“I think it’s nice,” he said.
“Well, you’re always the one in charge!” It just slipped out.
“I don’t feel in charge,” Connor said. “I feel very un-in-charge, actually. I feel like everything is new and slightly scary.”
“Scary? Why? I’m scaring you?”
“No.” He ran his hand softly along the inside of my calves, beneath my jeans. “I just am very aware of what you’ve been through. Your body.”
Oh my God, please don’t let him say the word “bag.” It will ruin this for me. It will, I thought. I swallowed so loudly I’m sure they could hear it across the bay in Annapolis, which, by the way, I could see through the eerie fog that lingered now on the water.
“So a lot of times.”
“A few. Yeah. A bunch, I guess.”
I didn’t want to bring up the girl Tim’s friend knew. I just didn’t want to go down the path of everything that was before, and yet, here I was, heading there. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was including her in that group. If he’d had sex with this girl and then not spoken to her again. Like Zoe had said.
But more than all that was bodies. All those perfect bodies of the girls Connor had to have touched. I could picture their smooth and unscarred stomachs.
You think the worst is behind you, but it’s never behind you. In fact, saying something is the worst does not leave room for all the bad stuff that can follow it. You say the pain is nine, but you mean ten. You leave room.
“I want to say this is so different, but that sounds stupid and cliché.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”
“But it’s true. It’s just so different. It’s about everything with us.”
I nodded.
“You know what would help me?”
“Are we here to help you? I had no idea. I thought this situation”—I brought my shaking hand out to show the dark room—“was more to help me.”
“Really? To help you?”
“That sounded selfish,” I said. “It’s not to help me. It’s to help us?”
He laughed and kissed me. Sweetly, peck-like, a question, and then a longer, better kiss that I guess sort of answered it. “Maybe we don’t need help,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Can I see it?” he asked me.
I gasped. I remember the sound I made very well.
“No!” I clutched the pillow harder.
He tried to ease the pillow out of my lap.
I held tighter.
“It just needs to happen.”
“Why?”
“Because then it will just be normal and everything will be normal and the only slightly awkward thing will be that you have never done it before and that I have never done it with you before.”
I let go of the pillow and lay back on the bed, crossed my arms. A wooden plank was probably less stiff than I was in that moment.
Connor laughed at me. “You totally don’t have to,” he said. “It was just a thought.”
“You really want to see it?” I said.
“No, Liz,” he said. “I really want you to show it to me.”
I felt my body relax. What would be the worst thing? There were so many worst things, but really, there only can be one.
“Okay!” I said. “Okay,” I said again, softer. I unzipped my jeans and kicked them off. There was still my underwear to contend with, but taking that off seemed like a lot to deal with at once. So I just left them on, the bag tucked in.
I was thankful he didn’t ask for the light.
He stayed propped on his elbow. He ran his fingers along the left side of my stomach, which was not the bag side. I held my breath. I felt my power, the power that had gotten me there and let me be in this house, eating Connor’s oatmeal and looking at his corner of stars, the power that had let me live a while now without experiencing that crippling shame. But now I could see I would never save Connor. And it would always be him who had the power not to love me.
We were silent. The moon was practically inside the room with its ghost-white light.
“So. There you have it.”
Silence.
“Aren’t you going to say, I think you’re beautiful? Or something else sort of fake?”
“Well, I was going to say that, I’m not going to lie. But you sort of took the wind out of those sails.”
“We could drop the sailing references,” I said, looking at the row of sailing trophies that glinted on his shelf. “Just for the night.”
“Okay.”
“So what will you say then?” I was reaching for my jeans.
He paused and looked hard at what I could only call the contraption. “Looks like you lost that catfight,” he said.
It made me laugh. It made me feel like he was telling the truth.
“Can I put on my jeans now?”
“Yes,” he said. “But really you do look beautiful.” He was looking now at my face. “It’s been said a million times before, but I haven’t said it to you a million times yet.”
He saw me. I could feel it, like, in my cells. And that power returned. My secret—evil kryptonite—was no longer a secret. Connor had seen it. My self could no longer be used against myself. Now there was nothing left to hide.
“You’re like a superhero,” he said, sitting up.
“Hardly.” But I wondered if he was saying something not so different than Stella had been saying.
“So much strength.”
I was silent as we lay there, clothed, bathed in moonlight on Connor’s bed. I could feel everything. The fleecy downy hair of his arm on my neck. The salt thick in the air. The soft comforter. The creaky shifting of the old house. The bay moving against the shore. Once I had thought no boy would ever love me because of my illness and this body I now lived in, and here was Connor, who sailed me across the water to here, and who didn’t just love me despite it, but a little bit because of it.
I felt so open to him, and connected. And then I did another thing I never would have expected: I brought my legs around him. I placed his hands on my waist and I brought my hands to his face and I kissed him. The biggest, most romantic kiss I have ever had.
He unbuttoned my flannel shirt so slowly I thought I’d die. And then he pulled off my tank top beneath it and held me very close to him. He undid my bra. Somehow we got our pants off in an un-clumsy way and somehow Connor got a condom out of the night table drawer and somehow it happened in the exact way it was supposed to happen, which was easily and like we’d known each other and been together this way before. Familiar even though it was utterly strange. And somehow when Connor was on top of me, his chest to mine, his stomach to mine, his legs and mine intertwined, somehow I forgot about the bag. It was just Connor and me and everything that was ahead of us.
He crawled off me, and I quickly put on his T-shirt to cover up. White V-neck, Connor’s sea-boy smell.
He sighed deeply. And held out his arm for me to crawl into the crook of it. “Hi there,” he said.
“Hi.”
The moon, the bay, the boat creaking, bats swooping.
“Hey,” I said, leaning on his bare chest, perfect, not sunken but also not overworked and muscly. Perfect for me. “Hi.”
We Were There
I lay under the comforter with Connor, so warm, like it was us two huddled up against the world, against the coming winter, my lips on his shoulder and his chest and his arms full around me, the heat of the place where his hair met his neck. I did get up several times for the bathroom, but it was okay and soon it was morning, the gray light shining through that window, the sun’s fall heat making its way into our room. I remember getting up with Connor—his wild red hair, bloodshot blue eyes, crooked smile—and then, before leaving his room, looking back at the messy bed, the down comforter pulled back, pillows indented where our heads once were, this place where we had slept, evidence that we had been there.
We ate more oatmeal (it must be said that there hadn’t been a lot of complex
ity or variety to our meals), and I remember thinking how strange that no one had tried to call me to make me come home. But it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours; no one even knew I was missing. As we got on the boat and Connor unwound us from our moorings, I wondered if this would—or could—ever happen again.
Back in the parking lot there was Stella leaning on that ridiculous white car, Samantha panting in the backseat, when, after what seemed like a pretty complicated backing into the slip, we got off the boat.
“Hey.” She nodded her head at Connor. “How goes it?”
“Good,” he said, pulling me aside by my elbow.
I hugged him, hard.
“I’m going to finish up stuff on the boat, okay?”
“Oh, sure.” I was so stupid thinking you just tie it up and head for your car. “Do you want me to stay? Can I help? Stella will wait. When I texted her from your house, I told her it could be a while.”
“Help?” he asked. “Like all the times you helped on the boat? Or with the . . . oatmeal? Those kinds of helping?”
“No. This kind!” I kissed him again.
“I’m good,” he said when we’d parted. “Have to make sure everything’s okay on the deck, and bring in all the lines, tie up the fenders and so on. And I’ve got to get back to school today. Before I turn into a pumpkin.”
“So you’re driving up there tonight then?” Pumpkinhood. I remembered.
“Mm-hmm,” he said.
I didn’t see an overnight bag. Had he just driven down with a wallet and the keys to the magic house on the hill by the bay? “When will I see you?” I asked him. I was skeptical.
“Next vacation is Thanksgiving, right?”
“Right!”
“So then,” he said.
“Meanwhile,” I said. But what was meanwhile? “Can you take another weekend?”
Connor seemed to think it over. “Just one,” he said. “The more you stick around, the more brownie points you get.”
“Okay,” I said. “But please, don’t get lost again, okay?”
“Why do I know you’ll always find me?” said Connor before he kissed me. And then he turned back to the boat.
I watched him walk along the dock, someone I would once never have known. He ducked onto his boat and began to take unfurl the jib. Jib.
“Are you just completely ruined now?”
I jumped and turned to see Stella stomping behind me in her scuffed-up black Docs. “Hi,” I said. “Ruined?” Was I?
“For everything else. Ruined.”
I rubbed the outside of my arms. “Totally.” I leaned into her and she guided us back to her car. I opened the door and pitched myself inside.
“Just destroyed,” I said.
“I want to hear everything,” she said as I clicked in my seat belt and readied myself for home.
My mother was reading the paper and my father was out back planting bulbs when I walked in the front door. It was barely 3:00 p.m.
“Hey!” I said. How many times could I arrive here a totally different person? How many more times? How many more arrivals?
My mother turned down a corner of her paper and looked at me over her reading glasses perched on her nose. “Liz?”
“No, Mom, it’s Jesus Christ.”
“Charming,” she said. “I thought it was Zoe! I don’t know why I thought you were coming back later.” She went back to reading her paper.
I went upstairs to check on Frog and change and put on my own cutoff sweatpants, ones I wore at camp before any of this. I pulled the drawstring tight.
I miss you I miss you I miss you, my phone said.
Who is this? I wrote back.
This is your mother, he wrote. I know what you did last night.
It gave me shivers to think of it. The whole night, the whole day, the whole . . . event.
Thank you.
Thank YOU.
Who ARE you?
I’m that guy? From the hospital? With the cute dog?
I know, I typed. I remember him.
My mother was still reading, glasses back up on her nose, her paper upright before her, when I came back downstairs.
Through the plate glass window behind her, I could see my father leaning over in his yellow Crocs, planting. I had a secret. I had this big, beautiful secret now. Something for myself. Something private. That no one could examine, open up, take out.
I watched my father stand and place his hands, still gripping his shears, on his hips as he surveyed his little patch of garden. I hugged myself. And I wondered what flowers would be coming up this spring.
After
Before I knew that Connor would get lost again, which he became, terribly so, I went back to my regular life. I continued training Mabel and doing my homework (we’d moved onto Antigone now . . . ), and, bizarrely, I hung out a lot with Michael L, who, surprise, surprise, had a girlfriend now, so in a way it was like things used to be when I had pined and pined for him. Only that was gone now. How nice was it not to yearn and ache and want and want? But how is it that one second you will die for someone to only brush by you, and then the next, just nothing?
But it was great to be friends. He tried to get me out and about more. The week I got back from my adventure with Connor, he convinced me to go to a field hockey game.
“Don’t think so,” I said initially. What would going to a hockey game possible do for me? Aside from make me sad.
But he insisted. “You gotta support your girls, Lizzie! You’re strong enough.”
I wasn’t sure, but it seemed wrong not to go. And it involved too much explanation.
From the bleachers I watched. The sidelines: big yellow plastic barrels of Gatorade and water. The gleaming bench. The pile of extra hockey sticks; the land of lost toys. And Mr. Crayton cupping his hands over his mouth from the sidelines, screaming. And yes, my old team on the field, moving. Lydia. Dribbling out front. Her plaid skirt. Her shin guards. Her ponytail. On the field Lydia was still herself. She was quick and nimble and beautiful. How I missed her as I watched her do what we had once done together so often.
I missed all of it. The grass, the scorekeeper, that smell, the pep talk before, the talking-to we got during, the losing, and winning.
No going back for me. Elbows on my knees, head in my hands, Pumas on the bleachers in front of me. I missed being teeny. I was smaller than I’d been before the hospital, but tininess was behind me. I turned to Michael, who was crouched over. “I’m going to be sick,” I said.
“Fuck,” he said. “What do you need?”
I looked out at the field. “No, no, just watching this. I just can’t. I’m leaving, okay?”
He moved to stand. “You sure? It’s kind of lame to just leave.”
“Oh well.”
“Okay, I’ll come then!”
“Nah, I’m good!” Whodathunkit: Michael L would turn out to be the nicest guy of all. “I’m going to walk home.” I stood up and looked down at him. In any other life I would have chosen him. In any other moment in my life I would have stayed and waited for him anywhere. “Thank you, though,” I said. Such a prince. Who knew.
I felt him watching me as I made my way down the bleachers, one for each step, the sound of feet stomping on metal. And then I was out the exit the nonathletes use to leave the field.
When I was out and crossing through the school parking lot, I could hear the crowd cheering behind me.
There’s a shortcut through this apartment complex by the train tracks that I used to take when I walked to school, back before my mother started dropping me off and picking me up each day. Before before. After leaving the hockey game, I went down that little path and sat on the train tracks. I laid down a penny, like Zoe and I did when we were kids, waiting for the trains to come, watching the penny tremble and then running, coming back for it, all flattened.
I sat on the cold metal tracks and dialed Connor. Straight to voice mail. It was the drill, our drill, I knew. I didn’t leave a message. Also part of the
drill. Maybe he had his phone; maybe he didn’t. It was so hard to know. But if he did have his phone, he knew it was me. He knew my number.
Then I called Nora, because I missed my obnoxious, selfish, criminal friend.
“Dahlink!” Nora said when she heard my voice.
I picked at the sticks along the tracks and decided to tell her about Connor. “Hey, hunny!” I said. “I miss you!”
“Likewise, Bun-bun,” she said. We had just taken to these odd forms of endearment. Bizarre but sweet. “I’m so glad you rang. I wanted to tell you about this party I went to this past week-end. Just cracking, I tell you. Crack-ing.”
I sighed. There was no talking to Nora. Or more, I didn’t want to talk to her. Our relationship was just me listening. “Cracking? How is everything over there?”
“Smashing, my good friend. Sma-shing. Three kegs. Dancing on tables. That was me, of course. Did you have to ask?”
“I thought your parents were keeping you home, Rapunzel-style.”
“That’s all over,” she said in her regular Nora voice. “They couldn’t bear me. Shall I tell you about the game of Truth or Dare that went très far afield?”
“Lovely,” I said. I toed the dirt. There were smashed beer cans and burnt sticks scattered across the tracks.
“Et vous?”
“Tu,” I said.
“Tutu!” said Nora. “I need one. Lots of tulle and sequins. Hot, hot pink.”
“A good look for you,” I said.
“Bien sûr.”
“Anyway, same ol’, same ol’,” I told her. “Living the dream over here.”
I heard her sigh, air out of a tire. “Actually,” Nora said, “actually it’s all shiit here. Really, doll, school is shiit, the party was shiit. There was no dancing. Not on tables, not on chairs, not even on the hideous wall-to-wall carpet. Truth or Dare was a snooze. I had to be home by ten p.m. Honestly, I just can’t wait for camp.”
The tracks rumbled beneath me. That meant at least three minutes before it arrived.
“That’s the only time it’s any real fun. Angelo or no Angelo. That will be aces, my dear. Aces. Not so far away, really. In some ways.”
“I’m not going back to camp,” I said.
We Were Never Here Page 19