“So why Journalism?” She asked me as we got back into the car and continued on our way.
“My dad was a journalist, so I guess I figure it’s what he would have taught me to do if he was still around. How about you? Do you always do the fine-art stuff?”
“Not always. I started off photographing the usual stuff like ducks and flowers, but I love how the camera lets me create different worlds and show those worlds to other people.”
“So you’re crazy,” I said with a smirk.
She laughed.
“Maybe a little. Is that okay?”
I shrugged. “You know. Whatever.”
She just smiled at me.
We talked some more about where we were both hoping our photography would take us and sat for a while just watching the mountain rocks and forest pass by our window. Then we arrived.
We paid the entrance fee, got our wristband and went in to the dressing room to get changed.
I was finished before she was.
I laid my towel on the back of a beach chair and stepped down into the water. It was warm and smelled rich with minerals from the hot spring that fed the pool. Then I turned and saw Jo run past me and jump in. I shielded my face from the splash then ducked under the water to swim to her.
When I came up I saw her watching me with her eyes bobbing up just out of the water.
“You have beautiful eyes,” I told her.
She smiled, closed them and ducked underneath the water again.
I waited a few seconds.
I felt a poke in my ribs as she sprang out of the water, onto my back and pulled me under. We wrestled for a while under the water, and chased each other back and forth across the pool. When we were both tired she put her arms around my neck and hung on my back. My arms wrapped around hers.
“What is this from?” She asked, touching the pencil-eraser sized scar on my forearm.
“That’s from my mom’s friend burning a tick out of my arm.”
“Ew, a what?”
“One summer when my mother’s bastard of a jailbird business partner came out to Minnesota with us, we were out fishing when it started raining harder than I had ever seen before or since. I had heard from somewhere that fish bite more when it rains, and I truly have loved the rain since I was little so I stayed out on a dock fishing while everyone who lived at the trailer park sat in the bar watching me through the front window. It rained so hard my ass-cheeks went pruny, and I didn’t catch a thing.”
She laughed and shook her head.
“That night, after I peeled off the layers of soggy clothes and climbed into the shower, I saw something on my arm. It looked like a little seed or something. So, I tried to brush it off, but it was stuck. When I looked at it more closely I saw that it had legs and no head. Its head was stuck in my arm. I went and showed my mom who showed her business partner staying in the hotel room next to us, and he informed me that it was a tick, probably carrying Lyme disease and that we had to burn it out. We tried but killed the thing before it could pull its head out. He then informed me that the only way to make sure he got all of the head out was to cut the wound open, with a razor blade, and explore around with a pair of tweezers. I begged him to shoot me instead, but he wouldn’t have it nor would my mother, so they laid me down on a bed and dug into the bleeding hole in my arm like they were playing the operation game. ‘There’s no more head,’ he told me, ‘but to make sure it doesn’t get infected we need to cauterize the wound, and I’m thinking to my self Cauter WHAT?!?”
“ ‘I’ll light a match head and push it on the wound with my finger. It will go out immediately and I’ll burn myself, but it’s the only way,’ he told me. I must have been too young or too terrified to stop and suggest some simple alcohol. Then there was a puff of smoke, a smell of burning skin and it was over.”
She looked at the scar, touched it carefully, then started laughing.
“What? It really hurt,” I said.
“Oh I’m sure it did. I’m also sure you won’t forget the alcohol next time will you?”
“I just won’t go fishing outside of some old rickety bar when it’s pouring rain,” and we laughed together.
“Do you have any interesting scars?” I asked her.
She let go of my neck and stood in the pool in front of me, lifting her arm.
“I fell out of a tree and landed on a rock, here,” she said showing me a one-inch white line on her ribs.
“I got this one flipping over the bars on my bike,” I said showing her the scar on my elbow.
“Well, a shovel fell off the wall in the garage when Susan and I were playing princess castle and got me here,” she said turning, lifting her long wet hair and showing me the scar between her shoulder blades.
“That looks like it hurt,” I said touching it. Then I leaned down and kissed it gently.
She turned and kissed me back.
I wanted to spend the rest of the week in the pool watching her beautiful body swimming around in the warm, spring water, but it was a three-hour drive home, and it was getting close to dinner, so we decided to head back. Before we left, I had one of the life guards use my little Holga to take a picture of Jo and I laughing in the swimming pool together.
Six
School was much more bearable now with Jo’s hand to hold in it, and I was enjoying all of the nuances of new love, like sharing lunch and finding notes hidden in peculiar places like my locker and books. I even enjoyed talking to Jo about homework.
“What do you think about this?” Jo asked me one afternoon between classes as she handed me a folded photograph of a woman wrapped in white silk, floating underwater.
“I like it. It has a kind of otherworldly quality to it,” I said looking at the photo. “For some reason I almost feel sad for her. Like she’s lonely or waiting for someone. Who’s the photographer?”
“Howard Schatz. I’ve been kind of fixated on him the past few weeks since I found a book of his work at Camera Obscura.”
“That gallery you visited downtown?”
“Yeah, you really should go with me sometime. You’d LOVE it. They have this little closet of a bookstore that is somehow packed with pretty much every photo book ever printed.”
“Nice. Hey, I talked to my mom and she said you should come by sometime for dinner. Are you up for that?”
“Yeah. My parents are pretty ready to meet you too.”
I laughed and shook my head.
“What?” Jo asked.
“So, it’s meet the parents time huh?”
“Is that okay?”
“Yeah, I guess I’m ready if you are. You wanna meet my mom first since I kind of already talked to her about it?”
“Sure. I need to go though. Can we talk more about it after class?”
“Yeah.”
Then she kissed my cheek and was gone.
Jo’s parents had found out about me through her sister Susan, a senior at the school who I had met only a few weeks after Jo and I started dating. This wasn’t a problem since they trusted her to decide who her friends were.
Jo and Susan got along even though they were about as different at two people could be. Jo was artistic and reserved with dark hair and a wardrobe bought at the Corner Closet, a retro second-hand store in Aurora. Susan on the other hand was bright. She was blonde, loved sports and reached for her Dolce & Gabanna sunglasses on sunny afternoons. What the two of them had in common was their strength and kindness. Once in a while I would swear that I had a crush on Susan, but then I would meet up with Jo for a movie or lunch, she would kiss the back of my neck or play with that little length of hair behind my ear and it would dissolve away.
Saturday came, and we had plans to meet my mother for dinner.
We spent the afternoon doing a bunch of touristy stuff around Golden like visiting the bronze buffalo, and walking along Clear Creak while some fishermen cast flies for trout.
Jo’s idea of picture taking was slow and thoughtful so she didn’t often ha
ve her camera with her; mine was glued to my face. I took some shots of us in the brewery, one of us feeding a three-legged dog on main street and a couple of shots of a group of kayakers practicing white-water maneuvers across the street from Golden City Park.
My car at the time was an old VW rabbit with a half-functioning tape deck that had no carpeting at all on the driver’s side floor, just naked, grey metal. This didn’t bother Jo. She just filled the glove box with a small library of cassettes that she had crafted over months that covered just about any mood that I could think of, and that afternoon, as I pushed our little rabbit up the serpentine curves we listened to Aerosmith’s ‘Ain’t That a Bitch’.
Around three we stopped at the Buffalo Bill Cody museum, and I snapped some shots of Jo and I at the stony grave of Wild Bill, including one of me picking her up and spinning her around while her summer skirt twisted around us. I was wearing my favorite pair of silver rimmed aviator-style sunglasses with the big, round lenses.
After the museum we still had about an hour to kill so I took her to my favorite spot where you can look out twenty miles across Denver, all the way to the airport. We parked along the road and I took out a blanket from the back of the car so we could lay it out and just sit and talk for a while.
“Have you ever met your real father?” she asked as I picked up a handful of rocks and rolled them around in my hand.
“Nah, mom said that she’d heard he had moved to the east coast somewhere, but she never felt the need to go find him. She said that she would understand if I ever wanted to contact him myself, but I guess I’m just nervous about how she’d cope with having him in her life again.”
“What do you mean?”
“They met when she was in her early twenties at some concert or something. They fell in love and were together for over a year, but one night they had a fight and she told him that she was pregnant. I guess it freaked him out or something, because he left. A couple of weeks later she found out she really was pregnant, with me. Well, he came back saying that he wanted to do the right thing, but after seeing how he had reacted the first time, she told him she wasn’t actually pregnant and that she had lied. Then he left again; this time he didn’t come back.”
The stone was hard and cold beneath our blanket but we didn’t care. I looked out over Golden to the city skyline in the distance. The birds were out singing their thanks for a warm summer afternoon, and I could smell the pine in the air. Jo laid her legs across my lap and let one shoe fall sideways off of her foot and she pinched its edge between her naked toes. Then I took out my wallet and showed her the small square photograph that I had found in the camera bag some years earlier.
Jo looked at the photo closely.
“You look like him.”
“My mother says the same thing, but I don’t see it,” I said running my hand along the back of her foot. “She tells me bits and pieces about him sometimes like how he could meet you at the grocery store and remember your name six months later, or how he always thanked everyone he met by name, like waiters and bankers. I guess they were out one afternoon, walking back to his house from the park, when some people were carrying a couch down the street, and he just dropped what he was doing and helped them. Little stuff like that. Stuff I’m pretty sure she told me so that I wouldn’t hate him.”
“Do you? Hate him I mean?”
“Nah. Not really. I feel like it takes too much energy to really hate somebody. I don’t suppose it’s really his fault anyways. Maybe, if my mom had told him the truth he would’ve stayed.”
“Do you think you’ll ever try to find him?”
I just though about her questions for a while like I had some many countless times before. “I don’t know. I mean what if he’s a jerk or something?”
She turned the photo over to look at its back then looked at its front again.
“I’ve only ever seen one other photo of him that’s hanging on our living room wall. I’m curious sometimes, but I don’t really want to bring another guy into her life that could just turn out to be a problem. She seems happy right now.”
“She’s really had a rough time hasn’t she?”
“Yeah. She’s raised me the best she knew how, but the guys have always been ass holes. When I was two she married a captain in the coast guard. That lasted about two years. He had a habit of throwing her around, which she put up with for a while since he was the most stability she had known in a long time, but when she came home one afternoon expecting to find him in the back yard playing with me or maybe out at the pool, she found me in the back yard playing by myself and him in bed with another woman. So, she packed a bag for me and we left. They got worse after that.”
I picked up a pinecone and fingered the little spines beneath its wooden leaves.
“When I was twelve, mom needed some help moving out of a little apartment and into the house we’re in now, so she asked around at the local church. They recommended Peter Simons. They started talking, and he told her about all this money he had made in various businesses at various times and how he was fighting to get his kids back from his wife who was abusing them. It broke her heart and she started helping him. Over a few weeks they spent more and more time together. She would lend him her van to move out of his house, and I would get conscripted to help him repaint an apartment that he was renting out or clean out some storage shed full of crap. He made her laugh, and she thought he was dangerous, in an exciting way. She would go to court with him all dressed up like they were going to a dinner party, and at night she would fall asleep digging through old papers and older laws trying to help him find a hook that would help him keep his kids. More than once they went to Las Vegas gambling, eating and talking about all of the things he had done in the military or in business or in life. He was her real life James Bond, and he gave her a cause; these poor, innocent little kids who needed protecting from their own mother who was abusing them and the courts, who for some strange reason just couldn’t see the truth. Well, at the time she owned a small jewelry shop in Littleton that was doing pretty well, until one afternoon when she went to the store and found it empty. She immediately called him for help but there was no answer. Over the previous months she had also lent him her credit card because, according to him, all of his assets were tied up in the divorce. Then one night he left town with his kids and her clothes and jewelry, only stopping long enough to max out her credit card and empty her bank account. She was left with a thirteen-year-old to feed and no money, no credit and nothing to sell in a store that she still had a lease on. She went to the police, but since his name had been on the lease with hers, they considered it a civil matter and wouldn’t pursue any criminal charges. She had been totally screwed, and the police just watched. It took her selling some of my great-grandmother’s jewelry, and some emergency food aid from the government to get us back on our feet. After that she just wasn’t the same.
“When her first husband beat the crap out of her and slept around I know it hurt her, but I think she thought she could handle it–for me, so there would be someone there to help take care of me, like a father. It was different with Peter. I’m pretty sure she loved him. I think that’s what hurt her the most.”
I tossed the pinecone over the edge and watched it fall, maybe 200 feet, before bouncing off some rocks.
“God Alex, I’m sorry. I can see why you’d hesitate before trying to find your dad,” Jo said sitting up next to me and curling her legs beneath her. She had kicked off her other slender red shoe and sat leaning on one arm. She was absolutely beautiful in a white spring dress with red flowers she had bought just to meet my mother. I loved that dress.
“Don’t get me wrong though,” I said. “When it’s just us, things are pretty good. Sometimes I’ll come home late, after being out with friends or whatever, and I’ll see the light on in her room. I’ll knock on the door and if there is no answer I know she is out on her balcony smoking a cigarette. ‘Mom’, I’ll holler in through the cracked door. ‘Yeah h
oney,’ she’ll say sliding open the glass door to the balcony. ‘Come on in. I’m just out here watching the stars,’ she’ll tell me or maybe, ‘I’m just out here thinking.’ Then she’ll put down her cigarette and walk into the bedroom to give me a hug. If it’s cold out, she’ll be wearing a full-length silver fox coat she bought off a customer in her store, and I’ll wrap my arms around her, bury my face in the soft hairs of the fur and remind her that she’s my favorite mom. Then she’ll laugh. ‘Well, that’s a good thing because you’re my favorite son.’ Then I might go out on the balcony with her and tell her what my day has been like or she’ll talk about some interesting piece of jewelry that came into the store and pretty quick the conversation will wonder onto whatever it is she’s reading.
“My mother never bothered to spend the money on a bed frame, but she loves her books. Her mattress just lays on her bedroom floor with stacks of books piling up next to it, sometimes two and three feet high against black and gold fabric that she’s pinned to her walls as decoration. She might be pulling apart Shakespeare or Whitman, reading the newspaper or writing in a journal; usually several at a time. But the one thing that is always open by her bed is the Bible. I’ll sit down and she’ll share with me some interesting nugget she’s found digging through the Hebrew Scriptures. We’ll debate back and forth and more times than not, before either of us know what’s happened, the sun will be rising on another day.”
While we were talking raindrops started tickling our cheeks and arms. Jo looked at her watch. “It’s four-fifteen. Should we get going?”
“We had better,” I told her. We folded up the blanket, got back into the car and wound our way back down the mountain.
I hadn’t talked to anyone about my mother like that before that day, which meant I hadn’t really thought about it. Not about her or my dad or what kind of awful things she must have been fighting through. I mean, how often does a kid stop and actually think about all the stuff their parents go through. You don’t usually stop and look at them like they are real people until you get older, when the weight of some of the decisions they made on your behalf finally starts to crystallize, and the bit that sucks is that then it’s often too late.
If I Lose Her Page 3
