The Radius of Us

by Marie Marquardt

  If things were different.

  If I were different.

  We cross the street and join a big crowd of people waiting under a silver overhang.

  “Where are all these people going?” I ask.

  “Probably nowhere,” Bree says. “It just started running. I think everyone wants to come out and ride.”

  “See what it’s like,” Ty says. “You know?”

  I guess, but it seems strange that they’re all lining up and swiping their credit cards at a machine, paying perfectly good money to go nowhere.

  “Don’t we need to get a Breeze Pass?” Gretchen asks.

  “I got this,” Ty says, opening his wallet and pulling out a blue card.

  I don’t even have a wallet. I’ve got absolutely nothing.

  I nod and say, “Thanks, man.”

  A slick blue train pulls up, so quiet you barely hear it, except for a short high squeal as it turns the corner to come into the station. It jolts to a stop, the doors slide open, and we pile on with a bunch of other people. Ty slides into the last available seat, and Bree climbs right onto his lap. I follow Gretchen all the way to the front, where people are standing. She holds on to the center rail, and I grab an overhead bar nearby.

  Three high chimes, and the doors are closing. The trolley starts to move and a woman, dressed in really fancy leather boots and a cropped jacket, starts talking to me.

  “Disculple,” she says. “En dónde encontramos el tour de CNN?” Her Spanish is as fancy as she is. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s from, like, Argentina or somewhere.

  “Lo siento, señora,” I say. “No soy de aquí.”

  She smiles and shrugs. Her smile is nice. It makes me want to help her. I lean toward Gretchen. “Hey, Gretch,” I say. “Where’s the CNN tour?”

  Gretchen glances up at the map on the wall of the trolley. “It’s this one,” she says. “You have to go inside that building and there’s a kiosk.” She squints a little. “Why?”

  I shrug and motion toward the fancy lady. Then I turn back to her. She is looking away, so I touch her really lightly on the shoulder.

  “Disculpe, señora. Mi amiga dice que se puede entrar por ese edificio.” We’re pulling up to the stop, and I point to a big glass entryway. “Hay un kiosko adentro.”

  The doors slide open, and the lady nods and smiles. She grabs the hand of a little girl, and they push their way out, through the crowds.

  About a hundred people pile into our car, including a guy with a big-ass boom box blaring. Gretchen scoots in closer to me and says something, but I can’t hear over the old-school hip-hop.

  “What?” I call out.

  She leans in and talks right into my ear. She is really close. Her lips are brushing up against my face, which is doing strange things to me.

  “Sometimes I forget,” she says. “I mean, that you’re, like, a Spanish speaker.”

  Her cheeks have gone pink again, and she’s watching my lips, like she wants to touch them. I swallow hard.

  “I don’t know any Spanish,” she says, still looking right at my mouth, like she can’t look away. “Do you think in Spanish?”

  I’m not even sure she said it out loud. She mouthed it. She made me read her lips. I glance down, because the pink is spreading along her neck, creeping down under her shirt.

  “Yeah,” I sigh. Christ, I am sighing. “I guess it sort of, uh, well—it depends, I guess, on what I’m thinking about.”

  The streetcar jerks to a stop, and she loses her grip on the rail and falls into me. I have to grab her waist with my hand to hold her steady.

  A sign glows outside the doors. WORLD OF COCA-COLA. The tourists keep piling on and that’s so completely fine with me, because they are pushing and shoving and Gretchen is pressing against me and I am not letting go. The doors close and she moves in even closer, like she wants to fold herself into me.

  And then the trolley starts going, and we’re surrounded by them—a wall of American tourists folding us into each other.

  The trolley jolts and Gretchen shifts, her hand flying over mine. She keeps it there and she slides my hand down a centimeter. I mean it—just the smallest bit, and the tip of my finger is on the bare skin under her shirt, right at the edge of her jeans.

  We’re lighting up, both of us. We are filling up with heat and light. I know she feels it too. Everything disappears: the music, the tourists, the walls of this trolley packed with people. Gone.

  She turns to face me. She’s so close, I can feel her breath. I watch her neck—her hair, spread across my chest.

  “Are you now?” she whispers. “I mean, are you thinking in Spanish?”

  I nod. I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten how to speak.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she says. “I want to hear it.” I close my eyes. I’m so lit up that my mouth can’t form a single word. “But tell me in Spanish,” she says.

  I can do that.

  I lean in, my lips against her hair, and I start to whisper. We ride along and she listens, taking in slow breaths. Gretchen’s chest rises and falls and the place where my finger touches her skin burns with blue heat—that crazy intense heat that turns whatever it touches into pure white ash. And it’s so damn beautiful, saying all the things that we could be together. So I let myself tell her. Just for now, I allow myself to believe that the aching and the wanting are okay, because I could love her, and she could love me back.

  If things were different.

  If I were different.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  GRETCHEN

  MY PHONE LIGHTS up with Adam’s face—a picture I took a year ago, forever ago. I need to pick up, to prove to myself and to Adam, and maybe even to Phoenix, that all this is perfectly normal.

  By “this” I mean the fact that Phoenix and I haven’t talked about that day at all—the pupusas, the Ferris wheel, the trolley (Oh God, the trolley)—but the kids and I are still hanging out with him every afternoon in the community garden. Or maybe, by “this,” I mean that Phoenix and I keep finding ways to be close to each other out here, to touch a hand lightly, to brush up against a bare arm. And when the kids and I leave in the afternoon, we hold our hug for a beat too long, pressing in to inhale our combined scent—lavender and patchouli, dirt and sweat.

  “Hey, Adam!” I say, brightly.

  He is sitting on the bed in his dorm room. I can tell by the poster behind his head. “You sound good,” he says. “What’s up?”

  “We just planted a tree—Luke and Anna and I.”

  “A tree?”

  “Yeah. It was fun.”

  “Let me see,” he says.

  Phoenix is standing with a hose, watering the tree. He darts a look at me, questioning.

  I shrug and turn the phone so that Adam can see. He sees the tree. He also sees Phoenix, boring an enormous hole into the tree with his cold stare. I really hope Adam can’t tell—that he can’t read the slouch, the look, the way Phoenix’s entire body says, I do not want to be part of this FaceTime conversation with your boyfriend.

  “Cool tree,” Adam says. “Fig, right?”

  “Yeah.” How does Adam know these things?

  “Who’s that guy?”

  “Oh, um, that’s Phoenix. He’s helping with the garden.”

  Phoenix watches me, his eyes searching.

  “He’s sort of in charge.”

  Phoenix hears me say those meaningless words.

  “He’s, like, really good at this stuff.”

  He’s helping me come back alive. He’s sort of amazing.

  That’s what I want for Phoenix to hear me say, but he doesn’t, because I can’t.

  “Cool.” Adam looks away from me, toward the door. He looks like he’s ready to head through it. “Listen, mon chou, I know I said I was coming home this weekend, but my friend—”

  His eyes dart to the corner of the room. “My friend is playing in this show—well, their band is playing…”

  Their band. Interesting use of
pronoun. “No worries,” I say. “What’s the band called?”

  “Flower Girl—the name’s ironic. They’re emo, alt-rock, like Ex Hex with a little Girlpool mixed in.”

  I was right. “They” is a girl. And I’m not even bothered by this, at all. I’m also completely in the dark about what kind of music this girl plays, since I’ve never heard of Girlpool or Ex Hex.

  “You definitely should go to the show, Adam,” I say. “Support your friend.”

  “Maybe I’ll come next weekend,” he tells me, looking back toward the door.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That works.”

  He nods once. “Gotta get to class, mon chou. I love you.”

  I say I love you too because I do love him. But I guess I’m realizing that love is a complicated thing.

  * * *

  I don’t remember what Adam did when he first saw me on that night back in August, after the incident. I don’t even remember whether he hugged me or took my hand or kissed me. But I remember him sitting on the edge of the leather ottoman, watching in silence as the police officer grilled me. Adam listened to me describe what happened, and his eyes got so wide. And the moment that his jaw dropped, that was the exact moment when Adam began to see me differently, or maybe not to see me at all.

  When I stumbled into the house, my face covered in blood, my eye bulging and already turning black, my mother was standing in the kitchen with a cup of tea. I remember that detail, the tea, because the porcelain cup fell to the ground and splintered into a million pieces, but my mom didn’t even notice. She was already running toward me, calling out my father’s name, again and again and again.

  “Dan! Dan!”

  She tried to wrap her arms around me, but I held out my hand to push her away. “Don’t,” I said. “I’ll bleed on you.”

  My dad ran into the room, ignored my protests, and pulled me in close. Then I collapsed, sobbing into his chest.

  He cried too when I told him. And he kept asking me, “Did he hurt you—did he try to hurt you?”

  It’s so weird that I kept saying no. Because, yes, he hurt me—in more ways than I could even begin to imagine at that point, but I knew what my dad was trying to ask me, and I didn’t want to hear him say the word.

  The police officer, though, he had no trouble asking that question, or any other question. By the time he arrived, Adam was there, too. I guess my mom called him. While my dad was holding me, my mom had been fuming and pacing and doing things. I don’t even know what things. I think she was just trying to stay busy so she didn’t have to face me.

  After the police left, Adam stayed. He kept asking if I was okay and I kept saying I was. Which was an enormous lie. But I wanted him to feel okay, so I said it. I said it all the way to the hospital, where he held my hand tight while a bunch of nurses fussed over me and tried to put me back together.

  Over the next few weeks, people came to the house to see me, and I was asked that question a lot. My aching muscles began to heal and my bruises faded from black to brown to yellow and I was asked so many questions and told so many things and none of them were right.

  What did he look like? Was he black? Was he white? Was he on drugs?

  Why did it matter what he looked like? These friends and well-wishers were supposed to be showing up at my house for me, to see how I was doing, to help me feel better. So why did everyone keep talking about him? I hated it when they asked about his race. I hated it so much. God, what a stupid, terrible, senseless question.

  If only you hadn’t been walking alone to your car. Why were you alone?

  Jesus. The blame. I mean, really. They were telling me what I should have done differently, and my bruises weren’t even gone yet. How was this helpful?

  I always carry my keys in my fist for protection. I park under streetlights and weave to my car to avoid assault.

  Advice. So many people with so much “useful” advice. Because, yeah, I was totally planning to go out that night and park on an empty street and walk to my car alone. I didn’t leave the house for weeks, but the advice just kept coming.

  I bet he was a drug dealer. He probably just wanted your credit cards so he could buy a big-screen TV at Best Buy. Maybe he was homeless and just desperate for money to eat.

  So much speculation about him. Maybe because no one dared to speculate about me and whether I would come through all this—ever.

  You’ll go back to being your old self soon, Gretchen, and I will wait for you. I’m here, waiting. I promise not to go anywhere.

  That was Adam. That’s what he told me a few weeks later. And I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that I was pretty sure my old self was gone for good.

  * * *

  After I’m finished babysitting the kids—after I’ve washed all the dirt from the garden off them, fed them, bathed them, and put them to bed—I get into the car and start to drive. I don’t really have a plan, but I’m driving toward Athens. I need to see Adam. I think I want him to know it’s okay. I want him to stop feeling like I need him, like he can’t move on until I’m better. Because I am getting better, and because I think we both need to let ourselves move on.

  When I am about twenty minutes away, I have to stop for gas. I drive past two stations, because they’re not very well lit, and just the thought of getting out of my car at one of those places pulls at my chest and makes my hands tingle. But then I find a QuikTrip with enormous stadium lights and a bunch of people waiting in line at the pumps. I circle twice, trying to get up the nerve to stop and get out of the car, alone. My heart is beating a little faster than usual, but I know I can manage. I pull up behind a family—the dad is pumping gas, and the kids are in the back of the minivan, watching a movie. I swipe my credit card, and I’m looking all around me at first, hyperaware. But everything is fine. It’s just a normal gas station and a bunch of typical suburban people. So I set up the nozzle and pull my phone from my pocket. I’m looking at my phone, trying to stay calm—to distract my mind from all the potential dangers it wants to conjure.

  I check Adam’s feed:

  Studying @ Henderson’s w/Rose and crew waiting on Kaukauna Kid up at 9 not to be missed if you’re into experimental jazz improv.

  Rose. It’s a nice name. I’m guessing she’s probably the Flower Girl he wants to stay in Athens for. I guess I’m about to meet her.

  * * *

  Henderson’s is easy to find. It’s right off Prince Avenue, in an old converted factory building. Redbrick with a sign hanging above the door, a gramophone record player etched into the dark wood. There are a few tables outside, but they’re empty. The night is cool, and the air feels damp.

  A big plate-glass window opens onto a coffeehouse/bar/live-music venue that’s filled with people. Adam’s type of place.

  There’s a bunch of street parking, but I can’t bring myself to park on the street. I’m afraid it might bring back the memories. So I drive until I find a crowded parking lot. I lock my car and head inside fast, not even pausing for a second to think about what I’m doing or what I’m going to say or what might happen once I get this over with.

  As soon as I go through the door, I see them: Adam and a girl, sitting next to each other at a table. A strange energy fills the space between them, and it makes me want to stop and watch. He’s sort of leaned in toward her, but he isn’t talking. His face looks scruffy, like he might be trying to grow a beard, and he wears Wayfarer eyeglasses, black-rimmed. They’re new. The girl has on suede boots with three layers of fringe and a really short poufy skirt that has a complex flower design. Her hair is long and wavy. The way it falls creates a sort of wall, blocking out the world. Her bare knee is close to his, but not touching. They aren’t touching anywhere, but it’s like they are touching everywhere. Or at least wanting to.

  I don’t feel much of anything watching them, except curious about how that energy forms, how it can be so visible—so evident, even to strangers, probably. They’re sitting with another girl. I recognize her—the pink-haired one fr
om that awkward Skype conversation. I don’t know how long I stand there—long enough to notice weird jazz music with a bunch of dissonance playing over the speakers, and to take in the acrid scent of roasted coffee beans, long enough to see them like that, in their own world, not doing anything at all except for inhabiting that space together.

  I watch my boyfriend of two and a half years build a field of intense energy just by sitting next to this girl, and I start to wonder whether that’s what people see when they watch me and Phoenix working beside each other in the garden, or sitting on the edge of a raised flower bed, sharing a bottle of water.

  I know—it’s so far beyond time to get this over with.

  “Adam,” I say, walking quickly toward him. He looks up at the same time as the girl.

  “Mon chou!” He stands and throws his arms around me. We hug, and he lifts me just a bit off my feet.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks, pulling back and smiling. “I can’t believe you’re here.” He looks quickly around, still holding on to my shoulders. His touch is soft, soothing, familiar—but not electric.

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “I came alone,” I tell him.

  “You drove here?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’ve been driving more and, you know, doing stuff on my own.”

  He lets go of one shoulder and turns to the girl with the wavy hair and fringed boots. “Did you hear that, Rose? She drove here, on her own.”

  The girl—Rose—stands up to face me. She smiles a sweet smile and says, “That’s really great, Gretchen. I’m so glad you’re getting better.”

  How much does this Flower Girl know?

  Then the pink-haired girl gets up and throws her arms around me, pulling me into a tight hug. “I’m so glad you’re finally well enough to come up here! We’ve all wanted to meet you!”

  Does everyone in the entire town of Athens know I’m a mess?

  “Sit down,” Adam says to me. “I’m gonna get you a coffee.”

  He sort of pushes me into his chair and takes off for the bar. Rose and the other girl sit too.

  “Your timing is perfect,” the pink-haired girl says. “Kaukauna Kid comes on in, like, two minutes.”