Willow

by Julia Hoban

  “It was the right thing to do,” Willow insists tiredly.

  “At least let me take you to student health services,” Guy says. “It’s completely confidential. . . .”

  “No.”

  “But I can’t leave you like this! You can’t put me in this position!”

  “I haven’t put you in any position,” Willow says coldly.

  She quickens her steps. They’ve almost reached the park now.

  “Yes you have,” Guy says stubbornly. “I can’t just forget about this. What if you—”

  “I told you I’m not going to kill myself.”

  “Is that supposed to make it all right?” Guy sits them both down on a bench. “Slicing yourself up with a razor is cool as long as you don’t die?”

  “I guess what I mean is that you don’t have to concern yourself, you don’t have to—”

  “Right!” Guy cuts her off mid-sentence. “I don’t have to concern myself!

  “I don’t need this,” he continues after a moment. “If I don’t tell your brother, then what? Am I supposed to watch out for you? I can’t do that! I’m taking some classes up here, I was going to start looking for a job. Goddammit! I have other things. Now I’m stuck with you!”

  Willow stiffens at the thought. “No you’re not! I just told you that!”

  “I’m not?” He looks at her angrily. “Okay, let’s get this straight. You don’t want me telling your brother. . . .”

  Willow nods fervently.

  “So, fine, you make me promise that, and then you expect me to just walk away? Are you kidding me? I may have better things to do with my time, but that doesn’t mean I need you on my conscience.”

  Willow has a sudden inspiration. “If I sleep with you,” she says, “will you leave me alone then?”

  Guy is silent for a few seconds, then he looks at her. He seems perfectly calm. Maybe the past hour has been so unsettling that he’s immune to further shocks. He studies her carefully and Willow has the horrible feeling that he’s deciding whether or not she’s good enough for him to accept the offer.

  And what will she do if he does?

  Willow herself feels far from calm. Her heart is hammering as painfully as it did when she raced across the campus after him. She can’t believe what she’s just done. Would she actually be willing to sacrifice . . .

  But after all, would doing that really be any different than the razor?

  “Can I ask you something?” he says finally.

  “Okay.” Willow nods. She’s sure that he’s going to ask her if she’s a virgin, or if she has any—

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  Yes.

  “No. I mean it,” he continues without waiting for an answer. “Are you out of your mind? Besides,” he says as he kicks a stone out of the way. “Who says I feel that way about you?”

  Willow is almost as humiliated as she is relieved. It never occurred to her that he would have to feel a certain way about her in order to sleep with her.

  “Well, I just thought that, you know, you’re a—”

  “Stop talking,” he interrupts her. “Now.”

  They are both silent for a while. He looks away from her and stares straight ahead. Willow isn’t sure what to do next. Maybe she should just get up and go home, but even as she’s considering this, Guy turns back to her with a question.

  “Why do you do it?” he asks. “Can you at least explain that to me? Why you do it?”

  “What makes you think I’d want to talk about that with you? What makes you think I feel that way about you?” Willow says, mimicking his words. She tries to inject as much venom into her voice as possible. She’s smarting with embarrassment and shame, both by her crazy offer and his easy rejection.

  “Right! You’d just be willing to have sex with me!” He shakes his head at the absurdity of the thing. For the first time Willow notices that he’s still holding her hand. And, even though he’s just humiliated her, even though he’s just made her feel like an idiot, she’s reluctant to relinquish the contact.

  “What am I supposed to do with you?” Guy says the words out loud, but it’s clear that he’s not really talking to her. “I was going to have a great semester too. I can’t spend my time . . . Jesus I don’t want this!” he mutters angrily.

  Willow can’t help laughing. Does he think that she does?

  “What’s so funny?” He turns to her. “You think this is funny?”

  Willow shrugs. “Oh sure, both of my parents dying, that was hilarious.”

  Guy looks embarrassed for a moment. “How . . . Do you mind telling me . . . How did it happen exactly? When did it happen?”

  This isn’t the first time that someone has asked. The answer never gets easier, but Willow appreciates the tentative way that Guy has framed the question.

  “It was . . . I was . . . I was driving. And it was about seven months ago.” She states the facts baldly.

  “Did you even have your license yet?” Guy frowns.

  “Huh?” Willow frowns in return. That was not the response she expected. “No. A permit. What does that matter?”

  “Well, it—”

  “Look,” Willow interrupts. “I really don’t want to talk about it, okay? It’s hard for me.” She shakes her head over how ridiculously inadequate that sounds, how mild.

  “Yeah, I get that.” He picks up her wrist and stares at the blood that’s starting to dry. “I get that it’s hard, but that doesn’t mean that this is the way to go.”

  “When you’re where I am, then you can tell me what to do.” Willow jerks her arm away from him. She pulls so hard, the blood starts flowing again.

  “Be careful, will you?” Guy snaps. He starts to rummage around in his backpack. “Here.” He tosses some Band-Aids, a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and a box of sterile cotton into her lap.

  Willow looks at him, a question in her eyes. It’s one thing for herto carry stuff like this around . . .

  “I’m on the crew team,” Guy explains. “We’re out on the river three mornings a week. Anyway, you get a lot of blisters rowing, and the last thing you want is polluted water getting into an open cut.”

  Willow nods. Should she clean herself up in front of him? Prolong this encounter, which has been nothing less than harrowing? The smartest thing to do would be to get up and run. Quit her job at the library, avoid him in the halls, never see him again.

  “Well, go ahead,” he says after a moment, gesturing toward the bandages.

  Somehow the idea of taking care of herself in front of him seems embarrassing, as private, as intimate as cutting would be. Right!Unconsciously she echoes Guy’s words. You’d just be willing to have sex with him!

  With a sigh she unscrews the top of the hydrogen peroxide and pours some onto the sterile cotton. Willow should be a pro at this kind of thing by now, but she’s having a little difficulty. For one thing, she’s right-handed, and this particular slash is too inconveniently placed on that arm for her to be able to reach it easily with her left hand, and for another . . . The events of the afternoon have finally caught up with her. She’s just completely worn out. She dabs ineffectually at the cut for a few moments before dropping the cotton in her lap, closing her eyes, and giving up. She is much too tired to care.

  Willow is leaning back against the bench, thinking about whether she should just go to sleep there, trying hard to forget the last hour, when she feels Guy’s hand on her arm.

  What now?

  She opens her eyes, wondering what he’s up to. Is another confrontation in the offing? Maybe a lecture about her lack of hygiene? But it seems as if Guy has moved beyond arguments. He is completely focused on her arm as he examines the damage she has done to herself. She watches him through half-closed lids as he picks up the cotton and tenderly swabs the cut. His hands are beautiful, large and gentle. Willow can’t remember the last time she was touched this way. He’s actually much more careful than she herself ever is as he disinfects several of the more rece
nt wounds, then deftly bandages her up and pulls down her shirtsleeve.

  They have both been silent throughout. And now, although Willow feels she should thank him, not only for what he’s just done, but also for keeping her secret, she can’t find the words to speak. Guy too looks like he wants to say something, but doesn’t quite know how or what. So they just sit there, regarding each other steadily, the dusk growing and deepening around them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Willow glances at her brother as she eats her cereal. He has a cup of coffee in one hand and a scholarly journal in the other. He seems totally absorbed in what he’s reading, but she can see he’s almost at the end of the article, and she’s dreading what will happen when he finishes.

  She knows that he’s going to bring up yesterday. He’ll ask her all sorts of questions about Guy. He’ll want to know if there’s anything going on between them.

  Willow hasn’t seen her brother since she and Guy showed up at his office yesterday. David had some conference to go to and hadn’t come home until after she was asleep. “Good morning” and “The coffee’s hot” are about the only words they’ve exchanged, but she knows that sooner or later he’s bound to bring up that little scene in his office yesterday.

  Sure enough, David puts the journal down and turns to her with a serious expression on his face.

  “So what’s going on with you and Guy? Are you seeing a lot of him? From what I remember he’s very nice, very responsible too. . . .”

  It’s as if her life has become something out of a nineteenth-century English novel. She’s an orphan. She’s living in the maid’s room in the attic. And now her brother’s an inch away from asking her whether Guy’s intentions are honorable. . . .

  What’s next, the workhouse?

  Willow knows that he’s waiting for an answer. Maybe she should just tell him what he wants to hear. After all, isn’t this just the kind of thing she was searching for at the dinner table the other night, something that would make him happy? Why not go along with it? Spin some tale? She’s done it before. After all, did Guy really say that he wanted to go into anthropology because of David? But this time it’s too hard;the disconnect between why she and Guy were together and why David thinksthey were together is too great. She can’t lie about it, she just can’t, not even for her brother.

  “No. I haven’t been seeing that much of Guy,” she says after a few moments. “He hangs around campus a lot because of those courses that he’s taking, and I’ve run into him once or twice up there. That’s really all there is to it. I mean, don’t get too excited, okay?”

  “I see,” David says slowly.

  That came out more sharply than she intended. The last thing she wanted to do was upset him more than she already has. Her only intention was to stop him from prying. Willow avoids his gaze as she buries her face in her cereal bowl, but she can feel David’s eyes on her before he too turns back to his breakfast.

  Willow feels terrible, but what can she do? Thankfully there’s a distraction at hand as Cathy comes in, dressed for work, carrying Isabelle, who is dressed for day care.

  “We’re off,” she says, kissing David on the cheek.

  “Oh hey, Cath.” David looks up. “Have you seen my old issues of American Anthropology? I can’t find them anywhere. Do you have any idea where I might have put them?”

  “Well sure, didn’t they used to be in your study?”

  There is an uncomfortable silence while they all think about the fact that David doesn’t have a study anymore.

  “Yes, yes they did,” David says after a moment.

  “Well then, we packed them up when we were clearing the bookshelves for Willow. Remember, we shoved all the boxes under her bed?”

  Cathy buries her head in Isabelle’s hair and gives her a kiss. It’s a natural gesture, but Willow wonders if she’s doing it just to avoid looking at her.

  “That’s right, I forgot.” David gets up, his journal tucked under his arm. “I guess I’ll go look for them.”

  Cathy blows him a kiss as she heads for the door. “See you later, Willow,” she calls over her shoulder.

  “See you later,” Willow calls back.

  She can hear David rooting around upstairs, dragging boxes out from under the bed. She has nothing to worry about, not really. Under the bed is fair game.

  But what if David doesn’t confine his searching to that area?

  Willow breaks out in a cold sweat. Maybe she hasn’t hidden anything under the bed, but that doesn’t mean that she hasn’t hidden anything under the mattress. In time-honored fashion, she’s done what countless other girls have done before her, only it isn’t love letters that she’s stuffed in there.

  She imagines the look on David’s face if he finds her stash. There’s not much really. Some old blades, not very clean, along with some rags that she’s used to staunch the blood, but their meaning would be horribly obvious to anyone.

  Of course she should go up there after him, make sure that he doesn’t find anything. But she doesn’t seem to have the energy, the will, to get up from the table. For just a second she thinks about staying downstairs, letting fate decide the thing for her. Maybe it’s better this way. After all, it’s probably just a matter of time. Can she really trust Guy to keep her secret?

  Willow considers life without the razors, thinks about her brother’s reaction to the find. Those thoughts are more than enough to propel her out of her chair. She races up the stairs, two at a time, and pauses at the entrance to her borrowed bedroom, slightly out of breath. She watches her brother as he hauls carton after dirty carton out from under her bed.

  So far things are okay. He’s busy sorting through the various books and scholarly journals, totally absorbed in the boxes. He clearly has no interest in searching under the mattress.

  Willow wanders over to the mirror and watches David in the reflection. She notices that he’s placed the journal that he’d been reading earlier on top of the dresser, and starts idly leafing through it: some tome on the funerary rites of the ancient Greeks. Willow is about to put it down again, when she glimpses a piece of paper folded in between the pages. Her school’s letterhead jumps out at her in bold black writing.

  It can only mean one thing. It must be a summons. Someone must have found out about her. Her fingers tremble as with one eye on the mirror she unfolds the paper and starts to read.

  But it’s not that at all. It’s nothing more than a generic letter addressed to the parents of students in the junior class. Each parent or guardian should make an appointment to come in and discuss PSATs, SAT prep courses that the school offers . . . Blah, blah, blah . . .

  The same junk that Claudia and company were talking about. Nothing important.

  Willow is so relieved that it takes her a second to realize all the implications of the letter. Sure it means nothing to her. She couldn’t care less if David has to sit through some boring meet and greet with the teachers.

  But what about David? This wasn’t part of his game plan. He should be doing this kind of thing for Isabelle, for his daughter.He doesn’t need a dress rehearsal. She’s sure he resents her terribly for this added burden. If he didn’t, wouldn’t he simply have mentioned it? After all, school is the one thing that he seems able to talk to her about. Willow places the letter back in the journal, ashamed that her first thoughts had been for herself.

  “David, I’m sorry.” Willow turns away from the mirror.

  “Sorry?” He frowns as he continues ferreting among the boxes. “What for?”

  “Well, for . . .” Willow trails off. What can she say? Sorry for ruining his life? Sorry that she was driving that night? What can she say to him that would possibly express what she feels?

  Maybe I should just go ahead and ask him if he has a kitten!

  She could say that she’s sorry for the fact that he has to attend a parent-teacher conference fifteen years ahead of schedule. That mightbe something she could apologize for without sounding overly melodramatic, ex
cept clearly it’s something she’s not supposed to know about.

  Talking to her brother has become like walking through a minefield. She has to step carefully to avoid setting foot in one of the traps.

  “Hey, look at this,” David exclaims as he reaches into one of the cartons and pulls out a small blue volume. “I forgot about this,” he murmurs, blowing some dust off the spine. Willow can see that it’s one of their father’s. David puts it down on the floor, and shoves the cartons back under the bed. “So.” He stands up. “You were saying?”

  “Nothing,” Willow says sadly. She grabs her sweater and her backpack from the chair. It’s time to get going or she’ll be late for school. She pauses in the doorway and looks back at David. “I have nothing to say.”

  And that, at least, is the truth.

  Willow knows that to the outside observer she must look like a model student. Her hand races across the page as she takes down every word the teacher says. She’s perfected the art of looking like she’s listening when her mind is a million miles away. Not only that, but she knows when to nod along to show that she’s really interested. . . .

  The fact is she hasn’t heard a thing. Not one thing all day. She might as well be on another planet.

  Willow can’t be bothered with irregular verbs or Greek mythology. Her mind is elsewhere. She keeps bouncing back and forth between relief that David didn’t find her stash, and terror that Guy will out her anyway.

  She hasn’t seen him anywhere. Well, that’s not so surprising since they don’t have any classes together, but still . . . She needs to talk to him. She needs to figure out what the future holds. She still hasn’t fully metabolized the fact that someone else is in on her secret.

  If she had to pick someone to find out about her, she supposes that Guy is better than, say, Claudia, from history class. But that doesn’t stop her stomach from turning over as the realization that he knowsabout her hits her once again.

  Willow looks up as everyone around her stands and gathers their books. The bell must have rung.