Aubade: A Revision

This is not about the issue of Playboy you stored beneath the hospital bed, or about the phone booth where I found you years later, or even about your room near campus in a house I saw only once. No, this is about you prying the bark from my headlight and refusing to share the twin bed. It’s about me waking at dawn to the sound of baseballs spiraling into mitts worn by college boys, boys who understood what it meant to follow a process, boys who soaked their gloves in neatsfoot oil, stroking the leather until it softened and yielded, ready to embrace each Rawlings, each MacGregor. My brother labored to season the Wilsons his godfather sent each birthday, baking them in mother’s car on summer days in Alabama, retrieving them at dusk to tuck them under his mattress, using his weight to mold them, believing, like the woman who slumbered faithfully on a rooted, hand-hewn bed, that the man responsible for such gifts would someday return to recognize the handiwork.

Eventually my brother quit waiting, and now, fifteen years later, I’m sure that you have, too. But lately I’ve taken to meeting you there in that room overlooking the diamond, to coming back with coffee or vodka, to wearing your shirt that smelled like home or just walking in clothed in my own set of terrors, crumpling the note on your desk and waiting for you to rise.

Or sometimes you’re back at that phone booth, stranded because I never could give directions, and I’m circling town and telling the story: We said we’d meet at the first gas station to the right of the exit, only there isn’t a station for miles. Half the residents of that small town were out that night looking for you, the boy in a black car with out of state plates, so that they could set you back on my path, and this time when I find you in that phone booth I do not wait, but kiss you as the townspeople cheer around us.

Or else we’re sixteen again. We’re back in the recovery ward, and I’m pulling the blanket from your shoulders and running my hand down your chest until I meet the hem of your hospital gown, recuperation and caution and avoid all exertion be damned. I’m watching the monitor as your heart rate beep—beep—beeps all the way up to the nurse’s station, and a team runs in, alarmed, and discovers how I move you.

But most nights, you’re still bedridden and veiled in morphine, and I’m still too timid even to touch your hand near its IV. Love, I know I cannot save us. But I come anyway, slipping back until I find that room, smell the chlorine products the janitors favored, see the roses you could not have wanted, the crutches you cannot yet wield. I rescue that magazine from the place where you believe it is hidden, moving it from the tile to your pillow to keep you from waking alone.