Free Everything by Kevin Canty Page B

green grass and looked up into the clear sky. The way the color was so light, almost washed-out and intense at the same time. The things he didn’t understand about light.
    * * *
    This unexpected empty time. It was like putting your foot down in the dark and finding no stair there, the tangible lack of presence.
    She came through the sunlight and the tall grass, a translucent cloud of dry pollen before her and around her, tall and quick, confident in the step. A white skirt swinging around her long legs. Why did he know her? Dark hair tied back. It felt like he had been expecting her all along, like this was what he had been waiting for without knowing it. Then she came closer, and stopped a couple of feet away, facing him, long-limbed, serious. He felt—what? He didn’t know what he felt. Excitement, fear.
    I saw your truck, Layla said.
    What were you doing up here?
    I just got restless, I wanted to go for a drive.
    It’s a long drive.
    I was really restless, she said.
    She turned her back on him then, went down to the edge of the water, a few feet away. She wore a green blouse with no sleeves and he admired the length of her, the color of her skin, the tiny downy hairs on her arms that shone in the sunlight. Her feet in sandals were slim and pretty on the river rocks.
    They’re rising out of there like motherfuckers, she said. How come you’re not fishing?
    * * *
    He raised the cast for her to see, wrapped in a plastic whole-wheat-bread bag.
    I tried, he said.
    They were deep in the wilderness, forty miles in either direction to a gas pump. They were almost alone except for the few other cars and pickups in the turnouts along the road, and these were fishermen who wanted to be alone themselves, alone with the water. Past the old orchard, the valley opened up, and he could see the hillside above, green forest giving way to rock to sky. Bighorn sheep lived up in those rocks. Something clarifying and clean about the way the sky drew your eye up, lifted you out of yourself.
    When he looked back down again, she was still there.
    I could hook ’em fine, he said. I just couldn’t land them.
    I haven’t been up here since last spring, she said. I don’t know why. It’s the prettiest place.
    I haven’t either. Now it’s almost closing time.
    I go back to Seattle tomorrow.
    Then they were kissing. Then after some small comedy, fumbling with the pants and fishing apparatus, then they were naked in the tall green grass with the last sun of the year falling down on them, the touch of her, the length of her, the inevitability. This was written somewhere, it felt to Edgar. This was always going to happen. And then it did.

*
    You’re here awfully early in the morning, Betsy said. I didn’t know you were such an early riser.
    RL looked at the clock on the wall of the hospital room. It was six thirty in the evening.
    I need to tell my mother, she said.
    The thing about it was her eyes, he thought. Her eyes were clear and lucid and it seemed like she was right there in the room with you. Then she opened her mouth and there was no telling what would come out. Her mother had been dead since college.
    Then the pain hit again and she disappeared inside. Maybe it wasn’t pain, maybe it was confusion, illness, something. Her eyeswent blank but they stayed open and her mouth opened a little and she breathed hard through her mouth like she was walking uphill and her forehead and cheeks broke out in a cold sweat. Her skin went pink and gray in these moments of pain and sometimes he could see fear in her eyes. Ashes and roses, animal flight. I wouldn’t make a dog do this, he thought. I’d put a dog down, before I made him go through this.
    Then she was asleep, or something like it. Gone, anyway, the light out of her eyes and her eyes half closed. It was spooky to look at them. All he could see were the whites. The room was half dark, somewhere in the windowless internals of the hospital, and the lights of the various instruments and