The Careful Undressing of Love

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “You can’t keep us in here,” I say. Isla and Charlotte are still quiet, looking out the windows, at their feet, at the lunch trays, anywhere but our principal’s eyes.

  “We’ve never had a situation quite like this,” the principal says. “The media attention is a bit of a new thing for our school, and we haven’t ironed out a great plan yet to make sure the student body and the three of you are all comfortable and safe and able to do your best jobs learning.”

  “It’s fine,” Charlotte mumbles.

  Isla’s silent and still.

  “Are you going to kick us out?” I ask.

  “Of course not,” the principal says, but her eyes move to the left and to the right and I know it’s a possibility. “It’s been a very troubling few weeks. The attack in Chicago and Jack Abbound’s death and of course we’re coming up on the seven-year anniversary and the papers have been—well. It’s a hard time. It’s a hard time to feel safe and comfortable. But we’re going to make it work for everyone, I can promise you that much. And we won’t hold this all against any of you. We’re not mad at you.”

  She wipes her hands against each other, all great, that’s done, and looks at her assistant, who keeps biting her lip. The assistant has a tattoo of scales on her wrist. Gemini. It’s popular these days, to get a tattoo of your astrological sign on your wrist.

  It makes me dislike her a little. Distrust her.

  They leave and we eat our lasagna and try to think of something to talk about.

  “What would Delilah do about this?” Charlotte asks. Her glasses look a little foggy and her face is drawn. I wonder what Cruz likes about her face. Maybe her green eyes or the straight line of her nose or the way she puts the perfect puff of blush on each cheek.

  “New Delilah or Old Delilah?” I ask.

  “Our Delilah,” Charlotte says, and we all know what that means.

  “She wouldn’t sit here and let it happen,” I say. “She’d, I don’t know, protest. Petition. She’d laugh it off and bust into her classes anyway. She’d fix it.”

  If she saw us right now, she’d say “don’t sit around and let the earth do all the spinning.” And we’d laugh at the way Delilah says the perfect things in the perfect moments.

  But Delilah’s not here so we sit until two thirty, when Cruz comes by and releases us from the classroom.

  “I should have come earlier,” he says. I nod. Charlotte kisses his mouth like it’s fine that he ignored us all day and let us take the fall once again. He walks us through the hallways like a bodyguard. His arm is around Charlotte.

  Owen’s outside the building, and the sight of him makes my heart jump. Not with the happiness of being around him, but because I’d forgotten about him all day long, so his face is a surprise. I’m not much of a girlfriend, it turns out.

  “They locked me up,” I say.

  “Yeah.” Owen’s hands are in his pockets and my friends don’t leave us alone but they give us some space.

  “You didn’t come save me.”

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

  He keeps looking at my shoulder instead of my face.

  “You’re not the same with me,” I say at last, because Owen’s not saying much else. “You knew about the street and the Curse and stuff. You knew and it didn’t matter, I thought. But now it does?”

  Owen looks at my other shoulder.

  “You didn’t even look like you in that picture,” he says. “What’d they do to your face?”

  “Makeup.”

  “Oh.”

  I know Owen’s slow way of moving and thinking and speaking, so I take a deep breath, still my busy hands, and try to quiet my heart while I wait for him to speak.

  “Every single person who was married to a Devonairre Street Girl during World War Two died in battle,” he says at last.

  He read the article. Thoroughly.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s weird how little I thought about that. But I don’t know any other widows except for your mom and Charlotte’s mom and Cruz and Isla’s mom and Delilah’s mom. Your moms are all widows. The only widows I know in the whole world all live on one single street.”

  “You’re starting to believe,” I say. Out of the corner of my eye I watch Isla flirt with a nervous boy. I see Charlotte and Cruz hold hands and avert their eyes from everyone staring at them.

  Owen is extra slow with his words. He’s barely even blinking.

  “I’ve never felt about anyone the way I feel about you,” he says when I think we’re going to stay in silence for the rest of our lives. I can sense a but to his sentence, and I think maybe this is it, we’re breaking up, he’s letting me go because I’m too scary and dangerous and wrong.

  Then I’ll be left alone with thoughts of Cruz, whom I don’t want to be thinking about at all. I want to think about Owen. I want Owen to stay. I want to hook up in my bed, all angles and gasps and perfect fits and dream-filled naps. I feel powerful in bed with Owen and vulnerable in the garden with Cruz and I want that power back. I want to drink in the garden with our friends and not worry about things like love, and only worry about Owen’s blue eyes and big hands and sweet snores.

  It feels like we had built something with blocks—Lorna- CruzCharlotteDelilahIsla. It feels like we had a delicate castle of blocks on our living room table and Jack’s Death and the Chicago Bombing swooped in and knocked the whole thing over—and then mocked us for believing blocks were anything real. All I want is to build it back, exactly the way it was.

  But I can’t put it back together without Owen.

  “You told me you loved me once, in your sleep,” I say. Love is the last thing I want to be thinking about, the last word I want to be saying, but there it is. Love. Always popping up when you least expect it. Always invading perfectly safe and sweet things like affection and tenderness and sex.

  “I did?”

  “‘I love the moon and you and I don’t have a chicken,’” I say, smiling at the words although so much has happened in between the time when he said them and this moment right now.

  “Huh?” Owen says. He doesn’t smile back. Whatever magic is in those words for me isn’t there for him. They might as well have been said by someone else.

  “It’s what you said a while ago. When you were dreaming.” I’m fluttery inside and I want him to think I’m beautiful. Those things aren’t love but they’re something even better. Safer. Easier. What I feel for Cruz is thick and inescapable and heavy. What I feel for Owen is light and lovely. I want to keep it. I want to hold on to it.

  “Well. Sounds like it was quite a dream,” Owen says. And I think, yeah, yeah, it was.

  We are maybe about to end or we are maybe about to kiss but instead someone spits on me.

  At first I think it’s a drop of rain, so I look up to find storm clouds. There aren’t any. It’s a sunny day. But Henry Pollan is a foot away, ugly-scowling and wiping off his lips.

  “Get away from us,” he says, his voice deeper than I remember from sophomore year math class. He asked me to a dance once and I said no, because I knew Charlotte and Cruz and Delilah and Isla weren’t going to the dance and I couldn’t see myself there without them; I couldn’t picture my arms around Henry’s thick neck.

  Now he’s waving his arms and doing a menacing dance with his feet like he’s ready to fight.

  “What the fuck?” I say, hitting the spit off my skin, slapping my arm over and over in the hopes that I will somehow feel the sting of the hit and not the wetness of his spit. I gag.

  Owen rushes at Henry, all instinct, and in that moment, too, I love his body and the easy way it moves. He shoves one of Henry’s shoulders, jerks his head.

  Cruz sees and comes at Henry, too. He raises his shoulders, like that will make him wider, stronger, scarier.

  “Fuck you!” Cruz hits Henry’s other shoul
der. Owen and Cruz flank Henry, making menacing moves with their chins, their elbows, their shoulders.

  There’s a scuffle—Cruz, Owen, Henry, and a few others get into it—but it doesn’t last because Henry and his friends end up running away, scared, I think, not of the boys, but of the Devonairre Street Girls.

  “Jack would have fully kicked their asses,” Cruz says when it’s just us on the sidewalk.

  I nod and Owen nods and Charlotte tears up and Isla juts her hip out and pretends not to care.

  “They believe,” I say. “Every single person we see on the street believes. At least a little bit. They wonder.”

  “They’re scared of us,” Isla says, and for the first time in weeks I see little girl Isla again, sad eyed and wishing the world were different.

  23.

  We follow Isla’s lead and get drunk after school.

  “Finally,” she says, like she’s been waiting for us to join her since early this morning, which I guess she has.

  “To Chicago,” Cruz says, but it’s not a very good toast, and we don’t want to think about Chicago. I’ve heard most of the city hasn’t gone back to work and kids haven’t gone back to school—things have paused for even longer than they did here after the Bombing. Chicago doesn’t want to rebuild, the news says. It wants to dedicate all the shattered space to gardens, with the ashes of the lost men and women buried underneath the ground.

  “To Chicago,” we repeat back to him, downing peach vodka out of plastic cups. It’s a terrible taste but I’m thirsty for the way I’ll feel after a few more sips.

  Owen is here, but quiet. We aren’t touching or speaking or even looking at each other. But at least he’s here.

  We get drunk in the sad way, not the fun way.

  “We should get Delilah,” Charlotte says. “She’d do this with us, I bet.”

  “She’s busy with Angelika tonight,” Isla says. “We’re making a tribute. To everyone we’ve lost.”

  “How do you know that?” I ask with a laugh, like we’re back in the old days, where no one would ever know more about Delilah than I do.

  Isla doesn’t answer. She waits for me to figure out the answer myself.

  My spine sweats and I know, for sure, that I’m the outsider, not Delilah. That everything I’ve thought was true isn’t, that I don’t understand the street I live on or the people that I love.

  Isla braids a few pieces of grass together and Charlotte leans against Cruz and takes bigger sips of vodka than usual. I survey the plants. Someone has been overwatering them and they’re drooping.

  People think they’re helping, but they’re actually hurting things.

  The second Minute of Silence hits at 4:36.

  “We have to be quiet,” Owen says. Cruz and I roll our eyes.

  “I don’t have to be quiet,” Isla says, but she is. We all are. Cars stop. Devonairre Street pauses. I’m thinking again about the afternoon in bed with Owen and I look to him to see whether he’s remembering the same thing, but he’s misty eyed looking at the bench.

  “I gotta go,” he says when the minute is over.

  “We didn’t finish our talk earlier,” I say. My voice shakes and everyone’s listening but pretending not to. Owen sighs.

  “What do you think about during the Minute of Silence?” he asks. I get the feeling there’s a right answer and a wrong answer.

  “You,” I say. “I think about you.” At least this one time, it’s true. “What do you think about?”

  Owen pauses. He looks a little sick. He looks a little sad. He doesn’t look so much like Owen. “I think about Jack,” he says.

  The way he says Jack’s name, I know it’s over.

  He takes a lemon on his way out. Plucks it from the tree like it’s a thing he’s always done.

  • • •

  We get drunker.

  Then we get drunker still.

  We are angry-drinking, we are lonely-drinking, we are grief-drinking, we are fear-drinking. Isla is somehow our leader.

  When we are bleary eyed and it’s six thirty in the evening, Cruz brings out his phone to look again at the article. He reads it aloud, in his most ridiculous voice; and if we were even the littlest bit sober I don’t think it would be funny, but we’re blitzed, all of us, even Charlotte, so it is downright hysterical.

  “That’s about us,” I say. “They’re talking about us! How crazy is that!”

  “So crazy!” Isla says.

  “How many people in the world are talking about us right this minute?” Charlotte asks. She lies down on the bench, her legs swinging off the edge, her head at an awkward angle that can’t be comfortable.

  “A hundred,” Isla says.

  “Hopefully none,” I say.

  “They don’t know the first thing about us,” Cruz says. He says it right to me.

  “One hundred percent incorrect,” I say. “They know everything about us. Wait. Wait. Okay. Look.” I pull out my phone and bring up HistoryoftheAffected.gov and find my way to my own page, the one that people can look at if they want to put themselves in my shoes or something.

  “The History of the Affected will build compassion and understanding. It will help us remember the tragedies, and build a better world,” the president said when the program was first being introduced. It was an impassioned speech that people say will go down in history like the Gettysburg Address. The words are written in fancy calligraphy across the header of the web page.

  “See? They know me,” I say, staring at a picture of myself on the screen.

  There’s me at eleven, cross-legged at the one-year anniversary in Prospect Park, lost in the grass while everyone else sat on chairs. My hair was uncombed, a key was around my neck, and at the edge of the frame it’s clear I’m holding someone’s hand.

  Cruz’s.

  Isla’s haunting the background of my photograph as well—I can see her little-girl dress as a blur behind me. But it’s Cruz’s hand that I can’t take my eyes off.

  “God,” Cruz says, leaning in to take a look with everyone else. “You look sadder than I ever remember either of us being.”

  “I hate the memorials,” I say.

  What’s most clear in the photo, more than my sadness or Cruz’s hand or the fact of the photo existing at all—the person who captured it wanted, I guess, to get a vision of what tragedy looks like—is the pile of lemons in my lap.

  I feel a wave of anger on behalf of eleven-year-old me, looking to a pile of fruit to make me feel better. When the lemons didn’t work, it felt like something was wrong with me. I didn’t understand those first two years why the pain kept coming, like a flood.

  “Angelika’s always there,” I say. “Lurking.” I think of the way she’s tied herself to Delilah. Their afternoons braiding bracelets on the stoop. Their identical mugs of tea. The way Angelika now has a framed picture of Jack in her kitchen window, stealing a bit of him for herself.

  “You’re telling me,” says Charlotte. It’s an unexpected joke from someone who never makes jokes. I throw my arms around her, and for an instant we are best friends.

  Charlotte gets woozy, and it disappears, the thing between us. She moves toward Cruz, grabs on to his shoulders to steady her, and I’m back to resenting the hell out of her button-up shirt and pressed cardigan and sensible shoes.

  Isla doesn’t say anything about Angelika or lemons until a few minutes later, when she says, simply, “Nothing helps.”

  The sun’s starting to come down and we’re due home soon and I’m not any closer to understanding anything except that being near Cruz makes me want to be near Cruz more and thinking of Angelika makes my palms sweat and my heart race and I’m sad for the little girl with a lap full of lemons.

  “How do you think they’re doing in Chicago?” I ask. “I keep forgetting about them. Isn’t that disgusting? We should go to Chica
go. We should write letters to people in Chicago. We should be . . . doing something.”

  And in an instant, I understand the lemons. I want to bring them to Chicago, hoping that they’ll help.

  “Let Chicago do Chicago,” Isla says, her voice a little slurry. I wonder if Isla should have friends her own age, if we’ve done something terrible to her by treating her exactly as one of us. “They don’t need us worrying about them. They want space.”

  I remember after the Bombing we hated the people who wanted to crowd our space with their vague grief. They cried at candle lightings and spoke about being a mile away or upstate or across the country.

  And now here I am, wanting to take a bit of the Chicago Attacks for myself. Trying to grieve for someone I didn’t lose, for people I never loved, for a place I’ve never known.

  “I feel like we’re connected to them,” I say, trying to defend myself but I know I’m wrong. “We’re the same.”

  Charlotte dozes off in Cruz’s arms. Isla gets a call and lets us know she’s meeting someone in Prospect Heights.

  “Who?” I ask, because no one else remembers to ask.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Isla says.

  “It matters to me.”

  Cruz shifts. “You’ll call me if you need me?” he says, an all-wrong response. We have to keep Isla here. We have to keep her safe and away from whatever it is she’s trying to do. She’s trying to be Someone Else and we can’t let that happen. She’s ours. She’ll always be ours.

  “I won’t need you,” Isla says. She doesn’t turn back to look at us when she goes. She looks straight ahead, her hair flapping behind her like a cape, giving her superpowers.

  Then it’s me and Cruz and sleeping Charlotte in the garden.

  It is always me and Cruz alone in the garden, with all the things we cannot say.

  We don’t speak, we don’t stare, we don’t text. But minutes pass and we don’t move, either. Cruz hands me his phone. He’s still on the History of the Affected database and he’s pulled up his page. There is a picture of Cruz, suited and sad. He is staring at someone nearby. A girl in a familiar gray dress with my silvery hair.