Close Enough to Touch

by Colleen Oakley

“I said, I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “I know. She’s not really a babysitter. Just someone who will be there in case you need something.”

  “She’s a stranger,” he says. “I don’t like strangers.”

  “She’s not really a stranger. I mean, you met her on Tuesday.”

  “Why can’t it just be like it was?”

  “Because it can’t, OK?” I say, my voice louder than I intend.

  At that, Aja picks up the earbuds and replaces them in his ears.

  I sigh and flick the turn signal as I drive into the apartment complex parking lot. My phone buzzes in my pocket for the third time since we’ve gotten in the car, and when I park, I pull it out to scroll through the work calls and texts I know I’ve missed.

  Five are from my boss, as I suspected.

  But the sixth? Oh, the sweet sixth. It’s from Ellie.

  fourteen

  JUBILEE

  SITTING AT THE desk in my study Friday night, I clutch the crumpled piece of paper in my fist and stare at my handwriting. Madison called twice this week to remind me we couldn’t go on our first “adventure” (her word, not mine) until I got an EpiPen. I’m not going to be responsible for your untimely death, she said in what I now recognize as her very Madison H. dramatic fashion.

  But that’s not what’s compelling me to contact Dr. Zhang. Not the only thing, anyway.

  The rash—the one on my stomach—has crawled up from my belly button and spread like kudzu all over my chest, my shoulders, my back. I’ve tried all the home remedies my mother became expert at to help relieve the itching, to help soothe the angry, scaly patches of red—oatmeal baths, teaspoons of Benadryl, antihistamine creams slathered on as thick as frosting on a cupcake. Nothing is working. And I know only Dr. Zhang can help me.

  I punch out the email that I’ve been trying to compose for the better part of the past two days. I have to email her directly because when I called on Friday to make an appointment, the chirpy receptionist informed me that Dr. Zhang has a seven-month waiting list for new patients. I tried to explain I wasn’t exactly a new patient, but she only chuckled: “You last saw her twelve years ago? Uh, you’re a new patient, hon.”

  I read back over what I’ve written. It sounds plaintive, oversimplistic, and a little desperate, but I am desperate and it’s the best I can do.

  I hit “send.”

  And then I wait.

  Four minutes later, my email pings.

  Jubilee! Of course I remember you. Can you be here Tuesday at 10 am?

  I pad to the kitchen, my heart beating excessively for the minimal effort, and dial Madison. She doesn’t answer, so I leave a message. Then, though it’s not even eight o’clock, I go upstairs and get in bed.

  THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

  I open my eyes and scan the room, blinking. My pillow is damp where I’ve apparently been drooling in my sleep. I wipe my chin with the back of my hand. The light filtering in through the windows informs me it’s morning, but I have no idea what time it is. Or if that rapping noise was real or just part of some dream.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Well, that answers one question. I sit up and wonder who it could be. Probably a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness—I’ve had a few of each knock on the door the past nine years. I’d always wait silently in the kitchen for them to move on.

  Now curiosity propels me out of bed and I creep to the window and carefully move the blue curtain panel so I can peer out. I can’t see the porch from this angle, but I can see—

  Eric’s car. In my driveway. I quickly back away from the window, my heart knocking against my chest. I completely forgot he said he was going to come today—but more important, why on earth did I agree to it? I don’t even care if the Pontiac runs—it’s not like I’d drive it, anyway. My bike gets me to and from the library just fine. I was just caught off guard, I think. He was being so . . . so un-Eric. More than just routinely polite, he was being kind and warm and even a little bit funny. But now, in the stark light of day, I feel like some pathetic charity case whom he feels some obligation to because I saved his son, and I wish I had just said no.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  I stand stock-still, hoping maybe he’ll just leave if I wait long enough.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  I count slowly and right when I reach one hundred and think he might be giving up—

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Guess not. I pull on a pair of worn leggings that I left on my chair. I head downstairs and open the door just as he’s raising his fist to knock again. A blast of cold air hits me in the face.

  “Sorry, I . . . uh . . . just woke up,” I say, looking from Eric to Aja and then back again. Eric’s hand is frozen in midair and I wonder why he’s not moving. I know my hair is a tangled disaster, but I don’t think I look too crazy. At least not crazy enough for the wide-eyed stare on Eric’s face.

  He clears his throat and—finally—slowly lowers his fist. “Good morning, Jubilee.” At my name, Aja’s eyes pop open, as round as quarters, grabbing my attention. Then I look back at Eric, but he’s not looking at me. Not in my eyes anyway. He’s looking, I think, directly at my chest. Not much to look at, I hear my mom’s voice saying in my ear, followed by her smoker’s cackle. It was something she said to me often. Mean, yes, but true—I didn’t inherit my mom’s particular assets—and I can’t imagine what’s drawn his attention.

  Wondering if I’m in some bizarre dream and I’m just going to find myself topless and vulnerable and desperate to wake up, I glance down. What I see is worse. I fight off the wild urge to slam the door shut in his and Aja’s faces run back upstairs, and crawl into the bed, never to get out of it again.

  I’m wearing his sweatshirt. The Wharton one. The one I’ve been sleeping in every single night since he brought me home from the hospital. Not because it’s his, of course, it’s just . . . comfortable. And smells good. But all he sees is that I’m wearing it and all I want to do is die a little bit.

  Heat creeps up my face, until it is positively on fire. “Well, thank you for coming,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady and composed. “The car is . . . well, you know where the car is. Let me know if you need anything.”

  I go to close the door, but Eric reaches his hand out, stopping it. “Wait.” I stare at his fingers splayed against the grain of the wood. I remember the dream, his fingers touching mine, and my breath comes quicker. One of my online Harvard classes was an art intro: How to Draw the Human Form. The professor said hands were the hardest part of the body to draw, not only because of the complexity of their joints and lines and getting the proportions correct, but because hands are equally as expressive as the face in gesture and emotion. I thought that was stupid. Until now. I swallow with difficulty.

  “I’m actually waiting for my sister, Connie. She said she’d help with the car. Do you mind if we come in for a minute?”

  I take a step back, trying to put distance between myself and Eric’s hands, but he takes it as an invitation. Left with no choice, I step back farther. “Sure,” I say. “Um . . . come in.”

  I close the door behind them and then we’re standing there, at the base of the stairs, in an awkward silence. I know I should say something, tell them to make themselves at home, or some other genial expression, but I can’t stop thinking about the basic fact that there are two additional people standing inside my house. Guests. That I didn’t really invite in, but here they are. The sound of Eric’s hands rubbing together in an attempt to warm them up brings me back to the moment. I open my mouth to say something—anything to break the silence—but then his hands catch my attention again, this time because I’m wondering why he doesn’t have gloves on in this weather—and that’s when it hits me. I forgot to put on my gloves. I clasp my hands behind me. “Um . . . I’ll be right back,” I say, finding the bottom stair with my foot. “You can sit down.” I nod toward the living room. “I mean, if you want to.”

  Upstairs, I strip off E
ric’s sweatshirt and toss it in the laundry bin, the humiliation of being caught in it inflaming my cheeks once more. The air at once feels cool on my bare skin but also causes a prickly sensation that intensifies the itching. I know scratching will cause more pain than relief, so I resist the urge, quickly apply some more useless cream to my bumpy skin, and then pull a clean T-shirt and cable-knit sweater over my head. I hope the cowl neck will cover the tail end of the rash that’s threatening to creep up my collarbone.

  I stick my hands in my gloves, take a deep breath, and walk back downstairs.

  When I get to the bottom step, I stop. Aja is engrossed in an iPad and sitting in the velvet-covered easy chair. My chair. Eric is sitting on the couch, on the far left cushion. My mother’s seat.

  I didn’t know it was my mother’s seat—or more accurately, that I still think of it as my mother’s seat—until I see him sitting there, and a kind of uncomfortable awareness washes over me.

  And then I start to notice other things:

  The way that the cushion of the velvet chair sags down, offering no support to Aja’s tiny frame and giving him the appearance of a limp marionette, draped in the seat.

  The ashtray in the center of the coffee table. I removed my mother’s half-smoked cigarette from it years ago but never got around to emptying it of its now-stale ashes.

  And the books. Good god, the books. Stacks of them cover nearly every surface. Two or three here to the fifteen or so growing from the floor beside my chair and stopping at the perfect height to hold a coffee mug. It’s not that I don’t put them away, but more that I have nowhere to put them. The shelves are filled to busting, each nook and cranny stuffed with a book, creating a jigsaw puzzle of spines. And I’m suddenly embarrassed to think how much money I’ve spent over the years on reading. And I discover the irony—if I had just gone to the library to check them out, maybe I wouldn’t have to work there now to pay my bills.

  I wonder if Eric thinks I’m a hoarder of sorts. Like those brothers who were found dead in their New York City apartment among their 140 tons of stuff.

  The books and ashtray aside, at least my house is clean—I’m momentarily grateful for my meticulous efforts in keeping dust mites and cobwebs at bay.

  I clear my throat and Eric looks up.

  “Sorry about the, um . . . mess,” I say, sweeping my hand in the general direction of all the books.

  “Occupational hazard?”

  “Yeah,” I say, grinning before I can stop myself. It’s the new Eric, the warm one with witticisms that catch me by surprise.

  And then my smile disappears and I just stand there, because Aja’s in my seat and I’ve never had two people in my living room before—not since my mother left—and I’m not sure what to do.

  A knock at the door causes me to start.

  “That’ll be Con,” Eric says, standing, and a ludicrous sense of relief fills my belly that my mother’s seat is empty once again.

  I turn and open the door to a woman holding a tool kit. “You must be Jubilee,” she says, walking right in, even though I didn’t invite her, and the mental count of people in my house that aren’t me goes up by one. I wonder—has the ceiling always been so low? The walls always felt so imposing? Even though frigid air follows her in, my skin starts to prick with sweat.

  “You’re lucky Eric told me about your car,” Connie says, as if we’re picking up a conversation we let go just the night before. “He would’ve only made it worse.”

  I stare at her eyes—exact replicas of the olives in Eric’s head. “Can it get worse than not starting?”

  “You have no idea,” she says, then turns to Eric. “I’ve got to head up to the office in a few hours. Shall we get started?”

  “Keys are on that table,” I say pointing them out. Eric grabs them and follows Connie out the door. Exhaling, I shut it behind them. It’s only when I look up that I realize Aja hasn’t moved from my chair. His attention is so thoroughly on his video game, he doesn’t seem to even realize that his dad and Connie have left.

  I stand there, wondering if I should say something, but after a minute, my grumbling stomach propels me into the kitchen for breakfast. It’s only as I’m making coffee that I realize I should have offered some to Eric. Should have offered him anything, really. That’s what they always do in the movies when someone visits: tea, water, a snack. I remember Aja and wonder if he’s hungry. I stick my head into the living room.

  “Hey, Aja,” I say. He drags his eyes from his video game to me.

  “Eggs?”

  He blinks. “What?”

  “I’m making breakfast. Do you want some?”

  He pulls a face, and I realize maybe eggs aren’t appealing to a kid’s palate. But I don’t have any cereal or . . . what else do kids eat? “Er . . . cookies?”

  He shakes his head no and looks back down, which I’m glad about, because right after I said it, I realized I finished the last three Chips Ahoys in the pack on Thursday.

  After breakfast, I wash my pot, plate, fork, and mug and wander back into the living room. It’s making me out of sorts, not being alone in my house. I feel self-conscious, like someone is bearing witness to every single one of my actions, even though Aja hasn’t looked up from his game since I asked him about breakfast.

  I pick up a few books from the table behind the sofa, as if I mean to put them away, but I’m not sure where exactly to take them to, so I start to rearrange them in the stack, putting the largest ones on the bottom.

  “Is your name really Jubilee?”

  I jerk my head toward Aja’s tiny voice, surprised at the sound, and then tilt my chin. “Ah, yes,” I say. “I guess I didn’t really get to introduce myself the other day.”

  He holds his head steady; behind his glasses, his large eyes stay trained on mine.

  Then he gives a slight nod and I notice his focus travels to my hands. Studying them, really, his dark eyebrows furrowed. “Why do you wear gloves?” he asks.

  I look down, my fingers clasping one another, fiddling with the material of the gloves. I look back up. “Well, um . . . it’s kind of hard to explain,” I say.

  He sucks in his breath, his eyes finding mine again. When he speaks, it comes out as a reverent whisper. “It’s because you can’t touch people, isn’t it?”

  My stomach drops down to my feet. “What?” How could he possibly . . .

  “You can’t control it, can you?” His eyes are dancing now, shiny blots of ink.

  I narrow my eyes at him. Did one of the nurses tell him? At the hospital? So much for patient confidentiality. Oh god—does that mean Eric knows? My mouth goes dry.

  “It’s OK. You can tell me,” he says, leaning forward in the chair. “I swear I won’t tell anyone.”

  I glance at the door, hoping Eric will barge through it, but then not wanting him to be privy to this conversation. And then I wonder why I care so much about what he thinks.

  “Can you show me?” Aja asks, and I jerk my head back to him.

  “Show you?” Now I’m confused. He wants to see my hands?

  “Yeah, a fireball! How big are they? Do they go where you want them to?”

  Fireball? I narrow my eyes, my mind a jumble. “Aja,” I say, interrupting his flow of questions. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your pyrotechnic energy!” he says, so excited now, he’s bouncing a little in the chair, and I get concerned that the sagging cushion won’t hold.

  “My pyro-what?”

  “And you pretended you hadn’t even heard about the X-Men,” he says. “I should have known. Right when I saw you. You even look a little like her.”

  “Like who?”

  “Jubilee!” he says. “You’re Jubilee!”

  I nod, but more because he’s finally said something that is in fact a true statement. Something I can agree with. “Well, yes. That’s my name, but—”

  “From the X-Men! And you can shoot plasmoids from your fingertips”—he starts pointing at things, making littl
e zinging noises—“which is why you have to wear the gloves.” I walk around the sofa and sit down on the opposite end from my mother’s seat.

  “Aja.” He continues mock zapping things, his excitement at a near fever pitch.

  “Aja!” He stops and looks at me.

  “I don’t have any . . . powers,” I say. “I can’t, um . . . zap things. That’s just in the movies.”

  He opens his mouth, right as I remember our conversation from the library. I know he’s going to correct me, so I beat him to it.

  “I mean, the comic books. Sorry.”

  He closes his mouth and scrunches his nose, absorbing this. The light in his eyes dims a bit and it’s like they’re attached to a string on my heart. And it’s being tugged. Ludicrously, I find myself wishing I could shoot fireballs from my fingertips, if only not to disappoint him.

  “But . . . why do you wear the gloves?” he asks.

  I look at him and find myself compelled to tell the truth. “I have an allergy,” I say.

  At this, his shoulders fall. “An allergy? Like, to peanut butter?”

  “Kind of,” I say. “But mine’s a lot more rare than that.”

  He tilts his head. “How rare?”

  “Very,” I say, leaning a little closer to him. “But if I tell you, you can’t tell anyone.”

  He leans a little closer, too, and it feels as if the room is holding its breath.

  “I’m allergic to other humans.”

  His eyes go wide and shiny and bright again, and I don’t understand why this pleases me so. But it does.

  “That’s why I ended up in the hospital after pulling you out of the river.” I hold up my gloved fingers and wiggle them. “I can’t touch people.”

  His eyebrows are so high, they’re nearly hidden beneath the fringe of thick black hair on his forehead, and then, in an instant, they fall and go crinkly as he ponders this new information. I can almost see the gears turning in his brain. When he finally speaks, it’s in a whisper. “So, you kind of are a mutant?”

  I consider this. And how that’s what I’ve felt like for my entire life. Like a curiosity. A monster. A total freak of nature. But somehow, coming from his mouth, this possibility doesn’t seem nearly so bad.