An Exaltation of Larks

by Suanne Laqueur

  “Is everyone asleep?”

  “I think everyone’s dead. They killed two bottles of that pisco shit, they could barely get up the stairs.”

  Deane shivered as he slid in next to her. They kissed around stifled giggles, freezing up and analyzing every little creak and thump the house made, then dissolving into laughter again.

  “I think it’ll be all right,” Ari said. “They were freakin’ plowed.”

  “Which makes us the adults in the room.”

  The kissing slowed down and sank deep, their bodies relaxing and becoming one with the silence.

  “It’s so nice in a bed,” she said. “I can see why people like to do this.”

  “Mm.” His hands slid beneath her shirt and closed gently around her breasts. “You’re so soft.”

  “Your hands are always so warm.”

  She arched into him, her skin wanting more. “Can we take our clothes off?”

  His kiss hesitated against hers. “I can’t… I don’t want to do it here. Not with everyone upstairs.”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean we’d do it. I just want to feel what it’s like to be naked in bed with you.”

  “I do, too. God, I wish we were alone. This would be such a perfect place for the first time.”

  “I know. Just for a minute, can we?”

  He laughed against her neck. “A minute. Right.” But he reached for the buttons on his flannel and started undoing them. Deane wriggled out of her shirt and sweatpants. Clothing was kicked out item by item, then they inched into each other’s arms.

  “Hi,” he said softly.

  “Hi.”

  “This was a really bad great idea.”

  “I know.” She slid her body as close as she could to him, then kissed her way closer. Desire pooled thick like pudding in her chest, sweet along the back of her throat.

  “I can’t wait to make love someday,” he said.

  A sudden aching damp swelled between her legs. “Soon,” she said. “Someday soon.” She sank into his mouth a little more, opening for him. Tasting him. Feeling his penis hot and stiff against her stomach. Wanting to feel it glide inside where she was wet and craving.

  “This feels so good,” he said.

  She ran her fingers along the edges of his shoulder blades. Along the bumps of his backbone and the long spaces between his ribs. Along his hard, slim arms and down his tight stomach. Up again over his chest and throat and threading them through his hair. “I love your body.”

  His hands pressed into her back. His arms and shoulders rose in goosebumps. Even the fine down of hairs on his chest looked up. “For real?” he whispered.

  “It’s beautiful.” She pulled tighter toward him, wanting to pass clear through the barrier of his skin and meld with his muscle and bone. Melt together and never separate. Leave a piece of her lodged deep within so she could be in him even when they were apart.

  I’m so happy.

  “Ari?”

  “Mm.”

  She perched on the edge of herself. Hesitated a split second. Then stepped off. “I love you.”

  His chest filled up with air as he slid hands along either side of her face. “I love you, too,” he said, exhaling and pressing her forehead to his.

  “For real?”

  “For real.” He kissed her. “It’s beautiful.”

  The damage was great the next morning. None of the adults could get out of bed. Ari and Deane left a note and took the shuttle bus to Smuggler’s Notch. They started on the easy trails until Ari felt comfortable, then gradually moved on to the intermediates.

  Now at the tail end of winter break, the resort was mellow. Often they had trails entirely to themselves, the wide open boulevards theirs to barrel down at top speed, or meander across with gigantic turns.

  I’m in love, Deane thought, throwing her head back to the bowl of the blue sky, the snow-frosted trees and the folds of the mountains.

  They kept stopping to grab each other. Coming to a breathless, laughing halt at the side of the trail. Trying to kiss, laughing as they bonked helmets and goggles. Laughing as they yanked their head gear off so they could get close, wrap arms around each other and kiss, their poles sticking out in all directions.

  “God, I love you,” Ari said, unzipping her jacket a little so he could get at her neck. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “It is,” she said, leaning back in his arms, toppling off the edge of the world. Love caught her in its palm, kept her cradled in a soft joy all the rest of the day.

  On the drive home to Guelisten, she and Ari rode with Val. They sat in the backseat holding hands, falling asleep on each other’s shoulders, or contentedly staring out the windows while sharing a pair of earbuds. Playing songs for each other, the lyrics filling Deane with a teary affinity with the world. The memory of being naked in Ari’s arms tightening her chest and belly, nearly to the point of tears.

  I’m in love.

  Val reached around the back of her seat and tapped Deane’s leg. Deane caught her hand and they twined fingers. Out the corner of her eye she saw Ari smile before he looked back out the window at the snowy countryside.

  Val freed her fingers, then reached to Ari, her hand making circles. Ari caught it up in his and gave a squeeze.

  “Everybody for to hold hands,” Val said. “For we to get home safe.”

  Deane unbuckled and hitched toward the driver’s seat, sliding her arms around Val.

  “Hi, Mumsy,” she whispered.

  Val turned her face, smiling. “Who’s the happiest girl in the world?”

  “Me.”

  Alex seemed tired on the way home from Stowe. No conversation in Spanish, no jokes or stories. He kept turning the radio knob, following the NPR lineup. Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, followed by Car Talk. Then Moments in Time.

  “Can you keep a secret?” Jav said.

  “Sure.”

  “This journalist talking? Camberley Jones?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She was one of my clients.”

  Alex’s face didn’t change a millimeter. “When?”

  “Back in two thousand three. Or two, maybe? She won the Peabody Award for a story she produced on that college shooting down in Philadelphia. I went with her to the ceremony.”

  “Huh.” Alex turned the volume knob up. He shifted a little in the driver’s seat, tugging at the legs of his jeans, then settled back. His demeanor closed up like a fan while Jav was wide open, desperate with longing. Wanting Alex’s attention.

  Are you mad at me?

  His shoulders flicked. What was he, in seventh grade and needing an emotional weather report? The guy was tired.

  He tried to chill, but the air in the car was electric and dripping. It sank claws into Jav’s skin, yanking and pulling him in all directions. His hand curled in a fist to keep from straying toward Alex. The pull in his bones was both sexual and soulful and it infuriated him. He had friendship. He had acceptance. He’d found a family. Why wasn’t it enough? Why, in his mouth, on his tongue, resting like pearls, were these impossible opalescent questions: Do you want me around? Do you want me?

  Do you love me?

  Every cell in his body cringed. His fist opened and closed in a reflexive response to fight this feeling.

  I don’t need his love.

  I don’t want it. I don’t want to need it. Not from him. Not from anyone.

  I don’t want this strangle in my chest, this heat in my belly, this agony in my bones. I don’t want it.

  He turned his head toward the window, desperate to hide. He’d never felt more exposed in his life. Didn’t understand why his gigantic emotions weren’t broadcasting through the car speakers, wanting this moment in time to be preserved. Not end up a giant’s abandoned plaything.

  Don’t you love me anymore?

  “Do you miss anyone from your family?” Alex asked. “Or did they all hurt you beyond repair?”

  “I miss my dad,” Jav said after a moment.

  �
��Yeah. Me too.” Alex took a hand off the wheel and turned the radio down a bit. “This is kind of a weird question—”

  “Whoa, I don’t know, man. We haven’t jerked off together yet.”

  Alex laughed and the back of his hand whacked Jav’s shoulder. “Shut up.”

  “Go ahead,” Jav said, laughing above his burning stomach.

  “Did your clients change after Nine-Eleven?”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know. Did you have more work? Less work? Different work? Were more people, women, I mean, looking for companionship? Bad enough to pay for it?”

  Jav twisted his mouth, thinking. “I don’t really remember,” he said. “I do remember this pervasive sadness in the city, though. It was a presence. A layer of dust that never went away. You could always feel the smoke and smell hanging in the air.”

  Alex grunted, fingers drumming on the wheel. “I tanked,” he said. “Big time.”

  “From it being the second Nine-Eleven?”

  Alex glanced over, nodding. “Yeah. Something in me couldn’t get past the coincidence. It felt…personal. It dredged up shit I didn’t even know I was carrying around.”

  “Probably the shit your brain didn’t know how to process at the time.”

  “I felt like such an asshole.”

  “How so?”

  “I mean, Christ, what’s wrong with me? Val was the one in the city that day but I’m the one having a breakdown? It made no sense. I had no war story. I’m safe, my family is safe, thousands of people are far worse off from this tragedy. What the hell is going on that all of a sudden, I can’t get out of bed in the mornings?”

  “That bad?”

  “Bad. Lowest I’ve ever been in my life.” He pointed with his elbow across the console. “You asked about the scar. When I said I cut myself, I meant it literally. With my father’s dagger.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Twenty stitches. Nine plus eleven make twenty, you know. Because I like everything to be poetic.”

  “Did you get help? I mean, obviously you came through, but did you just tough it out?”

  “No. Maybe if I’d been single and stupid I would’ve soldiered on. But when you got a wife and kid…” He trailed off and ran his fingertips over his brow. “It’s not just your breakdown, it’s theirs, too. Depressed, anxious, suicidal—you’re still a parent and your kid is watching to see how you deal with it. Deane was twelve and she wasn’t stupid. I didn’t have to pretend nothing was wrong, but I couldn’t lay down and give up either. I had to walk that walk and let her see me crawl sometimes.

  “Anyway, I went on meds and did some counseling. Lot of counseling. I got Sheba, she gave me my sleep back. I started running again, going back to the gym. Working out and working through it.”

  “It was such a fucked-up time.”

  “I kept coming back to the image… It was a picture taken at ground zero. This chunk of the building. This jagged piece of the facade stabbed into the middle of the debris and dust. Smoke rising up from the ground, hovering over everything. No color. Everything black and white and grey. The light is sickly. You know which picture I mean?”

  “I know it,” Jav said. “It almost looks sci-fi. Like an apocalypse. Nuclear fallout.”

  “I showed that picture to my therapist and said, ‘This is what leaving Santiago felt like. This is how it feels not to know what became of my parents. This is my childhood. This is me when I was eleven. Right here.’”

  “And now it’s you again at forty.”

  “All over again. Same date. Same destruction. People just disappeared.” Alex shifted in the seat and cleared his throat. “I don’t tell too many people about this.”

  “Why not?”

  Alex shrugged.

  Jav’s eyes followed the lines bordering the highway. “Why you telling me?”

  A beat. “Because someone staged a coup on your life, too. Left you a kid standing in the rubble. And you toughed it out and rebuilt. Even though no kid of your own was watching you. I admire that. At the same time, I wonder how bad it hurt.”

  It hurt so bad.

  Jav licked his lips, taking a slow deep breath. “The coordinates on my neck are for Shanksville, Pennsylvania,” he said. “My friend Trueblood was on Flight Ninety-Three.”

  Alex’s head flicked to him, stayed a little too long and he had to veer the car back from the shoulder. “Qué mierdas… Javito, are you shitting me?”

  “I was on the phone with him. Right until the end.”

  Alex hit the brake and slowed the car onto the shoulder. He put it in park, flipped the hazards and half turned in his seat. “He called you from the plane?”

  “Yeah. I was like a secretary. Writing down things to tell his family.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Hardest fucking story I ever wrote in my life.”

  Alex slowly nodded, eyes wide and fixed on the dashboard, mouth slightly parted.

  “Fucked me up bad, too,” Jav said. “I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t get out of bed. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t stop crying. Couldn’t write. I could screw, that was it. I don’t know if my clients changed but I know I did. I made a shitload of money after Nine-Eleven because sex was the only way I could get my thoughts to turn off.”

  “Man, that’s…” Alex closed his eyes. “I can’t even fucking imagine.”

  “Yeah, you can,” Jav said. “If anyone can, you can. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  Alex put the car in gear and pulled back onto the highway. “You and I,” he said after a minute. “We’re so alike. It’s no wonder.”

  “No wonder what?”

  “That we kept finding each other. I’m having a hard time thinking it was coincidence. Cachai?”

  “Cachai.”

  The miles fell away in silence. Slowly Jav’s hand crossed the console and dropped on Alex’s arm. Alex’s head made the slightest dip down, regarding it, before returning to the road. His face unreadable.

  Heart pounding, walking the line, Jav slowly moved his palm. Over a scarred elbow. Along a tattooed forearm. Alex was stone still, staring down the highway.

  This was a mistake.

  Then, on the steering wheel, Alex’s fingers unfolded. Raised up. Stretched out.

  Jav’s hand slid over Alex’s wrist. His own fingers stretched, reached, and settled between Alex’s, entwining, squeezing and settling back down, piggybacked on the wheel again.

  “Estás bien, hermano?” Alex said softly.

  You all right, brother?

  “Si.”

  “It’s no wonder. Not to me.”

  “Me neither.”

  After a moment, Jav took his hand away. He crossed his arms over his soft, limp chest and sighed the last of the worry stored there.

  “Oh my God,” Val said. “I feel sick.”

  “I know,” Alex said.

  “He called Jav from the plane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Had him on the phone right until the end. Literally to the end.”

  “Jesus.” Val inched over on the mattress, reaching for him. “Hold me.”

  “Hold me,” Alex said, quivering inside his skin. “What a fucked-up…”

  Inside his head, his mind was running around and around in a screaming circle, trying to escape the story. Shaking a foot like it had stepped in dog shit. Get it off me!

  He clutched at Val, remembering the sharp edge of her scream when the second hijacked plane went right over her head and sliced into the south tower.

  Get out, he’d yelled through the phone. Get out of there now, get off the island.

  She called him once more as she was making her way to the tip of the island. Then the first tower fell. The call dropped. All cell service went to shit and Val went dark, swallowed up in the chaos.

  A tiny hairline fissure cracked Alex’s mind and each agonizing hour that passed widened it.

  If I lose her, I’m done. If she’s disappeared, I
’m finished. I will not survive. I can’t flee this coup. I have no embassy to help me escape.

  He had no memory of picking Deane up from school. He all at once found himself holding her in his lap as they stared at the TV. His outward manner calm and reassuring, answering questions as best he could, while inside he was cracking into pieces. The dragons off their chains. An unbearable urge to go running for the closet and close himself inside. He nearly collapsed like another tower when Val finally called, safe in New Jersey, on a bus headed for Rockland County. Shocked to the point of numbness. A fine veneer of hysteria over her exhausted voice. But alive and coming home to him.

  What if she’d called him from a plane? We’re going down. It’s the end. I love you, Alex. You’re the love of my life. I love you.

  “I love you,” Val said. “Come back, Alex. I’m right here. Deane’s safe in her bed.”

  He held her tighter, projecting backward, envisioning himself as a widower with a twelve-year-old motherless daughter. Which made him think of himself, left motherless at eleven.

  Who did you cry for at the end, Mamí? Were you alone? What did they do to you? How did it end?

  He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to think about what he’d read in an account of Pinochet’s atrocities.

  He tried not to think of airplanes over oceans, carrying prisoners bound to railroad ties. Unable to call anyone before the final shove.

  He tried not to think of airplanes at all.

  “You’re shaking so bad,” Val said.

  “I woke up the dragons.”

  Sheba nosed open the bedroom door and came straight up onto Alex’s side of the bed. Val got him a Xanax. She took half a tab herself then lay down again. Alex pulled her hard against his chest while Sheba pushed herself tight behind him. He couldn’t put his mind down. Every thought upset him, or free associated to another upsetting thought. The dragons opened their jaws and set the world on fire. Everything was burning.

  “Hold onto me,” Val said. “I love you so much.”

  “I hate this,” he said, powerless against the tremors in his limbs. He hated the helplessness, hated having nothing for it but to shake it out. Most of all, he detested the compulsion to go in the closet and shut the door.

  He started hiding after 9/11. Stealing secret minutes from the day to escape into the dark he feared. The shoplifted time grew longer, the need grew greater. Until the day he couldn’t come out. Val found him, curled up under their clothes with his mouth on his kneecaps, his father’s antique dagger in his hand.