Everything I Have Is Yours

by Eleanor Henderson

  “Wow,” I said. “Beautiful.”

  Aaron was holding tight to the doorway. “I used to sleepwalk as a kid,” he said. “I was always scared I’d sleepwalk out here in the middle of the night and fall seven stories to my death.”

  While Aaron used the bathroom, I snuck a peek at the mail he’d picked up. On the top was a credit card bill addressed to him.

  It was a strange sensation, learning my boyfriend’s last name. It felt like I was uncovering a secret.

  Aaron returned from the bathroom, grabbed the stack of mail. In the other bedroom, shirtless, sitting in bed, was Morris. He held a newspaper in front of him. One cat was curled at his feet. Another sat nibbling at one of the little saucers of dried cat food that littered the floor around his bed. Another he called to him—Pssht pssht pssht—and I recognized the hand gesture, the way he tapped his thumb, as though pushing a button. The cat came and forced its forehead into his fist.

  “Hey, Pop,” Aaron said. We stood just outside the doorway. “This is Nell.”

  “Hello,” I said, waving.

  He lowered his newspaper and lifted a hand, eyeing me over his glasses. “Hello.” He sounded tired. How many girls had Aaron presented in this doorway?

  On the elevator down, I said, “He seems nice.”

  “He’s a little crazy,” Aaron apologized. “Kind of a mess. That’s why I can’t leave Florida.”

  The elevator opened. He looked at me. “Well. It’s why I haven’t left yet.”

  * * *

  When I eventually admitted to my parents how old Aaron was, they feigned shock. Then they shrugged. “Who are we to judge?” my mom laughed. They had a larger age difference than we did. I was the third child, months away from leaving the house; they were old and they were tired. I was this close to eighteen. They trusted me. And they liked Aaron.

  But Aaron didn’t yet know how young I was. How did we not talk about what I did with my day—go to AP Calc and Lit and Art, stay after school until dark to lay out the newspaper? We talked about music, about movies, about our families, our friends, our jobs. He knew I was going away to college, he knew I still lived with my parents, but he didn’t want to believe I was so young.

  I didn’t ask him to my senior prom. I didn’t go. I didn’t invite him to my graduation—though I did, finally, tell him that I was graduating.

  “Like, from high school?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Wow.”

  “You didn’t know I’m in high school?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe you went to community college.”

  After graduation, he took me out to dinner at TGI Friday’s to celebrate. His friend’s girlfriend waited on our table. She was in the grade above me; we’d played softball together. See? She was dating an older guy, too. “Congratulations!” she said to me. “I heard your speech was awesome.” She turned to Aaron. She must have seen his blank face. “Your girlfriend is the valedictorian,” she said approvingly.

  When she’d walked away, he looked at me, proud and scolding at once. “Valedictorian?”

  I looked at my plate. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Why hadn’t I told him? Was I scared that he wouldn’t want me? Did I already sense, somehow, that our worlds were not aligned, what an act of will it would take, for us to fit the facts of our lives together?

  We tried to make the most of our summer together. We went to the beach, the mall, the movies, so many restaurants. He surprised me on my break at the movie theater, and we sat in his car and ate free popcorn and talked. We met each other’s friends. A friend of mine started dating his friend Derek, and we went on double dates. It wasn’t so weird, dating an older guy! Everyone was doing it. At night, Aaron and I put on our bathing suits and snuck into the hot tub at the condo. We danced to Santana at SunFest, then went home and had sex in his bed. We had sex in his bed and sex in the hot tub and sex in my parents’ Honda Accord, parked at the beach. He was my first. I did not know then that there wouldn’t be a second.

  We spent a lot of time in the car, driving around, Aaron driving me home after a late night at his place. I wanted to wake up next to him. My parents had pushed back the curfew, and pushed it back some more. I begged my mother to let me sleep over. “What can we do at eight in the morning that we can’t do at two in the morning? Wouldn’t you rather know I’m safe than driving home on I-95 in the middle of the night?” She wasn’t stupid. She knew I wasn’t going to let up.

  “Fine,” she said finally. I leapt up and hugged her.

  That night, out at dinner, I took a toothbrush out of my purse and presented it to Aaron. His face lit up in a smile.

  Then it was our room, our bed.

  “I love you,” he told me in that bed. His face was hanging close to mine.

  I laughed. “I love you, too, you know.”

  On my eighteenth birthday, I was brushing my teeth when there was a knock at the door. My brother presented with me a giant vase of roses that had been delivered. I smiled around my toothbrush and brought the flowers into the bathroom with me. It was weird, performing our courtship in front of my family, but we were oddly unembarrassed. I still have those flowers, dried, in a glass box in my office.

  * * *

  We drove around. The windows open, driving up the beach, down the highway, in circles, listening to Ween, the Lemonheads, Dinosaur Jr., all the music Aaron was teaching me. One of us would accidentally bring it up—my impending departure—and the car would fill with a sad silence, like a held breath.

  “Maybe you should come with me,” I said.

  * * *

  I don’t know why we chose Colorado. Neither one of us had been there before. It was a kind of test run for Vermont: a weeklong vacation in the mountains. I had taught him, on the desktop in my bedroom, how to use a mouse, and he found a cabin for rent in the Rockies. The executive functioning required to plan this trip was no small task. It required phone calls, mailed checks, plane tickets.

  The moment we landed in Denver Aaron started getting sick. He’d had headaches his whole life, terrible ones, but not like this. “That altitude will do it every time,” said Richard, the owner of the cabin, as he drove us the hour from the airport. The cabin was sweet and quaint and covered in an outrageously ugly paisley carpet, orange and purple and vomit green, which became the psychedelic background to Aaron’s headache. While the rain came down outside, he lay naked in the fetal position in the bed, and I learned to freeze a washcloth for ten minutes and to lay it in a crunchy crown on his forehead, then after he’d melted it, to switch it out for another washcloth in another ten minutes, and so on. I rubbed his back, kissed him, and while he intermittently slept, retreated to my bed to read The Bluest Eye. While it pained me to see him in so much pain, I also felt spiritually nourished, wildly in love, and deeply connected to my boyfriend. I was the powerful minister to his pain. I was high. Maybe it was the altitude. I did not know that it was a ritual that we would perform night after night in the years ahead—Aaron moaning along to the mystery that had befallen him, me cooing beside him with a book half-open: there, there; there, there.

  After twenty-four hours, the headache eased, and he returned to me. Between rainstorms, we hiked. We watched Seinfeld on VHS. We washed our clothes in the cast-iron sink and hung them up outside the back door, and nothing had ever made me happier than the sight of our shared laundry—his boxers and athletic socks, my tank tops and bras—the colorful banner of our domestic coupleship.

  One morning in the middle of sex, a knock came on the door. It was Richard, who had promised to drive us up to Mount Evans as soon as the rain cleared. The rain hadn’t quite cleared, but it had tapered off, a fog hanging heavy behind him. Richard drove us in his little pickup up the steepest, narrowest, crookedest, windiest—and at 14,265 feet—the highest paved road in North America, Aaron and I cramped in the cab beside him, Aaron in the middle, I pressed against the door, the wild and intrepid mountain goats inches from my face, the passing trucks ra
ttling the windows, the road almost entirely pillowed in fog, no guard rails to catch us, just green giving way to August ice and snow and the rock face of our death. Every time another car’s headlights approached, Aaron squeezed my thigh and I squeezed his, not a sweet or tender squeeze but the squeeze of someone trying to extract something difficult to extract, and I thought, if I die on this mountain, my parents will kill me, all while Richard piloted the pickup with the heel of one hand, narrating, pointing. When we got to the top and parked, the fog was so dense we couldn’t see a thing. “It’s usually a spectacular view,” Richard said. He took a picture of us anyway, Aaron shivering in his shirt sleeves, the wind whipping my hair. We looked both miserable and ecstatic to be alive.

  And then we had to get in that car and drive back down the mountain.

  Later, we lay under the blankets of our rented bed. We were alive, warm, healthy.

  “I don’t want to say good-bye to you,” he said.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “So let’s not.”

  We laid out the way our life would look together. I would leave for Vermont in a few weeks, and he would let me settle in for a semester before he followed me. My heart bounced around the bed. What about his job? He would quit. (He reminded me that I had said, during our first phone conversation, “What, you don’t want to work at CD Warehouse the rest of your life?”) What about the cats? He would bring them. He’d find an apartment. He’d find a job. He’d enroll in classes at the community college. He’d always wanted, he said, to be a kindergarten teacher.

  A kindergarten teacher! I pictured him in his big pants and a cardigan and a bowtie, a little boy on his knee, a book open before them.

  My heart was floating over the bed now, looking down at us. It was joy, it was innocence, the rush of a life glimpsed at its beginning, from the first colorful square on the board. It was also a righteous satisfaction: that I would get him out of Florida. That I would change his life. That I would save him.

  * * *

  We had an early flight back to Florida, so we spent the night at an airport hotel. After Aaron went to bed, I filled the tub and got into the water and cried. I had spent the week desperately happy. I was going to spend, it seemed, the rest of my life with this person; he would be the only man I ever loved. But how could I do that—how could I give him everything—when he had already been in love before?

  “I thought I was in love before,” he’d told me. “Three times.”

  There were many more girls in his past. But in the bed in Ixora Circle, he’d told me about those three girls he’d thought he loved. The girl with the glasses, who owned the same baby doll dress I did, a patchwork of faded plaids from Contempo Casuals, like a dress that might be worn by a barefoot girl in a factory during the Great Depression. I’d found a picture in a drawer: the girl with the glasses, sitting in a driveway with a bunch of other kids while Aaron and his band tuned up in a garage. They had been engaged, he told me. For a while she had even lived with Aaron in his dad’s condo with his dad and his dad’s little saucers of cat food, but they had fought a lot, and they called off the engagement and she moved back in with her parents.

  There had been another girlfriend, when he was in high school. There was a picture in a drawer of them sitting together on a couch, Aaron in a white Robert Smith shirt, buttoned to his neck, the girl blond and blue-eyed, with hair-sprayed bangs the height of a heavy metal drummer’s. Aaron had gone on camping trips with her family, had gone to more than one prom with her, and though their relationship had been innocent, was that maybe even worse, that he had loved her so purely?

  The third girlfriend was dead. She had been bipolar. She had been prescribed lithium, which I knew only as a Nirvana song I really liked. The lithium—why did he tell me this?—had increased her sex drive. After they broke up, they were friends. She was working as a stripper in Lake Worth, and one night after work she was raped and murdered. Her body was found in a field behind the strip club, her throat slashed. She was wearing nothing but a pair of sneakers. Her murderer was arrested but never convicted. Soon after, her sister died, and her mother. She had a three-year-old daughter.

  There were no pictures of her, but her initials were tattooed on Aaron’s wrist.

  It had been building for months, this sadness I did not know what to do with. All those girls! He still had the number of a girl whose number he’d gotten at TGI Friday’s the week before we met. He’d never called her, but he’d shown me the slip of paper in a fit of hyper-honesty: Lisa del Rio, in fat, loopy cursive. A girl who lived in this neighborhood, that neighborhood. Girls who worked in record stores. Brunettes, blondes, the Black Puerto Rican waitress from his mother’s restaurant, years older. I had gone to a couple of bases with maybe a dozen zitty guys, ages twelve through seventeen. He had been going to bed with girls for years. How many years? How many girls? Sometimes I tried to torture myself, imagining the number. I would never, ever ask him. I still don’t know it.

  In the bathtub in Colorado, I cried as loudly as I could, until Aaron woke and came to me and sat on the edge of the tub. I babbled out my teenage sorrow. “I can’t take it,” I said. “I can’t stop thinking about them.”

  I had wanted and expected him to be consoling, to tell me again that his love for me was beyond what he’d felt for any of them. But I think I already knew that. I wasn’t afraid that I would be another girl in a photo in a drawer. I was afraid that I would be with Aaron for the rest of my life and that drawer of photos would follow us. I understood that this was the fate I was choosing. The truth was, as much as I hated Aaron’s past lives, I needed them. I needed someone who was carrying around all that heartbreak, all that history, so I could warm my own hands near its flame. That drawer of photos, it felt combustible.

  But Aaron sighed. He was tired; he had been sleeping and wanted to go back to bed. “It was a long time ago,” he said. “That me didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  Only now do I suspect that he wasn’t just tired; he was jaded. It was not the first time he’d had to reassure a girl that he loved her the most.

  * * *

  I packed for college. We sat on the couch and told my parents Aaron was coming with me. They tried caution.

  “What happens if you break up?” my mother worried.

  I hugged Aaron around the ribs. “We won’t.”

  Middlebury was blazingly beautiful, and I adored all my classes, but I didn’t make friends right away. Everyone else seemed to fall in love with their roommate. Everyone else seemed to come from the same New England prep school. On the first night of college, I watched a girl jump on a boy’s back and howl across campus together like some mythic eight-foot beast, and I thought, You just met an hour ago. For orientation, I chose the three-day hike in the mountains, lacing up the boots I’d bought for Colorado. I struggled to keep up. I told the group leader, a senior, about my boyfriend back home, and she laughed. “I give it until fall break,” she said. When we stopped the first night, I asked her to cut my long hair to my chin, and she did, with the first-aid scissors, and I packed out my hair in a Ziploc bag.

  I missed Aaron. He sent me a cassette on which he’d taped one track, Billie Holiday’s “Everything I Have Is Yours.” On a Post-it note, a hand-drawn heart and instructions: Listen to this on your headphones before you fall asleep tonight.

  I did, while my roommate slept, smiling at his handwriting.

  Everything that I possess, I offer you

  Let my dream of happiness come true

  “I love it,” I told him.

  We didn’t really discuss it. It just became our song.

  I listened and listened to it, and cried and cried.

  After two weeks, I called him and said, “I want you to come up now.” I found an ad for an apartment in the local paper and called to make an appointment, the first call I would make on his behalf. A few days later, my dorm room phone rang at six in the morning, and I pulled on shoes and a sweater and ran out into the Sep
tember dawn, where Aaron’s Pathfinder was idling in the fog. We drove to the closest motel, had sex in the motel bed, and then I cried and cried, not the performative tears of the bathtub but tears of joy, because my love had come to me and because I wasn’t only saving him, he was saving me.

  He brought me a warm washcloth and pressed it to my face. “I love your haircut,” he said.

  The next week, I asked a guy in my dorm to buzz what was left of it, and he did. Between my scalp and the coming winter were a few millimeters of hair.

  We mailed a picture to my parents. On the phone, that same delight dressed up as shock. “You don’t mind that she has no hair?” they teased Aaron.

  He told them, “I’d love your daughter if she had no head.”

  My mother laughed hard. Later she told me that was when she knew he was the one.

  DISTEMPER

  When performing an image search of “skin disease,” “rash,” or “lesions,” it is best to hold your head as far from the screen as possible, which depending on the length of your arms is approximately three feet. If possible, close one eye. Squeeze the other one shut until you almost can’t see out of it. Then scroll fast and don’t stop until you’ve seen all that you cannot unsee. There will be children, just so you know. They live in another country, another time. Their faces aren’t even faces anymore.

  Compare your husband’s lesions to the lesions on the screen. That one’s too crusty. This one’s too oozy. That one’s too uniform, too stippled, too oblong, too yellow.

  Conclude that there is no one on the planet with your husband’s disease. He is both too original and too damaged to share in anyone else’s symptoms—he is above and below others’ suffering. Except for the children, whose suffering you scroll by as fast as you can.