He got out too and came around to my side of the car, offering himself. He could have pulled me toward him and I would have gone, but he let me decide. He was looking down, and his face—what I could see of it, the tip of his chin, the line where his forehead met his hair—was ghostly white.
I moved as close to him as I could without touching him. “Juliet,” he said. “I think I’ve come back here. From somewhere far away. I don’t know how. But I do know why. I’ve come back here for you.”
My mom always says that she fell in love with my dad’s intensity, but in the end, it’s what drove them apart. As I’ve gotten older, she’s explained more. If he was frustrated at work, he couldn’t speak to her, she told me. At home, he’d be stone silent in the evening, eating like a robot, then marching upstairs and lying on the bed until his brain had worked out a new theory or potential solution. Otherwise, he wouldn’t move or speak until morning.
He hasn’t changed. When I visit him every summer, he doesn’t stop working. My choices are to hang out in his house, surfing cable and reading magazines, or to join him at the hospital, putting on a white coat and following him on rounds, where I’m introduced as a student—probably not in line with hospital regulations, but doctors like my dad tend to do whatever they want. Mostly the residents, nurses, interns, students, orderlies, and even the patients go about their business without seeming to notice me, but some ask me questions like I’m an adult. When I tell them I’m planning to be a lawyer one day, they make jokes about how I can sue my dad. The hospital is pretty cool, actually, once you get past the whole everyone-here-has-cancer aspect of his job.
But there’s only so much hospital observation I can take, and one morning a couple of years ago, I set my alarm for three-forty-five and waited for my dad in the little rock garden he has instead of a lawn because he doesn’t want to take care of anything. When he came outside and saw me shivering in the chilly darkness in my shorts and high-tops, he figured out pretty quickly what I had in mind. Without speaking, we ran together, my dad slowing his pace to match mine. I remember there were still stars in the sky. We ran on the beach and through the streets of his little town, and though my dad is not the kind of guy who will admit he likes company, that afternoon he came home from work with a pair of real running shoes in my size.
Now when I run, I channel my dad, his way of thinking. My thoughts organize themselves into a rhythm that actually helps me to keep running. And the morning after the Fall Ball, a little rational analysis was definitely called for. I pulled my hair back into a ponytail, threw on a light fleece and leggings, and headed out while my mom was still pushing buttons on the coffeemaker.
But my thoughts kept stopping me. I’d remember something Lucas had said the night before, or the way I felt when he was talking, and it was like someone had just tied sandbags to my ankles. I actually walked part of my route, feeling stiff and short of breath.
Back home, my mom told me that both Lucas and Rosemary had called. I didn’t call either one back. I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, hopped on my bike, and took off.
When I’m in the library, I feel the way I imagine Lucas does in the MEPS—like the physical space holds the secrets of my future. The books tell me what has happened in the world, what might happen to me, what I can become.
I love our town library in particular. I love the way it smells of clean carpet and furniture polish and the dust-meets-chemical odor the microfiche readers emit. I love the librarians’ low voices, the muted thumping of the wood chairs against the tables, the water fountain gurgling politely just inside the door.
That morning, I headed straight for the card catalog, where I identified Library of Congress subjects that led me to other cards in other drawers and eventually to a new computer system that used keyword terms to find articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post as well as books. I searched “war + Iraq + snipers.” I searched “head injury + hallucinations” and learned that the proper term for what Lucas thought was happening was “delusion.” I saw medical terms I’d learned from my dad combined with concepts like “recovered memory,” things I’d read about in the news.
When I prep for debate, I take all the research points I’ve organized on index cards and arrange them in patterns, grouping them around facts, assertions, logical conclusions, and links. I make them into a web, a well-thumbed dictionary, a map where lines of inferences lead me from fact to fact to fact.
I did that now, only without index cards, the points of evidence organizing themselves in my brain alone. They were too complex to write down. There were too many lines. I knew they all led somewhere, but I wasn’t yet sure where.
I looked up stuff I’ve heard physicists on Nova try to describe—about the way the universe bends backward and things happen to space and time. I paged through magazines the librarians pulled from archived boxes in the back. I gathered research points on ghosts and memory and time travel. I Xeroxed stuff. I underlined. I jotted down facts in a notebook. I read. And read and read and read. I left my research only when I was so starving I had to go outside to wolf down my sandwich.
It was already dark, and when I checked my watch, I saw that it was after four in the afternoon. I shivered, hugging myself in my too-light jacket. Snow had started to fall. This wasn’t the first of the season, and the leaves had been off the trees already for weeks, but this time, it felt like winter.
When I got home, my mom informed me that Lucas had called again. I didn’t call him. Instead, I got back on my bike. I wore my ski goggles under my helmet and a scarf. I looked like the Red Baron, and I found myself laughing out loud at this idea as I rode.
I needed Rosemary, I’d decided. I would tell her everything. Finally. She was my best friend. I should trust her, not Lucas. I should be honest with her.
And I would be honest. I would explain how Lucas could read Arabic. About his crying in his sleep. I would tell her how he remembered the dress before he saw the dress. I’d tell her how he said his parents were going to separate. About the watch. About the fire at Sanjay Shah’s house. I would tell her about the dreams. The buildings with flat roofs in a city the color of sand. The war. Everything I’d learned in the library. I would tell her how Lucas struggled not to tell me. How he tried to run. How I hadn’t let him go.
She would read over my notes. She would give me an A-plus for research. She would know what they meant. She always knew; she was always sure. She would decide whether Lucas was crazy. And then she would tell me how to save him.
Rosemary lived at the top of what everyone called Mansion Mountain in a white house with columns. The rooms in the front had high ceilings, dark rugs, white couches, heavy drapes at the windows. These rooms were for guests and Rosemary’s rich grandparents, the ones who spent their winters in Aruba.
In the back of the house, it was all tennis and dogs. Tangled leashes and worn collars, chewed-up tennis shoes, tennis balls rolling around under cabinets, dogs rolling under chairs, sleeping with tennis balls grasped gently in their mouths. Tennis balls crowned the mail pile, held up a broken table leg, mixed with the apples and oranges in the fruit bowl, and even, bizarrely, took pride of place in the door of the fridge where the ketchup and salad dressings are supposed to go.
The tennis court itself—of course the Fields have one—was in the yard behind the pool and the flower beds, and when I got there, Rose had just finished playing a game with her dad, who was now taking on her little brother under the lights. On weekends, he would do that, play one kid after another. The snow meant nothing. The Fields played tennis all year round—in the winter, Dr. Field put a plow attachment on the riding lawn mower and cleared the court. Rosemary and her siblings got enlisted to follow behind, pushing off the remaining puddles with a broom.
I met up with Rosemary under the pergola next to the court. She wiped her neck and face with a gym towel and shrugged into a warm-up jacket.
“We need to talk,” I said, all business.
�
�No kidding,” she said. “I’ve been calling you all day.” She poured us each a hot cider from a samovar on the same table where ice water was served in the summer, then gestured to a pair of chaise longues. I sat, my legs wrapped in a wool blanket with a Wimbledon logo, and watched Rosemary’s little brother, Patrick, failing to hold his serve. Being at Rosemary’s house—being with Rosemary period—was like stepping into another world.
“So?” she said.
And in spite of the fact that I’d been rehearsing this conversation in my mind for the last hour, I found I didn’t know what to say. I looked down into the steaming mug between my hands, watching the tiny bubbles trapped in the foam burst one by one.
“Juliet?” Rose prodded.
Flushed from tennis, she sat sideways on the chaise with her legs spread apart, her elbows resting on her knees, the towel still in her hands. There was snow falling behind her, caught in the lights shining down on the court, and as I looked at her—registered her athletic sureness, the solidity of her world—I realized she was going to think I was crazy.
“So what happened last night? Did you and Lucas break up?”
“No,” I said, but had we? With Rosemary asking so directly, I wasn’t sure of even this basic fact. Last night, I hadn’t told him whether I believed him. He’d stood away from me outside his car in the church parking lot, and when he could have pulled me toward him, he hadn’t. He’d waited for me to make a move. He’d left the decision up to me. And I hadn’t made one.
But maybe this was me making one now: “He’s mad at me about the marines.” For a second, I was so surprised at the lie that had come out of my mouth that I just sat there, letting the words settle. Then I continued. “I keep trying to get him to understand that he’s throwing his life away, and he told me I had to stop or we would have to break up.”
Did Rose know I was lying? She looked at me straight and even, shaking her head. “Don’t let him blackmail you,” she said. “You get to have opinions.”
She knew I was lying. I’m sure of it. But I think she also knew that there are times to confront your friends and times to give them some room. She changed the subject. “Did I tell you?” she said. “Dex is a huge dork. Listen to this. Last night, we got to the supposed party at Nunchuck’s and nothing was going on. Dex had gotten bad information. We ended up at 7-Eleven for Slurpees at one in the morning. He bought me a Snickers bar and then he ate it.”
“That’s kind of … sweet?”
“Yep,” Rosemary answered, meaning no.
And then Rosemary lay back on the chaise, looked out at the lights shining down on the court, and held her hands out in front of her as if she was asking the universe a question.
“It looks like fun, what you and Lucas have. I guess I just wanted that too.”
I stared. Rosemary and I have never been the kind of friends who become clones, who go for that let’s-be-twinsies double-dating thing. She was talking about something deeper.
“Okay,” I said. “But Dex?”
“Like I said, it looks like fun,” she went on. “But me, with Dex? It wasn’t fun. Big surprise, right? You have to feel it for real.”
“At least Dex isn’t a stalker like Jason,” I tried.
“Actually, I should tell you …,” Rosemary said, her voice trailing off. “I talked to him this morning.”
“Who? Jason?”
“I don’t know what came over me. He always calls on Sundays because I once told him that I don’t go to church with my parents. I knew it was him and I picked up the phone anyway.”
“Rosemary!”
She pulled her long, straight ponytail over her shoulder and began to inspect her hair for split ends. “I was bored!
You abandoned me to high-school-boy hell. And Jason’s not that bad. The necklace was romantic.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, and she dropped her ponytail. “Rosemary, he’s crazy.”
“I know, I know. It was a mistake. Jules, he was so gross,” she went on. “Soooo desperate. And you know what I noticed? All he does is tell me how much he misses me, but when I open my mouth to say something, he doesn’t even listen. He just starts in on how much pain he’s in. Him, him, him.”
She laughed. And then her sigh, which was sad, opened a window. A window for me to speak through. Or maybe jump out of.
“I told Lucas I loved him last night,” I said as fast as I could. And wished immediately I’d spoken even faster. I wished I’d said it so fast that I could get credit for telling her without having her actually be able to understand. “I told him I loved him, and I meant it. Which I thought would be scary, but wasn’t. What is scary is that I realized last night that I couldn’t handle it if we broke up. If something happened. If I lost him.”
I was expecting her to be horrified. But instead, all she said was “I’ve never felt that way.”
“Then maybe you’re lucky,” I said. “Because I feel like I’ve somehow lost control. I have no power over whether or not I’m happy.”
Rosemary sat up again and lifted her cider to her lips. Blowing on its hot surface, she said without looking at me, “I hear you.”
“You do?”
“I’m sort of jealous.” She raised her eyebrows in a gesture that acknowledged the persistent irony of life. “But at the same time, I can see what you’ve gotten yourself into, and it’s not good, Jules. I’ve been worried about this for a while. You should break up with him.”
“Break up with him?” I honestly was wondering if I’d misheard her.
“Isn’t that why you came over? To get me to tell you that?”
“No!”
“Come on.”
“Breaking up with him wasn’t even remotely on my radar.”
“But, Juliet,” she said. “How can you not break up with him?”
I didn’t say anything then. I was trying not to get mad at Rosemary, but here’s the thing: I was getting mad at Rosemary. I’d thought she could save Lucas, not get rid of him.
And what if she was right?
I thought about the pages and pages of notes I’d taken that day. I’d been so thorough, keeping my handwriting legible and even, my bullet points logically ordered into headings, quotes, subpoints. I’d kept careful track of the sources I was citing. I’d felt all day that I was making sense of what was happening. But maybe I was just using all that paper and ink to avoid the cold, hard truth: Lucas was crazy. And I was crazy too for not walking away as soon as I knew.
Rosemary put her mug back down on the bricks. She was staring at me like she’d just figured something out and wished she hadn’t.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s nothing.”
“Come on.”
“Okay,” she said, and sighed. “I’ll tell you because it’s plain as day to me and has been for some time. This guy is going to break your heart.”
My mom was already in her bathrobe, drinking sherry and eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream when I came in the back door. As it always did after I’d been at Rose’s, my own house felt small.
My mom looked positively lost inside her fleecy white robe. And for the first time in maybe my whole life, I thought to ask: What in the world had happened to my mom after my dad left? How had she let her world get so predictable and safe? Didn’t she want … well … more?
There must have been something in the way I was looking at her that she could read, because she squinted at me hard and then she said, as if she were joking, and also as if she were picking up a conversation where we had left off, “It would be fine with me, you know, if you just never grew up at all. No one here needs you to move on.”
I was grabbing books out of my locker after homeroom Monday when I heard two kids talking as they passed me on their way to first period. “—a freshman?”
“Yeah. He goes here.”
“That kid whose house burned down?”
Robin Sipe was a few steps behind them. “Hey!” I called to her. “What’s going on?”
“You didn’t hear?” She was talking fast, the way she does when she’s nervous before a test or working on a story for the paper. “That little freshman who wanted to write a hip-hop column,” she said. “Sanjay Shah. Juliet—his house. Last night, it burned down. In two hours, the fire was that hot. Everything they own is gone. They’re lucky they got out alive.”
“Sanjay Shah’s house burned down.” With each word, I was trying to grab hold of something, to gain some control over what I was hearing.
“Didn’t you notice the smell this morning?” Robin continued. “He lives right near here. Go out on the football field—you can still smell the smoke. That’s my lead. I’ll write the story. We can move some stuff around to make space for it on the front page.”
I shook my head. I felt myself falling back against my locker, then scooting down into a squat, right there in the hall, my back pressed up against the cool metal. The bell for first period rang. “Hey,” Robin asked. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t, but I nodded.
Sanjay. I barely knew him, but suddenly, he’d become hyperreal to me. What would it feel like to be standing in the street in front of your burning house, shivering in pajamas, knowing that life as you knew it is over?
What would it be like to be Lucas, stumbling over memories of a future no one else could see?
And then it was no longer Sanjay Shah in my imagination, shivering in his pajamas. It was Lucas locked out in the cold.
Lucas wasn’t in physics. He wasn’t at lunch. After school, Mr. Mildred asked me to stay late to go through some back issues of Foreign Affairs, but when he saw the look of abject panic on my face, he took his question back without making me come up with an excuse.
Rosemary gave me a ride home, and I sat for a minute in the car before I got out.
“You know, Jules,” she said, staring ahead and trying to sound neutral, like she was preparing a general observation on the nature of life. “Guys can be dicks. You can’t stop that. But what you can do”—she paused here for dramatic effect—“is not make yourself vulnerable to their dickishness. Don’t open yourself up to the pain.”
I Remember You Page 10
