I Remember You

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  I hadn’t seen Lucas in four days because of the ski trip, and now it looked like I wasn’t going to see him that day either. I wasn’t going to see anyone, as a colleague with four-wheel drive had given my mom a ride to work.

  I lay in bed with my knees pulled up to my chest, feeling the return of the fear from the mountaintop. In physics, Mr. Hannihan told us the earth is spinning at a rate of a thousand miles per hour. “Imagine an amusement park ride moving that fast,” he’d said. “Isn’t it crazy that we don’t feel a thing?” It was gravity, he explained. There are rules that govern bodies in motion, bodies in space.

  But maybe those rules didn’t always apply. A thousand miles per hour is awfully fast—how are any of us supposed to hold on?

  The phone rang. Lucas: “I’m coming over.”

  “What?” I said. It was a good ten miles from my house to his, and his car was not okay in the snow.

  “I’ve got cross-country skis.”

  He hung up fast, and then there he was, about an hour and a half later, standing on the snow-covered porch of my house, his cheeks burning red to match his red fleece vest, the sleeves of his chunky wool sweater rolled up to show off bare arms above black gloves, his cargo pants hanging low on his hips. He was sweating, his hair was tousled, he was breathing hard, and his eyes were bright when I stepped out into the sunshine to greet him. I breathed in his smell, the muskiness, the sweetness on his breath, the damp wool of his sweater, and I could barely stand to breathe out. I wanted every molecule to stay with me forever.

  I think Lucas was feeling the same thing. He has large hands and strong arms, and without saying anything, he used the full force of them to press me against him. I looked up into his face and he leaned down to kiss me. His skin was rough and his breathing ragged.

  Struggling with the releases on his ski boots, Lucas moved through the front door, still kissing me. I had my back up against the wall, and Lucas was pushing up against me, kissing me harder now. All I wanted was to kiss him back. I felt my breath catching. I wasn’t thinking about anything but getting closer to him. He had his hands under my sweatshirt, on the naked skin of my back, and I wanted to strip off his vest and his sweater, to feel what his chest would be like on mine.

  Stumbling, holding each other, we moved upstairs.

  I wish that I could say I’d planned it, that we’d talked about it, that I’d taken the requisite trip to Planned Parenthood my mom made me swear to years before. I’d always imagined that my first time would be premeditated, that I would be deliberate about it and not rush into something I would regret later. We used a condom and everything, but still, I didn’t decide. I just let it happen.

  And the moment after, with the sun streaming around the closed shades, the softness of the bedsheets, the quiet of the house, everything was settled. The fear was gone.

  I opened my eyes to find Lucas watching me. Part of me wanted to hide from him. I didn’t want to wreck the moment by saying the wrong thing, by making a statement that would move us away from the place we were now. But once I locked eyes with him, I couldn’t look away, and I didn’t want to.

  We lay in my bed under the covers, the windows bright with reflected snow, my stuffed animals pushed to the side, the blue quilt and the white-painted bed frame just as they had always been. It was perfectly quiet, the way it can only be when it has snowed, with cars off the roads and the blanket of white an acoustic cushion. My cheek was resting on Lucas’s bare shoulder, his arm wrapped snugly around the small of my waist. He was looking at me, straight into my eyes. We were smiling at each other. I think. I barely knew what I was doing with my face, only that I felt happy in a way that went so deep I was sure just then I would feel happy forever.

  I said, “Do you remember if we ever felt like this? Before?” I spoke my question as quietly as I could while still allowing Lucas to hear. I wasn’t sure he was going to know what I meant, but I couldn’t stand to be more specific. I leaned my nose into the soft skin just below his shoulder and breathed.

  “It wasn’t like this,” he said. “It was never, ever like this.”

  “So what was it like, that time?”

  We were still lying in my bed, but now we were eating pancakes from a shared plate. We’d made them together while our feet froze on the linoleum kitchen floor, and then we’d raced back upstairs.

  Lucas speared a hugely syrup-saturated bite with his fork, held it in front of his eyes like he was inspecting it, and said, “What do you think? Could I get more syrup on here?” I giggled and sank deeper into the pillows. And then, as if the entire course of our relationship had not been dominated by unanswered questions, he began to talk.

  He talked as we finished the pancakes. He talked as we set the plate down on the floor. He talked as the light changed in the windows, as we ran downstairs for cups of tea, apples and peanut butter, tuna sandwiches, Oreos, toast. I asked questions and Lucas answered them. He talked and he talked and he talked some more.

  What remains with me from our conversation is images and short bursts of story. Lucas could only remember the parts that had stuck with him for some reason, those memories that are like souvenirs you pull out to look at time and again.

  As he shared one memory after another, I began to realize something. Maybe it should have been obvious, but I hadn’t thought of it before.

  I realized that what he remembered was not guaranteed to happen the same way again.

  Most things, Lucas said, were the same. The way he felt when he was around me: a lifting in his chest, a happy shortness of breath. But other parts of that “time before” had been different. And it wasn’t just that our first kiss had taken place months earlier. Or that this time we had his terrifying secret between us. Lucas himself was different. He was more careful, more appreciative of what we had.

  And I was different too. Or at least, Lucas said I was. The concept was beyond my comprehension—I mean, Lucas’s extra memories were changing him. Fine. But how could I be different when I couldn’t remember anything but the time we were living in now? “Please,” I found myself saying over and over. “I think all of this would be a little easier to understand if you stuck to specifics.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “I’ll try.” He said he remembered my bedroom, my house. He remembered sharing an apple bite for bite with me on a sunny afternoon in his car. He remembered a fight we had over his not coming to watch a debate tournament. He remembered the way I smelled. (“That’s a good thing,” he clarified after I gave him a look.) He remembered the way my hair felt in his hands, how protective Rosemary had been.

  “She’s not protective now,” I said.

  “Last time, she didn’t like the way I treated you. This time, she’s afraid you’re in too deep. She’s afraid she’s losing you. She’s afraid you’re going to get hurt.”

  Lucas remembered that I got him to study a lot more. “My GPA went up a whole point,” he said.

  I shrugged. “This time, mine has gone down.”

  He told me the way I look when I study hadn’t changed. “You go radio silent, as if everything and everyone around you has ceased to exist. I remember watching you, thinking how I could never do that. I got jealous, the idea that you could be so absorbed by something that wasn’t me. But I don’t think of it that way now. Now I just see how amazing you are. What makes you you.”

  I hung on every word. I felt safe and lazy and loved.

  He remembered me crying once, he said. We were fighting again in the front seat of his car, but he didn’t remember what we were fighting about. “It was the kind of fight where you kept saying the same things over and over. What seemed obvious to you made no sense at all to me.” He told me my hair was wild, my face was blotchy. He remembered thinking at the time that maybe I was right, but something kept him from admitting it.

  “You were harder to move,” he said.

  “Move?” I said. “Like, pick up and carry?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t tell you? You used to be a bodybuil
der. You weighed two fifty in your socks.”

  I stared.

  “Kidding!” He kissed me on the forehead. “You were harder to move, like, mentally,” he explained. “You didn’t trust me. Or anyone, really. It was hard to get you to change your mind.”

  “It was hard?” I repeated lamely. I felt like he was describing my dad. Ugh.

  “Impossible, actually.” He lay back on the pillows, looking up at the ceiling, an Oreo raised like a pointer he was using to illustrate a talk. “Which is weird. You should be just the same. But you’re more open than you used to be—”

  I cut him off. I was mad at him now, and at myself. “Maybe Rosemary is right. Maybe I shouldn’t be so trusting.” I moved away from him. “I think I need a shower,” I said.

  Lucas took my elbow, drew me back toward him. Lifting my chin, he peered into my face. “You’re mad,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I’m explaining this all wrong.” I gave him a skeptical look. “Juliet, you’re exactly the same person. I’m just seeing different parts of you this time around.” He broke the Oreo in half, spilling crumbs he didn’t seem to notice, then said, “Here, open your mouth, eat this.” I did.

  “See?” he said. “That other time you wouldn’t have accepted the Oreo. You would have thought I was playing a trick on you. Now you trust me.”

  I wasn’t convinced, but I wasn’t feeling like pulling away from him again either. He popped the other half of the Oreo in his mouth and then kissed me. “Whatever happened that time around doesn’t matter. What matters is this time. What matters is that you’re the girl. I get to be with you again, the way it should have always been. You’re the one I never got out of my head. Serious. Stubborn. Driven. Smart.” He laughed. “What can I say? You’re you.” He kissed me a second time. “I can’t believe how lucky I am.” He pushed my hair back from my forehead. I think there were Oreo crumbs on his fingertips, but I didn’t care.

  My hurt feelings had melted away. I nestled back into the pillows. As long as Lucas was with me, everything was going to be okay.

  “You’re the girl,” he repeated with a contented sigh, and I felt a growing warmth in my chest. I felt like the luckiest person alive, like the earth was revolving on its axis at a thousand miles an hour, but the axis was me.

  Still, there was something I needed to know. “So what’s going to happen?” I said. This was the same question I’d asked on the phone from the ski resort and he hadn’t answered.

  Lucas swallowed. He looked away. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I have a bunch of ideas, but I think we have to wait until I get to the end of the dream to find out if any of them will work.”

  “Guess who was in Aruba?” Rosemary and I were sitting on a curb outside the 7-Eleven a few blocks from school, sharing a hot chocolate. Our school had a rule—you had to play at least one sport or participate in something called an “extracurricular physical education elective.” And this—drinking hot chocolate at 7-Eleven—was our version of the physical education elective called Winter Jogging. As long as you checked in with the coach, Mr. Agassi, who sat outside the locker room grading math homework, you could “jog” on the honor system—that is, go wherever you wanted to. Which for us meant 7-Eleven.

  “No way,” I said. “Jason?”

  “He was surfing. Everyone on the beach was watching him, and then he came up to me, and I don’t know. It was a moment.”

  “Stalker Jason?”

  “I did totally tell him it was over.”

  Sometimes Rosemary’s logic was beyond me. “You told him?” I said. “I thought the plan was to not actually talk to him at all. And where does Dex fit in here?” I don’t know why I’d made it my life’s mission to stick up for Dex. Maybe because I could see how much Rosemary was hurting him.

  “Dex?” Like she didn’t know who I meant.

  “You’re always acting like you like him. And you do. I know you do. At least a little. Admit it.”

  “Of course I like Dex. And … I like toast. I just don’t love toast. And I don’t want to always eat toast.”

  Just then, two guys in suits came out of the 7-Eleven. Even though Rose was in a watch cap and jogging clothes and sitting on the curb like a street waif, they both turned to stare. One of them could have even been thirty. Rose shook her head. “Losers,” she muttered.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, and thought, for probably the hundred millionth time, that I had no idea what it was like to be her.

  “So what happened with Jason?” I said, sighing, ready for the story.

  And she told me how she’d snuck out of the cabana after her parents thought she was asleep. How Jason was waiting for her at the tiki bar on the edge of the beach. How there was live music. How everyone was in their twenties.

  Jason kissed her. He wanted to see her again but she’d said no. She wanted to leave the magic moment between them just as it was, frozen in time, etched into polished stone.

  Rosemary’s and my jogging route back to school took us by the charred remains of Sanjay Shah’s house, and we stopped to look. Rosemary put a hand on my shoulder for balance and lifted her foot to stretch her quad.

  “Dex gave Sanjay his old bicycle,” she said. “He fixed it up, put a new chain on it, new tires. He used his landscaping money.”

  “Poor guy,” I said.

  “He’s not suffering!” said Rosemary in a tone of exasperation. “God, Juliet, you act like Dex is some kind of victim, like being my friend is some kind of mental torture.”

  “I meant Sanjay.”

  “Oh.”

  Tuesday. It was my mom’s take-a-donor-to-dinner night. Lucas and I were up in my room. And by the time we heard her steps approaching the door, it was too late. My mom was home early. She knocked.

  How I wanted at that moment to be dressed, to have my hair not tangled and falling out of a ponytail, for Lucas’s shirt to be tucked into his pants, his pants back—well—on. How I wanted to be able to say “Come in!” breezily and carry on the charade that we were very busy up here doing our homework.

  Because when I said “Give me a minute,” I felt that something more solid than just a closed door came to stand between my mom and me. I heard the embarrassment in her voice as she said “Oh.” Then, as understanding dawned: “Oh!” Then: “I only wanted to let you know I’m home. But I don’t need to! No need!” I don’t know if I was imagining it or not, but I think at one point she might have said “Oh, boy!” I am sure, however, that she was upset. And that she fled.

  That weekend, dinner with Mom at a restaurant downtown: halfway through the meal, she took a sip of wine, pursed her lips, opened her mouth to speak, paused, then finally said, “I’m worried about you.”

  I could feel my eyebrows shoot up to my forehead, heat come into my face.

  “I don’t want to make you mad, and I trust you,” she said. “But I worry. I worry you are losing yourself.”

  I held my breath.

  “Lucas is a wonderful kid,” she went on. “But …” She reached across the table and took my hand. “But you are a wonderful kid too. You—Juliet, you.”

  “Is this because of the other day?” I asked. It came out sounding more defensive than I meant it to.

  My mom shrugged. She took another sip of wine. “It’s that …” She waved her hand in the air. “All those hockey games. Juliet, you were never even remotely interested in hockey before, and now … But it’s not just hockey. It’s that you seem so … obsessed with him. Like all your priorities have changed. You’re so far away.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m right here.”

  “What I want to tell you, Juliet, is—I just want you to remember that you have your whole life ahead of you.”

  “But I don’t,” I said. I could hear how hard and cold my voice had become. “My life is right now.”

  She stared. I never talked to her this way. I could see growing hurt in her eyes. But I felt like I had to keep going. It would be more merciful to be clear
.

  “I’m not you,” I went on. “I don’t want to always be careful. When I look at the way you live, I want to go out and rob a bank or something.”

  “I was just saying—”

  “After Dad left,” I said, cutting her off, “you gave up. Talk about letting a man dictate your whole life. The way you are—you and Val—it’s like you both signed on for early retirement. Are you jealous or something that I actually have a life?”

  “Juliet—” my mom started, but I held up a hand.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it. And don’t try to turn me into you.”

  Her eyes opened wide in surprise. She lifted her arm, and for a fraction of a second I thought she was going to strike the table like a judge ordering silence in a courtroom. But she only signaled the waiter. “We’ll take the check.”

  She didn’t speak in the car. She was angry, I could see that. When we got back home, she told me she was going for a walk.

  I was camped out in my room when I heard her come in an hour later. Then I heard Val’s car arriving, and then Val’s flat-footed step in the hall. She knocked. I braced for a lecture, even though that wasn’t Val’s style. But Val just said, “Oh, you’re still here? Your mother was starting to wonder.”

  I shrugged. The sight of Val’s spiky hair and honest eyes made me suddenly wish I could take back everything I’d said, go downstairs with her and my mom, make our traditional Saturday-night sundaes, pretend I was younger.

  “Want some ice cream?” Val said.

  And I did. I really, really wanted ice cream. I wanted to stay up with them and watch Saturday Night Live. I wanted to be the self I was before Lucas, before his secrets, before everything had gotten so complicated. Or at least, I sort of wanted that. I didn’t want it enough to give Lucas up.

  So I just shrugged.

  “You won’t believe me when I say this,” Val said as she turned to go. “But I know what you’re going through. We’ve all been there.”