I decided the best way to tell Jo about everything that happened between Kris and I was to put it in a letter and give it to her when I saw her. This way I could see that it all came out clearly and the way I wanted it to. It took me three drafts, but there it was, folded and ready to go.
We got home around 8:30.
I helped mom unpack our luggage. Then I changed my clothes so that I didn’t smell entirely like I had just been in a car for fourteen hours and explained that I was going to see Jo. Mom wished me luck and I left.
9:30 was pushing it a bit to just drop by her parents house, but this was a special occasion and I knew Jo would be at least as excited to see me as I was her, so I bought two-dozen red roses and pulled up to her front door. The lights were on and a car was in the driveway that I didn’t recognize. It didn’t matter.
With roses and letter in hand I walked up to her door. I was nervous. Jo and I obviously knew each other, but ten weeks is ten weeks. Some of the sweat on my palms had to be from my excitement to see her anyway.
I wiped my palms on my jeans and knocked on the door. My heart was rising up in my chest.
Jo answered. It took her a second to register who it was standing in front of her. Then she screeched louder than I had ever heard her screech, and she flung herself into my arms. I spun her around and squeezed her tightly.
“Alex! What are you doing here? I thought you weren’t back for two more weeks.”
“Ha ha, I know right? Mom and I talked about it and thought it would be fun to come back a few weeks early so that we could spend some time together before summer was over.”
“Oh my god Alex, I’ve missed you so much,” she said burying her nose into my neck.
“Ah babe, I’ve missed you too. You smell sooo good. Your shirt ran out of smell about a week after I arrived. I wrapped it around my pillow so that I could smell you when I fell asleep. These are for you,” I said pulling her back so I could get a better look at her, and handing her the flowers and letter. “You look great. And you’re all dressed up.”
As soon as I said that the look on her face changed from excitement to worry, and she put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, god Alex.”
“What?” I asked as I saw she was holding a photograph. I reached out and took it from her hand.
It was a photo of her, and by the looks of how she was dressed it had been taken that night at some formal occasion…with another guy.
“What is this?” I asked looking up at her.
“Jo, what’s going on?” Someone else asked from the house.
I turned and saw the guy in the photo standing in the open doorway of her house.
“Alex, I can explain,” Jo said reaching for my arm.
I pulled away. “Explain what? What’s going on?”
“Jo, is everything okay?” The guy in the doorway asked, stepping out onto the porch.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked taking a step forward, but Jo stopped me.
“Yes, everything’s okay, Paul. Please, go back inside. I’ll be in in a minute.”
I waited for Paul to finish looking me over and go back inside. Then Jo turned back to me.
“Who’s Paul, Jolene?”
“He’s a friend of my parents. They wanted me to go with him to this ROTC officer’s ball downtown. I didn’t want to go, but they kept on me about it until I finally said yes. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”
“Not that big of a deal huh? Great. So, I’m gone for a couple of months and you go off dancing with the soldiers?”
“Alex, it’s not like that. I’ve known him since we were like ten or something.”
“So it was just a dance?”
“Yes, it was just a dance.”
“Was it just a dance for him, Jo, or does he like you?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Was there just a kiss afterwards? Maybe JUST a little touching?”
Then she slapped me.
It took a second to recover before I looked back at her and saw the tears streaking down her cheeks. She walked up to me and put her finger on my chest. “I have never let anyone touch me, Alex, the way I let you touch me,” she said clearly trying to hold back just how much I had crossed the line.
I put my hand over my eye and rubbed my face. Then I reached for her shoulder. “Jo I–”
But she pushed my hand away and went back into the house.
I turned and walked away, got in my car and drove off.
It didn’t even hit me until I was almost home how much of an idiot I had been.
Especially since I knew that right about then she was opening my confessional letter I had put in the flowers and reading about all the things I had done that summer.
All the way home from Minnesota all I could do was hope that she would understand and forgive me for what I had done, which she would have I’m sure, even though what I had done was so much more of a screw up than her going to some stupid dance with some guy she grew up with.
“Who’s the asshole now?” I said looking at myself in the rear-view mirror.
When my exit came on Sixth Avenue I didn’t take it. Instead I drove to a late-night Starbucks in Golden, bought myself a Venti Latte and headed up Lookout Mountain to think.
I dropped Aerosmith’s ‘Nine Lives’ into the tape deck and let Steven Tyler scream at me while I maneuvered up the hairpin curves.
It was pretty late, around 10:30 I think when I rounded a curve and saw something jump from the trees into the street.
Shit! I swerved barely missing the slender animal as it jumped into the trees on the other side of the road. My heart was beating. Thank God I’m only going 25.
I pulled up to my favorite spot, laid the blanket out on the hood of the car, now musty smelling from months of disuse, and sat down. It was so quiet up there while I looked out over Golden. Lakewood. Aurora. Denver. Littleton. Aurora. I could almost draw lines in the air where each city ended and the next began. I looked down at the Coors Brewery, the Colorado school of Mines campus and Table Mountain. I looked down the stretch of Sixth Avenue to Downtown Denver and saw Mile High Stadium glowing in the night like a band of luminous white diamonds, and I looked out into the distance to the tiny-white-tent peaks of Denver International Airport.
I took another sip of my cooling coffee and wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. The night air was getting cold this high up.
I picked up the pad of paper I had taken out of the back of the car and started writing.
My dearest Jolene,
Please let me start by saying how sorry I am for getting so upset at you. You were right, you going out on a dance with someone IS no big deal. I was so excited to get home and see you. Then when I saw that other guy I guess I got more confused than anything, which is no excuse. Please believe me, I’m not writing this to make excuses, I’m writing this to say I’m sorry. I’m SO very sorry. I should never have questioned your faithfulness. I know you love me, and I love you so much. Then on top of everything I said those awful things. You have no idea how badly I wish I could take them back. I know that you wouldn’t let anything go on like that.
I also want to apologize for the timing of everything. I wrote you that letter expecting to be there when you read it so that I could answer any questions you had and try to assure you that nothing else happened between Kris and I. Then I had to go off and be a total ass.
I know that things like this can fracture a relationship beyond repair, but I really hope that’s not the case. I meant it when I told you that I love you. Summer was awful without you, and I can’t imagine going back to school knowing that I can’t have lunch with you or give you a ride home or that I won’t find any more of your letters squeezed through the slats in my locker. It’s too much! Please forgive me. I’m so so sorry. I love you. Love,
-Alex
I felt my eyes getting sore and the back of my throat starting to burn as I wrote it.
I looked at my phone. No calls. No messages.
I folded up the letter and slid it into my rear pocket. I folded the blanket, tossed it onto the passenger seat and got in.
I started making my way back down when the music came back on. It must have been between songs because it went from complete silence to full Steven Tyler, and it startled me. I looked down to turn the volume from emotional disaster to something sane. When I looked up again I had just enough time to see the deer in my headlights.
I swerved but clipped it.
The window smashed and my headlights went out.
I saw the edge of the road and swerved to compensate.
It was too late.
The loose gravel on the roadside pulled my backend around, and the car flipped.
I remember the world outside my window slowly slowly turning upside down.
Then a pain shot through the side of my head, and I blacked out.
Seventeen
I woke up in a dimly lit hospital room with a heart monitor beeping in my ear. My head hurt. Something was pulling at a sore spot on my arm. When I lifted it to have a look I saw a tube sticking out. I touched my head. There was cloth…some sort of cloth wrapped around my head. It took me a minute to focus my vision. Near the end of my bed was someone. Wrapped in a…blanket. It was Jo, wrapped in a blanket. She was asleep. There was another chair with a blanket. An empty chair. I didn’t see anyone else.
“Jo,” I quietly said trying to sit up.
She opened her eyes.
“Hey you,” and she smiled, wiping the hair from her face and walking over to me.
“What’s going on? Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital. You hit a deer coming down lookout mountain road and flipped your car. The bar tender who works at the bar at the top of the hill heard the crash when she was driving home down the mountain, and she called an ambulance. They had to cut your car in half with the Jaws of Life to get you out because you were wedged between two trees pretty bad,” she said gently touching my face.
“How long have I been here?”
“About two days.”
“Am I alright?” I asked starting to move every body part I could think of. “My head hurts, but I think I can feel everything.”
She smiled and brushed my cheek. “Yeah, you’re alright. Just a concussion from smashing the side window with your head.”
“So, I’m concussed huh?”
She laughed. “Yep you’re fully concussed, but the doctor’s pretty sure you’ll survive.”
Then my mother walked in with two cups of something hot.
“Alex!” She said setting the cups down and hugging me. “Oh thank you Jesus. How do you feel?”
“Pretty concussed.”
“Pretty what? Should I call the doctor?”
I smiled and Jo shook her head.
“Oh, I get it. From the… very funny,” and she sat down on the edge of my bed. “The doctor said you should be fine, and that we should let you wake up on your own, but you hear about people losing their memory in books and in TV shows and…I’m just glad you’re awake. Are you hungry? We could get you something to eat. The cafeteria isn’t all that bad.”
“It’s pretty bad,” Jo countered.
“Okay, its pretty bad, but I could get you some jell-o or something.”
“I’m okay. My stomach is all over the place.”
“Yeah, that’s probably the medicine. It might take a few days for your appetite to come back. How’s your head feel?”
“It hurts. So does my lip.”
“Yeah? Well, you got punched in the face by a car.”
I laughed. Then pain streaked through my head and I winced.
“Ew, ok maybe enough with the jokes for now,” she said rubbing my leg. “Jo, honey, here’s your coffee.”
“Coffee huh?”
She shrugged. “It’s not exactly a Starbucks down there.”
“Alex, I’m so glad you’re okay,” my mother said. “When I heard that you had been in an accident it just tore me in half, and I kept thinking how things haven’t been…”
“Mom,” I said holding up my hand. “Please. It’s okay.”
She wiped an eye and took a deep breath then took my hand and kissed the back of it. She stood up. “Well, I know you two have some stuff to talk about so I’m going to go find you something to eat.” Then she left.
“Jo I–”
“Shh Alex, let me talk first,” she said putting a finger on my lips. “When your mom called and told me that you had been in an accident I almost passed out. I thought there’s no way I can lose you like this, not now, not after…”
Then she leaned onto my chest and started crying.
“All I could think about was how the last time I saw you I slapped you in the face. I’m so sorry Alex. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I would never have gone out with Paul if I thought you would have a problem with it, and I tried to call you and talk to you about it but there was no answer. And…”
“Jo, Jo. Look at me. It’s okay. I was such an asshole about the whole thing. You were right, it wasn’t a big deal. I trust you; I don’t know why I said what I said. Did you read the letter?”
“You were in the emergency room and your mom said they found a letter on you so I read it and saw how you said you were sorry about our fight and about Minnesota and how you expected to be there when I read it. I had been too angry with you to read the other one you gave me, so I pulled it out of my purse and read it then. And Alex, it’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I trust you too. I don’t want this to come between us either. I didn’t even get the chance to tell you how much I missed you this summer.”
“I missed you too,” I said laying my hand on the back of her head. “Can we just go back to how things were before I left–before this summer?”
“Please,” she said lifting her feet onto the bed.
I draped the top blanket over her, and we just lay there next to each other letting the pain of all that had happened shrink away.
When mom came back with a plate of something covered in plastic, Jo was asleep, curled up next to me.
“Hey,” she whispered. “How is everything? Are you two okay?”
I nodded.
“Good. I called her right after I heard where they had taken you and she came right down. She’s been in that chair the whole time. I’ve tried to get her to go take a walk down to the cafeteria or outside for some fresh air but she’s refused to leave. She wanted to be here when you woke up.”
I smiled.
She sat down, set the food on the table and started nursing her coffee. I closed my eyes. I had never slept with anyone before. This is nice, I thought to myself. Then I fell asleep.
I was in the hospital through the next day while the doctors ran more tests, to make sure my brain hadn’t swollen. I guess a concussion can be anything from minor to pretty serious, so they didn’t want to let me go until they knew I was alright. I laid around while Jo told me about her summer at Camera Obscura Gallery downtown.
In the time I was gone the gallery had had two separate showings, which Jo helped hang. She also flipped through almost every book in their little bookstore and met more than a dozen local and national photographers. She said that instead of a lunch break every day, around 2 o’clock Hal Gould, the gallery’s owner, would host a coffee break complete with cheese board, fruit, nuts and a variety of other little bits that he or the curator, Loretta, would bring to the table. In fact Hal’s coffee breaks were so well known, she started expecting photographers to drop by nearly twice a week always bringing something special to add to the treats.
“Ah Alex, it was so great getting to be at the gallery all summer. One of the photographers who came in almost every week it seemed like, was William Corey, a photographer from Boulder. Just before coffee break one afternoon, he brought in prints from a series he had shot on his last trip to Japan, ‘Zen Gardens in Kyoto’ I think it was called, and they were
amazing. He uses an old, large-format bellows camera that is eight inches wide and twenty inches long, which makes photos that are this really cool rectangular shape, and Alex, the colors are so AMAZING! I mean I could swear that I was actually looking at a real garden laying spread out in front of me. There was one of a stone fountain with leaves lying all around it and one with these red bridges like something you would think out of Memoirs of a Geisha. Oh, and there was one that he shot from inside a wooden porch looking out onto a garden of trees that were turning the brightest red I think I’ve ever seen,” she said gesturing with her hands as she tried to explain the compositions and shapes. As she spoke I would watch her eyes wander past me, back to the images she was remembering.
“One of the two photographers I got to help hang was Phil Borges, who does work for National Geographic and Amnesty International. He goes to remote locations like Tibet and India and photographs indigenous people. He tries to not just take their pictures but talk to the people and work with them until they let him capture their image. He’ll shoot with a Polaroid back and give the people he’s photographing a copy. He told me that for some of these people, it’s probably the only photo they’ve ever had of themselves. His stuff is really interesting too. It’s really solemn, and the colors are so subtle that they almost look black and white when you first glance at them.
“I’ve learned so much from working at the gallery Alex. It’s like someone has just opened my brain and dumped in the collected photographic genius from the last hundred years.
“Oh, and I’ve got some really great news.”
“What’s that?”
“I was talking about some of my underwater photography to Loretta, Camera Obscura’s curator, and she wanted me to bring in a few pieces to show her and Hal. Well, I took in three prints and they really liked them, and they want me to do a solo show!”
If I Lose Her Page 10
