Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines Page B

blessed rank down here. I didn’t mind it when I was with Tommy because he thought there was something cool about this place, something kind of anthropological.
    One time I stood in the dark with him and watched him as he smoked a cigarette. When he took a drag, we both lit up. He laughed at my skittishness and I pulled the lighter from his hand and held down the button for a while. Sometimes memory rips you and that moment, that experience of light, keeps going through my brain like burning fuel. It’s hard to imagine that Tommy is gone, even though I saw him cut out of this world.
    The walls are damp, every surface tagged, drawings from people who were here before us.
    He said, —I guess everyone wants to go back to the womb.
    It was a dumb joke, this place is not where I’d imagine anyone coming from, but I laughed anyway. I loved his voice, especially when I let my thumb off the lighter and it turned dark again and he was nothing but voice and I could imagine he was six-foot-six and fifteen years older and finally right for Allison.
    —I don’t, I said.
    And I didn’t. I never wanted to return to the crawl space of Allison or the belly of the cosmos or wherever we hail from. Not because there’s something wrong with her, entirely, or wrong with the universe, entirely. I mean, I love Allison and feel sorry for her, for it. But you don’t want to travel backward.
    —Yeah, well, that’s what makes you smart, he said.
    He didn’t say it sarcastically. Tommy meant things like that. I looked down at the crown of his head, the smoke swirling around it. I took a drag from his cigarette and then he took my hand and showed me the way to the locker rooms.
    Remind him constantly of his victories. Keep his heart warm even if you have to set the house on fire , Bylaw 32.
    I don’t know if Allison did that enough. She was kind of burned out by the time she married Tommy. Or she was just too taxed with Thad. I think they hooked up because of her position, the influence she could offer. I don’t know. I think she loved him. Probably more than I understood.
    I open my phone now and use it as a flashlight, weak as it is, because Tommy told me you can run into false doors down here, that it’s easy to get lost, that you never know who or what you’ll find. And that thought has my skull pounding. I can feel a patch of sticky blood where I got hit in the back of the head. I remove my T-shirt, wad it up, and hold it there with my free hand.
    I want to call Allison but the reception is worthless down here. I begin to take pictures with my phone. Not for the images but for the small pulses of light the phone throws off. I’m draining my batteries for light.
    Water is coming off the pipes now, it’s drumming on my shoulders and head, dead water running down my back and chest and arms. That happens when they turn the fire hoses on the crowd in the stadium, so I know what’s going on up there. And I’m feeling sick wondering what they’ve done with Tommy. That’s something I’ve never wanted to know before—what they do with the people who die in the ring. Because we always left right away and the organization took care of all of the arrangements, and all we had to do was make it to the funeral in one piece. Allison has never talked about what happened to them and it’s possible she doesn’t know. But I suddenly feel guilty for not knowing if the caskets of her husbands, my fathers, were sometimes empty or missing parts. Thinking back on the succession of men Allison married, I’m convinced this was true: that there was a lightness to some of their caskets.
    What I’m really worried about is that someone will steal Tommy’s hand and try to sell it on eBay, though I don’t know what it will be worth now that Caesar’s Inc. has begun the process of downgrading him.
    The noise of the stadium crushes overhead, the vibration drills into my bones. I find a doorknob.
    I’ve been in this room before.
    A few pieces of