Amy Inspired

by Bethany Pierce

He told me I was beautiful and gently touched my cheek, ran his thumb across my lower lip. He told me he was very attracted to my intelligence. He would have kissed me if I’d let him.

  I told him to take me the rest of the way home.

  We walked side by side. When he reached for my hand I let him. He laced his fingers through mine. The streets were empty, and in the moment’s anonymity I was free to enjoy what it would be like to belong to Eli. All our other many walks through campus, hands in pockets and cautious distance between our bodies, seemed unnatural in retrospect.

  I asked what he was going to say to Jillian.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

  “You have to tell her.”

  “Of course I have to tell her.” He let go of my hand, slipped it back in his pocket.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m not interested in anything that’s not going to be serious from the beginning.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “I don’t want to date and I don’t want to mess around.”

  “We’re in total agreement then.”

  I crossed my arms. “There’s no way you and I would ever work.”

  “Why not?” He shrugged, half laughed, as if I’d given him reason to hope.

  “We don’t want the same things,” I said, exasperated by his good humor.

  “Try me.”

  I tried to imagine Eli holding a child or balancing a checkbook. With complete honesty I confessed, “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “I promise you, I’m breaking up with Jillian.”

  Of all the things he could have said. That he would so fervently offer her disappointment as foundation for my happiness made me sick to my stomach.

  “That’s too convenient, Eli.”

  “Why does it have to be hard?”

  “Shouldn’t it be? Shouldn’t breaking up with someone you’ve been with this long at least be a little hard?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Jillian adores you,” I said. “You have to at least try to make it right with her.”

  “You’ve become quite the expert on someone you’ve never met.” He began to say something, stopped, then said it anyway with a spitefully calculated superiority: “Don’t flatter yourself that you’re the only problem we’ve been having. You have no idea what she needs.”

  “What she needs? Isn’t this about what you need? You live like there’s no consequence, like you can walk away and live your own life and no one’s the better or worse, but nobody lives like that, Eli. When you leave you hurt people, and there’s nothing you can say about your work or your art or your needs that will justify it.”

  He was taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

  Beyond his pretense of innocence I recognized the likeness of my father, the ever affable, the ever apologizing, the man whose love wasn’t enough. What kind of idiot would I be to make myself the moving target for the same misery Jillian would suffer tomorrow?

  The torrent came easily, and each spiteful word filled me with relief: “You don’t care what people think of you and you think that gives you license to do whatever you want without consequence. You’re done with Jillian? Walk out on Jillian.You’re done with your aunt? Walk out on her, leave her alone after all she’s done for you.”

  “Amy, wait a minute—”

  “You’re not as independent as you’d like to think you are, Eli Morretti—you just delude yourself into thinking that just because no one follows your long meandering quests no one cares or misses you.”

  “You don’t know anything about my family.” I had never seen him angry before. “My family,” he said fiercely, “is my business.”

  “I know that you haven’t spoken to your brother in years— that your aunt was lonely and you left her. You leave, that’s what you do. And I can’t be with someone who thinks he can walk out when it suits him.”

  “Sometimes I run. I’ll admit that. But you should think twice before you point your finger, Amy. At least I’m living my life. You bury yourself in books and papers and hole yourself up where no one can mess up the safe little world you’ve made for yourself.”

  “First Zoë and now you.” I glared at him. “I’m tired of being told what I should be and what I’m not.”

  “Amy!” He grabbed my arm just as I turned away, grabbed me so hard it hurt. Before I knew what was happening I had slapped him across the face.

  He dropped my arm, his hand flying to his cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered, shocked by what I’d done. “I don’t know what I was thinking—”

  “You hit me,” he said in disbelief.

  “I didn’t mean it, but you grabbed me. Eli, I’m sorry.” I ran my hand over his cheek. “Are you all right? Is it bad?”

  This time when he grabbed my arms, just below the shoulders, I felt the restraint in his hands, how careful he was to hold me gently but hold me nonetheless. “Don’t presume, Amy Gallagher, that you know what I mean or what I need—or what I want.” He dropped his hands. “I wanted you.”

  He turned his back to me.

  “You can walk yourself home,” he muttered.

  I would have called after him, but the shame of my own brokenness overwhelmed me, burning as hot as the imprint of his face, pulsing, on the palm of my hand.

  18

  I was checking out at the student commons food court when a man dressed in a styrofoam ice cream cone costume walked by, advertising the Alpha Delta Phi ice cream social fund-raiser being held on the lawn outside.

  “Get the milk shake!” someone shouted. A dozen students appeared from nowhere to stampede the ice cream cone out the door and across the quad.

  “Some kind of relay,” muttered the cafeteria lady. She shook her head and took my money. “Kids will be kids.”

  She did not need to explain. The weather had finally taken a turn. The sunlight was like Ecstasy crop-dusted over Copenhagen. Runners and dog-walkers appeared at dawn and dusk. Fraternities threw lawn parties just for the excuse to get half naked and beer-buzzed in the middle of the afternoon. Downtown, parents set their children to run wild in the park fountain, and students wearing flip-flops on their already tanned toes sat outside The Brewery to indulge in books that had nothing whatsoever to do with school.

  Mom came by to celebrate another successful Luna Landing in Columbus. We sat on the porch roof, watching the commotion. She’d been talking me deaf since she walked in the door. She was so relieved Eli was gone, she spoke of him all afternoon, saying what a nice man he was and how good it was that we’d had some help around the apartment while he was there. I smiled and said nothing. I hadn’t seen him since our fight and had no desire to see him ever.

  “What’s all this racket?” she asked. “Is there some big event on campus?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Spring.”

  Zoë wrote saying she needed a few things and asking if I could ship them to her. There had been days when her mother could eat without pain or vomiting, and they were packing their bags in anticipation: the next good day, they would make a trip to the beach.

  I drove to UPS for bubble wrapping. I packed Zoë’s sequined slippers, her second pair of running shoes, and her favorite red string bikini. I packed a dozen pieces of specifically requested jewelry. She also wanted beach reading, including her well-worn copies of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Handmaid’s Tale.

  I made an exaggerated list of everything she wanted, checked each item off with bold red check marks, and put the checklist inside the box so she would find it first. I threw in a bag of Tootsie Pops for good measure.

  You will all get through this, I wrote on the bottom of the checklist.

  I knew better. Brian warned me that the doctors had probably helped Fay maintain some semblance of normal life as long as they could, but curing the disease had not been an option for years. Despite his warning, I held out for a miracle. Fay had baffled physicians before.


  Of course, the improved weather might have tainted my expectations. My hopes were expansive, for despite fears to the contrary, winter had ended after all.

  As if to combat the feelings of seasonal optimism, Pastor Maddock chose to begin a five-week series on the book of Ecclesiastes.

  Pastor Maddock was a towering man. He had a booming voice but rarely employed it. That was what I liked about him: For all his potential powers of intimidation—height, sonorous voice, extensive knowledge of Scripture, among others—he taught rather than preached, mitigating his passion with a kindhearted professor’s concern. It required conscientious effort on his part to speak slowly and gently, with words that would not impress his congregation, as he disapproved of their adoration of ministers. And this was a congregation that very much liked to be impressed.

  That Sunday he concluded his sermon by reading from Scripture: “ ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun… . There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.’ ”

  He took off his reading glasses and set them on the pulpit ledge. “Listen to me, people: If you don’t believe in an afterlife, and all you have is—at most—a good eighty years on this earth, then your life is so small in proportion to the great expanse of space and time, it might as well not have happened at all. We don’t have to think in eons to see proof of this. Each generation forgets the preceding.

  “Recently, my wife and I visited Civil War battlegrounds while vacationing with friends. We stood there overlooking this beautiful field, trying to imagine the tragedies that took place on the very same soil and not that many decades ago. Now, like many of you, I have mental pictures of this war that transpired before I even existed; I have memories of a thing that happened before my time. Who hasn’t seen a Civil War documentary? Or read a Civil War story? Or seen a Hollywood film that portrays the conflict in one way or another?

  “We may commemorate the Civil War in books and films, but both are frequently colored in a romantic light, washed in a nostalgia for a lost time. The specific story of each boy, father, and brother, the specific strife of each wife, slave, or child, is lost, buried, as each generation forgets a little more of their parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ stories.

  “ ‘There is no remembrance of men of old,’ Solomon said. ‘And even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.’ ” Pastor Maddock paced the platform slowly. “Folks, we will pass from this earth, and this earth will forget us. Oh, we may be remembered by our family and by their descendants, but for how many generations? And even if you are remembered, you will be known only by a name on a family tree or by a single accomplishment or, worse, a single mistake.

  “Yet that is not who we are. We are more than a single accomplishment. We are more than the accumulation of mistakes. Something in us craves to be recognized, to be seen and heard—and, most important, to be affirmed.”

  He walked to the end of the platform, wiping his forehead with the purple handkerchief he’d pulled from his front pocket. He perspired as if the sermon required strenuous physical exertion.

  “This desire to be known is all around us.” He folded the handkerchief back into a square. “Go home and turn on your television. You’ll find men and women crawling all over themselves to be the best, the most honored, the most awarded.You’ll see teenagers who can’t sing their way out of a paper bag standing in line for hours to make fools of themselves in front of judges on national television, all for that chance to be seen by the millions, even for just those fifteen seconds of fame.

  “But folks, even the ‘immortality’ of fame cannot preserve the life of a man or woman forever. Who knows the name of the man who erected the obelisk in D.C.? Or the name of the artist who sculpted The Ecstasy of St. Teresa? How many people do you know who can recite the names of all the presidents of the United States? And even if they can recite their names, do they know anything more than a brief biographical sketch of each man?

  “If we are known only to those who know us now and are forgotten soon after they too pass away, what do we have to give our lives weight and meaning?

  “ ‘I have seen the burden God has laid on men,’ says Solomon in Ecclesiastes.‘He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.’ ”

  He returned to the pulpit, shuffled the notes he hadn’t consulted once. “Now, I know you all can’t stand much more of this. ‘Pastor Maddock,’ you want to say, ‘we’ve got dinner in the oven.’ Just hold on to your seats, I’m almost done. And believe it or not, this is a message of hope. Because if you notice, the Scriptures say that God has set eternity in the heart of man.”

  He braced his hands against either side of the pulpit. “That aching in your body that feels almost like a physical hurt. God has made it so. That passion to be known and loved not as a name or by an accomplishment or by a mistake—that desire to be known as you, yourself, in all your individual thoughts and dreams and worries and hopes and foibles—God has made it so. That need to wrap yourself around Time, to defeat death, to outlive this life—God has made it so. He has made it so that you will find recognition in Him.”

  The pianist began to play. In automatic unison, we stood to sing the closing hymn. I was deeply stirred by the things Pastor Maddock had said and blinked back to the present moment feeling somewhat outside myself.

  Dazed as I was, it took me a few moments to recognize a familiar looking girl slipping out the back doors after the last prayer had been said and the congregation began to file orderly from their pews. I hurried to the foyer and searched over the crowd of bustling families, but I’d no sooner seen Ashley Mulligan and she was gone.

  After a lunch at the deli across the street, I took the bus to central campus and followed the sidewalk past the academic buildings to Leonard Chapel. The chapel was a whitewashed room with a steeple and narrow rows of many-colored stained-glass windows. It did not inspire religious feeling, but it was quiet and isolated, a good place to think. My thoughts wandered to Eli, but I quickly corralled them back. I refused to dwell on our fight; I didn’t want to consider the possibility that what he’d said about me had been true. I prayed, instead, for Ashley and then for Zoë and her parents. I prayed until I was sure I’d been in the chapel an hour. My phone informed me it had been exactly seventeen minutes. Prayer usually had this effect on me.

  I took the trail down into the woods, following the creek until the path crossed the water by way of a rickety wooden bridge. I was skeptical of Pastor Maddock’s message. The need for popularity or fame or recognition had always been a point of guilt, not of hope; I had never before considered the possibility that the desire to be known was Spirit-inspired.

  The well-worn trail wound and divided. When the path finally met an open field I was surprised to find myself on north campus, a soccer field away from the crowded neighborhood of underclassmen dorms.

  It began to rain while I waited at the nearest bus stop. When the bus finally appeared ten minutes later, I was soaked to the skin, my arms covered in goose bumps. I didn’t mind the rain. It felt good, God’s opened arms throwing liquid blessing into mine.

  Michael’s car was in the driveway when I arrived home. I hadn’t seen him since Zoë left. He ran to meet me under the porch awning.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded, as if I had no right to be out alone past dark.

  “Out.” I was cold and wet and quite aware that my body was broadcasting both of these facts through my shirt. I crossed my arms over my chest. “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “I need to talk to you about something—to ask a favor, really.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s serious.”

  I sat on the porch to take off my shoes. I wrung out my socks one at a time.

  Michael grew impatient. “Can we go inside?
”

  “Just give me a minute.”

  He sat in one of the lawn chairs. He clasped his hands. He leaned forward, wiped his mouth, clasped his hands again.

  “Michael, what is wrong with you?”

  “It’s about Zoë and me,” he said. “I need you to talk to her for me.”

  I picked bits of gravel from between my toes. “Why can’t you talk to her?”

  “It’s complicated. You know, she’s already upset about her mom. If I try to tell her how I feel, she’ll freak out. But she’ll listen to you.”

  “Tell her what, then?”

  “Amy, look, don’t think I don’t care.” He turned to me with the most wounded expression. “We’re just not working. She’s way out there, I’m here. We never talk—and when we do—I don’t know, I never know what to say … I just can’t do it. Our lives are different now.”

  I stopped rolling my pant legs up. “Her mom has cancer. She doesn’t need you to talk; she needs you just to be there.”

  “But I can’t be there, that’s the thing.”

  “Your boss would give you a few days off. You could visit.”

  “I can’t just cancel everything and be always driving to Chicago.”

  “That’s exactly what you can do.”

  A series of faces passed before me: Adam, the narcissist; Eli, the delinquent; and now Michael, the ever moronic. The men I knew seemed different enough at first, but ultimately one proved as fickle as the other, and the plot never varied: men showing up, men exiting.

  I asked if he was leaving her.

  “I’m not cut out for this kind of stuff.”

  “Michael, no one knows what to do in times like this. There’s no right or wrong thing to do or say—you just need to be there.”

  He shook his head.

  “You can’t do this to her,” I whispered. I didn’t trust myself to raise my voice. “Wait until her mom gets through these last treatments. Wait until she’s home at least, so you can talk to her in person.”

  Michael studied the side of his shoe. Mud from his sprint to the porch had sullied his fresh white soles. He wiped them clean on the edge of the porch. “I think we need to end things now while we’re ahead. We had a good run, you know? We were good for each other for a while. Now we need to move on.”