by Leah Stewart
He shook his head. “Why does life have to be like that?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“My grandfather didn’t give me this car,” he said. “He died. He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“I don’t want sympathy,” he said.
“Why not?”
He didn’t say, but I knew the answer—sympathy made it that much harder not to cry. He swiped at his eyes, dashing away a tear I hadn’t seen. “Guess you think I’m a real crybaby,” he said.
“I don’t,” I said. “I think you’re brave.”
He shot a glance at me, as though to see if I was lying, then looked away. “Well, you don’t like me.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“You act like you hate me,” he said. “Ever since you saw me playing guitar. I guess you thought I was really bad.”
“No, I thought you were good.” I heard my voice tremble and took a deep breath. “I thought you were great. I just closed the door because I was embarrassed.”
He shook his head. “You sort of annihilated me.”
“I didn’t mean to. I was afraid you thought I was spying on you.”
He considered this. Then, at last, he smiled. “Well, you were, right?”
I smiled back. “I guess I was.”
He sighed, leaning back against his seat. “So you don’t hate me.”
I shook my head.
“Good,” he said. “Sonia really wants us to be friends.”
Until he mentioned her name, I’d forgotten Sonia, and at the realization of this I felt as guilty as if I’d put my hand on his leg, at that rip where the skin showed through. “She’s great, isn’t she?” I said.
He smiled again, but this time it was a private smile, akin to the one Sonia wore when she talked about him. “She really is,” he said. “At first I wasn’t sure, because she reminded me of the girl I dated in Virginia. But really just because she was pretty and a cheerleader. Sonia’s nothing like her.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“She just wanted to date me because I was on the basketball team. She wanted me to take her to dances and bring her corsages, you know? She didn’t care about me. I thought she did, but . . .” He shook his head. “I learned that song for her, the one you heard? And then I found out she made fun of me later to her friends.” His voice tightened. A flush crept up his neck. “So I guess I’m a little sensitive about that.”
And I’d made it worse by shutting the door on him. I started to apologize again, then stopped myself. “Sonia would never do that,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I can trust her.” He nodded to himself. “I feel really lucky,” he said, “because I thought I’d always be unlucky in love.” He was only fifteen, but I was, too, and so I didn’t laugh. In fact, my throat closed. I was the unlucky one.
Something caught Will’s eye outside the window. “Hey,” he said. “Look at that.”
I saw nothing but the Taco Box, a local fast-food restaurant where high-school kids hung out. Their specialty was Spanish fries—actually tater tots covered with melted cheese. A squat building with a pink tile roof, it was at that moment like an island in a vast lake. “What?” I said.
“Come on.”
I followed him across the parking lot. The water got deeper the closer we got, until it was halfway up my shins. Then I saw what he saw. Ducks. There were ducks, a pair of them, gliding in a graceful circle around the Taco Box.
I glanced at Will, and I could tell by the way he watched in silence that he saw it, too: the beauty in the light bouncing off the water, the graceful motion of the ducks. The ducks were not surprised to find a lake where there had never been one before. They took what was offered.
As they disappeared behind the Taco Box, Will said, “I’m glad you don’t hate me. I like you.”
“I like you, too,” I said, and that was all, but I was as embarrassed as if I’d just confessed to love. I stared out at the water and from the corner of my eye I saw that he was doing the same. His cheeks were pink. He was not impervious, and neither was I. It was startling how wrong I could be, how quickly the old world could change. The ducks appeared again, completing a circle. I don’t know how long we watched them, how long before I remembered that my feet were wet and cold. We had to go back to school.
Of course I told Sonia about leaving school, about Will’s rescue of the dog, a story that made her treat him like a hero for the next couple of weeks. But I held back the part about the ducks, and because she never mentioned them, I assumed that Will hadn’t told her about them, either. Almost everything I had and did I shared with Sonia. The ducks afloat in the parking lot, they were mine.
13
At times in high school I repressed my feelings for Will so effectively I could spend hours in his company without a pang. Then he’d kiss Sonia’s temple or tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and just like that I was back in the whirlpool of guilt and envy and longing. Walking up Mass. Ave. a dozen years later, I wondered if Will had just come from a visit to Sonia’s office, and was stunned to find myself sick with jealousy at the thought that they might still be friends or, far worse, that he might be her fiancé. It struck me now that if they weren’t still together it would be odd for her to keep his picture, a picture of an old boyfriend, on the fridge. When I saw her I’d have to repress my feelings once again. I didn’t want her to know that I still cared about him, about her, about any of this. I resolved not to mention his name.
The day of the flood there were still six years of my friendship with Sonia remaining. But maybe when I kept back the part about the ducks, that was the first choice I made that led us to the end, because what I really wanted to keep was a part of Will. I didn’t think about it that way at the time. Even after that day, I didn’t consider myself to have a crush on him, until my father forced me to see it.
One afternoon, I was lying on my bed reading David Copperfield—I was going through a Dickens phase, in which I systematically read all of his books in order of publication—when someone knocked, and my father came in carrying his briefcase. I was surprised to see him home before dinner. He was wearing camouflage, which brought out the green in his changeable eyes. He had beautiful eyes, with the sort of long, curling lashes women envy in men, in contrast to the military precision of the rest of his straight-edged features, his Roman nose, his serious mouth, his abutment of a jaw. I had always been sorry I hadn’t inherited those eyes.
“Hi, honey,” he said. “What are you reading?”
I sat up and showed him the cover.
“Good book,” he said. “My favorite Dickens.” He liked reading as much as, if not more than, I did, and unlike my mother, he could remember the plots and characters from books he’d read twenty years ago.
“It’s my favorite, too, so far,” I said. “Why do you like it?” I thought maybe we would have one of our talks. Every now and then he had this wonderful way of engaging me like I was an adult, of sitting up with me after my mother had gone to bed to expound on topics like the difficulty he had believing in heaven and hell. For that reason, he was my favorite parent, something about which, as a teenager, I felt a mingling of guilt and righteousness.
“It’s been a long time since I read it,” he said. “I probably wasn’t much older than you. But I think it’s because I like the characters. I even like dumb little Dora.”
“I just got to her.”
“I shouldn’t say anything else, then. I don’t want to give away the ending.”
“It’s not like it matters,” I said. “I know it will be happy. They’re always happy.” It had dawned on me sometime in the last year that happy endings were not an inevitability but a contrivance, and so I had begun to affect a scorn for them. I thought I sounded very adult as I said, “I mean, he writes so much about death and poverty, but then at the end he always makes it all work out. It’s so unrealistic.”
“What about the poor gu
y in A Tale of Two Cities?” My father made a slicing motion across his neck. “He loses his head.”
“I haven’t read that one yet.” I checked the list of publications in the front of the book. “I’ve got three more before that one.”
My father laughed. “You’re reading them in order?” He set down his briefcase and reached for the book. He sat on the end of my bed and studied the list. “So you haven’t gotten to Great Expectations?” I shook my head. He stared at the ceiling, biting his lip. “If I remember right,” he said slowly, “he meant to give that one an unhappy ending, but then he rewrote it to make it happy.” He looked at me and smiled. “To give love a victory.”
I crossed my legs and sat up straight. “But that’s not what life is like. So why rewrite it?”
He paged through the book without appearing to see it. “You know,” he said, “a happy ending isn’t really the end. It’s just the place where you choose to stop telling the story. Why not make everything work out when you have the chance?” He sat with his elbows resting on his knees and stared at his hands. He seemed to have forgotten I was there. I suppose he might have been thinking about all the things that hadn’t worked out for him, the unhappy endings, the time he spent in Vietnam, the way that war had directed him into a profession he hadn’t really meant to enter. I wasn’t old enough then to have any real concept of regret, of the endless things that ripple out from every choice. I knew only that he seemed, suddenly, rather sad.
I said, “I guess everything doesn’t always work out, does it?” I don’t know what I wanted him to say to that. Part of me wanted to understand him. Part of me didn’t. In the end it didn’t matter, because he didn’t hear me. After a moment, he turned to look at me, and his eyes slowly focused on my face.
“You’re a smart girl,” he said. “I’m proud of you.” Then he handed me the book, picked up his briefcase, and pushed to his feet.
I held on to that book with both hands, as tight as I could, although it was the moment I really wanted to hold on to. I could have lived in it for a long time.
He paused on his way to the door and turned back. “I almost forgot,” he said. “Your mother had me pick up your pictures.” He squinted at me, grinning with boyish mischief. I recognized the expression and braced myself. I was about to be teased. I tried to guess what he was going to tease me about—the pictures were mostly from homecoming, which I’d gone to with Sonia, Will, and a friend of Will’s who’d been drafted as my date. My father pulled the packets of photos from his briefcase. They’d been opened. I reached for them, but he held them back. “I just have one question,” my father said. He extracted a photo, studied it, then turned it to show me. “Who’s this?”
It was a picture of Will. It was a beautiful picture. His dark eyes, which often looked black, in this picture had a hint of gold. He wasn’t looking at the camera, but at someone—no doubt Sonia—off to the side, and on his face was an expression of love. Ardent, undisguised love, such as I would never see when he looked at me.
I said, as matter-of-factly as I could, “Sonia’s boyfriend. Will Barrett. We went to a party at his house, remember? You know his dad.”
“He’s Sonia’s boyfriend?” my father said. He started leafing through the packets. “Because, hmm, there are a lot of pictures of Sonia’s boyfriend.” He showed me another one, then another. “More than anyone else, even Sonia.”
“So?” My cheeks began to burn.
“So maybe Sonia has something to worry about.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I reached for the pictures, but he held them away.
“Cameron’s a snake,” my father chanted. “Cameron’s a snake.” He waved the pictures at me, hissing between his teeth.
I tried. I really did. But I hadn’t been prepared. Not after the discussion we’d been having, the way he’d taken me so seriously. All at once I stood and said, “Shut up, shut up.” I snatched the packets from his hands and burst into angry tears.
“Jesus H. Christ,” my father said. “Don’t be such a crybaby.” He picked up his briefcase. Frowning at me, he headed for the door. “Pull yourself together,” he said. “I was just teasing you. You’re not the first person to have a crush.”
When he was gone I pulled out all the pictures of Will. I took deep breaths, furious at myself for crying, determined not to cry another tear even if I choked on the lump in my throat. I decided to keep the ones of Will with someone else. But the others, the ones where he was the center of the frame, I ripped up into tiny, jagged pieces. I let them rain into the wastebasket. My father had looked at these pictures and seen what I was trying so hard to hide from myself. I couldn’t risk anyone else coming to the same conclusion.
I tried to return to my book, but the pictures were still in the room. I fished the pieces out of the wastebasket, stuffed them inside a used lunch sack, and took the sack into the kitchen, where I buried it in the trash can under some balled-up paper towels.
Maybe I did live an old story, but I couldn’t help but live it as though for the first time. The first time you fall in love, it’s like you’ve created the first love in the universe, and the first time someone you love dies, you grieve the universe’s first death. What does it help to be told that what you feel is nothing new? You want your father’s respect, not as a pale copy of all the children who have ever wanted their fathers’ respect, but fiercely, because he’s the only father you’ll ever have.
What my father didn’t know was that I wasn’t only envious of Sonia. I was a snake and a crybaby in other ways as well—I was envious of Will. Because of him, Sonia’s time was no longer automatically mine. I didn’t drop by her house unannounced anymore, because sometimes Will would be there, and, worse, their faces would be flushed, their lips red and swollen. We were often a threesome, but it was hard to endure the ends of those evenings, when they drove off together while I walked to my front door alone. I made some halfhearted efforts to spend time with other girls I knew from school. They were willing to include me, inviting me along when they cruised Main. But they knew why I was with them—that I had, essentially, been dumped—and I felt like a stowaway, squeezed into the backseat of some stranger’s tiny car.
At the beginning of junior year, I started dating a boy named Dustin, because he asked me out and because I hoped if I said yes I’d fall in love with him. He was a Southern Baptist, and our relationship consisted mostly of our fumblings in the dark of my living room or his car, his guilt about these fumblings, and his attempts to bring me to Christ. Still, being with him was preferable to playing chaperone to Sonia and Will. He gave me a Bible with my name printed on it in gold, wanting me to read the Gospels, but the first time I touched it, it fell open to Song of Songs: “For love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away.”
“You know what my mother says?” Sonia asked me. It was toward the end of Christmas break, and I was spending the night at her house. “She says we’re too young for love, that in a year Will and I won’t remember each other’s names. She says this isn’t love.” She sighed. “If this isn’t love, what does love feel like?”
I had no idea. I’d had no luck falling in love with Dustin, and I couldn’t give that name to what I felt for Will. I shrugged. “It feels like what it feels like,” I said.
She stared at me for a moment like I’d posed her a riddle, and then she laughed. “I can always count on you for the answer,” she said.
I didn’t particularly want to talk about love. So far this night hadn’t gone the way I’d anticipated. Sonia had been calling it a girls’ night, a night when we wouldn’t even talk to our boyfriends on the phone. We hadn’t spent enough time together lately, she’d said, and I’d agreed, repressing the impulse to be sarcastic in response. I’d imagined we’d draw pictures, watch movies, make up dance routines in celebration of how we used to be, but so far all we’d done was talk about Will.
Sonia’s father was out of town, her mother up in her room, and we were sitting on the couch in the living room, Dirty Dancing waiting in the VCR, talking about Will.
“I have to tell you what happened last night,” Sonia whispered. “I’ve been dying to tell you.” Her voice trembled with repressed excitement, and I knew what she was going to tell me. I wanted to hear it and didn’t want to in equal measure.
“Where’s your mother?” I whispered back.
“She can’t hear me,” she said. “She’s upstairs.”
“Okay, tell me,” I said, but then I couldn’t let her say it, so I said it first. “You had sex.”
“We had sex!” she said, her voice rising enough on the last word that I shushed her, casting a worried glance toward the stairs. “I have to tell you about it, okay?” Her eyes searched my face. She wore a confused, slightly worried expression, and I realized that I wasn’t behaving like a girl whose best friend had just lost her virginity. I should have been curious, giggly, exclamatory— not reluctant and subdued.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “Tell me.” As I listened, I did my best to think only about Sonia, to convince myself this story had nothing to do with me.
They drove out a country road to a dark and quiet field. It was only a few miles from her house, but to Sonia it felt like they had left the earth, or perhaps more like the earth had disappeared, like they were suspended in space, holding on only to each other. There was discomfort, the strange feel of the condom, but still it was perfect, so perfect that in the morning Sonia couldn’t quite trust her own memory, so she got out of bed and found her shirt in the hamper. There were three little pieces of grass still stuck to it. She picked them off and lay them side by side on her bedside table. Evidence.
