Take Me Back

by Sally Mandel

  Someone flipped her hood over her hair. She looked up to see an unfamiliar boy grinning down at her. “Guess what,” he said. “It’s snowing.”

  “I suppose that’s because upstate New York still thinks it’s winter.”

  He brushed the snow off a spot beside her and sat down. “Mind if I join you?”

  Amy shrugged. She didn’t care one way or the other. Although he was extremely good-looking, with clear blue eyes and dark hair falling across his forehead.

  “I’m Theo,” he said. “I’ve been waiting all week for a chance to meet you. It’s the first day you haven’t been surrounded by half a dozen girls.”

  It was true; ever since her parents separated, her friends had been sticking to her like nettles. She knew she should be appreciative, but mostly she just wanted to be left alone. And now here was this person breathing her air. He did have a dazzling smile.

  “You must have a really good dentist,” she remarked.

  He laughed. “Three years of braces. Amy, right?” He held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.” She didn’t bother to ask how he knew her name.

  On their first date, he took her to a bar. Amy could easily pass for twenty-one. Theo had brought along a fake ID that he’d had made up for her just in case — a very convincing driver’s license that said she was from Topeka, Kansas. The photo was Marcia’s, that slut, a close enough likeness if you didn’t stare at it too long. Besides, it was so dark in there you could hardly see anything anyway.

  It turned out that Theo was finishing up his sophomore year at the state college, which made him around twenty, Amy thought, five years older than she was, which didn’t faze her especially. Older guys always seemed to like her. Even the father of one of the kids she babysat for had grabbed her thigh once in the car during the drive home.

  “I’m a sophomore, too,” she said. Thank God, she thought. They had tried to move her ahead two years ago. Her mother had been ecstatic, but Amy didn’t want to leave the friends she’d been in class with since kindergarten. “What are you researching at the library?” she asked.

  “Term paper on Dostoevsky. I found a great essay on The Idiot. It was even the exact right length.”

  Amy was surprised not to find herself more repelled by this. Since her decision to become a writer, she had developed fastidious habits of accreditation—the ownership of ideas was, to her, sacrosanct. She disapproved of Theo’s casual larceny all right; she just couldn’t work up a lather over it.

  “What’s your drink?” Theo asked her.

  “I can’t,” Amy told him.

  “Oh, come on. At least have a brew.”

  She explained about the hives.

  “Well, then, I’ve got something just as good,” Theo said, took a screw-top bottle out of his pocket and shook a capsule into his hand.

  Amy hesitated.

  “Honey, you are all twisted up in knots,” Theo told her. “You need something to get you through the rough patch.”

  Gazing into his guileless eyes, she realized that she had no life. She was a husk, a milkweed pod, no heft to her at all any more.

  “I’ll make sure you’re okay,” he said.

  And so she took the capsule from his palm and swallowed it dry. Pretty soon, she felt herself growing pleasantly warm, as if she were a hot water bottle being filled up. No more cold, no more emptiness. She smiled at Theo, at everyone in the bar. She smiled at the world.

  “You’re a magician,” she said to Theo.

  “Not really,” he said, grinning. “I just wanted to see you happy.”

  He didn’t sleep with her the first night. Not that she wasn’t willing. Amy had never been so attracted to anyone in her life. After she swallowed the capsule, she found she could look straight through Theo’s clothing, could see the long smooth muscles of his arms, the curve of his shoulders. She needed to have physical contact with him and kept her fingers on some part of him at all times. He seemed aglow to her, surrounded by pale light. He was a gift. And finally, after what seemed months to Amy, though it was actually only two weeks, he made love to her in the small apartment he rented off campus.

  “I’m not a virgin,” she said. She had matured early, years before her friends, but she had kept quiet about it. Not that she was ashamed; she simply guessed that they wouldn’t understand.

  Theo had given her another sort of pill an hour ago, a small yellow one this time. Her skin began to feel like it was shimmering, all the tiny hairs along her arms prickly, and standing at attention. It seemed miraculous to her that simply by ingesting a tiny scrap of yellow, a person could go from feeling nothing to feeling everything. She couldn’t wait for him to touch her.

  “I don’t care if you’re not a virgin,” Theo said. “You’re my clean pretty girl. You could never be anything but clean.”

  She supposed it was the drugs, but tonight she was a vessel full of words, words that kept replenishing themselves as she talked, talked, talked. Theo seemed keenly interested in her family, as if she were describing some fascinating alien species.

  At some point, though, she realized that she knew next to nothing about him. She noticed the pale welts across his back and traced them with her fingers. “Did you have surgery?” she asked.

  He just shook his head with a smile and climbed out of bed. When she questioned why he had left home when he was sixteen, he said, “Let’s just say I was safer out of there.” He hadn’t been in touch with his parents for more than a year, a fact that floored Amy. She could barely imagine a week without contact with her own.

  After that night, Amy spent all of her time with Theo or else plotting ways to meet him. She began to lose weight. Food didn’t interest her, and it was hard to sleep because the drugs kept her pretty wired. She managed to skip out of school early most days by telling the principal that she was still recovering from mononucleosis and needed extra rest, her pallor lending the story credibility. She had an outstanding academic record and was president of her class. As Miss Solid Citizen, who would have doubted her?

  The drugs were fantastic. And Theo was the best drug of all.

  As the weeks passed, Tuesday nights became even more of a problem. Part of her parents’ separation agreement stipulated that her father was to see her every Tuesday. Amy wondered who dreaded it the most. She was supposed to spend one weekend a month with him as well, though to Amy’s relief, he hadn’t yet called upon her to fulfill that one.

  Once upon a time, Amy and her father had been close. He had liked poetry and would write her little rhymes in doggerel. By the time she was ten, Amy was pretty deft at it as well. When she went to sleepaway camp one summer, she wrote poems to him about her friends and the horrible food. He would send back silly limericks about the family cat, poems she kept safe in a special black lacquer box.

  Amy had also spent one of the happiest days of her childhood with him. Having decided that he was going to establish a commuter airline, he got himself a pilot’s license and took Amy up with him. They didn’t tell her mother ahead of time, but radioed her when they were already in the air, thinking it would be a delightful surprise. Stella didn’t speak to Simon for a week, but it was worth it. Amy had the most glorious day. “Let’s go to Cape Cod for lunch,” her father said as they soared up over the treetops and into a summer sky. Cape Cod may as well have been the moon. They took a taxi from the little airport near Chatham to a clam shack and gorged themselves on steamers and lobster rolls. It could bring tears to her eyes when she thought about it now.

  “Do you mind going to the mall for a bite?” Simon asked. “I need to pick up a couple of things.”

  “Fine,” Amy said.

  Most of the traffic as they drove east along Route Five was farm related: tractors, slow-moving trucks loaded with hay or corn to feed the dairy cows. Soon enough, the heavy vehicles would all turn off and disappear up the little ribbons of back roads that led home. Amy kept the window open so she could smell the fresh, green air.
Neither she nor her father spoke. It used to be fun to ride with him. He’d had so many questions about her, as if she were the most interesting person he’d ever met. Not the standard stuff like her mother would ask—“How did your math test go?”—but “What does it feel like inside your head just before you fall asleep?” or, “If you could be one person for a day, who would it be?” All that now seemed like an awfully long time ago.

  “Things going okay at school?” Simon asked finally, dutifully, his speech lapsing into the rhythm of his youthful tongue. Half British and when he was tired or less than comfortable, he started to sound like he was broadcasting over the BBC.

  “Yeah,” Amy answered. In the old days, before he’d turned into a non-person, he would have asked something like, “Which of your teachers has the best sense of humor?” or, “What was the worst thing they served in the cafeteria today?”

  I used to like you, Amy thought. I used to love you. She knew for sure she used to call him “Daddy.” Now she didn’t call him anything. For so long now he had been more like a silent ghost in the house than a father. First he’d retreated into his tiny office where he stayed all day, often in his pajamas, to “work” on the computer, though everybody knew he was watching daytime television and tugging at his cheek with his fingers as if he were trying to peel his face off. Amy tried to talk to him. Tried and tried and tried again. He had simply looked at her as if she were something unfamiliar that had somehow strayed into his vision, like an eye floater. The poet was gone, and so was the pilot. The English didn’t believe in therapy, Stella told her. Apparently they didn’t believe in antidepressants, either, and one night he just packed up and left.

  It got easier once they were inside the mall in Utica. There was the fast-food restaurant to choose—the trays to pick up, the food to order, the table to find, none of which required conversation. Amy sat across from her father in the busy food court and shot him a look from under her sun-bleached eyebrows as he twirled miserably at his spaghetti. He had buttoned his shirt wrong, a sure sign of a man who lived alone. The sudden pain in Amy’s heart migrated to her throat and lodged there. She set her fork down.

  “How’s the new apartment?” she asked, giving up on dinner.

  He lifted the corners of his mouth at her. “I haven’t opened the cartons yet.”

  “Would you like me to come over and help?” It just slipped out.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “I’ll get around to it eventually.”

  He dropped her off at eight. It was still almost light outside. Amy knew she should hunker down and start studying for her finals, but all she could think of was how to meet up with Theo. She reminded herself that she still had a chance to remain at the top of her class. Even with Theo. Even with the drugs. She tried to tell herself that she’d see Theo tomorrow. Maybe it wasn’t such a long time to wait. He said he’d take her bowling. The idea appealed to her. Maybe she could make it through an entire evening without drugs.

  On the way upstairs she was stopped in her tracks by an unearthly sound emanating from her mother’s bedroom, a chilling wail that crawled up Amy’s back and across her scalp, leaving a trail of goose bumps.

  “Mom!” she cried out. “Mom!” She bolted the rest of the way up, nearly tripping on the top step in her haste. She half expected to intercept an intruder at the bedroom door, a serial killer who had left her mother lying fatally wounded in a pool of blood. The howling continued unabated as Amy catapulted into the room.

  Stella was lying on the bed in the fetal position, clutching a pillow and splitting the air with her cries. The room felt damp and close, as if misery had sucked the oxygen out of it.

  Amy sat down beside her mother and touched her shoulder. “Mom. Stop. You’ve got to stop.”

  The sound halted mid-scream as if someone had clicked the off button. She lay rigid and still.

  “What’s the matter, Mom? What can I do?” Amy asked. She stroked Stella’s shoulder.

  “Go away,” Stella said.

  “What?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  Amy’s hand fell to the bed and lay there, stunned, like a bird that had just slammed into a plate glass window. Stella rolled away from Amy and put the pillow over her head. Amy stood up. The room felt unsteady as if the floor were tilting. She grabbed the bureau to steady herself. Then she went to the telephone and called Theo.

  Amy was the best-looking girl Theo had ever dated. Oh sure, her nose was a little asymmetrical and her front teeth overlapped just a bit, but as far as he was concerned these flaws only made her more adorable. Having a beautiful babe around had never posed a problem for him. Most likely to succeed … with women—this is what it said in his yearbook, right there below his photo. The guys gave him grief about Amy, called him a cradle snatcher. But Theo knew that they were just envious.

  Theo loved nights like this, especially in his old MG, when he could put the top down and blaze through the summer night like a shooting star. He had some great shit on him, too, and looked forward to turning Amy on. She’d always looked so sad before, even surrounded by that pack of friends, but the drugs, they’d made her happy right from the start. That smile of hers could melt a glacier. Amy had sounded pretty hysterical over the phone just now, but he could take care of that in no time. He loved that, loved being the instrument of her joy. Watching the shadows leave her face, listening to her laughter, it was better than any pharmaceutical.

  Maybe it was a little weird, given the drugs and the sex, but Amy had a purity about her. Theo had noticed that from the beginning, the way she sat in the library turning a strand of shiny blonde hair around her finger while she read. She always smelled so clean, like fresh air, like something that lived in a garden. He liked having that in his life for a change, so different from anything he’d known growing up. You never knew what kind of lowlife would stagger out of his mother’s bedroom in the morning. When he left four years ago, it was tough coming up with money for an apartment and gas for the car, but the drug business soon took care of that and then some. He knew it wasn’t forever. One of these days he’d need to get started on a real career. But in the meantime, he was having the best time of his life. So what if Amy was young? Down the road, a difference of five years? It wouldn’t mean squat. The fact that he was actually thinking about a future with her kind of amazed him. This was a whole new thing.

  Rather than dropping her off a block from the house as he normally did, Theo had insisted on taking her all the way home. “It’s 2:00 a.m.,” he said. “The last thing I want is to set your old lady off into mother bear mode.”

  “Not likely,” Amy had answered. “Not even with a nuclear device.”

  He pulled up to the curb and leaned in to kiss her good night.

  “I didn’t know I could ever feel this good,” Amy said.

  Surely Theo’s heart was visible through his shirt, he thought, pulsing with a warm and golden light. Gone, the inner fireball of anger ordinarily afflicting him, like a serious case of indigestion. Incredible. He was always angry.

  He laid his hand against Amy’s cheek. “Your eyes are like disco balls,” he said. “Better not stare at anybody for a few hours.” He gave her a gentle push and watched as she walked slowly away from the car. She kept stopping to look up at the trees with that big smile on her face. God knew what she was seeing. She must have a real party going on in her head.

  It was too beautiful to go inside. Amy sat down on the front steps of the house and felt the breeze ripple like silk against her bare arms. She reached out, convinced she could catch the soft fabric in her hands, but it eluded her. She gazed up into the branches of the weeping willow. Its slender leaves were swaying in a rhythmic waltz. And just beyond, the stars throbbed along with the night music. She loved it all so much. She was overflowing with summer, with song, with joy. Why would she ever want to sleep again?

  There was a soft sound beside her, like the clearing of a throat. She turned and saw a
cricket sitting on the step beside her. She stared at it for a moment.

  “What?” the cricket said.

  “Did you say something?” Amy asked.

  “I believe I asked you first.”

  Amy let out a long breath. “I must be really stoned.”

  “You got that right,” the cricket said.

  Amy sat very still. Moths beat against the front hall window where the light escaped from the house, making small sounds of frustration. Their voices, like the delicate patter of spring raindrops, were barely audible, but by listening carefully, she could make out a few phrases.

  “What’s the issue here?”

  “Could we be doing something wrong?”

  “I’m getting a migraine.”

  “Cool,” Amy said. “I think I’m getting the hang of this.” All at once, she realized that the cicadas were having some sort of contest. “I’m louder than you!” one shouted. “No, meeeeeeee!” came the reply from the far end of the lawn. “Me! Me! Me!” hollered another from across the street. So that was what it was all about, Amy thought. No wonder they make such a racket. When she turned her head, the darkness rained sequins that settled on the ground beside her feet and slowly faded.

  “Here comes trouble,” the cricket said. It hopped off the step and crawled under the porch.

  The neighbor’s old dog was sauntering up the sidewalk, his tail wagging slowly like a tired flag.

  “Hey, Bob!” Amy exclaimed, delighted. He was half black Lab, half poodle, with his glossy coat parted down the middle of his back. One eye was blind and cloudy but the other, a lustrous brown, studied her carefully. Amy held her breath, hoping he’d have something to say.

  “Looking a little the worse for wear,” Bob said. His voice was deep and roughened by age. He sat down on the pavement and scratched himself with his back leg.