“Why?” I asked.
He winked at me. I swear to God, he winked at me. And then he said, “I want to make Tom insanely jealous.”
“Let’s go, then,” Miles said, laughing. And with that, they left me. Stunned. They took the dance floor, laughing and awkward and wonderful. I felt such love for both of them. Such love.
I looked over to Jeremy’s friends, who were all watching. I wondered which of the boys was Tom. If Jeremy was serious. Then I looked over at my father, at everyone else who was watching, confused and excited. Something was happening. I knew my father would blame me. I knew he would say all of this was my fault. And I would take it. I couldn’t take any of the credit for my astonishing brother, but I would happily take all of the blame. If it could be in some way my fault, then I would know I’d done something right.
I would stay to find out. And stay, and stay, and stay.
It is never, I hope, too late to be a good brother.
BREAKING AND ENTERING
People never change the place they hide their keys.
It was right after midnight. Back when it was summer, back when I had some reason to hope. Cody’s parents were out of town for the weekend and Cody’s keys were locked in his car, seven blocks away. He took me around back and we walked quietly through the night foliage, listening like thieves for the neighbors who would notice, the ones who might tell. I wasn’t supposed to be there, wasn’t supposed to be the boy Cody loved, wasn’t supposed to see when he moved the flower pot and revealed the spare key underneath. He didn’t say anything, didn’t swear me to secrecy. He just held his breath a little as he squeezed past me to the door, ran inside so the alarm wouldn’t sound. When I walked in, I had to call out for him. He reached me before I got to the light switch. We found ourselves in the dark.
Now it’s afternoon, four months later. Cody is gone, but the key is still in its hiding place. I don’t know what I’m doing here, only that I have to be here, doing this. Breaking and entering. The breaking has already happened, is always happening. So I reach for the key. I fit it into the lock. I enter.
I should be in school. I should be enjoying the first breaths of the last gasp of my senior year. I should be living my days like they are the best days.
Cody is in a place I’ve never been, with people I’ve never met. Somehow I allowed him to step into the future without me.
From a schedule I saw back when all such things were hypothetical, I know he is sitting in an English class right now. I can picture him there. I can see him slumped back and doodling. I can see him after class, walking over the green. Or asleep in his dorm room, eyelids closed. The pattern of his breathing. I can see it clearly, and none of it is true. It is only my version, which is imagination.
This place is real. These steps are real. I am in his house, surrounded by the house silence that is not like breathing at all. There is only background. It is a sound like loneliness—enough to let you know you’re there, but not enough to fill you with life.
I have very few memories of the kitchen, but it’s still hard to be in here. It’s wrong and it’s stupid and it’s hard. I can’t deny what I’m doing anymore, not with the sink dripping and cereal bowls in the sink. I remember the sliver of the kitchen I saw that night when the refrigerator light knifed it open to us. Four in the morning, he could stand there naked and not be afraid. I wore his robe and took comfort in the thought that I was making it a little bit mine. Everything we did that night seemed so brave and so doomed. Brave because we felt doomed, doomed because we felt we’d always need to be brave. Even getting orange juice at four in the morning. Looking into that light.
I want him to know I’m here now.
I want him.
The sink drips and drips and drips. Cars pass outside. The key is still in my hand, fitting.
There are things he told me. His fear of stormy nights. The time he kissed a boy in summer camp, pretending it was a game. His father’s affair. The strength of his love for me, even if he didn’t always call it love.
I remember these things. They are my proof that we actually happened. He wouldn’t have told me these things if I hadn’t meant something to him. I have to hold on to all the truths he gave me. Even when they seem so incomplete.
I drive past this house all the time. I’ve made it on my way to school. Sometimes I slow down. I don’t know why. Only that it’s where he once was, back when we were.
We’d said we’d keep in touch. But touch is not something you can do from a distance. Touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it’s gone, it’s gone. We should have said we’d keep in words, because they are all we can string between us—words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen. But they cause more complications than clarity. On the phone, there are always voices in his background. On the screen, there are always the sentences saying he has to go.
I know he is gone, but this house is not. That’s the best way I can explain it. I cannot touch him, cannot press my hand against his body, cannot feel the warmth spread from his skin. The best I can do is touch the things he has touched the most. I just want a moment in his bed. To trace.
The stairway is lined with photographs. He is every year old. That night, the one that’s slowly becoming a lifetime ago, he walked me through all the class pictures, all the bad haircuts and awkward smiles. Him as a seven-year-old ring bearer and him as a fourteen-year-old on the lip of the Grand Canyon. That night, he held up a flashlight and he told me about the photographs like they were words in a long sentence. Then he turned the flashlight off. He took my hand and led me forward.
His room looks the same. His parents always leave the light on. To ward off burglars. To pretend someone is home. I don’t have to touch the switch. I don’t have to do anything but walk inside. I know he took things with him. I was there when the car left. I stood there camouflaged by his other friends in a group good-bye. I saw the milk crates of books and the sheets and the toiletries crammed into the backseat and the twine-tied trunk. But the room doesn’t seem to have suffered from the subtraction. Most of the books remain on the shelves; I see a copy of Demian and wonder if it’s the one I gave him or the one he already had. I take some solace that there aren’t two, that a book he would associate with me has made it to his room at college. I cling to the associations.
The bed is made, ready for his return. I put my face to the pillowcase, hoping it might smell like his echo. Instead it smells like laundry. I take off my shoes. I curl up on top of the sheets. I clutch.
We fought over who it would be easier for. He said I was lucky to be in the same place, to have such a familiar world around me, to have the friends here and the knowledge of where I was. I said he was lucky to be getting a new beginning, to be moving on.
I don’t know what I thought I’d find by breaking in here. An envelope with my name on it, awaiting my arrival? Cody himself, standing in front of the closet, deciding what to wear? An entirely empty room, as robbed of his presence as I am? No, not really. Maybe all I wanted was what I find now: rest. Simple, uncomplicated rest.
The light fades. The day ends. The door opens, and I’m asleep. It isn’t until she’s in the room that I stir. I sense her presence before I can register it. She stands there for a beat before saying anything.
“Peter?”
I open my eyes. There is light, there is color, and there is Mrs. Baxter standing in the doorway, looking like she’s come home to find all the furniture rearranged.
I am surprised she knows my name. I’ve met her probably a dozen times, but it was always in passing. I was a sound in another room, a door about to close, a phone call answered before she got to it. I’d never felt like a boy with a name to her. Cody had wanted to keep me separate.
“Hi, Mrs. Baxter,” I say, sitting up and turning out of bed. Staring at my shoes unlaced on the floor.
“Is Cody here?” she asks. But she’s looked around. She knows the answer.
“I don’t think so,” I tell her. If I
bend over to put on my shoes, I will have to turn my head entirely away from her. That seems rude, so I just sit there.
I always thought Cody looked more like his father—the same shoulders, the same dark hair. But there’s something in Mrs. Baxter’s eyes that looks familiar. I don’t know whether it’s their shape or color or just the way she’s looking at me now, trying to piece the situation into sense. I get that glint of Cody from her.
“How did you get in?”—this is said calmly, almost kindly. She’s not alarmed. I don’t get that from her.
“I used the key.” I’ve let go of it, lost it in the folds of the blanket. I reach over for it now, hold it in my palm for a moment before offering it back to her.
She doesn’t take it. She has her own keys in her hand. Unjangling car keys and house keys and probably office keys. Her hair is shorter than I remember. When Cody left, she must have cut her hair.
I reach for my shoes and then stop. I feel the key in my hand and I stop. I don’t look right at her and I don’t look all the way away from her. She is standing next to Cody’s desk and I am looking at the photos on the bulletin board. I am looking for me. I am looking for some sign of me.
If we were strangers, she would be calling the police. If I had been a part of her life, if she had known me, we would be talking. But instead we’re somewhere between strangers and familiar. So the questions fill the room in their silence.
He pulled away from her. He never told me that, maybe didn’t even know it. But all the times Cody talked about his father and everything his father did wrong, he never said anything about his mother. Not to me.
I know the situation is my fault, so maybe that’s why I finally say, “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
And she doesn’t say anything. For just a moment, she gives me a look that makes me think that, yes, it’s possible she does know exactly why I’m here, more than I know myself.
“I’m so sorry,” I continue. And it’s like the last word is a hurdle and I can’t leap it, because something in the word snags my voice and suddenly I am giving everything up. I am letting my shoulders fall and I am feeling myself become the absence, feeling myself become that gasp and sob.
I could never say what I was to him. He never let me know, because maybe he was afraid that if I knew, everyone else would know, too.
But keeping my guard up has taken too much. Now I just want it to end. I’ve always wanted the happy ending, but now I’ll just settle for the ending.
Here. In his room. How had we managed to erase the rest of the world? Because that is what it took for us to crawl into the naked silence, into the truth of the thing, into the doomed and the brave.
Now the light is on and his mother is here and I am on the edge of his bed and my head is in my hands. My eyes are open and I’m not seeing a thing because I am so lost inside.
I hear the hit of the keys as she puts them down on the desk. I see her legs as she walks over. I feel the weight of her as she sits on the bed next to me, not touching.
“Peter?” she says gently.
And I say it again. “I’m sorry.” And again.
He is so far away and he doesn’t feel it like I do. He doesn’t feel it.
We sit there. Breathing, thinking.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” she says. “I’m just a little confused.”
I can tell from the sound of her voice that she’s not looking at me, just as I’m not looking at her. We’re both looking in front of us now. At the empty doorway.
“You miss him,” she says. And my first instinct is to deny it. Deny us. Deny her. Deny myself. To admit one thing is to admit everything. It has always been that way.
So instead I wonder what my silence says. Because even if I cannot say yes, cannot say so much, I also can’t bring my voice to say no, to say I don’t really miss him at all.
Quietly, so quietly, she says, “I know.”
I turn to her then. And her eyes are closed. Her coat is still on. Her left hand is gripping her right hand. Then she opens her eyes, sees me, and smiles. Not a big smile, or even a welcoming one. But a small, rueful smile. It could be kindred, or it could just be sad.
“It’s not easy,” she says, in that voice that mothers have, that mix of unwanted knowledge and small consolation. “Whatever you had—I don’t know exactly what it was, and that’s fine. But it must not be easy for you. You miss him, and that’s okay. But you have to figure that if it’s too hard to hang on, then maybe you should let go.”
I want to ask if he’s mentioned me.
“What is his room like?” I ask instead. “Up there.”
She looks at me for a moment, deciding something, then says, “It’s fairly small. Not much bigger than this room, but for two people. His bedspread is blue. It matches the carpet, which is something we couldn’t have known. We got him a refrigerator. One of the small ones. His roommate seemed very nice. I think they get along.”
“Does he call?”
She nods. “Yes. We talk for a few minutes. Every few days.”
If I had been the same age. If I had gone to the same school. If I was in that room right now. There’s no way to know if we would have lasted. There’s no way to be sure, and plenty of reasons to doubt it. I just wish I’d had the chance. That is one of the things I miss the most—the chance to make it work.
The whole time I thought that I was figuring him out, wearing down his hesitations. But really I was wearing myself down in order to spend that one last hour, that one last sentence.
“Peter,” Mrs. Baxter says. And it’s almost the way he says it. That mix of love and reproach. “You can’t do this. Look at me.” I do, and it’s not his eyes I see. No, it’s something completely separate. A different kind of concern. “Do you understand? You can’t do this.”
I start to say I’m sorry again. For using the key. For being here, when all she probably wanted to do tonight was take off her coat, sort through the mail, wait for the call.
“It doesn’t work,” she continues, unclasping her hands, smoothing her skirt. “What you’re feeling right now doesn’t work. You can’t wander around and think the wandering will call them back. Believe me. I know you don’t want to hear the long view, but let me tell you. You are so young. I know it’s none of my business. But still.”
She sounds surprised by her own urgency, by the fact that she is talking to me this way. I doubt she gets to give advice often. Certainly Cody never took it, to the point that he never mentioned her giving it.
She stands then. Puts her hand on my shoulder and lifts herself off the bed. Walks to the doorway, then turns back around.
“You can stay as long as you need to,” she says, “but don’t do this again. This is the last time.”
I know I didn’t come here to say good-bye. But suddenly it feels like it is.
She picks up her keys off of his desk and looks at me, at the room, one long time before she steps into the hall. I hear her bedroom door close behind her. Cody’s door remains open.
I don’t need any souvenirs. I’m sure there are things that I could take that he would never know were missing. But I already have an unlabeled collection of things that are ours. We would ink our skin blue and sign messages with our thumbprints. We bought our favorite movies for each other. We made our own yearbooks to sign for each other, a month or two before he left.
The yearbook I made could be with him now, or maybe just hidden somewhere in this room. I say good-bye to knowing the answer. I say good-bye to the sheets that don’t smell like him. I say good-bye to the robe that’s forgotten what I felt like. I say good-bye to the part of myself that misses him so much. I say good-bye to hope, but I also say good-bye to hope’s disappointment.
I turn the light off as I leave. Then I remember, and turn it back on. Leave the room as I found it, but not untouched.
I call out good-bye to his mother. She calls good-bye in return.
I head back down the stairs. I head through the kitchen
. I open the back door, then close it behind me. It is only then that I realize I still have the key. I go to the flower pot, which I hadn’t moved back in place. It is dark now outside, but I can still see the outline of where the pot should be sitting, the faint impression left by the key. I return the key to its hiding place, then conceal it once more.
People say good-bye, and then they take one last look. I am a few steps away when I turn to his window. And there, as I watch, the light goes out. The door closes, and I walk away.
SKIPPING THE PROM
Our story was going to be that we’d overslept, but in the end we told the real story, which was better. Not more exciting or daring. Just better.
From the beginning, Kelly didn’t want to go to the prom, and neither did I. I think I would’ve gone if she’d wanted to, and vice versa. But we wanted to spend the night with each other instead.
We’d been going out for five months, and we knew we wouldn’t be going out in another five months. It was a conversation we had by never having it; in the same way we’d be graduating from school in June, we knew we’d be graduating from home in August, and that meant graduating from our relationship as well. We were sad about this, but not sad enough to change it. We wanted to be realistic. We prided ourselves on our realism.
It was hot that night, so I was wearing a T-shirt and an old pair of shorts, and she was wearing some sleeveless Gap top and cutoffs. We’d discussed getting dressed up like everyone else, but decided to go for comfort instead. Instead of heading someplace fancy, we went to our local diner. It was amazing to see it so empty, and to know that we weren’t going to bump into anybody from our grade. Even though we were a couple, it was rare for us to get a chance to go out on our own. We had a group we called “the group” because it wasn’t defined enough to have a more elaborate name. It was just this mass of friends we moved with from time to time—in school, then from school, then after school, and (maybe once a year) instead of school.
How They Met and Other Stories Page 15