A Live Wire

Number three. Write this one gentle. Maggie didn't make it out the far side, and the dead have earned gentleness even from the likes of me.

I married Maggie fast. Faster than was decent, faster than was wise, faster than a man does anything but grab a live wire. Because that's what she was, a live wire, and by now the pattern's plain enough: what I was forever chasing was the quiet. Only Maggie wasn't quiet. Maggie was the loudest fire I ever ran straight at, and I understand now that's exactly why I ran. There's a kind of trouble so big it drowns out the smaller, meaner trouble ticking inside your own chest. For about three months, being with Maggie was louder than my own heart. And to a man built like me, that racket felt like peace, fool that I am.

I met her at a place called the Dude's, off State Street, a bar with a swamp cooler that dripped a black line down one wall and a jukebox that only played the sad side of every record. She was up on a stool doing the whole room, not for money, just for the sport of it, and when she laughed she threw her whole head back like she was daring the ceiling to fall. She had a gap in her front teeth she never once tried to hide, and a way of putting her hand flat on your forearm when she talked, like she was checking your pulse. I bought her a drink. She drank about a third of it and gave the rest to a fella down the bar who looked like he was having a worse week than either of us. That was Maggie. Generous with everything she couldn't afford, herself first and worst.

We were married inside of a month. A justice of the peace in a strip mall between a nail place and a Chinese takeout, and she wore a yellow dress and no shoes, carried the shoes in one hand the whole time, and I remember thinking a man could spend forty quiet years and never feel as alive as I felt standing on that cheap carpet with a barefoot woman promising me things neither one of us had any business promising. I'm a Leo, and a Leo believes he's the life of every party. Maggie was the party, no believing required, and a man ought to know better than to marry a mirror with the better shine on it.

She had a habit. The bad kind. The kind that doesn't loosen its grip for love or money or a good man's promises, and I want to go careful here, because I of all people have got no stone to throw. Maggie was running from something inside her own body, same as I was running from mine. Mine came with a name a doctor could type, panic, and a little bottle with Klonopin printed on the side that I could shake one out of and count my breaths and come back down. Hers came in wax paper and never once asked her a fair price. I'd wake at three in the morning and the bed would be cold on her side and I'd find her at the kitchen table with the one lamp on, not lit up, not partying, just sitting, small, chasing something back down inside herself with her arms wrapped around her own ribs like she was holding a door shut. And that was the Maggie nobody at the Dude's ever met. The quiet one. The one running.

Here's the piece of it I keep turning over. I know that woman at the kitchen table. I am that woman at the kitchen table. Three in the morning, the whole house asleep, and something in your own chest turned traitor and coming for you, and no lock on any door that keeps it out because it's already inside, it's you, it lives where you live. The only difference between us was the shape of the thing and how mean it played. Mine circled. Hers closed in. We were two people running from our own bodies in the same dark, and I married her thinking two like that might somehow add up to one whole. All they add up to is twice the running.

And I married her figuring, what, exactly? That I'd fix it? I fix machines. A dryer quits, you pull the back panel, you find the burnt element or the shot thermal fuse, one cheap part gone bad, and you swap it and it runs and you get paid and you go home. That's a life a man can make sense of. But you cannot get your head down inside a person the way you get it inside a dryer. There's no panel that comes off. There's no one part you can hold up to the light and say, there, that's the bad one, that's the whole trouble. I stood in front of Maggie with my whole toolbox and every trick I had and there was nothing to turn. She was the one machine I ever met that I could not repair, and the not-fixing of her is a thing I carried a long time, because a fixer who can't fix starts to wonder what in the world he's even for.

I tried the things a man tries. I hid her stash and she found more. I drove her to a place out in Midvale with a name like a promise and she lasted nine days. I yelled and I begged and one bad night I put my fist through the hollow-core door of the very bathroom she'd locked herself into, and I fixed the door the next morning, hung a new one, because that at least I knew how to do. Fix the door. Never the thing behind it. And when I finally understood I couldn't fix her, I did the coward's arithmetic I always did, the same sum that ran under every one of these marriages: I left. Quiet. Early. Before it could finish taking her down where I'd have to watch. Told myself I was sparing us both. What I was sparing was me.

It didn't last the season. Some things don't. And a while after, not long after, she was gone. Overdosed, by herself, at that kitchen table for all I know, the way that particular grip finally takes the ones it's got hold of. I heard it thirdhand, weeks late, from a fella at the Dude's who didn't even know we'd been married. She went into the ground somewhere I didn't go, and I have carried the not-going like a stone in a coat I never take off.

And I've set her down here in the notebook, in the count, wife number three, partly because she was. However short a run it was, she was. But mostly I set her here because somebody ought to. Somebody ought to write it down that Maggie was more than the thing that killed her. She was a live wire and a loud fire, she gave away drinks she couldn't spare and threw her head back at the ceiling, and for a few bad, bright months she was louder than my own dying heart, and I was no good for her and she was no good for me, and I'm sorry, Maggie. I'm sorry I couldn't fix a single thing. I'm sorry I fixed the door.

She's no suspect in my own case. The dead don't run a man's bathwater. But she is the first body in this story that isn't mine, and count is a thing worth keeping, because it's going to matter, before we're through, just how many people turned up dead in the general vicinity of my whole charming life. A wife, dead of the very thing she was running from. Hold onto that. We're going to need it later: when we get to the ones I didn't marry, the girl and the boy, and to the ugly little question of whether death just naturally trailed along after me all those years, or whether, near the end, somebody finally started helping it along.

Number four I married in a church, if you can feature it. Which ought to have made her the safe one.

Colleen.

And Colleen is where the tub comes in.