I Remember You

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “No.” Rosemary tossed her hair and sniffed meaningfully. “I’m better than that.”

  “Nice,” said Lucas. “ ’Cause I’m starving.” He looked at me, then Rose. “You guys want to eat?”

  Over pizza, Rosemary asked about the movie. “It was awesome,” Lucas said. “There was this little girl, right? With big eyes.” He looked at me. “Huge, right?”

  “Saucers.”

  “And a doll.”

  “A creepy doll.”

  “Like Chucky. Like, ‘I’m baaa-aaack.’ ” Rosemary was laughing too hard to get any Coke up through her straw.

  “And Chucky and Big-Saucer-Eyes Girl only spoke Spanish.”

  “You noticed that?” I said.

  “Yeah, like, what the heck? The whole movie was in Spanish.”

  Rosemary was laughing harder. We all were.

  Then Lucas asked Rosemary about Jason. “So who is this clown?”

  “I thought it was so cool at first,” she said. “How he took me to restaurants and knew about all the food and liked to drink wine.” She spoke with an air of pity, as if she were describing someone with a terminal illness. “But he’s not cool. He’s pathetic. He’s in college. He should be going to frat parties and drinking beer. He should have friends. I swear, he would rather spend weekends antiquing with his parents.”

  “Yeah, that’s just sad,” said Lucas, kind of snorting. We were all laughing again.

  After we were done eating, Rosemary went to the bathroom, and Lucas took her place on my side of the booth. He slid his arm around my waist and looked down at me, half joking, half serious, his eyes narrowed to slits. “I hope I never hear you talking about me like that,” he said. “If I don’t go away nicely when you break up with me, just keep it to yourself, okay?”

  I couldn’t help it—I giggled. Having him so close to me, pretending to warn me, feeling his face next to mine … The whole time I’d been listening to Rose, laughing with her, I’d been wondering when I’d be able to kiss Lucas again, how long I would have to wait, if it would be tonight or some other time.

  “I won’t,” I said, shaking my head. I was laughing still, almost like I was being tickled, but I was also serious. I wanted him to know the truth. “It’s not the same.”

  Lucas started to say something, but then he stopped. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d registered a bell ringing as someone entered the restaurant, and now that I was following Lucas’s eyes, I saw it was a soldier wearing fatigues, his tiny-boned wife at his side. The soldier was carrying a toddler, and the wife had a diaper bag. They were beaming.

  “Hey!” shouted a voice from behind the counter. A man who worked there came running out to give the soldier a slap on the back, and then he kissed the wife. “You’re back!” the man said. “She was in here last week and told me you were coming home. You got in just now?”

  “Today.” The soldier put the baby down so she could toddle, and he rubbed a hand across the top of his stubbly crew cut.

  “That’s going to be you, right?” I said quietly to Lucas, pulling my gaze away from the soldier. I was teasing, but when I saw the look in Lucas’s eyes, I could feel my smile fade. His description of his dream came back to me in a flash—everything the color of sand. Bedsheets on a clothesline. The heavy feeling in his body, his knees, what he thought was an older body.

  Was Lucas thinking about the dream now? He squinted like he was concentrating.

  “Yeah,” he said. He put his hand on his own head, touching his almost-curling hair, imitating, maybe without even realizing it, the way the soldier had rubbed his head.

  And then my brain started to go into overdrive, as it sometimes does when I’m in a debate round.

  “Oh my goodness,” I said. “Of course! Lucas, I just figured all this out.”

  Lucas pulled back his head like a turtle retreating into its shell. “Figured what out?” he said.

  “It makes perfect sense,” I said. “Your remembering thing? You’re not remembering. You’re scared.” He gave me a “Huh?” look, but I plowed on anyway, sure he’d understand soon. “You’re afraid to join the marines. But you don’t want to admit it, so your brain is resorting to these dreams. It’s your subconscious trying to tell you something.”

  Lucas twisted his mouth in an expression of skepticism, but I just kept going. “Don’t you see? Your dream isn’t a memory, it’s a projection of the future.” I was inventing the theory as I described it. “You’re so sure this is what it will be like you can’t imagine it any other way.”

  “Juliet—” Lucas began, trying to stop me.

  “No,” I said. “It’s fantastic, because this is so easy to fix. Lucas, you know you don’t have to go. No one’s forcing you to enlist. There are colleges for everyone—”

  “Juliet—” Lucas tried again.

  But I still wasn’t done. “Sometimes a plan seems great when you’re a freshman or something, but as you get closer to the time, it looks like less of a good idea. You can wait—”

  Lucas cut me off. “This isn’t about talking to a guidance counselor and picking a career path,” he said, his tone sharp.

  “Then what is it?” In the cloud of self-congratulation at the brilliance of my own theory, I couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t see it just like I did.

  Lucas took a breath and shook his head. And then he smiled, a slow-moving smile. “It’s because that guy’s army, you bonehead.” Like it was a joke.

  Passing the soldier and his family, Rosemary came to the end of our booth. She nodded at the seat that Lucas had vacated to sit next to me. “I’m not disturbing you two, am I?” she said.

  “Not at all,” said Lucas, standing quickly, like he was happy to move on.

  He dropped Rosemary and me at my house without kissing me good night.

  Was something wrong? I didn’t have a chance to ask him and didn’t really want to anyway. As soon as Lucas had stood up from the table, I’d seen how intrusive I had been. I wished I’d kept quiet. I just wanted to go back to the part of the evening when we were kissing by the car. Or laughing with Rosemary over pizza.

  Inside, we found my mom reading on her cozy white couch in the living room, her knitting basket at her feet and the TV, muted, turned to the news.

  Valerie was with her, working on a crossword, drinking bourbon—her de-stressing routine.

  “Rosemary?” my mom said, her eyes narrowing as she tried to figure out what was going on—I’d left with Lucas and was returning with Rose, a good hour later than I’d said I’d be home.

  “We met up after the movie,” I explained. When my mom didn’t answer immediately with “Oh, sure,” it occurred to me that she was deciding whether she believed me.

  “So how was the movie?” Val asked. “And more to the point, what kind of self-respecting hockey player takes you to a foreign film?” Val hadn’t met Lucas yet, but she’d grown up with brothers and loved the idea of him. I think she was envisioning Sunday afternoons on the sofa, with Lucas her surrogate nephew, watching football.

  “Flores de Dolor? Wasn’t particularly well reviewed,” my mom said, yawning.

  I laughed, remembering Chucky and I’m baaa-aaack. “It shouldn’t have been.”

  My mom was looking at me, a question in her prettily furrowed brow. For a second, I considered telling her what was going on, if only just to get it off my chest. I could sit down on the couch between Mom and Val and let them fold me into their easy, protective arms, making like I was still ten, and we’d talk and talk, them hooting at everything I said like I was the most brilliant child ever born.

  What would my mom make of Lucas’s dream/memory weirdness? Would lawyerly, practical Val have a theory? They would believe my subconscious-fear theory, I was sure. They wouldn’t be able to tell if a soldier was army or marines.

  Before we went to sleep, Rosemary and I lay silently for a while, and I thought, This is when you tell your best friend what’s been happening. But I didn’t. And then I thought, Now. S
till, I couldn’t start.

  And when Rosemary finally said, “I should have seen this thing with Jason coming,” I was grateful. “The boring ones are always the angriest,” she went on. “They don’t know they’re boring. They just think everyone else is blind to their charms.” She yawned and arched her back like a kitten. I knew she’d be asleep in five minutes. “Sad, really.”

  “That he’s so boring?”

  “That he’s so cute. Such a waste.”

  “Maybe there has to be something a little bit wrong with anyone in college who would date someone in high school.”

  “You mean I’m supposed to date high school guys?” Rosemary scoffed, then caught herself. “Oh, Lucas. I forgot. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “It’s better than okay.” Rosemary yawned again. “I could tell tonight. He’s crazy about you.” She was two breaths away from losing consciousness. “And he should be.”

  I could have said something about his memories to her then. But just at that moment, her breathing grew even. Rosemary was asleep.

  Lucas called the next morning and came over at noon. We walked into town for sundaes. “You know, Juliet, whatever weirdness—” he said, and then he stopped, like even bringing up the topic was getting too close to talking about it. “Are you mad?”

  I put my lips together in a smile that was mostly a grimace. Me, mad? I wanted to say. Wasn’t he the one who should be mad at me for forcing a theory on him when I obviously didn’t understand?

  But if I said that, we’d be talking about it again, and I didn’t want to go there. So I just shook my head. No, I wasn’t mad. We looked down into our ice creams until the moment passed.

  From that day on, my memories get choppy, like I’m fishing snapshots out of a box where they were stored in no particular order.

  Parent-teacher conference day: no school. Was it October? November? I remember picking apples with Lucas. I remember the leaves had started to turn orange for real. We went to Lucas’s house afterward.

  I’d been there before. Lucas had the kind of mom who insisted I come over for dinner, and she’d given me green peppers to chop two seconds after we’d been introduced. “At long last,” she’d said when Lucas brought me into the kitchen, “Lucas’s girlfriend.” Like she hadn’t thought he had it in him.

  And Lucas had the kind of dad who, when dinner was called, trudged in from the garage with grease on his hands and shoveled his food into his mouth like he was being paid to eat and took no pleasure in it. Lucas said his parents fought, but they didn’t in front of me, except once, sort of, when Lucas’s mom was asking about my college plans and she turned to Lucas and said, “See? At least someone your age isn’t going off to get themselves killed in the marines.”

  Lucas’s dad waved a hand in the air dismissively. “Don’t waste your breath,” he said, addressing Lucas as if Mrs. Dunready weren’t even in the room. “Your mother isn’t the type to understand.”

  After apple picking, with no one home, I learned more about his family. Lucas took me out to the tree fort he and his dad had built for his little brothers. He pointed out the trail in the woods that his dad had blazed, leading to the pond where Lucas had learned to skate. “My dad wasn’t around a lot when he was still in the service, but the times he was here, he was here. Now he’s around all the time, but it’s like he’s a ghost. He’s nobody.”

  Lucas showed me his BB gun range, which raised my debate-rhetoric hackles. “Do you know how dangerous it is to have guns and young boys together under one roof?” I said. “Did you know that most gun deaths of children are accidental and happen even in households where the guns are locked away? Boys, especially, will find them.” I’d debated a gun control resolution six times my freshman year.

  Lucas stopped me by placing his hands on my shoulders. He looked like he was trying not to laugh. “BB guns, Juliet,” he said. “We may be gun people, but we’re not stupid.”

  I felt myself calming down. Lucas had that effect on me. Taking my hand in the hallway at school, he’d made me feel like I had traveled somewhere—to a place I wanted to be.

  “Besides,” he went on, smirking. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” I sucked in a huge breath, all ready to tear apart that backward NRA charge so many people accepted as gospel.

  Then I realized Lucas was kidding.

  He put a hand at the back of my waist, pulled me to him.

  Inside, the empty house was filled with dust motes, and it smelled like old breakfast. Before, with Tommy and Wendell to distract me, running around in nothing but Lucas’s hockey shirts and their tighty-whities, I hadn’t noticed that the tile on the kitchen floor was yellowed and the couch in the living room sagged. But now, in the quiet, the house felt tired, like it had seen too much history.

  Lucas made us peanut butter sandwiches and then found me in the den, where I’d gone to study the pictures on the wall, the way you do only when no one’s home.

  Most were studio portraits. Some were black and white, some were in color, but all of them were of young Dunready men—marines—scrubbed, shaven, shorn, squeezed into dress blues. All had Lucas’s even forehead and his nose, which looked like it might have been broken and promised to get a little beaky with age. There was more too: group photos, plaques, glass-framed boxes displaying ribbons and medals, a line of VA hats on the shelves above what looked like family photo albums, a framed poster of the marines hoisting the US flag on Iwo Jima.

  “That’s my grandpa,” Lucas said, pointing to one of the black-and-white pictures. A man with glasses and a dimple in his chin. “And that’s my dad.” He looked like Lucas with brown hair. A handsome young man. “That’s Uncle Wendell. Uncle Charles. These guys over here were my dad’s cousins. This guy—Uncle Florrie—he’s the one who died in Vietnam, and this guy, Cousin Sal, he kind of went crazy after this POW thing. For a while, he became a Mormon, and then he went totally AWOL, abandoning his Mormon family and joining this group that was—well, my grandma always tried to make it sound like he was in a club, but basically I think he was robbing liquor stores. I only met him once, when he came back east and my grandma had a big barbecue. Totally crazy.”

  “For real?”

  Lucas nodded slowly, so I was expecting bad news. Convulsive ticcing? Ragged clothing? An unmistakable smell of old pee?

  With his index fingers, Lucas traced two lines across his upper lip, pinching air in the neighborhood of his jawline. “Huge ’stache.” It took me a minute to get what he was even talking about. “I’ve seen squirrel tails less bushy than what this guy was growing on his lip.”

  “Wow,” I laughed.

  “My dad would have put all this stuff in the living room if my mom had let him.”

  “Wow,” I laughed again, though differently this time.

  “So you can see …”

  And I could. I got it now, why Lucas wasn’t going to college. Why, when we went to the mall, he always stopped by the Military Entrance Processing Station—the MEPS—where the recruiters knew him by name and made sure he never left without one of the granola bars they gave out for free, a Xeroxed newspaper article about a former marine who started a small business with a VA loan, a video called A Vision for the Future, or a copy of “The Few, the Proud” brochure. In this family, if you weren’t a marine, your picture wouldn’t show up on this wall. It would be as if, in the context of your family tree, your branch didn’t exist.

  We moved upstairs. Lucas’s room had been off-limits when his mother was around. But now I could take it all in: a bureau painted brown, old-fashioned window shades with fringe trim, hockey trophies, brown-checked wallpaper. And a marines poster, a black-and-white image of a man’s face, broken out in sweat and straining in agony. One of the man’s hands was visible, grasping a rope he was presumably climbing, while police-tape-yellow type boasted:

  WE’D PROMISE YOU SLEEP DEPRIVATION,

  MENTAL TORMENT, AND MUSCLES SO SORE YOU’LL PUKE.

 
BUT WE DON’T LIKE TO SUGARCOAT THINGS.

  MARINES: THE FEW. THE PROUD.

  Lucas pointed to the window, through which I could see the woods behind the house, the surface of the pond glinting through the trees. “See over there? I almost died there once.”

  “For real?”

  Lucas exhaled through pursed lips. “I’d gotten this pair of skates for Christmas. They were used, but they were real hockey skates. My first. It had been warm for a few days and Mom told me no skating, but I didn’t listen to her. No one was going to keep me off the ice.”

  Which cracked, he went on to explain, and as he described falling in, I felt the heavy cold that must have penetrated his winter jacket and jeans. “What did you do?” I asked, feeling impatient. It didn’t matter that I could see him standing before me, obvious proof that he had lived to tell the tale. I was still scared. I wanted him to get to the end of the story quickly.

  “I broke my way out.”

  “You what?”

  Lucas reset his jaw in the manner of someone who was trying to appear not to care. “Ever seen those icebreaker ships in places where the ocean freezes, like Alaska? They have these huge wheels at the bow that basically eat through the ice, clearing a path for the boat. I turned myself into one of them. I don’t know how I’d managed to hold on to my hockey stick when I fell through, but I had, and I used it to break a path.”

  “But you were really young.” When I was that age, I was still afraid of the monkey bars.

  “I was as old as Tommy.”

  I tried to imagine a little-boy version of Lucas. In my mind, I saw a crew cut sticking out of the freezing water; he was alone, fighting for his life by beating at the edge of the ice until it cracked in submission. “Did your mother absolutely freak out?”

  “I never told her. As soon as I got on solid ground, I ripped off my new skates and just left them there. I ran to the house, went in the back door, and threw everything I was wearing into the washing machine. I somehow managed to turn it on, and then I climbed into my bed in my underwear. My teeth were chattering really hard. I drew blood when I bit my lip by accident. I was scared. But I knew if my mom found out, she wouldn’t let me skate anymore.”