by Rachel Kane
Thinking of the chaos of my life the past few months, as I dug myself deeper into work to avoid my problems, I had to laugh at that.
“Did I come out ahead? As far as I can tell, you’re incredibly wealthy, while I’m scrabbling to keep clients happy.”
He shook his head, looking down at the plate. “I don’t want to restate a cliché here, but money doesn’t buy happiness.”
I could feel myself bristling at that. Money could have bought a lot of things in my life: Security for my mom, a respite from my ever-increasing responsibilities at work, a chance to go back to the environmental issues that had once captivated me.
Meanwhile Theo’s family was throwing around the fate of this house like it was nothing, like houses grew on trees.
His tone let me know he was serious, though. He had the money, but he wasn’t happy.
“So tell me what happened,” I said.
“I thought you didn’t want to know. Ancient history, you said.” He got up from the table, and I followed him outside.
“Suddenly I have an interest in ancient history,” I said. “Greeks, Romans, Harrisons, you name it.”
The night was cool, and I was glad I had my sweater on. During the summer, evening was a riot of sounds, with frogs and crickets and whippoorwills. Towards autumn, the nights got quieter, although you could still hear the stridulations of some of the insects.
I chuckled quietly to myself. Stridulations. One of those words you learn in school, that you never end up using again, until it pops into your head decades later.
“First off, you have to understand that I wanted to tell you,” said Theo. “Everything happened so suddenly, and there was no one to talk to, and I honestly thought I was going to go insane. Dad…he made me promise that I would help Val run the company.”
I didn’t have an artist’s eye like Theo, but even I couldn’t help but be moved by his face right now, staring out at the water. The half-moon cast his face into silvery light and mysterious shadow.
It was hard to stay mad at a face like that.
And yet…
“No one at your company had a phone?” I asked. “You didn’t have a way to tell me that you were abandoning me? I mean, it’s fine now, obviously. Time has passed, wounds have healed. But Theo, I was a wreck after that. I nearly flunked my first semester at college, I was so sad.”
He was silent for a few minutes, and I wondered what was going on in his head. Was he imagining me at school, on the thin mattress in my dorm, head in my arms? Not crying, it wasn’t that kind of sadness. It was the quiet kind, where you wait by the phone, and you wait, and you wait, and eventually it sinks in that you are never, ever going to have your old life back.
Or was he thinking of himself? Maybe he didn’t have me in mind at all right now. Maybe that latent selfishness he’d always had, was now in full bloom, and his effect on me didn’t matter at all.
That was the moment I realized that it really mattered to me what he thought. Before this, Theo showing up had just been an odd occurrence in my life, like when an old memory pops into your head out of nowhere…like when you hear crickets and remember the word stridulation. Meaningless outside the moment.
No, something else was going on. Something deeper. Theo’s leaving had affected me so much, that in a way, that one event had marked out the rest of my life for me.
It wasn’t that I was angry at him right now. It was just…here was the secret mystery of my life, and I had to know, was it important to him? Had he thought about it at all?
He stepped closer to the water, away from me.
“I thought about you every second of the day,” he said, as though reading my mind. “Because that’s what stung the worst. That’s the part I truly couldn’t understand. Paris? Yes, I was aggrieved that I couldn’t go to Paris. Join the company? A shock, sure, a total rearrangement of my life. And of course, I was devastated about my dad. But it would have all been bearable, survivable, if I’d had you to talk to. If we could have just come down to the water like we used to do, and lie down and look at the sky, and talk. Micah, it killed me that I couldn’t do that. I know it was wrong not to tell you what was going on, I know that it’s really all my fault.”
My heart pounded, battering against my chest like a moth against the window. I didn’t realize how much this would hurt. Part of me was saying that I should’ve kept quiet, I should’ve ignored the past entirely, kept things superficial, bland, polite. The other part of me wanted to dive headlong into this pain, because this ache was the first true and honest thing I had felt in years.
“But why?” I asked, my words choking in my throat. “Why didn’t you say anything? We could have… We would’ve…”
He gestured back at the house. “I wish I could blame Val. For years, that’s exactly what I did. He told me I couldn’t see you again.”
“Your brother? What power does he have over any of this?”
“I know. It doesn’t make sense, I realize that now. But back then…Val was the only solidity in my family. You know what it was like growing up here, you had to hear about the Harrison legacy as much as I did. There was nothing more important than family, keeping the fortunes flowing, keeping the name honorable, all the… All the bullshit that comes when a family gets rich and wants to pretend it’s all noble and ancient. My mom had nothing to do with any of us for a while after that. She sank into a dark, bitter place. Val was the only one of us still living, and I clung to him like a life raft. For a long time, whatever he said was law, as much as I hated it.”
“He told you never to speak to me again?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t really understand relationships. So it’s not like he was giving me, you know, normal human advice. Sometimes I think my dad’s death didn’t affect him the way it did the rest of us. I can never tell what he’s feeling, really, when something bad happens. But the thing about Val—”
I shook my head. “Forget about Val. You still could have called. You could’ve broken up with me instead of leaving me hanging. I’m sorry, look, it doesn’t matter. I don’t know why I’m pressing so hard on this point. Call it my lawyer-nature. I don’t like mysteries.”
If I had expected him to come up with a concise explanation, it was clear that wasn’t going to happen. Oddly, I found that I wasn’t disappointed by that. I felt something—intangible, indescribable—but it wasn’t disappointment.
My father hadn’t died. He’d never been in the picture at all, aside from a few brief, tense stories from my mom. I didn’t know what it was like to lose a parent.
Maybe it did things to you that I would never understand. Maybe Val’s order to abandon me had made sense, somehow, back then. If the sorrow is deep enough, maybe you just do what you’re told, and wait for the pain to end.
Or maybe I wasn’t worth fighting for.
Some thoughts have weight to them, they’re heavy, you can feel them dragging you.
Look at my life. What had I accomplished? My one big dream had been cast aside. My relationships were all empty disasters. My career, from one perspective, was just background noise turned up loud enough that I didn’t have to think.
I’d go down in history as just another lawyer. Worse, one of those with loose ethics, who doesn’t mind representing someone like Braddock Moore. Never setting the world on fire. Never playing a starring role in anyone’s life, not even my own.
Maybe I hadn’t been worth fighting for, even back then.
And that had made things easier for Theo.
I needed to work. I needed to get away from this house, away from all the memories, back to normal life. Bury myself deep in the next case. Hell, bring on Braddock and his shady problems. The shadier the better. What did it matter, as long as it kept me busy?
As long as I didn’t have to think?
Theo was staring up at the sky now, his eyes reflecting moonlight. In this light, he looked so youthful, so vibrant, like time had stood still for him. I dreaded thinking what I must look like
next to him, with my worry lines and my cheap sweater.
Had I meant anything to him?
Was I so easy to drop, so easy to cast aside?
I had to know the answer to that.
What happened next could have a number of possible explanations.
I’m an attorney. One of my jobs is sorting through motives, through the different versions of the truth, to find the one that shines the best light on my client, always within the confines of the law.
Tonight? Which motivation drove me?
Maybe it was the overall stress of the day, the week, the year. Winning a case had resulted in a moral dilemma, then I had wound up dropping into a situation that brought up every painful memory I’d ever had.
Perhaps it was the insufficiency of Theo’s explanation, the kind of case you’d poke endless holes in while standing in front of the jury. A story that thin, that unsatisfying, called out to be challenged.
Or maybe it was just the moonlight, and the sound of the evening. The breeze off the lake, and the waves gently lapping the pilings of the dock. The way Theo’s jaw cut a shadow over his throat, the way his eyes shone in the darkness.
I kissed him.
I had to know what I’d meant to him.
He was surprised, startled, I hadn’t given him a moment’s warning, but as I pulled him to me, I could feel him softening against me. Our lips met, and he kissed me back, my hand cupping his face, his lips so soft, his arms wrapping around me.
Did it mean anything to him? Had it hurt him the way it hurt me?
My entire being was focused on answering this, kissing him, studying the way he returned the kiss, the yearning I felt inside him, the strength of his arms.
It had started with a question, but I felt an answer flaring up inside me. He meant something to me. I’d tried to ignore it, tried to tuck it away in the past, but I still felt it.
As the kiss broke, and he gasped, stepping back, staring at me, I couldn’t ignore this truth: I still felt it.
He reached up and touched his lips, as though they tingled from what just happened.
I saw it then. I saw it in his eyes, half-shaded in the moonlight. The pain. The history. He felt it too.
I had meant something to him.
It had all been real.
…and I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what to do with this discovery, not at all.
11
Theo
The bridge of Micah’s nose is interesting. It has, not a bump exactly, but a small elevation, just a centimeter or so down from the top, one that you can feel with your fingertips, but it’s hard to see unless you’re studying him.
Or unless you’re studying the painting you made of him years ago. If you’ve got it propped up in bed with you, looking at it closely, studying the youthful energy in the strokes of charcoal, in the finer pencil-lines around the eye, leading to the paint itself, where you’d only managed the shoulders, the throat, and a little of the face.
I wasn’t going to think about tonight.
The way the kiss had broken off, our sudden and abject apologies.
I don’t know what came over me, he said, stepping away.
The irrelevant thought intruding in my head was, don’t step back too far, you’ll fall in the water.
We hadn’t exactly run from one another, but nor were we sticking around to talk about what had happened.
That’s how I ended up going to bed at eight at night, pretending to be tired, when really I just needed to hide.
I don’t think I’ve ever told another living soul about the way that summer ended. Not that it’s a secret, but there’s just no one on earth who would understand what it did to me, being ripped away from my dreams of Micah and Paris.
Here’s how that conversation would have gone, with anyone who didn’t truly grasp it:
But Theo, you were going to leave him anyway. It was going to be either Paris or the company. He was off to school too.
It never would have lasted past the summer. These things never do.
Which was a fair point, except that we hadn’t been given the choice, had we?
We hadn’t been allowed to work it all out for ourselves, to travel in opposite directions and see how far we could get before our rubber-band love snapped us back together.
I set the painting down on the floor. I’d worked so hard on it. The time I had spent studying Micah’s skin, the languid hours tracking his every curve and line, it was love, yes, and a good bit of lust as well, of course, but it was also study. It was effort. A labor of love, combining my two favorite things in life, art and Micah.
Was it all gone? Was it all crushed out of me now?
How did I feel after that kiss?
What was I going to do?
A sensible person would’ve stayed with Micah at the dock. Would have talked things through. The implications of the kiss. The meanings behind it. What had it meant to him? Was it just a random thing? Was it a test of the strength of nostalgia? Was it a rekindled passion?
Without quite articulating the thought, I found myself rummaging through the box I’d brought down from the attic, looking for paper, for pencils. A drawing pad was at the bottom of the box, and the paper was still good, if a little dusty. Here was a tin pencil-box, full of drawing pencils and charcoal sticks and smudge sticks and brittle kneaded erasers.
The 6B pencil, soft and smudgy, felt natural in my hand. I needed its darkness, because the first thing I was drawing was the night sky bordering his face. Micah had stared and stared at me, and I think he thought I was looking away from him during much of our conversation, not realizing that with each glance I was taking more of him in, the half of his face visible in the moonlight.
That’s what I wanted to capture. The fact that only half of him could be seen…the way he was now a mystery to me, strange and in some ways invisible. A smudge here, an erasure there to suggest the sliver of moonlight on his darkened brow.
Those eyes. What had he seen, in the time we’d been away? Where had all the softness gone? His gaze penetrated, it sought answers, not out of curiosity, but out of aggression.
There was something scary about Micah these days, and I’m not sure he even realized that fact. I wouldn’t want to be a witness on the stand when he was asking the questions.
How to capture that? How to suggest that hardness…but also the need I’d seen there? The naked hunger that he had approached me with? It had been so startling.
So welcome.
It had been a long time since someone took me in their arms. No matter where I went in life, no matter how much of my family’s money I spent, or how impressed everyone was with our latest acquisitions, when it came down to it, I couldn’t find the connection I needed.
Sycophants galore, of course. People who saw me as a golden road to a fat bank account? They’d date me. They’d pretend to see deep into my soul, they’d do anything I wanted, and it was all so shallow and manipulative that inevitably I had to break it off.
Micah didn’t care about my money. If anything, the family legacy had always been an impediment to his happiness. Hell, it was a huge obstacle to him right now, with all the stuff going on with my mom.
With no hope of reward—without even a signal that I would reciprocate—he had swept me into the most passionate kiss. He had left me breathless and shaking.
…and afraid of myself.
Yes. That was what this sketch needed. Micah’s ability to leave you afraid of yourself, uncertain of what you might do, to get what you wanted.
It had been so long since I’d thought about what I wanted. You get used to doing what you’re supposed to do, being where you’re supposed to be, and what you desire most is pushed to the back, to the dusty old attic of your heart.
When I looked down at the picture, I was almost frightened. Micah stared back at me, eyes glimmering with a violent attraction that threatened to pull me straight down into the paper.
It wasn’t just memory. It wasn’
t the faded hazy nostalgia of young love.
This was something new, something happening inside me right now, and it involved Micah as he was today, the man he had grown into.
If you set the drawing next to the painting from back then, the difference was amazing. The lazy, sultry boy, next to the hard, hungry man. The same person, but the years had left their mark.
If I wasn’t careful, I might fall for this new man. Not for the memory. Not for the nostalgia. For the here and now.
It couldn’t happen. That, I was sure of. Kiss or not, awakened feelings or not, nothing could happen between us.
Because things hadn’t changed. At the end of all this, I was still going to make decisions for the good of my family. I’d go back to work in my own world, and he’d go back to work in his, and we wouldn’t see each other again.
Doomed from the start, right? It was the same as that final summer, except this time neither of us had any illusions about living our dreams.
We both knew that dreams are useless, discarded once you grow up, and that you try to make your own comfort out of the grim toil of daily life.
At least, I knew that. And I couldn’t let my guard down and think otherwise.
There was pain down that path.
I didn’t want to hurt like that anymore.
* * *
“Darling, I’m so glad you’re here!”
“Come over and kiss me!”
“Oh, gross,” I muttered, watching the disgusting scene play out in front of us.
Nicholas Shaw was a tall, tanned man of leisure, one of those men wholly comfortable in the world. And way too comfortable with my mother, if this gratuitous display was any indication.
The only thing saving me from gagging was seeing the discomfort on both Val and Micah’s faces.
Breakfast had already been strained. Mother told me she’d woken with a headache. (”The stress, I am sure,” she’d said, “but you are not to worry.” “It’s just a headache, why would I worry?” She’d given me an unreadable look, and patted my hand before turning to Val to ask him about the business.)
