gap

She’d received half a dozen messages, some mocking and teasing, some blunt in their insistence that they “see other people,” none sounding like Mark. The messages came from his phone, and were just like the messages from his Facebook account. But they were all in lower-caps, awkwardly worded, distant…and when was the last time Mark used the word “dude”? “other dudes in the see, yknow” he’d written. Someone had written.

So one of Mark’s friends was using his phone, had logged into his Facebook account. That’s what the rational and annoyed part of Phoebe assumed, but the other part, the over analytical and uneasy part of Phoebe was already assuring her that there, in fact, were other dudes in the sea, and that her 3 year relationship with Mark had only been a fling anyway.

Mark (or whoever was pretending to be Mark) hadn’t answered his phone in almost two days. They’d been fine when they’d talked the night before last about Mark’s work and Phoebe’s plans for Thanksgiving Break, and thirty hours later Phoebe is ignoring the poetry discussions in English class and wondering if she should let her parents know that it’s over with Mark when she saw them that weekend. Or drive the 200 miles to Milwaukee to confront him in person.

She tried calling him again on her way home after class, but it rang four times before going to voicemail. Fear and frustration curled into anger as she slammed her phone shut and shoved it into her purse.

“Phoebe-weebee.”

Phoebe stopped mid-march, startled at the familiar voice. She swiveled around and to see a disheveled youthful-looking man in shorts and a t-shirt lying on a hill next to the sidewalk.

“Henry.” Phoebe raised a brow as she carefully approached her brother. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Henry smiled easily, resting his head on his hands and leaning back in the damp grass. “I am watching the leaves change.” Phoebe glanced up to see a young ash tree towering over them, the left side of which had gone bright orange.

“Yeah,” she frowned, almost grimacing, “the leaves are going to start falling soon, huh? The campus grounds crew will come around this week and start pulling off the dead leaves before it makes a mess.”

“How…humanitarian.” Henry crossed his legs and sighed as he gazed up at the leaves.

“I meant, what are you doing here?” Phoebe specified. “What are you doing in this state? At my college?” She hadn’t seen her brother since summer, maybe June, when he stopped by their mother’s house to pick up his summer clothes. Before that, and since then she supposed, he’d been wandering from town to town, state to state. Without phone calls, emails, or even postcards their family had yet to figure out what he was up to between visits; it was as though he didn't exist when he wasn't standing right in front of them.

“I was just wandering through,” he stated as though it explained everything. “I remembered you were still going here and thought I’d stop by, check out the sights.”

“The sights,” Phoebe repeated. Suddenly the annoyance she felt from earlier was back.

He glanced over at her. “You don’t mind if I stick around for a couple of days, do you?”

Phoebe shrugged and it started to drizzle. “I have a couch,” she offered, already making her way across the grass, back to the sidewalk. “But you could have called first.”

Henry was suddenly beside her, still smiling. “No phone.”

“There are payphones everywhere,” she pointed out.

He shrugged. “I don’t know your number. Or anyone’s.”

“You could have….” She struggled to find something to catch him on as he followed her across the street. “You could have found an internet café and emailed me!”

“Ich, computers hurt my eyes,” was his only excuse.

Phoebe rolled her eyes and checked her phone. Mark hadn't called. She went around the sprinklers that her brother ran underneath as she led the way to her apartment.

“My roommate isn't home,” Phoebe informed Henry as soon as they entered her dreary living room/kitchen/dining room. The curtains were all drawn and dirty dishes and used paper plates took up most of the surfaces in the room, but Phoebe quickly cleared the desk and turned on her computer. She didn't know what to say when she turned around in her chair to see Henry piling all the dishes into the sink and bagging up pop bottles.

She shook her head. “What are you doing?”

“It's kind of smelly in here,” Henry 'explained'.

“Well you can't recycle the water bottles,” Phoebe told him as she typed in her password. “Just toss them.”

Henry gently lobbed the empty water bottle into the back of Phoebe's head. Phoebe took a deep breath and ignored him, signing into her email, then to Facebook to see if there was anything from Mark.

After straightening up the kitchen (for whatever reason), Mark bugged Phoebe about taking a walk and looking at the leaves, arguing that she could do her homework at the park. Phoebe patiently explained that all of her homework as on her computer, and he settled for opening the curtains and watching the trees from the couch.

Once the apartment was silent, and she still hadn't received a message from Mark, Phoebe felt she couldn't hold it in any longer and explained the weird messages to Henry.

“He keeps breaking up with me through text messages and on Facebook,” she explained, partly wondering if Henry knew what Facebook was, “but none of the messages are him, and he hasn't actually called me so that I can be sure, and he won't answer his cell phone, and I just don't know what to do.” Henry seemed surprised – and a little confused – at the situation, but he didn't have any advise beyond, “Go ask him yourself.”

Henry watched the sunset from the balcony while Phoebe read an article for Journalism, switching between and Facebook every few minutes. He eventually wandered back in and flopped down on the couch.

“I was in Wisconsin last week,” Henry told her, “but not Milwaukee, I never got to Milwaukee. There's this place called the Wisconsin Dells, and it's kind of a touristy thing; there are amusement parks and water parks and campgrounds full of plastic cabins with faux-wood siding, but beyond all of that, the place itself is breathtaking. There are these cliffs where the forest just cuts off and drops straight down, hundreds of feet into the river. It's like the earth got bored and decided to take a different path. Some of the rock faces are sanded smooth from the water; they look like clay. Anyway, I was there for a while giving private tours for food and spending money, but people don't seem to want things like that anymore. They want the water parks, the ferries, and the tour guide with the megaphone and name tag. It's fine anyway; I want to go further west. The Dells are nothing compared to the Rocky Mountains, jutting up in millions of layers, trying to escape the planet. I think I'll go to Colorado next. After Thanksgiving, of course.” He yawned. “Run up the first towering cliff I can find and see much of the world is reachable from there.”

Phoebe stared at her brother for a few minutes before she realized that he'd fallen asleep, stretched out along her couch still in his faded sweatshirt and jeans. His words echoed in the room even after she refreshed the page. Still no message. Her stomach sank.

She was woken at nine the next morning by her vibrating cell phone: a text from her boyfriend, grammatically correct, period and all: “Call me as soon as you get up.“ She did. He answered.

“I've had the stomach flu the last couple of days,” he explained, “and it got really bad yesterday. I guess my roommate got ahold of my cell. This morning I saw the texts he sent, I'm so sorry.” He sounded sorry, and despite the nervous doubt still fluttering in her stomach, Phoebe accepted his apology. Relief didn't flush her like she'd expected.

She wandered into the living room as Mark described the way he'd payed back his roommate by waking him up at six this morning by blaring speed metal right next to his ear. Phoebe was surprised to find the couch unoccupied. She glanced at the window, curtains still wide open from last night and letting in the midmorning sun. Just down the street, the maintenance crew had begun pulling the dead leaves from the tree branches on campus; she could hear the engine of the cherry picker from where she stood. As she began to move away from the window, Phoebe spotted a solitary figure hunched on the sidewalk in front of the next building. It was Henry, watching the crew work.