It was taking all my concentration to keep from crying. So I didn’t explain how wrong she was. I just sat there, trying to transform my face into a perfect blank. Val closed the door.
Lucas’s headaches continued to get worse, and apparently the only thing that helped besides double-dosing himself with ibuprofen was drinking.
So my memory of that winter consists of a string of parties. We went wherever the hockey team was getting together, because the hockey team was Lucas’s ticket to alcohol. The hockey team did tequila shots in strange kitchens. The hockey team drank out of a funnel. They shook up beer cans to the point of explosion, punctured them with ballpoint pens, popped open the tops, and nearly drowned themselves with the spray. I watched the hockey team throw up in rhododendron bushes. I watched them pick fights with each other. I saw Nunchuck snap a pool cue in half and use the sharp ends to slit the upholstery on a chair.
I don’t know if I could have survived if Dex and Rosemary weren’t always there. They helped me drag Lucas away.
One time, Lucas, Rosemary, and I were sitting on landscaping boulders outside a house where a party was raging. Dex was batting a tennis ball against the garage doors. He was showing off for Rose, who studiously ignored him. She was draped across the boulder next to the one Lucas and I shared, wrapped in a puffy jacket, her legs stiff in jeans and boots, as if they belonged to a mannequin. She looked into the distance, seemingly focused on the low clouds in the sky.
“Why donchu give the guy a break,” Lucas said to Rose, slurring his words. “Look how hard he’s working to impress you? Why not shpread a little love?”
Rose gave Lucas a look that he was too drunk to understand. Gesturing toward him with her thumb, she said to me, “You’re not letting Prince Charming here drive you home, are you?”
Dex stepped away from his handball game to back Rosemary up. “Yeah,” he said, standing just behind her. “Back off, Dunready.” And then, as if the idea just occurred to him, he wound up and threw the tennis ball straight at Lucas, hitting him in the shoulder.
“Oh, you did not,” said Lucas, and he fished the ball out from under a bush and chased Dex off the driveway into the woods behind the house and then back onto the driveway. Without moving from her rock, Rosemary put a leg out for Dex to trip over as he passed. Sure enough, Dex stumbled, then took a few boxer’s steps in Rosemary’s direction.
“You want a piece of me too, do you?” he said, shaking the long hair out of his eyes, leaning over her like he wanted her to stand up and fight.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rose said. “I want to play handball. You up for a game?”
And he was. Like one of Rosemary’s mom’s dogs, he sat up and barked when she called his name.
Lucas was not so easily trained. Winded from his sprint, he went to sit down next to me but missed, landing in the bushes instead.
“I feel like someone cracked my skull open with a rock,” he said from the ground. “I don’t think I can move.” And he couldn’t. In his helpless, drunken flailing, his jacket sleeve had caught on a branch. I would have laughed except I could see that he was scared.
I unhooked his jacket and got him to his feet. “It’s okay,” I said, bringing him to me. He was trembling. He held on to me like he wasn’t able to stand on his own. “You’re safe here,” I said. “You’re safe with me.”
He took my hand and squeezed so hard that I had to pull it away. I rested it on his cheek. I forced him to look at me. “Where are you?” I said. “Come back here. Come back to me.”
His eyes refocused, his breathing slowed. He shuddered. “You fell in the bushes next to Tim Marconi’s garage,” I went on. “You’re drunk but you’re okay. It’s high school. You know that, right? You’re still seventeen.”
He nodded and staggered back to the rock. We sat down.
“Is it—is it the dream?” I asked. He’d told me he’d sometimes get stuck inside images from the dream even when he was awake.
He nodded again, and I held him there, kissing his cheeks, holding his face in my hands. Even drunk and frightened, he was beautiful. I loved feeling the shape of his bones beneath his skin.
“What makes it so terrifying?” I ventured. “That it seems so real?”
Lucas shook his head. He rubbed my thigh with his palm, as if I were the one who needed steadying. “It’s not knowing who or what we were looking for,” he said, whispering. “Why we were there. No one explained it to us. We were just bodies.” He laughed, and I watched him without understanding the joke. “Our job—a soldier’s job—is to take up space and not die. But even so, that building—I remember wondering how they could send us in there. It was a death trap. I could guarantee you that everyone who lived on that alley was hiding inside, some armed with IEDs they’d made in their kitchens out of tea tins and roofing nails.” He pushed his hand through his hair. He was shaking again.
“Lucas,” I said. “I’m looking at you. It’s 1994. You’re seventeen. Don’t you see? You don’t need to be scared right now.”
But it was like he couldn’t hear me. “There were stairs, Jules.” He nearly choked on the words. I saw sweat along the line of his forehead, even though it was winter and we were sitting outside. “Switchbacks. Endless switchbacks.”
I pictured the fire stairs at my dentist’s office complex. Every time I took them, I felt like I was in a chase scene from a movie, my footfalls echoing on the concrete steps, my fingers scraping on the iron railing where rust had eaten through the paint.
“Do you know what it’s like to lead a squad up eight flights of stairs?” Lucas went on. “You’re looking at sixteen opportunities for someone to jump you. Sixteen chances not to get a straight shot. We were rats in a maze. Blindfolded rats. Rats waiting to die.”
I held his hand. I stroked his face. “You’re here now,” I said.
“You believe me, right?” he asked.
“I do,” I told him. And I wasn’t just saying that. I believed that what he was telling me was real.
Over and over, I reminded Lucas that his vision didn’t have to be his future. Sometimes he found this comforting. Sometimes he would let me talk him down from the nightmare. Other times he took it as a sign that I didn’t believe what he was saying.
“George Bush, okay?” Lucas burst out once. We were supposedly doing homework in the breakfast nook in my kitchen, but we’d gotten on the subject of Lucas’s dream.
“What?”
“He’s the next president.”
“George Bush already was president.”
“No, not him. His son. George W. I just remembered. No one will think he has a chance, but then he’ll win. Or sort of win. There’s this huge freak-out over whether he actually got elected legally, and for a month after the election no one knows if he’s president or not.”
I stared. I swallowed hard.
“You know how that guy tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York last year but everyone was fine?”
I nodded.
“He comes back. Or someone just like him. It’s horrible. All these people—office workers, maintenance guys, people who work in the restaurant on the top floor—they all die.”
As he let this point sink in, he lifted his arm to scratch the back of his neck, his loose-fitting gray T-shirt pulling away from his arm. I loved the way his muscle curved in at the elbow, the way his skin was soft and smooth just there. How could someone so beautiful be the source of such terrible news? Couldn’t he be wrong? Couldn’t that not be true?
“Lucas,” I said. “Please stop.”
He did.
But the dream, the memories, the headaches kept coming. One unusually warm day in February, Lucas took me back up to the gym roof and we stood at the parapet again, watching the kids streaming toward the parking lot, the locker rooms, jobs, buses, after-school activities.
The skin on Lucas’s face was drawn tight over his cheekbones. There were dark circles under his eyes. His mom had noticed his headaches; she’d conf
ided in me that she thought they came from stress—the stress of his approaching enlistment, of his parents’ impending divorce. She didn’t know about his dreams. She didn’t know he was afraid to fall asleep at night, that he was waking up thinking he was in danger and could not forget what he had seen.
“We started to go up the stairs,” he told me up on the gym roof that day. “Inside the apartment building. I remember a baby crying and a teakettle whistling, but like I said, everyone was hiding, so it looked deserted. When we looked in the few doors that were standing open, the apartments appeared to be empty, as if all the people who lived there had cleared out suddenly. But we knew they were still there, that the beds, the curtains, the closets, whatever, were crowded with them. You could smell them.”
Lucas put his hands on the edge of the parapet and pushed on it, as if he had the power to move concrete. “I think I felt it before I heard it,” he said. “The plaster was ripping itself out of the wall next to me.”
“Ripping itself?” I could feel his pain, the fear, as if I’d been there beside him.
“That’s what I thought, until I realized it was bullets striking just inches above my head. I ducked and they stopped. I don’t remember signaling to the guys behind me, but I do remember looking down the stairs and seeing them all crouching. There were windows at the landings, and I’d been right in front of one.”
I wanted to cover my ears. I didn’t want to hear any more. But Lucas needed to tell me. I could see that. He needed me to leech the pain away. “Did you? Did you get shot?”
“No. I was okay.” He put my hand on his heart. “But this thing was going crazy.” I could feel his heart beating now, strong.
“What if you don’t join the marines?” I said. “You can get a job that keeps you outdoors. You can become a hockey coach or a wilderness ranger. You can be a farmer.”
“My uncle Ray’s a farmer,” Lucas said. He was back to smirking—I was always glad to see any sign that he was his old self, even if that sign was his dismissing my idea. “My dad told me Uncle Ray makes, like, ten thousand dollars a year.”
“Why aren’t you taking this seriously?” I said, pretending to be annoyed, pushing his shoulder, hoping he’d push back. But also? I was annoyed. Why couldn’t he decide not to enlist?
Lucas wrapped his arms around me, buried his head in my neck. “I’m not not taking it seriously,” he said. “It’s just that taking it seriously hurts.”
“It hurts?” I said. “I know your head hurts, but you’re saying you can feel … an idea?”
He broke away, sat down on the pebbly surface of the rooftop. “I don’t know how this works, okay? I don’t know the rules, if there even are any. All I know is it hurts. Thinking about change hurts a lot.”
“But just imagine it,” I said. I bent down, forcing him to look me in the eye. “Imagine us married. Imagine—I don’t know—kids. A minivan. Whatever.”
“I think about it constantly,” he said. “All I think about is how much I want to be with you.”
“You do?”
“And all I get for my efforts is pain.”
“So it really hurts right now?” I said.
“Yeah,” Lucas said, grimacing as if to show me. “It hurts a ton.”
At a party, Lucas, Rosemary, and I ended up in a hot tub with this senior girl who was drinking vodka out of a Gatorade bottle she’d been carrying around all night. Rosemary gestured to the senior girl in her bathing suit, the Gatorade, Nunchuck passed out on the patio furniture—it was like we’d stepped onto the set of Risky Business. “This,” she whispered, “is ridiculous.” I agreed, but I liked the ridiculousness. I liked that it was something Rosemary and I could both see without spelling it out. I liked that we were laughing together. I liked the feel of Lucas’s leg next to mine in the warm water, his hand on my knee.
He slung his arm around my shoulders and gave me a sloppy wet kiss. “I want you to know,” he announced to Rose and to me in the tone of a drunk, “I’m going to fix this. I’m going to make this stop.” Rose had no idea what he was talking about, of course, but I did, and when Lucas and I were in Dex’s backseat, headed home, I whispered, “So … you’re not going to enlist?”
He pulled away. “No,” he said. “I have another idea. I can’t tell you. I have to work it out more in my head. And I can’t promise anything. The whole thing will be a giant experiment.”
And I let it go. Later, I wished I’d forced him to tell me more.
At the end of February, Rosemary and I were in the 7-Eleven parking lot with hot cocoa on the brain when Rosemary put a hand on my arm. “Stop,” she said. “We can’t go in there.”
“We can’t?”
“I just saw Jason.”
I could feel my eyes widening. If you can scream and whisper at the same time, that’s what I did. “Here?”
Rosemary nodded.
“What is he doing here?”
“I have no idea.” You should be able to guess, though, I thought. Ever since Aruba, he’d been calling a lot.
“Are you sure it was him?”
“Maybe?” Rosemary said.
We decided that since Jason had never met me, I’d go into the store and try to figure out if it was him. Rosemary said I could tell by looking at his left wrist. He wore a braided leather bracelet—she said he never took it off.
This 7-Eleven was pretty big. There was a circular counter in the center for the cashiers. Off to the left was the to-go food—with counters for coffee and tea, the Slurpee machines, shelves of sandwiches, yogurt, and drinks. On the right there were aisles of chips, magazines, pantyhose, replacement windshield wipers, and gallon jugs of washer fluid.
I felt like a spy as I noted a dark head of hair in the mayonnaise, cereal, and dish soap aisle.
But the man reading the ingredients on a box of Honey Nut Cheerios was way old. He was wearing a suit with the tie loosened. He could have been forty. Or sixty. It was hard to tell.
“Can I help you?” he said when he caught me staring.
“Um …” I turned in embarrassment. But then I spotted another dark head of hair, clear across the store by the coffee. Trying not to appear to be hurrying, I made my way over to the doughnut case and pretended to study the options, every now and then sneaking a look at the guy busy reading the tea bags and then putting them back.
That had to be him. He looked rich and young. He had thick, dark eyebrows and conservatively cut brown hair shot through with streaks of blond. A strong jaw. Broad, square shoulders. Everything he was wearing looked like it had just been washed and ironed.
And the tea drinking confirmed it. I mean, a guy our age drinking tea is weird, right? And so was Jason. That had to be him.
But when he reached with his left hand for a cup from the dispenser, the cuff of his shirt pulled away from his wrist: no bracelet.
Rosemary had said left wrist, hadn’t she? I turned from the doughnut case, walked past the checkout and through the double doors, and rounded the corner of the building, calling out “Which wrist did you say?” before I realized that Rosemary was not alone. Standing close to her—way too close—was yet another male figure with dark brown hair. Compared to the cute guy inside, this new version of what it took my brain a full minute to understand was the real Jason was a mess.
He looked to have a few days’ growth of beard, and he was wearing a thin gray sweatshirt that hung off his shoulders like it hadn’t been washed recently. His dark hair was shaggy in the back and long over his ears. But because he was leaning against the open door of his car, one elbow cocked, the loose fabric of his sleeve had slid down and exposed his wrist. His left wrist. Where I could see a braided leather bracelet, plain as day.
“Are you Juliet?” he asked, and smiled in a way that was a little sad and a little scary at the same time. There was something about his eyes that made me wonder how long it had been since he’d slept.
Rosemary looked at me and shook her head slightly to let me know that I shouldn
’t answer his question, presumably because she had this under control. “What are you doing here, Jason?” she said, her jaw tight, her arms folded over her chest.
Jason blinked hard, but he didn’t shift his gaze. He was still looking at me like he was hoping he could read something in my surprise, get access to information that Rosemary wasn’t giving up.
“Well?” Rosemary said, stepping between us. Finally, Jason met her gaze.
“I just want to talk to you,” he said. “You aren’t answering my letters, and I can’t get through to you on the phone. Did Aruba mean nothing to you? How can you not want to see me again? I thought maybe if I drove to your house—”
“My house?” Rosemary said. “You mean the one where my parents live? My dad will call the cops on you.”
“You could introduce me,” Jason said. “I mean, I’m not a bad guy. He might like me.”
“Jason, you aren’t my boyfriend.” I could hear the frustration starting to crack through Rosemary’s calm. “I’m not going to introduce you to my parents. I’m not going to talk to you on the phone. It’s over.”
“No,” Jason said. “In Aruba, see—”
“I do see,” Rosemary said. “I see that you’re acting crazy. You have to stop calling.”
Her words were harsh, but maybe they were what he needed, because suddenly, Jason was standing up straighter. He tucked his chin like he was literally swallowing her words. “I guess I should go,” he said.
Rosemary nodded. She didn’t relax her jaw. She uncrossed her arms only to put her hands on her hips. As she did, her half-zipped hoodie shifted slightly. At her neck I could see the glint of a gold chain. She was wearing Jason’s necklace.
I saw Jason notice it only a half second after I did. This was bad.
“You want me to go?” he said, smirking now. “It’s what you really want?” Later, Rosemary swore she hadn’t heard any kind of smirk in Jason’s tone. After all, she pointed out, he probably saw only the chain. Without the diamond, how could he be sure?
I Remember You Page 13
