I Remember You

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “You were nine?”

  Lucas shrugged off the question. “My dad got home—it was the day after Christmas. My mom was working, probably. And I guess he found the laundry. He must have seen the muddy trail from the back door into the laundry room too. He washed everything. Found my skates. Came and put them on the floor by my bed. Didn’t say anything. But he didn’t need to. He knew how much I’d wanted them, and how much skating meant to me.”

  Tears were forming in my eyes. Maybe because my own dad had never done anything like that for me. But thinking of Lucas as a little boy, naked and shivering in bed, I had to ask, “Shouldn’t your dad have been more worried?”

  “My mom worries enough for our whole family. That’s really what her problem is with the whole marines business.” Lucas grabbed my hand, smiling again, and lowered his head to look into my eyes. “Don’t feel sorry for me.” He laughed. “I only told you that story to impress you.”

  He pulled me onto the bottom bunk. I felt a deep ache forming inside me, a fluttering. That was what it was like to be with Lucas. That was how I felt whenever he touched me.

  He pulled a mini photo album from a shelf above the bed. “Want to see pictures of my little brothers back when they were still cute?”

  I wanted to do anything Lucas suggested. And Tommy and Wendell were really cute. There they were riding bikes in a campground, then eating cereal in matching Ninja Turtles pajamas at a picnic table, a pop-up RV behind them. His mom making pancakes, wearing a Santa hat—she had Lucas’s blue eyes. A photo of his dad in his marines uniform, squinting at the little-boy version of Lucas holding his hand.

  “Your dad—” I didn’t know what to say. He looked happy. Hard to tell just from a photograph, but there was something there. Pride?

  “He should have stayed in the service,” Lucas said. “But my mom couldn’t take it.”

  “Was he deployed a lot?”

  “Yeah, and she stopped going with him after a bit. She hated base life. Which I don’t get. I mean, I was born in Hawaii—paradise, right? And all my mom remembers is that her sisters were out getting educations while she played solitaire and drank vodka for breakfast.”

  “Your mom?” I couldn’t imagine her drinking.

  “At Camp Pendleton, which I actually remember, there were kids everywhere. You could get any toy at the PX. And candy. But my mom couldn’t get away from that whole life fast enough. She moved home and gave my dad a choice: re-up as a reservist or live alone. Then, after she went back to school and started working, money wasn’t such a factor, and she told him she couldn’t stand even the reserves. The minute he was discharged, it was like, boom, he was gone.”

  “He left you?”

  “Not physically. But it’s like he can’t feel anything. Except anger. I can’t remember the last time he laughed. And I get it, he loved being a marine. It’s who he was.…”

  Lucas’s voice trailed off, and as he took the album out of my hand, he laughed bitterly. Then he rolled over on top of me, kissed me and tickled me, and we were laughing and kissing at the same time and sort of wrestling too. Then just kissing.

  This was the first time we’d ever lain on a bed together. We’d always been in a car, or outside, or with my mom, or with Rosemary, or at a party.

  Lucas pushed the hair off my forehead. He propped himself up on an elbow. He ran a finger under my jaw and down my neck. He said, “I don’t want to ever stop remembering the way this feels. Just this shape here.” He let his finger rest in the hollow beneath my collarbone. I looked straight up at him.

  But I can’t write too much more about this. Because sometimes, when I think about holding Lucas, or being held by him, when I replay the things he said to me, when I hear his voice inside my head, my hands shake and I can’t think straight to write. I feel … I don’t know. I feel too much.

  Lucas and I fell asleep in his bed that afternoon, my head resting on his chest, his arm wrapped around me. We had a blanket pulled up over us, and it was so quiet we could hear the hum of the fridge from downstairs.

  What woke me was the sound of Lucas crying in his sleep. He wasn’t crying out like he was having a nightmare. He was whimpering, and then I saw that tears were streaming down his cheeks.

  I called his name. He stirred and seemed to swallow the noise he was making, then sniffed and the tears stopped also. He didn’t wake up, even when I wiped a tear from his cheek.

  I started lying to Rose. Not about anything important, just little things. Almost like I was practicing, like I was teaching myself how to lie.

  She asked about a new sweater, and I said it used to be my mom’s, when actually Val had bought it for me the week before.

  She wanted to tell me about an episode of ER, and I said I’d already seen it, because I was trying to get her off the phone in case Lucas called. I said I’d meet her at her locker, but I went to Lucas’s locker instead.

  I don’t know if Rosemary knew I was lying. If she did, she never said anything about it. She might have just been too distracted by her own life. And her own lies.

  Jason had started calling her constantly, pretending to be someone from our school, leaving messages with her mom, sending her letters that begged her to change her mind about breaking up with him, telling her she was the only person who made him happy.

  She’d had to become a hawk with the mail—if her parents found out she was dating college guys, they’d probably ground her for life. That was why when Jason sent her something in a FedEx box, Rosemary stashed it in her backpack, waiting to open it at my house. Which was smart, because her mom would have heard the gasp Rosemary let out when she saw the will-you-marry-me little blue box from Tiffany inside the FedEx package.

  Yes, that’s the Tiffany: the big jewelry store on Fifth Avenue in New York City where Audrey Hepburn stares in the windows and eats a Danish out of a paper bag.

  Holding the box in front of her, Rosemary breathed in horror, “Oh, my God!”

  I just stared.

  “You don’t think he’s crazy enough to—” she began, and then answered her own question. “No, he isn’t.”

  She was right. Jason wasn’t crazy enough to send a diamond engagement ring to a girl who wasn’t returning his calls.

  But he was crazy enough to send a diamond. Rosemary gasped again when she saw it, then gently lifted the delicate gold chain and let the diamond swing into her palm.

  “He does know you’re sixteen?”

  She nodded, though honestly I didn’t know if she’d heard me. The diamond was sparkling in the light, and she appeared to be hypnotized.

  “Rosemary,” I said. “Put the necklace down!”

  She startled to attention.

  “You can’t keep it. You have to give it back.”

  Rosemary assumed a calculated expression that would have been at home on one of the boyfriend-swapping, backstabbing golden girls she used to hang out with.

  “How?” she said in an I-don’t-have-time-for-how-much-you-don’t-understand-about-relationships tone. “Mail it to him? Give it back to him in person? Or return it to the store?” She laughed. “For, like, a credit?”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

  “If I return it, he’ll just write me another letter telling me he can see I’m still angry and try again.”

  “He needs to get the message that you’re done,” I said. But Rosemary wasn’t nodding. “You do want him to get that message, right?”

  “Sure,” Rosemary answered, meaning, I could tell, no.

  Later that night, I was sprawled on the carpet in my room, doing my homework. I barely registered the sound of my mom rolling the trash cans down the driveway to the curb. I barely registered the sudden absence of that sound.

  But then there she was, standing in my doorway, her ankles looking especially birdlike sticking out of big black rubber clogs. Her hair was kind of sticking out too, like she’d put in too much mousse and hadn’t seen what she looked like in the mirror. She
was holding the crumpled Tiffany wrapping paper and white silk ribbon in her hands.

  “What,” she began in a tone I didn’t quite recognize. She sounded like a mom on TV. “What, may I ask, is Tiffany wrapping paper doing in our trash?”

  And honestly, I didn’t know what to say. I was so used to telling my mom the truth that my first instinct was to confess to her about Jason and Rosemary. But if I did, she might feel obliged to tell Rosemary’s parents. Which was out of the question.

  So I did what people do when they aren’t used to lying: I lied badly.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  Lying badly is never smart. Because now my mom was not just freaked out by the Tiffany wrapping paper, but also aware that I was lying to her.

  “Nothing?” she repeated. “This is wrapping paper from Tiffany. I know I didn’t put it in there. No one’s given me a gift from Tiffany in quite some time.”

  I forged ahead with my lie. “Rose had it at her house. It was something one of her aunts sent her.”

  “Juliet, you don’t lie to me,” my mom said. This was a statement of fact more than a command.

  And she was right. I didn’t lie to her. Except I just had.

  “Did Lucas give you something from Tiffany?”

  “Lucas?” I was laughing even as I said his name.

  Laughing from shock.

  Lucas had bought me a grilled cheese sandwich. An ice cream. He’d paid for a strip of photos from a booth in an arcade. “I don’t think Lucas even knows what Tiffany is.”

  “He didn’t give you a piece of jewelry from Tiffany that he got God only knows how—maybe from the money he’s supposed to be saving for college?”

  “Lucas isn’t going to college,” I reminded her.

  She twisted her mouth into a frown.

  And I felt a sudden sadness that I was making my mom into the person she was right then—frail, angry, wrong, alone. I wondered what would happen if I just tossed my books aside and ran over and gave her a big hug.

  But I didn’t get up and give her a hug. I clicked my retractable pen closed and open and then closed again with my thumb, something I’ve seen my dad do when he brings me along to the hospital and I watch him take his residents on rounds.

  “I just want to make sure you’re not getting swept away by his … energy,” my mom said. “I mean, Lucas is a sweet kid. But, Juliet, you’re so smart. And—” She stopped. “It’s natural to feel things that are … physical. But I just want you to recognize them as that. Not to confuse those feelings with deeper ones.”

  “What can you possibly mean by that?” Again, I felt like my dad on his rounds, scaring his residents with his condescending tone.

  “Do you have anything in common with Lucas? Are you letting his emotions dictate yours? These are mistakes everyone makes. Women make. I have made. At your age—at any age, really—you can get hurt. Way more easily than you would think.”

  My mom’s eyes were actually welling up with tears. I thought I knew why—and it wasn’t because of me. Was this why she never dated? Had never met anyone after the divorce? She was afraid to make another mistake?

  “He’s my boyfriend, okay?” I said. “I have a boyfriend. And yet the earth continues to spin. The sun rises in the mornings. Night follows day. Here I am, sitting on the floor, doing homework like I always do.”

  “I know.”

  “Are my grades slipping? Has school called?”

  She shook her head, her eyebrows pinched together. I’d closed a door and she was knocking on it, rattling the doorknob from the other side, but I wouldn’t let her in.

  Rosemary told me later that what my mom had meant was “Don’t have sex.”

  And I could have told my mom that we hadn’t. But I didn’t want to. Rosemary discussed sex casually, as if it were just one more activity—tennis, soccer—that she was really good at and got the chance to do a lot. But there was nothing casual about the way I felt about Lucas. About touching him. Kissing him. I felt like if I said out loud what the feeling was, I would jinx it. It would desert me. Sung too often, even your favorite song becomes just a series of random notes.

  Besides, my mom was done. We’d had a fight and I’d won. Or at least, that was what I believed.

  When the phone rang on a Wednesday afternoon and it was my dad, I nearly had a heart attack. “Dad?” I said. “Are you okay?” Like everything in my dad’s life, the timing of phone conversations is regimented and precise. We speak every Sunday at five p.m., and there’s not a lot of room for variation.

  “Your mom asked me to call.” He was using the extra-nasal California accent he slips into when he’s uncomfortable giving a patient bad news. “She says you have a special friend and it’s time I knew.”

  Special friend? Could anyone use that phrase and not sound like they were programmed for English vocabulary by a punch card?

  Another kid might have moaned, “Oh, God, Dad, this is the nineties!” But there’s something about my dad that always kept me from acting that way with him. I’d always known—since I was really little, probably—that there’s a certain way you have to be with my father or you’ll scare him away.

  So I kept my cringing invisible to him, even as he read out loud—and I am not making this up—the correlation some pathetic social scientist had made between the age at which girls start having sex and the educational degree they eventually go on to obtain. The gist was that if I had sex before my eighteenth birthday, I could pretty much kiss law school goodbye.

  At dinner that night—sushi again—I pointed at my mom with my chopsticks and aligned my gaze along them, as if I were sighting her down the barrel of a gun.

  “Dad called me today,” I said. “And if your strategy to keep me from having sex with Lucas is that I’ll hear Dad calling him my ‘special friend’ every time I think about him, that will definitely do the trick. Thank you for that. And for your information, Lucas and I are not having sex. I have no plans to have sex with him at the present time. If at some date in the future I reverse that opinion, I will be procuring appropriate contraception and engaging in practices guaranteed not to result in pregnancy or the contraction of STDs.”

  She took a sip of her watered-down ginger soda. “Your father called?” Her eyes—big, blue, framed with her trademark heavy mascara—made her appear the very soul of innocence. She didn’t bring up the subject again.

  As the fall moved forward, all I wanted was to be with Lucas. I didn’t care when Val got tickets to shows. I didn’t want to hang out at Rosemary’s after school, eating cheese popcorn and drinking the Pellegrino that was supposed to be for guests. I didn’t care if Rose was watching Doctor Who. I didn’t care what Jake and Amanda were up to on Melrose Place. I didn’t want to try on dresses I would never wear. I didn’t want to spend Saturday mornings wandering the museum’s galleries while my mom finished up a few projects in her office overlooking the sculpture court.

  I made excuses. I’d tell my mom I had homework, then spend the night on the phone with Lucas, pretending that I’d just called him when she picked up the extension downstairs.

  I knew my mom was watching me—over the top of her knitting, her glasses pushed down to the bottom of her cute-as-a-button nose, the questions she wasn’t asking swirling in her brain. I could tell what she was thinking. She was thinking that Lucas wasn’t enough. That he didn’t understand the world—her world. That someone not going to college was going to pull me down.

  I could have made a case for him. I could have put her mind at ease, telling her about how in physics Lucas was the one who understood how velocity and momentum affect the universe. About how he beat me in Scrabble.

  I could have told my mom how much Lucas knew about the marines. How he’d memorized the complex hierarchy of job classification. How, if you wanted to see any action, you’d need to be an “03,” and how you needed to time your enlistment with the annual cycle of job assignments to maximize the available choices. He would say things like “Guys m
ake the mistake of thinking only about basic, but you have to plan for four years. You need a good job going in—you don’t want to just be a grunt.” He talked about how technology was changing the way the military fought. He mentioned Grenada. The Gulf War.

  I could have told my mom how protective Lucas was of his little brothers, how because of whatever weirdness was going on with his dad, he had been the one who helped out their Little League team the year before. I could have told her how once, when he and I got stuck in a traffic jam Mrs. Dunready had warned us about, Lucas pushed his hands against the steering wheel, locked his elbows, and said, “You know what I hate about my mom? I hate how she always ends up being right.”

  I could have told her how generous Lucas was. Generous in ways most people didn’t notice. Like, he didn’t interrupt people. When Rosemary was talking, he turned his full gaze on her and let her say what she needed to say. He did the same to me, and also to my mom, to his friends, to Mr. Hannihan, although no one interrupted Mr. Hannihan—God forbid he should get off the subject of his sailboat and start talking about physics.

  But I didn’t tell my mom any of this. Maybe because, from the beginning, there were things about Lucas that I knew better than to tell anyone. Or maybe it was just because what I really wanted from Lucas was Lucas. Undiluted, uncopied, unphotographed, unprocessed Lucas. I didn’t want to share him. I wanted it to be just him and me. Alone.

  One Sunday, Val invited Mom and me over for her famous chili and I said I couldn’t go because I already had plans with Rose.

  My mom let me know with a withering glance that she assumed I was meeting Lucas and just not telling her. But she was wrong. I did have plans with Rose—sort of. We were going to meet up with Lucas and his friend Dexter Fine in the park near my house.

  “You lied to your mom?” Rosemary said as we waited for Lucas and Dex to arrive. Rose and I were sitting side by side on a bench facing the drained swimming pool. “Your mom?”