“We drove around for a while (by then we’d decided we liked the looks of the city and maybe we could move here and marry Texans.  That changed today…)” – travel journal entry – Day10

In Between Days

He called again the midnight I touched a coyote.

I was working strange shifts at the time, because I liked living in between days.  I liked the still, heavy anticipation of the sixty seconds at midnight when nothing was yesterday or tomorrow, when nothing that happened counted because it couldn’t be recorded as happening on one day or the other.

I had once thought I’d marry a Texan, but we’d never set a date.  We had not split up, either, so he was both going to be my husband and not going to be my husband.  He was not here, but not gone.  He would call, always at midnight, but he would not say anything.  He would call from different numbers and he would just breathe, and I knew it was him because his breath was a fog I had to duck under or climb over to find the horizon.  He was another part of my life that both was and was not.

Every midnight, before I got into the car, I held my breath and put my arms out and waited for the sky to open up, for something beautiful and cataclysmic to happen.  Sometimes he called, and sometimes he didn’t, but either way nothing happened and something did.   But this midnight I dropped my keys, and shattered the quiet between time and not time.

When I bent over to pick them up, the phone was ringing in my purse and there was a dog, prancing jerkily in front of me.  I stood up slowly and patted the dog on the head.  I said “What are you doing out here, boy?” and then I saw in the moonlight that this was both a dog and not a dog.  I had not yet thought the word coyote because I answered the phone, but touching it gave me a feeling of no-going-back.

“Hello?” I asked.   A line open as arms, but with more static.  The coyote and I stood staring at each other, while my not-husband breathed.  The coyote was stuck between a pounce and a pause, as dogs often are; the coyote was both a dog at a stay and a wild animal on the verge of flight.

I took the phone from my ear and saw a zero become a one on its screen.  My not-husband did not hang up.  I peered out from under the fog of his breath, and it parted for me: ahead I saw an early sunrise that could not be.  “Hello?” I said, “It’s very early, or very late.  Are you in trouble?”

“No,” he said, finally, and for the first time, “I’m in Austin.”  A wet nose nudged my hand.

On July 9^th, 2003, as a coyote settled at my feet, here and Austin moved through time.