by Margo Rabb
Not only my scalp blushed, but my arms and legs and hands and face, too. Why could he only see me now? Why not tonight? I felt angry at that part of him that I’d used to love—that mysterious, elusive part. Why had I ever liked that about him?
“Listen. I can help you.” She checked her watch. “Eddie is the guard on duty in the booth today. I slipped away from my dad this morning and had a smoke with him out there. Talked to him for a while. He’s super nice.” She handed me two long brown cigarettes. “Give him these—they’re Gauloises, he loves them—and he’ll let you out and back in, no problem. If Henry asks where you went, I’ll tell him you’re in the bathroom. We have two hours before they round us up for the set, so that should give you plenty of time to get back.”
I didn’t know if I should trust her.
“I’m not always a total asshole.” She smiled. “Just let me help.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
I texted Will:
If you can get here ASAP I can sneak out for a little while. We can meet by the fountain in front of the studio. I’d love to see you.
He wrote back:
See you soon
One Art
I left the building. I walked past the sound stages, the golf carts roaming, and people walking everywhere. I found Eddie in the entrance booth and gave him the cigarettes.
“Cool, thanks,” he said. “I’ll let you back in, no problem. Don’t worry about it. See you in a bit.”
Outside the gate, I sat on the bench by the fountain. Will wasn’t there yet.
I waited.
And waited.
The manicured grass looked too green, too perfectly trimmed. I stuck a toe into it. How did they manage to make real grass look completely artificial?
My entire body buzzed; I’d drunk one cup of coffee but felt like I’d drunk ten. I didn’t have my phone or my bag with me—Henry had collected all our things and put them in the studio lockers.
I felt grateful for the hair and makeup. If Will had liked me before, with frizzy hair, then there was no way he wouldn’t like me now. I wore the vintage black dress and red high heels my mom had let me borrow. I felt a pang thinking of her, a small sharp knot of love.
Finally, a beat-up green Cadillac from the seventies turned into the parking lot. The door opened with a metal squeal.
His hair was longer, curling to his cheekbones. He looked taller, larger, his shoulders wider. Everything about him seemed absolutely familiar and completely foreign at once.
He loped toward me and enveloped me in his arms. The scar on his chin seemed more noticeable now, or maybe I just knew to look for it.
It all rushed back, the hours in the north tower, week after week, the van ride home, the bakery, our kiss on the street, our entire night in the roof garden. Everything.
Here. Now. For real.
Real. The word seeped under my skin. I buried my face in his T-shirt. The same smell: sugar and soap. It must’ve been embedded in his pores. I dissolved with relief.
He pointed to the car. “So I got a new one.” He sounded apologetic. “Cupcake-free. I’m still not used to driving without a giant pastry on my roof.”
I nodded. I couldn’t say anything because a thousand things crowded my throat, drowning each other out.
He touched the back of my neck. “You look beautiful. Did you do something to your hair?”
I managed to say, “They did it for the show.”
We sat down on the bench. The fountain sparkled; not a speck of dirt or a fallen leaf or a single blade of dead grass wrecked the water.
I sat right next to him but I could barely see him. Dark jeans, navy T-shirt, black shoes; I had to force myself to notice these things because after all these weeks of hoping and dreaming, I could barely absorb that he sat beside me now.
He looked up. The sky seemed bluer than it ever was in New York or Tucson or Texas or Tennessee or anywhere—maybe it could only be this blue in California.
“Nice day,” he said.
“It is.” Clunky words. I could practically see the words clang off the bench and onto the grass. I’d spent so much time imagining what I’d say, and in my head now those ideas all sounded stupid.
That’s okay, I told myself. This is normal. We just need time to get used to each other again.
“I loved all the letters and poems you sent,” I said. “And the songs—I listened to them the whole trip.”
“Thanks.” He smiled awkwardly, the way I’d seen him smile at Mrs. Peech when she sat too close to him, or asked him how he’d become such a wonderfully accomplished swimmer.
I said, “I can’t believe you’re here. I was so afraid I wouldn’t get to see you.”
He touched my hand, grasped it lightly—his hand that I’d held in the roof garden—then clutched the edge of the bench. “How was the trip?”
“Ohhh.” Where could I start? “I shot a gun in Texas. And fought a crazy woman on the bus. In Tucson I almost got bit by a rattlesnake.”
“Wow. You’re like a superhero.”
“A road-trip superhero.” I smiled. “They need a cartoon about that.”
“I wish I’d driven out here. Cross-country.”
I thought for a second. “Come back with us—at least part of the way. You’d love Tucson. And Texas. You have time before school starts, right?” I waved toward his car. “I bet that thing could make it, even if it doesn’t have a cupcake on its roof.” I touched his arm. “Or maybe in December, on your break. We could take a trip.”
He flinched, almost imperceptibly. A twitch of his shoulders. If I hadn’t spent so much time staring at him in the tutoring center, watching his smallest move, I wouldn’t have noticed it. But I’d seen him do that when he’d talked about his dad, and about Gia, just before they broke up.
“Everything feels so crazy right now.” His voice was soft. He looked away from me. At the ground. The concrete, the genetically engineered grass.
“What happened? Is everything okay with your dad?”
He nodded. “I took your advice. We went out for dinner. Talked for hours. He apologized. He even planned this whole trip for us—we’re supposed to drive up the coast tonight and camp on the beach. Not with my car—I don’t think this one would make it—we’re taking his Jeep, just the two of us.”
“Tonight? For how long?”
“Four days.”
“I’m only here two more days. We’re leaving Sunday.” I tried to keep my voice level, though an icicle melted down my spine.
“I know—I’m sorry. I tried to change things, but my dad’s show at LACMA opens Wednesday, so this was the only time we could do it. He wanted to leave this morning, but I put him off so I could see you. He’s had dinners with donors every night, and after the opening he goes to Italy for an artist’s residency for three weeks—this was the only time he could do it.”
“Maybe you can come back sooner. Tell your dad we came all this way.”
“We can’t.”
I couldn’t process what he was saying. It was too different from what I expected. A person you loved couldn’t tell you they’re leaving tonight and not seeing you again, not after you’d come all this way, it wasn’t possible.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t plan it like this.” His voice sounded genuinely sad. Why was he saying this? His jeans were the same jeans he’d worn in the roof garden, a quarter-size tear at the right knee. I remembered touching those jeans, the belt loops, the soft worn fabric. He could change his mind. I could change it.
“Just stay tonight then. I’ll see you after the show.” I was pleading now. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to sound normal, but everything I said was soggy with need.
He gazed at the fountain. His T-shirt had a tiny bleach stain on one sleeve, and I thought of the time I’d stared at him in the van, memorizing the moth holes of his black coat.
“I’m starting college soon.” He spoke slowly. “I live here now. You’re in New York.”
“I only ha
ve two more years of school—sometimes you can skip a year and go right to college.”
He looked away. “Eva—”
“I could move here. We could—I could get emancipated. Anything is possible . . . anything is possible.”
Those were things I’d planned to tell him. Out loud, they sounded nothing like they had in my head.
He stared at his hands. “All this summer I was hoping we could—I don’t know.” He paused. “Maybe that it could happen without someone getting hurt, or that we could keep it casual. But we can’t keep it casual.”
You can’t keep it casual was what he meant. Writing I love you and traveling three thousand miles to see someone wasn’t keeping it casual.
“You sent me that e. e. cummings poem. And the CD. I thought—”
“I shouldn’t have sent that,” he said. “It was a mistake. I was thinking—” He paused. “Well.”
My stomach plummeted. My insides began to crumble. Everything inside me crumbled. “You were thinking what?”
He glanced at his shoes. “I’m sorry. Even before we started this—I started this—I think I was afraid it would be a mistake if I did, because I never wanted to ruin our friendship. I never want to hurt you.”
Too late.
He turned to me and kissed my forehead. It was partly a chaste kiss, and partly not chaste at all—his lips lingered too long, too softly, his hands stroked my shoulders, my back. He put his arms around me. He was saying one thing and his body said another.
He didn’t mean what he’d said. Deep inside, he didn’t.
His tone softened. “Sometime, in the future, we’ll see each other again.”
“When?”
“Someday.”
Something began to move inside me, birds’ wings fluttering through my blood. “They may have found my dad’s body.” The words tumbled out of me; I had to tell him, and telling him would bring back the old Will, the roof garden Will, who didn’t hold back, who made me feel, more than anyone had before, that I wasn’t alone. The Will who understood.
I told him about the eleven bodies, and the fight with my mom, and how I’d stopped answering her calls. The words kept pouring out like a waterfall. I told him I was going to contact the NTSB on my own, making the decision to as I said it. If I could travel across the country, I could call some official and demand to be notified about whether they’d found my dad. “I’m going to call them tomorrow,” I said.
He nodded, his arms tight around me. “I hope you do.”
For a few minutes it felt good to be in the folds of his arms, confessing. And then I hated myself for it. I pulled away. Maybe Will could only be that Will in the roof garden. Maybe we could only be us there. Not now, in a parking lot in Burbank, staring at too-green grass.
I sat an inch from him. This isn’t happening.
He shook his head. “Listen, I’m not going to bullshit you. I wish things were different. I wish we could run off, away from everybody else. Away from the whole world.” He paused. “But I’m starting school soon. This isn’t the right time. Sometimes people meet at the wrong time.”
I thought: People overcome wars and storms and pirates and diseases every day and they’re still together. Time is easy. Didn’t he know that? Didn’t he know that tomorrow we could die, or—
“I need to feel free when I get to college. To start over. No responsibilities.”
It knocked the wind out of me, stamped all my stupidity and useless love on my forehead. Was that all I was? A responsibility? Did he want to forget the whole past and start over like my mom did?
We sat there silently for a while. I thought I’d cry but I didn’t. I felt numb. It didn’t make sense.
I thought: we’re not in a romance novel. The words fell into my head. In a romance, if a person said, Sometimes people meet at the wrong time on page 50, then they’d still get married by page 250. They’d have their happy ending.
He checked his watch. “You probably need to get back.”
I nodded. He stood up and I walked him to his car. Walking isn’t the right word—I was hovering, making the motions, footsteps, barely aware. We stood at his car door and he hugged me one last time, and told me to keep writing him letters, though I knew I wouldn’t, that letters alone wouldn’t be enough, but even then there was still this hope deep in me, trilling—he could still change his mind—hope singing out, every moment, arm in arm with the humiliation, until his car turned the corner.
Then the hope disappeared in one swoop. Only the humiliation was left.
I’d imagined it so differently that the reality felt like a slap. And now all these things sat inside me waiting to burst. He was the hook I’d hung all my dreams on, and now they fell, evaporated.
Everything ached, and I didn’t know why they called it heartache when it was chest and stomach and skin and flesh and blood ache. The fountain ached. The clouds ached. I started revising every single thing I’d said to him. If I’d only said the right words. If I’d been funnier and smarter, everything would’ve been different.
If I hadn’t tried, if I’d stayed in New York and waited for his visits—surely he’d come visit to see his mom in December—if I’d waited till December, kept it casual, not taken this trip—
I walked past the fountain and sat down in the grass, pulled up blades of it.
Why did the happy and hopeful feelings never last? Why did the things I loved not last? The emptiness and hollowness and disbelief were familiar—they dug up the old grief, split it open.
There was so much more I’d wanted to tell him, so much I’d been certain we’d talk about in the long days and nights I thought we’d have. I’d thought that the things we’d shared as we talked in the stairwell and on the roof had bonded us together in this dark space, and I could tell him anything, anything.
I’d wanted to tell him about Janet and Grace, Irma and Lulu.
I’d wanted to tell him that my grandmother said good-bye to her parents on a train platform and never saw them again.
I’d wanted to tell him about Lulu’s baby who died, and how she was expecting a new one.
I’d wanted to tell him about “The Floating Poem,” to give it to him.
I’d wanted to tell him about the letter I’d written to my dad in the old diary.
And I wanted to tell him about the fight with my mother and the memory of the funeral, the worst memories that I never talked about with anybody, but I’d hoped to talk about with him.
Now as I sat in the grass, I kept pulling it up in clumps, until all around me I’d destroyed a tiny patch of earth.
It was late. I didn’t know what time it was. I had to get myself together. I had to hurry. Maybe the producers would let me talk to Annie before the show, and I could tell her what happened. All I wanted to do was to see her and speak to her. I stood up and walked back toward the entrance.
Eddie was gone. Someone new was there now. I told him I had to get back inside right away.
“Name?” He glanced at a list in front of him.
“Eva Roth.”
He eyed me warily. I knew I probably looked like a crazy person, my eyes red, makeup smeared, dirt under my fingernails. I wiped my eyes and tried to look normal.
He took a long time going through forms, lists of paper in front of him. “Don’t see an Eva Roth here.”
“I’m on it. The Smartest Girl in America. Look—I spoke to the other guard, Eddie—can’t you call him, please? He’ll let me back in, he promised—”
He picked up his walkie-talkie and mumbled a few things to someone on the other end.
“Set’s closed,” he said. “They’re not letting anybody in.”
“They have to.”
My stomach twisted. This could not be happening. He had to let me in. I couldn’t let Annie down. I couldn’t not be there for her. That wasn’t possible.
“Listen,” I said, and I tried to explain again. He shook his head. The more I pleaded, the more tired and exasperated he became, as if he deal
t with crying girls outside the studio all the time, and I was the last straw. He told me I had to exit the gate or security would escort me out.
My chest thickened as if it was filling with water.
All Annie wanted was the scholarship—she had to win the scholarship. I stared at the gate again. Could I run through it? Knock the guard over? How had this happened? I’d thrown everything important away. All for a guy who didn’t love me.
What had I done? Who was I? Who had I become?
“Please,” I pleaded with the guard one more time.
“Sorry, kid,” he said.
I went out the gate and sat back down on the grass. My hands lay in my lap. I rubbed them to get the dirt off, but it was stuck on. It seemed embedded permanently.
I thought of Freda. Scrubbing. The nonstop cleaning that had seemed so weird to me all my life now made perfect sense. She was trying to scrub off the grief. You could see it on her skin, the weight of it, in her sagging face and in the deep furrows under her eyes. And she wasn’t the only one in our family to feel its weight—it was there for Janet, too, burying her parents’ ashes in purchased plots, and it had been there for my mother in the cemetery. It was there for me. Grief from losing Will, grief from my dad, grief from my mom who didn’t even seem to love me. Grief from what I’d done to Annie. A dirty, heavy, permanent weight.
I was afraid that what was inside me wasn’t strong enough. This empty fragile nothingness. Worse than nothingness: dark places. Dark places that might never leave.
I saw now how I’d spent so much of the last two years trying to disappear—into romances and websites and movies and TV—and now I wanted to disappear more than ever before, but it felt like the locks had been changed, the keys thrown out.
How do you walk through the world, how do you continue, when you know what a dark place it is? It’s like you realize you were hiding beneath a blanket, and now the blanket’s blown off and you see the universe for what it really is: a place where terrible things happen, the worst things, a place where your father can fall from the sky, and the romances that saved you are lying fantasies. How do you get up each day, when you know that? When you know the truth?