Willow

by Julia Hoban

  “Do you need a paper bag or something?” Guy looks alarmed.

  “No, no, I just . . . I never willbe anyone’s daughter again,” Willow continues after a few minutes. “And I was right to be . . . to become a . . . cutter, because maybe you think this doesn’t look so bad, that girls cry, people cry, but you’d be wrong, you’d be so wrong, anything . . . anything at all . . . would feel better than this does. I’m . . . sorry.” She tries to catch her breath. “I’m sorry to be putting you through this. . . .” Willow wipes her eyes once more. Their hands are still clasped, and she feels the backs of his brush across her forehead. “This isn’t what I had in mind when I said to take me here. . . . This isn’t what I was expecting. . . . Or maybe it was. . . . I just . . . I don’t even know.”

  “Willow, you haven’t put me through anything.”

  “I need a Kleenex.” She sniffs.

  Guy disengages his hands from hers, takes the hem of his sweatshirt, and wipes her nose with it.

  “That’s romantic,” she says, embarrassed.

  “Well, it is sort of, because I wouldn’t do it for anybody else in the world.”

  “I . . . I . . . well that’s . . . That’s the . . . the nicest . . . I . . .” Willow hiccups. “Excuse me. I also get the hiccups really badly when I cry.” She takes his sweatshirt and wipes her nose again. “I’m a mess.” She laughs shakily. “But guess what? There’s no one else in the world whose sweatshirt I would want to wipe my nose on.” She hiccups again.

  “Do you want some water for those hiccups?”

  “No.” Willow shakes her head. “No, thank you. But you know what I would like? Could you get me my hot chocolate? I left it near the door.”

  “Okay.” Guy shrugs. He gets up and is back within seconds.

  “Here you go.” He looks dubious as he watches her take a sip of the now stone-cold drink. “Is that really good?”

  “Well.” Willow makes a face. “It depends on what you call good. It kind of tastes like river mud at this point.”

  “Is that something you’ve had a lot of?” Guy asks as he sits back down alongside her.

  “I’m guessing.” Willow puts the cup down on the floor. She leans back against the cushions with a deep sigh. “Thank you,” she says suddenly.

  “For what?”

  “Thank you for bringing me out here. Thank you for not telling my brother about me. Thank you for being such a . . .”

  “You’re crying again.” He shifts so he can take her in his arms.

  “Yeah, I know. Gimme your sweatshirt.”

  “Okay, hang on.” He wipes her tears away. “You going to start hiccupping again?”

  “No.” Willow shakes her head.

  “Do you want to stay here and, I don’t know, maybe take a nap or something? Or do you want to go back to your brother’s house now?” Guy says after a few minutes.

  But Willow wants neither of those things. And she’s shocked by just what it is that she does want. The past half hour has hardly been conducive to passion. And yet, as she sits there with him on the window seat, with his strong arms around her, she knows that if she can survive crying, then there are other things that she can survive too. And that if some things are lost to her forever, there are others that she has not yet begun to experience. She knows too that what she wants is not because passion is the natural antidote to grief, but because it is the most natural, most perfect, most complete expression of what she feels for him.

  “Do you remember when you first . . . when you first found out that I was a cutter?”

  “I’ll never forget it.”

  “But do you remember . . . Well, do you remember how I tried to bribe you?”

  “I’ll never forget that either.”

  “Well.” She swallows. “I . . . well, I hope that now, maybe you would . . . I mean, I want to . . . If we could . . .” She stumbles over the words but looks at him expectantly, hoping that since he is so often able to know her better than she does herself, that he will understand what she is trying to say.

  To her dismay he looks completely baffled.

  “Oh, this isn’t coming out right!” Willow exclaims, wonders if perhaps this isn’t a good idea after all, if it will shock him, following as it does so closely on her breakdown, except she can think of nothing that she has ever wanted more. “Never mind!” she says dispiritedly. “This isn’t how I imagined it would be anyway, not with my nose all runny.”

  “Imagined what?” Guy asks slowly.

  Willow moves closer to him. “What do you think,” she says finally.

  “I . . . Well . . . I’m not sure whatto think.” Guy pulls back from her a little until she is at arm’s length and studies her face. “And I’d really hate to make a mistake right now. Because, well . . . It sounds like you’re saying that you want . . . Well, you want . . .”

  “I’ve never heard yousound so flustered before.” Willow laughs. She wipes the last vestiges of her tears away. She can’t believe that he doesn’t get what she’s saying, and she can’t believe that she can laugh about it either.

  “Willow, are you . . . I mean are you referring to when . . .”

  She decides to make things easy for him. “C’mere.” She pulls him forward again. She has kissed him twice before. Once with disastrous results, once not nearly so catastrophic, but never with all that she feels inside. She hopes and believes that now, finally, she can show him how much she cares for him, but still, she is trembling slightly as she moves to close the gap between them.

  “You’re sure this is okay?” Guy whispers against her mouth.

  “It’s okay,” Willow whispers back as she helps him find the buttons on her shirt. “It really is okay,” she repeats, amazed and thrilled that it should be so. She pulls the tearstained sweatshirt off over his head.

  “But you’re so shy.” Guy’s breath is soft against her throat as he slides her bra off her shoulders. “And you’re so vulnerable. Please tell me that you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.” Willow reaches for the buttons on his jeans. “I’m sure, but . . .”

  “But what? What’s the but? What’s the but? Why . . . Why are you saying butall of a sudden?” Guy stammers a little as he helps her shed the rest of her clothes.

  “But . . . Well, have you ever done this with anyone else?”

  “Never.” He pulls her down so that she is lying on the window seat.

  “Good.” Willow is surprised that shy as she indeed is, she isn’t embarrassed to be naked in front of him. Maybe this is because in every other important way she already has been.

  “Have you?” Guy lies down on his side next to her.

  “No!”

  “Good.” He kisses her hair, her face, her neck.

  “Wait, wait a second.” Willow pushes her hand against his chest. “I have to ask you something else. Do you . . . Do you . . . Umm. Do you have . . . anything?”

  “What?” Guy frowns. “Oh! Umm-hum, I have . . . uh, I have something in my wallet.”

  “Good.”

  “Can I . . . Can I . . .”

  “You can do anything.” She shivers as his hands move over her body, but this time it is wholly unmixed with fear and she cannot believe how wonderful it feels.

  “Wait a sec . . .” Willow sits up suddenly. “You do? Have something, I mean?”

  “Well, aren’t you glad that I do?” Guy sits up too and looks at her.

  “Wait a sec . . .”

  “Again wait a sec?”

  “If I had something in my bag you’d want to know why . . . I mean, how longhave you had somethingin your wallet?”

  “Since I was twelve.”

  “No!” She hits him with the flat of her hand.

  “Of course I haven’t.” He moves in to kiss her again.

  “Well, tell me.”

  “Don’t you want to stop talking now?” he says against her mouth as he pushes her gently back down on the window seat cushions.

  “No.”

  �
��But if you keep talking, then I can’t kiss you, and then we can’t do what follows after that. . . .”

  “But I like to talk to you. Because I can ask you anything, tell you anything,and no matter what I say to you, I know it will be all right.”

  “That wasn’t fair.” Guy sighs against the side of her face.

  “Now I have to answer.” He props himself up on one elbow.

  “I’ve . . . had somethingin my wallet ever since I knew . . . Well, ever since I hopedthat there would be a time when I would need to . . . protect you like this.”

  “And when was that?”

  “If I answer that, thenwill you stop talking?’

  “Yes.” Willow bites her lower lip and runs her hands over his shoulders. “I will, because your answers are so perfect.”

  “Oh.” He looks down at her and smiles. “Then would you believe me if I told you that I put it there after the first time I met you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” He pauses and Willow can tell that he is going to tell her the truth. “I . . .Well . . .” He runs his hands through her hair and watches as it drifts back to her shoulders. “After I saw you in the physics lab.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t get it.”

  “We’d already talked in the stacks, and I knew you were different from any other girl I’d ever met. And then you told me that your parents were dead, and I thought that you were so . . . lost and vulnerable. So when I saw you in the physics lab . . . and I saw you try and take care of someone that you thought was weaker than yourself, I couldn’t believe that someone who had been through what you’d been through could be that . . . well, generous, and thoughtful . . .”

  “But you hardly knew me.”

  “I know. And I don’t want you to think that I rushed right out to a drugstore or anything. I didn’t know that we’d even talk again, or that if we did, if we’d get along, or maybe you were seeing someone else. . . . I just knew that the way you tried to protect someone like that, especially given your situation. . . . I just . . . I thought that you had to be the most special girl I would ever meet. . . .”

  “I’ll stop talking now.” Willow twines her arms about his neck.

  “Isn’t that interesting.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “When you blush, it doesn’t stop at your collarbone.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll tell you something else.”

  “What?”

  “I just figured out why someone would want to make the first mirror.”

  Willow blinks in surprise. That is not what she was expecting to hear.

  “Why?”

  “I think some lover wanted his beloved to see how she appeared to him. He wanted her to be able to see herself the way that he did.”

  Willow has nothing more to say. She watches him as he kisses her cuts and she hopes that her inexpert exploration of his body has the power to affect him the way that he’s affecting her.

  “Ouch.” She winces as he inadvertently pulls her hair.

  “Sorry, I . . .” Guy can’t help crushing her as he leans over and reaches down to the floor. “I . . . um . . . I just um . . . need my wallet and it’s in this pocket. . . .” He searches for the borrowed jeans.

  “Are you nervous?” he asks as he finds the pants and fishes his wallet out of the pocket.

  “Uh-huh.” Willow nods. “What about you?”

  “Very.”

  “Oh. Well, don’t be, because I’m nervous enough for both of us.” Willow wonders if what is about to happen will hurt, and she thinks how ironic it is that she of all people should have this concern.

  It is painful, she flinches involuntarily, but it is Guy who cries out. “I’m sorry! Did I hurt you?! I didn’t mean to, but . . .”

  Willow covers his mouth with her hand. “Only for a second,” she assures him. “Only for a second.” And she realizes that this is true. Pain has somehow transformed into pleasure, and that pleasure is better than any pain could ever be.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Persephone dwells among the shadows in Hades, among them but not of them, she is . . .

  Maybe talk about how her mother as a goddess of the harvest represents fertility, so that when she (Persephone) eats the pomegranate, it’s kind of like an act of solidarity, since pomegranates are a symbol of fertility, even though it means that she’ll have to stay in the underworld. . . .

  Oh, who cares?

  Willow looks at the notes she made in the library a few days earlier and sighs in frustration. They’re absolutely useless. Still, trying to make some sense out of them is better than staring at a blank screen. She can’t even bring herself to turn her computer on. But if she doesn’t get something done soon, she’ll be in trouble. The Bulf inchpaper is due first thing in the morning, and she hasn’t even written a sentence.

  She’d thought that she’d had trouble concentrating on the subject before. But now that it’s two in the morning of what has been, excepting the day of the accident, the most eventful twenty-four hours of her life, it’s proving to be absolutely impossible.

  Willow pushes her notebook away and reaches for her bag. She takes out the note, the innocent piece of paper that her mother had written to the housekeeper, and lays it flat on her desk. She finds it extraordinary that such a little thing has the power to move her so greatly.

  Perhaps she had known all along that something of the kind was waiting for her at home, that to be confronted by such a thing would be to let loose with all that she had been suppressing for so many months. And perhaps even if she hadn’t found the note, there would have been something else, something equally innocuous that would have set her off just the same.

  Willow thinks back to the way she cried earlier in the day, the pain that she allowed herself to finally feel. She is staggered that she was able to process such overwhelming emotions, and wonders if she will be able to do so again.

  Is she ready to part company with her constant companion? Willow opens her desk drawer, takes out one of her many razor blades, and places it beside her mother’s note.

  Well, what’s it going to be, then?

  She looks at the dull metal blade, then shifts her eyes to the faded ink, wondering if the message will once again move her to tears, and if it does, if she will once again be able to withstand the onslaught.

  Oh God I hope so!

  But maybe her earlier tears have no implications beyond their immediate and obvious meaning. She was affected by her mother’s letter to the housekeeper, by the small reminder that once her welfare was paramount in someone else’s world, and for whatever reason, she was able to process that feeling without the alchemy of cutting.

  Or maybe the reason is obvious after all. Maybe by allowing herself to care about somebody, to lovesomebody, she herself set the entire chain in motion, and maybe it is his love that enabled her to endure the grief that issued forth.

  Willow pushes herself away from the desk and wanders over to the dresser, then looks at herself in the mirror that hangs above it.

  She doesn’t think that she looks any different. Shouldn’t something so profound, so life-changing, mark her as visibly, as decidedly as her razors do?

  Willow pulls up her shirt and examines the scars on her stomach. They are slowly fading, and in the dim light from her desk lamp, their shadowy outline is less vivid to her than the memory of the way that he kissed them.

  Look at that. I guess when I blush it doesn’t stop at my collarbone.

  She drops her shirt and stares at her face again. Her hair is still down, she never bothered to braid it again. She wonders now if she had really been wearing it that way all these months because it was so convenient. Perhaps it had simply been an unconscious attempt to return to an earlier time. She pushes it back and focuses on her eyes. Maybe there is a change, albeit one that is invisible to her. Maybe there is something that would be immediately obvious to anyone else.

  Would Markie notice? If she were to meet her tomorrow, wou
ld she see a difference? Will Laurie be able to tell?

  Willow wonders if her mother would have noticed. And more, if her mother hadn’t noticed, would she herself have told her?

  Willow has no answer to that, but she knows this much is true: The rest of her life will be filled with moments just like this, moments when she will want more than anything to tell her mother something, ask her father a question, and simply not be able to. All the tears that she lets fall will never change that. And neither will the razor.

  She walks back to the desk. She has to get some work done on her wretched paper, but as she sits down she hears a faint silvery sound, and this time she understands immediately just what she is hearing.

  She should be accustomed to the sound of her brother weeping by now, but listening to his tears is even more painful than it was for her to cry herself.

  Willow puts on her bathrobe, moves to the door, and walks out to the landing. She grips the banister, kneels down, and looks through the bars. If she cranes her head she can just see him seated at the kitchen table.

  It is unbearable to watch.

  She has a sudden urge, different from before, to go to him, confront him, comfort him if such a thing is possible. Now that she knows how weeping that way feels, she can’t bear the thought of him there alone. But how can she possibly comfort him, when she knows that she herself is the cause of his tears?

  Without thinking, Willow reaches into her pocket for her razor. She grips it tightly, but she doesn’t cut. She can watch him without cutting. She has proven so to herself, but watching is no longer good enough. Can she go to him, can she face his pain, is she strong enough for that?

  She takes a tentative step down the stairs, but this time she doesn’t hide in the shadows. If David were to look up, there would be no way that he could miss her.

  Willow reaches the bottom. She never takes her eyes off David as she grips the razor tightly. Without any choice on her part, the edge of the blade is already cutting into her skin.

  Is this what she wants? To continue the same way that she has? Is this in fact the answer to her earlier question?

  She sinks down on the stairs, unable to go to him yet unable to look away. She can feel the blood as it starts to spring from her palm. Willow knows that she should put her razor down. She should get up and walk the remaining few feet that separate them. But she is incapable.