The Mighty Red

The weight of first light, the struggle not to rise into consciousness knowing bad things waited there—the vodka headache, the bloating, the potential misery of her period starting on her wedding day, right out of the blue, wouldn’t that be just . . . the wish, oh just the subtle green wish that slipped alongside Kismet’s cheek like the tendril of a climbing plant, that Hugo would enfold her to his comfortable bulk and make her laugh. She could hear his whisper, she breathed his cleanly OCD smell of fresh soap, his shy armpits, because, yes, could it really be? She startled, heart zinging. Yes, it was Hugo. He was calling her softly from under the bed.

It was 4:39 a.m. and sometime in the night he’d made it through the minefield, past her mother’s first-floor bedroom, up the creaking stairs, into Kismet’s bedroom. Had he actually wedged himself beneath her bed? Well, she had put risers on it to increase the potential storage space and removed the boxes of school notebooks and awkward drawings just last week in order to destroy all evidence of her past life. Her stuff was now piled around the room. She hadn’t done a thing. But anyway, there was enough room under the bed and yes, in fact, Hugo had hidden there most of the night. He had stretched out on his back, right underneath the bedspring and mattress and Kismet. For many hours, Hugo had been staring up into the dust-ball gloom, allowing the flow of tears to slide from his eyes into his cupped ears. Thoughtful Hugo had wanted to let her get some rest before the stress of the day’s events. Those events. Now she forgot all about them for he was crawling up the side of her bed and sliding beneath the covers. She rolled into his soft freckled arms and crushed her face into his blast of gold-red hair.

‘Hello, Dangercat.’

He had many pet names for her.

She began to cry and their feelings overwhelmed all judgment. They made the delirious last love of lost destiny. There was so much emotion in that room that it poured off Kismet’s old mattress, out from under the quilt her mother had pieced together from Kismet’s favorite T-shirts. That emotion altered the surfaces in Kismet’s childhood bedroom. The shelves of treasured books, jewelry boxes, and wire daisy-shaped earring hangers all shuddered with fateful pleasure. The many collages she had made from magazines—collages of eyes that were sightless, lips that couldn’t speak, hands that couldn’t touch—suddenly came alive and there was babbling, blinking, whispering, touching. Life was all around them in a whirling haze of heart-lifting happiness. It could never be replicated. It could never come true. That’s what made it so powerful.

‘Your marriage is an ephemeral blip,’ said Hugo, as they lay together, in fraught peace, at dawn. ‘I do not believe in it. We are bound by fate.’

‘And surrounded by junk,’ said Kismet, looking at her clothes, her stuffed animals. ‘Has this ever happened before? Us?’

‘Maybe our ancestors had a thing.’

‘We should trace it back,’ said Kismet in a weak voice. It was true that both their families had been in the valley for centuries.

‘Books,’ said Hugo.

‘Which books?’

‘Uh, classics? I guess after today—’

‘Adultery,’ said Kismet. Her voice was hushed.

They kept saying the word because it sounded so weirdly grown-up. It did not occur to either one of them to stop having sex after Kismet’s wedding.

‘Let’s read the same books,’ said Kismet.

‘I’m sure we’ve got copies. I’ll pull them.’

‘And then we’ll go to all of the places in the books. And have adultery.’

‘Don’t you commit adultery?’

‘As in commit to, or as in a sin?’

‘Both.’

‘Right.’

Kismet saw a wide dry desert of time and Hugo tiny in the distance. She pushed her childhood quilt into his arms and kissed him. His lips were soft and full like a woman’s and his eyes were muddy hazel brown, completely vulnerable. So young. Nothing could be done about the fact that he was only a homeschooled kid, no matter what he said, and she was a recently graduated senior taking on the cross of womanhood before her time.