He stormed to the next hole, took another shot, got another in the hole on his first try. And on his next turn, same thing.
“What is he, a ringer?” Pete asked Rosemary.
“He’s nobody,” she said.
“No,” Lucas leaned into their conversation to interject. “He, ladies and gentlemen, is the Jack Nicklaus of minigolf.”
A couple of girls our age had stopped to watch Dex. One said something to the other behind a hand. Dex was not aware, but I saw Rosemary shoot them a hostile glare. I rolled my eyes at her. I guess I was feeling a little hostile myself. Maybe anger is contagious.
Or maybe “contagious” is the wrong word. Maybe it’s “inspirational.” Maybe seeing Dex storming from hole to hole, cutting in front of little children taking too long to set up their shots, made me see my own feelings of frustration for what they were.
Dex was sick of Rosemary playing games with him? Well, I was tired of Lucas playing with me. How could Lucas say he loved me and then drive by as if I weren’t even there? How could he not believe me about his dreams? Refuse to even consider my opinion about the marines?
Dex didn’t want Rosemary to keep jerking his chain? I too was sick of never knowing where I stood. I’d been tossing back and forth between sadness that the version of Lucas I’d fallen in love with was gone and blind attempts to pretend that he was still here, and he … he wasn’t tossing at all. He was proceeding with his plan for his life as if it had been written in stone.
But where Dex’s anger translated into flawless play, mine was absolutely debilitating from a minigolf perspective. I took so many swings and sent the ball in so many fruitless directions that Lucas started making jokes about it.
Which I seized on as an excuse to let my anger fly.
He said, “I don’t want to say I’ve found your Achilles’ heel … but I think I’ve found your Achilles’ heel,” and I turned on him, threw my club down at his feet, and said, “Don’t talk to me.”
“What—” he began.
“Don’t even look at me.” He was staring. “This was your idea.”
“Minigolf?” He was smiling as if he thought I was joking.
“All of it,” I said. “You brought me up on the gym roof. You told me you remembered me. You told me you’d come back for me.”
The smile was gone now. “Juliet,” he said. “I’ve explained to you—”
“You’ve explained nothing,” I hissed, because people were waiting to play and they were staring. “Because you know nothing. You’re throwing your life away and you’re acting like I’m the one who’s delusional.”
“Come on,” he said, holding out a hand for me in a gesture that begged for me to see reason. But I didn’t want to see reason. I didn’t want any of this. I wanted time to move backward. I wanted the old—new—whatever. I wanted my Lucas to come back.
Turning my back on him and his uncomprehending gestures, I stormed ten greens ahead to where Dex was just finishing up the course. “I need to get out of here,” I said to him. “And I don’t have a ride. Can you drive me?”
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all night,” Dex said. Without so much as glancing at the others, he started walking, leaving me to follow. I did.
I didn’t try to talk to Dex in the car. I could see how mad he was, and I didn’t want to get in his way. But when he pulled up in front of my house and broke his silence to say “I am done,” I said, “Me too.”
Dex said, “Every time she looks at me, I think, Maybe this is the time. I’ll tell her how I feel now. But I don’t even know what ‘the time’ means. She doesn’t care about me. She pretends to, but she doesn’t. Do you know what I mean?”
I did. “She doesn’t deserve you,” I said. “She’s my best friend and I love her, but what she’s doing to you—it isn’t fair.”
“I know!” Dex said.
“I haven’t said anything out of loyalty, but I’m sick of loyalty.”
“Me too. I’m sick of trying so hard.”
“I’m sick of Lucas.”
“You should be. And I’ll tell you something. About the hospital.” I was so carried away I barely registered the ping of dread that last word inspired. But I was also relieved—at last someone was talking about it.
“All that stuff you told Lucas’s mom,” Dex went on. “About his dreams and stuff. You believed it. You believed the things he’d said were real. And I know why.” Dex paused. “When you love someone like that, you’ll believe anything.”
If, two hours before, someone had told me I’d be sitting alone with Dex in his car, nearly crying over something he’d said, I would have said they were crazy. But there we were, sharing secrets. And there I was, choking up. It felt amazing to think that he had seen. That even without knowing all the details, he had understood.
“You’re right!” I said. “You should believe people. The problem isn’t with trusting too much. The problem is the people who take that trust and throw it in your face.”
“I am so sick of always feeling like a chump,” said Dex.
“You’re not a chump.”
“Thank you!”
We talked that way for a good half hour. We declared to each other that we were done being someone’s sidekick. Being the person no one listened to. But eventually the anger faded and we were left alone in the car together, feeling the other’s sadness. That was when I got out.
I let myself into the house and stood in the front hall. I was thinking. My mom was at a show with Val in New York—they wouldn’t be back until the next day—so the house was dark. I threw my keys into the basket on the mail table without turning on the lights. I was thinking about the night Lucas and I went to Friendly’s, the night he started telling me what was happening and I thought he was crazy. I was afraid of him then, but I didn’t walk away. I already felt connected. I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair, that I’d already been hooked on him. But maybe now I wasn’t as hooked as I’d once believed.
I decided I would get into my pajamas, curl up on my mom’s spot on the couch, and watch television until I was too sleepy to stay awake anymore. But when I turned to look in the direction of the couch—my hand on the light switch in the front hall—I saw something I couldn’t believe was real. I saw a person sitting in my mom’s spot already. Alone, in the dark, the TV off. When he saw that I’d seen him, he leaned forward so I could see his face.
Lucas? I thought. I guess I was expecting a ghost. But the someone sitting on my mother’s couch in the empty house with all the lights turned off was Jason.
The scream came automatically. I felt my hand grasping my throat. I knew I should run for the phone, but instead, since I was still in the entrance hall next to the stairs, I ran halfway up the flight, then crouched down, hiding behind the rails, where I could see through to the hall and the arched opening that led into the living room. I was acting on the kind of impulse that causes you to jump onto the counter when there’s a mouse in the kitchen. It was important, I thought, to get as far away from Jason as possible while keeping him in view.
“Where’s Rosemary?” Jason said, turning toward me, but staying put on the couch. Hearing his voice, I felt my panic intensify. Before he’d spoken, a small part of my brain could cling to the hope that he was just a shadow, a figment of my imagination. But shadows don’t talk.
“She’s not with me,” I said.
“No,” he said, his voice trembling. “She is. I called her house. I pretended to be some kid whose name I got out of the yearbook. Her mom told me she was with you, that Rosemary would be sleeping over here.”
I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to be paying attention to. Through the banisters I saw a copy of the L.L.Bean catalog lying on the top of our pile of mail. It was there because I needed a new raincoat and my mom had told me to pick one, but I hadn’t done it yet. Did that matter? Or was what was really important the fact that Rosemary had told her mother she was sleeping here?
A knot formed in my stomach. My breath came fast
. Ideas traveled in circles.
I saw some dust on the stairs. My mom hated that, I knew. I was supposed to have vacuumed before going out to meet my friends, but I hadn’t. Rosemary had lied to her mother. I had lied to Jason. I had lied to Rose. Rosemary was with Pete. Rose was lying to Dex. Lucas didn’t understand.
Jason was here.
Sitting in my mom’s spot in the living room.
And I was alone.
“Rose changed her mind,” I said. “She was going to sleep over but she wasn’t feeling well, so she went home.” To whose home, I didn’t say.
“Don’t bother,” Jason said. “I used to be on the inside of the game, remember? If she’s not with you, she’s with a guy.”
I think I nodded. “Want me to call her?”
I could hear the trembling in my voice, but could he? If I was calm, would I change his mood? “I could call her,” I said again. I felt like whimpering, but I made my voice go steady. “It wouldn’t take a sec.”
Jason didn’t answer me. I swallowed hard. My throat was so tight the swallowing hurt. I made a motion as if to stand.
“Sit down,” Jason growled. I sat.
Jason stood. I could see he was holding something that glinted in the streetlamp light coming through the front window. Metal. A knife?
Before I could see for sure, he sat down on the couch again and put whatever he was holding on the coffee table in front of him. In our kitchen, we had one good knife with a wooden handle bolted to a steel blade. It was the knife Lucas and I traded back and forth when we helped my mom make dinner, the only knife we owned that didn’t get stuck on the skin of a tomato.
“Do you respect me?” Jason asked.
“Okay,” I said. I’d heard his question, but I was having trouble processing it. I was trying to breathe. I was thinking I might throw up. I was wondering if that would make Jason mad or if it might make him feel sorry for me, if he’d let me go into the kitchen to clean up. Or the bathroom. Upstairs. I could sneak into my mom’s room on the way, get the cordless phone.
“Do you?”
“What?” I said. Then, remembering: “Yes. I respect you. A lot.”
Jason was quiet again, looking out the window as if Rosemary might come up the front walk any minute.
“She just won’t listen.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But she listens to you. You can explain to her. You can get her back for me.”
I didn’t point out that he was wrong. That Rosemary didn’t listen to anyone. Instead, I said, “Sure.” I said, “Just let me call her.”
“Stop asking me that!” He was really angry now. “I’m not stupid. I know you’re probably thinking of ways to get rid of me, just like Rosemary always was. But I don’t want to be gotten rid of. I want to be with someone who can appreciate me. She always said you were smart. She said you thought things through carefully. She said you were a good listener.” He was calming himself down. I could hear it. “So maybe you can help me.”
“Jason—” It should have been easy to explain to him that no one could listen under these circumstances. But then he reached toward the coffee table. And maybe if I’d screamed loud enough a neighbor would have heard. Or maybe, from where I was sitting, I could have beaten Jason in a dead sprint to the front door—it was right there, at the bottom of the steps. I could bust my way through it before he crossed the living room. But I wasn’t thinking about those things. I was thinking: Sharp. Danger. Lucas had said that in the marines, all you needed to be good at was not dying. I hadn’t understood what that meant until now.
“Rosemary likes you,” I said. “Deep down.”
“I’m sure of it,” Jason said. “In Aruba last summer, she was the one who came up to me. I wouldn’t have even tried with her, but she called out to me as I dragged my gear up the beach. She asked me what kind of board I was using. She made it sound casual, you know, like she was interested in getting into the sport.”
“But she wasn’t?”
“No,” Jason chuckled, remembering. He was calmer. That had to be good. “She told me later she didn’t know anything about surfing. We hiked up to a waterfall, which is where we got together for the first time. And she told me like she thought it was funny. She was lying to me from the beginning.”
He’d started to sound angry again, so I tried to steer him back. “But it was fun, when you were in Aruba?”
“It was amazing,” Jason said, the bitterness out of his voice. He started to talk about all the things they’d done together. They went scuba diving. They did the waterfall hike. They lay on the beach and looked up at the moon. It wasn’t until they got back home that things started to go wrong.
I tried really hard to show Jason I was listening. “Uh-huh,” I said over and over. I wouldn’t say I got comfortable, but I did relax enough to notice that my fingernails had been pushing into my palms. I opened my fists, willing my hands to lie flat on the step I was sitting on.
“Rosemary,” Jason said. “She just makes me feel … I can’t describe it. But do you know what I mean?”
“Of course,” I said.
“You have a boyfriend, right?” Jason said. “I’ve seen you with him.”
“Lucas,” I said. Just saying his name made me both sad and hopeful at the same time. Couldn’t he save me? “He’s about to enlist in the marines.” I don’t know why I mentioned that, except that I was grasping at reasons for Jason to let me go. Maybe if he thought my marine boyfriend was going to come looking for me … Although Lucas wasn’t a marine yet. And he wasn’t looking. He was probably too busy getting a good night’s sleep—he was taking this ridiculous military recruitment test called the ASVAB the next morning, which was supposed to determine whether he’d be better at landing helicopters or filling them up with gas between flights.
“I’ve thought about doing something like that,” Jason said. “I look at those guys and I envy their sense of purpose. It seems like if you’re a marine, you know who you are.”
“If you’re a marine, you’re someone who’s going to let the government pay you seventeen thousand dollars a year so you can get yourself killed before your twenty-fifth birthday,” I said.
“What about honor and country and all that?”
“That’s a line.” I could feel my brain switching over into debate mode. “If you look at US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, it’s all about oil,” I said. It felt good to control the information. “Our foreign policy debacle in Nigeria, the whole mess of the Middle East, our refusal to confront China on reports of human rights abuses. That’s oil.”
Jason raised a hand. “You sound like the kids in my dorm. They’re so caught up in their ideas. They never say hi to me. They don’t notice anyone but themselves.”
And when he said that, I was suddenly, out of the blue, completely enraged. Maybe it was spillover from thinking about Lucas’s becoming a marine. Maybe it was the stupidity of Jason’s comment—I mean, okay, he thought his hallmates were selfish because they were more interested in talking about big ideas than in taking care of Jason’s fragile ego?
In the lucidity of rage, I decided that the knife was an impulse Jason didn’t have the guts to follow through on. I also decided that because the knife came from my kitchen, it wouldn’t be possible for it to hurt me, as if, instead of a regular kitchen knife, it was an enchanted weapon that could not rise up against its master.
This harebrained logic caused me to do what I did next, which in hindsight I can see was colossally dumb. I said, “You know what, Jason? Why don’t you and your pea-sized ego get yourselves out of my house.”
He stared.
“You know what Rosemary really said about you?” I went on. “She said you were too sad and pathetic to scare her.”
Jason stood up fast. He groaned, looking to the ceiling as if Rosemary were up there, or as if he was angry at heaven.
The fear I’d managed to push away rushed back.
I ran up the last few steps an
d turned into the upstairs hall. I careened into the first room I got to—my mom’s—grabbed the cordless phone off her bedside table, and then practically leapt over her bed into her bathroom, pulling the door closed behind me and locking it.
I’d vaguely heard Jason calling “Wait!” when I’d started to move. I’d heard his footfalls on the stairs. Seconds after I slid the lock into place, the handle turned. I felt him push against the door.
“Hey,” he said. “I thought you understood!”
I didn’t answer him. I was holding the phone. I’d already dialed. All I needed to do was wait. All I needed was to get through to someone before he had a chance to knock the door down.
I’ve heard that the difference between a disaster and a near disaster comes down to snap decisions, and the snap decision I’d made just then was a bad one.
You see, I hadn’t called 911. I’d called Lucas.
All I can say to explain why I made that choice is that when people think they’re in danger of dying, they do strange things. I called Lucas because I felt really scared and alone and I knew he would understand. As if what I needed was understanding.
My memory of that moment is all shaking fingers and the sound of my own breathing in my ears. Lucas’s phone rang once, twice. He picked up groggy on ring number three.
And then the line went dead.
“Rosemary said you’re smart,” Jason said from outside the bathroom. “You didn’t think I would just unplug it?”
He was pushing the door now, I assumed with his shoulder. I saw the latch moving. The doorframe was splintering.
I thought about the knife.
I thought about the tiny window in the shower wall. It opened onto a sheer drop of twenty feet. Stone patio below.
Then the rattling on the door stopped. And a second later, I heard Jason say, “What the—”
There was a whack. An “Oomph.” Something hit the wall. The door shook. A muffled “Argh.” Another whack. Then a thump on the floor like someone had dropped a heavy book bag, and Rosemary’s voice: “Juliet, open up.”
I Remember You Page 20
