A waiter leads us to a reserved table on the northern side, where many of the city’s tallest buildings shine in the night sky, a webbed necklace of lights spread out in all directions. A bottle of champagne sits in a sweating ice bucket, and the waiter pours us two flutes and leaves us alone with dessert menus.
“Good call, Mr. Faulkner,” Marisa says. “Very impressive.”
I raise my glass. “Cheers.” We clink and sip, the champagne dry and bubbly, prickling the inside of my nose in a strangely pleasant way.
Marisa sits back and stretches, her arms over her head. It’s both cute and alluring. “So, your sister,” she says, leaning forward and resting her elbows on the table as she gazes at me. “She have a name?”
“Susannah,” I say. “You have any siblings?”
She shakes her head. “Only child. A mixed blessing, although there’s not a lot of blessing in it. My father guilts me into taking care of my mother.”
I frown. “How’s that?”
She picks up her champagne flute, sips, then turns the glass in her hand, considering it. “I mentioned he can be controlling. Everything to him is the next big score. Everything’s transactional.” She puts the glass down. “My mother’s injury doesn’t fit into that paradigm. You can’t bargain with it or bully it or get around it. So he gets others to deal with it. Like me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. While I would give anything to have both of my parents alive again, I can understand that other people’s families are difficult, and I can see that having a sickly mother and a domineering father is hard on Marisa.
Marisa watches me, the nighttime city gleaming behind her. “You didn’t ask about my mother,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
“My mother. You didn’t ask about what happened to her.”
I look back at her. “I’m sorry. You said before she had some health issues, but you didn’t elaborate. And I didn’t want to pry.”
“It’s not prying,” she says. “I want you to know me. I want you to know everything.”
I reach for my glass and hold it up. “Now that I will drink to,” I say.
She smiles and shakes her head. “I’m serious, Ethan. I want us to know each other.” She leans forward, her eyes on mine. Those beautiful gray eyes, shot through with green. “It’s hard for you to talk about your mother, isn’t it?” she says.
I put my glass down. “No,” I say. “I just don’t want to.” I pick up a dessert menu. “Should we each get something different and share—”
“You’re avoiding talking about her,” she says.
I lower my menu and look directly at her. “Yes,” I say. “I am. Because I don’t want to talk about her.” Marisa opens her mouth, eyebrows curved in sympathy and understanding, and I hold up my hand to stop her. “I don’t talk about what happened to her and my father. It’s not about you, or me not trusting you. I don’t talk about it with anyone. So let’s just order dessert, okay? I’m having fun, with you. Can we keep having fun?”
For a moment, Marisa says nothing, her expression blank, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve stepped over a line. But she stepped over a line, too. I have a right to not want to talk about my parents. Suddenly I’m angry, sick to death of being the guy whose parents were killed, the orphaned boy who carries this thing around with him always, whose life seems forever determined by a single act of violence. I don’t want to be that boy anymore. And I don’t know how to not be him.
Then Marisa takes a breath and closes her eyes and nods, once. When she opens her eyes, they are dark and liquid and she seems to look straight into me. “I’m sorry,” Marisa says, her voice low, almost small. “I do this sometimes. I just want in and I push too hard. It’s just, I feel … I feel close to you. In a way I haven’t felt in a long time.” She looks down at the table. When she looks back up, the open look of need and hesitation—no, fear—in her face pains my heart.
I reach my hand across the table, and she takes it and squeezes. “Hey,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Marisa.”
She nods and gives me a tight smile, then relaxes just a bit. We sit there, a thousand feet above the city, gazing at each other and holding hands, until the waiter comes to take our dessert order.
* * *
MARISA EXCUSES HERSELF after we finish a shared slice of cheesecake, and when I’ve paid the bill and finished my cup of decaf, she’s still not returned. I’m considering asking for a second cup—and beginning to wonder if she’s actually ditched me—when she suddenly materializes, looking slightly out of breath. “Hey,” I say, surprised. I stand up. “You okay?”
“Come on,” she says, holding out her hand, and I take it. She practically marches me to the elevator. Impatience radiates from her as we wait for the elevator to arrive. When the doors finally slide open, she pulls me into the elevator, stabs the CLOSE DOORS button, and darts a glance at a couple approaching the elevator. “You’ll need to get the next one,” she says to them, and before I can say anything to the startled couple, Marisa turns and kisses me, her tongue darting into my mouth. I embrace her, as much to hold on as out of passion, as the doors shut.
She pulls away, her breathing ragged, and punches a floor button.
“Marisa,” I say, and then she’s kissing me again, her mouth hot, urgent. My hands fall to her hips, slide down to cup her ass and pull her toward me. She sighs, then grasps my shoulders and lifts herself up and onto me, legs around my waist. I nearly stagger against the wall of the elevator, holding her, then lean back in the corner.
“Ethan,” she breathes, kissing my neck.
“Marisa,” I say, and now I’m half laughing. “What are we—”
“Shh,” she says in my ear, squeezing me with her legs.
I’m so distracted I don’t realize the elevator has stopped until it dings and the doors slide open. Startled, I nearly drop Marisa. The doors open onto an empty hotel hallway. Marisa hops down and pulls me out of the elevator.
“What are we doing?” I say.
She smiles, wickedly. “I like hotels,” she says. “As I recall, so do you.” We pause outside a room, and she holds up a key card.
I look at the key card, then at her. “You checked in? That’s where you went?”
In answer, she slides the key card into the slot by the door handle, then removes the card with a flourish. The door to the room cracks open, swinging inward slowly.
Marisa places her fingertips on my chest and steers me into the room, kicking the door shut behind her. We make our way through the dark room to the bed, shedding clothes along the way. Marisa pushes me so I fall onto the bed on my back, and she crawls on top of me, wearing black silk panties and nothing else. “Touch me,” she says, her voice slightly hoarse, and I oblige.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I love showing television ads in class—the smart ones and the off-the-wall ones and the sentimental ones that pluck at our emotions like a guitarist tuning his Fender. Ads are great examples of the power of language and imagery to manipulate an audience. And we fall for the good ones every time, even when we know exactly what they’re doing. The lonely grandmother, the kind young boy, the lost little girl, the dim but good-hearted father—they are such clichés that we forget they actual work.
The stern but caring teacher, that’s another one. My mother played that role quite effectively. Actually, that’s not fair; it wasn’t a role she played as much as it was honest self-expression. Most kids are great detectors of bullshit and will quickly write off teachers who strike them as fake or insincere. But they loved my mother, at first because she was pretty and witty and spoke with an Irish accent, later because she was compassionate and clever and devoted to her students. Whenever I see an old greeting card ad involving a teacher, it’s usually a mawkish affair involving piano music, sunlight streaming through classroom windows, a simple expression of thanks from a student, and the teacher blinking back a tear. And yet I always think of my mother when I see those ads, because she was tha
t teacher, the kind who cared and could always turn things around, no matter what was wrong.
Except my father, perhaps, but I’ll never know for sure. She wasn’t given enough time on this earth to do that.
One Christmas Eve when I was ten years old, I was helping Mom make sugar cookies to set out for Santa. This was something I had always done with Mom. In Ireland, Mom told us, they had left out a mince pie and a bottle of Guinness, along with a carrot for Rudolph, but in America we should leave out cookies and milk. Susannah always wanted to help, but then she would get bored and wander off, trailing flour and candy sprinkles. That particular Christmas Eve, Dad had come home early from the bank—this was the last Christmas before he was sent to Iraq—and gone out in the cul-de-sac with Susannah, where he was watching her ride her bike while Mom and I made the cookies. I’d been wanting to talk with Mom for a couple of days, but I hadn’t had the chance to do it without Susannah being around, so I decided to strike while the iron was hot.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?” Mom said, dusting a collection of snowman-shaped cookies with green sugar.
“Is Santa real?”
Mom looked up from the cookies. “Why do you ask?” she said.
I shrugged. “Horace says Santa isn’t real and it’s just your parents pretending.”
Mom put the sugar shaker down and wiped her hands on her apron. “Horace McAllister? Why did he say that?”
“Is he right?”
Mom stopped wiping her hands on her apron. “Do you want me to tell you the honest truth?”
I nodded. She took a breath, blew it out.
“Dad and I sneak downstairs on Christmas Eve and put out all the presents from Santa.”
“The stockings, too?”
“Yes, my love.”
I considered this. “So you lied to me. To us.”
Mom didn’t react with shock or dismay, like I’d thought she would. Instead, she looked at me a little sadly, as if disappointed in my response. “Dad and I pretend Santa comes down the chimney and leaves presents for all of us, yes. The same as our parents did with us.” She smiled. “You already knew Santa wasn’t real before Horace said anything, didn’t you?”
This was true, as the previous Christmas I had noticed that the handwritten To Ethan—Love, Santa on my stocking presents looked suspiciously similar to Mom’s own handwriting. But I had shoved my suspicions into a dusty closet in my mind and ignored them, until Horace had opened his big mouth at recess earlier that week, telling everyone that Santa was a lie. I wasn’t sure which was more upsetting: my parents lying to me, or Horace exposing the lie with a smirk on his face, like the rest of us had all been played for suckers.
Mom walked around the island counter and put an arm around my shoulders. “I like to think that Santa is real myself,” she said. “That there’s someone in the world who loves kids so much that he wants to reward them for their good behavior and spreads joy wherever he goes. It’s the spirit of the thing that’s true. And pretending to be Santa and seeing you and your sister on Christmas morning … that makes your father and me very happy. Does that make sense?”
I nodded. “Yeah, okay,” I said. And it did make sense to me. It was the spirit of the thing that was true.
She gave me a gentle squeeze; then a slight frown creased her forehead. “You aren’t going to tell your sister, are you?”
“No!” I said. I was actually a bit horrified at the idea, both because I didn’t want to ruin Santa for my sister and because I didn’t want to deal with whatever infernal plan she would come up with as revenge. “Why would I do that?”
Mom smiled then, a beautiful radiant beaming, and kissed me on the top of my head. “You’re a good son, Ethan,” she said. Then we hugged and went back to decorating sugar cookies.
That moment has a kind of soft, golden light around it in my memory, like a Hallmark ad, if you will, although Hallmark would never make an ad about a kid learning that Santa isn’t real. “You’re a good son, Ethan,” Mom told me. I had instinctively made the right choice, and my mother praised me for it, and so I tried—for a short time, anyway—to live up to that standard, to make the right choice. I have revisited that memory often, turning it over and over in my mind until it was worn smooth as soapstone.
A far more recent set of memories, darker and disturbing, rubs against that single one of my mother, like bits of gravel in a shoe. Memories and thoughts of Marisa.
Dating Marisa was fun and exciting at first. The sex was—is—fantastic, and left me wanting more. That night at the Westin … God. No luggage, no spare clothes—it felt sexy and decadent. The next morning we had to share the hotel’s tiny tube of complimentary toothpaste, which made us laugh. One thing led to another, and we barely made the checkout time. When I finally got home, I was able to brush off Susannah’s questions and just smiled at her.
Beyond all that, though, I’ve also felt something else, a kind of connection that usually causes me to bolt. Marisa is a combination of assertive and vulnerable that draws me in, and she seems to understand me on a level most people don’t, or can’t.
But recently something has shifted between us, as if we have taken a strange turn.
Last week, my AP class was talking about contemporary examples of popular feminist texts, and Sarah Solomon brought up the Disney movie Mulan and was all over it when Marisa, in the back of the classroom, started laughing. “Jesus Christ on a merry-go-round,” she said. “Mulan? Really? She has to pretend to be a guy to get any respect.”
I froze. So did Sarah and most of the other students, although some of them, like Mark Mitchell, looked delighted by the unexpected commentary.
Marisa continued. “I mean, most feminist role models in classic lit are BS anyway, right? Jane Eyre? She ends up married to Rochester, who then recovers his sight. I’m surprised the power of love doesn’t help him grow a new hand, too.” Laughter from the class. Marisa smiled and kept going. “What about Lizzie Bennet? She falls for that condescending git Darcy. Shakespeare’s the worst, though. Ophelia? Total victim. Gertrude? Horny adulterer. Juliet? Kills herself because of a guy she’s known for four days.”
This is probably when I should have tried to steer the class back in the direction of the original lesson, or openly engaged in a conversation with Marisa. Her going off on a related tangent was fine, but this felt more like a hijacking. But I was so startled and flummoxed that I said nothing, and Marisa took the opportunity to continue.
“Now I can hear Mark”—Marisa pointed at Mark—“saying, ‘Hey, but what about Lady Macbeth?’ Okay, what about her? She calls on the spirits of darkness to ‘unsex me here’ so she won’t have any soft feminine moral compunctions.” Mark blushed while his classmates laughed. “Honestly, women get treated terribly in the world, both in real life and in books and movies,” Marisa said. “Women aren’t weak, but God it pisses me off when people treat us like we are.”
“Ms. Devereaux,” I said, finally finding my voice. “I hear you loud and clear. Most stories about women don’t neatly fit into a feminist paradigm. This includes Jane Eyre and the other books you mentioned. So let’s talk about that.” I open one arm wide to encompass the entire class. “What do you all think?”
“Just one more thing, Mr. Faulkner,” Marisa said, and the students swiveled their attention back to her. “You all remember watching Much Ado About Nothing last week? Keanu playing some sort of sad pirate villain?” A few chuckles. “There was a line that Beatrice said—I can’t remember the actress, the woman who played Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter movies …”
“Emma Thompson,” I said.
Marisa nodded. “Yes, thank you. Beatrice has this great line when she’s furious with Claudio for publicly humiliating her cousin. ‘I would eat his heart in the marketplace.’ Now that’s what I’m talking about. If anyone did anything to try and humiliate me, I would eat his heart in the marketplace.” The students applauded, and Marisa smiled and bowed, then gestured to me as if handin
g back control of the class. The rest of the class went really well, the students buzzing about mixed messages and sexism across texts, but I still felt uneasy about the way Marisa had handled it. And Marisa had embarrassed Sarah Solomon by shutting her down.
I brought this up with Marisa after class, and her eyes grew wide and she seemed upset by the idea that she had distressed Sarah. The next day before class, she pulled Sarah aside and apologized to her. But something about the whole episode stuck with me. Marisa has been doing that kind of thing lately, pushing boundaries. Two days ago, when I passed out essay prompts to my AP students, Marisa was sitting in her usual place at her desk at the back of the room. When I placed the last copy of the essay prompt on her desk so she could better follow along with the class, she took the opportunity to brush her hand up my thigh, deliberately, suggestively. I flinched—I nearly jumped, to be honest—then darted a glance around the room to see if anyone else had noticed. The students appeared to all be looking at their own sheets. I stared at Marisa, who was also looking down at the essay prompt on her desk. Then she smiled, slowly, without looking away from the sheet of paper.
The same evening, I went back to school to watch a volleyball match in the gym, and to my surprise Marisa was there. We watched the match for a few minutes, standing close to each other, me wanting to bring up what Marisa had done earlier that day but feeling awkward about it. When Marisa suddenly said she wanted to talk to me, I felt relieved. She led me out of the gym and into the Stone House and down the Humanities hallway. I assumed we were going to our classroom, but she stopped outside the school counselor’s office. “I left something in here that I need to show you,” she said. “Do you have your master key?”
I hesitated, then unlocked the office. We both stepped in, and Marisa closed the door behind us.
Never Turn Back Page 9