Speak of Me As I Am

by Sonia Belasco

  I close my eyes. I can see Carlos slumped against that tree, arms folded across his chest. It was so dark, I couldn’t see anything but his outline, the shape of him gray over black. I ran to him and crouched down and pulled him up, but Carlos was limp. His whole body was limp and his clothes were soaked through. I pressed a hand to this throat, felt his too-slow thud of a pulse.

  Fuck you, Damon, he’d whispered. Fuck you, man.

  Carlos, stay with me. Stay with me, please, just—

  Like at that point Carlos still had a choice.

  I’m sorry, Carlos said.

  What are you sorry for? I asked. Don’t be sorry.

  I will never forget holding him like that, the rain turning my clothes to ice against my skin. My shoes were covered in mud. I kept whispering, over and over, Stay with me, man. Stay with me. But I knew he couldn’t hear me.

  “When the police came, he was still alive,” I whisper. “He was still alive in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, but he was unconscious. He was still alive at the hospital, but not for very long. They came out and they said he’d taken too many pills, that they’d been in his system too long.”

  “Damon,” Melanie murmurs.

  “And I keep thinking I could’ve done something,” I say. “Gotten there quicker. Read the fucking signs, you know? But then some days I’m so angry at him, I want to kick his ass, and that makes me so angry at myself, I want to cry. I get up on that stage and I do that death scene and I see Desdemona and I see Carlos like he looked in this park. And I’m Othello, but Carlos was Othello too. Carlos made that decision—for in my sense ’tis happiness to die—and he planned it and he went to this very spot and then he called me to come find him. He knew I’d come for him like I’d come ten thousand times before, every time he was in trouble. He made me part of his plan. He knew I’d take his fucking camera. He knew me so fucking well, but I don’t think I ever knew him.”

  “No,” Melanie says. “No, you knew him. You knew where to find him. You were the only person who did.”

  Melanie

  Your hand, on my arm, in the hospital, was so cold. I kept thinking: Where did all your fire go?

  CHAPTER TEN

  I begin to cry. I can’t help it.

  Damon moves forward, arm encircling my shoulders. He pulls me closer, and then I’m pressed against his chest, shaking.

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry,” he murmurs, and the words ghost across my scalp, disappearing into my hair. I’m pretty sure I’m still crying, but all I feel is the pendant of his gold necklace making an indentation in my cheek, his arms and his heat and his spicy boy smell all around me.

  “Why are you sorry?” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like my own.

  “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to make you upset,” Damon says.

  “But it is upsetting,” I say. “You’re allowed to be upset about things that are upsetting.”

  I can feel Damon shaking, and I wonder if he’s crying too. Crying is never something you want to do alone. I’ve done a lot of crying alone.

  “It’s never okay when somebody dies, Damon,” I say. “Never.”

  I think of how I’d feel if Tristan killed himself: It would be like someone had ripped my skin off and left me raw and exposed. How guilty I’d feel, how useless, how afraid.

  I look into Damon’s eyes and know he feels all of this too, and he’s been feeling it by himself.

  “I’m not going to say I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t think that would help.”

  “It wouldn’t,” Damon says. “No offense.”

  “I won’t say it’s not your fault either,” I say, “because I’m sure you’ve heard that a lot.”

  Damon nods. I can see his throat work as he swallows.

  “I’m only going to say that I think you’re wonderful,” I say, “and I have that picture of Carlos you gave me still, on my dresser, and I’m pretty sure—” I stop to catch my breath. “I’m pretty sure he thought you were wonderful too.”

  Damon’s arms tighten around my shoulders. His eyes are glittering and wet. He looks up at the sky. It’s almost dark and getting chilly. I’m shivering. I didn’t even notice. Damon takes off his jacket and wraps it around my shoulders.

  “It’s okay that you feel like this,” I say. “The way you feel right now—it’s okay. It’s okay to be angry, and sad, and feel helpless. You don’t have to hide it.”

  Love your grief, the grief book said.

  Suddenly I think I understand.

  Damon’s face is so soft and sad.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” he says, and when he gets up, I follow.

  Damon doesn’t talk about what I said, or what he said, or what I didn’t say, or what he didn’t say. Instead he leads me out of the park, onto the sidewalk, into a Best Buy. There’s something comforting about the glaring, jarring, twitching rhythm of all those flickering TVs, the noisy stereos, the hum of random noise. We wander aimlessly up and down the aisles, and he shows me different kinds of cameras—the one he has now that used to be Carlos’s, the one he wants for his birthday. We discuss shutter speed and Photoshop and Damon’s eyes light up when he talks about photographing flowers and trees, trying to get each blossom to stand out, to be able to see every wrinkle and vein of the leaves and petals.

  We grab coffee at Starbucks and sit for a while at the wooden tables, listening to smooth jazz and sipping caffeinated beverages. He seems to be waiting for me to speak, but I don’t really want to talk. I don’t think he wants to either. The coffee shop whirs all around us, the sounds of chattering voices, the purr and grumble of the espresso machines, the chiming of the opening and closing doors. Each customer brings a puff of winter air in with them as they enter or leave. We share the silence. It’s November now, the beginning of the end of the year.

  Over the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Damon Lewis, admiring the slender curve of his wrists or the swell of his biceps or the Crayola green of his eyes. But I can’t help feeling, sitting here in this coffee shop, the world going on around us, that I’m seeing him for the first time.

  We walk back to Damon’s house. No one is home, and everything is clean and neat. Damon leads me up the stairs to his bedroom. There are still boxes stacked in one corner, and his laptop is the only object on his desk. I stare at his walls for several minutes, taking in the pale blue paint covered with a massive web of photographs, people and places and things. I stare until the colors begin to swirl and blur.

  “Did you take—” I start to say.

  “No,” Damon says. “Carlos.”

  My chest hurts.

  “I want you to have this,” Damon says, and holds out one photo that’s not on his wall.

  My own face stares back at me, eyes rimmed with messy black, cheeks flushed a milky pink.

  “Oh my God,” I whisper.

  “I took this,” he says, “before I first met you. Over the summer. You were—”

  “—in Rock Creek Park,” I say.

  “I should have asked,” Damon says. “But that’s the thing about taking photos. You wait and the moment’s gone.”

  I take in a deep breath. I could freak out right now, knowing Damon took this picture before we even spoke. But I think I understand why he did it.

  Damon looked at me and he saw. He saw what everybody else had been missing, and I didn’t even have to say it.

  I remember how he reached out to touch the scar near my eye the night we kissed on that rooftop. I like it, he’d said. You’re demented, I’d replied. He was framing me, trying to see me and everything that makes me who I am. Scars included.

  It should make me feel self-conscious, knowing this, knowing how closely he looks. But now I know something about Damon that can’t be seen too.

  I examine the photograph—my shoulders curved, eyes downcast, hands bunched at my side
s. I seem so compact, pinched and tight, closed off. I look closer: Behind me stands a tree, gnarled and old, branches reaching out like open arms.

  “That’s the same spot where—”

  “Yeah,” Damon says, and lowers his eyes.

  Wherever I look, there you are.

  The photo feels slippery in my hand, as malleable as memory.

  Sometimes I wake up and can’t remember which side of my mother’s face had more freckles, the left or the right. The details seem unimportant, but they’re everything. They make something real and special and itself.

  I watch Damon’s face, the way it shifts and settles.

  “You said Carlos left you the camera and the photographs,” I say. “Are the ones on your walls the ones he left you?”

  “There are more,” Damon says.

  He crouches down and unearths a brown cardboard box from under the bed. He lifts off the lid and inside I can see piles of images, layer upon layer. He holds out the box to me.

  Outside a strong wind pushes through the trees. Damon’s bedroom window is open just a crack, and the breeze tickles the hairs on my forearms. I take the box and sit down on the edge of Damon’s bed.

  I lift out a shot of the Mall in springtime, trees green and heavy, cherry blossoms floating in the air like huge, dry snowflakes.

  “These are beautiful,” I say.

  “Some are beautiful,” Damon says. “Some aren’t.”

  He reaches into the box and takes out a photo of a homeless woman, squatting down by the side of a building, surrounded by dirty blankets and plastic bags filled with cans and bottles. The bottles glitter in the sun, green and blue, shiny red crumpled Coke cans and silver and black containers for energy drinks. But the woman looks old and gray and tired, fading into the concrete facade behind her.

  “That’s amazing,” I say.

  “I know.” Damon scratches behind his ear. “I never knew Carlos thought about—I mean, we talked about serious stuff. But I never knew he saw poverty like that. That he cared, I guess. There are a lot of photos like that one in here. He took these ones at this housing project in Anacostia, and—”

  Damon pauses, rummaging through the box and locating a picture of a young boy, tucked into a dark stairwell. His clothes are too big on his thin frame, and he looks exhausted, as if he hasn’t slept in days. On the wall above his head are two words etched in spray paint: OUR FUTURE.

  I suck in a breath. I can feel this photo, as if it’s reached out and punched me in the stomach. There are so many things I know are there, in the corners and out of my line of vision, hidden in plain sight. But I never see them unless someone makes me look.

  “I’ll never know if he really wanted to die,” Damon says. “He took pills. A lot of the time pills don’t even work. He had all this time to change his mind. I feel like maybe he did change his mind, because Carlos was like that, you know? He’d be all gung-ho about some crazy thing, and then later he’d be like, ‘That was stupid, what was I thinking?’ But this time—”

  He stops. I reach over the box and find Damon’s hand, lacing our fingers together. He looks up, and he doesn’t smile, but the tightness around his eyes softens.

  “We don’t have to talk about this,” Damon says. “This is depressing, and it’s not like you need more things to—”

  “I don’t think this is depressing,” I say. “This is Carlos’s life. This is what he wanted you to see, Damon. This is who he was, or who he thought he was, anyway. I feel like when people die they leave behind all these clues about themselves. My mom left her studio. My dad moved everything into the basement, but he left it exactly the way it was when she was alive. He hasn’t touched it since. At first I thought it was because he couldn’t face it, like he just couldn’t deal, but then I realized that studio is her, to him—it’s where he can still see her, still connect to her, you know? For me too—when I’m there I feel her there too.”

  Damon grips my hand more tightly, and I don’t pull away. I place my palm on his back. He’s warm, T-shirt damp with sweat. He smells like trees.

  “We should look at these photos,” I say. “Together.”

  Damon lifts his head. His eyes are a dark watery green, like the Atlantic Ocean under a cloudy sky.

  “Okay,” he says.

  We examine the photos one by one. Sometimes we make up stories to go with them. Sometimes Damon stops and stares and doesn’t say anything for long, painful minutes. Watching him, I know there are stories I will never know, stories that belong only to Damon and Carlos, only to Damon now.

  “This one,” I say, holding up a photo of Damon dressed in a collared shirt and slacks, sleeves pushed up above his elbows. “Where did he take this?”

  “Play rehearsal,” Damon says. “At Gate, last year, we did an August Wilson play. Carlos took some photos for the newspaper review of the production.”

  There are other photos of Damon underneath them—so many. Damon in the play. Damon doing crew. With his parents. Alone. All of them are beautiful, spontaneous, real. Never posed. Damon never seemed to know Carlos was taking them.

  “This, all the photos he took of you,” I say softly. “It’s not that he got your good side. It’s like he didn’t think you had a bad one.”

  Damon looks down at his hands. I can see the way two nails on his left hand are broken, skin dry at the knuckles.

  “He was wrong,” Damon says.

  “He loved you, Damon,” I say.

  Damon’s face is shuttered closed.

  “He didn’t tell me,” Damon says, so softly I have to strain to hear him.

  I think, for a moment, that Damon’s repeating what he said before. I keep thinking I could’ve done something. But then I realize: oh.

  There’s a reason Damon keeps these photos in a box.

  He knew me so fucking well, but I don’t think I ever knew him.

  “I wish—I don’t know,” Damon says.

  I wait.

  “After he died I couldn’t even look at the photos,” Damon says. “For weeks I kept them in that box under my bed, but I knew they were there, you know? Just sitting there, waiting for me to look at them.”

  Damon swallows. He still won’t look at me.

  “One night I couldn’t sleep,” he continues, “and I took out the box and I looked through them and I realized—Carlos was always trying to cover up anything too emotional with a joke, or he’d get pissed off and get mean or change the subject. He was a master at that, at avoiding getting too deep. He could be evasive as hell. But it was all so clear in those photos, all these pictures he took of me but never showed me.”

  I wait, but he doesn’t say anything. His hands are shaking.

  “What, Damon?” I ask. “What was so clear?”

  Damon takes in a deep breath and lets it go all at once.

  “The way he looked at me,” he says.

  I feel the tears coming on again, hot in my throat. I swallow them down.

  Photographs are what we leave behind, Carlos had said. So he’d left his for Damon, his legacy in a box: what he didn’t know how to tell Damon, what felt like too much to say out loud. He’d left them there for Damon to see.

  But photographs aren’t all we leave behind. Not photographs, not letters, not drawings or paintings, not houses or cars or money or clothes.

  People are what we leave behind.

  Of one who loved not wisely but too well. Carlos was so brave and yet so afraid. I wish, even now, even though I never knew him, that I could just sit with him and hold his hand and say, It will get better. It may never be perfect, but it will be okay.

  But I can’t do that for Carlos, or for my mom.

  I can do it for Damon.

  “I know I said I wouldn’t say that it’s not your fault,” I say. “But it’s not your fault if you didn’t feel the same way he—”
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  “I know,” Damon says, his voice soft. “I know, but it doesn’t matter, does it? Like—whether it’s my fault or not. This is the way I feel now, and he’s still gone.”

  She’s still gone.

  I want to say what everybody says: I’m sorry. It’s automatic, easy.

  But I don’t.

  “I wish I could make this better,” I say.

  Damon squeezes my hand.

  When he speaks, his voice is hoarse.

  “Oh, Melanie,” he says. “Trust me, you do.”

  On impulse I lean in and kiss Damon’s cheek—just a brush of the lips, just so he can feel the contact. When I pull away he’s staring down at me, eyes tracing my face.

  “I think people should see these,” I say. “People who are not us.”

  Damon blinks, slowly, and I can tell he’s never considered this.

  “Speak of me as I am,” he whispers.

  I stare at him for a moment, allowing the puzzle pieces to move and slide around until they fit.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Exactly.”

  We spend hours poring over the photos. Downstairs the house comes to life with the sounds of dinner being made, but neither of us are enticed by the prospect of food. When Damon’s mom comes upstairs to tell him to come to dinner, I stay quiet and Damon calls through the door that he’s not feeling well. It’s not exactly a lie.

  Shadows climb the walls and we fall asleep together, photographs scattered across the bed.

  I wake in the middle of the night because the shades are still open, moonlight streaming through the glass. It’s cold, and I’m bundled up in blankets, pulled up to my chin. I don’t want to close the windows because I like the feel of the cool air on my face, smelling of lit fireplaces and pine and approaching winter.

  Damon is so warm beside me, arm snug around my waist. I can feel him breathe against my neck, and it’s so good. Everything is so good.