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Jimmy exhales slowly, centering himself, steadying himself, and then he shoots. The cue ball kisses its target and sends it rolling ahead—to bounce off the edge of the pocket and back over the table, where it slows to a stop against the opposite cushion.
“Jeez, Jimmy,” Kim says, “I really thought you’d be better at this.” She takes a swig of her beer, picks up her pool cue, and effortlessly sinks another ball, then grins at him, eyes flashing. “You sure you’re not hustling me, Paul Newman?”
“Yeah, just rope-a-doping you,” Jimmy says lightly. “Give it another ten minutes and I’ll be off to the races.”
Kim looks up from the table again and quirks an eyebrow, and Jimmy smiles warmly. The row of pool tables stretches out beneath a low ceiling, the domed lights above them hazy with cigarette smoke. On a half-raised stage near the bar, a local band plays top forty hits, their stringy-haired guitarist thrashing the same four chords over and over again.
“Think those guys are gonna take a shot at Auld Lang Syne?” Jimmy asks, turning back to Kim.
“Can’t wait,” Kim says. She measures up her shot and sinks another ball. Then, straightening, she steps back from the table and makes her way to the other side, brushing past him and adding under her breath: “Two to go…”
Jimmy folds his hands over the top of his cue like a staff and makes a contemplative little tsk noise with his teeth. “Nah, I reckon I’ll turn this around.”
Kim just snorts, studying one of the two remaining striped balls.
He lowers his chin onto the back of his hands and smiles again, staring vaguely around the bar. The long room is heavy with the noise of others’ laughter, of clanking glasses and excited chatter. It’s mostly UNM students, and Jimmy spots a few half-familiar faces, people he recognizes from his reconnaissance trip to the law school, or from that night at the mock Irish pub after Kim had finished her finals. He hadn’t seen many of her college classmates again until tonight—one of the lines that had been drawn in the white sands of Alamogordo and have since been erased by basement phone calls, by company Christmas parties and the blue vapor of the sodium lights outside Jimmy’s apartment.
A glass shatters somewhere and people cheer. Jimmy rocks his cue back and forth slowly, still keeping his chin on top of his hands. He tries to imagine Chuck partying at Georgetown, going out with everyone after class—at least five years their junior, still too young to buy beer, and he wonders at the fleeting thought of his brother feeling as out of place over there as he has here in Albuquerque. Knowing Chuck, the feeling wouldn’t have lasted long.
Across the hall, more of Kim’s classmates take up a spare pool table, and Jimmy searches his memory for their names—Steph and Cara and one of the Erics, who’s wearing a turquoise polo this time instead of salmon.
“What happened to the other Eric?” Jimmy asks thoughtfully, looking back to Kim again.
“Dropped out,” she says, still eyeing up her next shot. “The attrition rate this semester is…” She just grimaces.
Jimmy props his cue against the table again and takes a swig of his drink. “Must suck to get so far only to lose it all.”
“Says Mr. Few-Credits-Shy-of-Graduating,” Kim murmurs.
Laughter bubbles up in him, effervescent like the beer, and he shakes his head. Across the room, a woman is handing out dollar-store cardboard crowns to anyone who’ll take them, the numbers 1993 sticking up from the headbands. Jimmy sips his beer again and pops his lips off the bottle, then smiles at Kim. “So, you got any New Year’s resolutions?”
Kim flicks her gaze up to him. “What?”
“Not much time left to decide,” he says, indicating the clock near the bar. “Have to get them in fast, before the buzzer goes.”
There’s another loud cry from down at the bar, and Kim glances over in its direction then goes back to studying the pool table solemnly. She’s in jeans and a cardigan, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and her hair pulled back in a loose bun. Stray threads fall past her forehead as she bends over the pool table. Her brow is pinched in concentration—though real or pretend, Jimmy’s not sure.
But he offers a little smile and relents. “Gotta say, my ‘92 was a lot better than my ‘91… ” When she finally looks up he grins wider. “And I think ‘93 is gonna be even better. I’ll keep on in the mailroom, keep on at HHM. Just stay on track. So I guess my resolution is to”—he darts a hand out in front of him—“keep riding the train! Straight to the station!”
Kim nods, shifting her pool cue a fraction.
“A full year in Albuquerque,” Jimmy continues. “What could be better than that?” And as the words leave his mouth, he realizes he’s said them without a trace of irony.
“Yeah,” Kim says lightly. “What could be better than that?” She finally shoots, and the blue ten-ball bounces off the side of the pocket and out across the table.
Jimmy makes a sympathetic pained noise but says, “Aha! The tide is turning!” He picks up his cue again. Chalks the tip. Stares at the table thoughtfully—at his orange five-ball where it hugs the cushion, then around at his others. He makes a humming sound, then looks back up at Kim. “You know, you didn’t answer my question.”
Kim raises her eyebrows.
And Jimmy raises his right back. “Your New Year’s resolutions?”
The band on the stage abruptly stops playing: a discordant ring of strings and feedback. There’s a few seconds of hushed silence before a delayed cheer, and then the hubbub of the bar slowly returns to normal.
“Better hurry up,” Jimmy continues eventually, widening his eyes as he looks back to Kim. He jerks his head over to the band. “I think those guys are gearing up for the big number.”
Kim stares at him, and he doesn’t look away this time; he just holds her gaze, waiting, until eventually she speaks: “Resolutions?” She folds her lips inwards, then says, “I’d like to pass the bar.”
“Oh, come on, Kim, no!” Jimmy cries, slamming a palm down on the table. One of the pool balls rolls a little, and he quickly resets it, waving a hand dismissively before continuing: “Something real. Spill it. Clock’s ticking.”
“You barely said anything, either, you know,” Kim says. “You just talked about trains.”
“It was a metaphor!” Jimmy says. “I was the train!”
“I understood the metaphor, Jimmy,” she says, lips twitching. “But it’s not like you bared your soul.”
“All right, all right, I’ll let it go,” Jimmy says. He laughs again and leans forward, eyeing up his angle. “One of these days, Kimberly Wexler, you’re going tell me more about yourself.” He draws his cue back, pauses and says, “And I’ll be ready,” then takes the shot. His ball misses the pocket again, but Jimmy just grins winningly, clicks his fingers, and holds out his palms: ta-da!
“Well, I’ll tell you this for free: you are very bad at pool,” Kim says dryly. She lifts her own cue, positions her shot for a few seconds, and then smoothly sinks another striped ball. Only one to go.
The tenor of the room shifts, the mood tightening, the minutes closing in on midnight. The woman throws her remaining paper 1993 hats wildly over the heads over the pool players, and they twist through the air for a few brief moments, casting shadows along the walls like birds. One lands nearby, but Jimmy doesn’t reach for it; he watches Kim takes her next shot instead. Her final striped ball rattles down through the pocket. A smile flickers across her face.
Someone brushes behind Jimmy, heading across the smoke-filled hall toward the dance floor. Outside, the sound of gunfire rises, pops and cracks of people firing into the air, louder and sharper than the fireworks that have been going off all evening. Near the bar, somebody starts calling out a countdown, energetic and raw and soon joined by many other voices.
But Kim’s still lining up her last shot with precise and careful movements. She stares down her pool cue at the eight-ball where it glimmers darkly on the green velvet. Her chest rises and falls with measured breaths.
“You gotta call it,” Jimmy says, beneath the chanting of the crowd.
She peers curiously over at him as if she didn’t hear what he said. Loose wisps of hair hang around her face, drifting slightly with the tiny air currents in the warm bar. Her eyes glitter beneath the smoky overhead lights.
“You gotta call the pocket,” Jimmy repeats softly.
So Kim points to the back corner pocket, lines up her shot, and says: “That one.”
“Kim!” Jimmy hisses. He points to the clock on the wall. “Look at the time, we gotta go. We gotta go.”
Kim glares up at him over her textbook and frowns.
So Jimmy leans forward and snaps the cover closed with a bang that echoes through the UNM law library. A couple of students look up from their own books and sneer, but he rolls his eyes and waves them away. “Kim, it’s five, you’re off the clock, let’s hit it,” he says, pointing to the time once again.
But Kim still doesn’t look at it; she just stares at him witheringly.
“We had a deal, remember?” he says in a little sing-song voice.
She sighs. “Jimmy.”
But Jimmy’s gotten pretty good at reading the tone of his name as spoken by Kim Wexler over the last almost-year, and he can tell that this Jimmy has fondness and hard-admitted eagerness beneath the exasperation. This is a Jimmy that means, Yeah, okay, I know that I need this. It means, I’ve already decided to do this for myself anyway, and often it means, All right, you can come over to my place.
Because Jimmy sees Kim again now, really sees her, in a way that he’d forgotten how to for a while. He sees her coming closer and then pulling away again, like she’s testing the ice, stepping out slowly. He sees how her hand twitches at her side when she’s thinking hard about something. He sees how she pauses in her mailroom work now, for just for a fraction of a second, to stare at the door as if she’s already imagining herself out of it, a few months ahead of schedule.
And he sees her watching him, too, when she thinks he isn’t looking. Studying him like a tailor taking his measure. Like a conman running down a mark. He can’t figure out what she might be looking for, and he thinks that one day he should just ask, but he enjoys the feeling too much to give it up: the eyes on the back of his head throughout the day.
And, of course, he sees that without him closing the textbook for her, she would spend her entire thirty-second birthday here in the UNM law library, surrounded by towers of yellow legal paper as if she’s lost in a cornfield. Like she’s some crumbling old house on the prairie.
So he plays her game right back. “Kim,” he says. He reckons sometimes that she has it better, that it’s a lot easier for her to inject tone into his two syllables than it is for him into her one. But it suits her, he thinks, much more than Kimberly. Kim: crisp and sharp but with a soft humming noise at the end, smooth and warm on his lips. Kim.
And then she exhales and closes her eyes for a moment and says, “Okay.”
He slides the textbook off the table and places it on one of the collection carts nearby, and Kim packs up her notebooks. She folds her papers flat carefully and stacks them all in her briefcase, and it occurs to him for the first time to wonder if she thinks a backpack would look too childish as she carried it in and out of the glowing hallways of Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill. Not many of the other students around the library have briefcases.
The Saturday traffic near the university is thinner than Jimmy’s used to. It’s a cool February day, and the clouds of earlier in the morning have slowly dissolved in the afternoon, leaving the sky clear and blue and enormous. It’s a short drive to Kim’s place, but Jimmy winds his window down and lets the cold air fill the car, the sun hitting his forearm with the tentative warmth of late winter, of early spring.
“So what are we doing?” Kim asks, as she pulls into her parking space in her apartment complex.
“You’re gonna love it, don’t worry,” Jimmy says, glancing around idly. He hopes that Andrea has cleared out by now. He suffered through an hour long conversation with Kim’s talkative roommate earlier that week, but finally managed to get her to agree to spend the night at a friend’s—though when he stopped by this morning, she was yet to show any signs of leaving.
They climb the stairs and walk around the balcony in comfortable silence, and then Kim pulls out her keys to unlock her door.
Jimmy stills her, laying his hand over top of hers. “Just a minute,” he says. “First off, I need you to hand me that briefcase.”
Kim looks between the case and Jimmy warily, and she says nothing.
“Kim,” he says, just a short hum at the end this time, and he holds out a hand, palm up. “Come on.”
Her eyes flash but she slowly hands it over.
It’s even heavier than Jimmy was expecting. He raises his other hand to indicate that she should keep waiting, and then he moves one apartment down along the balcony and knocks on the door. A few moments pass in silence. When he glances back Kim is watching him, half amused and half quizzical.
Finally, the door before him opens. An elderly man with a thin comb-over stands in the threshold, peering up at Jimmy.
“Good evening, Horatio!” Jimmy says brightly, and he holds out the briefcase. “Like we talked about?”
Horatio nods sagely and accepts the briefcase from Jimmy. He mutters something unintelligible but friendly sounding, then slowly closes his door. The latch catches with a snap.
There’s a sound of a chain being drawn, and Jimmy chuckles. “Good man,” he murmurs.
“Jimmy, did you just kidnap my notes and give them to my kindly old neighbour?” Kim asks as he walks back up to her.
“And he’s not gonna let them out again on pain of death,” Jimmy says, and then he waves a theatrical hand to Kim’s door. “Okay, you can go ahead now.”
Kim shakes her head, and she unlocks the door slowly, as if she’s worried what she’s about to see on the other side. But as she pushes it open, it reveals only her usual clean apartment—and, thankfully, no sign of Andrea. On the kitchen counter near the door, there’s the stack of Blockbuster rentals that Jimmy dropped off that morning. Old classics he knows she doesn’t have are mixed with some recent releases: Death Becomes Her and Patriot Games.
“Happy Birthday,” Jimmy says, and he casts a hand widely around the apartment. “Ta-da!”
Kim takes it in, eyes narrowed, as if she’s expecting somebody to jump out from behind a corner.
“I know it’s not a tort law book,” he says, dropping his voice dramatically. “But, Kim?” He waits until she looks at him again. “I got beer, I got tequila, I got bourbon, I’ve already ordered an absurd amount of Chinese food that should be arriving in”—Jimmy checks his watch—“about two hours, and I’ve got enough movies to last us through till the summer.” He grins at her. “Sound good?”
And Kim finally smiles. “Sounds good.” She lets out her breath and picks the first video from the top of the pile, tilting her head to read the sideways title in small font, and then she chuckles. “Sounds really good.”
Jimmy leans forward and puts down his box of orange chicken on the coffee table and groans. “Okay, I’m done for real now.”
“You said that the last three times,” Kim says. She holds out a hand and says, “Mongolian beef?”
“Yeah, but this time I really mean it.” Jimmy tracks down the Mongolian beef in the mess of cartons and passes it over to her, then leans back and locks his fingers behind his head. They’re on their third movie of the night, but it seems like they’ve barely made a dent in his excessive takeout order. There’s even more boxes of unopened Chinese food in plastic bags on the floor, and Jimmy stretches and yawns then darts a glance at them. “Okay, done for now, anyway.”
“You just gotta pace yourself,” Kim says, popping a piece of beef into her mouth. “It’s all about—oh, I love this part, shh!”
Jimmy grins and scratches the back of his hair as Jean Arthur races back into the Senate. Jimmy Stewart, raspy-voiced, at the end of his rope, is swaying on his feet, and soon page boys arrive with bins and bins of telegrams out for him to rifle through hopelessly. He looks past the camera to the President of the Senate, his hair hanging in messy threads over his forehead and a despairing smile on his face, and Jimmy hears Kim inhale softly.
So he watches her watch the last few minutes of the movie. Her chopsticks are frozen halfway to her mouth, a piece of beef gripped between them, and her lips move almost invisibly around the shape of the dialogue—I guess this is just another lost cause, Mr. Paine. All you people don’t know about lost causes. Kim’s let her own hair down, too, and it falls in waves over her shoulders, fragile and crystalline under the blue light of the television. When Mr. Smith grabs a handful of papers and throws them in the air, Jimmy swears he can see the shadows of them, birdlike, across her face.
Then the film finishes, and she looks to him, and lets out a little breathy laugh. “I know it’s cheesy,” she says, after a moment. “But…”
“It’s not that cheesy,” Jimmy says.
She slowly lowers her chopsticks and folds her lips inward thoughtfully.
So Jimmy picks up his glass of water and splashes some his bangs, then brushes them loose over his forehead. “Like this?” He shakes his head like a dog and grins at her.
Kim just snorts. “Terrible.”
“Merry Christmas, ya old Building and Loan!” he cries, throwing up his hands.
“Even worse,” Kim says, shaking her had. “I thought this was supposed to be my day.”
Jimmy chuckles, then snaps upright. “Oh right, hang on! I was gonna wait until we were done with dinner, but I guess that’s impossible…” He laughs again, and then hops to his feet. There’s a brown paper bag beside the still-towering stack of video tapes, and he goes and grabs it, then drops back onto the sofa, crossing his legs beneath him. He holds out the bag and Kim takes it.
She smooths her thumbs over the paper, revealing the name of a local thrift shop, and she lifts an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything. Slowly, she unfurls the top, and then slides out a large pair of tortoiseshell glasses, the lenses cut in an old-fashioned cats-eye shape.
“Like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, remember?” Jimmy prompts. “I saw them and I thought, boom, that’s Kim. Can’t study the law properly without glasses.” He shrugs. “Plus it’s, like, a good luck charm.”
Kim looks at him sideways and smiles.
“In case I’m, you know…busy,” he adds softly.
She laughs lightly and slaps his knee. “I didn’t think you remembered that.” She unfolds the arms of the glasses and examines them. “I thought we said you were Judy.”
“Did we?” he asks mildly.
Kim twists on the sofa so that she’s facing him directly, then lifts the glasses toward him. Jimmy watches them approach and waits, not moving as she slowly slips them over his ears. His vision of her blurs out, losing all the fine detail.
She becomes just a gold-lined shape before him, triangles of blue light demarcating the contours of her face.
And she’s still touching the sides of his head, her fingers light around his ears. She moves a hand forward and brushes his damp bangs over his forehead again, the pad of her forefinger trailing above his eyebrows. “It does look good like that, you know,” she murmurs, and Jimmy grins.
And then the phone rings. It’s shrill in the quiet apartment.
Kim slowly lets go of his head.
“Birthday wishes, you think?” Jimmy asks lightly.
The blurred shape of her face shifts, and there’s a short moment when he thinks that she’s just going to let it ring, but then she’s rising from the sofa and walking over to her phone. She picks up the handset and answers it.
Jimmy scratches his forearm idly, settling against the arm of the couch. Fiddles with his bangs again.
He’s always thought that that movie was a bit too saccharine, really, but through Kim’s eyes he can see why someone would like it. Can see the appeal of the articulate, emotional energy of Mr. Smith on that Senate floor, winning the gallery over with his well-chosen words. And it’s all still a performance, really, isn’t it? Just taking that honesty and making it visible, trembling and sweating, in front of the audience.
And then the silence from Kim becomes noticeable, stretching out and out like elastic, and Jimmy looks back to her. He takes off the Judy Holliday glasses—
—and she returns to crystal-clear focus before him. Her face empty. Unreadable.
Jimmy feels like he’s coming back to himself, like he’s snapping back to reality from the hazy world of lukewarm Chinese takeout and Frank Capra and blurred contentment. He leans forward, palms on his knees.
“Yes,” Kim says into the phone, finally. She nods her head once, abruptly, and it looks strange with her blank face. Like she’s a puppet. Then even quieter: “Yes.”
Jimmy tightens his grip on his knees, thumbs pressing into the dips beside his kneecaps. Something is sinking in his stomach and he doesn’t know why—doesn’t know why except for the cold uncanniness of the Kim who’s standing across the room, so far gone from the one who just watched Jimmy Stewart’s impassioned filibuster on the screen, who just smiled warmly over a dumb gift.
And then completely free of any affect, Kim says, “Yeah, that’s great, Mom.”
Jimmy hears himself inhale like it’s another person doing it. And now he wants to get up, wants to leave the living room and give her space, or wants to stand beside her—but he’s locked to the sofa, an unfamiliar part of him not actually wanting to move at all, not wanting to even breathe again.
“That’s really great. I’m happy for you,” she says. She’s staring off at something in the middle-distance of the kitchen, gaze completely locked in place. “Okay,” she says flatly, and then a short time later, “Okay.”
And Jimmy tries to find the layered emotions in those two syllables, to find the edge of worry or fear or love, but the word just sounds like nothing, like empty glass.
She says it one last time, and then lowers the phone. Stares down to the handset in her grip, head hung forward—neutral and cut-stringed.
Nothing about her seems to move at all.
But then she laughs, little sharp bursts of noise that hurt his ears. She puts the phone down and walks back over and sits beside him. “So what were were talking about?” she asks lightly, looking with mild interest at the takeout on the table.
“Kim,” Jimmy says.
“Yes?” She reaches for a box of fried rice and poke around with the chopsticks. She frowns down at it, then lifts up a little bit of meat. “Do you think this is shrimp?”
And she’s staring at him now, and Jimmy hates how calm she looks, hates that if he hadn’t seen her reaction just minutes ago, he wouldn’t know anything’s wrong. A long silence passes between them and then he says weakly, “Yeah, shrimp.”
“Great!” Kim says, popping it in her mouth, and she looks back to the paused end title of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. “So, what’s next? Something new? A bit of Harrison Ford action, maybe?”
“Kim,” Jimmy repeats.
“—or maybe we go weird, go Brazil, bring on the late night with some Gilliam strangeness.”
And she’s not playing the game this time, so he leans forward and lays a hand on her forearm and says, “Kim. Do you just wanna get out of here?”
And something in her face breaks a little at this, a tiny hairline fracture over the surface.
He jerks his head towards the door. “Let go. Let’s bail.”
The fracture spiders out a little further, but she says calmly, “Jimmy, I can’t leave Albuquerque right now, I have so much—”
“We don’t need to leave Albuquerque. Just come with me.” He tightens his grip on her arm. “I have a plan.”
So Jimmy takes the keys and drives, pulling out of Kim’s apartment complex and heading east, cutting through the late-night traffic. It’s a cold, cloudless night, the moon a half disc in the sky, and nobody's left on the streets outside the restaurants and bars.
He’s aware of Kim in the corner of his eye as he watches the road. She’s cradling the bottle of tequila and bag of takeout he pressed into her hands before they left, and she’s looking away from him, so that even if he faced her properly he’d only see the back of her head.
It’s silent in the car for once, the stereo turned down, just the sound of the wheels over the road until he slows outside his own apartment and turns the engine off.
“Wait here,” he says, and he darts inside. He opens his kitchen cabinet and grabs the bag he came here for, then pauses. Glances around his dark room, and walks through to the bedroom to pick up a couple of his old coats, too. Folds them over his arm and rushes back out to the car.
He slides into the driver’s seat with his haul and twists to throw it all into the back, then turns to Kim.
She’s studying him with amusement, eyebrows raised.
“Okay, bear with me,” Jimmy says. “It might look like I don’t know where I’m going, and that’s because…I don’t.” He fights to get the car into the reverse then pulls out of the spot and leaves the complex, heading east again, following his nose towards the foothills of the Sandias.
He takes side streets at random as they appear beneath the car’s headlights, until the well-paved roads and nice houses seem to suddenly stop, edged by the beginnings of the sparse, mountainous landscape. Jimmy coasts slowly past the cross-streets until he sees one that heads to the mountains, and he takes it, following it until it ends in a couple of parking spots and a metal gate that’s closed over the continuing dirt road.
Jimmy idles in front of the barrier, and turns to Kim. It’s hard to see her face in the dark, but he says, “That look locked to you?”
“Hard to tell,” she says softly. She glances to him briefly. “You should go check.”
So he does. The metal is cold beneath his palms, but it’s not chained to the other end with anything, and Jimmy swings it open freely. He darts back to the car and drives it through, then closes the gate again, and then they continue on, following the dirt road as it approaches the Sandias. The quiet inside the car seems different, now, more deliberate.
Soon, they round a curve, and the lights of the expensive houses behind them vanish. Jimmy finds an area where the dirt road widens, and he slows to a stop on the side. He looks at the time on the dashboard, then points to it. “Ten minutes left of your birthday, we’re just in time,” he says. He flicks on the overhead light, and Kim’s face appears brightly before him. He holds out his palm. “Can I borrow a light?”
Kim smiles. “Long way to come for a smoke break.” She pops open her glove compartment and roots around, then hands him a lighter.
“Whew,” Jimmy says, closing his fingers around it. “I didn’t actually remember to bring one. And that would’ve been a real letdown, ‘cause I did remember”—and he reaches over to grab the plastic bag he grabbed from his apartment—“these.”
Kim’s eyes are fixed on him. “The fireworks.”
And Jimmy laughs and opens the bag, looking in at the colorful boxes of fireworks he bought on their road trip so many months ago. “Yeah,” he says. “The fireworks.” He grins at her again and then pops open his door, stepping out into the dark and the cold, and he can hear Kim doing the same. It’s just bright enough with the half moon and the light pollution from the city to see the shape of her still, the shadow of her watchful expression as he opens the backdoor and grabs the coats.
He throws on his old leather jacket and slides her the other one across the roof—an ancient, fleece-lined corduroy thing he brought back from Cicero after Thanksgiving, that his mother had pressed into his hands the day he left. That he hadn’t even seen since he was a teenager, and that still smells faintly of cigarettes and weed.
Kim shrugs it on as he walks around to her. It was always big on him and it’s enormous on her, the sleeves hanging over her hands. She tries to fold them but gives up, and just draws it close around herself, her hair drifting past her face in the light breeze, a half-visible smile playing around her lips—and Jimmy wishes he could go back in time and show his angry eighteen-year-old self this woman who’s inexplicably followed him out into the mountains in the middle of the night and is standing there in his thrift-shop jacket, the smile on her face becoming clearer and clearer as his eyes adjust to the darkness.
And Jimmy turns and pulls out the first packet of fireworks from the plastic bag, cracking the cardboard open and sliding one out. He walks away from the car with it and then kneels carefully. Nestles the firework in the dirt and finds the fuse, then turns back to look at Kim.
“If those rich people in their Sandia-view mansions call the cops,” she says mildly, “you better be right behind me, because I’m flooring it.”
Jimmy laughs again, and he doesn’t say, Of course I will be, and he doesn’t say, Always. He just sparks the lighter and holds it to the end of the fuse, then steps away, moving back alongside Kim.
The flame hisses up the fuse to the firework and then it’s off with a bang, cracking up into the sky and exploding in a shower of blue sparks that briefly illuminates the sparse pocket of dirt and sand around them, and Jimmy lets out a hushed sound and turns to beam at Kim.
She’s not smiling. Her eyes are dark and shadowed. “Pass me the lighter,” she says coolly, and she holds out her hand, and Jimmy gives it to her. She takes another firework from the packet and walks out to set it off, kneeling beside the lit fuse for a little longer than he did before stepping back.
It explodes above them in green sparks.
So Jimmy leans back against the cool metal of the car as Kim sets off firework after firework, comet ones with tails that flash through the sky, or fountains of sparks that spray from the ground and spill over the dirt. Kim is always a dark silhouette in an oversized coat between him and the brightness, always closer than him, always backing away from each fuse at the last possible moment.
The air fills with drifting smoke and the sharp smell of gunpowder, bitter and nostalgic, and the lights of the fireworks are soon made hazy through it, made hazy through the twisting ribbons that hang heavy above the dirt and move slowly with the same wind that lifts Kim’s hair around her head.
The gold threads snake over her face as she stares up into the brightness of the night.
It’s hard for him not to just watch her instead, hard for him not to make the most of the flashes of colored light that shadow her face differently each time, getting caught in her eyes as she stares upwards, getting caught in her smile.
And they drink tequila straight from the bottle, and it tingles in his mouth as he watches her, as he waits for her to come back and take it from him again and again, her fingers always a lot warmer than his, like licks of flame over his cold skin.
He bought roman candles, too, and Kim lights them in her hand, the charges exploding from the end like shotgun rounds, the sound echoing through the foothills. She fires some into the air right above Jimmy, and the sparks rain down on him, and he’s laughing and running out from beneath them, his hands over his head, and then the sound of Kim’s laughter is echoing around him now too, snapping through the air like firecrackers.
And he feels her hands on his shoulders, patting out sparks maybe, or just touching him, but by the time he turns to look at her she’s already moving away again, returning to the stack of fireworks that traveled all the way to White Sands and back and have been sitting in his kitchen cupboard ever since.
Kim burns through them all. Burns through them until there’s only one firework remaining, the largest one.
She spends a long time nestling it in the sand. The flicker of the lighter illuminates her kneeling form, the blocky lines of the oversized coat.
Then the hissing trail of the fuse starts, and she stays beside it for so long that Jimmy almost calls to her, stepping unconsciously forward, but then she’s running to him; and she doesn’t even look back at the firework as it screams and whistles into the air and explodes in an enormous flurry of red sparks—but it lights up the edges of her, and she’s grinning this strange grin, and she comes up and presses him against the side of the car and kisses him.
And the air smells like gunsmoke and ash and old cigarettes, and Kim tastes like it all, too, as she pushes him back, her hands on his chest, thigh coming up between his legs. She grips the lapels of his jacket and Jimmy presses a palm against the small of her back, bottle of tequila clasped tightly in his other.
The kiss is hard, almost painful, and Kim’s lips are so hot against his like she’s burning up—flames against his skin and still the scent of smoke, a lit black-powder fuse, scorching his mouth and his lungs until he can’t breathe.
And then she pulls back. Jimmy inhales, gasping, watching her. She twists to look out at the darkness for a moment, as if hoping now to catch a ghost of that last firework, but there’s only the dissolving haze of smoke, until, eventually, she returns her gaze to him.
Some of her hair still clings to his own chest, like static, connecting them with threads. Her lips are shining and her eyes are bright.
“Kim,” Jimmy says, falling back to the name yet again, to the sharpness and the hum. He gives a weak laugh. “Happy Birthday.”
Kim smiles openly. “It’s after midnight now, you know.”
And then it’s Jimmy’s turn to look out into the darkness. “I think we got until sunrise,” he says, and he smiles at her. He shifts his hand round from the small of her back, resting it on her hip, shapeless beneath the heavy coat. He presses it there for a while, then sighs. “Wanna tell me what that was all about?”
“Which part?” Kim asks softly.
He shrugs and makes a face.
She moves, letting go of his chest and shifting so that she’s leaning on the car beside him, looking out at the darkness, too. In the distance, the yellow glow of Albuquerque hazes the edge of the sky, the lights of the flat city hidden behind the slight rise of the foothills. Dark shadows of clouds are visible against the glow, amassing far away.
But Jimmy’s learning to read these silences, too, learning to read the way Kim lets them settle over her like water until she’s ready to break the surface.
So he waits.
“Which way is east?” Jimmy asks quietly, nudging his knee against Kim’s. They’re sitting on the trunk of her car, facing the rising black peaks of the Sandias.
She frowns thoughtfully, staring out from where she’s huddled beneath the blanket—an old checkered thing she’d had rolled up in her trunk next to a cardboard box of emergency supplies: non-perishable food and bottled water and a first-aid kit.
And a flashlight that’s tucked between them now. Waiting in careful silence for Kim to speak, Jimmy had folded up a piece of yellow legal paper he’d found in her car and stuck it over the bulb end, diffusing the light so that it’s like a glowing lantern between them.
Kim finally points to the top of one of the peaks. “That’s east.”
Jimmy stares in the direction for a few minutes, waiting for the light to change, though it’s still a long time before dawn.
“They made me feel claustrophobic, at first, you know,” Kim says quietly, and Jimmy turns to her. She inclines her head to the mountains. “But I liked it.”
He nods slowly.
There’s another silence, and then after a long time she continues, voice slow: “We used to get these big thunderstorms back in Nebraska.” She’s still looking up at the Sandias, the yellow glow of the flashlight pooling on her cheeks. “Superstorms. Enormous clouds on the horizon—just, unimaginably tall, Jimmy. Thunderheads you could see coming from miles and miles away, all purple and blue and gold out there. Nothing to hide behind.”
Jimmy presses his knee against hers under the blanket again and leaves it there. Kim’s knee is warm through his jeans.
“You could watch them, if you wanted, for hours. Slowly changing,” she says, and then she sighs. “But you couldn’t do anything to stop them if they were headed for you. You just”—and he feels her move closer, knee pushing harder—“you just had to wait. Wait, with the door closed, and hope they wouldn’t decide to come looking.”
The flashlight lantern slips forward, and Jimmy straightens it, then looks back up to Kim. Her eyes are moving a little, like she’s reading, though she’s only looking out at the darkness.
“I think she tried to call me on Christmas, too,” Kim says, voice soft. “But I didn’t pick up the phone.”
Jimmy exhales sharply, and she looks to him and folds her lips inwards.
The silence that follows stretches out for a long time, for long enough that Jimmy goes back to patiently studying the Sandias, waiting for a change in the light, for the first hint of a distant dawn. He can last until then if he needs to. It’s warm beneath the blanket.
“You know, I wanted to ring you on Thanksgiving,” Kim says, finally, and he turns again to face her. She smiles at him gently. “It was some dumb thing I wanted to tell you before I remembered you weren’t home.”
“You could’ve told me that night,” Jimmy says, grinning. “We did talk. And some.”
She chuckles. Nudges his knee. “You know, I think I’d already forgotten by then.” She blows a hair off her face and turns away. “Anyway, that made me feel…” she starts, and then she frowns. Looks out at the shadowed Sandias again. It’s a long time before she continues, and when she does, Jimmy struggles to follow the thread. “There’s something so clean about this place,” she says. “The desert. Like it’s sterile.” She laughs lightly and grins at him. “I know that’s a weird thing to say.”
But Jimmy shakes his head.
“It’s simple. Straightforward.” Her eyes soften as she looks at him. “It’s a good place to run away to.” And then quietness again. She tucks a stray hair behind her ear with a hand that peeks up from beneath the blanket. Catches his gaze. As he watches her, she seems to study his own face, her pupils dark, reflecting the fragile lantern. “You seemed different when you came back from Cicero. What happened over Thanksgiving?”
“Nothing happened,” Jimmy says.
“Something must’ve happened.”
Jimmy shrugs. “I don’t know why I felt different,” he says, eventually. “Maybe it was seeing Cicero again. Maybe it was just seeing Mom.” He breathes out slowly. The next question bubbles up, spilling from his lips: “Have you ever been back to Red Cloud?”
And Kim shakes her head. The movement makes a rustling sound against the blanket, and for a while Jimmy thinks that might be the only answer he’s gonna get, until she continues: “I hadn’t even talked to her.” She lets out a shaky breath. “Until this evening.”
The flashlight slips down again, and Jimmy straightens it. The soft yellow light shifts over Kim’s face as he nestles it back into place.
Kim sighs, breathing slowly, long measured breaths he can feel through the blanket. “I sent her my number. But she’s not really the type to—I mean, I guess she’s making amends now. Again.” Kim shifts, bringing more of her thigh into contact with his beneath the blanket. Then she looks away, and again her next words seem to come from some frayed, other thread: “I thought I needed that clean desert, you know. That sterile…” She lets out a ragged sigh.
He hears the scrape of fabric over cloth as her chest rises and falls with deep breaths.
And then again another change, and Jimmy wonders exactly how much is swirling through her mind right now, for these different pieces to keep breaking the surface: “God, Jimmy, at the Christmas party, everyone was the same. The same conversation, over and over. They could’ve been having it with anyone—hell, they were having it with anyone!” She gives a little barking laugh and turns to him, eyes flashing. “And the only time they looked any different was when they were looking at you.”
Jimmy frowns, Kim’s stare prickling over his skin.
“Because you dared to not be exactly like them. And they’ll never see past that. Now that they know,” she says quietly. She lifts a hand from beneath the blanket, the long sleeve of his corduroy jacket hanging over her palm as she touches it to his face.
He can smell the cigarette smoke of teenage Cicero days. And he can feel her, somehow, warm through the layers.
Then Kim lowers it again. “And the next week, my phone goes. And it’s her. I just stared at the number on the handset until the ringing stopped.” Her lips tremble as she exhales, long and tremulous.
“But you answered it tonight,” Jimmy murmurs. He feels a clench in his chest.
Kim smiles at him. “Yes.” She tilts her head and studies him, and the next words arrive like a shock, like something big finally coming up for air. “My mother got into a car accident one night when I was in Junior High.”
Jimmy stares at her, and she’s still looking gently back at him, soft and quiet at the edges.
“It was her own fault,” Kim continues, after a few moments. “Things were already pretty bad before then, but afterwards?” Her eyes are set and fierce, lit by yellow torchlight. “My mother had the doctor in Red Cloud around her little finger. Oh, you didn’t set the bone right. Oh, it’s chronic—oh, it aches.” Kim exhales through her nose. “God, it was always all so…messy.”
Her thigh is a line of heat against his, and Jimmy watches her in silence for a long time, watches her eyes follow the chaotic threads of tangled memories that are invisible to him, waiting to see if anything else breaks the surface again, if anything else peeks through.
Nothing does.
Her gaze is black, and heavy, and when the flashlight slips again, he doesn’t reset it. He just lets Kim’s shadowed face remain beside him as they both stare out at the dark line of the Sandias, watching for the moment when morning crests the distant peaks.
“Which way is east again?” Jimmy asks at some point, voice soft.
And Kim points, fingers small beneath the sleeve of his coat. “That way.”
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