by Alana Terry
He answered with a half-smile of his own, and she walked out the room, conscious of his eyes on her. How did normal people walk, those without PTSD? Could he tell if she was infected just by her gait? She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t stressed. Well, no more stressed than usual. And besides, it was finals week. Who wasn’t anxious, at least just a little?
The sun wasn’t setting yet, but the sky was that shade of grayish pink only seen in winter as Kennedy trudged back to her dorm. She would rather have made up the final first thing in the morning. Counseling? Was he serious? Give a quack a white coat, and he thinks he can read souls all of a sudden. Kennedy was a Christian. She didn’t get traumatized. Worried, maybe. Stressed, for sure. But full-scale trauma? That was for POWs and war veterans and all those firemen who saw thousands die the day the Twin Towers fell. Not girls like her. No, Kennedy had the Bible, and she had prayer. Maybe she just hadn’t been trying hard enough. She gripped the prescription slip, braced herself against the biting wind, and hurried to her dorm.
She stomped up the stairs, certain all she needed was a night of solitude. A night without Willow and the ridiculously dramatized shouts and cursing from those silly shooter video games her roommate always played. A night without worrying about homework or lab papers or due dates. A night just to herself, just her books, her fuzzy pink bathrobe, some hot chocolate, and …
“So there you are!”
She recognized Reuben’s voice and took a moment to collect herself before turning around on the staircase.
“I’ve been looking all over for you.” He held up her backpack. “You forgot this.”
She was glad he didn’t ask specifically about the test. She didn’t want to think about it. “I, um, I went to see the doctor about my cough.” She crumpled the paper even more tightly in her fist.
“What did he say?”
They were at Kennedy’s door by now, and Reuben stopped while Kennedy fidgeted with the lock. He followed her in without invitation and plopped down in Willow’s beanbag chair.
“Well?”
Kennedy had already lost the progression of the conversation. “Well, what?”
“What did the doctor say? About the cough?”
She tossed the wad onto her desk. “Wants me to go to counseling. He thinks I have PTSD or something.” She half expected to feel a warm surge of relief when the words were out, but all she could feel was the quivering in her abdomen and the hot sting of embarrassment.
Reuben didn’t smile and didn’t frown. He looked right into Kennedy’s eyes far too long for comfort. “That’s an interesting suggestion,” he finally stated without emotion.
“Interesting?”
He cocked his head to the side. “Well, do you have any objections?”
The question caught her off guard. She had been prepared to defend herself if he said it was a good idea. Instead, she had to rethink her arguments and failed to come up with anything coherent.
“It sounds to me like you’re in need of some serious holiday cheer.” He grabbed her scarf and held it out.
“What are you doing?”
“You and I are going off campus. We need to celebrate the end of the semester, the start of the Christmas season. With this.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out two tickets.
“The Nutcracker?”
“It’s an American holiday tradition. And since this is my first Christmas in America, I decided we should go.”
She wanted to smile. Wanted to laugh. Wanted to give him a hug to thank him for being that thoughtful. But she was so tired.
“Don’t you like ballet?”
She couldn’t bear to disappoint him. She wrapped the scarf around her neck and grabbed her book bag.
“The show doesn’t start until seven.” He grinned. “Which gives us just enough time to stop by Common Treasures and get you a few more books. What do you say?”
She was tired. Far more tired than she wanted to admit. But she wasn’t traumatized. Forgetting what is behind, straining toward what is ahead. Forcing a smile, she followed Reuben out the door and checked the lock behind them. There was a lightness in her step she hadn’t known in months. Maybe a night out was just what she needed.
CHAPTER 5
“What do you think of this one?”
Kennedy looked at the book Reuben held up. She loved the antique smell here, even though she figured the workers at Common Treasures Books were probably at risk for developing lung cancer or some other tragic malady from spending their time in the dust and mildew.
“Catcher in the Rye?” She frowned. “I read that once in tenth grade. Could barely understand it. Baseball and trains, right?”
Reuben chuckled. “Close. Except it was fencing.”
“Oh, really?” Kennedy asked. “I could have sworn it was baseball.”
“Well, there’s the part where …” Something else caught Reuben’s eye, and he snatched another book of the shelf. “I loved this one!”
Kennedy gawked. “Lord of the Flies? Are you serious? That made me want to barf.”
Reuben was already flipping through the pages, thumbing back and forth, letting his eyes skim over the passages. “This was the very first book I read in English literature.”
Kennedy had nothing to say and strolled around the bend to another section. Reuben followed reluctantly. She pointed to the spine of an old hardback copy of Pride and Prejudice. “You know, I never did get what all the hype was over Mr. Darcy. He was just a rich, eccentric introvert, but about half the girls in my high school had major literary crushes on him.”
Reuben raised an eyebrow. “Really? I found the whole thing dry and hard to follow.”
“It’s not hard to follow.” Kennedy was already scanning other titles on the shelf. “Oh, they have Little Women.” She pulled out the book. “You know, I think my grandma gave me an edition with these same illustrations. I wonder what I did with it.”
Reuben opened the front cover and pointed at the price penciled in the top corner. “You should find it. That’s enough to pay for next semester’s textbooks.”
Kennedy gently placed the volume back on the shelf. “You know, this is one of the only two novels I’ve read that’s actually made me mad.”
Reuben checked the time and slipped his phone back into his pocket. “Really? Why’s that?”
“I just always thought Jo should have married Laurie. I was furious when she turned him down.” She watched him button up his coat and asked, “Is it time to go?”
“Pretty soon. Show starts in twenty minutes.”
Kennedy placed the book back on its shelf and bundled up. “Well, next time we come here, we need to find something that we’ve both read and we both like.”
Reuben held the shop door open and nodded at the owner. “We might be here for days if we tried that.”
The wind had picked up, and Kennedy tucked her scarf into her leather jacket to keep it from flapping in her face. She increased her pace. They hadn’t spent very long at the bookshop, but it was the first time in weeks she hadn’t thought about classwork or finals or kidnappers or anything horrible like that. The campus doctor didn’t know what he was talking about. She didn’t need therapy. She just needed a chance to relax.
The Opera House was only two blocks away from Common Treasures, so they walked instead of taking the T. Kennedy asked Reuben how he spent Christmas in Kenya, but the wind was howling so loud she had to stand practically shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip with him to hear his response.
“We’d always go up country to my grandfather’s farm.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t all that different from family gatherings here, I assume. We walked to church on Christmas Eve. Didn’t get home until after midnight. On Christmas Day, my grandfather’s first wife would butcher one of the cows, and then we’d all …”
“You butchered a whole cow?” Kennedy recalled how much of a fuss her mom made over a fifteen-pound turkey.
“Well, I didn’t. Grandmother did.”
&n
bsp; “How did your family go through that much meat?” Kennedy didn’t know if Kenyans “up country” would have freezers or even the electricity to run them. Reuben had talked a lot about growing up in the city, but this was the first time he had mentioned anything outside Nairobi.
Reuben laughed. “You’d be surprised at how fast a hundred people can eat a cow.”
Kennedy leaned forward. “Did you say a hundred?”
“Around there. It changes each year depending on who’s gotten married, who’s had a new baby, and who’s passed away.”
Kennedy thought back to the largest family gathering she could remember. It was probably her grandma’s funeral. The wake was for relatives only, and she guessed there were twenty people there, certainly no more. Before she moved to Yanji, getting together with “family” usually meant her grandma, Aunt Lilian, Uncle Jack, and sometimes Uncle Jack’s two teenagers who spent every other holiday with him. Kennedy had figured it out once when she was younger. They were her step-cousins-in-law, and once Aunt Lilian and Uncle Jack split up, she had to tack an ex to the front of that and make the title longer and more confusing. She hadn’t seen them in over a decade and couldn’t remember the older boy’s name anymore. Still, they were the closest thing Kennedy had to extended family around her own age.
“So where do a hundred people sleep?” she asked, thinking about how uncomfortable Aunt Lilian’s roll-away trundle bed was.
“Wherever we can.”
Kennedy’s mind was reeling, like water molecules zipping around in a steaming pot. “I still can’t imagine having that many cousins. How many aunts and uncles do you have?”
Reuben furrowed his brow. “I’m not sure. I counted once, but I probably forgot a few.”
“Well,” Kennedy tried again, “how many kids did your grandparents have?”
“Twenty-three.”
Kennedy’s eyes grew as wide as the pipette bulbs in her chemistry lab. “Your poor grandma!”
Reuben laughed. “Well, that number was spread out over three wives.”
“Three? That’s a lot of times to be widowed.”
“No, three at the same time. They’re all still alive. It wasn’t all that unheard of back in his day, you know.”
“Really? They still do that there?”
“Not so much anymore, but yeah, in the past it was common.” Reuben’s voice had grown even softer, so Kennedy could hardly hear him over the wind.
“Will it be hard for you not going back this year?” she asked.
He looked away. Quickened his pace. “It wouldn’t be the same even if I went back now.”
A heaviness clouded the air between them like fog in a beaker. She had known Reuben long enough to recognize these brooding moods of his. She forced false enthusiasm into her voice. “Well, it’s like I already told you, if you don’t want to spend Christmas by yourself, I’m sure my pastor and his wife would love to …”
“Thanks, but it’s fine. Really. Here we are.” Reuben was apparently ready to end their conversation as soon as they arrived at the Opera House, and Kennedy didn’t press matters. They passed through the line and joined the other Nutcracker enthusiasts filing in to find their places.
“I thought it would be more crowded in here,” Reuben stated as an usher led them to their seats in the highest balcony.
Kennedy was glad to hear him sounding more like himself. He could never stay very serious for more than a few minutes. She stared down at the hundreds of empty chairs below. “Maybe everyone’s running late. That wind is awful.”
Reuben leaned forward, his eyes wide.
“Do they have shows like this in Kenya?” she asked.
He didn’t seem to hear her question over the sound of the tuning orchestra. “Look down there!” He pointed. “I think I just saw one of the dancers when the usher opened that door.”
Kennedy hadn’t seen anything. “That’s probably the entrance to backstage or something.”
“I wonder if we could go in there.”
Before long, the lights dimmed, and Reuben finally sat in his seat. His right leg bounced like pressurized carbonation in a jar of soda. Kennedy was glad they were this high up or else he might have run right onstage in his enthusiasm. She had never cared all that much for The Nutcracker. She had seen it a few times in Manhattan before her family moved to China, but it had never really enthralled her. Still, she was glad to be here with Reuben, glad to get her mind off everything that had plagued her recently.
When the orchestra began its first strain, Reuben sucked in his breath. She had to smile. As much time as the two of them had spent together over the past semester, she had never considered him the type to love ballet so much.
The first colorful dancers graced the stage, and he was completely lost. Sometimes she caught him keeping beat with one hand as if he were an assistant conductor. During the nutcracker’s fight with the Rat King, Reuben leaned forward in his chair so far she was afraid he might topple right off the balcony. As soon as the curtain closed for intermission, even before the lights came on, he sprang to his feet. “Let’s go!”
“What are you doing?”
He grabbed her hand and plucked up both their coats. “There’s empty seats down there. I want to see everything closer.”
On a normal night, Kennedy would have protested. She would have brought up issues like ticket prices and cranky ushers and would have forced Reuben to see reason. But his enthusiasm was catching. Besides, this was her night to throw worry to the wind and let it blow away into the Charles River, never to bother her again. They raced down the plush staircases to the lower level. A white-haired usher gave them both a quizzical look but didn’t say anything when they scurried down the aisle.
“How close were you planning to go?” Kennedy whispered as Reuben rushed toward the front.
“As close as we can.” He stared for a minute, paused, and squinted at the rows. “Over here,” he finally said. “This area was pretty empty.”
“Are you sure nobody was here?” Kennedy asked as he set his coat down on one of the chairs in the fourth row.
“If someone was, we’ll just say we forgot where we were and move somewhere else. No problem.”
Kennedy wanted to protest, but Reuben wasn’t even looking at her anymore. He was staring straight up at the huge dome ceiling, with all the graceful cherubs and dancers frolicking in the painted clouds.
“I’ve seen some beautiful things back home,” he breathed, “but not like this.”
Kennedy had to admit it was gorgeous. If it hadn’t been for Reuben, would she even have thought to look up?
“So, are you having a good time?” he asked.
Kennedy set her leather coat across the back of her chair. “Yeah.” She took in a deep breath, thankful she hadn’t had a single coughing fit since her exam.
The lights dimmed, the hum of conversation died down, and the sounds of the orchestra softly tuning their instruments billowed out to Reuben and Kennedy’s new seats. Thankfully, nobody pestered them for their chairs, and none of the ushers seemed to notice or care that they had slipped so close to the front even though they only carried cheap student tickets. Reuben’s leg bounced even more quickly when the curtain opened and revealed the ground fog and majestic backdrop of the Land of Sweets. For the entire second act, during the parts where she might have been tempted to lose herself in daydreams, Kennedy just glanced over at Reuben, saw his enraptured expression in the dim lights from the stage, and decided this was a perfect evening out.
Now that she thought about it, this was the first time she and Reuben had been off campus together without their textbooks and lab assignments in tow. She couldn’t even remember a meal in the student union with him that didn’t consist of at least some degree of studying. Had she really been so serious all semester? Layer after layer of exhaustion and anxiety lifted off her shoulders as she sat, mesmerized and enchanted just like Clara beside the prince.
When the curtain closed, Reuben clapped s
o loud it shot vicarious pain to Kennedy’s palms. He didn’t say anything as they got their coats and worked their way back to the aisle. Kennedy was about to follow the crowds out the main doors, but Reuben took her by the elbow.
“Wait a minute. I want to see something.”
She hesitated before he dragged her to the side door he had spotted from the balcony. A short, stocky usher with spectacles scowled a few feet in front of it. He had a clipboard in his hand and was talking to two well-dressed adults. After a minute, he put his hand to his earpiece and then waved the patrons through.
“Back here,” Reuben whispered. “Just act like you know what you’re doing.” Bypassing a few others who had formed a short line, he slipped in behind the two going through, and Kennedy followed, expecting any minute to hear the angry protests of the old man.
The door shut behind them.
“We made it.” He tightened his hold on her arm.
Kennedy didn’t know whether to laugh or chide him. “I can’t believe you actually did that.”
He ran, tugging her down a set of stairs to a hallway and down a small side corridor, giggling like a guilty child.
“Come on.” Reuben pulled her arm again. “I want to see if we can meet some of the dancers.”
“I really don’t think we’re supposed to …” Kennedy stopped as a whole flock of little girls scurried past.
“Aren’t those the ones who came out of that woman’s dress?” Reuben waved at the ballerinas, who hardly noticed him. He ran down the next hall, and Kennedy followed behind, feeling lighter and more playful than she had in years. In all her time living in Yanji, had she ever done anything this spontaneous?
Reuben hurried straight ahead, but she thought she heard someone behind them. The near-sighted usher, maybe, ready to put an end to their mischief? She stopped and spun around, her heart gripped with foreboding. Nobody was there. She let out a sigh and turned back toward Reuben.
He was gone.
The hallway was infinitely narrower than she remembered it. Why did they keep the lights so bright down here? She had turned so many times she couldn’t figure out where she was anymore in relation to the rest of the Opera House. Was this beneath the stage? There were no marked exits, no friendly old ladies with flashlights ready to show you the way. Where did Reuben go?