The Careful Undressing of Love

by Corey Ann Haydu

  Cruz doesn’t answer.

  “Angelika tell you about Emilio and Stacey ever?” Delilah says. Emilio and Stacey are one of those couples we’ve all heard about for years. Cruz must know the story, but Delilah goes on anyway. Sometimes it’s a comfort to tell the same stories over and over. Sometimes it’s torture. “Stacey had that husband who was fine and time was ticking and everyone was getting so nervous that the husband, what was his name?”

  “Dominic.” Cruz has thought about this story recently.

  “Everyone’s waiting for Dominic to die, slowing down their cars when he’s on the road, feeding him apples and basil and everything they knew to try to save him and all this energy is going toward keeping him safe and worrying about him. Then Emilio gets hit by some woman in a Jeep. No one was worried about Emilio.”

  I get out of bed. I can’t stand being in here for another minute. I’m burning with shame since I know where this story is going. Delilah is supposed to be my best friend. I can’t stand her telling this story like it’s a warning about me.

  I hate her for believing something different than I do for the first time ever.

  I hate Angelika for making her believe something new.

  “Stacey was hysterical at the funeral. She absolutely lost it. She loved Emilio. She never loved Dominic. You can be married to someone and not really love them. You can even think you love them and not love them. No one ever had to worry about Dominic. He was fine all along!”

  When Delilah and I first heard this story, I asked Angelika what Stacey should have done differently.

  “I think that’s clear,” Angelika said. In her accent, that’s sounds like dat’s and the word clear comes out lighter, airier than the way Delilah and I say it. “Were you listening?”

  “I was listening. But she married someone safe. And love happened anyway. What was she supposed to do? It sounds like love just sort of happens, whether you want it to or not, whether you’re married or not.”

  “Like moons and tides,” Delilah said. It was her saying for when something was inescapable, inevitable.

  I wonder whether she thinks Cruz and I are like moons and tides. The thought paralyzes me.

  “Did you forget all about them? Stacey and Emilio and Dominic?”

  “I know the story. I know all the stories.”

  “What if you’re Emilio? What if Owen is Dominic?” An awful noise follows. A cry. A heave. “There’s not any part of you that’s scared? Cruz. There has to be. Even a tiny part of you must be terrified of her.”

  I’m her.

  I wait for his answer. I wait for a resounding no.

  It doesn’t come.

  12.

  Cruz leaves and I stay in bed until Delilah drops a pan on the floor in the kitchen, so I can pretend I woke up from that.

  “Morning,” I say. It’s too early—school doesn’t start for a while and I’m still full from last night’s feast of sausage and lettuce and bread. Delilah gives me yogurt with almonds anyway, serving it up in a little bowl her mother made when that was a thing her mother was doing on a Healing Through the Arts retreat.

  Mrs. James hid all the paintings and sculptures so that Angelika wouldn’t see. But she hung on to everything functional—bowls and mugs and plates that fill up the cabinets of Delilah and Mrs. James’s apartment. They’re crooked and sloppy and I don’t think they did much to help Mrs. James move on.

  I hear Delilah’s mother moving around down the hall and I’m glad for the noise because I don’t know how to fill up the silence with words. I’m a bad liar, and I’ve never had to withhold anything from Delilah.

  “School’s going to be weird without you,” I say at last.

  “And without Jack.” There’s rage in her that I don’t know what to do with. I nod. Delilah ties more bracelets around my wrists. I don’t want them—the ones I have are leaving imprints on my skin from being tied too tight and they make me itch.

  They feel more like shackles than thread. Delilah yawns.

  “Sleepy?” I can feel her exhaustion. I can smell it—the raw, fuzzy smell of someone who hasn’t slept or showered for a few days. Her eyes are dry from crying and lazy from not resting.

  She rubs her eyes and walks to the love seat in the living room. She pulls her knees to her chin and falls asleep within five minutes, the total giving-out of a body against all the things keeping it awake.

  Sleep comes, no matter how deep the sadness cuts. It’s like a gift from the universe, and hearing Delilah’s deep breaths relaxes me, too.

  Everything else is changing, but the reality of sleep stays the same. It’s there; it will find us.

  Like moons and tides.

  • • •

  We walk to school in our straight line—me, Cruz, Isla, and Charlotte. Pedestrians hate us—in New York, people aren’t meant to walk in horizontal lines. We’re supposed to walk two in a row, like animals on Noah’s ark.

  But today we are four instead of five, so the sidewalk feels almost empty.

  “That’s a lot of bracelets,” Cruz says, looking at my covered arms. The way he notices me gives me goose bumps. I’ve never given any thought at all to my arms, but with Cruz looking at them today, I can think of nothing else. I wonder what they look like when they move and if they’re too pale.

  I fumble for my sunglasses and my heart calms.

  “Delilah’s being sort of—Delilah’s having a weird moment. We should keep Angelika away from her,” I say. I think Cruz tries to look through my dark lenses but I know I’m well hidden here.

  We’re in striped shirts and jeans, all of us. The sameness makes me ache for old Delilah.

  “Angelika’s amazing in a crisis, though,” Charlotte says.

  “You saw her when Delilah came back from the hospital,” I say. “It was not good.”

  “She was comforting her. She comforts us. It’s what she does.” Charlotte and I are disagreeing more than we ever have. I can’t stand the idea of another divide in our group, so I nod and muster something like a smile.

  “Angelika’s insane,” Isla says. Her striped shirt hits above her belly button. Her jeans are cuffed at the bottom and so tight I think they might pop. She looks about twenty-five and it makes me nervous.

  “Be respectful,” Charlotte snaps. Charlotte never snaps and even Cruz looks taken aback.

  “We’re always respectful,” I say. “But the last thing Delilah needs is to feel guiltier. Or sadder. Or more confused.”

  We get to the school entrance. This is where we wait for Owen and Jack to meet us every morning. Owen always kisses my neck and Jack always kisses Delilah on the mouth for too long. Then Jack tells us some song we have to listen to that we’ve never heard of and he puts an earbud into Delilah’s ear and we watch as they fade into a bubble and we walk behind them, not minding one bit.

  I was never jealous, watching Delilah fall in love. I fell in love with how happy she was, and I was glad one of us could experience it.

  Today it’s only Owen meeting us, of course.

  He kisses my neck. It’s dry out, and we each get a zap of electricity between his lips and my skin.

  “Ouch!” he says. “You stung me!”

  I try to smile, but it fails. Everything is failing now. We don’t move to the door—we don’t have Jack and Delilah’s love bubble to follow. We stand and watch other people living their normal lives. The school sits on a crowded intersection. Women with strollers sigh while they try to navigate around us, dog-walkers do their best to keep their five dogs from leaping and licking and wrapping their leashes around our legs. There’s a crap playground across the street and adults eye us when we’re walking by, ready to yell at us if we enter.

  “Fucking teenagers,” a girl not that far outside her teen years mutters, pushing my shoulder with hers.

  I watch her leave and envy the way her
life is exactly the same today as it was yesterday and the day before.

  I did this a lot in the weeks after my father died. I watched people move from being shaken up and emotional right after the Bombing to being fine a few weeks later. It was astounding. They had the same wardrobes, the same slang, the same inside jokes as before. I was different. I was new.

  People on the street are spilling coffee from walking too fast and they’re rolling their eyes at us. They aren’t looking for Jack or Delilah. They’re not fretting about Chicago. They’re absolutely fine. They’re moving ahead.

  “I don’t know if I can go in,” I say. “Can we really sit there all day talking about, like, Dickens or whatever? What about Jack’s other friends? Are they here today? Does he have other friends? Aren’t we supposed to know that?”

  Isla shrugs.

  “I don’t have any friends in my grade,” she says. “Maybe he didn’t have any in his. He was new and then he met Delilah, so . . .”

  I’m starting to panic at all the things we don’t know about Jack. What was in his flask and who he was friends with and what he had for first period and whether he liked chocolate. I rush through my mind, looking for facts about him, things that we know for certain, so that he doesn’t slip away too fast.

  “What was that song he told us to listen to last week?” I ask. I can’t go in there without a music recommendation from Jack. I can’t give up everything all at once. That’s what people don’t get about the Devonairre Street traditions—we have to give up so many things when the people we love die. So we hang on to other familiar things. Maybe I keep my hair long in part because I no longer get to eat doughnuts with my father on Saturday mornings. Maybe Charlotte wears the key around her neck because her dad’s not around to play Santa at their holiday party anymore.

  “Something from that love song album,” Isla says. “He was obsessed with that thing.”

  “69 Love Songs,” Cruz says. He looks at me on the word love, like it’s an accusation. My heart stops.

  I look to Owen, but he’s on his phone, probably looking up the album. He’s so sweet and good and handsome, and I don’t love him at all.

  “Magnetic Fields’ album, right, Lorna?” Cruz says, and I’m forced to look at him again. I nod.

  “‘I Don’t Want to Get Over You,’” I say.

  Cruz’s eyebrows jump. He jumps. Charlotte notices and gives us both a look. I shake my head and pull my lips in.

  “The song,” I say, but I’m blushing and Cruz is blushing and Charlotte or anyone with eyes can see it all. “The song Jack told us to listen to last week was ‘I Don’t Want to Get Over You.’ Magnetic Fields from the 69 Love Songs album. It’s good. It’s great.”

  “Right.” Cruz is blushing, too.

  I need the moment to end. The song is playing in my head now, and I need that to stop, too.

  “Hey. What do we do during the Minute of Silence today?” I grope for a new subject.

  “Whatever you usually do,” Charlotte says. It’s not as nice as she’s supposed to sound when she’s talking about my dad’s death. “I mean, whatever feels right for you.”

  “Will they have it, though?” I ask.

  Owen tilts his head and everyone else is looking at me like I’ve lost it, like the weekly Minute of Silence is a pillar of our world, like nothing could ever change our need for it.

  Maybe they’ve forgotten that seven years ago it didn’t exist. I hate that we pretend it’s been this way forever.

  “Well, there was Chicago. Won’t we need a Minute of Silence for Chicago? That was a Tuesday, too. How much silence can we really take every Tuesday for the rest of our lives?” I’m getting a little loud. Until now, Cruz was the only person who even knew that I’m bothered by the silences at all. I sent him a text during one a few months ago. We aren’t supposed to do anything like that—the silences are meant to be still, too—but it felt good. I’m not so silent on the inside, I wrote. We’re some of the only ppl in the world who could be loud during the moment of silence and actually get away with it. What would they say?

  When I saw him in the hall later that day, he smirked and I felt the deepest kind of gratitude for Cruz and I being in it together.

  “Huh,” Owen says, which isn’t a response at all.

  “You think we’ll do one for Chicago?” Charlotte asks. It seems like everyone but me and Cruz has almost forgotten about Chicago already. Jack’s death was so enormous and close, and Chicago is so far away and there’s only so much that can fit into one single week. Chicago’s hung on to me, though. It’s hard to grieve so many things at once.

  When I was little, my dad and I liked to bake together, and one day when I was measuring out the sugar and the flour in perfect copper measuring cups, I stopped mid-pour in a panic, the practice of measuring things suddenly disturbing me.

  “You’ve got your worry-wrinkle, Lorna,” Dad said, pointing to the place between my eyes where I hold everything that frightens me.

  “You say you love me more every day,” I said. Dad smiled and nodded and took the chocolate chips out of the cabinet. “But what about when you run out of room? Will you have to start loving me less?”

  Dad laughed and gave me a huge hug, lifting me a little so my legs were left to wiggle in the air. “How much love-room do you have left?” I asked into his shoulder. “A tablespoon? Or a cup?” Once I had that one question, I had a million other questions, popping like popcorn in my brain. I wanted to know the exact size and shape of love. Its volume, its density, how much it weighed, how much space it inhabited, whether it was a solid or a liquid or something else entirely.

  “You are so much like me, little one,” Dad said, giving me an extra squeeze before letting me back on the ground. “I’m still learning, but what I can tell you for sure is that hearts expand to fit more love in them over time. You think there can’t possibly be any more room, but there always is.”

  Now I’m not so sure about that. It feels like our hearts are so stuffed with sadnesses that they’re collapsing, getting too crowded to fit any more feelings into. I don’t have room to love Owen or forgive Angelika or properly mourn Chicago.

  Dad liked big questions about love and hearts and the ways of the world, but when he died I wasn’t old enough to ask him the most important ones.

  I got to ask him so few huge, worthwhile, complicated questions, and this week I have a new one every hour.

  “If there’s another Minute of Silence, we can think about Jack,” Owen says. The valley between what I’m feeling and what he understands is growing so wide I sometimes think we can’t even see each other across the divide.

  “What was it Jack liked to say before we went inside?” Isla asks.

  I close my eyes and picture Jack as I saw him every morning all these months—the exact way I let myself believe I would see him every morning, even after high school and into real life. He used to squeeze Delilah close, turn his head to face the rest of us, and say something before breaking away from the group. It’s unspeakably sad that the thing he said every morning is already hard to remember.

  I promise to pay attention to the details of my friends from here on out. I’ll remember their funny sayings and verbal tics and whether they say what’s up or how are you or how’s it going when we run into one another in the hallways. I’ll remember every one of Delilah’s made-up sayings. Moons and tides and onions and butter and whatever else she comes up with when she shifts back into being Delilah again.

  I scrunch my eyes, keeping them closed tight. I can see Jack’s face and his earbuds and his beat-up blazer and his messy hair. I can see his hands in his pockets and remember he always had his hands there, if they weren’t on Delilah.

  “‘Let’s do this thing, kids,’” I say. “That’s what he said every morning.”

  It’s such a small thing to remember, but I’m relieved to have grasped
on to something that was slipping away.

  We don’t move for a minute, missing him saying it. Missing something we didn’t know mattered at the time. Missing it in the now, and also the promise of it in the future.

  “Let’s do this thing, kids,” Cruz says.

  And like that, we have a new ritual. It’s Cruz’s job now, to usher us into the day.

  • • •

  At 10:11, we have our Minute of Silence.

  In the room across the hall, I can hear Cruz sigh.

  13.

  When school’s out, I want to see something pretty. Mom and I tried to do it every day after Dad died. “Every day we’ll find one thing that’s beautiful,” she said, bringing home a Renoir postcard from one of the knockoff stands outside the Met. Those were the worst days, the ones when she brought home postcards, like we had to reach back a century to find something not awful in the world. On the best days we’d find something pretty inside our own apartment or out on the street. On the best days we’d be able to see beauty in a world without my father.

  I go on a long walk and end up in the garden. It seems unlikely I can find beauty there today—places that Jack has been will be ugly for a long time, I think.

  But I see it. My beautiful thing for the day.

  Cruz on the bench.

  My face must change. I can feel it blushing, but it does even more than that, shifts in some stark, recognizable way. I put on my sunglasses as fast as I can, but it’s not fast enough, because instead of saying hello, Cruz says, “You heard us talking this morning.”

  I’m warm and shaky. I’m fluttery and hollow. Of course he can tell what I’m thinking about, what I’m trying not to think about.

  After the Minute of Silence this morning, the principal came over the loudspeakers. “Thank you,” she said, as always, followed by, “There will be a second Minute of Silence to commemorate the Chicago Bombings at 4:36 this afternoon. We expect you to take it just as seriously as you take the one in the morning. We stand by our Chicago brothers and sisters. We wait for answers with them. We will learn the names of the Affected. We will know their stories and the stories of their families. Thank you.”