The Tricycle

Even before he gave me the tricycle, I knew how things were going to go. To Rick, life had always been one big joke. For our first anniversary, he took me to his cabin on a lake several miles north of the city, where kids would bike to and fro as adults looked on with smiles on their faces and bitter envy in their hearts. He went up to one of the children on the beach and squatted down and told him “if you find a rock like this and you throw it just so, it will skip along the water like a swallow in a field of grass.” He didn’t say it just like that, but I thought it was fitting, because he always loved swallows. He would watch them all day in the chair that he put under the apple tree in the backyard, pointing and going “look, there goes a blue one!” and they would swoop down through the air and zip along wildly until they disappeared into the neighbor’s yard. 

The boy took the stone in his right hand and flung it as far as he could, and it landed with a crack and a tumble on the rocks several feet away. 

Ricky laughed and slapped the boy on the back and said “when I was your age, boy, I couldn’t throw it half as far.” He picked up the stone and squatted down as far as he could and whipped his arm like so, and the rock sailed over the water and skipped exactly eighteen times before disappearing under the broken water.

I sat on a bench under the shade of a lone sycamore as I watched him. I watched his smiling wrinkles escaping like sunbeams from around his eyes, and a grin hid like a shadow around the corners of his lips. And I could see the moment he would die as clear as if it were happening right in front of me. 

I was in the bedroom in the morning. Light filtered in through the trees in the yard and shone dimly through the window, coming to rest in an imprint of four mottled rectangles on the floor. He lay on a thin cot, long legs sticking out perilously from the edge, the hair on his feet long and dirty. His face hovered like a separate entity above his shoulders, woolen eyelids shut and fluttering ever so slightly. Steam curled slowly from his open mouth.

The image was so clear that I leaped from the bench in alarm, ignoring the sound of my knees popping like a thousand tiny balloons.

Out of the corner of his eye, Rick must have seen my sudden movement, because he threw his last stone and walked over to me, wrinkles knotted between his eyebrows in concern. I must have looked like I had seen a ghost, which of course was a likely possibility as far as I was concerned.

“What’s wrong, Audrey?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, I just felt like stretching,” I responded cleverly, and gestured dramatically with my arms. I could almost feel my muscles ripping. “Ready to go?”

He took me by the hand and we walked back up the bank and along the road to the sparkling new Ford sedan my son Steven got us for our anniversary. It still retained the otherworldly smell that new things tend to have, and entering it was like boarding a spaceship from one of those TV shows my good friend Georgina used to watch in high school.

On the way back to the cabin, Taylor Swift was on the radio. I noticed that Rick’s mouth was moving like he was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear him over the music. 

After a moment he reached over and turned it down, and then said “Dinner and cards with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson tonight?” 

I shook my head quickly. “I’m tired, I’d rather just go to bed.” Mrs. and Mr. Johnson were the couple that lived in the cabin next door. They had a longer gravel driveway than we did, and they even owned a four-wheel drive that could get up the hill by the Robinsons’ without skidding. I hated them. 

“We’ll just go home then.” After several minutes of silence, we turned onto the road that led down to the cabin. As we entered the driveway, I could see the sun through the trees; it was just setting behind the mountains. Even though my glasses were supposed to be photochromic, the sharp slivers of light hurt my eyes and I had to look away.

That night the fire was flickering and popping like knees and even though it was only the middle of October, it felt like Christmas. Not the Christmas like we’d have back in Virginia, where the snow would fall only on the years when my friends got new grandchildren, but a real white Christmas like you’d read about in children’s books, like Cobwebs for Christmas or The Polar Express. 

“Do we have any hot chocolate powder?” I asked Richard. He was sitting in the armchair across from me, golden wire-framed glasses perched so far down the end of his nose that, if it weren’t for the wrinkles there, they would just fall off, and holding an old book in his hands as if it were made of butterfly wings. 

I repeated my question, and he looked up as if he didn’t know where he was. “Oh, no, not anymore, we ran out last week.”

Rick fell asleep in his chair not long after, book in his lap. I didn’t want to wake him, so I got up and went into the bedroom to sleep. As I opened the door to the dark room, the nagging sparkle of Rick’s case of rings greeted me with smiles that were too wide, and I went quickly to sleep haunted by visions of my husband’s death.

In the morning I drove half an hour into town to buy batteries for the lamp. While in town, I saw a little store that sold sweets. The sign was colored pink and I could smell cinnamon rolls coming from inside. As I opened the door, a chime rang that sounded like sleigh bells. 

Setting a bag of jelly beans on the counter I said to the cashier, “I think Richard would like these.” She nodded, so I went on. “He likes Skittles and chocolate bars as well, but he likes jelly beans the best because they taste like a lot of different things. He used to buy a bag of them every day for his son Steven before we were married, but he’s forgotten for the past few years. He’s been too busy with his book to remember; he’s been reading it for six months now. I don’t know what it’s called, but he said it was written by his friend he met while working in Romania many years ago. Have you ever been to Romania? I haven’t, but I went to France with my mother when I was younger. Bayeux is beautiful, my mother was fascinated by it ever since she read about it in a book she found at the library.”

She mumbled something that I couldn’t hear.

“What’s that?”

“That’ll be $1.50.”

“Thank you,” I said. I liked the cashier, and her dress was pretty, so I rummaged through my wallet and withdrew my favorite $2 bill, putting it on the counter. “My mother gave it to me when I was very young. It’s yours now.” I smiled at her, and then I took the jelly beans and left the store. I set the candy in the back seat next to the batteries and a miniscule teddy bear with Steven’s name on it that I got at the supermarket.

That afternoon, Ricky gave me the tricycle. I saw it, three wheels wobbling, as it rolled over the gravel driveway, a great big bow on top that looked like it belonged in a car commercial, and once again I had a premonition of doom.

“It was my sister’s when she was little,” he said, beaming.

I hadn’t ridden a bike in years, let alone a tricycle. Somehow, it brought me back to some fleeting past I couldn’t remember, yet was there nonetheless. I could hear crunching gravel in my mind.

“I love it,” I said truthfully.

I rode it along the driveway, back and forth for a while. Then, one time around, as if some barrier had finally disappeared, I decided to go out onto the main street that looped around the lake.

Cars were infrequent and mostly local; most people traveling through the area took the interstate just a few miles south, so I could enjoy the crisp fall air without the stench of gasoline or the noise of engines, and I could experience my own thoughts for what seemed like the first time in all my life. I thought of my mother. She was a very short woman, and thin, but with such an expansive smile that it filled the room. She agreed to cook one meal per year, on Passover, and my father or I would make the rest. Passover was her favorite holiday—she would never agree to celebrate any others, and she wouldn’t allow anyone else to cook at all on that day, because they’d mess it up. 

She taught me to ride a bike when I was twelve, on a red three-speed two-wheeler she got for fifty dollars from a friend. While it did make me the coolest girl in the seventh grade, it also resulted in numerous trips to the hospital. Although she’d never admit it, I still think that’s what forced us to sell our house the following year and move into an apartment in the city.

As I pedalled along the lake, I was reminded of our first Thanksgiving feast at the apartment. The smile was gone by then. My father sat across the table from my mother, reading the newspaper. My brother was out as usual, and I sat in my chair as straight as I could as I ate cranberry sauce straight from the bowl. As I rode past the big oak tree, I was reminded of the tree my mother used to let us climb on when we were younger, and it was suddenly five years later, and my father was speaking to me through a screen door.

“Your mother is dead.” I can still hear his voice running through my head like a big old grandfather clock locked inside a tunnel, echoing back at itself forever. It was that same voice that roared through the halls from the bedroom whenever my mother said something he didn’t like. He never touched her, not in a bad way, but the smile was gone nonetheless.

I looked at him. His arms hung limp and ashamed from his shoulders, his face slack. I imagined the words as slime, spilling out of his mouth like ectoplasm.

“Okay,” I said, because I didn’t want to say anything else. “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.” I got back to the cabin at 7:52pm. Richard was sitting in his chair, reading his book. As I sat down across from him, he put the book down and opened his mouth.

“How was the ride?”

“It was good, I went by the old oak tree in that park on the lake.”

“My friends and I used to climb that tree when we were younger.”

“So did I,” I said.

When I woke in the middle of the night, it smelled like it did in Bayeux. Salt seemed to hang in the air like falling snow. I didn’t know what woke me, at first, but then the sound came again and jostled my languid memory: the window rattled violently. I looked over and saw that Richard was still asleep. Outside, in the pitch black, the wind howled fiercely, regal evergreens quivering and creaking like old houses or neglected doors.

I went into the kitchen to fix myself some tea. The microwave said it was 3:30 in the morning. It ran a few minutes ahead, so I estimated it was about 3:26. Of course, four minutes either which way didn’t matter much, it just mattered that we were out of decaf. I left the tea in the cupboard and drank the water on its own. I read the magazine from yesterday again, and finished the crossword puzzle I had started the night before. It was about 4:30 and I was about to go back to sleep when I noticed through the crack under the door that the light was on in the bedroom, and that it was a color that I couldn’t understand.

For a moment I stood there, confused. I decided it was a similar color to the unsure flickering the TV would make from the living room when I left it on at night. I thought, briefly, that Richard had woken and turned it on, but it occurred to me that to do so he would have had to drag the TV from the living room to the bedroom and hook up the mess of wires that writhed in the space between the screen and the wall. I thought it unlikely he would’ve gone through the trouble.

By the time I had flung wide the door, the room was dark again. Richard lay where he had when I woke, unmoving. I sighed, and listened to the breath in my throat. Steven always said you start to go a bit mad when you’re old. I figured that was what this was, so I crawled back into bed, closed my eyes, and dreamed of TVs.

I slept in, yet was surprised to see Ricky still in bed when I woke. I became alarmed only once I saw the thin stream of smoke emerging from his parted lips, and for a moment I forgot everything except the rectangles of light on the floor, that hovered there as foreboding and full of primal terror as a full moon. 

I called the doctor in town. He drove over in his old minivan, unloaded his bells and whistles, and shuffled inside, asking me inane questions such as: “Have there been any developments since you called?” To which I answered, “Yes, his ears are glowing now. It reminds me of that old Kwaidan story about the monk who plays music for ghosts and gets his ears torn off. Sometimes I feel the same way, because I don’t hear very well either, and sometimes my ears ache and since I can’t hear and my ears ache it’s like they’ve been torn off, and sometimes it’s so bad I’ll check to make sure I’m not tracking blood anywhere.”

“Oh yes,” he interrupted. “I remember you talked to me last week about this. Have your ears bothered you since?”

“Oh no, sir, not at all, they’ve felt fit as a fiddle lately.”

“That’s just fine, Mrs. Fletcher.”

“Ms. Rhodes is fine, Willie, seeing as Ricky’s dead and all, I think I’ll be changing it back,” I said, thinking it the right thing to say.

“Well we don’t know that yet,” the doctor said uncomfortably, opening the door to the bedroom. The sight that greeted us was just as I had described. The smoke still flowed, ending in a charred circle on the stipple ceiling. Ricky’s ears glowed golden ever so faintly. The doctor rushed to his side with a stethoscope. I left the room after that to fix myself and the doctor some tea.

The doctor never did figure out what killed him, but he said that, as much as he was a man of science, he believed it must have been caused by the supernatural. Possibly, he said, it was fairies or demons. My account of the previous night did not factor out the possibility of Richard’s spiritual ascendance, either. In fact, he really didn’t know, and said I should find someone more qualified, and that he was quitting the trade and had decided to finish that book he had abandoned many years ago.

The funeral took place on the lake. We all went out in our kayaks and let the winds carry his ashes this way and that until they dispersed into the air and water. Steven was there, and the Johnsons, and some of Ricky’s old friends from before I married him.

Then it was time for the speeches.

“Not all those who wander are lost,” Steven began. “My father’s favorite author was Tolkien, and those words fit him better than anyone else I’ve ever known. He knew exactly where he was in life, but never where it would lead him next.”

As I looked around at all the solemn faces there and listened to Steven’s words, I couldn’t help but wonder: when had they taken out that dead willow tree at the end of the road and replaced it with a young red oak? Pity, I’d liked that old thing.