“Why else would she have shown up if she wasn’t here to see you?” he asked.
I knew she was there to see me. “Why now?” I asked my friend.
“I’m not sure.”
Then he asked, “Do you think this is the best time for this?”
I had to see her. I had to know why. It didn’t matter whether Abby was beside me in our bed or sound asleep in Cold Creek—I needed to know the answer. That was my excuse, so I wouldn’t feel deceitful when choosing the clothes I would wear, making the climb up the mountain, practicing what I would say when she opened the door.
My hand grips the wheel, and I am afraid and ready. Though I have studied her every nuance and know the feel of her body in the dark, I have no idea what I am up against.
The rain falls hard against the windshield and there are spots along the windy road that force me to ride the brakes. I know these roads. I know each landmark. The Farm at Banner Elk. The curve that splits highways 194 and 184. The cell phone graveyard where all calls are dropped. The computer repair shop. The old wooden sign that reads “Snow Chains.” There’s Cynthia Keller of Emerald Mountain Realty racing to her truck with her drenched dog on the seat beside her. Fox Pointe. Jackalope’s. Fred’s. I am getting closer and my heart emits a warning. There is a buildup of tension in me that makes every turn of the wheel an exercise. I can manage a team of overgrown, wily teenagers, but when it comes to Lauren, I have no big play up my sleeve.
Anger ignited me this morning when I drove off in the dense Charlotte fog. I know that if I have carried my anger at Lauren all this time it means that I have loved her just as long. I am torn. Conflicted. I hate what she did to us. To me. And with a baby on the way all those years ago, I could look only forward and not back.
The rain is coming down harder at the top of the mountain. The clouds are stormy and full, galloping across a gray sky. I stop at the scenic view just below the Alpen Inn. The bench and map of the mountain are coated in the harsh slap of rain. The view is shielded by fog, but the marker tells me that I have arrived on Beech.
It is about eight minutes to her house. We had done the drive so often, we knew exactly how long from her road to the market, to the ski lifts, to our favorite hikes. I also knew exactly how much time it took for Lauren to collapse into my arms and fall asleep at night, or how hard she needed to be held when we said good-bye, how many freckles lined the inside of her right thigh.
The thought forces me to close my eyes, and the sounds of the heavy rain drown out a forgotten stirring deep inside my gut. What are you doing? I have always been a man of logic and facts, stats, numbers. On the field they make sense. Up here, I am trying to calculate the time we have missed, the lost hours, the broken promises. As I continue the descent toward her house, I don’t know what I’m doing. I am on automatic pilot, being pulled by a force that I’ve never been able to control.
I see her before she sees me. I know this because she is wearing her glasses, and they are fogged up from the condensation. She is sitting in the old wooden rocking chair on the front porch with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. The house is large and daunting, and at once I am thrown back into another time. I pull into the gravel driveway, and she stands up. Lauren. She is a shock to my system. If it were not pouring down on us, I know she would hear my heart asking her questions, the ones I’d held in for so long, the ones that can no longer remain quiet.
I run toward the covered veranda, through the thick glaze of wet, and we stand across from one another. She is my Lauren. Only more beautiful.
“I knew you’d come,” she says. They are the first words I’ve heard from her lips in seventeen years. I feel them circle around me. “Come inside,” she says, waving me in, not touching me with her open hand. She’s dressed just the way I’d imagine she’d be: faded Levi’s, white T-shirt. Her rain jacket is bright green.
I realize I haven’t replied to her. I have not said her name aloud, though I had imagined this moment repeatedly in my head. My sweater is soaked, and she offers to throw it in the dryer. I decline by shaking my head, because words escape me. I don’t want to undress in front of Lauren, even with Under Armour protecting me. We step through the foyer, she hangs her jacket on a hook, and we sit down in the open living room.
“Can I get you something?” she asks. “Coffee? Scotch?”
I shake my head no.
“How’ve you been, Ryan?” she asks.
There is a singular thread of normal that makes being in her living room the most natural thing on earth. I blink. She is still here, and nothing is the same between us. I am staring at her, tracing the changes in her face, studying the sapphire eyes. All at once I hate her. I hate what we have lost. I hate all the things we missed. I hate that I hate, because I know it can mean only one thing. I have a wife. I have a life. But I am looking at Lauren, and I love her. I still love her.
“Ryan?”
She is seated on the brown leather couch. I am across the room from her, on the bench that is carved out of tree bark, in front of the fire. We had sex on this bench.
I grip my knees with my fists and look toward the floor.
She sits proud, seemingly unaffected by my presence. It is hard to determine which one of us has the right to be more pissed.
“Lauren,” I finally say, finding her eyes and releasing her name into the air.
The rain tickles down the exterior of the house and thunder rattles the windows and floors. The winds have picked up again, and the howling noises crawl along the rooftop.
She has gotten up from the couch and takes a seat beside me on the floor. I can’t avert my eyes from her. Her pale face is gently lined, fuller and prettier. Everything good about her at twenty-one is even better today. Her hair is long and falling around her face, past her shoulders. And it makes her sexy as all hell.
“Ryan,” she says again, looking up at me. And it is then I notice a difference in her. It is her eyes. They are the same deep blue, the same depth that once pulled me in, though what’s in them I’m not really sure. Her hands are clasped in her lap. She is waiting. I am waiting too.
“Why didn’t you come?” I ask.
Maybe she doesn’t hear me because she doesn’t say anything. So I say it again: “I need to know why. What happened to us?”
The indifference in her face moments ago is replaced with something resembling shock. “You really don’t know?” she asks.
And this puzzles me. “Know what?”
She seems mad. And sad. Her eyes are many shades of confusion, heavy with something she can’t say out loud. She turns away and says, “Oh, my God.” She repeats it over and over and I want to touch her lips to make her stop. When she finishes, she turns to me with a distant look in her eyes. “I’m not sure it matters anymore.”
“Yes, it matters. I fucking loved you.” This wasn’t the Lauren I once knew. The Lauren I knew would understand that it mattered, the way we once mattered.
“I guess everything happened the way it was supposed to happen,” she lies, locking her defeated eyes onto mine.
“I don’t understand you. This isn’t how we talk to each other, this philosophical bullshit,” I say.
“You’re with Abby, Ryan. What do you want me to say?”
The way she says it pummels me. I was trained on offense and defense. I am failing at both. A silence comes over us and she breaks it by asking me if Abby’s all right. Quarterbacks have to be careful about letting their opponents read their plays through their eyes. It’s a skill I have drilled into my boys. I turn my head away from her so she can’t see how much she is killing me. Those eyes could talk me into anything. I stare out through the glass doors and study the rain that by then has slowed to a drizzle. It makes the things we aren’t saying louder, and I sigh. “Is this how we’re going to do this, talk bullshit pleasantries? She’s fine, Lauren. Fucking great.”
“I don’t believe you. You were never much of a liar.”
I bring my eyes back to hers. “I never had reason to
lie to you before.”
She is hooking me, stringing me along.
“We were happy, weren’t we?” she asks.
The question makes me want to get up and run. It hurts. I have never been able to protect myself from Lauren.
“Abby’s sick,” I admit. “She’s been having a hard time the past few years.”
“I can’t imagine why. She got everything she wanted.”
We absorb the harshness of her words, until she takes it back. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
I want to touch her face. I want to touch the hair that falls against her cheeks. I want to smack her, scream at her.
“You left me no choice,” I finally say.
“How wrong you are,” she says, though it is barely a whisper. “We all have choices. At least now I know what Abby did with hers . . .” And before I can get more out of her, she stops. “I’m sorry, maybe it’s not good for us to rehash the past, Ryan. That’s not why I showed up last night. I don’t want to play the blame game. I can’t. It took me too long to move beyond it. It shouldn’t matter anymore. I needed to see you. I needed to see what it felt like.”
“Yeah,” I whisper to her eyes, “What does it feel like?”
Her face is inches from my own and our stare is painful and deep. If I close my eyes I can inhale the old, familiar smell of lavender. She uses the same shampoo. This is what she does to me. My head falls into my hands. The blackness brings images of us across its screen. She is spreading her legs for me to come closer, she is grabbing my face in her hands while she kisses me, she is pulling at my hair. She comes to me in fits and feelings. My whole body responds to her being near.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” she finally says. “Everything we lost.”
I know Lauren, and her defenses are wearing thin. Long-forgotten feelings are finding their way back, making it impossible to pretend we don’t matter anymore.
“You left,” I say. “I would never have stopped you, but you could’ve stayed.”
“That’s not fair,” she says, shaking her head back and forth. She would push me away, but that would involve touching me. Instead, she straightens and says, “You know I loved you. That’s not how we got here. And showing up last night, I had to know you were happy.”
“That’s it? That’s all you wanted?”
She crosses her legs like Juliana and watches me, to see if she can see through me. If there is something else, she isn’t budging. Then she abruptly gets to her feet, her long legs following her like flower stems. She grabs her laptop off the table and sits beside me on the bench. “My literary agent has my only copy, so I have to show it to you digitally—this is what I’ve been working on.”
I pretend not to feel her leg against mine. The screen comes alive and before me are the reasons Lauren left: Jog Falls in India, Murchison in Uganda, Plitvice Lakes in Croatia. She is describing each one to me, and I am immediately struck by the beauty in her photos. She always had a knack for capturing the best in her camera lens. I hate myself for being jealous of the places that took her from me.
“There are excerpts about how I photographed each fall, stuff Jean-Pierre taught me, and passages about what each fall evoked in me. You have to adjust the light and camera speed when you’re shooting falls so it doesn’t look like a blob of white. You have to be precise. One millisecond off and the image isn’t caught. Timing is everything.”
I really don’t give a shit about Lauren’s waterfall pictures.
“These are one of my favorites,” she says, pointing at a stack of falls that she explains are nestled against the Brazil-Argentina border. “Iguazu Falls. We spent two weeks there. It took us that long to get the right amount of light to shoot. They’re much larger than Niagara Falls. You would like them. There’s Devil’s Throat.” She points again, and I am half-listening, pledging to myself that I will not inch closer to her on the bench. “It’s one of the widest cascades of the falls. Just breathtaking. You don’t realize how big the world is. That’s the lower falls,” she says. We took a boat ride right through it. It was incredible. And this is a shot I took from the river, looking up.”
I wonder if she can tell what she’s doing to me. The world is by no means that large, not when you love somebody you can no longer have. When you love somebody like that, it’s small and cramped.
“It’s nice,” I finally say, not bothering to ask about Jean-Pierre or any other men in her life. I hadn’t expected her to be alone all these years.
“That’s all you have to say?”
“What do you want me to say, Lauren? They’re beautiful? Part of me hates these damn falls.”
She doesn’t disguise the accusation when she says, “You did this, Ryan.”
She recedes from my side, getting up from the chair and pacing the floor. Her ass looks small and tight in her jeans. I pretend not to notice when she catches me staring. She’s thinking about something. I can tell by the way her forehead scrunches into lines, lines deeper than they used to be. She wants to say something more, but she shrinks away from me instead.
I turn back to the computer and follow Lauren through the China-Vietnam border, all the way through New Zealand. Each fall is unique and spectacular in its own right, though I have always preferred the hidden falls we found on our many hikes through these mountains. Less traveled and close to home, they were ours alone to discover. When I reach the end of the project, Lauren has scribed her acknowledgments onto the page. They read: “All my life I have been hampered by issues of sight. Without lenses, I am legally blind with limited depth perception. For someone who enjoys excavating the beauty in ordinary things, I am thankful for the devices that allow me to witness, capture, and preserve the pure beauty of our world. Not very often do we find a beacon in another living being whose light guides you toward your dreams, when futures and landscapes are blurry and indistinct. This journey would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of one very special person. His vivid memory inspires me daily. It is because of him I am able to see things clearer today than I have ever seen them before.”
I have no doubt those words are meant for me. “I’m glad I could give you clarity.”
She is standing beside me, running her fingers along the mantel of the fireplace. There are photos in frames that used to hold pictures of us.
“You inspired me,” she says. “Would I have preferred it to have happened in other ways? Yes, but I wasn’t given a choice, either. I never forgot what we had. I never forgot what we meant to each other.”
I place the computer on the table in front of me. I am stormy mad. Whatever’s left of the surge outside is now inside of me and clamoring to come out. “My father died, Lauren. If anyone knew what that would do to me, it was you.” My voice begins to crack. “You didn’t call. You didn’t come back. You didn’t do anything!”
My questions circle around her, and I can see her struggling with the answers. Agitation spreads across her cheeks as she holds back, something she’s never had to do with me before.
“Say something!” I say. “Give me a reason. Tell me you didn’t get the messages . . . Anything!”
“I got the messages!” she shouts.
“Then what?” I say, “What was it? What was it that kept you away from me?”
She turns her head, but I can see she’s rattled. Her cheeks turn pink and she forces her eyes closed, hiding what she doesn’t want me to see. Maybe my accusations and demands are too much for her. Her silence is too much for me. It pokes the air around us, making it difficult to breathe. I can’t sit here much longer. But then she faces me again and starts talking. Her voice is tangibly sad, her words full of regret. And something else.
“There were reasons—there are reasons—I can’t expect you to understand. But I swear to you. I swear to you, Ryan, if I could have been there for you, I would have been. Nothing would’ve stopped me.” The tears are spilling down her cheeks, and I am at once off the bench and standing in front of her. She is
staring into my eyes with a fierce, forgotten longing, and though the crystal blue remains fixed on mine, drops fall from each eye. The fine lines down her face want me to touch them, but I can’t.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “I loved you. I know you loved me.”
“I did,” she says. “And it’s complicated.”
“You loving me, or something else?”
“I loved you completely,” she cries out. “I loved you with everything I had. I gave you pieces of me I will never get back. No one else has ever been able to fill those places.”
“Why come back? Why now? Lauren, it’s so much easier knowing you’re far away. I don’t know how to be here without you. I don’t know how to be this close without touching you.”
“It was time to finish the photographs for the book,” she says, her cries becoming softer while she takes a tissue to her nose. “Believe me, I knew how hard it would be to return. And you have Abby,” she says, straightening herself. “I didn’t do this to us.”
“You did, Lauren. You disappeared. We were supposed to have a life together. I gave you a ring.” Here is where I have to stop myself because I’m saying things I can’t. I’m talking to her as though I’m free to love her again. And I’m not.
She dries her eyes with the back of her hands and rubs them on her jeans. We take our seats at opposite ends of the couch. I was prepared to feel this way about her, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so fast. I thought we would catch up and get to know each other again, and the old feelings would crawl back into their respective places. Instead, it has been instantaneous. So dangerous we have to rewind the conversation, make it so it never happened.
“Tell me how you’ve been,” she says, the traces of what we’d once meant erased from her cheeks.
I let out a painful laugh. “I can’t do this with you.”
“It’s all we have, Ryan.”
“It’s crazy,” I say. “It doesn’t feel right.”
Lauren’s tender gaze gives a small token of comfort. “I didn’t want it to be this way. I really didn’t.”
Where We Fall: A Novel Page 16