Blue Green Red
Sarah Prevatt
Tonight she thinks about her family for the first time in several years. It isn’t as if her memory hasn’t tried to bring them back, especially on those foggy nights when her husband plays Pink Floyd’s The Wall. On those nights, she goes into their bedroom and crawls under the thick sheets of their waterbed, shielding her face from the red gleam of the traffic light that slips through their bent blinds as the waterbed rolls and sloshes beneath her. She always pretends to be tired when he comes in later and asks what’s wrong, though the whole time she’s really trying to suppress the images that float to the surface of her memory: her mother’s face, red and splotchy, lipstick dry and settled into the fine cracks of her lips, and Damian, sitting quietly, eyes absent, smiling at the wall.
Tonight, she’s coming back from Bayside, where she and her husband, Eric, have spent several hours shopping. Melaney sits on the gum-stained concrete bench awaiting the metrorail and sees their faces appear against the hazy gray sunset. She closes her eyes, wills the images to drown in the blackness and the approaching grind of the metrorail.
Eric sits next to her, the coconut sculpture he bought at Bayside on his lap. His hair, soft curls normally slicked back behind his ears, springs forth in the heavy night air, unruly from the humidity. His pale cheeks are tinged with pink, and thin trails of sweat slide down his temples. He’s unused to this Florida heat, having grown up in a small New England town, but he’s smiling, can’t stop talking about the things he wants to do while they’re down here. He wants to go to South Beach, take in the clubs and walk along the warm sand. He keeps asking her to translate every sign they see in Spanish, but she tells him she doesn’t understand, that she hasn’t spoken Spanish since she left ten years ago.
“If you don’t use it, you lose it,” she says dryly.
He laughs, and asks her again the next time they see something posted in Spanish.
“I’m so glad we finally had a convention in Miami,” he says, raising his voice over the roar of the approaching metrorail.
She thinks back to the first time she visited Eric’s hometown, the small, neat town nestled among gray hills and trees naked by October. The sun didn’t shine much while they were there, but she liked that, liked not having to pause every time they stepped outside to let her eyes adjust. She relished the chilly caress of the habitual morning drizzle that glistened on her heavy nylon coat and softened her hair to post-shower dampness. His parents had been neat as well, with trimmed hair and collared shirts and a house that smelled like vanilla. When his parents had asked about her family, she’d told them her family was dead.
That’s what she’d told Eric six years ago. On their first date, he’d taken her to a Cuban restaurant. He knew she was from Miami, and he seemed to think the Cuban restaurant would impress her.
It wasn’t anything like the restaurants in Miami. The white rice was sticky and clumpy, they served dark coffee instead of café con leche, and the sandwiches were made with toasted wheat bread and American cheese. She didn’t mention the differences to Eric. When he asked how she liked it, she smiled and told him it was a refreshing change.
Later that night, over a stale guava pastry, he asked about her family.
“I don’t have any family,” she said, focusing on the thick red guava smeared on her plate. “My father, he’s gone, been gone for as long as I can remember. My mother, she died of cancer.” She didn’t mention Damian at all.
“I’m so sorry,” Eric said, his face soft in the dim light.
Outside, it began to snow. He never asked about her family again.
Tonight, the metrorail approaches slowly, its headlights casting golden beams through the murky darkness falling over the station. People shift simultaneously toward the rails. Once the metrorail stops and the doors chime open, Melaney and Eric move forward, twisting and squeezing, trying to avoid the bodies that press in on either side. She hears Eric mumbling apologies every few seconds, only to meet the scuffling of shoes on the rubber floor and the rustling of cloth as they continue to brush against other passengers.
They maneuver down the narrow aisles and slip into a row near the back. She slides into the dirty blue seat next to the window, tucked away from the mass of people brushing by each other in the aisle and squeezed next to each other in the seats. The metrorail is uncomfortably warm from the bodies pressed against each other.
Melaney leans against the window, clutches her purse. After everyone is seated, the metrorail jolts forward, and Eric leans in next to her, craning to look out the window at the glittering lights of the city awakening below. Their car is silent except for the occasional squeaking of brakes and the muffled music coming from the headphones of the young girl sitting in front of her.