But he knew. I’d seen it in his eyes.
“I do want you to go,” Rosemary said. “It’s what I really want.” So Jason got into his car and with a roar of the engine backed out of the parking lot and zoomed off down the road. Rosemary and I jogged back to school.
I didn’t tell her how scary I thought this whole situation was getting, because I didn’t want to open the door to that kind of conversation. I didn’t want to hear how afraid she was for me. But later that night, I found myself teasing out an understanding of what exactly had gone down. I was worrying. Like my mom must have been worrying about me.
Here’s what else worried me: something about Jason’s gaunt face, his desperate attempt to hold on to Rosemary, reminded me of Lucas.
In the locker room after jogging, Rosemary had thrown her running shoes into her locker in frustration, saying, “Why can’t he see that it’s never going to happen? Why do people insist on forcing the impossible?”
I could have answered her, but I didn’t. I could have explained that until she fell in love she would never know that people in love almost always try to force the impossible. They cannot imagine letting go of what they have. Or what they wish they had.
Like Jason, like Lucas, like me, like Dex—none of us could imagine changing the way we felt. And yet Lucas had told me that for him and me, that’s exactly what would happen. We would separate. He would enlist. I would go to law school and have a good life.
It seemed impossible. I couldn’t accept that that version of the future could be real.
As I write about my time with Lucas, I find I remember so much more than I thought I would. Somehow, one memory leads to another. They don’t exist in a vacuum but rather overlap with one another, each image, smell, or sound that I recall just another link in a very, very long chain. I pull and pull and never seem to get to the end of it.
Some of the memories I can tell are important, but others surface for no apparent reason. Dex opening his locker, only to have a pile of books cascade down on top of him. He jumped back, caught a history text in one hand. Why would I remember that?
Rose spraying me with a can of Reddi-wip outside the hockey locker room after a big win, any disagreements between us about Dex and Lucas fading in the excitement of the victory.
Val dragging a coffee table she’d refinished through the front door of the house in her Shaw Festival T-shirt, spewing swearwords appropriate to a sailor.
Lucas throwing an arm over his mother’s shoulder after Tommy announced at the dinner table that he didn’t want anything for his birthday except his dad to come back home.
Are the memories we recall governed by the feelings attached to them? Is that why they stay with us? Or do we remember only what we remind ourselves of over and again as the years go by? How is it possible that some memories you’d like to hold on to slip away and others—mundane and sad alike, the memories you’d just as soon forget—stay, bubbling to the surface of your brain for no reason at all?
I remember Rosemary’s dad quizzing us on the state capitals over her mother’s cornflake chicken, horrified that we were less than two years away from college and didn’t know them all.
I remember my mom, who hates games, acquiescing to penny poker with Val and me, shaking her head in annoyance when she forgot the difference between a straight and a flush, giving me her “What have you gotten me into?” look when I threw down four kings.
A Sunday-afternoon phone call with my dad, the click of one metal ball hitting another in the toy he kept on his desk as he told me about a new protocol for fluid absorption.
Lucas waiting by my locker at the end of a school day.
Lucas tying his skates.
Lucas sneaking up on Tommy and Wendell in a snowball fight.
My memories of Lucas surprise me in dreams. They come back to me as if I just experienced them yesterday. I remember what he smelled like, how his skin felt when I touched his cheek, how I could shiver with pleasure just hearing his voice on the phone. I can see him fresh in my mind’s eye, the way he looked coming off the ice after hockey, his hair matted to his head, his cheeks red, one glove tucked under his arm as he worked the other one free with his teeth.
During a debate tournament where I was losing a round, up on an auditorium stage, in front of a crowd: one of the middle school helpers slipped a note onto my desk. I recognized Lucas’s chicken scratch right away.
Chin up.
How had he sent that note? The hockey team was in a tournament too. Lucas wasn’t here.
Except he was. All the way in the back, against the wall next to the auditorium doors. His hair was still wet. He must have rushed here between games. He lifted a hand and gave me a thumbs-up before rolling back out the door.
Early in March, Lucas and I were buying ice cream in the mini-mart of a gas station. There was a woman in front of us with a loaf of bread, two cans of tuna, and a bag of Doritos. A little girl in baggy pants and a matching tunic I later learned to call a salwar kameez was tugging on her skirt. “Hey,” we heard from behind, and turned toward the granola bar and mixed nuts section. There was Sanjay Shah. His “Hey” was for Lucas, as if Lucas was someone he would have said hi to passing in the halls.
I did a quick calculation. The woman in front of us must be Sanjay’s mom, the little girl his sister. I knew Sanjay’s family was living in our town’s one hotel, which you reached through the parking lot behind the gas station. So the tuna fish and bread—was that dinner?
Sanjay took a step closer to Lucas, and Lucas’s arm tightened around my waist. “You’re the guy,” Sanjay said to him. “You’re the one who brought back my dog.”
By now Sanjay’s mom was looking at us too. Even his sister was standing up straighter, as if eager to hear how the stranger her brother was speaking to would respond.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lucas responded, his voice deadpan, uncharacteristically unfriendly.
“No,” Sanjay said. “It was you.” He took another step closer. “The terrier, remember? Brown with black ears? The night of the fire, you came down to the fire station with him. I saw you leave him with the guy washing the truck. Where did you find him?”
Lucas sighed. “He ran down to the river. Something happened to his paw, so he couldn’t walk.”
“He had glass in it,” Sanjay said. “The vet fixed it. He said if you hadn’t found him, he probably would have been too weak to find his way up the hill.”
“Yeah,” said Lucas. “That’s what I was guessing.”
“But how did you know to look?” Sanjay said. His black eyes were flashing, his Adam’s apple sticking out like a challenge. He had the beginnings of a mustache on his lip.
Lucas shrugged. “I was down there anyway.”
“And you just guessed he was ours?”
Lucas stepped around Sanjay’s mother and pushed the quart of ice cream over to the cashier, who picked it up without looking at it. Like Sanjay’s mom and sister and me, the clerk was listening to the two boys.
“I figured,” Lucas said. “I’d heard about the fire, so I put two and two together.”
“Do you have a police scanner?” Sanjay asked. “You found the dog before the fire had even been put out. Also, you could have taken him to the police station or the shelter, but you knew to come to the station. How did you know he was ours?”
Sanjay put his hands in his pockets, determinedly waiting for an answer, but Lucas just stood there without even shrugging. “Okay,” Sanjay said when it was clear he wouldn’t get a response. He looked down at his feet, then back up. “Thanks. He really could have died.”
“Yup,” Lucas said. “I know.”
Another Lucas memory: We were at the pond in the woods behind his house. Tommy and Wendell were scraping up a fine mist of ice dust behind them as they skated quickly back and forth, their skate blades clacking on the frozen surface. Even though they were playing by moonlight, they went at it furiously, their sticks tangling, their narrow
hips checking each other, as if they were one person tripping over his own feet.
When Lucas skated out to meet them, their game became two against one. They tried to shoot against him while he guarded the net. Then he was the monkey in monkey in the middle.
I stayed to the outer edge of the cleared ice—I hadn’t been on skates in years, and I was slowly figuring out how to get my balance. But then suddenly, Lucas was behind me. He skated into me as if he were going to knock me over, but he caught me, his hands wrapped around my waist, the two of us moving forward as one. At breakneck speed.
We skated in circles around the cleared area of the ice, twisting into figure eights, Lucas holding my hands and skating backward, then coming back to join me, pushing the pace. I was pretty much screaming the whole time, but afterward I felt completely different about my balance. We could hold hands then and skate and I didn’t feel like I was in danger of falling. In the bitter cold, we skated into clouds of our own breath. Beautiful.
“Look up,” Lucas said, and there was the full moon and stars and stars and stars. They traveled so deep back into the soft blackness it felt like they were falling on us.
“I feel so small,” I said.
Lucas nodded.
“And dizzy,” I said.
He nodded again.
And this, now, I remember thinking, this was a moment, a peak moment, like the peak day of foliage I’m always waiting for in the fall. It was a peak of happiness, but “happiness” isn’t even the right word. What I felt was a connection, like a tunnel running between our minds had been opened and could never be closed.
“Maybe I won’t sign up,” Lucas said.
“For … for the marines?” I asked. “You’d do that?”
“Maybe being back here, being allowed to return, even with the headaches, maybe this is my chance.”
I didn’t dare say anything. Lucas wrapped his arms around me tighter.
And then he did this thing. Like we were figure skaters, he grabbed me around the waist and lifted me into the air. I trusted him so completely it didn’t make me lose my balance. I landed easily, and when he did it again, I lifted my arms above my head, feeling all the power of the night sky, the fire inside the faraway stars, the sheer momentum and force of my feelings for Lucas giving me the strength to hold the pose. As I landed, Lucas wrapped his arms around me and I breathed into his jacket. All I wanted was to stay like that, holding on to him in the night air.
I was sure we would have more moments like that. That they would go on forever.
I was wrong.
It wasn’t a week later that something happened with Lucas’s helmet during a game. Skating hard, he faked in anticipation of a pass and collided with a player he hadn’t seen coming. The force of the impact sent Lucas flying across the ice, and as if it had been shot from a cannon, his head seemed to separate from his body and skid across the ice, stopping only when it slammed into the boards.
But no, that hadn’t happened, I quickly came to understand. The helmet had slid. Lucas’s head was still attached to his shoulders, the side of his face pressed to the ice where he’d fallen.
Nevertheless, something was wrong. Lucas wasn’t moving. And there was blood.
The rink went silent. I could hear nothing but my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. The pool of blood was growing. Then the coach was there. The trainer too.
When I saw Lucas move, I felt an enormous wave of gratitude pass through my body. He wasn’t dead.
A beautiful thought.
He wasn’t even unconscious. The trainer was checking him, and he was responding, lifting parts of his body. I saw that he was talking. Then he started to sit up. As he skated off the ice with the trainer on one side and Coach O’Reilly on the other, I pushed my way out of the stands and through the hallway into the locker room.
I found Lucas perched on the examination table in the trainer’s room, still wearing his pads, pants, and socks, his face stained with blood, his shoulders slumped like he had lost the ability to lift them. “Are you okay?” I asked from the doorway. The trainer was holding a piece of gauze to Lucas’s temple. He pulled it away, and I got a brief glimpse of the gash at his hairline. His face was pale, and his hair was matted to his forehead, which was slick with sweat.
“Lucas?” I said. The trainer stepped away and I approached the exam table. Lucas blinked at me kind of funny, and for a second, everything I’d learned about head injuries the day I ensconced myself in the library came back to me. Were his pupils dilated? Different sizes? Did he know the day of the week? The year?
He sure was blinking a lot.
Then his face opened up into a smile. A Lucas smile—the smile of a boy who says “Hell, no” when asked if he’s planning to go to college. He beckoned me in.
“Okay, that was terrifying,” I said.
The trainer was reaching into the supply cabinet, directing Lucas to hold the gauze to his head. “That little tumble?” Lucas said.
“Do you have a concussion or anything?”
“You with your concussions.”
“Quick: what year is it?”
“Umm …,” Lucas said, like he had to think about it, like it was all a joke. “Elvis is still alive.…”
I looked down at the concrete floor and breathed. Deeper than I’d meant to.
“Are you okay?” Lucas asked, lifting my chin. I laughed.
And Lucas winked.
Lucas’s mom took him to the doctor that night, but he was back in school the next day. He looked different, and it wasn’t just the bandage at his hairline where two stiches had gone in. He seemed … looser. Happier. He kept laughing for no reason. I turned around in physics to catch him stretching luxuriously, as if he were waking from a deep sleep, not recovering from a head wound.
His good mood lasted into the next few days. I chalked it up to his having survived the fall. To his feeling lucky to be alive. And to all the attention he was getting from his hockey friends, who were calling him Head Fake and going out of their way to high-five him in the halls.
Lucas did not seem even remotely curious about what had happened to his helmet, why the chin strap had broken, how it had managed to fly off his head. But Coach O’Reilly was. He phoned the equipment supplier, and by lunchtime, they’d called back and asked him to send them the helmet. Lucas was getting a free replacement. In fact, the entire team was getting replacement helmets, complete with four-color team logos and new jerseys thrown in for good measure.
A few days later, when Lucas and I were checking his practice schedule on the bulletin board outside Coach O’Reilly’s office, Coach called Lucas in to talk about the helmet some more. I waited, listening to every word through the door, which they had forgotten to close.
Apparently the helmet manufacturer claimed the chin strap on Lucas’s helmet had been at least partially damaged before the game began. Maybe Lucas hadn’t been putting guards on his skates before stowing them in his bag with the rest of his gear? The blades were sharp enough to cut into the strap.
“You’ve been using your guards, haven’t you?” Coach asked. “You don’t need me to tell you that.”
Lucas mumbled something I didn’t catch.
“We can’t have helmets flying off kids’ heads,” Coach continued. “I need to know whether to go after these guys.”
“Yeah,” said Lucas with a laugh. “That’s what my mom’s been saying.” And by laughing, he got Coach to laugh too.
It wasn’t until later that I realized he hadn’t answered Coach’s question.
After debate practice, I met Lucas at his car, where he was listening to music. Metal. I could hear how loud it was even before I opened the door. “Doesn’t that hurt?” I shouted, touching my temple because I wasn’t sure he could hear me over the bass. Lately, because of his headaches, he hadn’t been listening to music in the car at all.
Lucas smiled the no-holds-barred grin that earned him free samples at candy counters and ice cream stands. “Not today!�
� he shouted. He was still smiling when he slammed the car into gear. He drove fast, taking curves at a speed that the week before would have made him wince in pain. Something wasn’t right.
I figured out what it was as Rosemary and I were coming back from our jog the next afternoon and I saw someone slap the side of the soda machine when it wasn’t giving back their change. I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Lucas cut the strap,” I said out loud. “He cut it on purpose.”
“What?” said Rose. She’s pretty hard to surprise, but here she was, staring like I’d just sprouted a second head. “Lucas did what?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“No,” she answered. “It’s not nothing. You said Lucas cut his helmet strap.”
“I didn’t say ‘helmet.’ ”
Rosemary put her hands on her hips. “We both know what you meant.”
I wanted to tell her she had no idea, but I just nodded and shrugged like she’d caught me, then pretended to come clean, sticking mostly to parts of the story she already knew. I’d hated lying to Rosemary all year, but right then I was so worried about Lucas I didn’t care.
I told her I was guessing that Lucas thought hitting his head hard might make the chronic headaches stop. I didn’t tell her where the headaches were coming from, how painful they were, or what was at stake in getting them to go away. “I think he figured it would be like the radio in his car,” I explained. “The one you have to hit from time to time to get it to find the station.”
“But you think he cut the strap on purpose? You think he wanted to hit his head?”
“It was just a thought,” I said. “I’m probably wrong.”
“I hope so,” she said. “He could have died.”
I attempted a reassuring smile, even as a wave of fear washed over me.
Had this been Lucas’s plan, the one he’d announced to me in the hot tub? Had the plan been to rejigger his brain? Or die trying?
After school, Rosemary dropped me at home, where I picked up the phone to call Lucas and then hung it up, remembering that there was a hockey team dinner that night. I thought of leaving a message, but the questions I wanted to ask him—“Did you intentionally try to get yourself hit in the head?” “Did you realize you could have died?”—weren’t message material.
I Remember You Page 14
