Picture Us In The Light

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  When I peek into my bedroom now my mom’s sleeping on my bed, her hair splayed across the pillow. On my nightstand next to her there’s an expired bottle of Vicodin from years ago when she sprained her ankle, and a cup of tea I don’t think she touched. I stand in the doorway as the crash flashes over me again, and with it all its alternate-universe endings—my dad and I coming home without her, my dad planning her burial—that I was so close to bringing about. I watch her there, remind myself she’s breathing, steady myself back in the world.

  Around lunchtime my mom wants to move back out to the living room. I help her to the foldout couch and then hole up in my room, lying down and trying to nap or trying to lose myself on the internet. She calls for me an hour or so later.

  “Can you—bring me—water,” she says, biting off the end of each syllable like it hurts to talk. “Time for—another pill.”

  I get her a glass of water and bring it over. She shakes out a pill from the orange bottle and swallows it, and then sinks back down onto the bed, wincing, then lies flat and tries to catch her breath. “The medicine makes me so tired.”

  I don’t know what to say to her—it feels wrong to be talking at all without having first apologized. But everything I try to imagine saying sounds so impossibly small, wet cardboard trying to hold up a rooftop. There’s nothing I can say in my defense, nothing that can possibly make the situation any better, in any way, and I can’t bear the thought of hearing that made solid and loud and permanent by admitting it. Right now that truth is a hard knot in my stomach. I say, “Okay.”

  And I can hear right away how it comes out all wrong—I sound hostile and sullen. She looks at me, wounded and maybe a little angry, and I should say it all then, at least try, but I can’t. I go back to my room instead.

  All afternoon and all evening I draw Mr. X. This time I draw him on a couch, hungrily watching immigration agents pointing guns at my mom on his TV, his blood pumping like his team just won the Super Bowl. It’s dark out and I’m shading in his knuckles (he’s holding a beer, enjoying himself, his cane lying next to him on his couch), when a knock on the door shatters the quiet, threatens to detonate my heart. I sit frozen at my desk for a good ten seconds, waiting, the room contracting and then expanding around me in time with my heartbeat. When I lean forward and look into the living room my mom is out still, the medication pulling her under the surface. Another knock. I get up silently, cold all over, and look through the peephole.

  It’s Harry. I close my eyes and try to breathe past that feeling like a belt cinched around my chest, wait for relief. It doesn’t come. And the realization crests over me then, my eyes still closed: I can’t go to Providence next year. There is nothing I don’t owe my parents now, and I can’t leave them on the brink of emergency like this each time someone knocks.

  I open the door and step into the hallway, closing the door behind me. “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? I came to see if you were all right, which, apparently, you are. Where the hell have you been?”

  His jaw is tensed. And something about the way he has his arms folded tightly against his chest—I’ve never thought this, ever, but I’m pretty sure he wants to hit me. I say, “I was here.”

  “And you couldn’t take five seconds to pick up your phone? I’ve been calling you since yesterday.”

  “I know. I saw. I just—”

  He lets his arms fall. He takes a step toward me and shoves me toward the wall, not hard enough to make me lose my balance, but not exactly gently, either. “You saw and you, what, just couldn’t be bothered?”

  “You know it’s not like that. It’s—it’s kind of a long story.”

  I say it quietly, and something in him deflates. “Okay, look,” he says, closing his eyes a moment, “I got kind of—it was a pretty bad night.”

  “You want some tea or something? I can make you some.”

  “No, I don’t want tea, I want—” He composes himself. “No, thank you.”

  “You want to come in and sit down?”

  “All right.”

  I hold the door open. He comes inside, slipping his shoes off and shoving his hands into his pockets and looking around. I close the door behind us.

  I can read the shock on his expression; it’s his first time inside. Failure always makes him uncomfortable; he always tries to gloss over it in anyone else and stamp it out in himself. But this apartment is unequivocally failure. I see it again through his eyes, the grimy carpet and ’70s appliances and boxes and bags stuffed with our things crammed into all the corners, rising up the walls. I see him start when he sees my mom, too, sprawled out on the pullout bed.

  I lead him into my bedroom, which at least has the distinction of being reasonably neat and unpacked. His eyes flicker sharply over the bare walls. He plops down on my bed. Even furious there’s an almost aggressive perfection to the way he holds himself—impeccable clothes, hair artfully arranged, a chiseled profile that’s highlighted, somehow, by his anger. For the hundredth time, I think fleetingly how nice it must be to be him.

  Even in the dim lighting, though, his cheeks look flushed. I say, “Are you drunk?”

  “A little.”

  “What the hell, Harry? You drove here drunk?” I’ll kill him.

  “Of course I didn’t. My parents would’ve heard the garage open anyway. I took Uber. Don’t tell Regina.”

  “Ah.” Regina thinks Uber is evil. “She’s okay, right? I should’ve called her, but…”

  He lets me trail off. There’s nowhere for me to really go after that but. I should’ve called her, full stop. Finally he says, “Yes,” his tone clipped.

  “That’s good. I was worried.”

  “Were you.”

  “I mean—yes.”

  “Cool. It’s great you called her, then. It’s great you didn’t just go dark on her overnight. It’s great you answered your phone all the times I tried to call.”

  “I know. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  He raises his eyebrows at the wall. “I didn’t mean to yell at you earlier.” His voice is stiff. “I didn’t—actually, you know what, screw it, I did mean to yell at you. Why the hell didn’t you answer any of my messages? I wouldn’t have done that to you.”

  I want to tell him the truth—about the accident, about everything. But I picture him getting up in horror and disgust and leaving, never coming back, and my heart curdles. There are some things you can’t bring yourself to risk.

  “I wasn’t trying to piss you off,” I say. I sit down next to him, my back against the wall. We’re close enough that our knees brush against each other. It feels like the Pop Rocks candy Ethan and I used to hoard sometimes when we could talk our dads into buying it for us, those small explosions I can feel all over. I wait to see if he’ll shift away. He doesn’t.

  I tell him about crashing (I don’t say how) and how my mom got hurt, and I tell him everything my dad told me after. I didn’t realize it until just now but I kind of subconsciously assumed, when we moved, that I’d never bring anyone I knew into this room. And him solid and angry next to me—it sets him in sharp focus and blurs the rest of the room around me like he uses up all my vision, all my atoms rushing to align themselves toward him in a way that leaves behind so many billions of lacerations. I’m still exhausted enough, and everything I’m telling him is still surreal enough, that the room has the filmy, detached quality of a dream.

  He’s stunned. When I’m done he’s silent a long time. Finally he says, “Illegal is a messed up way to put it. You’re supposed to say—”

  “Dammit, Harry, you think I care right this second? Does it look like I care?”

  He swivels to face me. His hand hovers over my knee, and I think he’s going to rest it there. I want him to so badly I can’t breathe. But then he drops it to the comforter instead. “What are you going to do?”

  “I guess what they always do. I mean, what is there to do?” He opens his mouth and I recognize the look on his fac
e, that one where he believes he can architect the right outcome in any situation if he just tries hard enough, and I say, quickly, “No, trust me, they’ve already thought of everything. This isn’t something you can fix.”

  He looks panicked in a way I’ve never seen him look. “You aren’t, are you? You were born here?”

  “I was born in Austin.”

  “So no matter what you’re good, right? You get to stay here?”

  This is why illegal is a shitty thing to call people, because it shifts the goalposts on you—suddenly the things about yourself that you want to matter don’t anymore; nothing matters. I imagine trying to defend them to Mr. X. This is why I had to stop reading the comments sections to everything a long time ago, because I couldn’t stop thinking about the real people lurking behind them harboring all that ugliness, sitting beside me in class, waving me on at a stop sign, in line next to me at the store.

  “I don’t mean it’s not terrible,” he says quickly. “I just—okay. As long as you—okay.” He exhales. “Okay.” He catches his bottom lip with his teeth for a second like he’s considering something. “Also, I wanted to tell you something. I got into Princeton.”

  “You—what?” The words come as if from another lifetime, folded like those origami notes all the girls used to give each other in junior high. I have to fumble to unfurl them. “You just found out?”

  “I got the letter yesterday.”

  “What’d they say?” Stupid question.

  “The usual. Congratulations, welcome.”

  Was this why he came, so he could tell me this? Am I supposed to be thrilled for him? A heat starts to spread behind my eyes, prickling across my cheeks and the bridge of my nose. Why the hell would he tell me this right now? “So that’s it, then? You’re moving to New Jersey next year?”

  The look he gives me—he wants me to understand something, but I don’t know what that is. “I have to, right?” He yanks at the string on his sweatshirt, knotting it into something elaborate he probably learned as an Eagle Scout. “I’d be stupid to turn it down.”

  What was it, exactly, that I was hoping for—that for how impeccably he’s crafted his application package the past four years he’d somehow only get into the one exact school that’s close to me? That he’d get in nowhere at all and would move to Providence just for the hell of it? That he’d decide, suddenly, the thing he’s wanted all this time doesn’t really matter to him? That now that I can’t go to Providence after all he’d say, oh, what the hell, I’ll just stay in Cupertino then? Still, I can barely speak. “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t think I’d get in.”

  In some parallel universe where I just left the election alone—then what? Would that have hurt his application enough that he wouldn’t be destined for a future he only wants because it’s in the one place he thinks will feel all his? Would Sandra be here still? Sometimes when it’s dark and I’m alone I torment myself with tests of my own morality: Could I say, honestly, that if it meant bringing Sandra back, I’d give up Harry forever? Could I do that? But in the end, it turns out, I get neither.

  “What about Regina?” I blurt out. It’s not even what I meant to say. My skin feels hot all over, ragged at its seams.

  “Assuming her parents let her, she’ll go to Northwestern. If not, she’ll go to UCLA.”

  “So you’ll just—be in completely different parts of the country? You’ll never even see each other?”

  “I mean, if we can somehow find some kind of transportation device that will lift us through the air and—”

  “Yeah, but what, three, four times a year you’ll see each other? Are you really in love with her?”

  “Why do you always ask me that?” He takes his eyes off his knot to look at me, but I can’t read his expression. Then he returns his gaze to the knot, and I feel like someone shoveled out the contents of my chest.

  “I just want you to be happy.”

  “I’m happy.”

  “Are you really in love with her, though? You never actually answered me.”

  He starts dismantling his knot. There’s a tremulousness in my voice that I hate, that I can’t scrub out, but his tone stays low and steady. “Yes. Right? I think so. But I started thinking about asking if she thought we should break up before college and I almost broke out in hives. I can’t do that to her. If she wants to break up, that’s fine, I’ll get over it, but you don’t break up with someone whose best friend died a year ago. You just don’t.”

  Not with that attitude, I think wildly. There’s a porousness in my head, like words might starting leaking out too fast for me to stanch them. “You’re really just never going to break up with her? What if she never wants to break up?”

  His smile feels forced. “Then I’m a lucky bastard. Regina’s a ten.”

  “You’d literally get married to her and spend your whole life with her just because you don’t want to break up with her?”

  “You’ve made promises to yourself, right? I know you have.” He drops the strings and doesn’t look at me. “That one was mine. Right after Sandra. Anyway, I could do a hell of a lot worse than Regina.”

  Of all the stupid scenarios I always imagined where I’d find the limits of his loyalty, it’s the most obvious one that I’ll have to live with: he’ll stay with Regina and move across the country, probably make a bunch of new fratty friends, let me fade from his life. And maybe not even because he loves her, but because it feels like the right thing.

  I don’t know why I can’t think of anything to say, or why he can’t, either, but the silence holds us, descends over us like a tarp. I sit next to him, still touching him, without moving, and I think how strange it is that you can know someone so well and feel them threaded through your life in more ways than you can count and then still they build out these places inside themselves that they retreat to and you can’t follow, can’t even really see.

  I feel light-headed. A car backfires outside, making both of us jump. The spell evaporates, and Harry reaches out and thumps me gently on the back. “I gotta get home. I’m still grounded.” He pulls his phone from his pocket and navigates it with his thumb. “There’s an Uber four minutes away.”

  I slide off the bed. My legs are numb.

  It’s just that I love my life here. Loved it, at least. And now so little of it is left.

  I walk down the stairs with him; I know Harry well enough to know both that the shadowy gated parking lot probably freaks him out and that he’d never say so. As we go I imagine him moving further and further into a life that’ll always be too distant for me to be a part of, all those unfamiliar days building up like fence planks while I’m stuck in a picked-over version of our old life, the one he shrugged off and left behind. I didn’t even realize how much I’d been clutching that hope that we’d end up in the same place after all—I thought I was more of a realist than that—but I feel it now, that sharp pain spreading into a dull ache like a fistful of hair being ripped out.

  I wish he’d just stayed home. I didn’t need to find this out tonight.

  “Listen,” he says, his voice echoing through the stairwell and coming to swell in my eardrums. “I just—I needed to see you with my own eyes. I had to make sure you were okay. Next time please, please just get off your ass and call me, will you? Please don’t do that to me again.”

  Something unspools inside me like a kite string. “What does it matter?”

  He frowns. “What do you mean what does it matter?”

  “I mean—” I’m trembling in that way you start to when it’s late and the night has bleached all traces of the day from you and you’re depleted. “Who cares, right? In a few months you’re moving to New Jersey anyway. I’ll probably never see you again.”

  “What the hell? Why would you say that? Of course you’ll—”

  “Did you really have to come here and tell me this tonight? I’ve had literally the worst two days of my life.”

  At first he looks startled, like he can’t believe he he
ard me right, and then his voice goes hard. “Yeah? Maybe I would’ve known that if you’d bothered to call me back.”

  “I was a little bit busy.”

  We’re on the ground now, and we let the stairwell door slam shut behind us. His Uber’s waiting there, a vehicle summoned from the darkness to whisk him back to his perfect life that’ll funnel him into the future he’s always planned for. Harry jams his hands into his pockets and turns to face me.

  “You guys need anything?” he says tightly. “You want me to run to the store for your mom tomorrow or anything?”

  I can’t say why it’s that, of all things, that does me in. “Just go.”

  “Just go?” He lifts his hands in an angry, empty kind of way and then lets them fall. “You know what, thanks for all the support. I really appreciate the congratulations. Thank you, as my best friend, for not trying to guilt me about the most important thing I’ve ever done with my life. It’s not like I’ve spent the past four years or anything trying to—”

  “You weren’t even supposed to win that election.”

  He squints at me. “What?”

  “Sandra won the ASB election.” My heart is careening through my chest, pounding sideways and upside down and in every direction, roaring in my ears. “I changed the number of votes.”

  His face changes, slowly at first and then all at once. “What?” he says again, and this time I don’t answer; I know he wasn’t really asking. And immediately regret billows around me like steam, condenses on a mirror, and my skin feels hot and damp. I didn’t plan to say that. I was never going to tell him.

  “You would’ve gotten in anyway,” I say quickly, even though I know that’s not the only part, even though it’s too late. “You—”

  But he puts out a hand to stop me. And I always thought I would hold that secret because of what it said about me, because it would expose me in those moments I was emptiest. I was wrong, though: it was because of this exact look on his face.

  The Uber driver, a white guy in his twenties, rolls down the window and leans out. “Is one of you Harry?”