Sliding Past Vertical

by Laurie Boris

  “She’s not that great,” Emerson said. He wanted to make a list for him, but at the moment none of her negatives came to mind. “She’s not worth this.”

  “You don’t understand. It isn’t her specifically I don’t want to forget about.” Rashid paused a moment, seeming to puzzle over the syntax of his last sentence. “It isn’t even that she doesn’t care for me after all this time pretending that she might. Well. Yes, I want to forget about that. But being in love. This is the feeling I don’t want to forget about.”

  Emerson forced himself to look across the chasm between them. He focused on a space behind Rashid’s head, on the tennis courts across the parking lot from the biology building. Doing this decreased the nausea and the perception of height. Or he cared about them less.

  “You’ll be in love again.” Emerson took a step forward, right to the edge of the walkway. “You’re getting married. You’ll fall in love with your wife.”

  Rashid’s shoulders sagged as he surveyed the land stretching out in front of him, as if he’d given it his all and found it an utter disappointment. “Up until a few months ago I thought this might actually happen. Now that I know it’s not something you make happen but something that happens to you, I can’t take the chance on it never happening again. Why ruin two lives?”

  “So don’t marry her. Find someone you love.”

  “Find someone you love,” he repeated in a mocking tone. He turned on Emerson, shaking a finger. “This is easy for you to say. You have love enough to toss aside if it doesn’t please you. But who will have me? Ten women my parents have found for me in the last two years, claiming they are perfect matches. All have rejected me. Except for this one Indian girl who agreed to a marriage before even meeting me face to face. I can’t disgrace my family by turning her away.”

  “And they would have liked Sarah better? An American girl?”

  Rashid sighed. “Love makes one do crazy things.”

  “Like coming home in a body bag,” Emerson said under his breath.

  Jagadhish slunk through the roof door, head bowed, pleading something in rapid-fire Hindi.

  “Get him out of here!”

  The force of Rashid’s tone froze Emerson with panic. For a second he could only stare but then shook it off. “Go,” he said to the young man without looking back, eyes trained on Rashid’s footing. He convinced himself that only constant vigilance would keep his housemate rooted in place. Vigilance Emerson couldn’t give a five-year-old boy two thousand miles away eleven years ago. “Please.”

  Jagadhish didn’t move.

  Rashid looked tired. Decades older.

  He shuffled a foot against the marble ledge.

  The wind picked up. Something creaked beneath them.

  Emerson’s heart was about to leap out of his chest. “Look, Rashid…this is stupid,” he said, throwing out his hands. “You won’t be proving some point, you’ll just be hurting your friends and family. And I should know. Please. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get a cup of coffee and talk.”

  Rashid looked at Emerson for a long moment, eyes hopeful, still wanting to trust. Then he said, “No. You are only trying to fool me with your psychology.”

  A bank of clouds began to overtake the sun. Rashid seemed unaffected by the chill. Emerson curled his arms tighter around his chest. “No. I’m only trying to help you.”

  “By keeping me alive so I may die a slow and tedious death elsewhere. This is not helping me.”

  A perfect loafer slid another inch toward the edge of nothing.

  Emerson didn’t know what else to say. Except one thing but it would be a dirty trick, one that absolutely would have worked on him if someone had the presence of mind to use it instead of bodily yanking him from the window. And he would have hated whoever had said it, but at the moment he didn’t care.

  “What about Sarah?”

  The trick seemed to work. Rashid wasted no time hating him. Dark eyes scored Emerson from aft to stern. “What about Sarah?” he snapped. “She’ll have you. If you are not too stupid to see how much she loves you.”

  The bottom dropped out of Emerson’s stomach.

  Focus, he told himself.

  “She’ll still think it’s her fault,” he said. “No matter what you put in that note. You know how badly this will hurt her? She’ll carry it around for the rest of her life.”

  The younger man appeared to be thinking it over. Emerson waited, shivering in the cold. Rashid’s eyes grew moist. He blinked hard, turning his head away. When he spoke again it was with gravity, each word carefully polished.

  “You will tell her I am sorry.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “You’ll have to tell her yourself.”

  This time he didn’t sound so sure. “This I am prepared to do. If you go get her and bring her here.”

  “And leave you alone? I don’t think so.”

  Rashid smirked. “Jaga will stay and keep me from jumping to my certain death.”

  When he glanced over, the boy averted his headlight-stunned eyes. “No,” Emerson said. “I have a better idea.”

  Chapter 45

  A teenage waitress in an undersized T-shirt slunk out from behind the counter with unleaded in her left hand, high-test in her right, and a tattoo encircling her navel. Sarah cringed. She’d wanted to meet Emerson somewhere they’d never been before, but this little dive near the campus had not been her best idea. It was bad enough that whatever sleep she’d managed to get the previous night had been riddled with diving dreams, bad enough that her heart and body ached for what she’d done to Rashid and then done to him again with her clothes on, without all these nubile young things making her feel even more like a used teabag.

  She regretted having agreed to social contact with a member of the opposite sex not even twelve hours after sending another one packing. And all she could do was wait for him, alone, in a diner booth.

  “More coffee, ma’am?”

  While crow’s feet sprouted and her breasts sagged and eighteen-year-old trendoid pipsqueaks called her “ma’am.”

  “Switch me to decaf,” she said.

  The girl poured. “You wanna order now?”

  “No, I’m going to wait for my—” Sarah stopped. She didn’t know what to call Emerson. She’d been about to say “boyfriend,” but that was nothing more than wishful thinking. It would probably be a long time before he’d let her that close again, if ever. But “friend” seemed dishonest, too, a betrayal of a relationship that was hardly so casual. She needed something in between. Emerson always came up with the perfect word. Sarah alone couldn’t think of it fast enough to hold the girl’s attention. She flitted off with a bored, frozen smile and two fists full of coffee. As if she knew there was no word, would be no word, no matter how long Sarah took to explain their situation.

  No tip for her.

  * * * * *

  I didn’t mean to hurt him, Sarah imagined she would tell Emerson, as she nursed her third cup of coffee.

  Emerson would tell her not to be so hard on herself. That people made mistakes. And maybe both parties were hurting, but she’d done the right thing in the long run.

  She worried what could be keeping him and called the house. No one answered.

  Then, as she was returning from the pay phone, two foreign students she recognized as casual acquaintances of Rashid’s took the table across from hers. Too late to hide, the best she could hope for was that they wouldn’t tell Rashid she’d been here, waiting for whatever she was waiting for. What they would say! Another man! So soon! And how she looked! Earrings and eye shadow! Nothing but trouble, American girls, you are much better off without them!

  That’s it. I’m leaving. It wasn’t right to be here; it wasn’t respectful. Why should Rashid be miserable while I’m considering pancakes and Emerson?

  She signaled the two-fisted waitress.

  “More decaf?”

  “No, thanks. Could you please tell my—” There it was
, that damned missing word again.

  “Friend?” the girl offered, batting her eyes.

  Bitch. “If you could please tell him I had to leave...he’s tall with long blond hair and little round glasses, and everything on his face turns down...”

  “So pretty much the opposite of that guy?” the girl said, pointing toward the register with the pot of decaf.

  Sarah followed the direction of the spout and saw the boy from the lab. Jaga-something. He was in his lab smock, his stunned gaze jumping around the restaurant, landing on her.

  * * * * *

  He said nothing but Sarah knew she should follow. She was too afraid to ask where they were going but struggled in improper footwear to keep up with his galloping, sneakered strides.

  For a long time she would blame her shoes.

  Her back and calves would ache and it would be weeks before she remembered why, and when she did, she’d take all of her shoes that she couldn’t do a flat-out sprint in and give them to the Salvation Army.

  She’d even take up jogging.

  Emerson would be patient with her. He’d explain that there was probably nothing either of them could have done.

  The ledge that Emerson assumed to be marble was made of tin, painted to look like marble. And it could only support the weight of a steadfast adult male, however small, for not quite as long as it would take for him to change his mind.

  Chapter 46

  The college-professor uncle drove in from Cambridge with a rented trailer to pack up Rashid’s room. Grudgingly, he accepted Emerson’s help. He said little during the two hours for which he’d chosen to stay. Either he was in shock or blamed Emerson for the accident. Either way, Emerson was accustomed to working alongside people in grief and knew to keep his emotional distance unless called upon.

  He wasn’t called upon.

  It’s my destiny, he thought, to put closure on the material detritus of people’s lives.

  But those people were old and sick and might have welcomed death as an end to their suffering. The loss of this one, young life made no sense to him and never would. Rashid hadn’t wanted to die. Emerson had seen it on his face, the look of bewilderment, of gross miscalculation.

  Emerson had shot out a hand, not fast enough to catch him.

  Among the material detritus of this one, young life were two things of Sarah’s—a towel that Rashid seemed to have adopted and a single earring that had survived the fall in the pocket of his tweed blazer.

  “What is this?” The uncle plucked a dangling bit of gold filigree from the spread of his nephew’s possessions, spilled out from a manila envelope the police had given them. Emerson recognized it as the orphan of a pair he had given Sarah for her birthday a few years ago. “Surely this does not belong to him.”

  “I know who it belongs to.” Emerson put out his hand. “I’ll give it back.”

  The uncle bared pointed teeth and his eyes, close together and sunk into his head, were hard as marbles. He jabbed the earring into Emerson’s palm. “Do what you want with it. Throw it into that ugly lake of yours, I’m not sending it to his mother.”

  Emerson kept the earring and the towel for Sarah in a plastic bag in the trunk of his car. Someday, when he thought she could handle it, he would give them back.

  They belonged to her, after all.

  * * * * *

  Little things stopped Sarah cold: a shaker of cumin he’d left behind, a bag of rice, an empty Kingfisher bottle she’d forgotten to throw away. These would ruin her. One Saturday morning, the vacuum sucked up a piece of paper. She stopped to extract it from the dusty maw and read the handwriting that broke her every time she saw it.

  Milk, sugar, bread, cereal...

  His grocery list must have fallen from his pocket and drifted under the sofa. It contained the ordinary stuff of ordinary life, a life that no longer was because of her. She sank to the floor, clutching the scrap in damp palms, and cried.

  This was all she had left of him—these stray things, a few tidily printed words, and the guilt, which stalked her like a jilted lover. It was in the bathroom, the kitchen, in her bed. It waited for her in closets and behind the shower curtain when she got home at night. In the morning, it followed her to work. It wore his face and a brown blazer and black socks with gold toes.

  When she ran out of tears she put the list in her jewelry box. Guilt lived in there, too, in everything she’d worn that he’d admired. In the earrings Emerson had given her as a birthday gift, which she’d lied about losing in Rashid’s car, one of which she discovered was truly missing. It had been snagged by a sweater, jogged loose during a run for the bus, or tugged out by the earphone of her tape recorder, no doubt.

  She put the single one in her left ear and cried some more.

  She couldn’t face this day. She was supposed to go shopping with a couple of women from work and buy an outfit or two to celebrate her new job in the art department of the public relations firm. Then she was supposed to meet Emerson for dinner: a melancholy marking of time, a meal in his honor.

  The women understood when she called to cancel. They told her peppermint tea was the perfect thing for a mild case of food poisoning.

  To Emerson, she told the truth.

  * * * * *

  He called back that night, just after she had been woken by a neatly attired ghost with arms outstretched and gold toes curled around the ledge of her window.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She swore she could smell Rashid’s aftershave. “Just the diving dreams again.”

  “Him or you?” He paused. “Or me?”

  “Him,” she said.

  “The same one?”

  “Yeah, but different.”

  Sarah imagined Emerson in his room. She saw the unused typewriter, his placid eyes and mouth drawn downward as he leaned back in his chair, waiting for her to go on.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said, through fresh tears. “He was supposed to have gotten married today.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “It’s my fault.”

  “You didn’t make him fall, Sarah.”

  “Yeah, but he wouldn’t have been up there if I hadn’t—” She couldn’t continue.

  “There were things that had nothing to do with you,” Emerson said softly.

  She knew what things; Emerson had told her so many times. Pressure from his family. Falling in love. It could have been anyone.

  It just happened to have been her.

  “You want me to come over?” Emerson said.

  She took a slow breath. “No, I think I’ll be all right.”

  There was a pause. Maybe he’d been having diving dreams too, reliving the memory of what Sarah could only imagine. Watching Rashid fall, again and again.

  He’d been powerless to save him, just as he’d been powerless to save Thomas.

  “Unless,” she said, “you want to come over.”

  He asked if she wouldn’t mind. Just for a little while.

  * * * * *

  He stayed over that night. When the memories weighed too heavily and the sofa grew too lonely, he crawled into Sarah’s bed. She offered sympathetic embraces and that was all, but he hadn’t expected more. Having someone to hold on to was enough.

  “Were you writing?”

  “A little. It’s easier here. He’s not standing over my typewriter, looking disappointed in me.”

  After a long silence, she said, “You couldn’t have saved him.”

  “You don’t know that.” Then, softer, in as non-judgmental a tone as he could muster, he added, “You weren’t there.”

  She didn’t take offense or try to kiss their grief away. She simply held him tighter. “But I know you. If it were humanly possible, you would have done it.”

  * * * * *

  Emerson left his typewriter at Sarah’s apartment. It was easier than lugging it back and forth, since he did most of his writing there anyway. He wrote while she was at work, as his schedule
permitted, and during the two evenings a week she attended the computer classes her company had paid for her to take.

  She’d encouraged him to join her, but he was saving his money for nursing school and chose, for the foreseeable future, to remain faithful to his old Super Sterling.

  With it he spat out enough Dirk to satisfy his editors and his increasingly active sexual desires, made worse because Sarah wanted to wait a little longer before sleeping with him.

  She wanted to take it slower this time. They made dates for dinner and shared chaste goodnight kisses. He found nice mushy notes and a chocolate donut next to his typewriter when he came to her apartment to work.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she wrote, fueling him for what Dirk needed to do.

  But lately he’d been pulled to write other things too. He dusted off the lousy start to the lousy short story about his dead brother, thinking he could finally tell it right. Because of Rashid, he saw a new context for it, one stupidly ironic death linked to another.

  Accidents caused by the side effects of human passions.

  But there was a catch. This latest irony was too new, too raw. He couldn’t tell that part of the story yet. He’d have to wait. Fortunately, he knew how to wait.

  Thank you for reading!

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