Willow

by Julia Hoban

  And it would be kind of rude to ignore him. . . .

  Willow doesn’t stop to analyze the situation further, but grabs her keys and heads out the door.

  She pauses in front of the building and stares at him, a thousand questions forming in her mind. She wants to know why he’s there, she wants to know what he thought about her calling him, but somehow, the only thing that she manages to say as she stands there shivering in her shirtsleeves is:

  “How did you know where I lived?”

  “There’s this thing called the phone book,” Guy says as he crosses the street. “And your brother put his address on the website for his class.”

  “Oh. Right.” Willow nods as she rubs her arms.

  “What are you doing barefoot?” Guy says as he looks her over.

  Willow glances down at her feet on the pavement. She hadn’t even realized that she wasn’t wearing shoes.

  “I . . . I just ran out of the house when I saw you. I didn’t stop . . .” Willow trails off. She wonders why they’re discussing such trivial things. Is it because he’s also reluctant to bring up the phone call?

  “Well, don’t you think you should put some shoes on?”

  “Yeah, well, I guess so.” Willow shifts back and forth uncomfortably. “Come on, let’s go inside,” she says after a second, and leads him back into the building.

  Guy is staring at her intently as she unlocks the door to the apartment. His scrutiny makes her very nervous. He must be thinking about the phone call, about what the phone call meant, but he’s not saying anything, he appears to be—

  “Your arms,” Guy interrupts her thoughts.

  “Yes?” Willow stops at the entrance to the living room and turns to face him. “What about them?” She looks down at her arms and tries to see them as he might. There are plenty of marks, but so what? Guy’s seen her cuts before, surely he’s the one person in the world that she can wear a T-shirt in front of.

  “There’s nothing new,” he says after a moment. He gestures at the thin red lines that score her flesh. “Those aren’t recent.”

  Willow knows exactly what he’s getting at, but she has no intention of answering his unspoken question. “In here,” she says as she walks over to the couch and collapses against it. After a moment, Guy sits down too.

  “Well, where did you do it then?” Clearly now that he’s brought the subject up, he has no intention of letting it drop.

  “On my stomach,” she says, having decided that in the long run, it would just be easier to tell him.

  “But that’s . . . I thought . . . I mean, you said that you only did it on your arms!” Guy objects.

  Willow stares at him, confused by his protests. Is he saying that it would be betterif she had cut her arms? Is it that he doesn’t believe that she cut her stomach? Does he—God forbid—think she made the whole thing up? That she was pretending when she called him in order to get his attention or something? Willow is horrified at the thought.

  “I said that I mostly do it on my arms.” Her voice is rough. “Here, you don’t believe me, you want to see?”

  She pulls her T-shirt up over her bra, unzips her jeans, and pulls them down to just above her underwear. “Here!” she says angrily, practically shouting. “Take a look if you don’t believe me!”

  Willow is surprised by her own actions. She can’t help thinking how different the scene would be if she were taking off her clothes for the normal reasons. If that were the case, her concerns would be about whether her underwear looked good enough, whether she looked good enough, not whether her scars looked recent enough for him to believe her.

  Guy, however, is determinedly not looking at her stomach. His face averted, he stares at the faded Persian carpet, the bookshelves, anywhere but at her naked skin.

  “Go on!” she admonishes him once again.

  Guy turns his head slowly, careful to keep his eyes on her face. “I never said that I didn’t believe you, I just was wondering . . .” He trails off miserably.

  Willow looks steadily back at him. She doesn’t think that she’s ever seen anyone look as unhappy, as uncomfortable, as he does at that moment.

  Finally, his eyes drop down and he looks at her stomach, really looks at it, takes in each and every cut.

  Willow leans back and watches him through half-closed eyes. He appears transfixed. She knows that there is something perverse about this scene. The reason that he’s staring at her, completely speechless, is not because he’s captivated by her beauty, but because of the horror of what he sees.

  Guy slowly reaches out a hand and places it on her abdomen. His hand is large and it covers every slash that she’s made. Placed like that, with her scars concealed, it’s easy to pretend that there is nothing out of the ordinary about the skin that he’s touching. It’s easy to pretend that his hand isn’t there to hide her cuts but for another reason entirely.

  But Willow can’t pretend. It’s true that Guy’s hand, as it rests on her stomach, is affecting her in ways that are completely new. But those wondrous sensations are mixed with the pain that he is causing as he irritates the freshly broken skin.

  And as for Guy, he does not look as if he is enjoying or even grasping the romantic possibilities of their circumstances. If anything he looks more than slightly sick. His face is white as a sheet.

  He whips his hand away suddenly and claps it over his mouth.

  “Do you want me to hold your head?” Willow asks, a distinct edge to her voice. She remembers the time in the stacks when Guy offered to hold her hair back, how struck she had been by his incredible kindness, how struck she is by it now. She wishes that she could be as considerate in return, but she is too traumatized by recent events to behave with such grace.

  “No, no.” Guy shakes his head. “I . . . No.”

  “Good.” Willow yanks down her shirt and zips up her pants.

  Guy doesn’t speak for a moment. He’s sitting the same way that she is, slumped against the couch, his expression dazed.

  “What . . . Could you tell me whatmade you do it?” he says haltingly.

  “I had an argument with my brother,” Willow responds. She doesn’t quite know how else to describe what happened.

  “What . . . About what? The fight. I mean . . . what was it about?” Guy asks. His normal facility with speech seems to have deserted him. Willow realizes that she’s never heard him sound so inarticulate before.

  “About whose turn it was to do the dishes,” Willow says. She’s much too tired to go into it all.

  “Fine,” Guy says. “That’s just fine.” He struggles to an upright position. “Don’t worry about being honest with me, I couldn’t care less. I mean, I just came over here this morning for fun, right? This stuff doesn’t matter to me. It’s no big deal. Don’t knock yourself out trying to give me a straight answer or anything.”

  Willow nods. His anger doesn’t faze her; she certainly didn’t expect him to buy what she was saying.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he says after a second. “I shouldn’t have gotten so angry—”

  “No,” Willow interrupts him. “You should be angry. I’m not being very nice to you, and you’re being . . . ”

  Kinder than I ever had a right to expect from anyone ever.

  She’s more moved than she can say by the fact that he showed up at her door. Ambivalence has turned into gratitude. She wants to ask him why he’s there, but is a little afraid to hear the answer. Would he tell her that it’s because she frightened him? Willow knows that she has forfeited the right to be called normal, but still, she hates to think that he might consider her . . . crazyor something.

  Is he there because he promised he wouldn’t tell her brother, and that makes him feel responsible?

  Is he there because he caresabout her?

  Willow sighs deeply. She feels unable to talk to him about any of this. She feels unable to tell him what his actions mean to her, and she realizes, given all that, that the least she can do is tell him the truth about t
he night before.

  “The fight was about the fact that David hates me now.” Willow says this simply, without drama. “He hates me because I killed our parents.”

  Willow waits to hear the inevitable. To hear Guy say, like everyone else does, that it was just an accident, that she didn’t set out to kill their parents. That her brother loves her more than ever now that she’s an orphan. She’s heard the empty words countless times before.

  But Guy is silent. He just looks at her.

  “I can’t imagine how hard it must be for you,” he says finally. He looks stricken. “For both of you, actually,” he adds after a moment.

  “You’re right, you can’t,” Willow says in a small voice. She should have known that he wouldn’t fob her off with some pabulum answer, that he wouldn’t try to talk her out of her feelings, or tell her that she was imagining things. “But . . . thank you for, well, at least for not telling me that it’s all in my head.”

  “Well, you’re welcome, I guess.” Guy pauses for a second. “Look, maybe I shouldn’t say this after what you just said. I know I can’t really get what you’re going through, and I believe that youbelieve that your brother hates you. I mean, I totally don’t think that it’s all in your head. I’m sure that things are really . . . well, hard between the two of you.” He shifts around on the couch and turns to look her in the face. “But are you sure that maybe you’re not, well, maybe, I don’t know, misinterpreting things somehow? I’m just thinking about the David Randall that I took a class with last year. There’s no way he would hate his sister. I mean, who would, right? But him especially, I just don’t see it.”

  “I think I know him better than you do,” Willow says stiffly.

  “I’m not trying to tell you what you feel or don’t feel. I guess I just wished that I could make you feel better,and maybe looking at things in a different way . . . ” He doesn’t finish the sentence.

  “It’s not that simple,” Willow says. Now she is the one having a hard time looking at him. It’s painful for her to see just how miserable he looks, because she knows that she’s responsible. “Look, don’t go thinking that talking to you doesn’t make me feel . . .” She fumbles for the words. “Well, you don’t talk to me like anyone else does,” she finishes lamely, but that isn’t what she really wanted to say, not by a long shot.

  “Yeah well, you don’t talk to me the way that anyone else does either,” Guy says.

  “I don’t?” Willow is surprised.

  “Oh sure, discussions about Tristes Tropiques,sandwiched in between talking about where on your body you cut yourself, because you think that you’re a murderer. Totally standard, every other girl I know is justthe same. What is it with you people? I mean really, if I have to sit through one more conversation like that, pretending not to be bored . . .” He shakes his head.

  Willow cannot believe, she really cannot believe that she’s laughing, Guy is too, and for a moment they are both literally convulsed with laughter. “That isn’t why I cut myself,” she says after she calms down.

  “Then why don’t you just—” Guy begins, but Willow interrupts him.

  “Look, what I was trying to say a minute ago is that, well, you’re the only person who listens to me, who doesn’t have to pretend that everything is okay.” She stops, not sure if she should go on, but really, it’s the least that she can do for him, considering how much he’s done for her.

  “You know, I realized something after my parents died.” Willow’s voice is a little shaky. “I realized that what people say, the way they react, tells you more about themthan it does anything else. People may think that they’re offering you condolences or whatever you want to call it, but really, they’re letting you see what they’reall about.”

  “I’m not getting you, exactly.” Guy frowns.

  “Well, okay, here’s what I mean.” Willow takes a deep breath. “After the funeral, this one old lady came up to me to tell me how sorry she was. I barely knew her, but my parents did a little bit. Anyway, she said that she was sorry, and then she said at least they didn’t die alone.” Willow closes her eyes as the sights and sounds of that day come rushing back to her. It’s not easy, but she collects herself after a moment and goes on.

  “Now, that’s a bizarre thing to say when you think about it. I mean, my parents were dead,they’d died in a car crash, that’s a horrible way to go, and she was saying that at least they didn’t die alone, she was saying that it was good that they died together.” Willow stops talking for a second and looks at Guy. She can see how intently he’s listening.

  “When I say she was old,” Willow continues, “I mean she was old,mid-eighties, I’m guessing, and I knew, everyone knew, that her husband had died thirty years before, and that her only son had died in Vietnam right before that. And I realized that all she had in front of her was the knowledge that she was going to die alone. She wasn’t being insensitive—for her, my parents really did have it easy.

  “And here’s another example, the other day I told Laurie about my brother, how he has to do all these parent things, and you know what she said? That he was being sweet.She wasn’t being insensitive either. It’s just that she doesn’t get it.” Willow pauses and shifts her gaze away from Guy. “But with you, well, the things you say . . . You doget it, and that does make me feel . . . better.” Willow can feel herself starting to blush.

  “You blush a lot,” Guy says after a moment.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Well, don’t help it. I mean, blushing. I think that’ssweet.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’m really happy if anything I do makes you feel any better.”

  “Oh.” Now Willow is really red, but she doesn’t turn her head away from him, she just lets him look at her, flushed face and all.

  “We’re going to be so late for school,” Guy says. “We definitely missed first period.”

  “I’m not going to school today,” Willow tells him. “I just can’t, not after last night, and anyway, I’m so behind in my work that I should really just stay home and try to catch up.”

  “Maybe I won’t go either.” Guy stretches out his legs and crosses his hands behind his head. “It might be nice to take the day off.”

  “You don’t have to do that because of me,” Willow says hastily. “I mean, you don’t have to worry that I’m going to do something. . . .”

  “Maybe I’m doing it because I feel like it,” he says. “But now that I am, is there anything you want to do? I mean before you get started on all this homework?”

  Willow thinks of all the things that she would like to do: go to sleep for about three days straight, get her work done—finally. Maybe even do something for Cathy and David, like clean up the house or go shopping, but all those things pale in comparison to the one overriding need she has right now.

  “You know what I’d really love to do, more than anything?” Willow leans forward. “I’d love to have breakfast. I’m completely starving.”

  “That sounds really good,” Guy says. “I’m starving too. Let’s get out of here.” He stands up and pulls her to her feet.

  “What are you in the mood for?” Willow asks, grabbing a sweater from the hall closet. “Do you even know anyplace near here that we can get breakfast?” She locks the door and walks down the stairs in front of him.

  “I know the best place,” he assures her. “And it’s only a couple of minutes away.”

  “There’s no place a couple of minutes from here,” Willow objects as they walk along the pavement.

  “Shows what you know,” Guy says as they turn the corner and stop in front of an old-fashioned diner. He pushes the door open with his shoulder. “Two bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches to go,” he gives their order to the guy behind the counter. “We’ll take them to the park, okay? Sit on a bench or something.”

  “This is pretty good,” Willow says as she bites into her sandwich a few minutes later.

  “You’ve never had a bacon, egg, and
cheese before?” Guy is incredulous. “They’re like a classic hangover remedy.”

  “Yeah well, I’ve never been hungover before.”

  “What was all that stuff about Jell-O shots with your best friend?” Guy looks at her suspiciously as they enter the park. “No benches, c’mon, I know a nicer spot anyway.”

  “If you remember, I told you that I threw up when we did Jell-O shots, no hangover,” Willow says as she follows him through the park. “And if you really want to know, that was pretty much the only time I did anything like that.”

  “This is perfect,” Guy says. They sit down at the top of a small hill, underneath a Japanese maple with their backs against the tree. It’s a particularly pretty place, shady, surrounded by flowers and with a view of a small man-made pond. “So, do you still see any of your old friends, anyway? I mean, what happened to this Jell-O shots girl?”

  He shifts around, trying to get comfortable. Willow is sensitive to every move that he makes. He stretches his legs out, jostling hers, and for an instant they are joined at the hip.

  Willow’s first reaction is to move away, give him more room. But after a second, she edges back and lets her leg fall into place against his. He doesn’t appear to notice. Why should he? It’s very tame, especially after what happened on the couch, but Willow is acutely aware of the way her body feels against his.

  “No, I don’t really talk to my old friends anymore,” she says after a while. “Markie, that’s who I did the Jell-O shots with, I haven’t spoken to her in months.” Willow finishes her sandwich and wads up the wrapper.

  “Don’t you kind of miss them?”

  “Well, yes, but . . .” Willow thinks about the phone calls she and Markie used to have. She wonders what Markie would think of Guy, and imagines the kind of conversations the two of them would have about him. Too bad she won’t be talking to her any time soon. “You know why I don’t talk to my old friends anymore?” Willow turns to look at Guy. “I can’t because it just hurts too much. At first I thought it was because they just didn’t get my situation, but then I realized it’s because they remind me too much of the life I used to have. Seeing them with their parents, doing the kinds of things we used to do, whatever, it’s all too hard. Things seem the same, and then at the end of the day, they go back to their same old lives, their same old world that they’ve always known, and I’m stuck on my own, in this new world that I’ve woken up in. I’m just a tourist in theirs.” She starts shredding the wadded-up sandwich wrapper nervously.