by Callie Hart
“What do you do for work?” Alison asks.
“I’m a watch maker. Actually I should say I repair antique watches, but sometimes I get to make watches too. If something is too broken to fix, or the owner never returns to collect their watches, then I can cannibalize parts to create something new.”
“Why would someone not return to collect their watch?”
Rooke speaks around a mouthful of cracker. “They die. Old people own antique watches. They have a peculiar knack of dropping down dead a lot of the time.”
Silence falls over the table. Then, one by one, the girls all start to titter into their wine glasses. Who are these people, and what have they done with my friends?
“Did you go to college?” Ali asks.
Rooke shakes his head. “No. I was on track to admission at MIT, but then I got arrested and that goal kind of went up in flames.” He says it so matter-of-factly that I almost forget to process it. But then I got arrested…
Alison gawps. “Why were you arrested?”
Rooke’s been careful not to glance in my direction—I’ve been paying specific attention to how many times his eyes meet mine across the table—but now his gaze flickers to me and remains on me, and I get the feeling he’s uncomfortable for the first time. “I did something stupid. I took something that didn’t belong to me.”
“What did you take?”
“An Audi R8. I stole it from the parking lot at the Dodger’s Stadium. I crashed it into a cop car parked outside a Rite Aid in the Bronx forty-five minutes later.” This time no one laughs. Rooke doesn’t seem to care. Or perhaps he just doesn’t notice. He takes a healthy slug of his wine. “Don’t worry. No one was hurt. I was a stupid sixteen-year-old kid who was angry with his father. I’ve grown up since then.”
Sixteen years old seems very young, but it was actually only seven short years ago for Rooke. I take a deep drink from my own wine and clear my throat. “Why don’t we discuss the end of the book? Isobel decides to keep the baby. Who else thought that was pretty reckless on her part? James is hardly father of the year material.”
“I actually think it was the only way they were going to be able to stay together,” Rooke announces. “James was still too hard. Too damaged by the things that happened to him when he was a kid. He loved Isobel, but it was only a matter of time before he did something to fuck up their relationship. As a father, he had to get his shit together. In his mind, he couldn’t ever let down his own child.”
No one speaks. Slowly, Alison leans across the table and asks very gravely, “Rooke? Are you gay?”
“No. Do I seem very gay?”
Alison tilts her head to one side. “It used to be easier to tell, y’know. I’m not so sure these days. Even straight guys spend an awful lot of time doing their hair. But no, you don’t seem very gay.”
“Is that a good or a bad thing?” He seems genuinely interested, not in the least bit offended that she’s asking about his sexuality.
“It’s neither. I just don’t know that many straight twenty-three-year-old males who like to read romance novels. Let alone any twenty-three-year-old guys who’ve taken the time to analyze the storyline so much.”
“I’ll admit, it’s not a genre I’d get caught dead reading typically.”
“Then why did you read it? Why did you come?” I ask. I can’t help myself. It’s the first thing I’ve said in a while, and it feels like my cheeks are blazing. For a moment, everyone is looking at me like I have three heads and no nose. Rooke sets his wine glass down and just…looks at me.
“I read the book because I wanted to know more about you. What interests you. What excites you. What turns you on. I came here tonight because I wanted to see you again. Okay?”
I stand. My legs are shaky, barely able to support my weight. “No. It’s not okay. How could you think it would be?” I don’t think I’m going to make it out of the room before I burst into tears. My eyes are stinging, burning, blinding me. I bang my hip on the doorframe as I hurry to escape and pain spirals through me like a jangling set of keys. Taking the stairs two at a time, I don’t stop my frantic scramble until I’m in my bedroom, my back pressed up against the sealed door with my heart banging manically in my chest.
No one follows me.
No one calls out my name.
NINE
DUE DILLIGENCE
ROOKE
People always say they want to know the truth. They make big speeches about how important it is to them and they harp on about the consequences of deceit, but when they’re faced with the truth, they suddenly don’t want it anymore. The truth requires you to be brave. The truth requires you to face awkward situations. The truth requires you to stand your ground, to bear it, not run away and hide from it.
That’s what Sasha did. She ran. I have no idea why, either. It would have been very easy for her to tell me politely that she isn’t interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with me. Fuck, I wasn’t even suggesting we have a romantic relationship. I don’t know her. I don’t know the first fucking thing about her. I was merely trying to change that. I was also just giving her a straight answer to her question. I could have lied to her, made up some bullshit excuse for coming across town to come see her, but it would have been pointless. Why else would a guy read a fucking romance novel that a beautiful woman dropped in front of him?
Downstairs, I can hear Jake playing guitar. He’s pretty fucking good, been playing for as long as I’ve known him, and that’s coming up on ten years now. He gets morose when he plays, though, so I give him his space and stay in my room. I’m not in the mood to make friendly, unimportant conversation anyway. I’m brooding. My mother tells me I’ve perfected the art, but Sasha Connor is causing me to really master my technique. How can she be so closed off? Fair enough, she’s older. Eleven years, to be exact. But what the hell does her age matter? She’s a beautiful woman, and I’m seriously fucking attracted to her. There’s something about her, some look or smell or idiosyncrasy of hers that keeps gnawing at me, demanding I think about her, and I can’t put my finger on it. It could be something as simple as her perfume. It could be the way her lips purse as she forms her words. It could be something more complicated, like the way her pupils fix and dilate as she listens to me speak. It’s plaguing me day and night, and I fucking know myself. I’m not going to be able to let the idea of her go until I understand why I’m so drawn to her. To do that I need to know everything there is to know about her.
I open up my laptop, galvanized. If she won’t sit down at a table with me, I’m just going to have to do things the underhanded way. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. MySpace, if she used to have an account. I’ll ransack every single social media profile she has online if I have to. I’ll trawl through her awkward family photographs. I’ll run her name through a search engine. I won’t stop until I find what I’m looking for, and when I do find it, that one thing that is drawing me so intensely to her, I’ll jettison it from myself and I won’t care about the woman anymore. That will be that.
Only, Sasha has no Facebook account. No Twitter or Instagram, either. How can that even be possible? In this day and age, everyone has a handful of social media profiles. Everyone. Even Oscar is on Instagram and Snapchat; the old boy has the funniest fucking feed I’ve ever seen. So how can Sasha be a complete non-entity online? It must be a mistake. I try Facebook again, scrolling through the profile pictures of a million Sasha Connors before I finally have to accept defeat and give up.
Google has nothing on her, either. She’s like a goddamn ghost. I’m about to give up altogether when I’m struck with a bolt of inspiration, however, and I decide to type in her name along with the museum’s name:
Sasha…American Museum of Natural History, New York City.
One point eight million responses returned. Well shit. That’s a lot of responses. There are only three links that look like they might be relevant, though. The link at the very top is an academic article about a deep space exhibition that was
held at the museum nearly six years ago. Sasha Varitas, though. Wrong name. I skip over that and click on the second link down: How species adapt and evolve. A new theory of evolution that has scientists rethinking the engineering behind the human eye.
The internet connection up here isn’t stellar. As my laptop thinks about loading the page, I take a swig of the beer I’ve been nursing for the past hour. When the information appears on the screen in front of me, I don’t bother reading the text. I scroll down, down, down until I hit the bottom of the page, on the hunt for referencing data, or maybe even a photograph of the contributing author. Sure enough, just as I’d hoped, a tiny professional headshot of Sasha stares back at me from the screen. Her dark hair is much shorter, almost cropped into a boy cut, and she’s wearing a slash of bright red lipstick that pops against her pale, smooth skin. Her mouth is pulled into a quirky, strange smile that makes it look like she has a secret she’s trying to keep. Her eyes are sparkling in a completely unfamiliar way.
Sasha Varitas, head curator at the Natural History Museum, recently released her debut novel, Biomechanics and the Origins of Man. She will be signing copies at The Red Letter bookstore in Tribeca this Thursday, 17th September from 7pm.
Huh. So she was called Varitas. She’s divorced, then. That surprises me. It shouldn’t—she’s old enough to have been married and gotten divorced, but it just never occurred to me. She doesn’t look her age. She seems younger than she actually is, I suppose.
Sasha Varitas. Sasha Varitas. I type that name into the toolbar of the search engine, and this time I’m rewarded with an entire page of results. Page after page of results, in fact, and all of the links have Sasha’s name in them.
Curator at the AMNH in tragic accident.
Sasha Varitas, 29, loses son in fatal collision.
Christopher Varitas, 6, drowned. Mother and father said to be distraught.
Car topples from Brooklyn Bridge. Woman rescued from submerged car, while son drowns.
My eyes scan over the results, the back of my neck prickling with sharp pins and needles. This is fucked. Like, seriously fucked.
At approximately 7:50 a.m. today, a woman driving her young, disabled son across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Carl Gallson’s School for the Profoundly Deaf was struck by a large refrigerated vehicle, launching her sedan through the barrier and sending it crashing into the water forty feet below. Motorists claimed traffic stopped immediately, and onlookers crossing the bridge by foot were screaming in panic. Local harbor patrol officer, Keaton Banks, happened to be on the river and close by at the time of the accident, and saw the whole thing take place. With little thought for his own safety, Banks entered the freezing East River and proceeded to dive down to the submerged vehicle.
One woman informed CWT News that she was convinced Banks was dead. No one surfaced from the water for a full ninety seconds. Crowds of dismayed bystanders are said to have been openly panicking and crying at the scene. Eventually Banks appeared with the body of a young woman in his arms. Banks then focused on keeping both himself and the intermittently conscious woman above water while his patrol vessel moved into position and performed a rescue.
Police trawlers recovered the submerged vehicle late this afternoon and confirmed the discovery of a deceased child inside the back seat. The victim has been named as Christopher Allan Varitas. Christopher’s mother, Sasha Varitas, is currently recovering in the hospital, having sustained a serious head injury, broken collarbone, and a number of fractured ribs. Banks was treated for mild pneumonia and is set to be released from the hospital within the next twenty-four hours.
Father of the deceased child and husband to Sasha, Andrew Varitas gave a moving statement outside the hospital this evening, thanking Keaton Banks for his heroic actions. Mr. Varitas openly wept as he asked news crews and photographers to please respect the family’s request for space in order that they might be able to grieve the death of their son.
Police have identified Reginald D. Whitson as the driver of the refrigerated truck that collided with the Varitases’ car on the bridge, and have also confirmed that Whitson fell asleep at the wheel. Many motorists driving on the bridge have reported that the large ten-wheel truck was swerving erratically in the moments before the accident. It’s yet unknown what recourse will be taken against Whitson, though State’s District Attorney Helen Underwood advised us earlier that in cases such as these, penalty to the full extent of the law is nearly always pursued.
I scan the article, looking for a date, and I find what I’m searching for at the very bottom of the page. June, 2012. Five years ago. Fuck. Sasha lost her son five years ago in what sounds like the most fucking awful ordeal imaginable. Being hit by a huge truck, tumbling from the bridge, hitting the water and probably watching her son drown? Holy fucking shit. Doesn’t get any worse than that. My chest feels like an elephant is sitting on it; it physically hurts to breathe. I don’t try to overcome the feeling. I want to know it, to experience it, so I can understand. If I can feel just point one percent of the pain Sasha felt the day she lost her son, I might be able to understand her now.
I can’t hold on to the pain for too long, though. It’s too great to bear, even this small, microscopic, far removed part of it, and I have to shake it off. I close my laptop and set it down on the bed beside me.
How did she recover from something like that? How? It seems inconceivable that a mother could ever heal from such a brutal, tragic event. And even before all of that, her son was deaf? How did she cope with that? How did having a son who couldn’t hear affect her life?
Suddenly, I think I understand why I’ve been so drawn to Sasha since I met her last week. The knowledge hits me hard—a very real, very disturbing thing. I’m drawn to that hollow look in her eyes. I’m drawn to the sadness of her, the way she seems to visibly throb with it, even when nothing about her suggests she might be unhappy. I’m attracted to the dark ache in her soul, because it’s something I can understand. Something that feels real to me.
Seriously fucked up shit.
TEN
TOO LATE NOW
SASHA
I’ve never believed in god. Not even when I was a little girl and my mother used to take me to church every Sunday. Religiously. Pun most definitely intended. I liked the atmosphere inside the church—the smell of the incense; the echoing ring of people stomping snow from their shoes in the vestibule; the low susurrus of chatter before the priest appeared to give his homily; the way the light took on a different, syrupy kind of texture as it slanted down onto the pews from the great stained glass windows overhead. Mary, Mother of God, weeping over all of us. Jesus Christ, savior of the world, guarding his flock of lambs. Saint Peter, weeping for the sins of the wicked. I never really invested in the stories I heard there, though. Never took them on board.
As I got older, the atmosphere inside the church underwent a tragic metamorphosis, and the chatter just turned out to be gossip. The stomping off of snow in the vestibule had the ominous crack of gunshots, and the priest’s homily made me progressively angrier and angrier each week. Weren’t Christians meant to be kind and saintly? Weren’t they meant to preach acceptance and forgiveness, not fear and hate? And I began to understand what I was being taught in Sunday school. I read the Bible, and it didn’t make any sense to me. There were parts of it that were good, of course. I loved the bits about leading a morally good life. I knew it was right to respect your elders, to always be honest, to share and help and be kind always. But the other stuff? An unknowable deity living in the sky? An eye for an eye? Stoning and hell? Eternal damnation and punishment?
If I’m to believe everything the Catholic Church told me when I was growing up, my six-year-old son is now languishing in purgatory, never to know true peace or happiness, because I didn’t have him baptized. Andrew wanted to get him baptized purely to please his own very strict Catholic parents, but I’d put my foot down. It had seemed stupid to participate in some outdated ritual merely to appease two people we only saw
once a year at Christmas.
I didn’t put my foot down when we had Christopher buried, though. I was too weak and broken to even register what was happening really, and so he was committed to the ground at St. Thomas’s Catholic Church, five blocks from the house, less than a week after he drowned. I have to pass St. Thomas’s on my way to work every single damn day. Not today, though. I leave the house and I cross over to the other side of the street, turning right instead of left. I don’t ever cross the Brooklyn Bridge. I don’t ever take the ferry, so I’m left with only one option to transport me to Williamsburg: the train.
The sound of the casters on the tracks numbs me quite nicely. By the time I reach my stop, I’m actually feeling better than I did when I woke up this morning, which is impressive given where I’m headed and what I’m about to do once I get there.
I hate apologizing. It’s strange to admit that there were benefits to being locked in such devastating grief, but it’s true. There were benefits. One of them was that I never had to apologize for anything. Late. Upset. Dirty. Hair a mess. Rude. Drunk. You name it. All sins are forgiven when you lose a child. I didn’t have to say I was sorry for any of it. Time has past now, though, and those rules don’t apply anymore. Alison made sure to tell me so last night, after she made everyone leave and came up to my room. Apparently, you have to start apologizing after five years of getting away with blue murder. Apparently, apologizing is what a sane, responsible, functional member of society would do, so here I am, trudging grumpily toward an antique watch repair shop in Williamsburg, wondering what the hell I’m going to say to Rooke.
I’m sorry I made you feel unwelcome in my house? I’m sorry I shouted at you? I’m sorry I ruined book club, and I’m sorry I didn’t say sorry immediately last night when I acted so inappropriately? It’s going to feel forced, that’s for sure. He was uninvited, and he only came to create a spectacle. I still don’t like that he did that.