I am delighting in the weight of the slabs of ice that formed in the seam of the lake. They are both homage to and mockery of the great mountains that surfaced from glacial shifts so long ago. I pick them up and hurl them back down to shatter into a million shots of light, while Nick captures the destruction, and my ecstatic reaction to this destruction, with his camera, the shutter clicking and clicking while the sounds of the people hush and go flat. There is only the breaking—heave and crack, heave and crack—so loud that neither of us hears the lake open up beneath me, sees my boot slip two inches too close and the water rise up past my ankles, my calves, the thick fabric of my ski pants swelling and drawing me under, heavy as an anchor. We don’t realize what is happening until it has happened, until the panic is in my throat and the camera slips out of Nick’s hands and I feel (not feel exactly, but sense) the icy water filling my clothes, gripping my thighs; and there is no thought but dreams, the way that dreams will take the shape of recent, but not too recent, memories. A child sitting completely still on her parents’ bed, her red hair lit up by the streetlight coming in through the window, staring into the backyard where her father acted out his private despair, my friend frozen in the doorway, the child too young to communicate what she knows or how she knows it, what it feels like inside a dread so private it can only be expressed this way—the body fighting instinctively for what the mind has all but given up. My father, her father, fathers falling. Sometimes, there is a note glowing on a computer screen in a dark room. More often, the message is beyond language, or pre-language.
A girl holds a boy’s hand in an ambulance.
A wife, her husband’s.
A mother, her son’s.
A childless woman wraps her body around a small girl on an unfamiliar bed in a city where such intimacies seem suddenly inevitable. Only here, my friend thinks. Only in this place, this city, with all these hot souls drawn together to thrive or suffer or go under—but we’ll be damned if we’ll go unwitnessed.
I make love loudly, I told Nick once, because you want to hear it and I need to say it. We suffer, but I am happy right now, and I am safe in this moment. I needn’t feel guilty about that. I’ve run away before. Believe me, I will do it again.
Believe me, I will not want to.
I sit in the shower and let the hot water thaw my skin. Nick had dragged me out of the icy water and worn my wet boots to shore. My feet felt small and numb inside his dry boots. A bruise forms on my thigh where I fell. It will remain there for weeks, a caution: Don’t get ahead of yourself. My hero makes soup in the kitchen. The child is returned to her mother, bathed and fed and resolutely silent. My friend climbs the stairs to her apartment and falls into bed while water puddles between my toes and my brother is pumped through with Propofol. Her roommate tries the locked door and realizes he has forgotten his key.
He knocks, but she is already asleep.
My mother holds her son’s hand while he breathes through a tube, sedated. She reaches into her purse for a cigarette and her phone, and then heads toward the door. I hear the soup bubbling in the pan and I watch a spider cling to her web in the corner of the shower. In another moment, my phone will ring. Nick will bring it into the bathroom and hold it out to me.
“Your mother,” he will say. “You want it?”
I watch her picture grinning on the screen, radiant in last summer’s sun. I hear the mice in the wall.
“I’ll call her back,” I say. He nods and kisses my forehead.
“Dinnertime,” he says. “When you’re ready.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am forever in gratitude to my family and friends who have shared their stories in the pages of this book.
For the love and support, always: Susan Nelson, Eric Nelson, Helen Gordon (I love you, Mommom!), Carole Gordon, Adam Gordon, Denise Gordon-Weisman, Jessie McLaughlin (M&N), Hannah Campbell, Angela Palm, Greg Falla, Aryn Hood, Meredith Grinnell, Ellen and Lou Vitola, Debra Hoffman, Nick Adams and the whole Adams family.
Thank you to Andrew Merton and Meredith Hall, who provided the tools and encouragement that have sustained me these many years. To my mentors and guides, Jo Ann Beard, Vijay Seshadri, and Alice Truax. To my steadfast agent, Joanne Wyckoff, editor extraordinaire, Dan Smetanka, and the incredible team at Counterpoint Press. What a gift. To everyone in the Renegade Writers' Group who helped shape these pages.
In loving memory of Irving Gordon, Cynthia Ann Turner, Harry Nelson, and my father, Jonathan Robert Nelson.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 17