Anaerobic Capacity

I wrote this after reading Stephen King's The Gingerbread Girl

Anaerobic Capacity


By Melissa Tyndall

Erica stepped out into the waning light of the fall afternoon. The cool air filled her lungs, and as she began to jog, she absorbed the autumnal colors whizzing by her in a fiery blaze of gold and burgundy.  Her knees were older than she was. The tendonitis ached and swelled, and she listened to the rhythm of her feet pounding the pavement to distract herself from it. She was bemused by her shadow bounding down the hill of her neighborhood, an obstruction of light, tall and gangly. She and her husband, Nick, had lived in Blue Ridge for five years. She taught English at the community college, him history at the university.

He liked that she went running, that she made time for herself, and they still could spend time alone after seven years of marriage. 

“At least we’re not one of those couples,” he said once, “that spend all their time together, yet aren’t together. When we’re together, we’re together.”

He would be getting home about now. He’d set his briefcase by the door, set his keys on the end table in the foyer and shake out of his jacket. She hated that jacket, the cliché, the history professor in his corduroy coat he’d purchased with patches at the elbows. He’d see her note: Gone running. xoxo, and wait patiently. 

After nursing a glass of bourbon in his study for an hour, the melted ice left a layer of water on top of the booze. Her prolonged absence piqued his worry. He shook it off. He told himself this was just a long one. There were only four weeks of class left and she’d gotten 100 essays this week. Bad ones. Essays that used witch instead of which, or called their peers collage students and didn’t differentiate between find and fined.

Fifteen more minutes passed, and he refilled his drink as his mind wandered. An old Army buddy once told Nick that he used to go on runs as a cover for seeing a married woman. It was a secret affair, an interracial affair, with an officer’s wife. They kept this secret from everyone. He would run near her home. They would meet sexually, clandestinely, and they combined passion with a thrill. He wondered if Erica could have a lover, but then abashed himself. They slept together. An affair wouldn’t be about sex or children. When they’d met, he was sterile. She was disinterested in motherhood. The matter had never come up again. It became a flat line in history, the subject of his obsession. His heart grew quiet and hope no longer beeped out the syllables of his last name.

The ice and slightly discolored water sloshed in his glass. He loosened his tie with his free hand, wondering how many minutes he should wait before it was appropriate to go looking for her without seeming like a suspicious, crazed husband. How many minutes could he wait without breathing?

Maybe he should have gone to look for her already. By now, night had fallen, and any number of things may have happened. She could have been lying at the side of the road. Perhaps she’d been struck by a car if she’d worn dark colors. It was conceivable that she’s been attacked by a dog. Even worse, she could have been assaulted by a man. The idea pushed a King story he’d recently read into his mind. His wife was instantly that woman, the runner, kidnapped by a psychopath and fighting for her life. It was called The Gingerbread Girl, he remembered, because it always made him mull over the children’s nursery rhyme. Run, run, fast as you can; You can’t catch me…

But she was caught; then, not caught, and he considered this as he rose from the chair and walked to their bedroom to change. He wore his old Commodores sweatshirt and jeans, and imagined a hike through the woods to find her. He worried that a man, like the one from the story, had tossed his wife’s body into the lake behind Rock Castle. His keys were in his hands when she came through the front door, her left arm over the shoulder of a boy half her age – her students’ age. Concern lay in Nick’s heart, but in his gut, he felt the muted pangs of nausea that accompanied jealousy.

A neighbor boy, dirty with lawn work. A Good Samaritan whose name he couldn’t recall, but Nick was sure it was probably something like Jimmy. A rebel, a fast driver that insisted he be called Jimmy because James was too formal, or that was his father’s name, or because a 20 year old man with an old-fashioned name didn’t get laid unless it was by an Ethel, or June or Ruth. Being called Jimmy made him accessible.

“It was stupid,” she said, hobbling over the threshold. “It probably looks worse than it is.”

Nick set the keys on the coffee table and drew her other arm over his shoulder. He and the boy ferried Erica to the couch and propped her ankle up on a pillow. 

“I twisted it on a small pothole and started limping home. Harvey saw me while mowing his lawn and was nice enough to help me home.”

“Harvey, huh?”

“Yes, sir. My dad is a big fan of the old west. Especially the Wild Bunch.”

“And he named you after Kid Curry?”

“Most people don’t get that.”

“Nick’s chair of the history department at the university,” Erica said as she winced from the couch.

He smiled and held out his hand to the kid, but in a formal way, as if Harvey just dropped off Nick’s nonexistent daughter after a date. 

“Thank you, Harvey.” 

“No problem, sir. I’d have taken her in my car, but it’s in the shop and my parents weren’t home.”

“You did fine.”

The neighbor boy said goodnight quietly, respectively, and Nick went to the kitchen to get his wife an ice pack. 

“I was just on my way to look for you when you showed up,” he said, handing the pack down to her. 

She arranged it on her ankle and leaned back into the pillows propped against one arm of the couch.

“I know. I’m sorry,” she said, smiling slightly and almost sadly. “I thought about you when it happened. 

I wished you were there.”

“Well, I guess it was good you weren’t alone.”

 “Harvey was nice wasn’t he?”

 He didn’t look up at her. He lifted her legs tenderly, sat down at the end of the couch and set her feet in his lap. He lifted the cold pack gently and studied the bruise growing splotchy and fiercely turquoise from her ankle to the top of her foot.  It wasn’t until then that Nick noticed the gold anklet with a heart pendant – one he hadn’t given her.  He grabbed her roughly, causing her to cry out in pain.

Nick turned the heart on the anklet over to expose the engraving “E+H”. He rose and headed for the door, and ignored Erica’s pleas for him to stop -- to act rationally. Nick wondered if he could catch up with the boy before Harvey got  home.