Heather Buyce-Vasquez
Joe, March 1938, New York
It was just beyond his grasp. Out of the corner of his eye, just under the surface. A rose-petal’s brush of her lips upon his. A tickle of her dark curls fragrant as she leans over him. His eyes are open now and the early morning glint of sunlight is making a jagged path across the rumpled bedclothes. He is alone. His heart aches in his chest, a thumping pain that makes his hands curl into fists. It is so silent that the thumping becomes a cannon in his ears.
Seven years ago she came upon him at a bar on Battery. Numb with cold and discouragement. He’d been unable to find satisfying work since arriving in the city. He’d been about to sink his last coin for a tumble of brown fire. He was just a well-dressed Paddy. The suit had been a loaner from his mate Bobby who’d gotten it from a girl he’d met on the Upper Eastside. The girl was a splash in the pan for Bobby but the suit stayed. It was too tight across his broad shoulders but Joe was slighter than he and it fit like it’d been looking for him awhile.
Her eyes had been liquid amber sparkling like spun glass. Her smile slight and gentle. Under normal circumstances he would not have joined in her flirtatious banter but she’d caught him in between manners and despair. So he’d allowed her to wash over him in a wave and he’d been carried out further than he could ever imagine. But instead of drowning – new life – breathed into him. Their courtship was tranquil and fevered. Enveloped like soft down. Easy and hot. And just like that he’d taken her as his bride and they’d begun their life together.
And now, as he lay, still chasing sleep, still his heart rending he became aware that the curve of her hip is not pillowed against his side. Not at her dressing table, her lilac dressing gown trailing along the floor. Her dark tresses tumbling down her back. She is not sitting in the cool window seat, cheek pressed to the glass, watching the town awake in the red light bathed across the cobbled road and peeking in between chimneys and the waving of the aprons and bloomers dried stiff in the night’s air. Not down the short staircase and sipping hot and bitter coffee on the front stoop watching the magpies dance on the damp grass. Not humming a melody lilting with things secret while brushing little Anne’s fine dark hair, plaiting it for the day wound in a cotton kerchief. She is none of those places. And Joe has no idea where his wife Lucy has gone.