The Copper Wire Between Us

The calluses on my palms had hardened into permanent ridges from twenty years of climbing utility poles. My forearms were a roadmap of scratched-healed scars from cable strand that bit back when I got careless. Up here, eighty feet above Tampa, the world reduced itself to wind, nylon, and the rhythmic *clink* of my gaffs digging into wood.

Liam would've hated this height. He was the guy in the bucket truck, the one who drank lukewarm coffee and complained about his sciatica while I risked my neck. We weren't friends—not really. But you don't climb poles with someone four hours a day for six years without knowing the precise cadence of their breathing, without learning which silences meant "I'm thinking about my daughter" versus "I'm about to snap."

The morning they found him facedown in the retention pond behind the Comcast depot, I was splicing fiber at the edge of a subdivision. Swimming in that stagnant water. Not even a proper drowning—they said it was a heart attack, said he probably never felt it. But I kept imagining the moment when his chest seized up, how the water must've seemed like the wrong kind of comfort, how the pond's surface closed over him like a second skin.

The detective said they'd found his phone nearby. The screen cracked but still functioning. They asked if I knew his password.

"Same as mine," I told them. "Every Tuesday we changed it together. Company protocol."

They looked at me like I was hiding something. And maybe I was. Because what I couldn't explain was that for six years, Liam had been the only person who knew exactly who I was calling at 2 AM from the top of pole 47-B. He knew the number by heart because I'd dialed it from his truck more times than I could count. He knew she lived three states away. He knew she picked up on the fourth ring every single time.

The call log showed he'd tried to call me the night he died. Just once. Two minutes past midnight.

I still climb the poles. Still splice the cable. But sometimes, when I'm suspended between earth and sky, held only by the leather strap around my waist and the faith that the wood won't rot under my feet, I imagine him down there in that water, swimming toward something I couldn't see, wanting to tell me something I never answered.

My palms still ridge the same. The cable still hums with voices that aren't mine. But some connections don't need wires at all, do they? They just stay open, waiting for someone to finally pick up.