LOVE STORY

After three days with no sleep, he started to see things.  She came and went.  Mostly she told him to keep breathing.


LOVE STORY

She opened the window and pressed her face against the cool metal frame.  Below, the streetlight sizzled. 
After a while she closed the window and tried singing.


LOVE STORY

The next morning, as he’d suspected, there was nothing left beside him except smoke, which rose gently up into the slowly revolving ceiling fan, and then wandered out the open window.


LOVE STORY

It seemed like longer than that.


LOVE STORY

The even rows of clear glasses behind him were dazzling in the spring sun.  He grinned.
She handed him the coins gingerly, as if they had a life of their own.


LOVE STORY

He was barefoot.


LOVE STORY

There was no answer.  She held the scrap of paper against the frozen phone with her bare hand, and tried again.


LOVE STORY

On the roof outside her window, he tapped gently on the glass.


LOVE STORY

“Guess who’s back,” he asked.


LOVE STORY

For almost a week that spring they lived in a room on the second floor of the abandoned hotel that everyone could see from the freeway.


LOVE STORY

“Smirnoff,” he said.  “That lousy Russian tried to kill me once.”


LOVE STORY

 “How are you?”
“Scared of the dark.”


LOVE STORY

On the ground far below, car windows gleamed like jewelry.


LOVE STORY

They slept on the floor, wrapped up with the electrical cords.


LOVE STORY

In January, the steam from the grates towered up to the fourth stories of the surrounding buildings.


LOVE STORY

“Do you want to dance?”
“No,” she said.


LOVE STORY

The voice on the machine was ragged from amplification. 
It was a woman.
“Are you there?” she asked. 


LOVE STORY

“Where are you?” he asked.
“Sixth Avenue,” she lied.


LOVE STORY

The window was dirty and fogged from the rain.  It could have been her.


LOVE STORY

He dropped the black plastic bucket of silverware onto the unsteady cart, shook his shoulders out, and walked away without answering.  


LOVE STORY

After a while, he rolled the window down and eased the seat back, still keeping an eye out for his dad’s shadow at the bar’s back exit. 


LOVE STORY

The faint colored light from the stained glass fell in blurry pools on the granite.


LOVE STORY

The line went dead.


LOVE STORY

“Wait a minute,” she said.


LOVE STORY

They sat on the dark stairs outside the party.
“Sing something,” he suggested.
“No,” she said.


LOVE STORY

“The blue one,” he said.


LOVE STORY

One night, he almost stopped.
After that, he never went back. 


LOVE STORY

They couldn’t stop the bleeding.


LOVE STORY

It took him until the end of June to get it running.


LOVE STORY

The dry grass over the graves was warm in the spring sun.


LOVE STORY

“No,” he said.


LOVE STORY

“I’ll be right back.”


LOVE STORY

“Do you know what time it is?” he asked.


LOVE STORY

“I know that.”


LOVE STORY

“Well, I’m at the Cadillac Hotel,” the woman continued.  “I guess there’s been some confusion.  She paid for a room but the bed hasn’t been used, and there’s no luggage.”


LOVE STORY

“James?” the woman on the other end asked.
“No,” she said.
The line crackled, then went dead.


LOVE STORY

When he got back from the war, there was no one waiting at the bus station, so he walked the eighteen miles from Detroit, home. 


LOVE STORY

After three days, the cat came back. 


LOVE STORY

Overhead, on the bridge, the traffic whispered about them. 


LOVE STORY

Half-way through the article, he dropped the paper, stood, and walked, without a coat, out into the spring rain. 


LOVE STORY

She took all the furniture when she moved back to Michigan.  He slept on the floor for the last five months, until the lease ran out.


LOVE STORY

From the third story window across the street, the woman gazed down absently at the traffic before closing the blinds, as she did every night. 


LOVE STORY

After a second, he turned back.
“Downstairs?” he asked again.
“Right,” she said.  “Downstairs and on your left.”


LOVE STORY

“I hate you, Joe,” he said evenly.


LOVE STORY

The officer frowned on her doorstep.
“I don’t know,” she insisted.


LOVE STORY

The pink carnations floated in the river behind the machine shop, maybe two feet off the muddy bank. 


LOVE STORY

One didn’t work.
Neither did three.


LOVE STORY

When the cereal ran out, he ate paper.


LOVE STORY

“I can tell him if you want.”
She shook her head.


LOVE STORY

About half of the ride, she was hidden from him by the maid who got on at the stop after them, and hung doggedly to the grab pole between them for the next forty blocks.


LOVE STORY

He couldn’t hold his breath any longer.


LOVE STORY

Another swell swept over the bow, pulling him paralell to the deck as he clung to the shuddering mast.


LOVE STORY

“Is Stacey there?”


LOVE STORY

That morning, they finally got the cover off the hydrant on the corner.


LOVE STORY

Years later he learned that her cousin had been lying: he was in love with her, and so wanted to hurt her, and had made up the stories in hopes that he would do exactly what he did—let loose with the flood of demands and recriminations that created such a strain between them during those last two weeks of the soundproof Russian winter.


LOVE STORY

She stood by the car, one child already buckled into the safety seat, one child clinging to the back of her knees, weeping.


LOVE STORY

She set the coffee down in front of him.
“Shut up, Jackson,” she said. 


LOVE STORY

But she didn’t close the door.


LOVE STORY

It got so he couldn’t get through a day without going to back see it.


LOVE STORY

It lay like that, on the pavement out back, for days.


LOVE STORY

He walked in the grass by the side of the subdivision’s new road, avoiding the patches of grubby snow: white linen suit, carrying a stem glass.  It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, the day after Christmas.


LOVE STORY

“How about this?” he asked.


LOVE STORY

Against its will, the white snow melted on the unfrozen asphalt outside the bar.


LOVE STORY

“Who was that?”
“No one.”


LOVE STORY

It wouldn’t come out.


LOVE STORY

They didn’t matter.


LOVE STORY

The last light went out, plunging the rows of toy lighthouses in the window into darkness.


LOVE STORY

The tanker hung immobile in the middle of the river, Canada sliding by beyond it.


LOVE STORY

Every time the train passed that apartment, he looked back, but he never saw them again.  After a while, he decided he must have been seeing things.


LOVE STORY

That was the second time.


LOVE STORY

It started raining.


LOVE STORY

Outside, the elephants shuffled mournfully in the warm night.


LOVE STORY

They found her in a hotel in Florida, just off I-75.  The police said it had been probably half a day since she died. 


LOVE STORY

“There’s no David here.”


LOVE STORY

“Jesus!”  She slammed her hands into the steering wheel.
“It’s just me,” he whispered from the dark backseat.  “Jennie.  I didn’t have a place to sleep."


LOVE STORY

The train took the little Escort from the side, and pushed it almost half a mile.


LOVE STORY

When she woke up, she didn’t ask where she was.


LOVE STORY

Or down by the river.


LOVE STORY

“Not as much as I thought I would.”


LOVE STORY

The door to the bar was open.  Through it, she could see the old man who owned the bookstore across the street come out to stand in the summer night. 


LOVE STORY

The girl was a little heavy even, with red hair and a broad, friendly face.


LOVE STORY

“Now,” she said.


LOVE STORY

Three thousand gallons of water rushed over the falls every second.    


LOVE STORY

She was right.
But he held out for eleven whole years.


LOVE STORY

“Don’t ever say that again,” he said.


LOVE STORY

He tried again to pull the sleeves of his jacket down far enough to cover his wrists, and lit another cigarette.


LOVE STORY

He couldn’t find it.

LOVE STORY

The fog rolled in so quickly you could actually see it creep up over the rocks and into the trees. 


LOVE STORY

He opened the door.


LOVE STORY

Everyone else was sleeping.


LOVE STORY

“No, we do,” he told his mother, pulling two crumpled dollar bills out.


LOVE STORY

“I don’t remember.”


LOVE STORY

She pushed it through the locker’s slats, then realized suddenly that she couldn’t get it back. 


LOVE STORY

They found the shards outside the window in the snow, in the jade plant, in the fishtank. 


LOVE STORY

Years later, when she cleaned the car before selling it, she finally found the rain-soaked map of Nevada, which must have dropped, invisible, into the narrow shaft between the stick shift and the passenger seat that night.


LOVE STORY

Almost.


LOVE STORY

“Across the street.”
She hesitated.
“Go on,” he said.  “Don’t be afraid.”

LOVE STORY

They leaned against each other in the door of the trailer, watching the crowd swirl by, down the midway. 


LOVE STORY

Below the dock, water lapped gently at the hull.


LOVE STORY

“That’s the third time this week.”


LOVE STORY

As a child, he had worked as an art thief.


LOVE STORY

“No.  Do you?”


LOVE STORY

The scar began at the nape of her neck and extended, a slender gray line, down the length of her back.


LOVE STORY

No one else had even recognized her yet.
He was already on his feet.  “Come on,” he said.  “I have to get out of here.”


LOVE STORY

The next year, he was back.


LOVE STORY

That settled it.


LOVE STORY

Seven minutes.  Five and a half, if he ran.


LOVE STORY

“Is that the moon over there?” he asked.


LOVE STORY

It must have been some other James.


LOVE STORY


That wasn’t what she’d  heard.


LOVE STORY

He didn’t want to know what the room she lived in looked like.


LOVE STORY

She dared him to, so he did, all the way to the top of the hill.


LOVE STORY

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Susie,” she lied.


LOVE STORY

Until he died.


LOVE STORY

The woods echoed with the stadium announcer’s voice.  The yellow leaves were still wet.


LOVE STORY

Halfway up the block he stopped, unable to go on.


LOVE STORY

“Liz?” she asked, squinting against the sunshine.  “Do you remember what happened?”


LOVE STORY

“Neither have I.”


LOVE STORY

She kissed her own shoulder.


LOVE STORY

“Not anymore.”


LOVE STORY

Through the crack in the blind, the yellow lights from the sign outside blinked all night.


LOVE STORY

“Have you been here before?” she asked.
“No,” he told her.


LOVE STORY

“It burnt in the walls for almost an hour before it found a way out. And then it burned to the waterline in five minutes.”


LOVE STORY

In July, before they started putting the walls into the skeleton of the new school, there was a huge pile of fill dirt in the back of the construction field, almost three stories tall, with the deep tracks of caterpillar tractors cutting a jagged path to the top.  You could see the whole town from it. 


LOVE STORY


Unbelievably, the thin gold silk was still torn to cobweb in places.  The button was still missing. 


LOVE STORY

She settled the small stuffed toy gently into the snowdrift that had gathered in the doorway, then walked back out of the alley.


LOVE STORY

The grass around the parking lot was white with sand.


LOVE STORY

“Tell him I still love him,” she insisted again.
The man beside her nodded at his reflection in the glass.


LOVE STORY

He leaned sideways in the doorway, grinning.

LOVE STORY

His neighbors started fighting again at four o’clock that morning. 


LOVE STORY

On TV, one horse pulled away from the rest, loping almost effortlessly towards the finish line.


LOVE STORY

She didn’t slow down.


LOVE STORY

Her mother and aunt held her back by the sleeves of his varsity  jacket.


LOVE STORY

“Look at that,” he said.  “Did you see that?”


LOVE STORY

When the landlady came in, she was still standing there, holding it.


LOVE STORY

He fumbled for her in the folds of the dusty velvet curtain.


LOVE STORY

Up ahead black water glimmered through the trees, which were almost invisible in the darkness.


LOVE STORY

He drank another beer, and made himself some soup.  Then, unsteady, he carried the big snake’s body across the darkened apartment parking lot, to the river, and threw it in. 


LOVE STORY

“Hello, hello,” she said, lurching awake, not sure, a moment later, whether she had really spoken aloud or not.


LOVE STORY

For days, he could hear her crying through the wall.  Then it stopped.


LOVE STORY

She set the rolls down beside him and bit his shoulder gently, on the tattoo. 


LOVE STORY

When he circled back, she was still there.


LOVE STORY

The snow on his face helped.


LOVE STORY

Everyone called her that, for years.


LOVE STORY

Before the train pulled out, the young man who had just sat down excused himself again and got back off.


LOVE STORY

He was lying, she realized, and looked quickly out the window, for help.


LOVE STORY

The next day the birds that had drunk from the fountain lurched around the yard.
It took the rosebushes a week to wither.


LOVE STORY

“She was here earlier,” he said.


LOVE STORY

“Okay, okay,” he said, lifting her gently up the last step and easing her through the door.


LOVE STORY

Even at night, the Christmas lights she’d strung around the small yard seemed to blur from the heat.   


LOVE STORY

The station only came in for about ten minutes, and then it faded again.


LOVE STORY

She never got off the plane.  It wasn’t until days later that he realized that meant she never got on it in the first place.


LOVE STORY

The first of July was a Wednesday.


LOVE STORY

She didn’t like that.


LOVE STORY

The bird lay in the dry autumn grass, stunned, but as far as they could see, unhurt.


LOVE STORY

“Dammit Mike,” she said, slapping his slack jaw.  “Dammmit, dammit.”


LOVE STORY

He didn’t believe them.


LOVE STORY

“You’ll have to kill me,” he said.


LOVE STORY

The old boats seemed to stir when they came in, straining gently against their moorings.   In the rafters, the seagulls murmured in their sleep.


LOVE STORY

The sheets glowed in the afternoon light.


LOVE STORY

He leaned against the warm fender of his car, staring through the screen door.


LOVE STORY

“Slowpoke,” she said.


LOVE STORY

The moon shivered on the dark lake.


LOVE STORY

By the time he got back, the piano was shattered on the sidewalk, and the old man across the street was hanging out the second-story window, screaming.


LOVE STORY

From the kitchen, a thin crack of light seeped under the door to the basement.


LOVE STORY

It took them almost five minutes to pry him loose.  He wouldn’t let go. 


LOVE STORY

He ducked back into the bushes.


LOVE STORY

Above the wide dusky lawn that led up to the big house, the sycamore leaves rustled in the dark.


LOVE STORY

Her slim wrists were extended in front of her, and the cop was snapping on handcuffs, almost gently.


LOVE STORY

All the way down the long street, light after light lit up empty porches.


LOVE STORY

He checked again


LOVE STORY

You could hear everything in the neighborhood through the hot night air.  


LOVE STORY

At night, you couldn’t see the end of the long sandy steps that led to the beach.


LOVE STORY

They never really knew whether it was really a body or not, there in the trees. 


LOVE STORY

She sat on one of the round plastic benches, peacefully rolling her skates back and forth.


LOVE STORY

When he came out, she was sitting on the car, waiting.  He dropped his bag in the grass, and limped over. 


LOVE STORY

He was always surprised by the wind off the river. 


LOVE STORY

She stood there on the shore, blinking against the sun, while he fumbled with the film. 


LOVE STORY

The rain poured down, warm and slanted.


LOVE STORY

Beside them, his truck grumbled and coughed. 


LOVE STORY

He crossed the parking lot and disappeared into the white cornstalks on the other side. 


LOVE STORY

For years, they fell from the sky: he swore to it.


LOVE STORY

The car sat at the edge of the gas station, empty, lights on, as if a ghost was about to turn out into the early morning traffic.


LOVE STORY

If you stacked the cinderblock bricks from the garden, it was pretty easy to clamber up onto the shaky garage’s low tarpaper roof.


LOVE STORY

The seagull dragged the wrapper across the parking lot, squawking.


LOVE STORY

By that time, their shadows were three times as long as they were.


LOVE STORY

The tires of  all sixty cars in the parking lot had been slashed.


LOVE STORY

The sidewalks were glassy with ice.  In the gutters, the water ran as high as the curb.


LOVE STORY

At one point, he knew, there had been a photo mural pasted on the entire north wall in the upstairs bedroom: half a dozen hot air balloons, suspended in a sky interrupted by the door and continuing, hidden, behind the bed.


LOVE STORY

He worked as a lifeguard, so even during the winter break, he could get them into the pool, any time of the day or night.


LOVE STORY

Outside the storm roared and pleaded.


LOVE STORY

It slid open easily.


LOVE STORY

It dropped lazily down, and disappeared under the bridge.


LOVE STORY

The platform trembled as the train pulled in.


LOVE STORY

“Will you excuse me for a minute?” he asked.


LOVE STORY

She held the phone up to the speaker.


LOVE STORY

The little bunch of plastic flowers bleached completely white over the course of the winter, perhaps because of the constant spray of snow and salt.


LOVE STORY

The green leatherette on the seat that hid them from the rest of the bus was cracked so badly it actually looked like it had been slashed. 


LOVE STORY

Eventually, you couldn’t hear the drums at all.


LOVE STORY

The dusk at the end of the freeway exit had grown so deep that you couldn’t even see what he was selling.


LOVE STORY

The clouds were so low they seemed to be weighing down the roof of the car, making it harder for them to move down the long road.


LOVE STORY

At one point, he’d had a house, and a lot of nice stuff.


LOVE STORY

Eventually, she climbed out the window.


LOVE STORY

He would drive up and down every street in town, until he found it.


LOVE STORY

He woke up and kissed her again.


LOVE STORY

The third galleon slipped beneath the waves.


LOVE STORY

There was no way he could really fall asleep, not on steps this steep.


LOVE STORY

Each time he looked up, but it was never her.


LOVE STORY

It really did look like the moon disappeared, just for that instant.