GABRIEL CARDOSO

GABRIEL CARDOSO WHITE NOISE VOWS

Painful, super-heated words had dissolved into single-syllable remarks and then silence. One of them had turned the stereo down to a level just above mute, and the sounds of the flapping windshield wipers and the snow tires crunching through fresh powder were too repetitive to be considered anything but white noise. White noise to match the cold, white blanket that was steadily covering the hibernating, mountain landscape.

Charlie was hunched over the steering wheel like an ossified nursing home resident, rather than a young man seemingly just past his prime, trying his best to peer through the pelting snow and continue their dangerous, two-and-a-half-hour drive home. His wife Hazel sat in the passenger seat, staring out the side window, lost in her own microburst of frozen thoughts.

“Why did you even tell me at all?” he asked with a shake of his head and a pained snicker at his own expense. He didn’t bother looking at her. He just kept his eyes locked on the faint set of tire tracks he was following faithfully to keep them on the road and out of the ravine. “Obviously you have a complete fool for a husband. You could’ve gotten away with it forever.”

“Please don’t do that. You know I don’t feel that way.”

“No, I don’t know anything about the way you feel actually.”

“What do you want me to say, Charlie? What do you need me to say to you that I haven’t already said?”

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Hazel shifted in her seat uncomfortably. Her brow was pinched and visibly vibrating with emotion. Her eyes were discernibly red and damp, even in the low light of the car’s interior.

“I don’t know,” he admitted truthfully, at a loss for an answer to his own question. “Nothing I have to tell you to say. Nothing you shouldn’t have already said.”

Another five minutes of silence. Another two miles of mostly buried road. They rounded a corner and were bombarded by the bright, flashing lights of a police cruiser parked at the bottom of the final, eleven-mile stretch that led to the summit pass. Stabs of red and blue color caromed off the pine trees huddled on each side of the pavement.

“No, come on,” bemoaned Charlie as he tapped the brakes and coasted forward cautiously, already knowing what was unfolding. “Not tonight.” The pass’s orangeand-white-striped traffic gates had been manually lowered into place, blocking the route forward. The road was in the process of being closed.

A snow-covered policeman waved them down, and Charlie reached to lower his window so he could talk to the man. Hazel beat him to the punch; she thrusts open her car door and stepped out to plead with the officer. Frigid, blustery air rushed into the car and made Charlie shiver so hard that his teeth chattered. “Please let us through,” she begged. “You don’t understand the kind of night we’ve had.”

“No, you don’t understand, lady,” responded the officer. “There’s been an avalanche. Nobody’s getting through for a week probably. You folks will have to turn around.”

Hazel got back in the car and dolefully settled into

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her seat. She was slow to close the door, perhaps briefly debating running pell-mell into the wintery woods. Fresh tears queued up behind her eyelids as she looked at her husband. Charlie was staring forward blankly, rubbing his forehead in consternation. “What should we do now?” she asked him quietly.

Charlie put the car into gear and cranked the steering wheel. “We turn around, Hazel. What other choice do we have?”

They drove back to Boise like strangers. Hazel turned up the stereo volume so he wouldn’t hear her crying, but one of the lines or melodies made him angry enough to jab the power button like a pugilist. “I don’t like our songs anymore,” he said with a cracked and swollen voice. “He’s ruined them for me. Something else I’ll have to thank him for.”

“If you’re going to hate someone, it should be me,” she said dejectedly.

“Don’t think that I don’t.”

“You haven’t threatened to kill me.”

“I didn’t threaten to kill him, I promised to. Big difference.”

“He’s not the one who made vows to you. I am.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t give me nine and a half good years first. He’s a complete stranger, and he had no right to change my life for me.”

“I told you, I put an end to it.”

“Mmm-hmm. And yet he keeps emailing you. Pretty strange behavior over something that’s over, so you’ll have to forgive me for not believing a word that comes out of your mouth.”

Hours of diligent, white-knuckled driving later, and they reached the outer limits of Boise. “You can drop

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me off at my parents’ house,” she informed him.

“Gladly.”

The traffic and neon lights of the capitol city made Charlie feel even more isolated. He looked longingly at the passing cars and imagined the drivers and passengers inside them living happy, carefree lives in complete contrast to his own. He felt abandoned and betrayed and enshrouded by fog in a world that was sunny for every other citizen.

He turned into her parents’ subdivision. His heart started racing, sensing an end to something that he wasn’t prepared to ever give up, a garden he’d vowed to tend until one of their deaths made him stop. His foot was prideful though and refused to quit pressing down on the gas pedal.

A white, two-story house came into view – a normally warm and welcoming residence where he’d spent nearly a decade’s worth of happy Thanksgivings and Christmas mornings since their wedding on a crisp September Friday. He was silently thrashing in the deep end of his own panicky thoughts when Hazel put a firm, yet shaking, hand on his knee. “Keep driving, Charlie. Please.” He hated himself for taking some small degree of satisfaction in her cascading tears.

“What for?” he asked, practically starving for her to give him the right reason.

“I don’t know yet. Just please do it.”

Charlie circled the block three times before either of them figured out what to say next. “We had a pretty good run for awhile, didn’t we?” he asked rhetorically. A cluster of good memories swam into his thoughts and made him both cringe and smile with nostalgia.

“I wouldn’t give back a second of it,” she said.

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“But you did, Hazel. You gave it all back. You let me go.” He pulled to a stop in front of her parents’ house. The motor chugged and nearly quit, but Charlie gave it a little gas and managed to keep it running.

“I know I did. I know. And now I’m scared that I’ve made the biggest mistake I’ll ever make in my life. Please, Charlie. Just keep driving. I can take over if you’re tired. Please. Let’s take the long way home, baby. Let’s go home.”

Charlie didn’t respond for a long, drawn-out minute, unable to make a decision. Pride screamed at him to kick her out of the car, throw her belongings on the snowy lawn, and drive away. Deep, unending love bellowed at him to do the opposite.

“Please, Charlie. I’m not ready for this to be over. We can be good again. I want that. I believe that about us.”

Charlie closed his eyes in potentially bottomless thought, and then he took a chance: a swan dive and a sink or swim splash off the most daunting precipice of his life. He put the car into gear and applied a feather’s weight of pressure to the gas pedal, tentatively opting to roll forward into an unknown future with the best person he’d found in his life. Still. Forever. Despite everything.

They stopped at a bustling truck stop – its cheerful lights twinkling in the snowstorm – loaded up on gasoline and stale coffee and overly-sweet donuts, and then they buckled their seat belts and drove the long way home, talking about old times mostly. They arrived at their half-frozen cabin just after dawn. Charlie brought in an armload of split logs and sparked a crackling blaze in the wood-burning stove while Hazel retreated to

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the bathroom. He was waiting with a towel when she stepped out of the shower, steam rising from her naked body. She hesitated on the bath mat and burst into a fresh ocean spray of tears, shaking her head at either the towel or the extension of kindness on his part.

“Come here, love,” he said, meaning it fully.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed.

“I know you are, Hazel. Come here, beautiful. We’re home now.”

She eschewed the towel and dried herself in his embrace instead. And the tenderest, springtime part of Charlie’s heart turned to permafrost when, for the first time in their long romance, he caught himself wondering if he was the man she was actually squeezing in return.

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