“Well, great, because you get to live with it until I can wash my bag.”
“How’s Lyle?” I ask.
“He’s all right. He’s doing something tonight. I don’t know. The environmental club. You were in that, weren’t you?”
“I think I still am. Not that I’ve been going to things. I’m going to be fired from the paper,” I realize aloud.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. The post-modern ska/bluegrass infusion band can probably wait two weeks for your review.”
Living with another person is strange, especially if you never have before. She drops her bag on the chair, pulls her sweater over her head, and steps out of her jeans, looking for something to relax in wearing only her bra and underwear. She’s comfortable and it’s odd that a few months ago, we didn’t even know each other’s last names. Once she finds clothes, she jumps up onto her bed and throws a bottle of water at me from the crate next to her.
“You’re missing the fall,” she says.
“I hate the fall.”
“Still, there are pumpkins and leaves and it’s cold, but not freezing yet. Good cider weather. You missed Halloween.”
I did miss Halloween, the holiday that I always want to be exciting but ends up disappointing me. This year, I slept through it. “And my birthday,” I tell her.
“I know.”
“Does it matter? Nineteen isn’t different than eighteen. It’s never different, is it?”
Kristen looks around the room, at the pile of clothes I need to wash, at my books for classes piled up and dog-eared but starting to collect dust, at the bologna sandwich she’ll end up cleaning up because I’ll just let it sit there.
“My chemistry class sucks.”
“Why are you even taking that?” I ask.
“I don’t know. They want me to be well-rounded. I guess I can’t effectively teach children about vowels without understanding noble gases.”
“Clearly.”
“It’s a lot of work, and I don’t really see the point. But I guess you have to do it, right?”
“I was good at chemistry,” I reply. “In high school, I mean. Although it’s probably harder in college.”
She reaches into her backpack, which is shoved into a corner at one end of the bed, and takes out her chemistry book. “I think this is the same book my high school used,” she says. “It’s science for elementary ed majors. They assume we’re stupid.”
“Says a lot about their hope for future generations of educated youth.”
“No kidding. Anyway, I have to write a paper about valence electrons or something. Does that mean anything to you?”
I move over to her bed and we spend the next few hours on valence electrons, atomic structure, and chemical reactions. It’s the first time since school started that I feel like I’m at school, that this is the actual point of college. My days and nights are full of experiences, but I’m only in classes a few hours a week. And lately, no hours a week.
“That makes a lot of sense,” Kristen says, “although I still don’t think I’ll ever really need this.”
“Maybe not, but at least now you get it.”
“What about your classes?” she asks. “How are they? Have you talked to anyone? I mean, to explain missing them?”
I shake my head. “Not really. I mean, I haven’t missed any actual work exactly, but I have a ton of reading to catch up on and some of my professors aren’t all that flexible about attendance policies.”
“Just talk to them. I’m sure there is something you can do.”
“I should probably at least finish the books first, right?”
“It’s Wednesday. Go back Monday? That’ll give you time to catch up?”
Jumping off her bed, I nod. “Yeah. I guess I can do that.”
She packs up her book and notes and turns on her laptop to check email. Since I need to pee, I head out into the hall for the bathroom. I can’t help but look, because I do it every time I leave the room, but Jack isn’t conveniently turning a corner from the other wing. I should go to talk to him, to say more than a few syllables when he shows up with food, but if reading a book is this complicated, I’m not sure I’m much company anyway. It’ll get better, I tell myself, and though I don’t believe it, I try to see it as law. It has to, doesn’t it? No one can feel like this all the time.
****
I try to keep the memories out, try to think about nothing but the moment. They keep bringing me food, looking after me, and motivating me to go to classes. I haven’t told them the story. It’s been tough because we’re still reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles and I don’t want to write about it. I don’t want to talk about what happened to me or to her, and I certainly don’t want to sit in class and listen to people argue how much of it was her fault. How can they say things like that? Do they really think it or do they just like to be heard? I wonder what it’s like to be so desperate to be heard that you lose sight of what you’re even saying.
Kristen and Lyle both went home for the weekend, so Jack’s on food duty. I’m trying to force myself to write something meaningful about Tess when he knocks. I open the door and find him in the hallway, his hair still wet from the shower. He’s wearing a dress shirt and corduroys, which is first time I’ve seen him out of jeans.
“It’s stupid and I know you’re still avoiding me, but-”
“I’m not avoiding you,” I reply. “I’m just trying to make sense of things.”
“I know, and it’s fine and you can open this and I’ll leave.” He hands me a card and a small box he was holding behind his back. “But if you’re not busy and you want to hang out tonight, I thought I could take you out. For your birthday.”
“That was weeks ago,” I say.
“Fifteen days. And it just passed and that’s not all right, so…” He stands there in the hall, looking worried, his hands in his pockets. I wanted it to pass unnoticed, but I feel bad telling him I don’t appreciate the thought. I do appreciate it. I’m just not sure I deserve it.
“Give me an hour,” I tell him. “I’ll come to your room.”
It’s not a date, I remind myself after he leaves. I need to decide how to manage this. I don’t have many friends, never mind guy friends, never mind guys I find attractive despite how much I tell myself that I can’t do this right now. I have no intention of doing this – whatever this may be – but it doesn’t mean I can turn off the idea that I want to impress him. Everything I’ve learned about relationships was with Derek, or through my mom’s direction, and I don’t know how to be just me. Jack has told me he wants me to be myself with him, but how, when I have no idea who that is?
My birthday feels so meaningless. How can it be important, when less than two weeks ago, I was seeing my life for the first time? It didn’t take what happened with Derek – and I still haven’t decided what that is or what to call it – for me to realize that I wasn’t whole anymore. I hid it and I lied to myself, like I do, but it was true that I’d lost something between home and school. I knew I had been clinging to the past. I knew that I was becoming nothing but a shadow of a person, given that memory was only illusion. To continue to remember means to forgive. I’m no longer capable of forgiving, and I think I like that realization most of all. Some things don’t deserve forgiveness.
I end up settling on jeans and a sweater – casual and not indicative of anything – before fixing my hair and heading to Jack’s room. He opens the door immediately, as if he’s been waiting behind it for the last hour. “Did you open it?” he asks.
In my getting ready, I left his gift and card on my desk and forgot. “I’m sorry. I will when we get back. I was trying to figure out what to wear.”
“You look really nice.”
“Thanks. So what are these big plans?”
He grabs his jacket and leads me into the hallway. “It’s probably stupid, but do you trust me?”
“I do,” I reply, before I even know I’m saying it. I do trust him, although I’ve known him
for two months, yet he feels like the closest friend I’ve had in ages. “Wow. Yeah. I do.”
“I’m glad.”
It’s going to snow, but it hasn’t yet, which is worse. There is the same painful cold that settles, a warning of the storm to come, but it just waits and aches while the snow builds. My sweater and coat aren’t enough to keep off the wind, but I don’t want to complain. My parents left a few messages for my birthday and sent me an e-card that I couldn’t get to play, but that was the full extent of my celebration. At the bottom of my e-card, my mother added a note that I should try to avoid eating before Thanksgiving if I didn’t “want to be a whale by Christmas.” I can’t help but feel like the wind, therefore, is worth it, just to spend time with someone who actually cares.
When we get to his car, Jack waits, hesitating by the hood. “Do you want me to open your door?” he asks.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted… I want to be nice. But I don’t want you to think that I think you need to have your door opened.”
Laughing, I open the door myself and climb into the passenger seat. Jack turns on the heat and we wait for the car to start, music quietly filling the space between us. It’s not that late, but the sky is already a blanket of stars. With the trees all dead, it’s easy to see the light through the broken parts.
“Tell me about your band,” I say and rest my head on the seat. Jack is comfortable. It’s easy to spend time with him.
“What about them? We’re okay. I mean, I have no plans of doing it past school, but it’s good for when things get bad. Sometimes I need a place to drain myself of the darkness.”
“Do things still get bad?”
“All the time,” he admits. “I’m not easy to know, Lily. In ten minutes, for no reason at all, I could shut down. I don’t plan on it, but I could. When I do, there’s no way out. There’s no escape from it. I live in a constant state of knowing that I’m just one failed kick from drowning.”
“Yet you’ve been there through everything for me.”
“I care. I don’t know why I care, I’ll be honest, but I can’t help it.”
“I’m happy you’re honest,” I say. “I’d rather you tell me how things really are. I’ve spent too long not knowing, being protected and sheltered from what I didn’t want to see.”
“Are you ready for the full truth?” he asks.
“Of course.”
I haven’t been watching the road, but we’re heading out of town and away from everything I know. A month ago, that would have scared me, but now the thought of a whole road and horizon full of something else is what keeps me from letting the thought of Derek and his hands on me, holding me down, ruin this. I’ve given him too many years of my life. We’re celebrating my birthday, another year, and there isn’t going to be space for him in this one.
“I play bass because I can’t sing,” Jack says. “I used to like singing, but my vocal cords are screwed up now.”
“Your voice sounds fine.”
He shakes his head and turns off the music. Even though the heat is on full, small wisps of cold reach me through the spaces between the window and the door and another hits me as he starts to speak.
“During my senior year of high school, I tried to die. I stood in my grandmother’s bathroom for three hours and I couldn’t find a single reason to go on. I tried. Lily, I wanted nothing more than to want to be alive, but I couldn’t. I thought about leaving a note, thinking I had the words. I believed it was a matter of finding the right ones, of putting them together like a person weaves a blanket. Once I found the pattern and I made my home with the words, my voice would finally be more than a silent echo. Is that ironic? Oxymoronic? Is it possible to have a silent echo?”
“I don’t know, but I’m glad you didn’t die,” I tell him. I imagine this semester, the night with Derek, sitting here now, and how none of this would have existed. He wouldn’t have existed. How can it hurt so badly to imagine losing something you didn’t even know you needed?
“Thanks, but the problem was that after three hours, the words didn’t come. Inside the mirror, I saw myself, but I was surrounded by nothing but hopelessness. I wanted to scream, but I knew the only thing that would come back would be desperation. Being alive was a burden and I didn’t want to face it anymore.”
He stops speaking and pulls the car to the side of the road. His hands are shaking and he’s staring at the road and tree line, although I know he can only see the blackness that was reflected in that mirror years ago.
“Tell me,” I say, reaching out a hand and resting it on his forearm. It’s not a big move although it terrifies me. I can’t stop thinking about that night and what it felt like to hear those words, to be touched that way and called a slut and a whore. I know it wasn’t Jack, but the sweeping nausea still seeps into my veins. But I don’t let go of his arm, because I want to care despite it all.
He turns to face me and his blue eyes are blazing with pain. “I don’t have the words, Lily. I can’t explain how it felt, how helpless but at the same time so sure. It was like one of those old fun houses, where the mirrors only reflect distortions, the world as you’ve imagined it be. I watched the mirror and then I went in my room. Right now, just telling you about this, I can feel the chair against my feet. I was so aware, probably more aware than I ever recall being before or after. The wood pressed against my bare feet, the rope thick in my hands. Sometimes when I’m in that strange moment where you begin to fall asleep, but when reality is still trying to hold on to you, I can hear the sound of the chair echo off the floor, falling over, and I remember it all. I remember everything I felt and saw.”
“What did you see?” I ask.
“Nothing. There was no white light. There was no sudden regret, no moment when I would have given it all for more time to appreciate the little things. There was just more misery, more sadness, and more darkness that stretched on endlessly. Until the darkness was all.” He pauses and closes his eyes before speaking again. “Then I woke up in a hospital bed, with a bunch of assholes standing around me, trying to label what was in my head. They had their go-to list of chemicals that would make me normal, their scientific names of disorders to explain why, when I pictured life, I saw nothing. I was there for months. When I left, I wasn’t any different. They just titled me chronic and told me to keep telling someone my problems and popping my pills.”
I unbuckle my seatbelt and lean over, not hugging him, but tightening my grip on his arm and resting my head against his shoulder.
“We’re both a mess,” he says, tilting his head down against mine. “I’m sorry. You don’t need this, too.”
Looking up at him, I know it’s going to happen. I know it’s a terrible idea, but I can’t help it. The thought of his absence aches too much and I want to know he’s real. I take my hand away from his arm and reach into his hair, pulling his head closer to mine until it’s too late to change my mind. He freezes, though, before he meets my lips, and whispers, “Are you sure?”
I’m not sure. I’m terrified. I don’t think I can have a boyfriend, not right now. I don’t know what I want and I feel guilty because I want to kiss him so badly but I don’t want to promise him things that aren’t true. But with his warm breath so close to my face and the chill of the car at my back, I nod.
35.
“We should get going,” he says. We’ve been sitting in the car for more than an hour. There was a lot of kissing, but that was it. It was really good kissing, which is messing with my brain too much. I’ve been with one guy – from kissing to everything else – and none of it was like the way Jack kisses me.
“We could.”
He laughs. “You’re never going to believe me, Lily, but I really didn’t bring you out tonight for your birthday to sit on the side of the road and make out. Not that it’s a bad thing.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It’s not much further,” he tells me and I settle back in on my side of the car, watching
him. He’s smiling. For a guy with so much pain in his life, it amazes me how happy he is right now. Of course, I catch myself smiling, too.
It’s only about ten minutes down the road from where we were, but the place we stop is just a dirt lot and a faded wooden sign. Jack opens the door and this time, he runs around to get mine before I finish getting my seatbelt off.
“You don’t need to open it,” I say.
“You’re right. I don’t.” He brings me against him and kisses me again. This time our bodies are close and I can feel the swirling in every part of me. He makes it hard to remember why I’m scared.
We head down the winding path and there’s a loud cry from an owl. It’s like I pictured on that one afternoon in the woods behind my house – and then I see it. The lake, with the sliver of the moon rippling on the water’s surface. The trees, dead, but surrounding us. The owl cries again and I understand. I understand so much in this moment.
“This is…” I can’t explain. I can’t say it, because it was a stupid story. It meant nothing. I’ve told Jack pieces of my life and about Derek and my mom, although not in full, and the story of the trees was just a random story. A quiet night when I was babbling and there were no big or important issues surrounding us. It wasn’t about fear or death or loss. It was just a story about hope – but he listened. And more, he made it come true.
“When I was growing up,” he says, “I used to go outside in my yard, and eventually in my grandmother’s yard, and I’d look up to space. The stars always intrigued me. Some of the light that we see when we look to the heavens has already died. That fact sort of inspired me when I was a kid, both before and after my mom’s death. The idea that, millions of years after the light dies, it’s just now being seen by someone? That’s crazy.”
I nod, but don’t add anything. He continues.
“For eight years, I asked for a telescope for my birthday. Even after my mom was gone. I was young enough to still not understand. I just wanted to see the stars. I never got the telescope, of course. We couldn’t afford it, and really, there were more important things than staring at dead light.”
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