“If you don’t mind,” said Dr. Katz to Lucas, “I’d like to continue my exam.”
Lucas nodded as Dr. Katz asked him to bring the fingers on his left hand together with those on his right and follow Dr. Katz’s penlight with his eyes again and again and again.
Watching Lucas alive and healthy in that moment did nothing to comfort me. I knew without question that somewhere, at some point in the future, my Lucas was gone.
I backed out of the room, saying goodbye to no one, not even waiting to hear what more Dr. Katz would say. I couldn’t stay there, surrounded by everyone’s joy, a moment longer.
I’d forgotten about my mom, though. She caught up to me as I was heading for the elevator. “Juliet?” she said.
How much of what I felt inside showed on my face? Could she read what was there?
“You’re leaving now?” she asked. I opened my mouth to make some excuse—that I was sick, that I suddenly remembered some homework I’d left undone—but I came up with nothing. Like Lucas, I felt myself gulping air, gasping with the effort to breathe. I collapsed into tears.
My mom held me as I sobbed. She’s shorter than me, and I stooped to lay my head on her shoulder, the fingers of her delicate hands smoothing my hair as my body shook. I never told her—not even years later—why I was crying. But I believe on some fundamental level she knew.
Maybe she, like Lucas, had been able to see into the future. Maybe that was what she’d been trying to tell me all year, that my heart was going to be broken, and that I could have no idea how bad it would feel. But that she did. She’d known what was coming and she was there for me. I didn’t have to be there alone.
I couldn’t have imagined I would need that kind of comfort from her. And perhaps pride would have prevented me from accepting it if I had been in a position to hold back.
I wasn’t.
The sobs seemed to come from a bottomless well. I felt them stretching my mouth until I thought my lips would crack. My jaw ached. Mom held me tight, her tiny body surprisingly strong, murmuring over and over, “I know, sweetheart, I know.”
It is amazing what you can forget. But it is also amazing what you can remember.
Home from the hospital, I drank a glass of warm milk, changed into my pajamas, got under the covers, and slept. I woke around midnight when Lucas called. He’d been moved to a room with a phone.
“Where did you go?” he said. For a second, hearing his voice, having him get right to the point, I felt my heart leap. How could Lucas not be Lucas? I must have been mistaken. “You didn’t say goodbye.”
I squeezed the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger, hoping it would keep me from crying.
“Juliet? You there?”
“There were so many people,” I said. “The room felt too crowded. I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen.”
That was when Lucas told me about the shift change, how the monitor in the nurses’ station had accidentally gotten turned off. “The nurses said you were the one who called them in. If you hadn’t been there, I would probably be brain-dead or something now.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Lucas snorted. “You saved my life.”
Later, I’d go back and take in the momentousness of that, but just then I was focused on a different train of thought.
“Have you remembered anything yet? From before you went to sleep?” He said nothing. “Lying on the bed with me?” I prompted.
“You mean at my house? Last fall?”
A cold bubble of disappointment rose into my throat.
“Do you remember your dream yet?” I asked instead.
“No,” Lucas said.
“Iraq?” I pushed him. “The alley? The flat-roofed buildings?”
“Why would I dream about Iraq? Why does this matter, what I dreamed?” I couldn’t see him, but I could almost feel him shudder, and it was the shudder that I clung to—my last hope. Maybe there were still traces of the paths his other self had taken? Like Dr. Katz had said, the memories are always there, you just lose your ability to reach them. Maybe after a night’s sleep …
“You must be wrecked,” I said.
“I just want to get out of this hospital. I don’t understand why they won’t let me go home.”
“They will,” I reassured him.
And I guess backing off the questions gave him the space to talk, because after a minute of my telling him about everyone at school calling him Head Fake and other stuff he’d forgotten, he said out of nowhere, “It’s terrifying, you know? Waking up to find out you’ve been sick but you can’t remember? And everyone thinks you’re crazy.”
“You’re not crazy.”
He was quiet for a moment, and during the pause a nurse came in. I heard him answer her question about headaches and dizziness. When she was gone, he said quietly, almost like he was talking to himself, “Before I woke up, it was black all around. I felt trapped. Kind of like the time I fell through the ice when I was little.”
“Oh, God,” I said. And suddenly, I just wanted to leave Lucas alone. I didn’t want to take him back to the scariest memory of his life, of being trapped in freezing water, the surface he was trying to pull himself onto breaking under his weight like a cracker, the skates that were supposed to be the best thing that ever happened to him pulling him down, and no one he could call for help. I knew now how it had felt for him to die.
“Lucas,” I said. “Oh, Lucas.” I was crying now.
“It’s okay, Jules,” he said. “I’m here.”
But he wasn’t. As much as I wanted to believe him, I knew he didn’t understand.
Here’s a letter that probably doesn’t often pop up in the advice columns of teen magazines:
Dear Random Magazine Editor,
There’s something I need to tell my boyfriend, but I’m not sure how to bring it up. You see, until a few weeks ago, he was a spirit inhabiting a younger version of his own body. Or not a spirit, exactly. He wasn’t dead yet; he was just seriously injured, dying at some point in the future. His younger self was able to access memories from his future self, connecting to his thoughts across time and space until his older body died.
Makes perfect sense, right? Okay, maybe it doesn’t, but I promise you, it’s all true. I’m not writing to ask if you believe it, anyway.
Before his future spirit disappeared, my boyfriend knew he was going to join the marines. He was going to die in a war. A war that hasn’t happened yet. And now that he can’t remember this anymore, I’m tortured by questions. What I want you to tell me is this: Should I tell him? Should I beg him not to enlist? How can I make him believe me when I am so convinced no one in their right mind would that I’m not even going to mail this letter?
Sincerely,
Confused
Forget mailing it; I never even sat down to write it. Advice letters are just not me. I don’t even read the magazines that print them. But I thought about those questions all the time. I thought about writing to someone, asking for help. Who could I turn to? My mom—and raise her suspicions? Since the day she’d held me as I cried in the hospital, I’d noticed her staring at me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. She’d been suggesting I go visit my dad, and when I reminded her that I couldn’t exactly miss school during my junior year, the one colleges look at most closely, she, who was always so enthusiastic about my education, would say things like “What? They have schools in California.”
And Rosemary? I hadn’t told her about Lucas’s delusions before he went into the hospital because I hadn’t thought she’d believe me. Why would she now?
Lucas was discharged from the hospital two days after he’d flatlined and revived. He wasn’t allowed to climb stairs or go to school, but even just sitting on the couch, we had fun. I couldn’t stop touching him, reaching for his hand, tucking my head into the crook of his elbow. We watched Beavis and Butt-Head, The Simpsons, a new channel, the Food Network, that featured this young chef named Emeril.
We
ate all the microwave popcorn Tommy was supposed to be selling for Boy Scouts.
A photographer from the local paper came to take Lucas’s picture.
I taught Lucas how to make the friendship bracelets I taught the little kids how to make at camp, and he made me an anklet.
All the neighbors dropped off casseroles and we ate ourselves sick on lasagna and tuna noodle.
For a week, Mrs. Dunready set her alarm for two-hour intervals during the night and woke Lucas to be sure he didn’t drift too deeply into sleep. They were both exhausted. She joked it was like having a newborn again.
His dad moved back in, supposedly so he could get Tommy and Wendell’s breakfast (toaster waffles) and, when the casseroles ran out, dinner (more toaster waffles) while Mrs. Dunready slept on Lucas’s clock. But Lucas believed that his dad’s moving back in meant the separation was off. “It’s disgusting,” he said, sounding pleased. “I heard them laughing. The other night, my mom said she needed some fresh air and was going to walk around the neighborhood and my dad went with her. They were like a pair of senior citizens or something.”
I tried hard to remember what Lucas had said. That his parents got divorced? Or just separated for a little while? The distinction mattered. Was the future not set in stone?
All the doctors except Dr. Katz lost interest in Lucas’s case once it was clear he was out of danger. They said he was allowed to go back to school, but I still went home with him to make sure he was okay. Rosemary gave us rides, as Lucas wasn’t allowed to drive yet.
Then Dr. Katz said Lucas was okay to be left alone. He was okay to drive a car and to sleep through the night. But still no hockey. That was when I thought he was probably well enough for me to tell him why he had to stay away from the marines.
But I didn’t.
I thought about bringing it up after a round of aggressive thumb wrestling on the Dunreadys’ couch (Lucas cheats). I thought about it while sitting on a bench in his backyard on a suddenly warm early-spring day, the moisture from the ground soaking through the soles of the old pair of sneakers I was wearing.
I thought about it when Rosemary showed me and Lucas the latest batch of Jason letters she’d had to hide from her parents and said, “I wish he never even existed.” I thought about it when Lucas and I were on a bit of a sugar high after buying Tommy and Wendell a package of Oreos and eating most of them ourselves.
I’ve lost track of all the times I opened my mouth to explain, or to ask if any of what he’d told me sounded familiar now, or to try to let him know that there was much more to the story than just the parts everyone was talking about. But there was something sharp, something worried, about the way Lucas looked at me. He was guarded, even when we were playing games or watching TV or listing the fifteen CDs we’d bring with us to a desert island or the top ten disaster movies of all time. It was like he sensed that I had something to say and knew he didn’t want to hear it. So I kept waiting. And as I did, the shell of his not-knowing grew thicker, felt harder to crack.
I didn’t have much time. His eighteenth birthday was coming up. And since he could drive but not play hockey, Lucas began spending more afternoons hanging out at the MEPS in the mall, counting down the days until he could sign up.
We fought.
“How come all the marines they profile in this brochure end up owning their own businesses?” I said while we were eating sundae cups in his car after he taught me to parallel park in preparation for taking my driving exam. “Are they impossible to hire? Do they have problems acclimating to work environments where it’s not okay to settle disputes with your fists?”
Lucas rolled his eyes.
“What about the ones who end up in prison because they can’t reacclimate to society after being in the military?” I said. “How come there’s nothing in here about the ones who turn out to like prison because it reminds them of living on a base? Where do they talk about all the chemicals soldiers were exposed to during Desert Storm?”
“Are you jealous?” he teased. “Because you can’t serve in combat? Admit it—handling a rifle is your secret fantasy. You’re a closet gun nut.”
Lucas still had the power to make me laugh. Really hard.
But laughing or fighting, he wouldn’t talk about the marines for real, as if by engaging in a sincere conversation—no matter where things went after that—he would be conceding whatever point he believed I was trying to score.
“Look at this,” I said one time when Lucas picked me up after a visit to the MEPS and there was a folder of information “for parents” in the backseat of the car. “See this list of frequently asked questions? Every single answer tells you to ‘contact a recruiter.’ Look here. They tell parents that every man deserves a chance to serve his country. What’s your mom think about all this?” I said.
“She thinks it’s great,” Lucas said, his mouth a straight line after he told this lie that he was halfheartedly trying to pass off as a joke. And then, as close as he ever got to taking me seriously: “She’s made her peace with it. It’s part of having my dad back home. So you can see, it’s good.”
It wasn’t good. “Is she going to go down to the recruitment office with you and take pictures as you swear the oath of service?” I said. The brochure said there was a room set up for this at the MEPS.
“Somehow,” he said, his voice short and clipped, “I don’t think she’ll find the time.”
While we were arguing, we were still often holding on to each other. Talking about the brochures in the car, Lucas didn’t take his hand off my leg, where he’d casually draped it. Another time, sprawled on the porch furniture at Nunchuck’s cousin’s beach house, I laid out all the ridiculous defense-spending numbers from the federal budget. I was leaning against Lucas’s arm and he had one leg wrapped around mine.
In the school newspaper office, I’d look up from my table a dozen times, hoping to see him swaggering into the room. And he often did. He would usually be waiting for me when debate practice was over.
He could still make me shiver just by looking at me. He teased me; he tickled me; he’d come up behind me, push my knees forward with his so I lost my balance, and then reach his arms around in front and catch me just before I fell.
He was still friendly beyond reason. Strangers smiled at him. Waitresses gave him free drinks. Kids in our school, kids on his team—they liked him. I liked him.
And … this is important for me to remember. Lucas still loved me. He would still run his finger down this little curve just beneath my rib cage and say, “This is my favorite part of your body.” I would finish saying something that seemed perfectly innocuous, and he’d say, “I just don’t know anyone else like you.”
I remember the last hockey game of the season. Lucas was finally allowed back on the ice. Out of loyalty, Coach O’Reilly put Lucas in the starting line. I guess he felt sorry for Lucas. But Lucas’s errors were costly. It was like he’d forgotten about passing. Every time he got the puck, he went in for a score, and he wasn’t enough of a player for that to work out in the team’s favor.
That was new.
On the Saturday night after that game, when he was still under strict orders from the doctor not to drink, to be home by nine, to take it easy, Lucas decided to hang out with the team and drink himself into a stupor.
“Why don’t we just rent a movie and go to your house?” I said.
Lucas said, “No way.” Later, I’d realize he was frustrated by the way he’d played, by the limits of his mysterious brain condition. But at the time, his anger felt personal.
He said, “We don’t always have to be together, you know,” and I felt as if he’d slapped me in the face. How could someone who said he loved me lash out in that way?
Monday, it was like that conversation had never happened. We held hands in the hallway. He kissed me in the front seat of his car. He came over after school and we did our homework together on the floor of my bedroom, then chopped the onions while my mom cooked dinner.
Before he’d gone to the hospital, he used to hold my face and just look at me, like he was trying to sear an image into his brain. He didn’t do that anymore. But he knew me; he knew the best parts of me, the private self that no one else except maybe Rosemary and my mom could see. I could look at him across a room and know that he knew I was me.
And also that he was going to die.
Every year at the beginning of April, my mom goes through closets. It has something to do with spring-cleaning, except she doesn’t do spring-cleaning. (We have a service; the rooms are as clean in June as they are in March.)
But she does care about closets. And when it comes to closets, my presence is required. So here we were, on the second Saturday in April, tossing things I’d outgrown into a pile with sweaters that had lost their shape, cotton pants that had shrunk in the wash, shoes that had worn thin in the soles, scarves that had felt right at the craft fair where she and Val had purchased them but looked a little too craft-fair-y once they’d brought them home.
The decisions were exhausting. Eventually my mom unearthed a Toblerone bar and we split it and a Coke, sitting on the front step of the house, where I had waited for Lucas that first time he came to see me.
Because the houses in our neighborhood are small, it has always been a neighborhood of families just starting out. Over the years, we’d given up on knowing anyone’s names, noting when they had new babies, or paying much attention when they moved out to the inevitable big house with a more modern kitchen. But that day, as we watched the kids on bikes, their helmets bobbing up and down as if their heads were balloons tied to the bike handles with strings, I thought, Where did they all come from? What was the point? Weren’t they all just going to grow up, fall in love, have their hearts broken, and die fighting in wars?
Confronted with the same view, Mom must have reached a very different conclusion. “You know,” she said, speaking with her mouth full, gesturing to the kids with her chin. “It’s a good life these people are making here.”
I Remember You Page 18
