Slowly, I colored in the squares. I knew time was of the essence, but my breath was coming fast and I thought coloring might help me refocus. I drew a new rectangle of new squares. I colored those in too.
Lucas had joined the marines. Lucas had been right about Bush and Gore. And here I was, taking the LSAT, marching forward just as Lucas had predicted I would.
And okay, I was crying. I assumed that by now, the people around me were aware. I didn’t have any tissues and I was sniffling up a storm, so I ripped out a sheet of the test booklet—again, at the tearing sound, heads popped up from exams like gophers coming out of holes. I used the test paper to blow my nose. Then I crumpled it up. I took my answer sheet and crumpled that up too. I stood—everyone was looking now—and I inched my way past the people in my row. The proctor looked at me questioningly, but I didn’t even bother to lie about not feeling well. I just shook my head at her, tossed my snotted piece of paper and crumpled answer sheet in the trash can, and, clutching my water bottle to my chest, pushed through the double doors to the quad, where I had to squint against the sparkling snow.
I didn’t go to law school. I moved to France. I traveled in Africa. Chicago. Seattle. I ended up in New York when Rosemary was living there with her boyfriend. I took a job at a not-for-profit for teen moms, writing policy papers. I made a life for myself. I dated.
I still got the occasional email from Lucas, usually something random. Around the time of my graduation, he’d sent me a letter from Heidelberg letting me know he’d seen someone on a train in Germany who looked like me. He’d sent me a postcard from Kuwait on my twenty-first birthday, when I was in Paris. I’m sure I thought of him when the Twin Towers fell, but that day was a blur—Rosemary’s boyfriend was incommunicado for six hours that morning, and I sat with her speed-dialing his phone, fielding calls from his family and hers. And then 2003 came around, and the United States went to war in Iraq. Around that time, Mom ran into Mrs. Dunready in the grocery store and reported that Lucas hadn’t gone. He’d been fighting in Afghanistan for the past two years and was about to be sent to the Philippines.
I don’t remember making a conscious calculation, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I decided that the future as Lucas had envisioned it was changing. His coming back had altered history. He’d said I would go to law school, and I hadn’t. He’d said he’d be fighting in Iraq, and his only deployment had been to Afghanistan.
More time passed. I went to graduate school in public health. I dated a guy who lived in San Francisco and taught me to rock climb. He gave me a subscription to Outside magazine. We met for vacations and long weekends in Utah, in Arizona. We went to France. When we were apart, I trained to go rock climbing, and I got as close to having washboard abs as I ever will. But I stopped seeing him when I realized I wouldn’t move to San Francisco for him, and he wouldn’t move to New York. That essentially we were friends.
My mother retired from museum fund-raising. With Valerie managing the business side, she opened a knitting store, where they sell yarn and beautiful, expensive, wearable art my mom makes from her own hand-dyed wool. I went through a phase where I convinced myself that Rosemary had been right all along, that my mother and Val were an old married couple. But now I’m not so sure. The only thing I can say with certainty is that they have shown me how love can take many forms.
I ran into Lucas’s brother Tommy at a holiday party back home a month before my thirtieth birthday. I asked if he was finished with college yet, and he laughed. He was out of college three years and married.
Tommy told me Lucas was fighting in Afghanistan again—after the Philippines he’d been to South Korea, Hawaii, San Diego. He was leading a unit, and if I breathed a sigh of relief that he was not in Iraq, I don’t remember doing so. This was after Obama had been elected. Did I make a quick calculation that the Iraq War was ending and it wasn’t likely he’d be sent back there before all the US troops pulled out? I don’t remember.
I suppose I’d actually managed to forget, as Lucas had promised me I would. Or maybe “forget” is the wrong word. The memories were there, but the paths to reach them had been covered with sand.
About a year later, I got in to work late. There had been delays on the subway—fifty minutes trapped underground—which meant I had pit stains on the silk blouse I was wearing under my suit. I changed into a spare tank top from my workout bag and put the blouse in the trash. I’d have to remember not to take off my suit jacket during the meeting I had later with people from the mayor’s office.
This meeting was a huge deal. The mayor’s people were finally talking seriously about implementing a plan my agency had been advocating for ten years. It called for a series of education centers for new teen moms—flexible classes, on-site day care, caseworkers, tutoring, an alumnae network. I was really excited about the idea—I’d come up with it. Teen moms need the world to wrap its arms around them and let them know that they have the support to make it through.
With ten minutes before the team from my agency would be leaving, I blotted my temples with a paper towel and opened up my email. My assistant, Tracy, came into my office, noticed the blouse in the trash, and fished it out. “This is redeemable,” she said.
I took a sip of my Diet Coke. Tracy raised her eyebrows at that too.
“I realize this is not a perfect nutritional statement,” I said in an attempt to head her lecture off at the pass.
And that’s the last thing I remember before the phone rang.
Tracy ran to her desk to answer the call, and I listened to her half of the conversation to make sure it didn’t have anything to do with the meeting.
And then I kept listening as I registered the surprise in her voice.
Her attempt to put the caller off.
The failure of that attempt as the conversation went on for several minutes. Tracy sat down in her chair and started scribbling intensively on her message pad.
And then I heard her voice, coming to me through both the open door and the intercom. “Juliet, don’t go yet.”
I was slipping my arms into the sleeves of the jacket. Then Tracy was standing in my office door, her tight curls pushed back by one hand.
“That was a nurse,” she said, reading breathlessly from her message pad. “From some kind of military hospital in Germany. Juliet, are you expecting this kind of news?”
This is what I heard: “Military.” “Hospital.” “News.”
This is what I felt: a flash of white wiping out the circuitry of my brain. There was a part of me that had been expecting these words for years, and yet they felt unreal.
“You don’t know anyone in the military, do you?” Tracy asked. “Serving in Iraq? Do you know what I’m talking about?”
I’d been standing when she started to talk, but now I was sitting in the desk chair where I had spent so many long days and nights. The one with the broken wheel only I knew how to balance on just right.
I looked at the green-and-white-paneled walls of my office, as if I was seeing them for the first time. I looked down at the skirt of my suit, the brown spectator shoes, the skin on the back of my hands.
Tracy didn’t need to tell me the rest. I knew. Lucas. This was the news—Lucas had died.
Leaning forward in my chair, I grabbed at my legs to counter the tugging feeling in my gut. I couldn’t form the questions. I couldn’t speak. I might have been crying. I know the tears came eventually.
“Juliet?” Tracy said gently.
Time was standing still. Except it wasn’t. It was moving backward. And forward. And sideways. It was doing what happens at the edge of the universe, shimmering, stretching.
I was sixteen again. As if a great wind had come up and swept me inside it, I felt Lucas with me. I could smell him, could feel the touch of his hand on mine.
“I thought he was in Afghanistan.” I could barely hear my own voice. “We’re supposed to be pulling out of Iraq.”
Tracy’s eyes were wide with concern. “Listen—”
she said.
But I couldn’t listen. I felt as if I was looking down on myself from the sky above New York City. From that perspective I could see halfway around the world to Lucas too, his body lying still in the hospital bed in Germany, bandages covering blackened skin. In my imagination, it was the same hospital bed where I’d held his hand when I was sixteen, but he looked older now, stockier, the way he’d described himself inside that dream so many years ago. His eyes were closed. He wasn’t dreaming anymore. He’d given up the fight. I could see how he had suffered.
Then, somehow, in my vision, I was there with him. I was telling him I loved him, telling him it was okay, that I knew he’d tried, that his body, not his soul, had given out, that I forgave him, that I had never forgotten.
I was myself at thirty-one saying these things, but I was also sixteen. I was myself. I was sixteen. And then the distinction blurred.
For a second, I caught Tracy’s eye, and she took a step back, toward the door and the relative safety of the general office. She must have seen what I felt like inside.
“How—” I remember saying. I looked up at the ceiling, down at the carpeted floor, then at Tracy again, still holding her message pad, frightened.
“Listen,” she began again. She swallowed hard. “This nurse. She insisted on telling me all this stuff.” She looked back down at the pad—I glimpsed her notes scrawled across three different WHILE YOU WERE OUT slips. “I tried to write fast. Do you want to hear this?”
I nodded.
“Okay. I guess this soldier, it was pretty bad. He walked into a bomb, the nurse said. An IED. Given the force of the explosion, he should have died, but by some miracle he arrived at the field hospital with a pulse. Do you want to just call the nurse back? Who is this guy?”
I couldn’t look at Tracy. I couldn’t raise my head. Each passing second was more painful than the last. “Just tell me the rest,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Okay.” Tracy consulted her notes. Her hand was shaking. I would have felt sorry for her if I had been allowing myself to feel anything at all. “He lived long enough in the hospital in Iraq that apparently they decided to fly him to Germany. I guess his doctors had no idea how he was holding on. The first time this nurse saw him, she said, he was in a coma, which she said is very common for burn victims, but he’d stabilized. His burns had started to heal.”
I sat perfectly still. If I moved—if I blinked—I’d need to make sense of Tracy’s words. But if I kept myself from moving, they would fall lightly around me, like snow.
“And yesterday, after months, he regained consciousness. The nurse, she was almost crying when she told me this. She called the family and they’re all on the way to Germany now, so when he started to talk, she couldn’t reach any of them. But he was talking, I guess, a lot. At first they thought he was hallucinating. None of the nurses understood what he was talking about. They almost sedated him, but he protested so violently they held off.”
“What did he want?” I dared to ask.
“You,” Tracy answered. “He knew your name. He knew where you worked. He made them look you up online. He dictated a message he wanted them to read to you, word for word. I wrote it down.”
She was shuffling her notes again. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. Tracy adjusted her glasses. Agony. “His message is: ‘I just woke up from a dream that you were in. I believe you saved my life. If you know what I am talking about, please come. Lucas.’ ” Tracy checked her notes. “His name is Lucas Dunready. Do you know him?”
Tracy pronounced his last name wrong, but I didn’t need her to get it right.
I stood.
I was dizzy.
“Um, Juliet?” Tracy said. “You know what this means?”
And you know how before, I felt like I’d been swept up into the sky, to a place where I could look down on Lucas in the hospital? Well, now I began to fall, the way you sometimes fall just as your body is going to sleep. Down, down, and then you catch yourself, as if the brakes on an elevator have finally grabbed hold. Except the braking part wasn’t happening.
Tracy had her hands on my shoulders. She was holding on to me, helping me remain upright.
“Juliet!” she was saying. “Help, someone!”
There were other voices. “She’s sweating.” “Her skin is gray.”
Footsteps, movement, then a straw. Orange juice. Cold. I could almost feel the sugar being absorbed by my blood. It filled me with hopefulness. I sat up straighter. There was a thought I was trying to form. I could feel my arms and legs regaining control of themselves, my back tingling, my eyes opening. I drew a deep breath, almost a gasp, like the one Lucas took after the nurse brought him back to life in the hospital so many years before.
It wasn’t just the orange juice that was making my heart start to pound.
Lucas … left me a message?
Lucas … just woke up?
I felt afraid of these words, as if the second I let them mean something, I would learn they were a mistake.
The words could not be real. What was real didn’t matter.
What did matter—I could see this now—was the waters of memory, the rocks that bore the mark of the waves.
Lucas woke up.
I had been in his dream.
That was no dream.
Tracy looked at the clock on my wall. “The meeting?” she said. “Maybe we should call and tell them you’re running late.”
“Cancel it,” I said.
Tracy’s eyes opened extra wide.
“Tell them I’m ill.” When you have a meeting with the mayor’s people, you are not allowed to be ill. But I was already standing, rummaging for my passport. I jammed a pile of folders on my desk into the outbox, hoping someone would go through it eventually. “Tell them I am violently ill. Tell them I am going to the hospital. Yes, that’s right. It’s not even a lie!”
“Juliet—” Tracy began. She was going to tell me to sit down, I knew, that I wasn’t well.
But I couldn’t sit. I could never sit again. I was pulling my purse from the closet, rifling on the desk for my phone. I would run. I would change my shoes. I would find an airport. I would use my credit card. I would get on a plane. I still felt dizzy, like my brain no longer trusted the orientation of the floor, like I was standing on a wildly rocking boat. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to feel confident in the ground beneath my feet, because I was about to fly.
In the airport I bought a notebook. A pen. I saw my reflection in the bathroom mirror and I bought a hairbrush. I haven’t used it. I haven’t had the time.
I have been writing and not writing, daydreaming, then writing some more—it’s been hours. I’ve barely registered the whine of the plane engines, the hum of the ventilation system, the soft questions of the German flight attendants. Am I done with my drink? Do I need a blanket? I stare at them as if I don’t speak the English they address me in, and they move on.
By the tiny pinprick of light coming from overhead, I have been writing so fast and for so long my hand is sore. But I keep at it. Writing is the only way I can organize my swirling thoughts, the moments I’m remembering and the feelings that remain so strong.
My body believes that it’s the middle of the night, but I am watching the sunrise through the ungenerously small window, so I know it must be morning. There are clouds below me. They are all I can see, though the GPS screen in the seat in front of me lets me know we are somewhere over the North Sea.
I keep cooling my tired hand against the window. My thoughts continue to flow. I’m swigging water from an Evian bottle, and the man next to me is distracted by my movements. I am a mess—and being a mess makes me laugh out loud. Again, the man next to me is not pleased. And yet I smile at him. I graciously offer him a mint.
“You have been busy,” he says, shaking his head at the mint, and I nod. I smile. I resist scaring him further by saying something crazy-sounding, like “I understand it all now. I remember it all.” But I do understand. You se
e, here’s the thing:
Whatever I said to Lucas in the hospital that day, whatever I took from him, and whatever I gave him of myself, whatever happened between us before he slipped away, it gave him the strength to stay. Lucas beat death. He beat time. He beat everything we think we understand about a physical and spiritual divide.
He is here. Because of me. Alive. Whole. And I am going to him. I can’t think past that. I can’t imagine the rest and I don’t need to or want to. I want only to live it, to watch it unfold.
I scan the pages of my notebook, looking back over my scrawl, seeing the places where the pen was pushing down hard and where the ink seemed to flow smoothly. I wonder what I will think of these words when I look back on them later, whether they will twist themselves around, whether I will remember the way I remember right now.
Lucas: I’m going to tell you this story. I will hold your hand. I will look into your eyes the way I did when I was sixteen. I will learn what has become of you. Although I believe I already know. I remember.
Lucas: I remember you.
I came up with the idea for this book after a weekend with my high school friends during which the intensity of those years came rushing back and time folded in on itself. Thank you to Christine Collins, Kirsten Lundeberg, Kate Snell, Maureen Murphy, Kelly Mulderry, Krystn Forcina, and Karen Febeo for the “mystical” time.
I always love reaching out to friends for research when Wikipedia, Google, and my library skills fail me. Thanks to Kim Woodwell, Ed Mitre, Jacob Kahn, Theresa Kahn, Mark Bertin, Nick Soures, Jeff Lind, Laura Lind, and Rick Kahn for helping me figure out chickens (for another project), hockey, hospitals, and whether email existed in 1994.
Along the way, readers gave me a great deal of encouragement and invaluable advice: Sophie Bell, Rick Kahn, Claudia Gwardyak, Anita Kapadia, Gayle Kirshenbaum, Marcia Lerner, and Jen Nails. Your reactions kept me going and gave me direction.
I Remember You Page 22
