I Remember You

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

There was Jason, facedown on the floor, his head on the throw rug next to my mother’s bed, his legs splayed so I had to step over them on my way out of the bathroom.

  There was Rosemary, standing over him, her tennis racket dangling casually from her right hand like she’d just finished a match.

  And there was Dex, kneeling, holding Jason’s wrists up behind his back so he couldn’t move. Blood was trickling out of Jason’s ear. I guess Rosemary had hit him with the full strength of her seventy-mile-an-hour serve.

  Jason twisted his neck to try to look up. “Rosemary?” he said. “Are you there?”

  “Get down,” Dex said to him, his voice fierce but clipped, as if he didn’t want to waste his energy on someone as unworthy as Jason. Jason put his head back down. “I’ve already called 911,” Dex said to me. “We just have to watch him for, like, one minute, and then the cops will be here.”

  “Rose,” I said. I think I was whispering. “He had a big knife.”

  “It wasn’t a knife,” she said. “It was this.” She held up a flashlight. A silver one.

  “You thought I had a knife?” Jason’s voice was muffled by the rug.

  “No one is talking to you,” Rosemary said.

  “How did you know I was here?” Jason said.

  “Because you’re a moron,” Dex said.

  “And because when I called my house to say I’d got to Juliet’s all safe and sound, my mother said Brian Wozniak had called looking for me,” Rosemary added.

  “And you guessed it was me? See, you do think about me.”

  “I haven’t spoken to Brian Wozniak since first grade. I happen to know that he is terrified of me. He would never call.”

  “Maybe he would,” Jason said.

  “Well, he didn’t say so when I asked him,” she went on. “So I drove on over to check things out. And I found Dex in the front yard.”

  “You’ve been following me around for days,” Dex said. “So when I saw your car parked around the corner from Juliet’s, I was like, Nope, not good.”

  “You’re the new boyfriend,” Jason said.

  Rose and Dex both said, simultaneously, “Shut up.”

  “I just wanted to talk to you,” Jason said, straining to lift his head again to address Rosemary directly.

  Dex pulled Jason’s arm up a little tighter. “She didn’t say you could speak.”

  Rosemary looked at me over Dex’s shoulders and Jason’s sprawled body, something about the insanity of the moment cutting through the wall that had risen between us. She looked down at her racket. Then back up at me. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  The police arrived. Two big men in uniform took Jason out of the room, and a female cop and a male cop with red hair asked Rosemary, Dex, and me all sorts of questions about who lived here, where our parents were, how we knew Jason, what had happened. Dex’s parents were the first to come, and the cops took Dex with them into another room.

  Alone with Rose, I started to cry. I just stood there, sobbing, my arms at my sides, the tears streaming down my face, the hiccups following unchecked.

  Rosemary took me by the shoulders and held me still. And I finally told her. I told her everything. About Lucas. About the roof, the kiss, the dance, the headaches, the dreams. I honestly don’t know if she understood a single word. I was blubbering. I was talking fast. I was shaking. I was going out of order. I was skipping important parts.

  But she was nodding. She was looking at me with her calm, even gaze.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said when I’d reached the end. “I’ve lost you. I’ve lost myself. I had a chance to make a call.” I was whispering now. “When Jason was here. And do you know what I did? I called Lucas. Not 911.”

  “Oh, wow,” Rosemary said. “That was really dumb.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

  “Look,” she said. I’d sat on my mom’s bed and Rosemary bent down so she could look into my eyes. “I’m sorry. This was my fault. This whole year—” She paused, then sat down too. “I wish it had never happened.”

  “Jason was scary” was all I could say. “He scared me.”

  “We shouldn’t have lied to each other, or hidden things.” She set her jaw, letting me know she meant it. I believed her. She wrapped me into a hug until the shaking stopped.

  “Where’s Pete?” I said, wondering if she’d left him waiting in the car outside.

  “Pete is over,” she said. She looked around the room. There was blood on the carpet from Jason’s ear—a stain about the size of a quarter. She stood her racket up so the bottom of the grip covered the stain. “Now just stand like this,” she said, gesturing for me to take the racket from her, to lean on it like it was a cane. “Can you hold this position for, like, ever?” she asked.

  And for some reason, we both found that to be totally hilarious. We laughed together so hard we ended up having to sit down on my mom’s bedroom floor, waiting for our shared hysteria to die down. It took a very long time.

  Rosemary’s parents arrived, shaking hands with the female cop. We were all in the living room, and Rosemary and I were drinking juice boxes that the cop had brought with her.

  Rosemary was being interviewed by the officer when Lucas burst in. I watched him look around incredulously, taking in the flashing lights of the cop car coming through the windows, the radio static emitted from the walkie-talkie of the officer interviewing Rosemary.

  “Juliet?” he said wonderingly when our eyes met.

  I could only shake my head.

  “What’s going on?”

  And I explained, watching his face tighten as I told the story. At the end, I thought of a question that had been hovering in the back of my head since he’d arrived: I hadn’t called him yet to explain all of this, so what was he doing here?

  “You did call me,” he said. “About forty-five minutes ago.”

  “But the line went dead,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I guess I knew it was you.”

  I gave him a questioning look. “No one else ever calls me that late,” he added.

  Which was true. We both slept with phones pulled into our bedrooms, the cradles next to our pillows in case the other called late.

  But still. “You knew to come?”

  He hung his head, looking embarrassed of all things. And then he admitted that he didn’t know something was wrong. It was more like he felt it. “It made no sense,” he explained, shrugging. “But I just didn’t feel right.”

  “Really?” said the cop interviewing Rosemary, who had taken a break from questioning in order to listen to Lucas’s story. “That’s all it took for you to decide your girlfriend was in danger? Sounds like you could get work as a psychic.”

  Lucas didn’t say anything. But he sat with me while I told the police about seeing Jason at 7-Eleven, about the phone calls, the jewelry.

  The whole time they were talking to me, Lucas was jiggling his left leg in a way that reminded me of the Lucas from before—anxious, impatient. Was the part of him I missed the part of him that understood danger? That was afraid?

  “Jeez, Juliet,” he said when we were alone in the living room, waiting for my mom and Val, the cop filling out paperwork in the kitchen. He ran his hand through his hair. “Think of what could have happened. I can’t believe I didn’t go kick the crap out of that guy months ago.”

  “I never thought he’d come here,” I said. My teeth were chattering again. An afghan my mom had knit a long time ago lay on the back of the sofa. I wanted it, but somehow the idea of reaching all the way across the couch seemed overwhelming. The cop had told Lucas to look for signs of shock. I couldn’t remember what they were.

  “Can I—” I couldn’t remember the name of the thing I wanted. I pointed. “Can I—” I said again.

  Lucas looked behind him. He pointed. “This blanket?”

  I nodded vigorously. Nodding seemed to be the only way to make the chattering of my teeth stop. Or maybe it made the chattering worse. I c
ouldn’t tell.

  Lucas picked up the blanket. He took one look at me and, instead of passing it over, stood, unfolded it, and wrapped it around me like you would wrap a towel around a little kid just out of the bath. He turned me into a blanket burrito.

  “I feel like you, that time when you were nine, after you got out of the ice and climbed into bed in your wet underwear.”

  “Yeah, and you know I got sick after that. It didn’t occur to me to take off my underwear.”

  “You’d know better now,” I said. My teeth were chattering so much I had to repeat myself twice to make him understand me, let alone get the joke.

  Once he finally did understand, he raised his eyebrows twice, in quick succession, the equivalent of a wink, acknowledging my lame attempt at humor. It was his gesture that made me laugh even through my chattering teeth.

  “I know a lot better now,” he said.

  “Ooh, baby, tell me.” I bit down and pressed my lips closed. “Tell me more about your nine-year-old underwear.”

  Lucas laughed, the kind of laugh where the person isn’t just being nice to you, or friendly—it wasn’t a social laugh. It was the laugh of someone who can’t help it, who you have caught off guard with a joke.

  And there was something about the fact that I could make him laugh that undid me.

  “Jules?” he said. “Juliet?” He was holding my face in his hands. I’d started crying again, and he wiped away my tears with his thumbs. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?” he said. “Are you scared?”

  “No,” I answered. “I’m crying because it’s so perfect.”

  “Huh?”

  I couldn’t explain. As with the blanket, I couldn’t think of the words for things.

  “I don’t want it to end.”

  “It won’t,” he promised. He pulled my face toward his. He kissed me on the forehead, then on the lips. Then we leaned toward each other, our foreheads touching, the tip of my nose grazing the tip of his. Like the time before, the time Lucas no longer remembered.

  “We don’t need to let it end,” he said, and I tried to believe him. I tried to believe that Lucas was Lucas. That he was mine in just the way I wanted him to be.

  “Promise it will never change,” I said, and Lucas promised it never would.

  But then, of course, it did.

  Lucas enlisted in the marines the day after his eighteenth birthday. I’d thought I was prepared for it, but when he stopped by my house on the way home from “processing in,” I burst into tears and ran up to my room. I didn’t want to look at him.

  At school the next day, we snuck out when we both had a free period and went outside, behind the school where we couldn’t be seen. Lucas kissed me up against the wall. It was June by now, and as hot as summer. We stood in the shade.

  I threaded a finger under the chain he wore his fake dog tags on, and I lifted them out of his shirt and held them in my fist. “These don’t make you anything,” I said. “They don’t tell you who you are.”

  Lucas uncurled my fingers, let the tags fall back onto his chest. “I’m going to get new ones,” he said. “Real ones. So you’re right. These are nothing.”

  “You’re going to die,” I said. He rolled his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said without actually sounding sorry. “I’m sorry that I obviously did such a great job of convincing you that my hallucinations—”

  “Delusions,” I corrected him, thinking I knew more about this than he did. Why didn’t he trust me?

  “Whatever,” he said scornfully. “I’m sorry I convinced you they were real.”

  “They are real. Listen. You’re going to walk into an apartment building in Iraq. You’re going to see a boy holding a radio that’s really a bomb. You’ll lock eyes. He’ll pee himself. The bomb will go off. And then you will die.”

  “You have to cut it out, Juliet,” he said. “You’re going to end up in the nuthouse.”

  “You heard me, though?” I said. I pulled him as close to me as I could. I wrapped my arms around his waist and held him to me in the shade behind the gym. “You’re going to die. You will die of burns.”

  “We’re all going to die,” he said.

  I squeezed my eyes tight against the tears. “You’re going to die sooner.”

  Lucas was gone by the Fourth of July, training in North Carolina. For six weeks he couldn’t even call. He came home at the end of the summer, just after I’d started school, but then only for four days.

  I didn’t see him again until Thanksgiving. I remember we were at a pizza place waiting for our pie to be cooked and he was telling a long, bragging story filled with military acronyms, and I stood up and pretended I had to go to the bathroom. “If he uses another acronym as if I should know what it means,” I said to myself in the mirror, “I am going to scream.”

  Add to that his comments about the college I’d applied to early decision being “fancy.”

  My college wasn’t fancy. It was small, way out in the middle of Maine, the kind of place where you have to wear long johns and snow boots from November to May. My senior year, I hung a poster of it in my room and pictured myself there even as I took Mr. Mildred’s advanced course on Faulkner and won and lost debate rounds and went to parties with Rosemary and waited for Lucas’s visits home, during which we fought as much as anything else.

  My mom worried I was so excited for college it was going to be a letdown once I got there, but from my first moment on campus, when Mom and I showed up with my three enormous duffel bags, a standing lamp, a Gustav Klimt poster, and a year’s supply of toiletries, I loved it. The kids on my hall stayed up until four in the morning talking about everything there was to talk about: music, the existence of God, the inevitable corruption of politics, what the deal was with Mr. T from The A-Team, who of all of us was the most likely to become famous.

  When Lucas got notified of his first overseas tour, and I explained it to my new friends, they said “Really?” in this half-choking way, trying to hide their surprise and distaste. All my friends were pacifists, like me. I’m sure they were wondering how I could even know someone in the military, let alone be dating him.

  Lucas was sent to Saudi Arabia. We said goodbye over my winter break. I remember crying. I remember tasting the salt of my own tears, they were flowing so freely. Then he was gone.

  And just as he’d said, he was the one who finally wrote the breakup email. He sent it from Saudi Arabia. He wrote:

  I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise to you.

  He wrote:

  I don’t see how we can even consider ourselves to be together when we don’t write for weeks at a time.

  He wrote:

  I don’t know what you’re doing at college and I don’t think I want to. It feels pretty irrelevant from where I’m sitting.

  He wrote:

  I had three days’ leave in Dubai, and I did some thinking there.

  He wrote:

  We are not in the same world. We are not going in the same direction.

  I was a sophomore by then, and my suitemates baked me a cake to celebrate Lucas’s departure from my life. They called him GI Joe; they found the idea of him—the picture of him in fatigues with a gun—creepy. They were relieved to have him gone and thought I was too, because that was what I told them. That was what I told myself.

  I studied in Paris my junior year, and while I was there, I saw a short article in the International Herald Tribune: Governor George W. Bush of Texas was considering a run for the presidency. I was in the mailroom at the university where I was studying, and as soon as I understood the gist of the article, I stood up, walked straight to the bathroom, and vomited.

  Fall of my senior year, with friends, I stayed up to watch the election results in my dorm’s lounge. I had a paper due the next morning, so I stepped away from the television as soon as they’d called the election in Gore’s favor. I stayed up the rest of the night writing, set my alarm for early in the morning, printed, proofread, and printed m
y paper again, and walked to class with my head still buried in it, correcting typos, sliding into my seat at the seminar table five minutes after class had begun. It wasn’t until the subject came up in discussion that I heard the news: the networks had made a mistake. The election had been too close to call. Gore was not talking. Bush was not talking. I felt like I had swallowed a rock.

  The next day I called Lucas. I had to call his mother first to find out how to reach him—he was rarely in the same place for long. I left a message and he called me back.

  We talked for about half an hour. He asked about my mother, about Rosemary. He’d just broken up with somebody, he said. She was a biology grad student. He’d met her at Sea World.

  “How about that election?” I said at last, testing the waters. I’d told him he had predicted the result. Would he remember?

  “Yeah, I try to keep my nose out of all that BS,” he replied, not missing a beat. “What a messed-up system.”

  Three weeks later, with about a hundred other students, I was filing into my college’s largest classroom to take the LSAT. I made it through two sections of the test before getting to logical reasoning. “The red shirt is hanging on the clothesline next to the blue shirt, but not next to the yellow …”

  I drew a diagram. I labeled the diagram. G for green, P for pink. I looked up at the board to check the time the test ended. And then at my watch.

  And in that gesture, I remembered Lucas.

  Lucas long ago, counting on his fingers, checking his watch, saying, “Two years left of high school, four of college, three at law school,” as if he could tell time on his watch in years. He’d accepted that I was destined for law school as easily as he accepted the idea that at some point in the future he was dying.

  The sob that came out of me was sudden. A lot of my fellow test takers looked up, but I was able to successfully disguise the noise I’d made as a cough.

  Not now, I pleaded with myself.

  I looked down at the question. Laundry. Red shirts, green ones, pink. But I couldn’t drag my brain back. I couldn’t recall the action I was supposed to be taking. I saw letters for each color written down on scratch paper. A grid with six columns neatly laid out.