Free White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke Page A

inhaled as much of it as I could as he passed.
     
    It had been a long time since I’d felt excited—sexually or otherwise. Some time in February, it seemed, a kind of spongy numbness had settled into my imagination, a physical numbness in my brain, not unlike the rather pleasant exhaustion one feels after a long, hard hike. I slept hard every night, never daydreamed, rarely worried about anything more than what to wear to school. I thought, perhaps, that I was becoming more like my father. Food tasted good. Television entertained. Work was work. Time passed, and the weather changed.
    And sex seemed unnecessary. Phil and I were still together, still a recognized high school couple, still spending our lunch period together, whispering through study hall, smoking cigarettes in his father’s car on the short drive home from school, but we hadn’t had sex since my mother disappeared, never took our clothes off in one another’s presence again, almost never even kissed.
    At first, it had been Phil who seemed to have changed.
    That whole first year, he’d wanted to do nothing except fuck. I’d have just climbed into the passenger seat of his father’s sedan, and already he’d have his hands inside my shirt, moving around fast, as if he’d lost something slippery in there. When we parked in the empty lot of some strip mall late at night, the windows would steam up like the snake house at the zoo—the deep weedy humidity of reptiles crawling over and under one another behind glass aquarium cases, and the night around that sedan would be a darkening green, closing down on us like eggs in a huge, watering mouth.
    Then, suddenly, Phil wanted nothing—no physical contact at all.
    For Valentine’s Day I bought a red satin bra and panties at the mall and invited him over. But he looked sad when he saw them.
    “I don’t feel very well,” he said, and I put my clothes back on.
    When I looked out my bedroom window I could see something small and blond-furred down there that had been run over in the road. It made a red sash of blood in the snow between two tire tracks. The naked trees were fringed with a loose, bluish fog. It looked like a Valentine—beautiful, brutal, cold—and my sexy underwear seemed to burn against my skin.
    I was horny—a word I’d always hated, with its connotation of clumsy eagerness and need—and felt humiliated, standing there at the window, by my desire. It had only been a few weeks since my mother had vanished, and those first few weeks I wanted sex more than ever. I thought about it constantly—in bed, in the shower, in Great Books, in the passenger seat of my father’s car as he drove me to school.
    And then one day my desire was simply turned off like a faucet, as if someone had called the water company while I was gone, and when I got back home, there was nothing but a dry, sucking sound when I tried to turn it on.
     
    But as I watched Detective Scieziesciez’s back as he passed through our living room I could imagine straddling his hips in my mother’s armchair, my hands in his hair, my mouth against his. It was as if Detective Scieziesciez shed a subliminal mist of maleness into the air as he passed—musky, intoxicating.
    Perhaps, I thought, he had a gun under that trench coat, and knew how to use it. Perhaps, I thought, something exotic might happen right here in our Garden Heights home with Detective Scieziesciez in it.
    Detective Scieziesciez looked around the kitchen, turned, smiled at me, and said, “Have your dad call me when he gets back, sweetheart.”
    “Is everything okay?” I asked.
    “Everything looks perfectly normal here,” he said, gesturing toward the kitchen, where the Formica glowed in the sterile morning light. “Perfectly in order—but, of course, in a case like this, we have to double-check every little thing.”
    “Double check,” I repeated in my head, “every little thing.” It was absurd, of course, since my mother had been gone since January, and