Mary and O'Neil Page 0,55
buttery, O’Neil thinks.
“Don’t you have any other sneakers?” O’Neil nods glumly at Stephen’s feet. “Those will give you shin splints, believe me.”
Stephen has begun, mockingly, to do jumping jacks, slapping his hands in the air over his head and counting numbers at random: “Six, fourteen, a hundred and eight.” Then he drops to the ground and does five snappy push-ups, wheezes hard, and collapses on the moist grass. “You know,” he moans, “the problem is I love to smoke. I mean, I truly love it. It would break my heart to quit.”
It is nine when they set off together down the drive, O’Neil holding back a little to let Stephen set the pace. O’Neil doesn’t quite know where he’s going, but he thinks there must be a way up the hill, something with an obvious name: Top of the World Road or Bella Vista Lane. From there he should be able to get a good look at what’s headed in their direction. The wedding is three hours away, and though a tent has been erected in his sister’s yard as a backup, it is important to both O’Neil and Mary to be married outside. They came up with the idea months ago, when there was still an inch of gray snow in Philadelphia and spring seemed a long way off. On the invitations, they wrote no address, only “The Meadow, Hanford, Vermont,” and shaded the paper with pastels: a stroke of green for the earth, blue and pink and bits of brown to hold the sky above it. It was a fun night, coloring the invitations at the dining room table of their small apartment, and O’Neil and Mary finished a bottle of wine while they worked, as they had done when they were first together and nervous with one another. But this was different. They were making wedding invitations.
O’Neil and Stephen run for a while in silence, under heavy trees that obstruct their view of the sky and the weather it contains. They are circling the hill, O’Neil knows, skirting its base, but there doesn’t seem to be any way up. Beside him, Stephen breathes heavily, and once in a while O’Neil pulls back to let his friend catch up. Stephen is holding his arms too high—as if he were carrying a pile of wood, when they should be closer to his waist to open the chest—and he is running on his toes, which scuff noisily when he lands. This will hasten the shin splints his heavy sneakers have already guaranteed, but O’Neil decides not to say anything. After about a mile they pass a big house with a barn and two speckled horses grazing on the front lawn; a dirt road veers to the right, along the edge of the property. A bent sign at the roadside reads, Skyline Drive, and beneath that, a warning: Minimum Maintenance Road. Someone has shot three holes in the sign, their edges haloed with rust. Beyond, the road turns again to the right and ascends into the trees.
“No way,” Stephen says. He stops and bends at the waist to brace himself on his knees. For a second O’Neil thinks his friend is about to throw up. Stephen gives his head a horsy shake and spits hard onto the gravel.
“Just don’t think about the hill.” O’Neil’s legs feel thick and sore, and he knows that if he stops moving his courage will leave him.
“It’s these shoes,” Stephen says. “I can’t believe you let me wear these fucking shoes.” He spits again and collapses on the ground, bracing his back against the thin signpost. He waves O’Neil on, his eyes already closed. “Here is where my job ends,” he says.
O’Neil doesn’t respond, and starts up the hill alone. He guesses it’s a mile at most to the top, but he runs easily in case the distance has deceived him. It surprises him, how bad he feels. Though he has slept only six hours and that not well, he hasn’t run for three days, and usually his body stores the energy. Today he feels as if he’s never run at all; his side aches, his fingers tingle with a strange coldness, and he cannot find the correct rhythm—legs, arms, lungs, the body’s musical sentence in three-quarter time—to match the hill that rises under him, carrying him up into the woods. The road is sloppy from late spring runoff, and O’Neil hears the soft gurgle of a nearby creek, winding its mossy way down the hillside.