Marathon Night

The dome swallowed sound in a funny way. I figured that out about ten steps through the door, when the waltz came at me from three directions at once, bouncing off all that curved white wall and wrapping around my head like fog. Twenty-four years of living and I'd never been inside an observatory before. My first time was going to be at a charity dance marathon on an island off Scotland, because apparently that was my life now.

I'd been flying students out of the little airfield near town for almost a year. I was good at my job, good at staying busy, good at not thinking about a night guard named Arlo who I hadn't spoken to in two years. Then my landlady bought two tickets to this thing, donated forty quid to some telescope fund, and caught the flu two days before, and here I was.

I looked around the floor. Couples swayed under the dome, wooden boards laid over the concrete, strings of little lights clipped along the railing that circled the telescope pit. The telescope itself sat under a big draped tarp, humped and gray like it was a sleeping animal. And standing next to the sleeping animal, holding a clipboard, was Arlo.

My stomach did the thing. The old thing, the dropping thing. Twenty-five years old, six foot of him, still wearing that dark green jacket I used to steal. His hair was shorter than when we were together. Everything else looked exactly the same.

I did what any reasonable woman does. I turned my back on him and asked a stranger in a blue sweater to dance.

"So is this your first time in the dome too?" he asked as we turned.

"First time anywhere on this island. I flew over it once, though."

"A pilot?"

"Instructor. Little airfield on the mainland."

"That's brilliant. I'm terrified of small planes, personally."

"Then don't look out the window," I said, and he laughed, and I let myself enjoy the laugh for about a minute before my eyes went back over his shoulder to where Arlo stood by the exit, checking badges, doing whatever night guards do at parties. He looked at the crowd. He did not look at me. Or he looked at me and then very carefully didn't, which is a thing you learn to spot when you've spent a year loving someone.

The waltz ended and a faster song came on and I traded the sweater man for a grandfather with hands like dinner plates, and then for two women from the ferry crew who danced together like they'd rehearsed it. Somewhere in there I caught myself scanning the room every time the crowd shifted. Which was stupid. I'd spent two years not scanning rooms.

Two years. He'd ended it the week I moved for flight training, over the phone, in about ninety seconds. Distance, he'd said. You'll be flying, I'll be up here in the dark, we'll just be hurting each other. I'd said a lot of words back, none of which I remember now except the last one, which was fine, and then I hung up and cried into a pillow shaped like a chicken.

I want it noted I was twenty-one when we met, at the college flying club, and he was twenty-two, and we had one whole year of being stupidly happy before the moving thing. Adults, both of us, doing adult things badly.

Another song ended. The band, three guys on a low stage near the doors, took a drink of water and started something slow. The lights dropped a little, warm and gold, and couples pulled in close all over the floor.

I was standing at the edge, deciding whether to buy a lemonade, when I saw him coming. Green jacket, crossing the boards between dancers, heading straight at me like he'd checked his bearings off the telescope itself.

"Ciara." Up close his voice was lower than the phone made it sound. "Do you want to dance? With me, I mean. This one."

I hesitated. I'd like to tell you I played it cool, but I mostly just stood there holding imaginary lemonade money.

"It's the first slow one in an hour," he said. "I checked the set list. It's my shift, I'm allowed to know things."

"Yes," I said. "Okay. Yes."

"Okay." He said it like he'd been practicing it.

He put his hand out and I set mine in it, and my fingers were cold and his were warm, and he didn't say anything about that, just pulled me in gently by the waist. He kept a polite hand's distance, respectful, careful, like I might spook.

"You look good," he said.

"You look tired."

"I work nights." A small smile. "I am tired. But thank you for choosing good."

We turned under the dome. Neither of us led, exactly, we just sort of agreed on a direction, the way we used to in his mother's kitchen, back when there was a his mother's kitchen for me.

"The ferry over was rough," I offered.

"It's always rough."

"You didn't take it?"

"I live here. That's the perk of the job, you live where the stars are."

"Right." I didn't know what to do with that, so I looked at his collar instead of his eyes.

"You still teaching people to fly?" he asked.

"Three students this month. One of them landed so hard the plane asked for a transfer."

He laughed, and that I remembered, the laugh, exactly the same, and it was worse somehow than if he'd been a stranger.

"And you?" I asked. "Still afraid of heights?"

"How did you know about that?"

"You told me everything, Arlo. You just stopped."

His hand tightened a fraction on my waist, not pulling, just holding. The song had maybe a minute left. Somewhere near the doors a woman rang a donation bell and people cheered, and it all passed over us like weather.

"There's something upstairs in my office," he said quietly.

"Arlo."

"An old tape. The machine still works, I check it every week, which is its own problem I haven't examined." He looked at me then, fully, and I made the mistake of looking back. "You don't have to. You can finish the dance and leave on the ferry and that would be fair. I just thought you should know it exists."

"Do you rehearse these speeches?"

"Every night for two years, apparently."

The song ended. His hand slid away from my waist and the cool air came in where he'd been, and around us couples clapped for the band and the lights came back up, plain and bright, and I stood there on the boards with my cold hands and my stomach doing the dropping thing, deciding.

Neither of us moved toward the stairs, or the doors. The band was starting another song, something with a fiddle in it, and we were still standing there in the bright up-lights like two people who had forgotten how to walk away from each other.

"One more," he said. "The fast ones don't count."

"They count."

"They don't. Nobody remembers a fast song." And his hand was back at my waist, and then, when the fiddle picked up, it slid up to the small of my back, flat and warm through my dress, and that was the exact spot his hand used to rest when we walked anywhere, and my whole nervous system apparently kept notes, because I leaned into it before I could stop myself.

I laughed at the second missed step. His, not mine. He stepped on my toe and said "sorry" and I laughed, really laughed, the ugly snorting kind, and he said "wow, okay," and I laughed harder.

"You haven't improved," I told him. "Two years and you still dance like a scaffolding in wind."

"You haven't gotten nicer."

"I've gotten very nice. Ask my students. They're scared of me but they say it nicely."

He murmured something against my hair when we turned, too low to catch, and I didn't ask him to repeat it. Some part of me knew if I asked, he'd say something true, and I wasn't ready for true yet. I was barely ready for the fiddle.

The song after that was slower, and by then we'd stopped pretending there was polite distance. His palm stayed at my lower back the whole time, steady, and my cheek found his shoulder without consulting me first. He smelled like woodsmoke and cheap coffee. He always had.

"Midnight," the announcer guy said over a microphone, way too cheerful for a man in a dome. "That's the marathon, folks, thank you all, the telescope thanks you, forty quid a couple, mind the steps on your way out."

The lights came up properly now, white and merciless, and couples peeled off toward the doors and the coat rack and the little ferry dock lights down the hill. I should have gone with them. The last ferry back to the mainland side was at half past, and I knew that, I'd checked it twice.

Instead I watched the band pack amps into a van and Arlo watch me watch them.

"The crowd's going," he said.

"I noticed."

"You could stay a bit. There's a viewing deck above the office. On a clear night you can see the whole strait lit up." He paused. "It's not a line. I'm not being smooth. It's just a deck."

"It was a little bit of a line."

"A tiny bit." He held the door of the stairwell for me, and I went through it, and that was my answer I suppose.

The office was small, and it looked lived in, which is a polite way of saying it looked like a man had stopped trying. A camp bed with a plaid blanket. A kettle. A cork board with tide charts pinned over what looked like a photo of a dog. And on the desk, wedged between a mug and a torch, a little grey answering machine with a red light blinking on it. Old fashioned, tape inside, the kind of thing you'd see in a museum and feel old