An Exaltation of Larks

by Suanne Laqueur

“I need to get out of here. Can you come get me?” She’d never played this card but it had always been in the deck since she started going to parties. If you’re in trouble, call. Anywhere you are, any hour, you call and I will come get you. No questions.

  “What’s the matter?” Alex said.

  “I’m not hurt, I just need to go home. Please come get me?”

  He gave a huge sigh of inconvenience, but he didn’t renege on the bargain. “Can you get somewhere safe to wait for me?”

  “I’m at the front gates. By the stone wall.”

  “I don’t want you waiting out by the road alone at this hour.”

  “Ari’s here. He wants to leave, too.”

  “All right, cosita. I’ll leave in five minutes.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  She hung up and looked at Ari. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He put his palms up and shook his head. “I got nothing anyway.”

  He lay down along the top of the stone wall, hands behind his head and his hat on top of his face. Deane sat on the ground, back against the wall, tearing up handfuls of grass.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said.

  Ari grunted.

  “I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

  Ari said nothing.

  She closed her eyes. The image of Casey and Brenna was burned there with a sickening fascination. The way he was fucking her. You couldn’t call it anything else. She’d stared at Casey in a sort of weird amazement, never having seen him like this. They’d only had sex with him on top. And the couple times they’d done it since her accident had been slow and careful and sedate. Deane hyper-aware of her healing body and trying to ease the pleasure around her little aches and bigger pains. Casey quiet and conscientious above her.

  Tonight, Casey astonished both Deane’s eyes and her ears. On his knees, taking Brenna from behind. His head thrown back and moaning, grunted words coming out of his chest and throat: I love fucking you, he said. God, I love this pussy.

  He groaned and babbled, holding Brenna’s hips and banging her with a reckless, animal abandon.

  Dude, Deane thought for a surreal instant. Where’d you learn to do that?

  “What an asshole,” she said, slumping against the stone wall.

  “I’m sorry,” Ari said.

  She glanced up. “You drunk?”

  “Mm.”

  “Try to get it together when my dad gets here? Don’t puke out the car window or anything.”

  He laughed slowly in his chest. “Don’t worry, I have it all under control.” He took the hat off his face and set it on her head. The warmth inside settled on Deane’s crown like a soothing palm. “Your dad’s cool, anyway,” he said. “I love him.”

  “Do you?”

  “He’s good people. You’re so lucky. Holy crap, look at all the stars.”

  Deane shifted her gaze and stared up at the twinkling sky. The vast, incomprehensible dome of distance and time and infinite multitudes. Deane and her problems a measly speck of dust below it. She drew her knees up, set her forehead on them and imagined Alex pulling on shoes, finding his keys. A hand on the doorknob ready to go, then he’d look back at Sheba. He’d smile and jerk his head. Come on, let’s take a ride. Deane needs to be rescued.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

  “Mm.”

  “What happened to your dad?”

  “My real dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t answer. The silence behind her grew heavy and she bit her lip. “If it’s not too personal, I mean,” she said.

  “I don’t know what happened to him exactly,” Ari finally said. “He and my mom were never married.”

  “But who was he?”

  “Just some guy she met,” Ari said. “Mom never talked about it much, said it wasn’t much to tell anyway. She met a guy and they had a good time together but then he left. Not in a bad way, not like he abandoned her. They parted as friends and moved on, and when she found out she was pregnant, she decided to have me on her own. And give me her name.”

  She chewed on the ends of her hair. “What’s the name you were born with?”

  “Aaron Gil deSoto. When Nick adopted me, I became Aaron Seaver.”

  “Do you know what your father’s name was?”

  “Rogelio Alondra,” Ari said, in such an exaggerated sing-song, she wasn’t sure he was serious.

  “Really?”

  “Rogelio Alondra,” he said again. “It’s on my birth certificate.”

  “Did she ever tell him he had a son?”

  “She said she couldn’t find him. Or maybe she didn’t want to.”

  “Did you ever want to?”

  He was quiet a long moment. When he next spoke, he sounded much more sober. “When I think about dads, I only see Nick. He was a great guy and I think about him all the time. Think how my life would be different if he hadn’t died. And I guess… Maybe I don’t want to go through that again. Know what I mean? Go looking for my real father and have it end up being disappointing? Or tragic?”

  “I get it,” she said.

  “I Google the name every now and then. I only get a bunch of Spanish results. Genealogy sites. Usually with Rogelio as one person, and Alondra as another person. Once I found a Rogelio Alondra but he was some Spanish lord in the seventeenth century.”

  They were quiet a while. The crickets chirped and chattered. The hair on Deane’s neck rose up, a prickling awareness at her nape. Then Ari’s finger touched her. She shivered in her skin as he drew along the thin leather cord.

  “You still wear this,” he said softly.

  “It’s good luck.”

  His finger caressed her neck and slowly moved into the soft, secret spot behind her ear. She bowed her head, let the hat fall to the ground and her hair tumble toward her face. His fingers started to play with it. Her stomach tightened, then relaxed. A thickness in her chest, tumbling down a chute toward her lap.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Mm.”

  “Do you remember kissing me?”

  She picked up her head, looked back at him, blinking. “When?”

  “At your house. Right after I gave you this.”

  For a moment she thought she would cry. She hated these potholes in her memory. Hated the vulnerability of the narrative being taken away from her. Anyone could mess with her head and tell her she kissed someone. Fucked someone. They could tell her she blew the track team and she’d have no way of knowing if it were true.

  Ari’s face was soft in the moonlight though. His hand still stroking her hair.

  “It’s okay if you don’t remember,” he said.

  She tried to. He gave her the St. Bernard medal. She remembered a little black bag. She remembered being touched. Delighted. Putting it on right away. But then…

  “I don’t,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I wondered if it got lost on the mountain. It’s not your fault.”

  She turned her head away again. Ari pushed her hair to the side and his palm settled warm on the back of her neck.

  I kissed him.

  “Now I really wish I hadn’t gotten back together with Case,” she said.

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  She closed her eyes. “Ugh, and I slept with him again.”

  “Don’t tell me about it.”

  She laughed. “You sleep with anyone?”

  “Right now?”

  “Ever.”

  “Yeah.” His thumb moved along the bumps of her spine. “Few times.”

  “Only a few?”

  She could feel him smile behind her. “I had a girlfriend. We started to mess around and… It was only twice, then I got sick. I missed a ton of school. When I came back, I was so run down and looked like shit.”

  “Mm.” His hand felt so good in her hair. Her head lolled, her chin tracing pendulum arcs.

  “She kind of moved on,” Ari said.
“But even if we stayed together, it was like… I was skin and bones and I didn’t want her to see me. I was embarrassed. I could hide it with a lot of layers of clothes. But the thought of being naked with someone wasn’t a pleasant thought anymore.”

  Deane had a sudden, intense vision of Ari lying naked on a bed. A girl folded in his arms, her head on his chest. His eyes closed and a tiny smile curling up his mouth as he ran fingers through her hair.

  “I’ve always been self-conscious since,” he said. “Something in me still feels so skinny and fragile.”

  “You’re not fragile,” Deane said. “You’re sparse.”

  “Sparse?”

  “You’re rake thin with obese emotions.”

  His wandering hand held still and squeezed gently. “I like that.”

  “You don’t have anything you don’t need.”

  “Still,” he said. “I need to gain the weight I want. The weight of things I want.”

  “What’s a thing you want?”

  “I want to be inside you.”

  His tone was conversational, his hand played in her hair again, easy and undemanding. But the night pulled in close and Deane felt herself expand to meet it.

  “That’s not a thing,” she said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  She touched the edges of the night and suspended there, swinging in the hammock of the moment, purely alive. Then a sweep of headlights, a crunch of tires on gravel and Alex’s car turned into the park entrance. The night slipped back into place as Ari sat up and Deane handed him his hat.

  October 2006

  Alex and Val were lying around in bed with Jav. Figuratively speaking.

  “Jesus Christ,” Val said. She closed her copy of Gloria in the Highest and tossed it aside, pulling the sheet up to her face to wipe her eyes.

  Alex didn’t look up from Client Privilege. “That bad?”

  “Oh my God. I’m a wreck.” She got up and went into the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face. “Son of a bitch.”

  As she lay back down, exhausted, the dogs started barking downstairs. After a minute, Deane tapped her fingers on the half-open door.

  “Qué onda, cosita?” Alex said.

  “Hey,” she said, coming in. “Look at you two reading so cozy.” She flopped down at the end of the bed, curving her body around their feet and snuggling against Val’s legs.

  Val and Alex exchanged a quick glance. Since she’d started dating Ari, Deane was hanging out with them more. Talking to them. Not only about the new relationship but about everything going on.

  Even after a summer of intensive physical therapy, Deane’s doctor wouldn’t sign off on her playing soccer or racing with the ski team. With their active daughter benched for first semester, possibly for all of senior year, Val and Alex braced themselves for an adolescent state of emergency.

  It never came. The exchange student departed and the spawn matured overnight. Deane went to bed a pill and woke up the next morning a pleasant adult.

  “It’s actually nice to have all this free time,” she said. No doubt because she was spending so much of it with Ari. They’d joined the school newspaper together. Ari was putting out a weekly comic strip—he did the conception and the drawing, Deane did the ink and color. They were taking a digital media class at Dutchess Community College. They worked at Celeste’s and volunteered at the shelter.

  “She never did all this kind of stuff with Casey,” Alex said.

  “I know,” Val said. “In two months I’ve seen Ari in my kitchen more than I saw Casey in two years.”

  Deane’s eyes were filled with happiness, her mind full of plans. She wanted Ari and Jav to come for Thanksgiving dinner and to Stowe when ski season started.

  She’s falling in love, Val thought, gazing down at her daughter, who was flipping through the pages of Gloria in the Highest.

  “Was this good?” she asked.

  “Insanely good,” Val said. “Jav writes so seamlessly, you forget you’re reading.”

  “That makes no sense,” Deane said, but Alex popped up from his pages and pointed a finger at Val.

  “Get out of my head, I was just thinking that.”

  Deane hummed, now reading at the beginning of Gloria.

  “It has a lot of sex in it,” Val said. “FYI.”

  “I’ve read books with sex. FYI.” Without looking up, Deane scooted off the bed and headed toward the door. “‘Night,” she said. “Love you.”

  “‘Night, honey, I love you.”

  “Te quiero, cosita.”

  Still reading, Deane stepped around Sheba and pulled the door softly closed behind her.

  “Who are you and what have you done with Deane?” Alex said.

  “Right?” Val said. “I love it. I hope it lasts.” She curled up by his hip.

  “I think it will,” Alex said, a hand on her head. “He’s a good kid. If anyone’s her first foray into sex, I’m glad it’s Ari.”

  “What?”

  He glanced down, eyebrows raised and face smug. “Aren’t I hip?”

  “Tragically hip. It’s not her first foray.”

  He looked at her a long time. “You’ve ruined my life.”

  “Sorry.”

  He scooched further down in his stack of pillows and put the book in front of his face again.

  Val moved her leg over his. He gave a soft grunt of acknowledgment. She smiled. It was difficult to distract Alex when he was sucked into a book. Difficult, but not impossible. She ran her palm up his thigh.

  “May I help you,” he murmured.

  She pulled the drawstring on his scrubs and slid her hand inside.

  “I’m reading,” he said.

  “Where is it?” she said, searching around. It always amazed her how a massively erect cock could shrink into such a shy toadstool.

  “Hey,” Alex said. “‘Where is it’ are not words to be using when your hand is in a guy’s pants. We’ve discussed this many times.”

  “He’s hiding. Is he cold?”

  “He’s reading, fucky. You ruined my life and now you insulted him. Get out.”

  Val withdrew her hand and rolled away. “If you find him later, wake me up.”

  She turned off her night table lamp and pounded her pillows into place. A few moments of page-turning quiet passed.

  “How do you know she was having sex with Casey?” Alex said.

  “She told me.”

  “When?”

  “Only recently,” Val said. “The other day when we were baking.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked back over her shoulder. “It was a good talk.”

  It was a golden day. A keeper. Deane and Val baked all afternoon, talking about creativity, art, love, college and relationships.

  Unprompted, entirely of her own accord, Deane started talking about Casey. Val, having finally learned a thing or two, kept her mouth shut, offering only the occasional, precipitating comment.

  “You know what I wish?” Deane said, licking the batter off the beaters.

  “What?”

  “I wish I could take back the sex. Know what I mean?”

  “Mm,” Val said. The last breath she’d taken didn’t want to exhale.

  “It’s not that I felt pressured,” Deane said. “It was a mutual decision. It was consensual. It just never felt like anything…special.”

  “I see.”

  Deane dumped the beaters in the sink and leaned forearms on the counter. “He was the wrong guy,” she said, sighing. “He was a good guy. At the time, I mean. He turned out to be a shit later on. But in the moment, he was the one I chose.”

  “Of course.”

  “He was the first guy, but the wrong guy. And that kind of sucks. He got my virginity. I wish I could get it back. You know?”

  A moment of silence swelled like a blister. Val was washing the mixing bowl and in the soapsuds she could only see her little girl, naked and uncertain in the dark, lying under a boy. And in Deane she saw herself at eighteen, with
a boy who wasn’t cruel, a boy who didn’t force her… But a boy who wasn’t the right boy.

  Then all the not-right boys after.

  And the bone-deep, introspective sadness after she stopped hiring Jav for sex.

  I never made love.

  “You got a weird look going, Mom,” Deane said. “Is this too much information?”

  It wasn’t the amount of information being offered, it was the information Deane wanted in return. It was those two words: You know?

  Watching sudsy water swirl away down the drain, Val was keenly, profoundly aware of Deane’s trust in her right now. This vulnerable, insecure moment and its need for a litmus test. What’s normal here? Tell me what you did. Tell me how you felt. Give me something to measure against.

  It’s no wonder she wanted you, Val thought in Jav’s voice. You’re the strongest person she knows.

  She turned off the faucet and reached for a dish towel. “Yes,” she said. “I mean, yes, I know what you mean.” She turned around, running the back of her hand over her forehead, as if trying to press an idea into place. “You trusted him on a lot of levels, especially after you came home from Chile. If the first time he let you down sucked, the second must’ve been ten times as shitty.”

  Deane stared back at Val, eyes bright and lips pressed, nodding the tiniest bit.

  “So I can totally understand wanting to take it all back,” Val said. She crossed her arms, leaning against the counter. “Unfortunately, honey, it’s part of becoming sexually active. It’s like a whole new arena of judgment you have to learn to negotiate. It’s hard. You misjudge, you make poor decisions and pick the wrong partners. Everyone does. I did. It hurts sometimes. Leaves you feeling like an idiot.” She spread her hands out, one corner of her mouth twisting. “But then next time…”

  “You’re smarter about it.”

  “I always thought physical virginity and emotional virginity are two different things anyway.” Val tried to keep her hand steady as she smoothed a piece of hair behind Deane’s ear. “First time I went to bed with your father I was a complete emotional virgin. Going to bed with all our history and affinity and years of knowing each other. Sex in that context… It was like nothing I’d experienced before. I know this sounds corny, but it humbled me.”

  “Really?”

  Val nodded. “I don’t know everything, honey, but I guarantee you this: you’re going to feel a whole lot better about making love when you’re making it with someone you love.”