When My Heart Joins the Thousand

by A. J. Steiger

  A shadow falls over me, and I tense. When I look up, I see man in a police uniform. He’s enormous, with broad, round shoulders and a bushy walrus mustache. “Everything all right, ma’am?” he asks, thumbs hooked into the loops on his belt. I thought policemen only did that on TV shows.

  I step away from him and start to rock back and forth on the balls of my feet, my hand still in my pocket. Men in uniforms make me nervous. If a regular person is bothering me or asking questions I don’t know how to answer, I can just walk away. But walking away from a policeman can result in being arrested. “I’m fine,” I mutter, and take another step backward.

  His thick eyebrows bunch together, and he frowns. “Mind telling me what you’re doing here?” His tone has changed, hardened. He’s suspicious.

  “I’m standing.”

  “Yes, I can see that. I’ll ask you again. What are you doing?”

  I lower my head, breathing rapidly. I know I’m making it worse—acting nervous, avoiding eye contact, like I’m up to no good. But I can’t help it. “Nothing.” I keep fiddling with the Rubik’s Cube, without taking it from my pocket.

  “It sure looks like you’re doing something.”

  I try to think of an answer, but my head is full of static. My legs itch with the urge to bolt, but if I do, he’ll chase me. “I don’t know why you’re asking me these questions.” My voice shakes. “I don’t know why people won’t just leave me alone.”

  He takes another step toward me, and I take another step back. “What’s that you’ve got in your pocket?” He holds out one meaty hand. “Let’s see it.”

  I don’t want him taking my Rubik’s Cube. I don’t like anyone touching my things. My skin crawls at the thought of him turning the cube over in his hands, getting his fingerprints all over it, violating it. He might decide not to give it back. I hunch my shoulders. “Go away.”

  He speaks slowly and evenly: “Place your hands against the wall.”

  I feel sick.

  “Place your hands against the wall,” he says again.

  When I don’t obey, he grabs my wrists and shoves my hands against the wall. My whole body goes rigid. The touch sends a sharp jolt through me, like a hot poker raking down my spine. His fingers are burning my skin. “Let me go.”

  “Keep your hands there, where I can see them—”

  I can’t stop myself; I start to struggle. I kick. When he pushes me against the wall, I scream.

  “Get your hands off her!”

  For a second or two, I don’t recognize Stanley’s voice. I’ve never heard him speak so loudly or forcefully.

  The policeman looks up, blinking. “Excuse me?”

  “I said let her go!” Stanley shoves himself between me and the policeman, shielding me with his body. His face is flushed and shiny with perspiration as he holds up his cell phone. “I’ve already dialed 911. All I have to do is hit send.”

  The policeman glances at his crutch and scowls. “This isn’t what you think it is,” he says. “Step aside.”

  “I’m not going to just stand back and let you assault her!”

  “I’m not assaulting her, for God’s sake, I’m trying to do my job.” The man draws himself up, looming over Stanley. He’s nearly six inches taller and probably a hundred pounds heavier. “Now for the last time, put your phone away and step aside. Or this is going to get ugly.” The color drains from Stanley’s face, but still, he stands his ground. The man reaches for something at his belt.

  “Wait!” I blurt out, and plunge my hand into my pocket. The man tenses and starts to pull out his gun. In the same instant, I pull out the Rubik’s Cube.

  He freezes and blinks at it. His expression goes blank. Then he shoves the gun back into its holster. “Let me see that.”

  I hesitate. Resisting will just make things worse—for Stanley as well as me—so I hand him the cube. He turns it over in his hands, poking at it like it’s some mysterious alien artifact, then hands it back to me. His expression is rigid, but his cheeks redden slightly. He clears his throat. “Well, apparently there’s been a misunderstanding.” He crosses his arms. “Why didn’t you just take it out when I told you to?”

  I don’t answer. I don’t know what to say.

  He frowns. “Is she re . . . mentally challenged, or something?”

  “No,” Stanley says.

  “Well, then what’s her problem?”

  “You’re scaring her.”

  The man glares at Stanley, then at me. He breathes a heavy sigh. “Fine. Whatever.” He shakes his head, muttering under his breath as he turns his back to us, then gets into his car and drives away. I clutch the Rubik’s Cube against my chest.

  Stanley starts to reach out, then stops. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” I’m still feeling shaky and weak and a little nauseous, but it will pass. It could’ve been worse. Would’ve been, if he hadn’t shown up. “What about you.”

  He smiles, though his face is still pale. “Fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “I have a thing about large, intimidating men yelling at me.” He wipes his brow with one sleeve and sags against the nearby wall. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”

  This is my fault. A dull heat spreads across my brow and seeps down into my ears and cheeks.

  He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and lets it out slowly. “Do you want to sit down?”

  I hesitate—then nod.

  We walk over to the bench in the park and sit, side by side, not quite touching.

  “That was nuts,” Stanley says. “I mean, you weren’t doing anything. You were just standing there.”

  I shrug. “I look suspicious. That’s just how it is. Lots of people have to deal with this kind of thing.”

  “That doesn’t make it okay.”

  I look at him from the corner of my eye. He stood up for me. He took a risk for my sake. Not many people have done that. “Thank you,” I say, the words awkward and unfamiliar in my mouth.

  “You’re welcome.”

  For a few minutes, neither one of us says anything. I can’t read Stanley’s expression. His fingers are clenched tight on his crutch, the knuckles almost white. I avert my gaze, my throat suddenly, painfully tight.

  “Look at me,” he whispers. “Please?”

  His eyes are bright in the dimness, almost luminous. They seem to soak up the faint light and reflect it back, like a cat’s; the bluish-gray whites are opalescent. “I understand, you know,” he says. “Why you’re scared. This whole human-interaction thing isn’t exactly easy for me, either.”

  He thinks he understands, but he doesn’t. There’s so much more to it. So much I can’t even begin to tell him.

  I’m still twisting the Rubik’s Cube, spinning the rows of color, but my mind won’t focus; I’m undoing the progress I’ve made, scattering the rows into tiny squares, jumbling it into a mass of incoherent color.

  “I was never any good at those,” he says, distracting me. “Rubik’s Cubes, I mean. I had one as a kid, but I wasn’t able to solve it.”

  “They aren’t really that hard. You just have to be patient.”

  “May I try?”

  I hesitate, then hand it to him. He starts to twist it. His slender, long-fingered hands are fascinating to watch, almost hypnotic.

  “Start by solving the white side,” I advise.

  It takes him a while, but eventually, he manages to complete one section. He hands it back to me, leaning a little closer in the process. His eyelashes are very long and dark, in contrast to mine, which are short and almost invisible because they’re the same pale red as my hair. I lower my gaze and clutch the Rubik’s Cube against my chest.

  “You like puzzles,” he remarks. There’s no inflection at the end, so it’s probably intended more as an observation than a question.

  I reply anyway. “I find them calming.”

  He smiles a little. “Sometimes, when I’m stressed out, I distract myself by solving riddles. I guess that’s kind
of the same. Like a puzzle in your head. There’s one from Alice in Wonderland . . . ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ I thought about that for a long time before I learned that it was supposed to be unanswerable.”

  “I never liked riddles much. They’re too ambiguous. A puzzle only has one solution, even if there are many different ways to get there.” I lock a row of colors into place on my Rubik’s Cube. “A raven and a writing desk are similar in any number of ways. They’re both made of matter, for one thing. They’re both heavier than a blade of grass.”

  “Sure, but a good riddle has only one right solution, and it seems self-evident once you know it. There’s that moment where things kind of snap into focus.”

  I hesitate. “All right. Tell me one.”

  “Here’s an easy one. What has hands but can’t clap?”

  “A corpse.”

  He winces. “A clock. Jeez.”

  “Well, my answer fits, too.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” He lets out a little sigh. “Okay, here’s a better one. There’s a house with four walls facing south. A bear is circling the house. What color is the bear?”

  I twist the cube harder. “How is anyone supposed to answer that. Those two things aren’t even remotely connected. Anyway, there’s no way a house could have four walls all facing south. That’s impossible.”

  “Is it?”

  “Obviously. Unless—” I frown, thinking. “Unless it’s at the North Pole. Which means . . . it’s probably a polar bear.” Realization clicks into place. “The bear is white.”

  “There you go.”

  I make a noncommittal sound in my throat. “All right. I see what you mean. But that one was more of a logic problem than a riddle.”

  He chuckles quietly. “Maybe.”

  It’s strange, how easily we slip back into conversation after everything that’s happened. I’ve missed it.

  An image floats up behind my retinas: Stanley sitting on the bench alone, crying. “Stanley . . . do you remember the day you threw your phone into the pond.”

  His smile fades. “Yeah. I remember.”

  “Why did you do that.” I asked before, once, and he just said he was being stupid and that it didn’t matter. But there must be a reason.

  He folds his hands together. “My mom had cancer,” he says. “She had it for a long time. After a while, it spread to her brain. And they couldn’t operate. They—they said that if they took out the tumor, she would probably be a vegetable. No awareness. She didn’t want that.”

  There’s a small sharp pain somewhere between my heart and throat, like a fishhook has caught inside me.

  “She knew she wouldn’t be around much longer. So she went to Elkland Meadows, and they made her comfortable. That’s what they do there.” The moonlight makes the bruise-colored circles under his eyes darker, the hollows in his cheeks more prominent. “One day, the pain was really bad, and they asked her if she wanted to stay awake or just sleep for whatever time was left. She said she wanted to sleep. So we said good-bye. I threw away my phone because there seemed to be no point in keeping it. I mean, who was I going to call?”

  A faint trace of daylight lingers in the sky, but the moon is already out. It slips behind a cloud, then emerges, wreathed in a silvery-white halo. Black-and-pearl-colored dusk shadows stretch across the grass.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. They’re the only words I have.

  “It’s okay,” he replies.

  But it’s not. Words aren’t enough.

  I start to reach out. Stop. Then I close the gap between us and take his hand. His fingers twitch, then curl around mine. His hand feels bird-fragile, the bones long and thin, the skin fever-hot. He squeezes my hand lightly.

  “You never told me.” The words fall from my numb lips, into the cold air. “Why.”

  “It didn’t seem fair to unload all that on you. And I didn’t want to scare you away. I mean . . . you’re kind of my only friend.”

  That word again. Feelings stir beneath my skin: uncomfortable feelings, like there are thin wires running into the center of my rib cage and something is tugging at those wires, sending vibrations into my core.

  “I guess that’s a weird thing to admit out of the blue, isn’t it? But yeah. I’m kind of a loner. Which is a slightly cooler-sounding way of saying ‘nerd with no social life.’”

  I can’t process this. “You talk to other people at your school. Don’t you.”

  “Sometimes. But it’s not the same. We talk about what TV shows we like or what music we listen to. We don’t talk like this.”

  I don’t respond; I’m struggling to control my breathing.

  “I guess I just unloaded. Exactly the way I didn’t want to. God. Sorry.”

  He’s always apologizing.

  “I’m not even nice to you,” I say.

  “Sure you are. More than once, you stayed up with me until four o’clock in the morning because I couldn’t sleep. Remember?”

  “It’s not like I had anything better to do.”

  “Every time you show me a kindness, you downplay it like this. Why are you so worried about being seen as a nice person?”

  “I’m not a nice person.”

  “We’ll just have to disagree on that.”

  I let his hand slip from mine. My fingers are suddenly cold. “I don’t know how to do this,” I murmur.

  “Do what?”

  “This. Everything.”

  He gives me a tiny smile. “I guess we can just play it by ear.” He bites his lower lip. “Do you . . . do you want to get lunch tomorrow?”

  “I have work.”

  He lowers his gaze.

  “We could have dinner instead, maybe.”

  His breath hitches. “Really? I mean, great. That sounds great.”

  “Do you want to go to Buster’s again. Or someplace else.”

  “Actually I was wondering . . . would you like to come to my place?”

  I blink and turn toward him. For a few seconds, I’m too surprised to respond.

  “I’m actually a pretty good cook,” he adds.

  What does it mean, that he’s inviting me? What would it imply, if I accepted? “We’re just going to eat dinner,” I say. “We’re not going to have sex.”

  Color rushes to his cheeks. “Well, yeah. I mean, no. Of course.”

  “Which is it,” I ask.

  “That was a question?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry. So . . . you’re asking me if I . . .”

  “I like having clearly defined boundaries,” I say. “I’ve never been in this situation before, so I need to know what your expectations are.”

  His face is bright red now. “I just want to cook dinner for you. Honest. I wasn’t planning on making any moves. After last night, I thought we should take things slow.”

  I pick at a loose thread of my sleeve. “Just be friends, you mean.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  Is that what I want?

  Things are so much simpler with animals. With human beings, everything is so complicated and ambiguous. There are people who remain friends without ever having sex. Then there are friends with benefits, people who have sex but don’t bother with the other aspects of a relationship. And then, of course, there’s romance, which is something I don’t understand at all.

  This feels dangerous. I should say no; I should retreat, regroup, try to figure out what all this means.

  “Yes.”

  A wide smile breaks across his face, and suddenly—despite my misgivings—I’m glad I agreed. “Great. I’ll email you the directions.”

  I nod.

  We look at each other, and I find myself preoccupied, once again, with those uncanny eyes. Blue within blue. I’ve never seen anything like them. I want to ask, but the words stick in my throat.

  “You know,” he says, “I just figured it out.”

  “What?”

  “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

  I furrow my brow
. “Why.”

  “Neither is made of cheese.”

  I blink a few times. “Well, now you’re just being silly.”

  “But I made you smile.” His voice softens. “You’ve got a nice smile, you know.”

  I touch my lips, surprised. I hadn’t realized I was smiling.

  Later, sitting on my couch, I open up my laptop. Blue sclerae. I plug the words into the search engine, and a list of medical sites pops up. I click on a link and start reading.

  Blue sclerae can result from loss of water content, which causes a thinning of the tissue, allowing the underlying dark choroids to be seen.

  I scroll down to causes. There are forty-seven possible medical causes listed. Among them are skeletal disorders, chromosome and ocular disorders, and high urine excretion. I think about calling Stanley to ask if he urinates a lot, then quickly reject the idea and go back to scrutinizing the possible causes listed on the website. Sometimes, it says, there is no specific cause. It might mean nothing.

  I close the browser window. Probably I’m overthinking it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  When I pull up in front of Stanley’s house that evening, my movements feel automatic, as if my mind has become disconnected from my body. Which maybe is a good thing, because in my mind, I don’t feel prepared for this.

  His house is small and blue, with a brick chimney, a neatly tended lawn, and a single car—a nondescript gray import—in the driveway. There’s a row of azaleas beneath the window, though they’re no longer in bloom.

  I’m wearing a black T-shirt with a graphic of a small white bunny bearing bloodstained fangs over the words NO ORDINARY RABBIT. He answers the door wearing a burgundy sweater, and he’s swapped his metal crutch for a cane carved from dark reddish wood—mahogany, maybe. “Hi.” His voice cracks a little. He clears his throat and tries again. “Hi. Come in.”

  I slip my shoes off on the mat and take a few cautious steps into the living room. It’s small and clean and smells faintly of cinnamon. The armchair and the couch are upholstered in brown corduroy. It looks very soft. I resist the temptation to run my hands over it and instead ask a question that’s been on my mind for a while: “Does anyone else live here.”