Gemelo
The summer after the worst election, I met The Man with My Face. I’m not sure how to explain this right; it’s difficult to describe the mirrored ghost of yourself coming back in man-form. So I focused, first, on the face.
The Man with My Face came at the start of August. Jack Barrington, the head director at our marketing firm in Boonville, Missouri, paid for our office to stay at a woodland resort flanking the Lake of the Ozarks and sitting behind a mid-sized vineyard. The conference was set to last the weekend and mostly involved us giving presentations about the same unstimulating ideas we had at the office. Jack’s conference was an elaborate ruse to court the three new potentials for the job as Lead Project Manager, which I was the likely candidate for because I was currently the Project Manager and up for a promotion. Still, Jack insisted we turn over the world for the best people. Too exhausted from my father’s recent death for competition in-house, I didn’t go up for the job and secretly started looking for other positions. Really though, I was genuinely curious at who Jack could pull out to the cow-doused Boonville.
The opening party was on the vineyard lawn, facing the sludge-slow Big Muddy, and I was late per usual. I wasn’t fond of being tardy as the only Black person at the firm, but I’d stopped looking at the clock, spending most of the time talking myself into going to the conference. I’d spent the first half of the morning saying prayers to my father’s just-dead spirit, trying to rip my Tio out of his memories on the phone, looking for business shoes, and flat ironing my hair so not to attract attention from my Midwestern workmates.
I didn’t see the Man with My Face at first. I fell out of my Honda, shimmy-shuffled toward the vineyard pavilion while buttoning up my blue jacket. I showed my ID to three glaze-eyed interns at the table at the front and click-clacked in my short heels toward the pavilion. The wine pavilion was a two story oaken building, the vineyard slumped behind it to reveal the fur-lined verdant forest that lined the Missouri River. Behind that river were tired stretches of graying farmland. Ripples of black mountain trimmed the skyline. The clouds were lowering, fat-bellied and cooling, ready for rain.
My office mates from the agency were stuck in friend-clusters and chatting loud. They walked the lawn with twiggy walks; they were all wearing khakis and blazers and smoothed down cold hair. I scanned the crowd for my boss so I could temporarily avoid him. While my eyes were zig-zagging around, and I was trying to simultaneously avoid being seen, I saw the Man with My Face.
He was chatting with Jack Barrington. When I saw his profile something sizzled in me. It was new and uncomfortable and shifted strange. This man was tree-tall, maybe-mixed. Butter-pecan colored with tightly coiled hair lifting several inches from his scalp. He maintained a carefully trimmed goatee, and wore a cerulean blazer and periwinkle shirt that he’d obviously spent a good amount of money for. The way he pinched the wineglass tightly and smiled too-big, then perfectly small, showed the fixed presentation of a Black man who is always aware of how he has to perform for white superiors. He turned to the side and I coughed down a breath. He had my face. It went beyond superficial characteristics, though we did both have huge black eyes, rosebud lips, noses that start thin and flare out at the bottom. It wasn’t phenotypical. There was a hit of me-ness in his face, the way he laughed and postured.
It was such a bizarre feeling to see this man, I just stood there, at a distance, staring at both of them as fat clouds grayed and lowered. My gaze must have been strong because it had the unfortunate consequence of attracting Jack’s attention. He brightened when he saw me.
I could never get Jack. On one end, he was the kind of person who said, proudly, “I haven’t read a novel since I was nineteen.” He would send the firm Tony Robbins quotes every morning for inspiration and played golf in a dudebro league. But he had also lived in Argentina for five years and was strangely best friends with a Top 40 rapper. Somehow his friendship with that rapper made him feel entitled to making broad-based comments about Black America to exclusively me and nobody else. A weird guy he was.
Jack grabbed the Man with My Face and tugged him toward me. “Aya! I want you to meet one of our guests. He’s going to give a talk later. He’s working in Vermont.” He beamed, already slightly drunk and proud of himself. “You have a lot in common. You’re both from Miami, both went to UM …” You’re both Black and relatively accomplished in this field, I knew he wanted to add. When the man lightly looked over at me he started, caught a bit off guard. He hid his reaction well. His eyes stretched but his face warmed politely. He reached a brown hand out, for me.
“I’m Gerald Chavez,” the Man with my Face said. “Jack’s spoken well of you.”
It turned out, after a strained chat, we knew all the same teachers and friends, trained in South Kendall and had gone off to work in various other firms. It was strange we hadn’t crossed paths in all of that time but we didn’t. He wasn’t into social media and I wasn’t good at keeping friends longer than a few years anyway. Jack was delighted by our conversation which made me want to cut it short even more. Jack was in full on court-mode.
“Gerald plays the piano. Do you play the piano, Aya?”
I didn’t.
“There’s this amazing Gerswhin song I want to play for you both,” he said. “Just a sec.” I was astounded that Jack was excited about Gershwin and not Eminem. He drifted off back to the pavilion to get his phone which left me and the Man with my Face alone.
Man with My Face leaned in and said, “You’re the only Black person here?”
I bit my tongue. “Yeah, I am.”
He smiled small. It was a tight smile. “Gotcha.”
I looked away. The clouds bulged and darkened faster. I didn’t really understand why he’d asked the question, if he was criticizing me for working here in the first place. If he were assessing whether or not he wanted the job. He and I stared at each other, noting the bigness of our eyes, the color of our skin, the face-shapes.
“Gemela,” he said. I blinked, registering the word and translation in Spanish but not expecting for him to say anything.
“What did you say?”
Jack was back. He opened Spotify on his phone and lush piano poured out. Gerald and I leaned down and listened. It was also odd having a man-version of my face inches away from mine. I stood up quickly and took a few steps away from him.
The thunder above rumbled, but we didn’t notice. I wondered if the sky was going to dump all over my just-ironed hair and the curls would burst forth, freaking out everyone at the conference. I absently touched my hair.
After the song was over, Jack grinned. “That’s the fucking shit right there,” he said and Gerald and I laughed quietly even though we didn’t think he was funny.
*
I excused myself to the bathroom. The Man with My Face made me feel uncomfortable and jittery, as if being close to him increasingly pulled back layers of myself the longer I stood next to him.
I splashed water on my face and Tessa, a British content manager with a sharp smile, pink hair and rapid fire talk came over. She was generally pretty irreverent but I enjoyed her company. She said, “Wow, that recruit fucking looks like you.”
I said, “Nah.”
“If you were a guy.”
“Not really.”
“It’s crazy. Like if you were a guy, that would be you.”
“Nah,” I said and stared in the mirror, thinking about that snap and sizzle I felt when I was standing close to the Man with My Face. I suspected Tessa would say the same if Gerald looked nothing like me, just because we were the only Black people at the conference.
Still, I studied the curve and cut of my cheeks, the way my lips parted. There were dark smudges under my eyes and my hair was starting to puff from the humidity in the air. What did it mean to see something so very you in someone else?
Tessa slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re going to be Jack’s calling card. He’s definitely going to use you to try to get him to work here. There’s also”—she leaned in and whispered as if it were a dirty word—“a diversity bonus apparently. So we could get a double-whammy here if he comes.”
I removed my shoulder from her hand. It was exhausting to think that people would think Gerald was a diversity hire when I was sure he had a stellar resume on his own.
“We’ll see what happens,” I said and wiped my face.
*
The rest of the day was presentations. The first a candidate, an Asian woman named Susan, gave a shaky talk. I got the sense she hadn’t prepared well because she didn’t want the job. The second candidate was a lanky white man with a very visible toupee. He was confident but monotonous. Gerald, on the other hand, knocked it out of the park. He showed effortless charisma, interacted with the crowd, he owned us all. I did notice for most of the presentation he avoided my eyes and I didn’t know why. I also didn’t know why whenever his gaze swung in my direction I looked out the window. It was all too strange.
After the presentations, Jack suggested we all unwind and play basketball at one of the courts outside of the main pavilion. It was a weird idea, nobody was really dressed for it and I thought I definitely didn’t want to be the only Black person playing basketball when I was incredibly terrible at it. Gerald, ready, was up for it and even had work out clothes, and so did a couple of other guys in my firm. Tessa and I decided to hang out and watch them play instead.
The Man with My Face was good. He was better than Jack, who played on the opposite team but I watched him miss easy shots and throw up a brick to make Jack feel better. At some point he lifted his shirt to wipe off sweat and his body reminded me of mine, strong and soft in some places with natural muscles scattered about; there was a birthmark on his stomach on the left side. I had a mark myself on the left side of my stomach where I’d burned myself with an iron. While I was looking at his mark, he switched his gaze to me. He saw me looking at him and I blushed. He didn’t look embarrassed nor like he wanted to entice me. He just seemed curious as to why I was looking at him in the first place.
I went back to the game. Tessa pushed my shoulder. She gestured with her chin at him, then studied me.
“Babes. Come on. You can take one for the team. This is a compliment to you, but he’s definitely my type. If you get him to come here, we can all have fun. And by we I mean me.”
I felt protective of Gerald and hated that she thought I was meant to draw him into this firm so I didn’t go along with her.
“I’m not doing that kind of work,” I said. “It’s up to him if he wants to come here.”
“Jack is going to offer him that job. The one you didn’t go up for.”
“Probably,” I said tightly.
“So you’re not interested in him? You know what I mean.”
“No, I have a boyfriend, remember?” I said and left it there even though Akito and I were on a break that was extending into six months now.
“Cool,” Tessa said. She got up and crossed the grounds. She tugged her shirt down to reveal her large breasts and wiggled her plump, ample ass. It wobbled and shook as she walked. She threw a hand on Gerald’s bicep and he grinned back at her. They started chatting. I felt a tinge of something that I couldn’t place but I shook it off. I got up and started to go back to the main pavilion when Tessa ran back over and stopped me.
“Aya, where are you going?” she asked out of breath.
“Out of here,” I said. “You have had it.”
At that moment I started wondering why I kept this job in the first place. Jack was frustrating, I was bored out of my mind and I wanted to leave Boonville STAT. As I was halfway through leaving, Gerald jogged over to both of us. He smiled at me, a too-big, nearly forced smile, and he regarded Tessa.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“I lost,” Gerald said.
“You lost!” I laughed. “On purpose?”
He bent over and picked a strand of grass and threw it over his back. “I don’t know.”
*
The rest of the day we lightly chatted with our colleagues, had small snacks that were anything but filling and Jack spent most of his time with Gerald, not even the other two candidates, who I sensed were becoming increasingly irritated. I tried to strike up a conversation with them out of sheer boredom but they were too-polite and restrained to get past basic formalities. At some point late into the night, when I was talking to the white man who was going up for the job, Gerald floated by me and tugged my elbow. He didn’t look like he wanted to join in the conversation.
“Gemela,” he said again. I excused myself and he led me into a corner. It was a strange pull and crackle of energy. It wasn’t quite familial but not quite sexual. If I were single and he kissed me or took me to bed I’d definitely react to him. If he were my brother, I’d accept him being so. It didn’t make sense.
“Do you want to go back to one of those rooms and talk?” he asked.
I scanned the place for Jack and Tessa. Tessa was talking to another employee and halfway flirting now that she’d had some alcohol and Jack was finally talking to the first candidate.
“Okay,” I said, not knowing why I was agreeing.
“Cool,” he said and led me to an empty room away from the crowd.
Inside, there was a large couch, a television turned off and a coffee machine. Gerald was still holding his glass of Merlot and I had a Pinot Noir I hadn’t touched. He gestured for me to sit down on the couch and I did. He sat a respectable distance away from me.
“Can you play any games?” he asked.
My eyebrows flew up.
“Not really.”
“What about Uno? That’s what they have here.” He flicked his thumb at a half-opened UNO box.
“Okay, we can play,” I said. Why not? What better thing did I have to do? Go back out and deal with Jack and Tessa? I took a sip of my full glass of Pinot Noir.
He rolled his sleeves up and shuffled the cards. The more he shuffled the more his knee crept closer to mine and then pulled back. There was a point in which his knee was knocking into mine, then it stayed pressed, knee-to-knee. I couldn’t tell if he noticed. I eventually pulled away, and he looked me in the eye.
“You know something?”
“What?”
“I feel like I know you, but I don’t know you at all,” he said. He put the cards down and asked me to pick one.
“Ditto,” I told him, seriously. I placed my cards down and he looked at his.
“Maybe because you look like me,” he said.
“I was thinking the same thing. My turn.”
I took my turn. Suddenly, I felt incredibly lonely. I missed Akito, who told me we should be “friends” now when I wanted anything but, and I missed my father, who was dead in the grave and my brother who was still locked up in Miami Correctional. My mother was glaze-eyed so I could barely talk to her. All I really had was this stupid job and at this point I was almost certain I didn’t want it.
I looked over at Gerald and he looked unbearably handsome under the light. I wondered how this attraction worked, because I barely saw my own face as beautiful, but when I saw him I thought he was gorgeous. His hair was like mine when I didn’t straighten in, in lovely coils. He saw me looking at his hair and laughed.
He reached forward and pulled a straight strand away from my face. Like a teenager, my heart slammed against my chest walls. I pulled away.
“You wear your hair like this all the time?” he asked, his eyes fastened on my face.
“In this setting yes. On my own it’s usually big and free.”
He half-grinned. “I saw that rain coming and thought, ‘O, man, she’s done.’ I couldn’t wait ‘til all that kink came back. I was hoping you’d have this enormous fro and all these folks would be fucking stunned.”
His knee knocked against mine again.
I said, “I hate it when people tell me how to wear my hair. I’ll wear it however I want.”
“When I was growing up, Abuelita told me to shave my head so nobody could see my hair. I did,” he countered. “I had to get a tight fade to fit in, but also so nobody could see how nappy my hair was. It’s grown out now, because I don’t give a shit. Let them see it.”
I looked at his hair. “It looks good.”
“Your hair looks fine,” he went on. “Any way. Looks like the hair my family has. All the ways. Wigs, weaves, straight, silk press, ‘natural.’ My hair. Whatever you do with it.” He studied me for a moment more, trying to gauge my reaction. He shrugged.
He went back to his cards. His hands were long and smooth. Mine were long, too, but too-long for women’s hands. We played UNO while drinking our wine too fast. His knee pressed against my knee again when he leaned over to get another card. He eventually told me I’d won the game, and he rested back and his knee disconnected with me knee. I got up to signal the end of our interaction but he got up with me.
“Do you know how to salsa dance?” he asked. “I was thinking you did since we’re both from Miami.”
I smiled. “I’m not good.”
“I’m not good either. I was hoping you could teach me.”
“I’m really bad.”
“Who cares? We’ll be the only Black Latinos who can’t salsa.”
Gerald put Willie Colón on his phone and he faced me. In that moment we both realized we were a little too close and we stood apart awkwardly regarding each other. I reached forward and took his hands and guided his right foot forward left foot back. He leaned in and we fell into step. We weren’t good in any way but we laughed trying the steps.
“Oh heavens,” I said. “That took me back.”
Gerald chuckled. “Just wanted a slab of home.”
We stared at the door but both didn’t want to go out. So we walked and paced and talked. About our families; he talked about his brothers who looked up to him as a golden son when he felt as if he couldn’t fulfil those duties. We talked about being the Only Black Person wherever we went in our field, about how we were perceived by white people and Black people. We shared fast secrets and talked about our divergent views of Miami. (I thought it was a place of hope and diversity, his view was more complex.)
It was late, too late when Gerald said, “Hey. Do you want to see the sun rise in the Midwest? I do. Last time I was here I was so pissed off I never noticed how beautiful it could be. All these fields, before anyone else claimed them.” I nodded.
We snuck out of the back door of the room and lingered on the porch facing the parking lot.
Outside, the Midwest was dappled pink and long and promising, like it was when I first arrived. We stared at the flexing shortleaf pines, and my body said I was tired but my mind was humming.
The sun nudged up over the porch. It crawled up quietly and broke the birches in half. The purple sky blazed bright. I could already hear Jack Barrington hollering at the waitstaff. We both found two chairs and sat down, closer than I expected.
His knee was close to my knee again and it knocked back and forth. His knee stayed there, pushed against me. I swallowed hard. His thigh was touching my thigh and he left it there. I didn’t know what any of that meant, but it felt sweet, for that moment to feel a person, who looked and smelled and felt like me, but was not me, and not my family, but understood some part of me, to be there. He suddenly jerked his knee away. He left a wide space open between our legs.
“I have someone,” he said, looking forward.
“Cool,” I said, too-fast. I wished I still had my Pinot Noir but I’d finished it hours ago. I don’t know why I feel cheated. He did nothing wrong. We didn’t do anything. I fixed my face so it didn’t look like I cared.
“She’s white,” he said. “Prairie girl. Born and raised Midwestern. From Nebraska. She’s a farm girl, she can milk a cow and everything. She likes to hike. We’ve been all over.”
“That’s awesome,” I said, making my face look extra obliging. I pushed away the sting of disappointment. I smiled too-big. I imagined the lovely girl who traverses mountains, who fell in love with the man who looks like me. If I were single, I’d probably fall in love with someone like that too.
I thought about telling him about Akito but there was nothing left to tell. He went on, “It’s complicated.”
I said, “I get it.”
He flicked his eyes at me, and he smiled. He wiggled his eyebrows. “Maybe you do.”
Gerald didn’t say anything else. He didn’t ask me about my love life and I didn’t volunteer any more information. He looked off.
“How long will you be in Missouri?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I need the money. I have to have something until I figure out what I’m doing next.”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m here. Not because of Jack Barrington’s stunning wit.”
He sighed and gazed at the clouds ruffling forest canopies. Our knees were much farther apart, as if we were strangers.
“Do you want to work in marketing your whole life?” he asked. “Just selling shit to people that don’t want it?”
I bit my lip. “I think we’re just trying to get by.”
He blew air from his nose and looked at me hard. “Aya,” he said so gently I wanted to cry. “What do you think would happen if we met each other in Miami?”
This time, I was silent. I could imagine it, but didn’t. Thinking of this felt very painful, all of a sudden. I didn’t know what he meant. If we were in Miami, we’d be surrounded by different colored faces and we’d fit in and we’d deal with a different set of problems. We might not have been friends, maybe we would have. We might have dated, maybe we wouldn’t have.
“That didn’t happen,” I said. “If it was supposed to have happened, it would have.”
“Right,” he said and looked at a mole on his hand.
“I wish I could just feel like everything is the way it’s supposed to be,” he said. “That nothing’s missing. I always feel like I don’t have enough time to feel good about things.”
“Right,” I said. We didn’t go any further. We were both exhausted. The sun shot up behind clusters of furred tree-tops. I could hear Jack Barrington singing.
“We have to go home,” he said simply. “I’m probably not going to take this job. I’m looking for the right resting spot.” He lifted himself up with his hands and helped me up. I held the warmth of his hand until he let it go. We left out of the back door and he walked back to his cabin, not looking back.
*
I realized I hadn’t gone back to my cabin all evening. I wondered what my co-workers probably thought of me and then I dismissed it. They could think what they wanted.
I stood on the porch in the pavilion and gazed at the Missouri sun. It was budging upward, spurting out orange now. I wasn’t tired in the slightest.
A few cabin doors opened and folks drifted out. I didn’t see Jack or Tessa yet so I darted to the dining hall to get some coffee and I caught Gerald out of the corner of my eye. He was in a circle with my co-workers and the other candidates. My heart banged big in my chest. The smudges under my eyes were deep, but he, with the same amount of sleep as me, looked fresh and vibrant. He joked with Jack and I passed their group to get Stevia. He kept talking, didn’t make eye contact. Jack saw me, however, and he tried to gesture for me to come over but I pulled out my cellphone and pretended to take a call.
I floated to the other side of the room to drink my coffee and saw Gerald putting on his blue blazer, shaking hands with the people around him. He flashed a dazzling smile with all his fencepost teeth and headed toward the doorway. I saw him opening the door and realized he was leaving. I didn’t know if we ever would cross paths again. I thought if I stayed behind and didn’t say goodbye I wouldn’t look like we spent the night together and like the only two Black people at the conference hooked up. People would see what my face looked like when I gazed at him. But then if I didn’t say goodbye, well, that would be terribly sad.
I rushed to cross the room and halfway through Gerald opening the door, I grabbed the knob. He held the door open and lingered there. We stared at each other.
I didn’t know what to do with what I was feeling and thinking. It felt mostly like some kind of loss. I felt Tessa, who had just come in the room, smirking somewhere behind me.
Gerald glanced down at me, his eyes blank, not expressing a particular feeling. I wondered if I was just lonely and he was confused and we weren’t twins and weren’t the same at all, we were just two individual people looking for some kind of belonging in a sea of indifference and people different from us. Maybe we were just two Black people who hadn’t seen some color in a long time. Or maybe there was something more. I didn’t know .
Gerald blinked, and I called out, lamely:
“It was nice to meet you.”
He paused, gave me a smile showing off all of his teeth. “Same.”
I turned on my heel to leave, changed my mind.
“You’ll be missed. Regardless of what decision you make.” The words fell out and I wanted to stuff it back in.
He opened his mouth, licked his lips. He said too fast, “Igual.” He looked around again, then at me. He seemed like he was going to say something else, but then the edges of his mouth flicked up in that smile, the smile I’ve used myself a thousand times. That un-real grin. It dropped and then there was another smile that was more frightening to me because it was true and shaky. He reached out a hand to me then stuffed it back in his pocket.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I reached out and hugged him hard, once. His body was startled, he took a second, as if considering something. Then, he wrapped his arms around me. It was brief, intensely deep and inexplicably warm. His large hand flew to my hair, cupped the back of my head, that hand stayed there for a moment. I felt his chin on my head. He released me quickly. He turned without looking at my face. “See ya.”
He didn’t stop to look at me, and he strode briskly away from the office workers smoking in the parking lot. I yanked open the door and came back inside. The conference was full of my colleagues snacking on bagels and chatting blearily in corners. Some of them looked like they’d stayed up all night long drinking and were nursing a bad hangover.
Jack Barrington was at the coffee station, making a second cup for himself. I tried to sneak past him but he turned around and caught me by the arm.
“Aya, hey, hey, yo.” He led me back outside, far away from the other two candidates who were sitting next to one another and talking over a scone. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
I heard the ignition start, the thump of Gerald’s car bass. Gerald pulled off. My stomach sunk. I tried to focus back on Jack.
“Sure, Jack.” I didn’t want to talk to him.
We stood under the amber porch and rain started again, fell down lushly. The wind swept the water under the awning and my hair started to get damp and kinky and I didn’t care.
Jack lit a cigarette and sighed.
“You don’t think he’s coming here?” he asked, sliding his eyes at me. “Your friend?”
I didn’t know why he was calling Gerald my friend when he was the one who brought him here in the first place. I didn’t know if he was implying I had sex with him and it scared him off, or I didn’t have sex with him and that made him less likely to stay.
“No,” I said, fully prepared to defend myself. “The man you brought here isn’t coming. I don’t think so.”
“Shit,” Jack said. He flicked the cigarette to the ground and stamped it out. “You couldn’t move him? I thought you two had some kind of connection.”
He opened his mouth to continue and my eyes started stretching. I hadn’t slept all night and I didn’t want to be pinned with a crime if I hadn’t done anything.
“I talked to him about it. Didn’t budge. Nothing happened,” I said and let the ambiguity of the sentence explain itself. “He’s pretty preoccupied with his girlfriend and job right now.”
“Girlfriend?” Jack’s eyebrows flew up. “He didn’t mention anything about a girlfriend. I should have said we could get her a job here too. I’ll call him later, try to sweeten the deal.”
“Okay,” I said. “You can try.” The rain was clumping in puddles, shushing the wild winds. Jack slid his eyes at me.
“Why would he come all the way out here if he wasn’t interested?” Jack groaned. “It’s like a cocktease. Spent all that money to bring him here, with no return. That was the point of this. He was perfect. At least I have you, Aya.”
I didn’t feel like fighting him, I just wanted to go home.
He smacked his lips, turned to me. “Aya, I can’t get more diversity if diversity doesn’t want to come out to Boonville. And if there’s no diversity, diversity doesn’t come. But then we can’t learn from each other or whatever. And I don’t want to be crude, but apparently the higher ups are saying if I hire a person of color, we get a bonus…”
“I heard,” I said, wincing.
He threw up a hand. “Anyway, thanks for listening. Hope I didn’t say anything offensive to you either.”
“You’re fine,” I said.
“Aya,” he said gently, kindly. I wanted to keep walking, but I stopped, turned, curious at the slanty shift in his tone. He looked at me long then smiled. “Could you go tell the waitstaff to move these tables out here inside?”
“Sure,” I sighed. Jack went on about how angry his wife was going to be about them losing the bonus, I wondered how long it would take Gerald to get to the Columbia airport to fly back out to Vermont.
After we finished, I went out to the pavilion porch and watched the red cedars and tall pines twist, bend and writhe in the rain. I let out a loose breath.
I closed my eyes and saw blackness.
Photo Credit:
The summer after the worst election, I met The Man with My Face. I’m not sure how to explain this right; it’s difficult to describe the mirrored ghost of yourself coming back in man-form. So I focused, first, on the face.
The Man with My Face came at the start of August. Jack Barrington, the head director at our marketing firm in Boonville, Missouri, paid for our office to stay at a woodland resort flanking the Lake of the Ozarks and sitting behind a mid-sized vineyard. The conference was set to last the weekend and mostly involved us giving presentations about the same unstimulating ideas we had at the office. Jack’s conference was an elaborate ruse to court the three new potentials for the job as Lead Project Manager, which I was the likely candidate for because I was currently the Project Manager and up for a promotion. Still, Jack insisted we turn over the world for the best people. Too exhausted from my father’s recent death for competition in-house, I didn’t go up for the job and secretly started looking for other positions. Really though, I was genuinely curious at who Jack could pull out to the cow-doused Boonville.
The opening party was on the vineyard lawn, facing the sludge-slow Big Muddy, and I was late per usual. I wasn’t fond of being tardy as the only Black person at the firm, but I’d stopped looking at the clock, spending most of the time talking myself into going to the conference. I’d spent the first half of the morning saying prayers to my father’s just-dead spirit, trying to rip my Tio out of his memories on the phone, looking for business shoes, and flat ironing my hair so not to attract attention from my Midwestern workmates.
I didn’t see the Man with My Face at first. I fell out of my Honda, shimmy-shuffled toward the vineyard pavilion while buttoning up my blue jacket. I showed my ID to three glaze-eyed interns at the table at the front and click-clacked in my short heels toward the pavilion. The wine pavilion was a two story oaken building, the vineyard slumped behind it to reveal the fur-lined verdant forest that lined the Missouri River. Behind that river were tired stretches of graying farmland. Ripples of black mountain trimmed the skyline. The clouds were lowering, fat-bellied and cooling, ready for rain.
My office mates from the agency were stuck in friend-clusters and chatting loud. They walked the lawn with twiggy walks; they were all wearing khakis and blazers and smoothed down cold hair. I scanned the crowd for my boss so I could temporarily avoid him. While my eyes were zig-zagging around, and I was trying to simultaneously avoid being seen, I saw the Man with My Face.
He was chatting with Jack Barrington. When I saw his profile something sizzled in me. It was new and uncomfortable and shifted strange. This man was tree-tall, maybe-mixed. Butter-pecan colored with tightly coiled hair lifting several inches from his scalp. He maintained a carefully trimmed goatee, and wore a cerulean blazer and periwinkle shirt that he’d obviously spent a good amount of money for. The way he pinched the wineglass tightly and smiled too-big, then perfectly small, showed the fixed presentation of a Black man who is always aware of how he has to perform for white superiors. He turned to the side and I coughed down a breath. He had my face. It went beyond superficial characteristics, though we did both have huge black eyes, rosebud lips, noses that start thin and flare out at the bottom. It wasn’t phenotypical. There was a hit of me-ness in his face, the way he laughed and postured.
It was such a bizarre feeling to see this man, I just stood there, at a distance, staring at both of them as fat clouds grayed and lowered. My gaze must have been strong because it had the unfortunate consequence of attracting Jack’s attention. He brightened when he saw me.
I could never get Jack. On one end, he was the kind of person who said, proudly, “I haven’t read a novel since I was nineteen.” He would send the firm Tony Robbins quotes every morning for inspiration and played golf in a dudebro league. But he had also lived in Argentina for five years and was strangely best friends with a Top 40 rapper. Somehow his friendship with that rapper made him feel entitled to making broad-based comments about Black America to exclusively me and nobody else. A weird guy he was.
Jack grabbed the Man with My Face and tugged him toward me. “Aya! I want you to meet one of our guests. He’s going to give a talk later. He’s working in Vermont.” He beamed, already slightly drunk and proud of himself. “You have a lot in common. You’re both from Miami, both went to UM …” You’re both Black and relatively accomplished in this field, I knew he wanted to add. When the man lightly looked over at me he started, caught a bit off guard. He hid his reaction well. His eyes stretched but his face warmed politely. He reached a brown hand out, for me.
“I’m Gerald Chavez,” the Man with my Face said. “Jack’s spoken well of you.”
It turned out, after a strained chat, we knew all the same teachers and friends, trained in South Kendall and had gone off to work in various other firms. It was strange we hadn’t crossed paths in all of that time but we didn’t. He wasn’t into social media and I wasn’t good at keeping friends longer than a few years anyway. Jack was delighted by our conversation which made me want to cut it short even more. Jack was in full on court-mode.
“Gerald plays the piano. Do you play the piano, Aya?”
I didn’t.
“There’s this amazing Gerswhin song I want to play for you both,” he said. “Just a sec.” I was astounded that Jack was excited about Gershwin and not Eminem. He drifted off back to the pavilion to get his phone which left me and the Man with my Face alone.
Man with My Face leaned in and said, “You’re the only Black person here?”
I bit my tongue. “Yeah, I am.”
He smiled small. It was a tight smile. “Gotcha.”
I looked away. The clouds bulged and darkened faster. I didn’t really understand why he’d asked the question, if he was criticizing me for working here in the first place. If he were assessing whether or not he wanted the job. He and I stared at each other, noting the bigness of our eyes, the color of our skin, the face-shapes.
“Gemela,” he said. I blinked, registering the word and translation in Spanish but not expecting for him to say anything.
“What did you say?”
Jack was back. He opened Spotify on his phone and lush piano poured out. Gerald and I leaned down and listened. It was also odd having a man-version of my face inches away from mine. I stood up quickly and took a few steps away from him.
The thunder above rumbled, but we didn’t notice. I wondered if the sky was going to dump all over my just-ironed hair and the curls would burst forth, freaking out everyone at the conference. I absently touched my hair.
After the song was over, Jack grinned. “That’s the fucking shit right there,” he said and Gerald and I laughed quietly even though we didn’t think he was funny.
*
I excused myself to the bathroom. The Man with My Face made me feel uncomfortable and jittery, as if being close to him increasingly pulled back layers of myself the longer I stood next to him.
I splashed water on my face and Tessa, a British content manager with a sharp smile, pink hair and rapid fire talk came over. She was generally pretty irreverent but I enjoyed her company. She said, “Wow, that recruit fucking looks like you.”
I said, “Nah.”
“If you were a guy.”
“Not really.”
“It’s crazy. Like if you were a guy, that would be you.”
“Nah,” I said and stared in the mirror, thinking about that snap and sizzle I felt when I was standing close to the Man with My Face. I suspected Tessa would say the same if Gerald looked nothing like me, just because we were the only Black people at the conference.
Still, I studied the curve and cut of my cheeks, the way my lips parted. There were dark smudges under my eyes and my hair was starting to puff from the humidity in the air. What did it mean to see something so very you in someone else?
Tessa slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re going to be Jack’s calling card. He’s definitely going to use you to try to get him to work here. There’s also”—she leaned in and whispered as if it were a dirty word—“a diversity bonus apparently. So we could get a double-whammy here if he comes.”
I removed my shoulder from her hand. It was exhausting to think that people would think Gerald was a diversity hire when I was sure he had a stellar resume on his own.
“We’ll see what happens,” I said and wiped my face.
*
The rest of the day was presentations. The first a candidate, an Asian woman named Susan, gave a shaky talk. I got the sense she hadn’t prepared well because she didn’t want the job. The second candidate was a lanky white man with a very visible toupee. He was confident but monotonous. Gerald, on the other hand, knocked it out of the park. He showed effortless charisma, interacted with the crowd, he owned us all. I did notice for most of the presentation he avoided my eyes and I didn’t know why. I also didn’t know why whenever his gaze swung in my direction I looked out the window. It was all too strange.
After the presentations, Jack suggested we all unwind and play basketball at one of the courts outside of the main pavilion. It was a weird idea, nobody was really dressed for it and I thought I definitely didn’t want to be the only Black person playing basketball when I was incredibly terrible at it. Gerald, ready, was up for it and even had work out clothes, and so did a couple of other guys in my firm. Tessa and I decided to hang out and watch them play instead.
The Man with My Face was good. He was better than Jack, who played on the opposite team but I watched him miss easy shots and throw up a brick to make Jack feel better. At some point he lifted his shirt to wipe off sweat and his body reminded me of mine, strong and soft in some places with natural muscles scattered about; there was a birthmark on his stomach on the left side. I had a mark myself on the left side of my stomach where I’d burned myself with an iron. While I was looking at his mark, he switched his gaze to me. He saw me looking at him and I blushed. He didn’t look embarrassed nor like he wanted to entice me. He just seemed curious as to why I was looking at him in the first place.
I went back to the game. Tessa pushed my shoulder. She gestured with her chin at him, then studied me.
“Babes. Come on. You can take one for the team. This is a compliment to you, but he’s definitely my type. If you get him to come here, we can all have fun. And by we I mean me.”
I felt protective of Gerald and hated that she thought I was meant to draw him into this firm so I didn’t go along with her.
“I’m not doing that kind of work,” I said. “It’s up to him if he wants to come here.”
“Jack is going to offer him that job. The one you didn’t go up for.”
“Probably,” I said tightly.
“So you’re not interested in him? You know what I mean.”
“No, I have a boyfriend, remember?” I said and left it there even though Akito and I were on a break that was extending into six months now.
“Cool,” Tessa said. She got up and crossed the grounds. She tugged her shirt down to reveal her large breasts and wiggled her plump, ample ass. It wobbled and shook as she walked. She threw a hand on Gerald’s bicep and he grinned back at her. They started chatting. I felt a tinge of something that I couldn’t place but I shook it off. I got up and started to go back to the main pavilion when Tessa ran back over and stopped me.
“Aya, where are you going?” she asked out of breath.
“Out of here,” I said. “You have had it.”
At that moment I started wondering why I kept this job in the first place. Jack was frustrating, I was bored out of my mind and I wanted to leave Boonville STAT. As I was halfway through leaving, Gerald jogged over to both of us. He smiled at me, a too-big, nearly forced smile, and he regarded Tessa.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“I lost,” Gerald said.
“You lost!” I laughed. “On purpose?”
He bent over and picked a strand of grass and threw it over his back. “I don’t know.”
*
The rest of the day we lightly chatted with our colleagues, had small snacks that were anything but filling and Jack spent most of his time with Gerald, not even the other two candidates, who I sensed were becoming increasingly irritated. I tried to strike up a conversation with them out of sheer boredom but they were too-polite and restrained to get past basic formalities. At some point late into the night, when I was talking to the white man who was going up for the job, Gerald floated by me and tugged my elbow. He didn’t look like he wanted to join in the conversation.
“Gemela,” he said again. I excused myself and he led me into a corner. It was a strange pull and crackle of energy. It wasn’t quite familial but not quite sexual. If I were single and he kissed me or took me to bed I’d definitely react to him. If he were my brother, I’d accept him being so. It didn’t make sense.
“Do you want to go back to one of those rooms and talk?” he asked.
I scanned the place for Jack and Tessa. Tessa was talking to another employee and halfway flirting now that she’d had some alcohol and Jack was finally talking to the first candidate.
“Okay,” I said, not knowing why I was agreeing.
“Cool,” he said and led me to an empty room away from the crowd.
Inside, there was a large couch, a television turned off and a coffee machine. Gerald was still holding his glass of Merlot and I had a Pinot Noir I hadn’t touched. He gestured for me to sit down on the couch and I did. He sat a respectable distance away from me.
“Can you play any games?” he asked.
My eyebrows flew up.
“Not really.”
“What about Uno? That’s what they have here.” He flicked his thumb at a half-opened UNO box.
“Okay, we can play,” I said. Why not? What better thing did I have to do? Go back out and deal with Jack and Tessa? I took a sip of my full glass of Pinot Noir.
He rolled his sleeves up and shuffled the cards. The more he shuffled the more his knee crept closer to mine and then pulled back. There was a point in which his knee was knocking into mine, then it stayed pressed, knee-to-knee. I couldn’t tell if he noticed. I eventually pulled away, and he looked me in the eye.
“You know something?”
“What?”
“I feel like I know you, but I don’t know you at all,” he said. He put the cards down and asked me to pick one.
“Ditto,” I told him, seriously. I placed my cards down and he looked at his.
“Maybe because you look like me,” he said.
“I was thinking the same thing. My turn.”
I took my turn. Suddenly, I felt incredibly lonely. I missed Akito, who told me we should be “friends” now when I wanted anything but, and I missed my father, who was dead in the grave and my brother who was still locked up in Miami Correctional. My mother was glaze-eyed so I could barely talk to her. All I really had was this stupid job and at this point I was almost certain I didn’t want it.
I looked over at Gerald and he looked unbearably handsome under the light. I wondered how this attraction worked, because I barely saw my own face as beautiful, but when I saw him I thought he was gorgeous. His hair was like mine when I didn’t straighten in, in lovely coils. He saw me looking at his hair and laughed.
He reached forward and pulled a straight strand away from my face. Like a teenager, my heart slammed against my chest walls. I pulled away.
“You wear your hair like this all the time?” he asked, his eyes fastened on my face.
“In this setting yes. On my own it’s usually big and free.”
He half-grinned. “I saw that rain coming and thought, ‘O, man, she’s done.’ I couldn’t wait ‘til all that kink came back. I was hoping you’d have this enormous fro and all these folks would be fucking stunned.”
His knee knocked against mine again.
I said, “I hate it when people tell me how to wear my hair. I’ll wear it however I want.”
“When I was growing up, Abuelita told me to shave my head so nobody could see my hair. I did,” he countered. “I had to get a tight fade to fit in, but also so nobody could see how nappy my hair was. It’s grown out now, because I don’t give a shit. Let them see it.”
I looked at his hair. “It looks good.”
“Your hair looks fine,” he went on. “Any way. Looks like the hair my family has. All the ways. Wigs, weaves, straight, silk press, ‘natural.’ My hair. Whatever you do with it.” He studied me for a moment more, trying to gauge my reaction. He shrugged.
He went back to his cards. His hands were long and smooth. Mine were long, too, but too-long for women’s hands. We played UNO while drinking our wine too fast. His knee pressed against my knee again when he leaned over to get another card. He eventually told me I’d won the game, and he rested back and his knee disconnected with me knee. I got up to signal the end of our interaction but he got up with me.
“Do you know how to salsa dance?” he asked. “I was thinking you did since we’re both from Miami.”
I smiled. “I’m not good.”
“I’m not good either. I was hoping you could teach me.”
“I’m really bad.”
“Who cares? We’ll be the only Black Latinos who can’t salsa.”
Gerald put Willie Colón on his phone and he faced me. In that moment we both realized we were a little too close and we stood apart awkwardly regarding each other. I reached forward and took his hands and guided his right foot forward left foot back. He leaned in and we fell into step. We weren’t good in any way but we laughed trying the steps.
“Oh heavens,” I said. “That took me back.”
Gerald chuckled. “Just wanted a slab of home.”
We stared at the door but both didn’t want to go out. So we walked and paced and talked. About our families; he talked about his brothers who looked up to him as a golden son when he felt as if he couldn’t fulfil those duties. We talked about being the Only Black Person wherever we went in our field, about how we were perceived by white people and Black people. We shared fast secrets and talked about our divergent views of Miami. (I thought it was a place of hope and diversity, his view was more complex.)
It was late, too late when Gerald said, “Hey. Do you want to see the sun rise in the Midwest? I do. Last time I was here I was so pissed off I never noticed how beautiful it could be. All these fields, before anyone else claimed them.” I nodded.
We snuck out of the back door of the room and lingered on the porch facing the parking lot.
Outside, the Midwest was dappled pink and long and promising, like it was when I first arrived. We stared at the flexing shortleaf pines, and my body said I was tired but my mind was humming.
The sun nudged up over the porch. It crawled up quietly and broke the birches in half. The purple sky blazed bright. I could already hear Jack Barrington hollering at the waitstaff. We both found two chairs and sat down, closer than I expected.
His knee was close to my knee again and it knocked back and forth. His knee stayed there, pushed against me. I swallowed hard. His thigh was touching my thigh and he left it there. I didn’t know what any of that meant, but it felt sweet, for that moment to feel a person, who looked and smelled and felt like me, but was not me, and not my family, but understood some part of me, to be there. He suddenly jerked his knee away. He left a wide space open between our legs.
“I have someone,” he said, looking forward.
“Cool,” I said, too-fast. I wished I still had my Pinot Noir but I’d finished it hours ago. I don’t know why I feel cheated. He did nothing wrong. We didn’t do anything. I fixed my face so it didn’t look like I cared.
“She’s white,” he said. “Prairie girl. Born and raised Midwestern. From Nebraska. She’s a farm girl, she can milk a cow and everything. She likes to hike. We’ve been all over.”
“That’s awesome,” I said, making my face look extra obliging. I pushed away the sting of disappointment. I smiled too-big. I imagined the lovely girl who traverses mountains, who fell in love with the man who looks like me. If I were single, I’d probably fall in love with someone like that too.
I thought about telling him about Akito but there was nothing left to tell. He went on, “It’s complicated.”
I said, “I get it.”
He flicked his eyes at me, and he smiled. He wiggled his eyebrows. “Maybe you do.”
Gerald didn’t say anything else. He didn’t ask me about my love life and I didn’t volunteer any more information. He looked off.
“How long will you be in Missouri?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I need the money. I have to have something until I figure out what I’m doing next.”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m here. Not because of Jack Barrington’s stunning wit.”
He sighed and gazed at the clouds ruffling forest canopies. Our knees were much farther apart, as if we were strangers.
“Do you want to work in marketing your whole life?” he asked. “Just selling shit to people that don’t want it?”
I bit my lip. “I think we’re just trying to get by.”
He blew air from his nose and looked at me hard. “Aya,” he said so gently I wanted to cry. “What do you think would happen if we met each other in Miami?”
This time, I was silent. I could imagine it, but didn’t. Thinking of this felt very painful, all of a sudden. I didn’t know what he meant. If we were in Miami, we’d be surrounded by different colored faces and we’d fit in and we’d deal with a different set of problems. We might not have been friends, maybe we would have. We might have dated, maybe we wouldn’t have.
“That didn’t happen,” I said. “If it was supposed to have happened, it would have.”
“Right,” he said and looked at a mole on his hand.
“I wish I could just feel like everything is the way it’s supposed to be,” he said. “That nothing’s missing. I always feel like I don’t have enough time to feel good about things.”
“Right,” I said. We didn’t go any further. We were both exhausted. The sun shot up behind clusters of furred tree-tops. I could hear Jack Barrington singing.
“We have to go home,” he said simply. “I’m probably not going to take this job. I’m looking for the right resting spot.” He lifted himself up with his hands and helped me up. I held the warmth of his hand until he let it go. We left out of the back door and he walked back to his cabin, not looking back.
*
I realized I hadn’t gone back to my cabin all evening. I wondered what my co-workers probably thought of me and then I dismissed it. They could think what they wanted.
I stood on the porch in the pavilion and gazed at the Missouri sun. It was budging upward, spurting out orange now. I wasn’t tired in the slightest.
A few cabin doors opened and folks drifted out. I didn’t see Jack or Tessa yet so I darted to the dining hall to get some coffee and I caught Gerald out of the corner of my eye. He was in a circle with my co-workers and the other candidates. My heart banged big in my chest. The smudges under my eyes were deep, but he, with the same amount of sleep as me, looked fresh and vibrant. He joked with Jack and I passed their group to get Stevia. He kept talking, didn’t make eye contact. Jack saw me, however, and he tried to gesture for me to come over but I pulled out my cellphone and pretended to take a call.
I floated to the other side of the room to drink my coffee and saw Gerald putting on his blue blazer, shaking hands with the people around him. He flashed a dazzling smile with all his fencepost teeth and headed toward the doorway. I saw him opening the door and realized he was leaving. I didn’t know if we ever would cross paths again. I thought if I stayed behind and didn’t say goodbye I wouldn’t look like we spent the night together and like the only two Black people at the conference hooked up. People would see what my face looked like when I gazed at him. But then if I didn’t say goodbye, well, that would be terribly sad.
I rushed to cross the room and halfway through Gerald opening the door, I grabbed the knob. He held the door open and lingered there. We stared at each other.
I didn’t know what to do with what I was feeling and thinking. It felt mostly like some kind of loss. I felt Tessa, who had just come in the room, smirking somewhere behind me.
Gerald glanced down at me, his eyes blank, not expressing a particular feeling. I wondered if I was just lonely and he was confused and we weren’t twins and weren’t the same at all, we were just two individual people looking for some kind of belonging in a sea of indifference and people different from us. Maybe we were just two Black people who hadn’t seen some color in a long time. Or maybe there was something more. I didn’t know .
Gerald blinked, and I called out, lamely:
“It was nice to meet you.”
He paused, gave me a smile showing off all of his teeth. “Same.”
I turned on my heel to leave, changed my mind.
“You’ll be missed. Regardless of what decision you make.” The words fell out and I wanted to stuff it back in.
He opened his mouth, licked his lips. He said too fast, “Igual.” He looked around again, then at me. He seemed like he was going to say something else, but then the edges of his mouth flicked up in that smile, the smile I’ve used myself a thousand times. That un-real grin. It dropped and then there was another smile that was more frightening to me because it was true and shaky. He reached out a hand to me then stuffed it back in his pocket.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I reached out and hugged him hard, once. His body was startled, he took a second, as if considering something. Then, he wrapped his arms around me. It was brief, intensely deep and inexplicably warm. His large hand flew to my hair, cupped the back of my head, that hand stayed there for a moment. I felt his chin on my head. He released me quickly. He turned without looking at my face. “See ya.”
He didn’t stop to look at me, and he strode briskly away from the office workers smoking in the parking lot. I yanked open the door and came back inside. The conference was full of my colleagues snacking on bagels and chatting blearily in corners. Some of them looked like they’d stayed up all night long drinking and were nursing a bad hangover.
Jack Barrington was at the coffee station, making a second cup for himself. I tried to sneak past him but he turned around and caught me by the arm.
“Aya, hey, hey, yo.” He led me back outside, far away from the other two candidates who were sitting next to one another and talking over a scone. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
I heard the ignition start, the thump of Gerald’s car bass. Gerald pulled off. My stomach sunk. I tried to focus back on Jack.
“Sure, Jack.” I didn’t want to talk to him.
We stood under the amber porch and rain started again, fell down lushly. The wind swept the water under the awning and my hair started to get damp and kinky and I didn’t care.
Jack lit a cigarette and sighed.
“You don’t think he’s coming here?” he asked, sliding his eyes at me. “Your friend?”
I didn’t know why he was calling Gerald my friend when he was the one who brought him here in the first place. I didn’t know if he was implying I had sex with him and it scared him off, or I didn’t have sex with him and that made him less likely to stay.
“No,” I said, fully prepared to defend myself. “The man you brought here isn’t coming. I don’t think so.”
“Shit,” Jack said. He flicked the cigarette to the ground and stamped it out. “You couldn’t move him? I thought you two had some kind of connection.”
He opened his mouth to continue and my eyes started stretching. I hadn’t slept all night and I didn’t want to be pinned with a crime if I hadn’t done anything.
“I talked to him about it. Didn’t budge. Nothing happened,” I said and let the ambiguity of the sentence explain itself. “He’s pretty preoccupied with his girlfriend and job right now.”
“Girlfriend?” Jack’s eyebrows flew up. “He didn’t mention anything about a girlfriend. I should have said we could get her a job here too. I’ll call him later, try to sweeten the deal.”
“Okay,” I said. “You can try.” The rain was clumping in puddles, shushing the wild winds. Jack slid his eyes at me.
“Why would he come all the way out here if he wasn’t interested?” Jack groaned. “It’s like a cocktease. Spent all that money to bring him here, with no return. That was the point of this. He was perfect. At least I have you, Aya.”
I didn’t feel like fighting him, I just wanted to go home.
He smacked his lips, turned to me. “Aya, I can’t get more diversity if diversity doesn’t want to come out to Boonville. And if there’s no diversity, diversity doesn’t come. But then we can’t learn from each other or whatever. And I don’t want to be crude, but apparently the higher ups are saying if I hire a person of color, we get a bonus…”
“I heard,” I said, wincing.
He threw up a hand. “Anyway, thanks for listening. Hope I didn’t say anything offensive to you either.”
“You’re fine,” I said.
“Aya,” he said gently, kindly. I wanted to keep walking, but I stopped, turned, curious at the slanty shift in his tone. He looked at me long then smiled. “Could you go tell the waitstaff to move these tables out here inside?”
“Sure,” I sighed. Jack went on about how angry his wife was going to be about them losing the bonus, I wondered how long it would take Gerald to get to the Columbia airport to fly back out to Vermont.
After we finished, I went out to the pavilion porch and watched the red cedars and tall pines twist, bend and writhe in the rain. I let out a loose breath.
I closed my eyes and saw blackness.
Photo by Jay Mullings https://unsplash.com/photos/green-grass-field-and-trees-SLOuYZbj2y8?utm…