Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  “I don’t know,” Jess said.

  “No.” He laughed a little. “Neither do I. I guess I wanted to see you face to face. To try to make some sense out of it.”

  She stared at him through the lantern’s glow. “Here I am.”

  “There you are. God. I look at you, and—” He took an unsteady breath and tapped his chest. “This is what I’m worried about. This thing here.” He thumped his sternum. “This is what I’m afraid to name.”

  She thought of Dani tracing her back in the tent in Mexico, the last word on their last night, the word she could not name either. Her toes curled inside her sneakers, and her jaw locked with the force of sensation in her.

  He held up a shaking hand. “Actually I’m terrified.” He dropped his hand. “What do you think about this? What are you thinking?”

  That was the thing: for the first time in weeks, she wasn’t. Her mind was an exquisite blank. All she had was her flushed body, a toe-curling heat. She wanted to touch him, to have him touch her too. She unfolded herself and rose to her knees, thinking, yes, yes, unfold, unfold.

  She leaned in, reaching for his face—the face that had been at the fringe of her consciousness all day and night, the face that materialized behind her eyes at the orchard, in the grocery store, in the shower, in her school desk, on her pillow, his knuckled-nosed, dark-eyed face above her, beneath her, between her hands.

  The doorbell rang.

  Jess fell backward and scrambled to her feet. Adam jumped up too. He put a finger to his lips, miming quiet.

  “Who is it?” he called out.

  “Detective Alvarez,” the booming voice said. “Sycamore Police. We had a call.”

  Adam kept his finger at his lips and pointed to the hallway. Jess rushed to the hall and ducked into the bathroom, hiding behind the door.

  She heard Adam open the door, the murmur of voices. She closed her eyes, crossing her legs tight at the ankle. The bathroom smelled of pine cleaner. Her foot hit the spring bumper on the bottom of the wall and set off a loud twang. She held her breath, but the voices didn’t pause. Tears stung her eyes, and she clenched the key in her pocket. What was she doing here? What the hell was she thinking? She thought of Dani, curled up asleep in her twin bed, sure her father was asleep down the hall, not in a stranger’s house in the middle of the night with her best friend.

  The door shut, and after a moment Adam called, “Jess? It’s okay to come out.”

  She returned to the main room. Adam stood next to the blanket.

  He said, “A neighbor called. Saw movement. Thought it was a break-in. I told the officer I was alone, doing some paperwork.”

  “So, not safe after all.” She gave a twisted smile.

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of the windbreaker, his head bowed. Seeing him like that, in an ugly jacket with his baggy shorts and sneakers, it was as if someone had snapped the lights on. A father. Dani’s dad. This was not what she had been imagining. This was not what she dreamed.

  He held up a hand. “Nothing happened. It’s okay. But we can’t tell anyone. This is—”

  “Wrong.” As in abnormal.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I won’t tell,” she said. Not her mother, not Dani, obviously. The only way she could tell would be to write it in her notebook, but she already knew she wouldn’t write a word about it. Because she didn’t have the words.

  “No harm done,” he said.

  Except that wasn’t true, was it? If they could tell no one, especially not her best friend? If she had the sick sense of carrying a secret inside?

  “I have to go,” she said.

  And go she did. She ran to the front door and bolted through it. With her long legs, she leaped off the low step, her tennis shoes crunching on the gravel walkway and then thudding on the pavement. She ran all the way home, the key bouncing in her pocket, chased by the rustling darkness, by what she had wanted, by what she had almost done, by what she could not tell.

  Normal. Okay. She could do this.

  Days, she walked the halls. She went to physics and learned about chaos theory and Schrodinger’s cat and mass and gravitational force. She went to AP English and learned about comedies and tragedies, about the nine circles of hell, and wrote about the meaning of the color yellow in The Great Gatsby. She recited French phrases to her French teacher, she ran the spongy track in PE. She slumped in desks, taking tests, taking notes, taking in her teachers’ wisdom, ignoring the desire that surged through her body like a virus. Days, she ate lunch with Dani, Paul, and Warren. She rode in the Squareback with them to pick up burgers and fries from the Patty Melt and tacos from Casa Verde, snuggling with Warren in the back seat, whispering to him about meeting over the weekend. Normal. A girlfriend moving to the next level with her nice boyfriend. Days, she did her homework. She studied with Dani at the library but stayed away from her house, claiming her mom wanted to spend more time with her this last year, her final year of high school. Nothing out of the ordinary. A regular teenager.

  Nights, she met up with Warren, both with her mother’s knowledge and without. Young rabbity Warren with his sweet dry pecks, his earnest rubbing through his jeans. She grabbed him and tumbled down with him into the rabbit hole of sex. They fumbled and twisted in the back seat of his car, wishing they had more space, and she whispered, I know a place. They parked at the end of the street of the For Sale house and, bent low, snuck through the unfenced yard to the back door, where she pulled the silver key from her pocket. Warren, caught up in the moment, didn’t even ask how she got it. Into the house they went, naked house, bereft of furniture and light. She, too, stripped naked, clothing wadded on the carpet, as she tamped down the memory of the man she first came here with, of the face that still showed up in her dreams. She moved out of her head into her body, happy to find that this boy had more finesse than the first one, with his hurried thrusts and clumsy hands. Lit by the moon through the window, she moved atop him and beneath him—voracious bodies, celestial bodies, entwined. She replaced her secret desire with this one, her jawline rashed from that enthusiastic boy’s stubble.

  In October, nights grew crisp. Pumpkins appeared on porches, and clusters of crimson and yellow dotted the Black Hills. Jess pulled her red puffy coat out of the closet again for those nights that dipped into the forties and her breath turned white. Those nights, her coat became a pillow on the flat floor, soft against her neck and spine as her heels and knees dug hard, as she braced herself against walls and doorjambs. Teenage sex, condom wrappers, trying out new positions in a stranger’s house they snuck into. Normal. This was normal.

  “I love you, Jess,” Warren said. “God, God.”

  And Jess, her night self, said it back, on her back: love, Warren, God, her own kind of trinity, not sure which one she was calling for. She rolled over and straddled him, rocking faster, making herself believe.

  Days, she turned in papers late and zoned out in class. Her grades fell as the SATs and college application deadlines loomed.

  Days, she woke sore, her hips and thighs aching. The raw, dry air stung her chafed skin, and she rubbed lotion on the carpet burn on her knees and backside. She looked to the side of the mirror, unable to meet her own gaze, this day person, this peripheral girl with the shadowy eyes.

  Days, her mind broke through the surface, gasping. Love, Warren had said. Love, she’d said, too, but she knew it wasn’t true, at least not how she felt for him, the boy to whom she’d transferred her desire. As to what she felt in her secret heart, she didn’t know. Capital L something, all right. She checked the thesaurus. Lustful. Lewd, Libidinous, Licentious, Lascivious. Liar. She filled in the blanks of herself: I am, you are, she is.

  Days, she touched the marks on her locker where those hateful words had been scrubbed off: slut, cunt, Jess Winters spreads. Not true before, but now they were—at least the last part, and even then she shivered with the force of her night desire, the image of someone pushing her knees outward. She rubbed the marks with her
thumb, shut the locker door with a soft click, holding her bag tight to her chest. She looked at her feet instead of finding a spot on the wall. She shuffled. She did not leap.

  Days, Dani said, “Are you okay? You seem, I don’t know, distant.” And Jess said, “No, just tired,” but she couldn’t meet her eyes—eyes like her father’s.

  Days, Jess thought of her own father in California, well into his new life, his cards with their scrawled bleats—Miss you, my beautiful girl. Give me a call sometime—stuffed in her desk drawer. Her father, the great betrayer. She thought of her low moans in the night house as she pictured a forbidden face, her secret thoughts on nights she lay in bed alone, and she wondered if her father had felt that way too: the shame and pleasure fused, hating himself but doing it anyway. Perhaps she was his daughter after all.

  Days, she didn’t open her notebook. She didn’t write a word. She chewed rubber bands until her jaw ached.

  Days, over dinner, her mother leaned across the table. What’s going on? Tell me, J-bird. Do you need a tutor? What’s the problem? I thought you were doing better. This isn’t you.

  No, it wasn’t her. At least, it wasn’t all of her. It was the normal part trying to kill the other part. Two halves, split in two, day and night, night and day. She didn’t know which side she was anymore, or how to fuse herself together.

  The end of October brought the start of the shaking season. On weekend days at the orchard, Jess watched Iris and Paul and two hired men haul out the sticks and the three-legged machine with its extended mechanical arm and clamp. The machine’s arm clutched the tree’s trunk and shook. As the ground vibrated and the shells rained down, Jess planted her feet as if she might be knocked off balance and flung to the ground herself.

  She helped rake the branches, dried leaves, and nuts into windrows, which they shoveled into small trailers and hauled to the cleaning shed. Jess raked until she had blisters inside her cloth gloves, until she had no strength to grip the handle. She pushed herself to exhaustion—into her body again, again to forget, or maybe to punish, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was she could fall asleep those nights, her fingernails and nostrils crusted with dirt.

  In the shed, they separated the nuts with screens and blowers, and then sanitized and dried them. They shelled some, cracking open the burnished brown outer layer and harvesting the nut, and left others intact, before bringing them to the office for packaging. Packaging became Jess’s job. Her hands in plastic gloves, she scooped and tied the sacks, labeled them, and boxed them for shipping. She kept her mind on the monotony of the routine—scoop, scoop, tie, label. But sometimes she stopped and held up a shelled pecan. Here it was, that tiny nut formed, emerging into the world with its strange bumps and ridges. Without its shell, it seemed vulnerable, exposed.

  She bit its soft flesh, trying to savor its rich taste, but instead she thought of pencils. She spit it into her palm.

  The end of the month was both Dani’s eighteenth birthday and, of course, Halloween. Jess, Dani, Paul, and Warren were going to dress in costumes and go to the town festival. A few days before, Dani stopped Jess at her locker. She grabbed Jess by the elbow, squeezing hard. Jess froze. But then Dani loosened her grip.

  “Can you come by the HealthCo after school? It’s important,” she said. Her eyes grew red and watery behind her round frames.

  Jess nodded yes, and after school, she waited for Dani at the pharmacy counter behind another customer—Stevie Prentiss, the girl from the Woodchute Motor Lodge. Looking at Stevie’s birthmark, Jess touched her own cheek. Stevie turned and caught Jess doing it.

  “It’s not contagious,” Stevie said.

  Jess dropped her hand, and her face flamed. “I’m not—” She wanted to say she wasn’t mocking, only curious, but she realized how awful that sounded. Stevie wasn’t a sideshow.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Stevie shrugged and turned to the counter.

  Dani came out of the back room and called to the pharmacist, “I’m going on break.” She grabbed Jess’s hand without a word and pulled her down the aisle to the HealthCo bathroom.

  Inside, the small bathroom held a toilet, a pedestal sink, a metal trash can with rust stains down the side, a mop inside a bucket, and a wire shelf cluttered with boxes and cleaning bottles. The sickly sweet air freshener made Jess think of choking down purple cough syrup.

  Dani locked the door, lifted her shirt, and pulled out a box from her waistband. “I’m late,” she said.

  Jess stared at the box and then at Dani’s face. “Shit,” she said.

  “No kidding. I didn’t want to do this alone.” She pulled out a wrapped stick. “I already read the instructions. Pee on the end and then wait two minutes.”

  Jess looked away as Dani stepped to the toilet and unzipped. Dani peed and flushed, holding the stick out with two fingers. She set the stick on the toilet tank and checked her watch before pumping chalky pink soap into her hands. “Two minutes,” she said.

  Jess checked hers too. “Got it.”

  “Okay,” Dani said. “Okay. Talk to me. Tell me things. Distract me.” She shook her hands dry and paced the room in two steps.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything,” she said. “Everything.”

  Jess couldn’t do either. She couldn’t even come close.

  She said, “It’s going to be fine.”

  Dani gave a jittery laugh. “But what if it isn’t?”

  “Then we deal with it,” she said.

  “I can’t have a baby.” She looked at herself in the mirror and slapped her cheeks, hard, twice, three times, until they bloomed red.

  “Don’t,” Jess said. “Dani, stop.”

  “Time,” Dani said.

  “One minute.”

  “I feel like I’m going to pass out. It’s stifling in here. God,” she said, pulling at the neck of her T-shirt, stretching it limp. She took off her glasses and wiped the lenses with the hem. “What if it’s positive? My parents are going to freak.”

  Jess looked at her tennis shoes, tapped the toes. One of the laces dragged on the linoleum. “It won’t be.”

  “I missed a pill a few weeks ago. I’m an idiot.”

  “You’re not,” Jess said.

  “Wouldn’t everyone love that. Valedictorian gets knocked up, ruins her life.”

  “Okay, time,” Jess said.

  Dani rubbed her hands on her jeans. “I can’t look. Will you? Please. I can’t.”

  “Of course.” Jess leaned over the toilet and looked at the lines. She smiled and gave a thumbs up. “Negative.”

  Dani whooped. She launched herself at Jess, hugging her around the waist, her glasses digging into Jess’s collarbone.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Jess patted Dani’s back, her nostrils flaring as she caught the scent of her hair. The same shampoo as her father.

  Dani pulled away, wiping under her eyes. “I better get going. We’ll celebrate this weekend. With a cornball hay maze and the world’s stupidest haunted house. Spaghetti brains and grape eyeballs. Seriously.” She tossed the box and stick into the metal trash can. “Can you stay over this weekend? Please? We haven’t had any time.”

  “I’ll ask,” Jess said.

  Dani gave her one more quick squeeze. Over Dani’s head, Jess watched the metal trash can lid swing like a broken jaw.

  Warren called the next day, and she told him she couldn’t go out. She wasn’t feeling well. He called again, and she didn’t answer. The machine clicked on and off, on and off.

  Finally she picked up.

  “Jess?” a voice said. A man’s voice, but not Warren’s. “It’s Adam.”

  “Oh.” Her heart thudded hard, and her stomach dropped. “Hey.”

  “I just want to talk a minute. To check in.”

  “Okay.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “You don’t sound fine.”

  Sh
e bit her lip, covered the receiver with her palm.

  “Jess? Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” she said. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t have anything to say.”

  He paused for a long moment. She almost said hello, wondering if he’d hung up.

  “Done with the old man, are we? You had your fun?”

  She blinked at his low voice, the anger in it. She frowned. “It never got started,” she said. “Remember? And it wasn’t fun. None of this has been fun.”

  “Like with your little boyfriend?” He laughed. “I saw you at the house.”

  Jess frowned. “Are you following me?”

  “Stay out of there.”

  “I’m not doing anything wrong,” she said. “I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “What’s that? Breaking into houses and fucking boys on the carpet?”

  “Yes. Fucking.” She spat the word, one she never used for sex, but it felt good to say it, angry herself now. Angry at herself, at him, at all of it.

  He breathed into the receiver, and she plucked a loose thread on her shirt, breaking it off. “It wasn’t real,” she said. “Between us.”

  “It’s real to me,” he said.

  “They’re real,” she said. “Your daughter and wife.”

  “Jess,” he said. “I—”

  “Don’t say it,” she said. She hung up, staring at the receiver as if it might speak.

  After the Halloween festival, around midnight, Jess, Dani, and the boys piled out of the car in Dani’s driveway, two rumpled flappers with wilting feathers in their headbands and two gangsters with crooked mustaches. Giddy from sipping the beer Warren brought, Jess kissed him, happy to be young again, to find herself a teenager out on a Halloween night. A festival, a six-pack tucked in the wheel well, jokes and music hovering in the air with their pluming white breaths. A boy her age with beery kisses and a gentle smile, pressing his hips against her on the front fender outside her best friend’s house. She had handfuls of mini candy bars in her bag to share with her mom tomorrow after dinner—chili and cornbread, their favorite fall meal. She had Dani, waiting on the porch, and they’d go inside and talk late into the night.