old couple—both only thirty-two—enduring the bossy nurse, the sullen nurse, the sprightly doctor in a mini-skirt, the Pakistani doctor with deft gestures and sad eyes. Then Curtis was knot 125 wheeled away for his treatment. Billie sat in their room and stared at a magazine’s photographs of insipidly smiling people. For the first time ever, she felt an urge to flee, to drive back to Austin without him. Billie and Curtis were both 32, born one week apart in April. She worked in a public library in Austin and had flunked out of grad school while breaking up with her previous boyfriend. Curtis fixed computers for money and old radios for fun. He didn’t care he had dropped out of high school, which intrigued her when they first met. He had no strings, whereas she often felt an inexplicable shadow tagging her like an oversized balloon, a guardian angel gone bad. Why had she agreed to marry him? She turned the pages of the magazine (smiling people on every page!) and remembered. It had seemed simple. She knew marriage wasn’t a thinking proposition —look at all those incredibly smart divorced people...