I Remember You

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  There might have been a time pre-Lucas when her comment would’ve made sense to me. Or a time when it would’ve made me mad. Even the day before, I probably could have summoned the energy to respond with sarcasm, saying something along the lines of “Maybe you should give that advice to Dex.”

  But in the mood I was in now, I just nodded, thinking that she was probably right but it was too late for me. I was beyond help. I was already in too deep.

  Once inside, I proceeded through my afternoon as if on autopilot. I brought my usual snack—Wheat Thins and a Diet Coke—upstairs. I sat on my usual spot on the floor, my back against the bed, my books spread out around me. I opened my notebook. I was supposed to be writing a paper on The Scarlet Letter, but I couldn’t think of a single word past “In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, images of New England as a wilderness …” What? I wondered. Images abound? Images tell the story? Images give us the impression that the place is still wild? I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

  When the doorbell rang, I ran downstairs so fast one of my feet nearly slipped off a step. Breathless, I yanked open the door. It slammed into the wall. I think something broke. Like, the wall. Then there Lucas was. He looked exhausted. Pale. Was he sick? His eyes were red and his lips looked strangely swollen.

  He leaned forward like he was trying to home in on a distant radio signal, then put a foot up onto the threshold but didn’t put his weight on it. “Come in,” I said, and took a step back to give him room to enter. There was a stiffness to his gait as he swung his body inside.

  “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “Sore from practice.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Okay,” he conceded.

  “You skipped school.”

  “My head hurts. It’s been hurting all day.”

  “Sanjay?” I said.

  “I know.” Lucas leaned against the wall right under the stairs, as if he didn’t have the strength to make it into the kitchen.

  “Lucas—” I started, but he cut me off.

  “If you want me to take it all back, I can try,” he said. “I don’t know if I can pull it off, but I could maybe keep the weirdness away from you.” His hands were pushed into the front pockets of his jeans, his arms akimbo. “And if you want to just break up with me, that’s okay. I’ll make it easy on you. I was thinking I should just disappear. Leave town.”

  He finished this speech and looked down at the fake brick linoleum that my mom always hated and was waiting to get the money to replace.

  “I don’t want you to go away,” I said. I reached a hand out to hold his. “I—”

  He wasn’t to blame for Sanjay, I wanted to tell him, but just then I heard the distinctive churn of my mother’s car turning into the driveway. We didn’t have time. “Will you stay?” I said. “For dinner?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Is it your headache?”

  “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s—Juliet, do you want me to stay? Aren’t you too freaked out? Don’t you think I’m nuts?”

  The engine of my mom’s car was off now. I could hear her shoes clicking on the path from the driveway. Now she was opening the back door, its rubber weather strip sucking on the floor. “I want you to stay.”

  He was still looking at me as my mom said, “Hello, Lucas!” She had a tendency to speak loudly to him, as if he were deaf. “Are you staying for dinner?”

  “Can he?” I asked.

  Did my mom see the look of relief on Lucas’s face when I asked that question? Did she notice our trembling hands as we helped her chop peppers and onions for a stir-fry? That we laughed a little too hard at jokes and were shy with each other in a way we hadn’t been in a long time?

  If she did, she didn’t say a word.

  After dinner, Lucas went home, and I managed to finish that sentence about The Scarlet Letter. Then I wrote another one, and another, until the paper was complete, typed, proofread, stapled, ready to go. I copied some debate notes onto index cards, perfecting my super-neat, tiny writing—part of winning was being able to read your own quotes on the fly. I brushed my teeth. I used my mom’s nighttime face cream. I cut my fingernails and laid my clothes for the next day out on a chair.

  Then, pulling back the covers, I found a letter under my pillow. Lucas’s chicken scratch filled only the first few lines of the notebook paper he’d written on.

  Dear Juliet,

  I guess the thing about all this, what I was trying to tell you the other night, is that I am not the same guy I was before. I am me, but there’s more. Seeing the future, seeing my future, I’m learning a lot. I won’t do things the same way again. I love you.

  If some guy shows up and treats you the way I treated you before, I’m going to break his jaw.

  But … no pressure.

  And to set the record straight, by the time I wrote that breakup letter, you were long gone. You had a good life. You had all the things you want. You didn’t need me.

  Love,

  Lucas

  Okay.

  I wept.

  Heavy, hiccuping, graceless tears.

  I buried my face in my pillow and nearly suffocated myself with sobs. Rosemary was right. My heart was going to be broken. But I didn’t care. I wanted it this way.

  Junior year. Winter term. This was the time for me to be studying as hard as I could. Like Robin Sipe, I should have been furiously editing my newspaper columns, making copies for college portfolios. I should have been mining the Sanjay Shah food and clothing drive for personal essay material. I should have been living and breathing debate. Already there had been a tournament at a high school in Boston, and during December I traveled with the team to Exeter, Providence, and White Plains.

  But none of those things held my attention. What did? Lucas. Hockey. Boys beating the living crap out of each other in the guise of an organized winter sport. That was all my brain could absorb.

  I fell in love with hockey’s can’t-look-away energy. Every game is like a train wreck in slow motion. Except it’s not in slow motion. It’s fast. And it’s brutal. Hockey players strap what are essentially knives to their feet. They carry sticks. They hit the puck so hard it becomes a bullet—it’s a lethal weapon. If not for the helmets, someone on the team would end up dead before the end of every game. Often when there was a break in play, I realized I’d been holding my breath.

  But when you’re on the ice, Lucas told me, you can’t afford to feel fear. Keeping your head in the game means not leaving yourself open to attack, not needing your teammates to rescue you—though they always will. Team is everything. It’s us versus them, and whatever you have done to the other guys—even if it involves blood—you don’t stick around to clean up the mess. Stopping, thinking—these make you a target. A liability to the team. Speed—not rules—is what keeps the players from getting killed. Just slip away as quickly as you rushed in.

  In hockey, you are looking not at what you are doing but at the puck. Where it can go, how it can get there, who can get open to receive it. You’re always seeking out this tiny black disk, and then there it is, darting off someone’s skate or appearing at the end of a stick. When I started watching games, it looked like the sticks attracted the puck, like they were magnetic and the puck made of metal. It was only after I’d been watching awhile that I could see it was the other way around. I began to understand the pushing and hitting as the backdrop for the real game, which was—and Rosemary laughed her head off when I told her this—like chess. Strategic positioning. Thinking three, five, fifteen steps ahead of where you were. Speed chess.

  Or maybe I just saw the game that way because I was always watching Lucas. He believed in passing, which was unusual for a high school player. I thought maybe I was the only one who noticed, but then I heard Coach O’Reilly commenting on it in a huddle, telling the others to look to Dunready setting himself up for the pass, “thinking,” Coach O’Reilly said, “like I t
ell you, two steps ahead of the other guy.” The coach called Lucas’s playing “real mature.”

  But the way Lucas played was more than mature. It was beautiful. Lucas was graceful and sharp; he was fast and he was subtle; he crouched, he swung himself forward, he flew, he stopped on a dime. Just seeing his name on the jersey—and his number, 17—was enough to send shivers down my spine.

  Meanwhile, in the month of December, I could have filled a book with the transcripts of conversations I wasn’t having. My mom wasn’t bringing up the subject of Lucas and I wasn’t either. Rose wasn’t mentioning Jason and I didn’t ask her about Dex. Even when I found them outside the gym doors at the top of the parking lot, their heads bowed over the shared headphones on Dex’s Walkman, I said nothing. Even when Dex got drunk and asked me point-blank if he had a chance with Rosemary, I shrugged and walked away. Lucas wasn’t talking either. He didn’t once mention his memories or his dreams. I think he could tell I wasn’t ready.

  Here’s what we were talking about: Lucas spent hours explaining hockey rules, hockey moves, hockey tradition. Rosemary’s mom adopted yet another dog, and Rosemary started carrying a lint roller everywhere, using it obsessively and pulling off another masking-tape layer when she saw so much as a single hair on her clothes. Dex got accepted early decision to Boston College, and Rosemary forced him to tell her his SAT scores. Banner news: Dex was actually smart. My mom was put in charge of the annual Christmas tree display at the museum, and I worked the coat check at the opening party. Val got buried under a company merger and we didn’t see her for weeks.

  By Christmas, this strange state of talking yet not talking and discussing without asking had started to feel normal. When Rosemary left for Aruba for Christmas break with her family, we said goodbye and exchanged gifts (winter-solstice pedicures, our tradition), pretending the silences weren’t becoming larger than the conversations, that I wasn’t itching all the time to ask her how she could be so cruel to Dex and she wasn’t thinking I had given over too much of myself to Lucas.

  Dex’s siblings and their children arrived in town, and Lucas and I brought Tommy and Wendell over to his house to play touch football with Dex’s nieces and nephews. (One of the nephews was the football. Lucas held the giggling two-year-old up in the air and Dex shouted, “No spiking!”)

  Then it was the night before I was leaving to go skiing with my mom and Val for winter break. Lucas’s family was trimming their tree, so I went over to join them.

  “My dad isn’t going to be here,” Lucas said when I got to the door—the side door by this time, since I was no longer a guest.

  “Is he working?”

  “He moved out.” Lucas tucked his chin into his chest as he gave his answer. I could see he didn’t want to talk about 1) the separation, or 2) the fact that another of his predictions had come true.

  “Are you okay?” I tried. He rolled his eyes. He shrugged.

  His mom seemed fine, at least. In fact, she was almost giddy. She had her hair up in a scrunchie. She’d brought home sushi. “Isn’t this what you eat with your mom?” she asked, and then, not waiting for my answer: “Lucas told me.” Tommy and Wendell weren’t talking about the separation, but from the way they scowled at their plates and refused to accept Mrs. Dunready’s assertions that the crab wasn’t raw, I could see that they were mad.

  Without asking, Lucas poured out two bowls of Lucky Charms and put them down on the table for the boys.

  “Next time, we’ll try tempura,” Mrs. Dunready murmured, turning up the volume when Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” came on the radio and pulling out a box of decorations for the tree. I loved seeing their ornaments: pictures of Lucas as a little boy, pinecones decorated with glitter, colored glass balls that felt brighter than the ones we used at home.

  Lucas pulled one US Marine Corps ornament after another out of the box and hung them prominently on the tree. “Must you?” Mrs. Dunready sighed, but she didn’t object any further.

  Before I left, I gave Lucas the watch. I didn’t say, “You already know what this is.” And when he said, “I promise I will wear this all my life,” he didn’t make it sound like he already knew he would. He broke our code of silence only once, when he buckled the watch to his wrist, held it away to show it off, and said, “It looks so new.”

  His present to me was a locket with pictures we’d taken at the photo booth at an arcade we went to with Dex and Rose. In one side, we were sticking our tongues out. In the other side, he was kissing me on the cheek. Engraved on the back was ALWAYS: 17.

  Skiing was something that for the most part I did alone, as my mom had never wanted to learn and Valerie, after teaching me, had given it up in favor of shopping and hitting the spa with my mom. So over Christmas break, I spent time alone with my thoughts, missing Lucas, wondering if he was all right.

  Huddled on the chairlift just after a snowstorm, I wondered if it had snowed back home. I wondered if the landscaper who gave Lucas work in the summer had called him to help clear and plow—Lucas had said he might. I imagined Lucas shoveling, stripping down to a flannel shirt and snow pants, making short work of the drifts.

  But was Lucas also—at some point in the future—leading a squad of marines into a death trap, snipers hiding in doorways or behind the laundry strung up on rooftops?

  Breakfast in the lodge: Valerie’s dark, spiky hair, her red-framed glasses catching the light from the fire already roaring, my mom cozy in fur-trimmed boots, her hair blow-dried, makeup in place. A toasted bagel with jam. Dark coffee for my mom. Raisin bran for Val. Both of them talking crow’s-feet and belly fat and laughing in a way I remembered from when I was little. All of it should have been comforting, but it wasn’t. I felt claustrophobic. I wanted to go home.

  Questions about college. There was a choice to be made. There was no wrong answer. Big, small; city, country. Not too close. Not too far. Liberal arts gives you the freedom to make up your mind about a career later. It teaches you to think.

  But I didn’t want to think. Especially about college. I just wanted to ski. I wanted to escape my mom’s and Val’s prying gazes and penetrating questions. They could see I wasn’t the same; they didn’t know why, but they knew better than to ask. Even if I’d tried to explain, they wouldn’t have understood. They didn’t know what I knew. They hadn’t heard Lucas crying in his sleep. They had made safe choices. I was the one out in the cold, seeing the future through Lucas’s eyes.

  On the last afternoon of skiing, I experienced vertigo for the first time in my life. I was standing at the top of the mountain, poised for the final run of the day, and suddenly, all I could think about was falling. In fact, I felt like I was already falling, my insides dropping out as if I were on a roller coaster. I couldn’t feel my feet. I couldn’t remember how to move my legs. My skis felt about as useful as a pair of cinder blocks. I couldn’t look down.

  I was not in a good place to stop moving. It was cold, there was a strong wind, and the icy snow was stinging my cheeks. I let it, squinting at the blue in the ice, the shadows stretching over the trail as snow blew across it in sheets. The sun was sinking lower in the sky.

  Lucas, where are you? I thought. I wanted him with me. He knew what it was like to feel your heart pounding in your chest and not understand why. I understood his dream now in a way I hadn’t before. I saw it the way he did, bathed in the cold light of anxiety.

  In my fear-addled state, the images from the dream gripped me with a new intensity. It was so visceral it was as if an older Lucas, a terrifyingly real, heavier Lucas, had stepped back in time and taken hold of me. By the throat.

  The rooftops, the laundry, knowing about Sanjay’s fire—I understood why it terrified him so much. And I understood that I believed him. The memories were real.

  As if I could outrace them, I finally pushed myself forward over the crest of the hill. I skied in a way I had never skied before. I skied like I was being chased by demons. I crouched into a tuck, turning my skis as little as possible, lean
ing as far forward as I dared. My breath came quickly. Blood pounded in my ears. I could hear the edges of my skis scraping against ice. I knew if I didn’t slow myself down, I would ski into a tree or lose my balance and fall. But I didn’t slow down; I raced faster and faster, clinging to the hope that the hill would end soon.

  That night, I had a hard time getting warm. Even when I was tucked safe into the lodge, drinking cocoa with my mom and Valerie and watching sappy movies on pay-per-view—a last-night-of-the-trip tradition dating back to when I was nine—my toes were like ice.

  “Look at her,” Valerie said to my mom when they reached a pause in their conversation and glanced over at me. She was half teasing in the way she always did, and I smiled, clenching my jaw to hide my chattering teeth. “She’s growing up. She’s nearly an adult.”

  “Yes,” my mom said, and then she giggled, which is something she does only when Valerie is around. Also, they were drinking champagne. “My baby!” she called out, embarrassing me, clearly enjoying it. I gave her the eye roll she was looking for, but I wasn’t really there.

  I called Lucas later from the hallway, dragging the phone out of the room so I could have some privacy.

  “There’s something I need to know,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “Your dream,” I said, letting it sink in that I was breaking a month of silence on the subject. “Every time you have that dream, you see more. Your head hurts more. You remember more. So what’s going to happen when you get to the end of the dream? What happens when your remembering is … complete?”

  Lucas said nothing for a minute. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. Then he sighed. “But I have an idea.”

  The day after the holiday break, there was a huge snowstorm and school was canceled. For the first time in my life, upon hearing that particular radio announcement, my heart sank.