Lungs Full of Noise

So Many Wings

1 2 0 So Many Wings The hospital says to come quick. Mary Lou jumps in the car, steps on the gas. She ignores stop signs, crosswalks , curbs. Knocks the mirror off a Jeep and keeps going. Parks in a fire zone. She gets there gasping, nose dripping salt on her tongue, hair frizzing out of a polka-dot headband, breasts loose in her shirt and sweaty against her ribs. She sets her palms on the counter, fingers gripping the grain of the wood. His name trips over her teeth and the nurse flips through papers and pauses, biting a tiny nip of skin from her lip. Mary Lou gets there, but he’s already dead. Already dead. Mary Lou licks the words to taste them. The dying already over. He’s not going to die again. Then a policewoman S o M a n y W i n g s 1 2 1 with more words. Words that careen and spark in Mary Lou’s head. His car heading north. An empty road. His car slipping out of its lane. Tires rumbling on grooves in the pavement. First the right wheels. Then the left. Then no more pavement to cling to. Just a car rolling over and over, the hood ornament leaving divots in the hillside, a piece of roof metal severing his arm. Then blood. A deluge of red. Red soaking into tan upholstery. Into violets and grass and dirt. And in the middle of all these words, Mary Lou thinks, I should tell her I’m not his wife. Instead, she asks about his hands. She says, I know that he’s dead, but he plays piano. Are his hands okay? The policewoman shifts her weight from hip to hip, says, His arm was severed at the elbow. Says, It must have been out the window. People like to feel wind on their skin. Not Chester , Mary Lou says. She knows how he hated breezes. They would get in his eyes and sting like chlorine and turn the white parts pink so he looked like he’d been crying for days. She says, He wouldn’t have put his arm out the window. Because of the wind. The policewoman rubs at her knuckles. Hard to say, she says. Maybe he was checking his phone. Or a deer crossed his path. Maybe he fell asleep. Mary Lou shakes her head. Chester’s the most cautious driver I know. The policewoman shrugs. A fluke, she says. An accident. I’m sorry. She hands over his wallet, his watch, his keys. Mary Lou looks at these things. And the policewoman adds, Your husband’s car got towed to Mortinson’s shop. And again Mary Lou knows she should confess that she’s not his wife. Though it would be just like Chester not to change his emergency contact. He knew she’d come. So she doesn’t say they called the wrong woman. Because ex-wives don’t get to hold the wallet of the man who rolled down the hill. Or hear the missing parts of the story filled in with words like cotton batting. Words like elbow, window, skin. Then the policewoman with one more word. Body. And again Mary Lou’s nose is running. She wipes the drips on her shirt. Okay, she says. The body. And wipes her nose again. She follows a balding doctor, who wears scrubs that are toothpaste green. And under the scrubs, moccasin shoes that are soundless and muffle his steps. The pink linoleum is speckled like salami . Chester hated salami, but Mary Lou loves it. She used to eat 1 2 2 S o M a n y W i n g s it in bed, savoring the salt on her tongue, and he would hide under the covers until she brushed her teeth. Then when she kissed him, he’d say she still had salami breath, that the salami stench had soaked all the way down into the salami pink of her lungs. At the corner, the pink tiles turn into gray ones. And she thinks how Chester liked to spell gray with an e. He said it gave the word a drizzly feeling. Gray with an a made the word seem fat and happy and that felt false. He used British spellings for other words too. He put an ou in color, spelled somber with an re. When they were married, it made her cringe. But now she’s...