it keeps going like that by Leah Francesca Christianson
When I wake up, the world is upside down. The car is ragged plastic and skin-stained glass. Ryan’s body crumples against the passenger door, right arm bent around his back like he’s scratching a hard-to-reach itch. Neck, slicked purple. Blood leaks from places that do not bleed. His face is—that’s not his face.
It’s too bright. Bouncy. Still can’t move. Two chests tower over me.
“Look who’s awake.”
Ryan! I try to look around, but my neck is braced.
“Please try to stay still,” Ryan says, but I can’t see him. “You’re in an ambulance. You were in a car accident. We’re taking you to the hospital.”
Are you okay? Where are we going? I try to ask these things. I don’t know if I do.
“Alright ma’am.” One of the EMTs pokes his head into my line of sight. His mouth is moving, but it is Ryan’s voice that says: “Let’s try to stay still, okay?”
My head tries to snap towards the sound, but it’s still locked into the brace. Did Ryan speak at the same time?
“Hey, hey.” The EMT leans closer as Ryan tells me, “You’re okay. It’s alright.”
Confusion ricochets from thumbs to hips to brain stem. Why does he have Ryan’s voice? Where is Ryan? What is happening?
“Can you do that for me?” says Ryan, still within the EMT. I want to stay awake, to solve this, but I drop back into darkness.
I open my eyes knowing the accident is about to happen. It’s a dream that isn’t a dream—we are speeding east on 80 from Denver to Lincoln, past buzzy silver streetlights and an ocean of corn, having a muted rerun of our favorite fight, just like we were right before that deer rocketed across the highway. Ryan is chomping on sunflower seeds, saying that he doesn’t understand me. I look for an escape hatch, something that might make it untrue, but the scene stays sharp and correct.
“You really like Lincoln when we visit,” Ryan continues. “Can’t you even consider it?”
He waits, a paused recording.
“I like it fine,” I say, just like I did before, turning on the wipers to remove the insect guts caked across our windshield. “But that’s not enough to uproot everything. I like living in Denver. Don’t you?”
The Nebraska landscape creeps under my skin. Fields of prairie grass knife away from the highway, stalks glinting electric under the lights. Ryan gets quiet, which means he’s mad and doesn’t want to be.
“Oz,” he says, reaching for my hand. His voice rolls over syllables like water gliding past rocks, vowels ballooning to hold all his plans. Soothing and Midwestern, unassuming and confident, here and his. “Listen.”
I’ll agree to everything he’s ever wanted. We can move to Lincoln, we can talk about kids again, we can watch football all day, we can, we can, we can. I’ll rewrite it. I didn’t say no and I saw that slab of roadkill coming and we are back on our couch, debating whether we should hire movers or do it ourselves. But the moment slides past, already decided.
The car shakes away. Suspended in midair, still hurtling forward, my hands press around his. When I try to touch his face, I’m frozen in place. His features start to harden and shine. Cheeks splinter into porcelain. Teeth swell against overstuffed gums, filling his mouth. They detach from rotting roots. Fly straight at me.
When I shake awake again, four people in scrubs circle my bed. Machines squawk back and forth. My left arm is in a sling. Spine pulses with angry heat.
“Oizya,” a doctor says. Only she doesn’t say it. Her tone is too punctured to be Ryan’s, but the voice is unmistakably his. “Hello. How are you feeling?”
I try my calming breathing. It sometimes helps when the feet in my chest begin kicking too hard—a five-second-long breath in, followed by five one-second-burst breaths out. I-I-I-I-N. Out. Out. Out. Out. Out.
“You’re in a hospital. You were in a car accident. You’ve been in and out of consciousness for the past 36 hours. You have a broken arm, and you’re pretty banged up but, overall, you’re doing fine.”
I-I-I-I-N. “Where’s Ryan?” Out. Out. Out. Out. Out.
“Ryan,” says Ryan, “is dead.”
I-I-I-I-N.
“He died in the accident.”
Out. Out. Out. Out. Out.
“I am so sorry.”
I-I-I-I-N.
“We would like to keep you for observation for a few days.”
ok, breathe out, Oz
“Can you tell us if you are experiencing any—”
breathe or they won’t let you out of here
“unusual—”
breathe out
“symptoms—”
you were driving why didn’t you look out
“we should—”
why didn’t you look out
“know about?”
In the morning, Ryan says, “Hi, baby.” It’s all sing-songy, as if I’m a sick kid or heartbroken teenager. My mom is here.
I keep my face hidden. But what mom gets scared off by that?
“You’re gone,” I say into my pillow. “This isn’t happening. This is not real.”
“Oh, honey. I wish it wasn’t.” Mom’s gardenia perfume fills the room as Ryan’s voice pours from her. “I won’t ask if you’re ok. I won’t go and say something that stupid. Can you look at me?”
I shake my head.
“Oizya,” Ryan whispers. “I know. Grief like this is almost unbearable. But you will get through it.”
“This is different.”
“I know.” Mom moves the pillow, touches my cheek, smooths hospital sheets flat. “It always feels different when it’s happening to you.”
A few days later, she drives me home. On the radio, Ryan sings Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” inflating all the wrong syllables and flattening every high note. Mom switches the station to NPR—Ryan hosts Morning Edition. He would have had a good voice for radio, with its unassuming rumbles that could sand a smile out of the grumpiest of TSA agents. I punch all the pre-set stations. Ryan is the sports reporter, commenting on last night’s Rockies game. He’s voicing a commercial for Shane Company, telling me that I have a friend in the Diamond Business. He’s attempting to rap as Jay-Z, his voice tripping over the words. He croons like an unconvinced Costello. He’s the DJ counting down America’s Top 40, complaining about the rising cost of gasoline. He’s right there.
“What do you want to listen to?” Mom says, forcing a big smile. “Put on anything you like.”
Messages fill my voicemail.
I got your text—could I drop off some food?
We’re getting worried.
It’s been a while since anyone’s heard from you.
One Ryan says, please don’t ghost us, before cursing and hanging up, calling back to apologize. As if I care. As if ghosts disappear.
If Ryan were really here, he’d say: Great and Powerful Oz—buck up. Get some food. You’re getting too skinny. Skinny is boring.
His dad calls, voice mirroring Ryan’s speech patterns and tendency towards sweeping declarations. They even cry the same. I spend the rest of the day laying on the stained yellow rug we got for free when the upstairs neighbor moved out.
After a week of ignored messages, Mom shows up unannounced with Thai food and puts on The Supremes.
But Mama says you can’t hurt love. Ryan’s voice grates each word to a pulp. No, you just have to wait.
The compounding Ryans make me want to vomit, but we sit down to eat anyway. After fifteen minutes of silence, she asks about work.
“I’m still on medical leave.”
“Right. When are you going back?”
I shrug. Mom chews on her bottom lip.
“Sweetie. I know you’re heartbroken. But—please don’t take this the wrong way—this also gives you a chance to rethink some things.”
I freeze my face, the way I try to when Mom starts on about “rethinking things.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t be sad. I am not saying that. This is a terrible thing. It’s just. He was always so. He was so.”
“Mom.”
“Just remember—nothing is closed off to you. If anything, your world has completely opened up.”
I can almost see Ryan. He would have been sitting where my mom is now. Leaning forward, legs spread wide, elbow on the table. Face so cracked with anger that it doesn’t belong to him anymore.
“Opened up?” I spit. “Is that a fucking joke?”
I wake up. I lay in bed until I’m about to burst with pee. I go to the kitchen, put on the kettle. I open a window and hear Ryans arguing in the street, bleeding from a loud car radio, cursing the rain. I close the window. The kettle starts screaming. My broken arm drums with the same bad techno song. The coffee won’t bite. The pictures on the fridge start laughing. My back throbs, a deep blood ache. I go back to bed. Fall into fields growing knives, dead deer littering highways, guts spilling out and inching towards me. Ryan’s face, cracked and melting, asks me to listen. I wake up.
This is how it goes, for a while.
After a month of sitting in my apartment’s belly, talking to myself in different fake accents just to hear something new, I start responding as I imagine Ryan would. At first, it’s something to do. But then I’m in the bathroom, turning my gaze towards and away from the mirror. I know it’s me talking. My voice is still mine. But I know his so well, I can thread it into anything. When I turn away, he could be talking, standing just around the corner.
“What the hell are you doing, Oz?” I ask, facing the shower.
“Trying not to lose my mind,” I huff into the mirror.
“I don’t think so. You’re hiding out.”
“Can you blame me?” I ask my rearranged face. Cheeks have a new slant, eyes sit a little deeper. Earned some fantastic new wrinkles.
“But you always do this,” I tell the plastic curtain. “Take the easy route. Hide from the hard parts of your life.”
Hearing one of Ryan’s old refrains gets my anxiety kicking. I take a deep five-count breath in, then puff the air back out in little bursts. These feet have waltzed through my chest since I was young and, when they want to, they’ll spin and dip me good. I could usually calm the kicks with a small change—a haircut, a new tattoo, fun pants. Sometimes, they needed more. A new apartment. A new person. In trying to make the feet stop kicking, I haven’t always been kind. But with Ryan, the feet mostly stood still.
“Oz,” Ryan scoffs as I poke at the plastic. “Come on. Is that really what you’re telling yourself now?”
“How am I supposed to live like this?” I ask. I don’t bother with the mirror.
“Same way you did before. Don’t you miss your life?”
Every inch of it. I miss my friends yelling over each other in bars, my mom’s grumbling when someone cuts her off in traffic, Cousin Jackie calling to tell me what fresh hell her toddler kicked up. I miss Love Island and baseballs commentators. Songbirds in the morning. Being on public transit and turning off my music to eavesdrop on an agitated couple or some gossiping teenagers, then listening to everyone’s hopes and worries and little yips. All that human noise pressing around me. I miss his arms and mouth and weird long toes. Being held and felt and fucked and I miss I miss I miss of course I miss my life.
“So go get it. It’s still there. Everyone’s just a voice in the dark.”
I start at a park. Wait until someone who looks kind walks past. Then, I fall. Pretend to trip, roll an ankle, drop to the ground out of nowhere dramatic as all hell, feigning unconsciousness as the person shakes me, calling from the grave, “Hey! HEY! You alright?”
It feels good. To be touched. To pretend. I keep my eyes closed. For a second or two, I believe the lie. But their hesitancy ruins it. I want to feel wanted.
There’s a spot about two blocks away from our place. It’s not hip enough to be crowded or bright enough to give me a headache. At the bar, the Ryan behind the counter asks what I’d like. I order a Sazerac. A couple of Ryans sit across from each other in a booth, banging their fists against the table and loudly arguing about the merits of Socialism. Over the stereo, Ryan sings something originally performed by a band I loved in high school.
The Sazerac is slick and bitter, tingling my mouth in a way I still don’t like. When he ordered them, Ryan always used to cajole me into taking a sip.
“I like it when your face goes all scrunchy,” he’d say.
“What are you drinking?” Ryan asks from a man with a lumberjack beard and angular eyebrows. I tell him. He nods. Says, “Good choice.”
I want to keep this conversation going, but I can’t think of a thing to say. I don’t know how to be around people anymore. The feet in my chest start shuffling, inching me towards the door. I used to have a personality, right? Didn’t I have ambitions and hopes and big dreams I shared with the world and bigger dreams I barely shared with myself?
I-I-I-I-N. Out. Out. Out. Out. Out.
“Would you do me a favor?” I ask.
“Shoot.”
“Would you offer me a sip of it?” I push the glass towards him. Already, he looks skeptical. “Just—I know how this sounds—”
“How does it sound?”
“I’m not asking you to buy it for me. If you could just pick it up, then offer me a sip, that’s all.”
His eyebrow arches even higher. “What is this?”
“Never mind,” I say, pulling the drink back. “Sorry.”
But Lumberjack Ryan shrugs and says, “Why not? Just stick around here for a bit after so I know you aren’t up to something funky, alright?”
He grabs the glass. I close my eyes. I can almost hear him shake his head.
“Do you—uh—do you want a sip of this?” The pause is all wrong.
Eyes still closed, I say, “Only if they changed all the ingredients.”
“Ah—no, I don’t believe they did.”
“I don’t know,” I say, wheeling my voice around. “You know I never like them.”
There’s a pause. This one’s different. For a moment, I think he’s left. Then, in a new, tender voice, Ryan says, “Maybe tonight’s will change your mind.”
I hold my hand out, eyes still closed. The sweaty glass presses into my palm. I take a small sip and feel my face contort. Ryan chuckles. It almost sounds right.
“Guess not,” he says.
I want to linger here. Continue talking to this Ryan with my eyes shut all night. Ask him for his recipe for pork shoulder and what he was going to say that night in the car and whether he was eight or nine when he cracked his chin on the sidewalk and got that half-moon scar and if he knows what is happening to me and what it’s like where he is, if he’s anywhere at all.
A hand on my arm brings me back to the buzzing bar. Sazerac Lumberjack squints at me.
“You okay?” His fingers are steady on my arm, rough and warm.
“Do you want to see my terrible apartment?” I ask.
Sazerac Lumberjack, whose name is Michael, lets me make demands without question—lights off; no, say this, not that; no, this phrase exactly.
“Come on, baby,” Ryan cries, moans, whispers, screams. Sometimes, he says things he would never say. I lap it all up.
I wouldn’t say that I make a habit of bringing people home.
“Do you want music?” asks the bald Socialist Debater.
“Please, no.”
Habit suggests some semblance of control. It’s a compulsion. A way to remove myself without completely losing the surface.
“I love this bed frame,” says a woman who works as a barback on Wednesdays.
“You picked it out,” I say. When I look up and see a discount Catherine Zeta-Jones looking confused, my heart goes to syrup. She doesn’t seem to dwell. People will let you say a lot of strange things. I never realized.
“Why do you always keep your eyes closed?” asks Michael.
It becomes easy, to slip just below.
One night, I fall asleep before telling Michael to leave. When dreams of car crashes shake me awake at 3am, he’s still there, out cold.
In the dark bathroom, sitting on the cold toilet lid, I imagine what Ryan would say about the man whose body he’s borrowing. What he says about me.
“So,” I tell the darkness. “You’re still living like this, then.”
“Not surprised.”
“Classic Oz.”
“Living a life you could ditch at any minute.”
“Nothing real to miss here, anyway.”
Then it’s nine months ago and Ryan is screaming in this little bathroom that keeps its echoes close, face twisted with disdain. Punctuating each word with concentrated anger—DO. YOU. EVER. THINK. OF. ANYONE. BUT. YOUR. SELF. And I wind up to say, “considering things beyond you doesn’t mean I only think about myself,” but break down instead because maybe I did do that, maybe this was how he really saw me, maybe he loved me in spite of himself, maybe he didn’t love me at all, maybe I was just a selfish girl who tricked him into my bed.
Then the feet kick open the trapdoor where I’ve hidden all the conversations: two-stepping around my mom’s worry, hesitant coffees with friends, the time my boss heard us on the phone and followed me outside to check in, the ways the people who loved me asked: Is this really what you want? The people who are calling now, using his voice to ask if there’s anything they can do to help.
“You can’t keep making excuses for him,” said Jackie once. “I am here for you no matter what, but I swear, if you move to Nebraska because you don’t know how to call this what it is, I’m slashing his tires.”
I knew what it was. And yes, maybe the Ryan I like to remember has been sanded down to just his good parts. But that’s because those parts were pretty damn good. And no one else saw that. The Thanksgiving dinners he made for me in February and times he kept me still when my tapping feet wanted to run me ten miles dead and how I could put him to sleep in five minutes with a head scratch and how we forgave the ugliness in each other, as often as we could.
Back in my room, Michael is still sleeping. I get back in bed, curl my body around his back, let him shift and resettle into me.
“I love you anyway,” I tell the back of his head. “I wouldn’t have left.”
The Ryan I’ve left in the bathroom shakes his head.
“I’m not lying,” I say. “I’m not.”
Yes, says the Ryan that could never be Ryan. You are.
Michael rolls over, placing his forehead against mine.
“Who are you talking to?” he asks, voice so gummy with sleep that he doesn’t sound like anyone at all.
Michael is already making coffee when I crawl out of bed. My kitchen fills with sizzles—he’s found cinnamon and pancake mix. There’s a picture on the fridge of Ryan and I at the state fair, biting into each other’s corn dogs, but Michael moves around the room with a homeowner’s ease. When I plop onto a chair, he smiles his good morning and slides a mug my way. His flannel drapes over the back of the chair next to me and, before I can think myself out of it, I pull it over my shoulders. The sleeves darken at the wrist with an earthy sharpness.
“Sorry,” says Michael, noticing, his voice a scratching Ryan record. “I didn’t wash it after yesterday’s shift. Might be some leftover dirt.”
“Where do you work again?”
“At the greenhouse on 23rd.”
“You do? I love—I used to love it there.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“I did?”
Michael chuckles and I get nervous, but there’s no tension gripping the room because I’ve forgotten something, no lifting of the feet in my chest, no souring of the coffee, nothing.
“Sure did. We can go if you want. I’ll get you that sweet, sweet employee discount.”
I haven’t left any room for him, or anyone else, and he’s made pancakes anyway. I ask what it’s like to work at the greenhouse. He smiles, leans back, and launches into a story. His hands move, gesturing across the table, up into his beard, out towards me, back. He tells me about his flowering life. I listen. I keep my eyes open.
I get used to it. Go back to work, return phone calls, make a few lunch plans. I’m not great at clocking who’s addressing me in a crowded room or staying focused during a conversation or knowing what people really want, from me or anyone. But slowly, I can be in the world again.
One day, I’m buying coffee. And there’s this twang. I look up at the cashier. He’s a standard beanied hipster, head tilted with expectation, but there’s something else. When he repeats, “Can I get a name for the order?” it’s still there.
“What?”
“What’s your name?”
A memory of Ryan—actual Ryan—knocks. I let it in.
“Should I be concerned?” Ryan asks. I’m 22 and stunned silent because someone so beautiful has just asked for my name, my name, walked right up to me at Jackie’s barbeque and I know he’s her husband’s buddy who just moved back to town and he’s dressed a little better than all my jackass friends but not so fancy that I don’t trust him. The sun is beating into him, but he’s taken his sunglasses off anyway so I can look him in the eye.
“Sorry,” I say, shaking my head to clear the gunk. “What?”
“I said, ‘Should I be concerned?’ because I asked, ‘What’s your name?’ and now you’re looking like you can’t remember.”
“Ma’am?” drones the barista. It sounds like Ryan, but it also sounds like a random guy, getting impatient. I say my name. And the barista doesn’t smile, doesn’t squint into the sun to tell me, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that name before, doesn’t give me a lopsided grin when I tell him No one has. The barista says, “Thanks,” and “Next” and “Hey, could you please move aside?” Someone bumps into me and apologizes, and they sound like Ryan with a lilt, a little different than the barista’s. A month later and there’s a little less of him. Another month, a little less.
Ryan fades, but everyone still sounds like a version of him who’s pretending to be someone else. It keeps going like that. He never really goes away.
Leah Francesca Christianson’s work has appeared in Bending Genres, River Teeth, TriQuarterly, Watershed Review, Split Lip Magazine, and other publications. Currently, she teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center, reads fiction for Split Lip Magazine, and is seeking representation for her first novel. Find her online @lfchristianson.
13 December 2024
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