The Falling Out

Abstract

The Falling Out Drew McCutchen (bio) Rocky didn’t want to spend his Christmas morning driving to Bellingham. He didn’t want to fight about it either. If he wanted to fight, he would have reminded Olivia that his parents were most certainly dead, and that this should exempt him from having to spend his Christmas with her father. But Olivia had already warned him that morning with a tightened raise of her eyebrows, the universal sign for “don’t fuck with me,” when he hesitated to pack the van. Now here they were, cruising up I-5, heading north. Their van lurched over a bump and Jack cried from the back seat. Olivia unbuckled her seatbelt and turned back to soothe their son. “Do you have to drive so fast?” Rocky moved his foot side-to-side, trying to knock feeling back into his toes. “I just want to get there early enough to leave without a scene,” he lied. Olivia turned back to her seat. “Well maybe if we visited more often he wouldn’t make a scene.” Rocky sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. His counselor, Dr. Jacobs, who Rocky met for an hour every Wednesday on Olivia’s insistence, told him that it was important to fight, to be invested. “He thinks family is very important,” she said. “He thinks family is very important now.” Rocky winced at his own words, feeling himself drawn into an argument. “What is—” Olivia stopped. They crested the hill to the interchange with I-90, and the desolation spread out before them. The foothills had protected many areas from the blasts, but here, in the Skagit Valley, the cities had been exposed to the brunt of the initial heat waves. The buildings that still stood were twisted, crippled at their support beams. The billboards, burned down to their skeletons, gnarled backwards like broken bones. The tree line in the distance a black backdrop, and the river, its slow meandering trail through the city, now ran gray with ash and sludge. They remained silent while they drove through this newly formed black desert, as stalled vehicles, roasted from the bombings, lined the freeway’s shoulders for miles. After the blasts, the government had tried to clear the roads, towing the charred vehicles out of sight, stacking the cars into towers of black steel. But the fervor to right the world ran short of the work to be done, and they had pushed the remaining rolling coffins onto the shoulder and called it good enough. Now the cars stretched on both sides, whole families still entombed inside almost two years later, their ashes sitting upright, waiting on a destination. Blast cracks spidered across the freeway’s bleached blacktop. Their van bumped over the buckled cement. Jack started crying again, and Olivia turned back to him. The black and pink ocean of her lesion raged against the delicate skin of her neck, the waves reaching up her cheek. At first she had let Rocky trace the wound with his fingers, riding the ridge between the scarring and the skin, honoring her new body. But then Jack had been born and she had stopped letting him touch her. And eventually Rocky had stopped trying. [End Page 132] “Can you please slow down!” Rocky didn’t respond, but instead kicked his foot against the floor. He didn’t want to tell Olivia about the hole in his right foot. The one that had started at the heel where he had nicked it on a nail during one of his secret trips to his charred childhood home. He didn’t want to tell her that the wound had scabbed over but refused to heal, that a sore had appeared, filled with fluid, popped, and dribbled orange ooze. The injury was slowly excavating the feeling from his foot, and now it sat like a brick on the gas pedal. He didn’t want to tell her that his foot wasn’t going to get better. This would just lead to the same useless fight. “It’s the cruise control. It edges up,” he lied again. He scanned his mirrors for the white flash of...