Full Version of Gale Huxley’s excerpt from Vol. 50 Issue No. 1
Sharon removes Velcro rollers from her hair and applies sheer lipstick that she doesn’t mind being kissed and she thinks her husband wouldn’t mind kissing. She puts on a cherry red dress and tells herself the dress is for her—that this act is the beginning of self-respect.
Over and over again, she checks the silver watch on her bony wrist and calculates how much time it will take to drive to the airport, to park, and to walk to the partition that separates the travelers and those who are waiting for travelers.
Sharon turns when she reaches the wooden front door. She scans the living room and sighs—an exhalation that curves her spine and brings her shoulders closer to her heart. It can be different, she thinks. This can be not a renewal, but a beginning. She runs to the desk in the office she shares with Kenneth and pulls a sheet of paper out of a drawer. With a grape-scented marker she writes on the clean page “Welcome home, my love.”
Sharon walks to the car with an urgency that is not only motivated by the possibility she will miss Kenneth rising to the top of the escalator. She drives in silence and lets her mind wander as her eyes monitor traffic—the road slick with rain she never saw. The sky in her rearview is darkening into a purple bruise, but in front of her there is the golden sunlight of a dying day. In her mind, Kenneth is next to her in the passenger’s seat as they drive down a winding country road, past white-dressed ghosts and creatures of legend.
She squeezes into a spot between a Ford Explorer and a Maserati. In the Explorer, two women sit next to each other, eating bagels. They look at each other and kiss with cream-cheese lips. A white chihuahua sits in the driver’s seat of the Maserati on the other side, watching Sharon, a paw on the steering wheel. The dog honks at her when she exits the Honda. Sharon pulls a receipt from her purse and writes down the row and level where she parked, then takes long steps to enter the airport.
There is a festival of humanity inside Terminal B. A group of people cheer when a young woman emerges from the bathroom with her luggage. Children run towards parents they haven’t forgotten in the intervening days, months, years. A family eats pizza while sitting on the edge of an unmoving carousel of luggage. They don’t notice when the belt begins to move, and their baby is carried away. People walk alone, their eyes wandering, searching, even though there is no one there for them. Lovers meet with flowers and passionate embraces. Sharon’s eyes fall on the lovers.
A space opens for Sharon to stand at the barrier of welcomers, and she fills the gap. She holds the paper to her chest. It is wrinkled from being gripped in her damp palm. She looks around, then unfolds the paper, as if she is flashing an audience. I’m wild. I’m silly, she thinks. Minutes pass. She doesn’t see the thin, tall figure who is always wearing a pageboy hat, rising to her.
Instead, a man who is thin and close to her height, approaches her. He opens his sweatered arms. Sharon turns around, then looks to each side of her. “My love,” the man says. He embraces her. His hold is tight, and it feels like the result of longing. “Let’s get out of here,” he says. He releases her and cups her heart-shaped face in his hands that feel rough to her intensely moisturized skin. Then dropping his left hand, he interlocks his fingers with hers. Sharon feels a silicon ring on his finger. She leads him to the Honda.
The Ford to the left has been replaced by an empty minivan with a stick family on the back window. The Maserati remains. The chihuahua now sits in the lap of an old woman wearing a hood and dark glasses in the dimly lit parking garage. Sharon gets into the passenger seat while the man places his luggage in the trunk. Her eyes slide over to him when he gets into the passenger side and closes the door.
“Kenneth?” she asks.
He slaps his thigh, then looks at her.
“You’ve always been funny,” he says, laughing. “Call me what you want, but I love the way Roy sounds coming out of your mouth.” He places his fingers on her lips. Airport germs, she thinks, but she kisses his fingertips.
“Do you want to go to that new restaurant? The Mexican restaurant on 10th that I’ve been wanting to try?” Sharon asks.
They share chicken fajitas, and each have a mango chile margarita. Roy offers to drive. Sharon accepts, carbonated energy moving through her torso. Roy pulls into a stone cottage in the part of town she walked through as a young woman at night, looking into open curtains that revealed expansive libraries or theatrical murders, with a certainty of her future, fused with wonder.
There is another car in the driveway, a green Volkswagen Beetle in the model Sharon’s mother drove before she was born. Sharon had seen pictures of it when she had gone through her mother’s things as a child. In her favorite Polaroid, her mother leans against the car and looks to her left, probably at the person attached to the outstretched hand floating at the edge of the film. Roy sees her eyes linger on the Beetle.
“Why did you take my car?” he asks.
Sharon shrugs. “I thought you’d miss it.”
Roy laughs. I’m funny. I knew it, she thinks.
The inside of the house is bright. There are pink walls, a blue couch, and green shelves in the living room. The kitchen is red, down to the refrigerator. All this color. She wonders if it’s tasteful. She’d recently added green pillows to the neutral-palette home she shared with Kenneth. Kenneth had told her they were fine, but she put the pillows in the hall closet after a week.
There is an aged acoustic guitar leaning against the wall by the fireplace.
“You play?” she asks Roy, walking over to it and brushing her fingers over the chords. She likes the roughness of the wires.
He cocks his head. “You do,” he says.
“But I have no musical talent,” Sharon responds, her voice more biting than she can understand why.
Roy smiles. “You play anyway, and you get better all the time.”
Sharon continues through the house as Roy empties his suitcase.
There is a bedroom filled with figurines of birds. Blue Jays and cardinals frozen on branches or caught in mid-flight look at her with eyes that seem alive.
“Roy,” Sharon calls.
Roy walks into the carpeted room. He rests his fingertips on a sparrow.
“You dusted them while I was gone,” he says. “Thank you.”
So this isn’t me, Sharon thinks.
She finds life-size reproductions of horror icons, like Creature from the Black Lagoon and Elvira in a room that functions as the library. Though she can’t imagine being such a fan of anything, she sees herself in that space of terror and books organized by color.
Before going to bed, Roy put his arms around Sharon.
“Roy,” she hesitates, her voice drifting off.
Roy opens his eyes. Sharon looks at the light of the moon reflecting in them.
“This may sound silly, but am I good at my job?”
Roy closes his eyes and rubs her back.
“Painting is your job. Mowing lawns is something you do,” he tells her.
“I work for a lawn service?” She intends this as a question, but Roy doesn’t answer it this way.
“Let me rephrase,” he says. “You mow lawns for money, but your passion is painting.”
Sharon thinks of all the half-finished canvases in the garage of her former life. Mowing lawns seems like it would be hot, but nice.
“What I love about you most is that no one believes in yourself more than you do.”
Sharon accepts Roy’s words, then falls asleep and dreams of a hummingbird drinking nectar held in her cupped hands. Not a drop falls through the cracks.
Sharon and Roy are watching the news while eating crepes for dinner three nights later when her face appears on the screen. Kenneth stands on a podium asking for Sharon to be returned home safely, tears choking his words. Her parents stand behind Roy, separate and holding themselves.
“We just want to know you’re okay, Sharon,” Kenneth pleads, looking into the camera, and so, into her.
“Poor man,” Roy says, shaking his head, béchamel sauce on his chin.
Sharon places her plate on the sea-horse shaped side table, then stands. “They’re at the park on the east side of town. Let’s join the vigil.”
They are amongst the crowd of people thirty minutes later. Children dart around. Couples clinging to each other as they hold fake candles.
Kenneth stands in the center of a tight crowd. Sharon makes her way to him, though people gasp and murmur as she pushes their shoulders aside.
“Incredibly rude,” she hears a woman with red hair say.
Kenneth holds a stack of fliers in his hands. She sees a picture of herself from last summer, along with her age (34), height (5’2), and her weight (143).
“I’m sorry,” Sharon tells Kenneth.
He smiles at her, then hands her a flier.
“Thank you,” he says, staring at her for a moment before looking through her, then beyond her.
“I hope you find your Sharon. She pauses, giving him a chance, then she turns around and leaves with Roy.
Years pass and Sharon discovers more about herself, or it is not so much discovery as acceptance and application. With horror, she finds that she enjoys running. She makes choices, like quitting painting. Sharon begins writing romance, something she had thought silly, but now brings every version of her into harmony. She and Roy adopt an eight-year-old girl, because the thought of motherhood, once intolerable, becomes not a duty pressured by culture, but a desire that stands upon firm ground.
On the tenth anniversary of Sharon’s disappearance, she watches an interview on the morning news as she eats a bagel with a side of grapes. Kenneth sits next to his wife, a woman with red hair who watches his mouth as he speaks.
“I accepted long ago that she’s gone,” he tells the interviewer. “I think that means dead, but if she’s still out there, I hope she’s okay.”
Sharon turns off the TV. She put her hair into a ponytail and dabs sparkly gloss onto her lips. When she reaches the stained-glass front door, she turns around. She inhales and her chest rises to the ceiling. On impulse, she runs to the library and grabs a pen and paper. She writes “Welcome home, my little collegiate!” in pink ink. Her daughter, Elaina, is returning from her first semester of college for winter break. She knows the sign will embarrass Elaina, but also that her daughter would expect this from her.
She parks the Beetle, and when she gets to the lobby of the terminal, she can’t remember if she’d written down where she had parked. She pulls a piece of paper out of her purse, wrinkled and faded, that says Level 3, Row Q. Sharon walks through the loners looking, the couples kissing, the family eating as they wait for luggage, and makes her way to the barricade. She holds the page in front of her chest and waits for Elaina.
A few minutes later, a boy approaches her. He has dark curls and wears cargo shorts. “Mom,” he says, throwing his arms around her. “Can we get wings on the way home?”
Sharon’s throat constricts. “No,” she squeaks.
“Come on. Please?” the boy asks, a whine and a crack breaking up the depth of his voice.
Sharon follows him out of the airport, looking back every few steps.
