by Lauren Marks
This guy had gone through all of the trouble of inviting a stranger out in this incredibly awkward way, cancelling his birthday party, only to stand her up? The possibility of not meeting him was both a relief and a disappointment. I was about to leave when a twitchy figure darted through the crowd, saw me, and froze.
What are you doing here? Jonah stammered. You weren’t down here all this time, were you?
Yep, I said, bristling a little. All the time.
I was here too. He shook his head. But upstairs. I was waiting outside.
It was an especially brisk night for a New York autumn. Slightly more sympathetic to the misunderstanding, I softened my tone a little.
Well, now that we’ve found each other, I said, at least have some sake to warm up.
Jonah sat down and had a quick sip, but sprang back from his chair like an elastic band being snapped. He cupped his left hand over his mouth and held up his index finger, in a just-one-second gesture. Before I could completely register what was happening, he was sprinting toward the back of the restaurant. A few minutes later he came back and apologized.
I’m just nervous, he said sheepishly. Sorry I threw up.
He threw up?! Jesus. Who was this guy? Should I just leave?
But something kept me in my seat. His anxiety was oddly flattering. Jonah told me that he had admired me from afar at school. He had heard me perform some Joni Mitchell songs, had watched me in a scene from Richard III. He had wanted to ask me out for a long time and sounded almost starstruck.
Jonah had made a pretty eccentric entrance to this date, and I think that’s why I paid close attention to everything he said and did that night. Almost immediately, I knew he was harmless. A bit of an oddball, sure, but who wasn’t? He was also a bundle of incongruities. His slim and hairless build was somewhat feminine. But he was more than six feet tall, and his face was full of well-defined angles—his cheeks, chin, and jaw exhibited an unmistakable masculinity. It was easy to find him attractive. At the time, men in New York were donning the “metrosexual” look: tight jeans, plunging V-neck shirts, and oversize plastic glasses. Jonah was wearing a North Face fleece and hiking boots.
He also had an unvarnished way of describing himself. He mused about his old high school car, a conspicuously un-macho, lime-green VW Beetle with a built-in flower vase on the dashboard. He opened up about his family, too. He had a sister, a visual artist who was a little younger than him. His parents had divorced when he was a preteen, but his father had received sole custody of the kids. Jonah said this was awarded because of his mother’s increasing mental instability, though the details of what actually happened seemed a bit obscure. He had been born and raised in Las Vegas, but his father moved the kids to leafy Seattle, splitting his childhood between two of the most dissimilar cities in the country. Though he and his father remained close, he’d severed ties with his mother long ago.
It was like no date I had ever been on. Jonah was showing his deck, giving me way too much information way too early. But, there was a lot I liked about him. He had uncommon stories and an uncommon way of telling them. When he started praising his cat back in Seattle, whom he had named Neutron, I teased him, asking if she had any “neutrinos.”
He laughed hard at my joke. An earnest, smoker’s laugh.
So much of his behavior was endearing. I’d been waiting for the difficult personality type that Laura had prepared me for, so Jonah’s total lack of guile caught me off guard. I could tell immediately that he did not suffer fools lightly—he had already enumerated a few things and people he could no longer make time for, and shockingly this list had come to include his own mother. But every decision he made seemed incredibly considered, never careless, and being in the company of someone who is that discriminating has its own allure. It means that you have succeeded where so many have failed. Under Jonah’s gaze that night, I started to feel resplendent.
By closing time, Jonah and I had huddled close together. I didn’t open up nearly as much as he did, but his sincerity impressed me. Intimidating was hardly the word I would use to describe him. But as we walked out of the bar together, the flirtation from the basement was exposed to some ground-floor realities.
Jonah hesitantly asked if I was interested in going upstairs for a drink and pointed at “his place” across the street. It was a dorm. Not only was he still a student, he lived with other students. I had graduated a year earlier, and I was moving onward and upward. Or that was the plan, at least.
Though I was glad I had indulged my curiosity about Jonah, he had already proved himself both exhilarating and exhausting. So I told him thanks, but no thanks. And I said bluntly that I didn’t think it could ever work out with us.
Oh. His eyes drooped. Umm. Okay.
Then, I pulled a few copies of Playboy I had snatched from our apartment’s newest stockpile out of my bag and dropped them into Jonah’s hands. His eyes were amused, but his expression completely befuddled.
For your birthday, I explained. I’ve got a whole box of them back at home.
He smirked. Can I at least walk you to the subway?
No need, I said, kissing his cheek. I prefer to walk alone.
Back at my apartment, I kept Jonah’s phone number on my desk between my computer monitor and my trash can. I passed it often but didn’t throw it out. More than a month later, Laura told me that Jonah had been moping around school since our date.
You really got under his skin, she said.
It was nice to not be so easily forgotten. More than nice. Jonah and I had established a mutual interest, and though I hadn’t anticipated it would last longer than a night, it managed to linger in both of us. When I finally dialed Jonah’s number, I just invited myself over to his place. There we wasted no time, giving a fervid answer to the question of what could’ve happened a month earlier.
Though I wasn’t able to remember any of this in the hospital, this was how Jonah and I began.
• • •
A couple days after my friends left Scotland, my mother brought Jonah up again.
He keeps calling, honey. Keeps saying he wants to fly out to Scotland. And I don’t know anymore. . . . Do you think it might be good to have him here?
There was a tone in her voice, a softness in her eyes. It appeared she was giving me a cue.
Yes? I asked her.
Well then, my dad said. You can speak to him yourself. He’s on the phone now.
I looked up, surprised, and before I had any time to prepare myself further, my dad put his cell phone against my ear.
Lauren? Jonah’s voice crackled through the line. Is that you, Lauren?
Everything about this situation was mesmerizing to me. I was holding a phone again, and even though it felt clumsy in my doll-like hand, I wasn’t dropping it. And suddenly, I was walking. I was walking away from my room to the far stairway, so I could take in every transmitted syllable. Jonah was saying he missed me, he loved me, he wanted to be with me. He had probably already been briefed that the conversation would go the way it was going; that I wouldn’t be an active part of our dialogue, and I wouldn’t be able to reciprocate most of what he was sharing. But he talked and I listened.
Jonah sounded so sure of himself as he pitched his travel plan to me; he seemed to have considered all of the intricate aspects of his trip to Scotland in advance. I found that impressive. I was still perplexed by the simplest parts of my daily life, having difficulty imagining even five minutes into the future, and this made Jonah’s certainty incredibly comforting. What do you say? Jonah asked. Do you think I can come see you? I mean, would you like that?
Yes. To everything Jonah asked, I said Yes. Yes, he could come. Yes, I would like that. It was nice to say Yes to Jonah, partially because we were in agreement, and partially because I was excited to say the word itself. Yes was one of the few parts of my vocabulary I could use with confidence.
Anticipating a future event was something I no longer had much talent for, but Jonah made
me believe that his visit was something I should look forward to. And that pricked a sense of excitement in me. I walked back to my room and passed the phone back to my mom. She could manage whatever needed to be managed—travel details, calendars, addresses, telling Jonah where we would be staying, and proposing places to stay nearby. My job was done. I had said Yes. Everything else was up to her.
And when my mother hung up with Jonah, she reported back.
Here’s the plan, kiddo. The hospital isn’t going to keep you much longer, so I told Jonah to come after your release. You can spend some time together here in Scotland, and then you’ll travel with me back to Los Angeles so you can recover at home.
There was a lot of information packed in her statement, and it was unclear to me how I should receive it. I absorbed it all piece by piece, like the knock of the rocking chair hitting the plaster wall.
Release. Boom.
Recover. Boom.
Home. Boom.
7
Ever since Alison and Alan Paterson had welcomed my parents into their home, my folks had taken to calling them “The Angels of Edinburgh.” The Patersons had a well lived-in house, which made it easy to relax. The drawers in the kitchen stuck. Plates were left in the sink and board games were scattered around communal spaces. It was the house of a university professor and a schoolteacher, so in nearly every room books and papers were piled on chairs and desks, and even fought for dominance on stretches of the floor. Two of the three children had already left the nest, and lucky for all of us, their empty rooms had accommodated the influx of unexpected houseguests that summer. The Patersons remained good-humored and unreasonably kind during our long occupation. I was in the hospital most of that time, but my mother told me about how one day, she had accidentally dropped a hot iron on the Patersons’ wall-to-wall carpeting, and while my mom had been mortified, Alison had simply laughed it off. She assured my mother there was some spare carpet in a closet somewhere.
All of us came to enjoy the company of the youngest son in the family, the one who was still living at home. He was a cheery eighteen-year-old who shared my brother’s name: Michael. BJ, Laura, and I had met him our first night in Edinburgh—and it had been a memorable meeting because it started with a pretty major case of mistaken identity. Alan had picked us up from the train station, and when we arrived at the house, we were invited to the kitchen for a homemade dinner. This was when I saw another figure in the room. He was hunched over a stool, shoving the remains of a digestive biscuit into his mouth.
It was my brother.
Beyond shocked, I blurted out, How on earth did you get here?!
When the boy looked directly at me, it was clear it wasn’t my brother at all. It was the red hair, the transparent, freckled skin, and the posture that threw me. As he stood up straight to dust off the crumbs from his trousers, I realized Michael Paterson was slimmer and taller than my brother. BJ and Laura remarked on the resemblance, too, but I found the physical similarities so striking that I never really took to calling him Michael, instead using his nickname, “Materson.” You can’t call twins the same name, after all. Our group spent a lot of time with Materson, especially after he had insisted on making us an English specialty: banoffee pie. The gesture was so kind, from a teenage boy no less, that our affection for him increased exponentially.
My parents were equally delighted to meet my brother’s doppelgänger when they arrived in Scotland and soon adopted his nickname, too. I assume his general presence made them feel comfortable, more like they were at home.
• • •
It was late September when I was released from the hospital, and as I was moving back into the Paterson house, my father was leaving it. He needed to go back to LA. My parents’ advertising agency was small—my father was the only writer on staff, and my mother was the CEO—and their clients were getting restless. It was harder to see my dad leave than Laura or BJ, but it was clear that he was more upset about the departure than I was. He apologized to me profusely, explaining and re-explaining the situation, until my mother assured him that she and I were going to be just fine, and he could always trust the women in our household to take care of themselves.
It was a weekday morning in the Paterson kitchen, and Mom and I were alone in the house. I sat with a cup of tea at the table, while Mom washed dishes at the sink.
Then, there was a knock—the sound I had forgotten to be expecting.
When I opened the front door, the sky was grey and everything around me was a little out of focus. The pale man on the step was almost fully obscured by the overgrown lavender bush situated just below the Patersons’ front step. He was dressed all in brown, a brown vest with matching brown pants and jacket, but his grey-blue eyes were sharp. We were frozen there in a stretched and shapeless pause. And then, in slow motion, he started to extend his arms toward me. The tweed of his jacket scratched my exposed neck, snapping me back to attention.
Jonah. This was Jonah. I had seen him only a month ago in New York, but that month might as well have been a lifetime.
Look at you, up and walking around! I didn’t think they’d keep your hair! He smiled and let his eyes tour my body. Good God, Lauren, I’m so glad to see you. Missed you so much. Jonah gave me a hug and then lightly stroked my cheek.
The hairs on my arms jolted up when Jonah initiated this more intimate contact. My alarmed skin bristled in goose bumps. I took a moment or two to relax into the touch, and then I even started to enjoy it. But Jonah was touching me like we were having a long-delayed reunion, and the sensations he brought out in me felt much more like a blind date. Outside of this interaction, the flow of my mind was still mainly Quiet, and though Jonah’s arrival pleased me, the introduction of this person into my new world was something I approached tentatively. Would it change the peace I’d been experiencing? I knew what Jonah had been in the past: the boyfriend. But for the time being he was just a familiar stranger.
Jonah took my hand, and continued to hold it as we went into the house. As he and my mother spoke in the kitchen, I struggled to remember if they had met before. I was getting better at reading faces—sad versus happy, fatigued versus energized—but that was the extent of my emotional intelligence. My mother’s expression during the conversation was much harder for me to tease apart. She had been introduced to Jonah a few times over the years, never forming a strong opinion, but when I was actually in crisis, she had zero patience for someone who didn’t leap into action on my behalf. Being off the grid on a camping trip hadn’t exempted Jonah from that expectation. I don’t know how much of her intense protectiveness Jonah could sense, or if he felt judged by her, because below their pleasantries, the two were probably sizing each other up. But I was oblivious to it at the time. The only thing I remember feeling about this conversation was that people talked a little too much.
Jonah told my mother of his love of traveling. He reminded her that he and I had been to Europe before, on a vacation to Switzerland and Italy two and a half years ago. Maybe this was his sly way of giving his credentials and competence, hinting that he and I might be able to venture off safely together, without a chaperone. My mother was initially hesitant, but eventually admitted that walking around on our own couldn’t be too dangerous.
As I started to pick up my wire-bound journal from the table, Mom explained its significance to Jonah.
When Lauren has trouble saying words, she’ll try to write them down. It usually helps.
Jonah and I went into the city later that day, but I hadn’t expected that the cobblestones and inclines would exhaust me the way they did. The Fringe Festival was now over and the town was much sleepier. With Laura and BJ, I had always been on the move. Now, I had to rest every block, a sitting tour of Edinburgh. But Jonah never complained. When he wasn’t acting in New York, he worked as a children’s tutor and taught English as a second language, a skill set that was quickly put to use with me. As we walked around town, we played a prolonged word game he had employed befor
e. It was a bit more active than Laura’s prompt sheet, and it was as simple as it was effective, especially since I was able to use the journal the whole time. I wrote down words that all began with the same letter. My journal pages mention New Zealand to Neanderthal, and later, Hammurabi, Huntington, and Humphrey Bogart. Jonah’s encouragement made me laugh. I loved how imaginative the game was, and I especially appreciated that he never asked me to recall personal details of my former life, something I was still having a lot of difficulty with. I felt Jonah, more than anyone else, was willing to interact in the present tense with me. We were in this new world, moment to moment, and we were there together.
Back at the Patersons’ home, we collapsed in their living room, me in the armchair and him on the couch until he scooped me up in his arms and placed me on his lap.
You’re going to have to indulge this irresistible urge I have to kiss you, he said, before laying dozens of pecks on the backs of my arms and shoulders.
Watch out, Lauren, I might never stop.
What was Jonah expecting from me next? I pivoted my upper body to face him, and unclear what he might want, I experimented by kissing him squarely on the mouth. The short exchange was gummy and taut. Since I had kept my lips closed, it tasted like nothing, like air inside of a balloon. I pulled back to gauge his response.
Is this okay? I asked.
Of course, Lauren. Of course this is okay. This is good.
And I agreed that it was good, but it was also very, very peculiar. Jonah circled his arms around my waist, resting his cheek against my back. He hugged me and I hugged the journal.
8
After two weeks back at the Patersons’ home, it was approaching October, and we were readying to return to the US. The neurosurgeons had instructed my mother not to let me travel from Edinburgh to Los Angeles on a single flight because they wanted me to spend as little time as possible in the restrictive air pressure of a plane cabin. Taking their advice, my mother booked tickets to California with a three-day layover in New York.
