sights in the rear view mirror

"If you could change one thing in your life mom, and you could choose with or without changing anything else what would you change?" 

I answer her carefully and slowly, "I would still have you and Alexis and Conner?" 

"Yeah, if you want to."

"Okay yeah. I want to. But I wouldn't have had a baby so young. I would have done my life the right way and gotten to do all the things I didn't get to do.  And things would have been easier...." 

We drive in a sleepy soft silence down through research park and away from the U. 

I would have told him how I felt standing beneath his shelter in the wind on top of a mountain.  I would have accepted his help when he offered it.  I would have rolled over in his arms instead of refusing to turn to face him. I wouldn't have let him walk away without knowing.  

I would have let him save me.

She sat on the sofa cross-legged, an unopened textbook across her lap, staring at the front door listening to him drinking himself into frenzy.  Her eyes searched the polished oak for the familiar faces encased within the grain.  Faces of women screaming with gaping mouths, flame like hair, and teardrop breasts.  Their bodies nothing more than remnants from when the tree was alive growing wild with designs of life.

Calmly she waited for what was coming.  She had chosen this gamble knowing she would lose; knowing all along the true price of stolen hours.  

She had gone out hiking with friends on trails leading nowhere through box canyons across ground barely released from winter’s tight hold.  The spring breezes cold enough to be painful on uncovered skin, yet in the patches of late afternoon sun she sweat beneath her thin fleece jacket.  

Following her companions, she walked among them as if she was one of them, knowing she is not.  She is a thief stealing away moments. Her sins covered by the sound of the wind rising through the trees.  

The glint of ice melting in the sun, the weightlessness of the mountain sky, laughter echoing off the rocks, a footstep in the woods, anything she can carry attempting to stash it away, somewhere safe, somewhere he cannot reach it.

Yes, she had known the price of her actions even well before she found him standing in the driveway waiting for her.  The sight of him smirking had made her stomach lurch but she reminded herself to remain calm.  She had chosen this moment and it would be here and then it would be gone, nothing but a bad memory.  Or better still if she could it would become forgotten between a thousand other moments.  Maybe forgotten is too strong of a word, perhaps distorted like looking through the icy water of a stream to the washed peddles below.    

He had cornered her coming the long way around back of the truck.  She had been gone from 2 to 5, three hours but he argued over and over it was four. Smashing his fist into the hood as he counted off the time, already too drunk to add but stable enough on his feet to have her pinned without laying a finger to her.  

Even as he ranted the force of his fist knocking bits of red clay loose from the underbelly of the truck she began to see the two of them as if from far away.  And being removed, watching like a stranger standing at the edge of the driveway it was easy to concede to his clouded reality.  

The mountain was icy.  It snowed.  She was gone 4 hours.  All of it true now.  And with that he had let her pass safely by him into the house.  But it was far from over and she knew that too. 

Beneath Still Water, mlb 

"What about you in your little life so far what would you change?" A million gym meets cross through my mind and I think I shouldn't have asked her.

"When I was 9 I won't have left my razor scooter out and it wouldn't have gotten stolen." 

"Yeah, that's a good one, kid." I say.