Cures for Heartbreak

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Cures for Heartbreak Page 15

by Margo Rabb


  “Prince Caspian—when they return to that house after all those years and trees have grown up in it?”

  I nodded. “I loved that part. It gave me goose bumps.” I remembered how it had thrilled and frightened me, the first time I pictured myself as being such a small blip in time.

  The trail grew steeper, and I started breathing too hard to talk. I didn’t want to go first and have him look at my butt the whole time, but he was hard to keep up with. We stopped for water breaks; he was breathing hard also. Finally, after a long while, the trail leveled off near the top. Then we reached a bare rock incline.

  He scrambled up the rock quickly. “Be careful—it’s a little slippery,” he said.

  I tried to place my hands and feet where he had, but I couldn’t reach as far. I held on to a root for balance but the root snapped, my foot slid, and I skidded down the rock, landing on my hands and rear end.

  “Shit!” My knee was gushing blood, I had a hole in my pants and a huge gash in my leg. My hand was bleeding too.

  Sasha climbed down the rock in half a second. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said weakly.

  “God—I’m sorry, I should’ve been spotting you. Can you move your knee okay? Your ankles? Wrists?”

  I flexed them all for him. I stood up, a little wobbly, but fine. “I think it’s just scrapes,” I said.

  “Sit down—let’s clean you up.”

  We sat below the rock and he took out his first-aid kit. He dabbed antiseptic on to my leg and knee, which stung so badly the word motherfucker leaked out of my mouth in a very unladylike voice. He applied a huge bandage, then cleaned off my hand too. That didn’t hurt so much, him holding my fingertips as he pressed down on the gauze to stop the bleeding.

  “It’s not so bad,” I said, his hand still holding mine.

  “You’re very brave.”

  “Ha.”

  “Do you want to keep going?”

  “Of course,” I said. I didn’t want him to think I was a wimp.

  “You sure? We’re almost to the top.” He let go of my hand. “Then you go first this time—I’ll spot you.”

  It wasn’t as romantic as I might have imagined—he egged me on as I sprawled across the rock, clinging to it like a spider. “Put your hand there, and your foot there—that root’s not stable . . . there . . . good . . .”

  Finally I made it up the rock, and a half hour later we reached the top. The view was fantastic—the huge broad sky, the rolling mountains, and the roads and houses far below, like a toy train model. I was exhausted and exhilarated, sweaty and dirty, relieved and proud.

  We ate our sandwiches and lay back on the rocks. After a while the wind made me shiver.

  “You cold?”

  I had only packed my stylish lightweight black sweater.

  “Here.” He gave me his fleece jacket.

  “Don’t you need it?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Guys had done this for thousands of years—given girls their jackets (or pelts). But it had never before happened to me.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, staring at the view, snuggling into the soft jacket, which smelled like laundry detergent and something dark and sweet, like chocolate. “No Himalayas, though.”

  “Still nice,” he said.

  “What made you decide to go there, to Nepal? I mean, if there was a risk, like you said . . .”

  “I know. Maybe it was stupid. But I was feeling really good, I loved traveling, and I met an Irish couple, Robert and Sue, in a hostel in Amsterdam. They were going and invited me to come. I was reading all these books at the time—that’s what I’d do in the hostels at night, and on the trains, read. I’d read Sartre and all this stuff about how you not only choose what to do but who you are . . . and Heidegger, who says it’s up to you to make the most of your being . . . and Kierkegaard—at least I think it was Kierkegaard—about beliefs being leaps of faith. I guess I decided I should just take that leap of faith.”

  “Wow.”

  He shrugged. “At least that’s how I interpreted what they said. I probably got it all wrong.”

  “But you didn’t. You were right to go after all. Don’t you think?”

  He nodded. “I was.” He stood up. “Can you excuse me for a sec? I have to go pee.”

  I had to also, but I was embarrassed to mention it in front of him, so I went off quietly. It didn’t seem like anything would embarrass him. He was so different from guys at school—he didn’t care about what clothes you wore or what part of the city you lived in (downtown or Upper West Side, cool; Upper East Side or outer boroughs, uncool). Or if you played ultimate Frisbee (cool) or handball (uncool), or listened to ska (cool) or metal (uncool). All of that seemed on another plane of existence from him. All that was meaningless. Beside the point.

  He returned a few minutes later. “It’s nice being here with someone else. I love this spot. I think after college I’ll move out of the city.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe somewhere abroad.”

  I felt sad already—nothing had happened between us—and still I felt he shouldn’t move abroad.

  I watched a bird winging its way through the valley, and hugged my knees under his big jacket. I noticed a dark splotch on the jacket near the zipper. “Oh my God, I’m sorry—I think I got blood on your jacket.” I tried to wipe it off, but the stain didn’t rub out.

  “Don’t worry—it’s fine. It doesn’t matter.” He touched my shoulder, and a quiver ran through me.

  “I guess a fall like that sort of disputes the ‘Everything in nature always works out right’ theory,” he said.

  No, it doesn’t, I wanted to say, not if it made you touch my shoulder right now.

  He surveyed the sky. “We should probably head down—it’s going to get dark soon.”

  We packed up the garbage from our lunches and started to hike down the mountain.

  “So what do the other philosophers say about that theory, that nature always works out right?” I asked on the trail.

  “I don’t know.” He held back a branch so it wouldn’t snap back toward me. “Honestly, it’s hard to keep all their ideas straight. So many of them disagreed with each other, too. I remember Spinoza said matter could think, that all of reality—trees and dirt and rocks and turkey sandwiches—is alive and can know things. Others thought he was crazy.” He hopped onto a rock, avoiding a patch of mud. “Plato believed in an ideal world beyond nature—that ideas exist in their own realm, and we don’t invent them, we discover them.” He paused and leaned against a thick tree. “And he believed that the soul is immortal. Aristotle disagreed—he said the soul is part of the body and dies with it.”

  “I don’t believe that,” I said, jumping off a wobbly rock. “I think there is some strange force, or something unexplained, about death. When my mom died we were all there, and at that moment it really felt like passing, like her body was just a shell and her soul was somewhere else, and I wasn’t scared. And I feel like she waited for us to be there to die, for the three of us to be in the room with her, even though she wasn’t conscious . . . I just feel like there’s something we can’t explain about it. I’ve felt her presence at other times too. But sometimes I just don’t know, I wonder if maybe I’m just making it all up.”

  I told him about the dream of my mother, peeling back the layers and finding her there. Except I left out the part about him being in it, not wanting him to think I was obsessed with him.

  “Wow. Interesting dream. What do you think it means?”

  I climbed over a tree trunk that had fallen across the trail. “I guess . . . I was thinking about it on the ride up. I don’t know. Maybe that . . . love is in layers, or something? Like, you can peel back one and the old loves will still be there. More people you love will accumulate on top, but the old ones stay there, and . . . you can check on them and return to them whenever you want.” I smiled and shrugged. “At least, that’s sort of the feeling I
had when I woke up. This kind of . . . permanent contentment.”

  We reached the rock where I’d slipped before. I slowly edged down it on my butt. He spotted me from below.

  “I don’t think it’s all over when you die either,” he said. “After Nepal I read about Tibetan Buddhism—they see life and death as parts of a whole, and they believe in reincarnation. My mom’s also really into these books by this psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross? She worked with dying patients, and she wrote that before she worked with them she didn’t believe in life after death, but afterward she did, ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt.’”

  “I should read her.” I paused. “Are you—are you afraid of getting sick again?”

  “Sometimes.” His voice was harder, more forceful. He snapped off the stem of a wildflower, and I regretted asking. I worried I’d overstepped a boundary or broken the silent arrangement.

  We heard crackling branches in the distance and stopped. A fawn pranced across the path, followed by its mother. In a second they were out of sight. We started walking again. The sky was orange through the trees.

  “Who’s your favorite among all those philosophers?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. I like the Tibetan Buddhists, and the Taoists. They seem sort of similar in ways . . . they both believe that life is about change and impermanence. You’re supposed to accept things as they come, focus on what’s happening right now, and not let changes upset you, because all things in nature exist in a state of constant flux. Even death isn’t a bad thing—it’s part of the changes.” He hesitated. “I should stop talking about it so much—my mom said it sounds kind of pretentious.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “It doesn’t.” I loved all this; I drank it in. I’d never had a conversation like this with anyone before.

  We’d reached the bottom of the mountain, and the path leveled off and widened.

  “How’s your hand?” he asked.

  “Good. The bleeding stopped.”

  He picked my hand up in his. I couldn’t breathe.

  “Your hand is so cold.” He warmed it between his palms and held it gently. The forest was dazzling. The failing light dappled the ground with splotches of orange and pink. We walked side by side and he kept holding my hand, gently stroking my fingers. My skin felt damp.

  By the time we reached the end of the trail the sky was dark. He got his flashlight out of his backpack and led me to a clearing.

  “Here,” he said. “This is what I wanted to show you.” I looked up. There were millions of stars above us. We stood there, staring at the sky, my hand still in his.

  “I like you very much,” he said after a while.

  No one had ever come out and said that to me before. I didn’t know what to say in return. Me too sounded wrong, as did So do I. Finally I said, “I like you.” I thought we might kiss, though he made no move to lean toward me—but that was fine too. I could stay here, silent, my hand in his always, I thought.

  In romance novels this would change everything. A hand holding on page fifteen and you knew for certain, no matter what, that the couple would end up together, that not even 350 pages of pirates, wars, family deception, or evil twins could keep them apart.

  That’s what I liked about those books. I wanted to believe when I read them that that kind of love was possible and real, that it truly existed.

  And it wasn’t only romance novels, either—I’d read A Room with a View after seeing the movie with Kelsey. We’d copied an E. M. Forster quote onto the back cover of our denim notebook binders: It isn’t possible to love and to part.

  I didn’t want to go, but he turned, still holding my hand, and said, “Are you hungry? Should we stop and get something in town?”

  “Okay.” I didn’t care about food or anything. We walked toward town, still holding hands.

  We found a small restaurant called Billy’s Steaks and Chops, which had red-checkered plastic tablecloths and bright red booths. We sat in one and ordered hamburgers and Sprites. The conversation switched to lighter things—TV shows, the worst subways, his mother’s obsession with their cat.

  On the Metro-North home I leaned on his shoulder and slept. Pretended to sleep. He kept his arm around me, and I was sure I’d never felt so happy. I thought of A Room with a View again, of George and Lucy leaning over the river Arno, and George saying, Something tremendous has happened. And George’s father telling Lucy later: He is already part of you.

  At Grand Central he walked me to the 7 train—it was pulling into the station, and we ran to meet it. He held the door open; we hugged quickly, he kissed me swiftly on the cheek, and I hopped inside the car.

  The doors closed and the train barreled home.

  I sat on the gray seat and replayed the whole day in my mind. On the back of a loose-leaf sheet where I’d written the time we were meeting, I transcribed everything in my head—the “I like you very much,” the hand holding, the philosophy. I wanted to remember it, all of it, to not forget a single moment of the whole day. I was certain I’d never felt so happy before. My body was singing with it.

  My dad and Sylvia were in the kitchen when I walked in. “How was your day? And evening?” my dad asked.

  “Fine.”

  He was cleaning up from dinner, rinsing off plates and loading them into the dishwasher. Sylvia was seated at the kitchen table, drying off a gaudy flowered bowl—an engagement gift, I figured.

  “Gigi called,” my dad said.

  “Yeah?”

  “She said Sasha left his lunch at home today. He forgot it.”

  “Oh.” So I’d lied—so what? I didn’t care—I was flying.

  “You had a nice time hiking?” my dad asked.

  I took my knapsack off my shoulder. “I had a nice time.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us you were going on a trip with him?”

  “It wasn’t a trip—it was just a hike. It’s not a big deal.” I started to walk out of the kitchen.

  “We’d like to talk about it,” he said. “Sylvia and I have been discussing it.”

  I paused. Sylvia got up from the kitchen table and started packing leftovers into Ziploc bags. She didn’t make eye contact with me.

  “You’ve been discussing it?” I asked.

  “We don’t think this is wise,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We don’t think it’s wise to be dating Sasha.” He said this more to the dishwasher than to me.

  “What are you talking about?” This wasn’t dating—dating was stupid girls and boys twittering in TV sitcoms. It couldn’t be more different from what had just happened between Sasha and me. “We’re not dating. And why do you care?” I scratched my bruised leg.

  He noticed the gash on my hand, the hole in my pant leg. “What happened there?”

  “Nothing.”

  Sylvia put her Ziploc bags into the fridge. “He’s quite a few years older than you, and he’s—it’s just not healthy,” she said, not looking at me.

  “What? What’s not healthy?”

  “We want to protect you,” she said. “He’s very sick. Leukemia is not a joke.”

  “I don’t give a shit about that,” I said.

  She winced. “And he’s very reckless—”

  “We don’t want to see your heart broken,” my father said.

  “Well, it already is broken, all right? Permanently. There’s nothing you can do about that.” I was thinking of my mother, and thinking of her made me angrier.

  “You’ve had enough tragedy for your sixteen years,” he continued. “Enough loss for your age.”

  “So what? Who gives a fuck? I can lose whoever I want!” I couldn’t believe I was saying this. What was I saying? What were they saying? And what did any of it have to do with Sasha? I gaped at them, half doubting that this was actually going on.

  “Please. Don’t get upset. We just don’t think you should go on another date with him again. That’s all,” my father said.

  “We? We?” I glared at Sylvia�
��s back as she silently packed vegetables into Tupperware containers. I knew this was all her doing. My father liked Sasha—I knew that.

  “You’re being crazy. You like him. What does it matter what she thinks?” I asked him.

  He banged the dishwasher door closed. “That’s enough.”

  Sylvia continued to pack the vegetables. “We both don’t trust him with you,” she said calmly. “He’s going to take advantage.”

  “What?” I sputtered. “You don’t know what—I mean, Sasha is—and compared to—” I wanted to tell her about Felix, and the difference between Felix and Sasha, but I didn’t want to bring that up. “And Mommy would’ve loved Sasha! I know she would! And this is none of your goddamn business!”

  My father turned sharply and yelled, “Oh it’s very much her business! You listen to her. She’s a member of this family now, of this house. What she says goes!” He pointed an accusing finger at me.

  That got me. Our house. Spooky House. My house. The house she’d invaded and ruined.

  “Fuck you!” I screamed, and the next thing I knew I was at the hall cabinet with Just Sunshine in one hand and Keep on Truckin’ in the other, and I smashed them both on the kitchen floor as hard as I could.

  Silence.

  We stared in shock. I thought I should say Fuck you! again for emphasis, though I felt sorry seeing Sylvia’s bare, hurt face, watching her gather up the shards and pieces, examining them, seeming like she might cry. I couldn’t look at her. I ran upstairs and shut the door to my room. I cried a few tears, which I told myself were over my mother. And it didn’t matter what they’d said about Sasha, I told myself. I’d see him anyway. They had no control. They didn’t run the subway system. I could see him whenever I wanted.

  But as I lay there thinking, a flicker of doubt rose in me: the fear that the romance novels and E. M. Forster were wrong, that in reality it was very possible and in fact likely to love and to part. Not from being forbidden to see him, or his disease, but a million other countless, endless ways—traveling to other countries, meeting other people, going to college, growing older. He could simply change his mind; he could wake up one day and feel differently. And that would be that.

 

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