The radio is playing a sullen tune; it bounces out like fifty pieces of grey metal clanging against the angles of the room in slow motion, a lonely dissonance like a machine running by itself in an empty warehouse so big you couldn’t see one side from the other. She stands there alone listening to it.
Her name was Amy and she came from the city—a basement place with the door set into street, so you had to walk down four steps before you could knock. She had a sad story, and you can see it in her face in that room listening to the radio. There aren’t any lines in her skin except one or two old scratches, but somehow her eyes and her cheeks are hanging like they’ve been filled with stagnant water.
She used to sit in that old row house alone too, but they didn’t have a radio. They had a TV, but she didn’t watch that too much. Sometimes on Saturdays if it would rain she’d sit and watch it.
Underneath the carpet of the back door that looked out on the alleyway filled with trashcans there was a loose stone and under that was a piece of plastic wrapped around a spare key. Beneath the plastic Amy dug a hole in the ground with her fingernails and buried a little box with a piece of paper in it. The paper was a note to potential future finders; it said: TO HE OR SHE WHO FINDS THIS NOTE: I am Amy, I live in this house, but who knows if there is even a house here anymore. There are three families that live above me on the other levels, so I guess it’s not really a house in that regard. Recent news is that there was a fire in Jacksonville this past week that killed ten people. Other news is that we just had an election and Andrea Duvall was elected to be our senator. I am 18 years old, and I have no siblings. The most popular movie out right now is Mount Rushmore Is My Home and the most popular song is probably Jimmy Jacks the Hero. I don’t need to say much more about myself because I will be famous by the time you read this, so you will know who I am. Or maybe it will be so far from now when you find this that my time of fame has already come and gone, so you may have to find me in the encyclopedia (and if they don’t have those anymore, I’ll just tell you I will be a singer and an actress first on Broadway and then in Hollywood, and I had a dog named Ox and a fish named Ginger, and I will marry the young man across the street who plays saxophone. His name is Richard.) Good luck to you and your world. -Amy
One day it was raining but she wasn’t watching the TV; she was just sitting in a chair looking at the square window on the wall. Outside it was grey and the rain dripped and sputtered against the screen. She saw Richard walk out of his home carrying his saxophone case and get into his car. He sat there for a long time with the saxophone case on the passenger’s seat and his hands on the wheel. He did not start the car.
“Richard,” she said, knocking on the glass.
He looked up confused, and then rolled down the window. “Hello. Amy?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing out in the rain? Would you like to come sit in the car for a minute?”
“Sure, I’d like that. I was just wondering what you were doing out here alone for so long. I saw you from our window—” She pointed across the street and he looked. “—and I was worried, so I came out here.”
“Thank you. Please get out of the rain. Come, get in the car.” She stepped around the front of the car to the passenger door and he opened it for her. As she got in he hooked his saxophone case by the black handle on top and moved it to the backseat.
“Thank you, Richard,” she said as she sat down and closed the door behind her.
“You’re soaked! What were you thinking?”
“I told you I came out because I was worried about you.”
“That’s awfully sweet, Amy, but I’m okay, really.”
“I don’t know if you are. Did you and your girlfriend break up?”
He looked back at her dumbfounded for a moment, and then he gathered himself and said, “Yes. We did. Just recently actually. I have a gig at that club on the East side, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it or not.”
“Why?”
“That’s how we met. She saw me play.”
“No, you and I met that day when it was also raining, and I was in my night shift getting that newspaper out of the street.”
His mouth hung slightly open. “I remember that.”
“You had a dog then; his name was Jeremiah.”
“That’s right,” he said, his mood brightening somewhat. “I named him after Jeremiah Johnson.”
“That’s right, that’s what you said when you introduced me. You said, ‘This is my dog Jeremiah, I named him after Jeremiah Johnson, you know the mountain man.’ Then you asked my name, and I told you it was Amy. That was when we met.”
“I remember that.”
“Yeah.”
They sat in silence for a long moment. After a while he looked at his watch and then looked in the backseat at his saxophone case, putting one arm on the shoulder of the passenger’s seat. “I don’t think I’m going to go to my gig.”
“No?”
“No, definitely not. I may never get work there again, but god, I just can’t.”
“Is it because of your girlfriend or because of me?”
“What do you mean because of you?”
“Because you want to stay with me instead of go to your gig.”
“Gosh Amy, what do you mean?”
“Richard, would you marry me?”
“Amy! You’re as old as my kid sister.”
“How old do you think I am?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen?”
She turned to look him straight in the face. His eyebrows were wrinkled together in concern. “I am twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four?” he said. He took his arm off the passenger’s seat to rub his forehead. “Gosh.”
“My mother used to say I looked much younger than my age.”
Richard didn’t say anything, but sat still for a moment.
“What happened to Jeremiah?”
“What?”
“Jeremiah. Your dog. The mountain man.”
“The mountain man or the dog?”
“Both.”
“I always heard the mountain man died up in the mountains one winter when it got too cold, but that’s kind of how all those mountain man stories end. My dog just got sick after enough years and then died. I had the animal service come and pick him up.”
“That’s sad.”
“Yeah.” Again, they sat in extended silence. They couldn’t even hear the rain anymore. “I’ll marry you, Amy.”
“Okay.”
So they got married. They moved out of the city and into the suburbs and they got their own dog. They named him JJ Junior. She never watched the TV anymore and they didn’t have a radio. She started to garden and eventually JJ Junior died too and they buried him next to the garden and the next year they planted a flower on top of him. They didn’t have kids because Amy couldn’t and Richard could bear that. He would sometimes think about how much he could care for a child, how he could listen for him before he was born inside her belly, and how even when Amy couldn’t be there for him, he could be, and how he could cherish everything he did even when others couldn’t. But he could bear it.
Once Amy thought of the note she put in that little box and smiled, and thought about how many years it had been since she had thought of that and the funny things that never leave you or come back to you in strange ways. She thought that probably no one would ever see it for a thousand years and when they did it would be too old to read, but maybe God would still see it because he was very old, and he would probably be still around then to read it, but maybe not.
They got old and Richard never thought about the little boy that could be and Amy never thought about the little note that was, and eventually they died together, and they were satisfied enough.
The little boy that could be was born to another couple named Richard and Amy, and she could have kids. Richard cherished him severely, so severely that Amy grew jealous of his love for him because she felt that every moment he loved him more, it was his judgement on her for loving him less. The doctor told her it was postpartum depression, but once she passed the postpartum she could bear JJ but never Richard, never Richard for loving him when she couldn’t. And because of that the boy could never love her for the bad feelings he felt she had towards his father and somehow that had something to do with him. He didn’t like the way she talked about him in front of him like he wasn’t there, and he liked the way his father would sit with him late at night when she was in bed watching TV and talk to him about whatever he wanted even if it wasn’t really anything at all. Eventually he went away and they all grew old and died and were satisfied enough.
The little note never got found and when they tore down the row of houses it ended up in a landfill, but God did see it. The writing was smudged, and he could barely read it, but he put it under a bright light and he could read I am Amy. He looked her up and found her in Heaven in a room he had forgotten about, all by herself, listening to the lonely sound of the radio.