A Simple Murmur from a Dream by Angela Ma

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The thing was, we’d always be all right, as long as we had each other. And we had plenty of that. We had being young. We had being married. We had it all on 50 gorgeous acres of our own estate vineyard, which, as Charlie reminded me time and again, was going to turn a profit any year now, fulfilling his forever dream of living off the land in the middle of rural nowhere, for which we’d sold our house in Austin and two cars; given up our jobs; friends, parties, gym memberships, bars. Life’s an adventure or nothing. In Austin he was miserable. He was wasting away in a cubicle. When I said yes, we’ll move, his eyes welled up and he came fast around my desk to kiss me, and from that moment on, I knew I’d made the right call. Sure, the Hill Country was no home I’d ever pictured for myself. But it had the two of us in it. I loved him like crazy, like I couldn’t ever leave him. And he loved me back.

So a speeding ticket had nothing on us. Charlie wouldn’t even be mad. In Charlie’s line of thinking, we weren’t broke yet if we could still sell our rings.

The officer gave me back my license and registration. Then he held the ticket through the window. Inked across the top in their familiar patterns of letters were my name, gender, and birthday. In the humid night air, there was the ozone smell of the machinery that had printed them. He held the ticket there, and as I sat, I thought about everything at once, how lucky I was, how in love I was, and I felt good. I looked at the ticket. I felt great. The amount was the price of two or three date nights in Austin. We didn’t need date nights anyway. We had the rest of our lives together. That’s what Charlie would say. Overhead, the clouds advanced, thick, grey, choking on each other. Rain was coming, and I had to get home to help save the last of the Syrah. I felt so great I couldn’t feel anything at all. I switched off the headlights. “You said it gets lonely out here?” I said to the officer. I didn’t know what I was doing.

I didn’t even know as I went around and into the trees and spread my jacket on the dirt with the scraggly grass coming out of it, and the officer was gone for a while by his car. Then he came around Charlie’s truck and into the trees too. I got on my knees.

Across the road there was a train station with all its lights on. It was past midnight now. No train came.

Afterwards, he tore up the ticket. I stood and I took the scraps and pretended I knew what I was going to do with them. His head was angled away from me. He didn’t say anything. He walked to his car, and halfway, his hands went up to his face. He started to run. Then he got into his car, made a U-turn, and the taillights sped off into dots, and then they rounded a distant hill and were gone.

I picked up my jacket. There were patches of dirt on the back. I shook them off and I went back to Charlie’s truck. For a while, I sat there, holding the jacket, feeling cold. Nothing happened. I opened my hand in my lap and the scraps of ticket were all crumpled and stuck together with cold sweat. Part of my name was showing. I ripped it into tinier and tinier shreds until there was hardly anything left to hold on to, and then I threw the fluff out the window. I did the same with the rest of the scraps. It was difficult because the sweat made them slippery. After I was done, I put the jacket in the passenger seat and started the engine.

I knew I had to get going. And at first I made good progress. But half a mile up the road, another car pulled into the lane alongside me, driving slow, and my foot just went straight to the brake. Soon I was driving slow too. Inside me, the urgency was extreme. My foot was tense over the gas. But I stayed slow, kept beside that car.

We coasted together until we hit a red. To the right, the other driver’s silhouette gazed straight ahead, like dreaming. I could see the silhouettes of her eyelashes, even. But I couldn’t see her face. She reached for the radio. A melody came to me, with the muffled, alien quality of being on the other side of glass and metal. It was only a degree louder than my speaking voice. If I said something, I thought, she might be able to hear me.

In my rearview, another car came up behind me. In the darkness, with the headlights blasting straight at me, there was no way to see about the driver. It looked for a second like a young woman, almost a girl. And maybe her arms were draped over the wheel. My own hands on the wheel were bright red in the glow of the traffic light. I could hear all our vehicles idling.

The light changed.

We drove under the speed limit, but no one went for a pass. When the driver up front sped up, so did I, and so did the driver behind me. When the driver up front slowed down, so did we. It was like being part of a fleet of migratory geese.

I opened my window a crack. The music and the low growl of everyone’s engines, the pebbles spitting from the tires, came right inside my ear. It gave me a feeling of being naked on the street. I closed the window. I looked directly ahead. I didn’t try to see anyone again.

Our fleet came up on a second intersection. The driver behind me put on her blinker, and a sudden panic filled me. It had no reason to it. I didn’t even know the person. Yet I felt that, if I could, I might’ve begged her to stay.

In the green light, softer and weaker than the red, I caught a last glimpse of her as she turned and sped away. Her face was too blurry to make out; her chin was propped on her hand.

It was lucky, really, that she had gone. Up ahead was the entrance to the highway. It was the entrance I was supposed to take. If she hadn’t broken formation, I might not have, either; might have driven past the highway, gone on forever. But that was only a feeling. Who knew? Maybe I wouldn’t have. Heat was coming back into my torso. It pushed out into my limbs. My hands and feet stayed cold. It was like steering with two blocks of ice. Eventually, I balled up my hands and drove with my wrists.

Around one, the gate came into view.

It was late in the season. Most of the plants had just leaves left. We were supposed to rip away the nets immediately after a harvest, before the grass got unruly, but Charlie and the crew had been busy, and the grass was tall now, and the nets were still caped over the plants, with vines bulging underneath. Beyond them were acres and acres of the same scene, rows laid out in squares, then the barn and the trailer, then more acres of the same, where Charlie and the crew were picking the Syrah now in the dark with their headlamps, until abruptly there began the flat dry hinterland, stamped as far as the horizon and farther.

Only the first few rows of vines were illuminated by my headlights. Sitting there, I had the idea that I’d never gone in there on my own. I went in every day, but that was with Charlie, helping him prune, tie nets, collect samples, harvest. Now it was just me in the truck. It may as well have been just me in the vineyard. The Syrah was far enough away that they wouldn’t have heard the engine. No one knew I was home.

I shifted the gear to Reverse. I started backing out through the gate. I looked at the vines in the night. I switched to Drive. I thought again and went back into Reverse. Finally, I parked the car and sat there with my wrists pressing hard into the steering wheel.

Charlie kept a backup headlamp in the glovebox. As far as I was aware, he’d never replaced the batteries. I switched it on. The light was pale. Every few seconds, it flickered. I got out of the truck.

I went across the dirt road and into the grass. I came up against the first line of trellises. A vine jutted out, directly at me. I put out a hand and held it. I just held it. Then I moved it aside. I passed into the vines.

Instantly, the air changed. It was cool, wet, almost cold, from the vapor in the leaves. Before me shone the pale halo of visibility from my headlamp. I moved my head and the halo moved. Particles of water floated and expanded in all directions, like the inside of a cloud. Strangely, in the changing mist, the contours of the vines seemed crisper, like waking up from a dream. I touched the edge of a leaf. All along it were microscopic ridges curving in one direction, creating the illusion of an unbroken line. I let go of the leaf and began to walk. Insects jumped out as I passed, forming a consistent, toneless hum. Grass touched my ankles. Vines touched my head. The mist clung to my skin and seemed to make me into an outline of myself. Outside the halo, everything was bathed in a primal dark. Past that, the world was shut away, indistinct, and the idea came into me that I wasn’t a person anymore, but some thing, suspended, and that thing, which wasn’t me, was the only real thing; everything else I had believed real was only the dream I had awoken from.

My foot hitched on something solid. I lowered my head and there was, coming out of the ground, a corner.

I bent down. The tall grass was easy to pull. I began to dig. About an inch down, the soil became packed. I sat down and crossed my legs and I loosened it with my nails. After it was loose, I pulled it in with the sides of my hands. I repeated this motion methodically. A pile grew around my feet. In the dark, the insects sat still and invisible in the leaves, and I leaned in and worked faster and faster. Dirt crammed my nails. Dirt crowded out to pack the tips of my fingers. Enough of the object had emerged now that I could have pulled it loose, but I kept digging. A circular hole began to appear around the object. I dug and dug.

Eventually, the object tipped free onto the walls of the hole.

It was covered in patches of dirt and white fluff. Behind them showed a surface of red leather. I wiped some dirt off on my jeans and I was holding a woman’s clutch. I flipped it around. The clasp was shaped like a clover.

At once, a memory bloomed in my mind. I had received such a clutch as a girl, as a gift from my mom, who had, in turn, bought it at a drugstore when she was a girl. The problem was that the clasp would stick. This happened especially, I felt, when I was most desperate to get it open. Our first month out in the country, it got stuck when I was trying to pay for groceries at the local cash-only store, and I’d had to call Charlie. After that, he bought me a wallet, and I guess I kept the clutch around until I didn’t. I had no clue when I’d lost it. I didn’t even remember noticing it was missing. But I must have known that it was missing, because when I realized suddenly, sitting in the dirt, that the clutch I was holding was mine, I wasn’t at all surprised to be in the act of finding it. It was as if I’d been aware all along that it was in a state of having to be found, though I’d never actively thought that I had lost it, and so never actively tried to look.

I popped the clasp a few times. It didn’t stick. Inside, there was nothing to indicate ownership; no initials, no scraps of paper. I moved my thumb over the leather. It felt familiar. Yet, at the same time, it seemed to me that my clutch had been brown leather, not red. And I might’ve sworn that the clover-shaped clasp on mine had had four leaves. This one had three.

“Liv?”

White light snapped in from the end of the row. It was Charlie’s special heavy-duty headlamp. The light was so strong, the beam had edges in the dark. I was at the very end of it and I saw Charlie at the other end, seeing me, the tunnel between us bright as day. Behind him dropped a wall of black, like we were seeing each other from the two ends of the world.

I stood up. “I thought I saw a racoon.”

He was striding toward me. “Did you get it?”

“There wasn’t one.”

“Good,” he said. “Have you seen the extra buckets? I’ve been taking the RTV up and down the rows. I couldn’t find them in the barn.”

“No.”

He cursed. He was almost to me, then. “Sounds like there’s a lot of fruit,” I said.

“So we need more buckets, or else we’re wasting time making trips to the tractor. If you can look for buckets, I’ll get back to picking with the others. Or if you want to do the picking, I don’t know. I can find the buckets. Whatever you want. It’s going to rain around seven. We have three rows to go.”

He pulled off the headlamp and stopped before me. His hair was damp. He tilted his head back to check the forecast. His skin was damp too and the line of his neck glittered with magenta flecks of juice from the grapes. Then he looked back to me, except it was a little past me. He took a step back bumping into the netting.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s just,” he said, and stopped. “It’ll be better next year,” he said.

He swallowed. I saw it move through his throat. In that moment, something deep inside me moved too. I wasn’t naïve enough anymore to think it was my heart. But it moved, and a feeling came over me.

“Charlie,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. I said it. I’m sorry,” he said. “Listen,” he said, “I just made an executive decision. You don’t have to help tonight. I bought the crew a round of energy drinks and I think we can save a decent amount before the rain.”

“You’re not going to get all of it.”

“That’s a possibility.”

“Then what?”

“So we lose some fruit.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’ll get over it,” he said. “I don’t want to force you to help me. I can see it in your eyes. I feel awful enough already. I feel awful every day.”

Still I could not say anything.

He looked up at the sky again. I looked up too at the terrible clouds. They were a dark sapphire in the center, and papery at the edges, with silver cracks among them where the moon was coming through. In one mass, they pressed steadily forward. Clouds I had seen five minutes ago were completely out of sight. Eventually the ones I saw now were going to be out of sight too. It was like a conveyer belt going to a place I didn’t know.

I moved my thumb along the curve of his neck. The grape juice smudged. “It’s okay,” I said. “You know,” I started. But then I didn’t say it.

I pulled him in and I held him. He held on to me and we stood there holding on tight. We stayed like that for a while. Then we walked to his truck. I was carrying the clutch with both hands. I had this vision of it. It was sitting on my nightstand, all neat and cleaned up. Then I stopped. I set it down.

I didn’t dig another hole. I didn’t take it back to its original spot. I didn’t tuck it by the trellis and write down “Row #3” so I could remember where I left it. Years later, when I went out looking for it, I realized I had considered each of these at one point or another, and the thing was, really, I could’ve done anything in the world with it. But I just set it down. So after a couple minutes of looking, I drove back to the trailer. I started cooking breakfast. I wasn’t mad about it. I didn’t have any particular feeling toward it. I had to, understand. It was just something that I had to do.

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Angela Ma holds degrees in Economics and Creative Writing from the University of Chicago, where her thesis won the Les River Fellowship for Young Novelists. She runs a small business and travels the world to work on farms. Visit: angelama.blog.

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16 January 204