I Remember You

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “Lucas?” All I wanted was for him to know he could trust me. If we could just get there, I thought, I’d worry about the rest later. “Please tell me what’s happening to you, how what you’re saying is possible.”

  The orange light shimmering up from the parking lot, the low voices of the kids wrapping around the bulkhead, the wool of Lucas’s jacket scratching my bare neck, the awareness my lips still carried of having been kissed hard—these sensations all knit themselves together. Tenuous reaching. Listening for distant bells. I felt for a moment that maybe he didn’t have to tell me. Maybe I already knew. Or I almost knew.

  Lucas took my right hand in both of his and held it up to his chest. It would have looked melodramatic if he hadn’t been so completely serious about it. “Juliet,” he said. “I’ve tried to ignore it, or make it go away, but I can’t anymore.”

  “Make what go away?” I said.

  He looked from side to side, then said, “I can’t tell you here.”

  When Rosemary saw me leaving with Lucas, she passed her Capri Sun to Dexter and hurried over. “Are you okay?” she said.

  “I’ll call you later,” I said. I think she assumed we were continuing some kind of breakup fight and just trying to find a spot to have it where no one could hear.

  But we weren’t continuing a breakup fight. We weren’t doing anything. We didn’t talk or even touch on the way out of the dance, or on the way across the wet parking lot, or in his car, which was cold when we first got inside. He drove, and I didn’t ask him where he was going. He was jiggling his hand on the steering wheel, and at one point I leaned over and covered it with mine. “Sorry,” he said, and he looked more than sorry. He looked miserable, terrified. I was pretty scared myself.

  “What is it?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I shouldn’t be driving when I tell you this.”

  I think it was then that I realized he didn’t know where he was going. “Pull over,” I said, pointing to a church on the right. I don’t know how I managed to sound so calm. I felt like someone had twisted my insides like so much spaghetti. “That parking lot. Pull over there.”

  The church’s empty lot faced the woods, and our headlights were shining into a desolate patch of trees and brush littered with garbage—it was a good place to stash a body, I remember thinking.

  Lucas turned to face me. He opened his mouth and then closed it before starting. “I thought I could tell you, but I just can’t,” he said. “It’s too nuts. You’re going to think I’m crazier than you already do.” He paused, then laughed.

  I started to reach out to him but stopped myself. He looked so wound up I was worried something would spring loose and go flying if I so much as grazed the back of his hand. “Lucas,” I said firmly, as if I needed to wake him up.

  He fumbled around for a tape and fed it into the stereo. “I need noise,” he said. “Something against this.” He tapped his temple.

  Then he pressed PLAY.

  The song that came on was one I’d never heard before, but it was beautiful. I’ve tried to find it but have never been able to track it down. A piano. A woman singing about the ocean, about longing, about a lighthouse, about things that used to be and are now gone.

  “My mom used to sing this when I was a kid,” Lucas said. “She had it on a record, and I made a tape of it the other day.” He was biting his lip.

  “Lucas,” I said. “You can tell me what you think is happening.”

  “If I do,” he warned, momentarily lowering his face into outstretched fingers, “you’re going to want to get out of this car, walk back to your safe little house and your mom, go off to become a lawyer or whatever, go to some fancy college. You’ll wish I really had broken up with you earlier.”

  “Lucas,” I confessed. “I love you.”

  That was something we hadn’t said to each other before, but I just blurted it out. I wanted him to know. He looked up at me.

  “I—” he started. “You love me?”

  “We don’t have to talk about it.” I was hoping to sound casual in spite of the fact that I was writhing in embarrassment. Why had I introduced the word “love”? “Sorry,” I said. “Forget it. Just tell me your dream.”

  “Juliet—” He smiled. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “It’s okay if you don’t feel it too,” I said, a lie.

  “You think I don’t love you?”

  Instead of answering him, I looked down at my hands. I was still wearing Lucas’s jacket, and I was pinching the cuffs between my palms and my fingers.

  “Juliet, don’t you see?” he said. “It’s been me, all along, loving you. I tried to hold back, to slow this down. That’s why I haven’t said the words. But I have thought them. I think them all the time. Frankly, they’re not big enough. Because I don’t just love you. I … I really love you.”

  I ventured a direct look at him now and was rewarded with a flood of warmth that traveled straight from my chest through the rest of my body.

  “Jules, every time I glance up and see you—when you come into a room—I love everything about you. Just during this conversation, I’m loving you. I’m thinking about how much I love you. I love the sound of your voice, the things you say, the way your eyes move, that thing you do with your mouth when you’re annoyed. I love your hands. I even love the way you wreck your own jokes by laughing before you get to the punch lines. I love you, okay? If I didn’t love you so much, I’m not sure any of this would be happening.”

  My face was burning. My eyes were tearing up. “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said right back, and then, not letting go of my eyes with his own: “Can I tell you now?” I nodded. I felt safe with him again. At least, for now.

  He was a soldier in that war, he began, in the city with the flat roofs, the one he’d dreamed about, the one where the buildings were the color of sand.

  I told myself he was describing a dream, but he talked about it as if it were real. As if he were remembering something that had happened to him just the other day.

  He told me that it was hot and dry in a way he’d never quite experienced, and he was sweating under his body armor. “We were heading into an apartment building,” he went on. “We were looking for someone, a guy in hiding. It looked like the neighborhood was deserted, but we knew there were snipers. We knew there were people inside the buildings too. They hid when they saw soldiers.”

  “It sounds like a movie,” I said, because I had to say something. I had to remind myself that it couldn’t be real.

  But I immediately wished I’d left it alone. Lucas broke away from me, moving his gaze out toward the headlights shining on the scary woods, and said, “Juliet, I can read Arabic.”

  I honestly thought I’d heard him wrong. And at the same time, I felt my insides clench, as if they were being squeezed by an invisible hand.

  “In the dream, there were signs on the stores and stuff. You know those swirly lines with the dots and stuff? That’s what Arabic looks like.”

  “I know what it looks like.”

  “I didn’t realize I could read the signs until last week. I woke up from the dream and found myself thinking about this blue-painted storefront. And I knew it was a bakery. I knew what the letters said.”

  “You’ve had this dream more than once?”

  He laughed bitterly. “I’ve been having it over and over again. All fall. And it’s killing me. I can’t describe what’s so terrifying about it, but I wake up with my heart beating so hard it’s like I’ve got an animal trapped in there or something. My whole body is soaked in sweat.”

  “You can read Arabic.” By stating this simply, I was giving him a chance to hear how ridiculous it sounded and take it back.

  “I can speak it a little too. Want to hear some?”

  “No,” I said, pressing my fingers against the tops of my cheekbones, where I felt a sudden pressure.

  “ ‘Hello’ is as-salāmu ‘alaykum,” Lucas told me. “Shukran is ‘than
k you.’ I think the one I knew the best was Lā atakalam ‘arabi. It means ‘I don’t speak Arabic.’ ”

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to put my fingers in my ears, but I didn’t. If I admitted the outrageous ideas coming out of Lucas’s mouth scared me, I’d be admitting there was even a chance that they could be real. There wasn’t one.

  “And the other day,” he went on, “in math, I caught myself worrying that the body armor I was wearing might be defective, and I was like Wha—? Where did that come from? But then I realized I knew where. There would be this rumor that some government contractor no one wanted to piss off had cut corners. It drove us crazy.”

  “But that wasn’t in the dream.” I was thinking that if I could find holes in his story, I could make him stop believing before he made me begin.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m not always dreaming.”

  “So you’re adding stuff to the dream,” I said. “It’s changing?”

  “Juliet,” Lucas said. “I don’t think it is a dream.”

  He gave me a few seconds to take in what he meant, but as they ticked by, I realized I was going to need more than seconds. A minute? A year? A lobotomy?

  “This is what you’re afraid is going to make me get out of the car and walk home?”

  Lucas nodded.

  And here’s the thing: it didn’t make me want to get out of the car and walk home. It scared me so much I couldn’t think of going anywhere. The windshield had steamed up, and it occurred to me we wouldn’t be able to see if anyone was coming toward us. I locked my door.

  Lucas took my hand. His palm was damp.

  “Every time I wake up, I remember more.” His voice was husky, the words tumbling out faster and faster, like a runaway car heading downhill. “The memories come out in flashes. I can remember a Thanksgiving when I ate turkey out of a can, but I can’t remember why, or where I was. I remember the day I enlisted, but I don’t remember basic training.”

  “How do you even know there was a basic training to remember?”

  Lucas shrugged, embarrassed. “I just do.” Then: “You know Sanjay Shah?”

  “The freshman?” I asked, even though there was only one Sanjay in our school. I knew him because he’d signed up for newspaper so he could write a column on hip-hop, and resigned after Robin Sipe had explained that 1) freshmen covered student council meetings and JV sports, and 2) no one in our school listened to hip-hop. “I know him a little.”

  “Well, I don’t know him at all, but two weeks ago I was hanging out in the library, thanks to you, and I ran into him by the magazines. I realized I knew his name. I knew that he has a little sister. I knew what his mom looks like. And I knew that his house is going to burn down.”

  “His house burns down?” I repeated dumbly.

  “To the ground. This year sometime. I remember the family loses everything.”

  Here’s what I was thinking: Not true. Not possible. I was thinking that this was the sign that Lucas had to be wrong. No one could tell whose house was going to burn down and when.

  “I’ve even approached him, like, three times to tell him. But every time I get close, I’m like, What the heck am I doing? He’s not going to believe me. No one would believe me.” He looked at me, suddenly pleading, hopeless. “You love me and you don’t believe me.”

  Believe him? How could I when I didn’t even understand what he was trying to tell me?

  “Do you remember anything else? About that fire?”

  “I remember that it happens when it’s cold out. I remember looking at the house afterward. It was completely destroyed. I remember staring at the charred boiler. The cement slab where the garage was. How parts of their car melted onto the driveway, so you could see this bubble of colored plastic where the brake lights used to be.”

  These details didn’t sound like things you could just make up. “Can you remember anything else like that? What about something from the news? Something that’s specific to a particular time?”

  He smiled sheepishly. “You know I’m not the biggest current events guy, not like you. But I did remember this thing about Newt Gingrich.”

  “The Contract with America guy?”

  “I guess so. The other day when you were reading the paper in the library, I remembered something that happens years from now. I must have been on a train or a bus or something and someone had left a copy of the New York Times behind. I picked it up and there was an article about what Gingrich was up to, and I swear I remember thinking, Juliet isn’t going to like this.”

  “You remember thinking about me in the future?” I said. “What else do you remember about me?” I wasn’t any closer to believing him, but I was getting curious. A story doesn’t have to be true for you to want to find out what happens. “What happens to me?”

  He suddenly clammed up. “I don’t really know,” he said, frowning.

  “You don’t know?” I squinted at him, not letting him off the hook. “Or you just don’t want to tell me?” I was seized by panic. “Lucas, does something bad happen to me?” He looked pained. “To my mom?”

  “No!” he said. “You’re fine.” But I guess he could see that his answer wasn’t satisfactory, and he took pity on me. “If you have to know, we break up.”

  “Oh.” And it wasn’t like I thought we were getting married or anything. It was just that this news that there was a very clear expiration date on our relationship—even if I didn’t credit the source—made me feel funny. And shy. “When?” I asked.

  “When you go to college.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  I wasn’t sure, but I shrugged.

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know exactly when, but I remember writing you an email.”

  “An email?” I said. “Like, on a computer?” My dad had email at the hospital. I’d listen as his modem dialed in once a day when he checked it. And I think my mom’s museum had it too, an account the administrative offices shared so they could communicate with museums in Europe when the fax was down.

  “Computers get really different,” Lucas explained. “But yeah, an email breakup wasn’t cool. I remember thinking that we should break up in person but being too pissed off at you to care.”

  I said nothing. I didn’t want to hear about Lucas being pissed off. About Lucas not caring. I reminded myself … this wasn’t real. This couldn’t be.

  “Something else I remember,” Lucas went on. “I stopped by the MEPS the other day and I had this flash. You know those little offices in the back? I remembered that the one I went through when I enlisted was the second one, and then I remembered that my dad was in a chair out in the front, where you can still hear all the mall music and smell the Cinnabon. And I remember that my mom didn’t come. I remember that she was upset with my dad, that she made him move out. That they separate and eventually get a divorce.”

  “Lucas,” I said. Couldn’t he see that he was mourning a loss that existed only in his head? “It isn’t possible for you to remember things that haven’t happened yet. This can’t be true.”

  “Christmas!” he said, plowing forward. “You’re going to give me a watch with my initials and the number seventeen”—his jersey number—“engraved on the back.”

  And I guess it just goes to show how desperate I was not to believe him that the fact that I had just ordered that watch at the jeweler’s the week before—and there was no way Lucas could have been aware of that—did nothing to convince me.

  “I’m wearing that watch in the desert dream,” he went on, tapping his wrist with two fingers as if he could feel the phantom watch there still. “I must have kept it.” He smiled ruefully. “It sure took a lickin’.”

  I swallowed. “Lucas, I don’t believe this. I can’t.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Jules, I’ve told you. I don’t believe it either,” he said. “I mostly sit around listing the zillion ways it can’t be true. But whether or not
you or I want to believe it, it’s happening. It’s real.”

  My mind was whirling, looking for some way to convince him. “Maybe I was right before,” I said. “Maybe this is just a psychological thing. Have you thought about that? It could be fear. It could just be that you’re afraid to join the marines, so you’re having anxiety dreams.”

  Lucas gave me the withering look he reserved for our more heated conversations about the marines. “I didn’t hate being a soldier, Juliet.”

  I rubbed a circle in the steamed-up window so I could see out.

  Lucas leaned across me to crank the window down an inch. Practical as the gesture was, his body felt good on mine, heavy and reassuring. He was here. That was a fact. No matter what he thought or said or imagined, we were in the car now. I was sixteen years old. He was seventeen. Those facts were incontrovertible.

  “The first memory, the memory of kissing you on the roof—it came to me that day in physics. When you looked at me, I remembered kissing you. It wasn’t like I was just thinking about doing it, or wanting to—I swear to you, Juliet, I knew I’d already done it. I knew I’d kissed you up on that roof in the dark, leaning against the bulkhead. I knew you were wearing a dress and that it was cloudy. The memory kind of knocked me out for a second, it was so strong.

  “I told you you were wearing a dress. I could have told you you were wearing my jacket on top of it, about the wall we were leaning up against. I could have told you what those bricks felt like against my palms. I could have told you that it had just stopped raining. I could have told you I had a vodka shot in a Capri Sun. I think I’ve been carrying that memory—you—in here.” He thumped his chest. “For years and years.”

  That was when I opened the car door. I stood up in the cold, damp night air. The woods were still there, the headlights shining on the brambles and the mess of crooked, fallen trees. I felt myself breathing heavily. I remember hugging myself, my back up against the car. I so wanted not to believe Lucas. I felt like a fool. I had told him I loved him, and now I didn’t know who he was.