Something Like Gravity

by Amber Smith

  “People died so young back then.” I was unable to stop myself from automatically performing the birth year to death year calculations in my head. “Nineteen. Twelve. Four. Eight months.” I pointed at each grave as we passed. “Two days.”

  “Crazy,” she said half-heartedly, still distracted.

  “So, are you looking for anything in particular?”

  Finally she turned her head in my direction. “Statues,” she said immediately, but then followed up with, “I think.”

  “Statues?” I repeated, and I found myself scanning the landscape for them too. “How about those, over there?”

  “No, not Jesus and Mary type statues. Something more . . . unique.”

  We veered off the main path, toward one of the pockets of taller headstones and monuments. I stayed on the walkway while she went to inspect a crowd of what appeared to be nearly life-size saints and angels, carefully stepping between the rows of headstones.

  “No.” She sighed, shaking her head, as if one of them had asked her a question.

  “What?” I called over to her.

  “Let’s head back more toward the middle.”

  As I followed her, she looked at me and asked, “Do you think this is weird?”

  “No, it’s . . .” I tried to choose my next word carefully. “Interesting.”

  We walked toward the middle, and she looked at the statues along the way, but none of them was right, apparently, because she had yet to take a picture.

  I tried to go with it, but we had been walking for quite a while, and I had to ask:

  “So is this a statue you’ve seen before?”

  “I have,” she said. “I just don’t know where. But I know I’ll recognize it when I see it.”

  “Okay,” I said, but I was having a hard time searching for statues because I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.

  “Are you getting bored?” she asked as we ambled along the path.

  “Not at all,” I said, looking around. “It’s sort of peaceful here. I like it.”

  “Me too.” She brushed her hand along the bark of a tree we were passing, and then said, “Hey, can I ask you something? It’s sorta personal,” she cautioned.

  “That’s okay,” I told her, even though I wasn’t positive it would be okay.

  “Being here, I guess it just makes me think about things.” She was prefacing her question too much. Her footsteps were slowing down. “Have you ever lost someone? I mean someone close to you, someone you cared about?”

  For some reason that was not at all what I’d been anticipating. I was worried maybe I wasn’t passing as well as I thought I was—maybe she heard something in my voice or laugh, or maybe she saw something in the way I walked, or maybe my chest wasn’t quite smooth enough or my jeans not baggy enough, or she had noticed my fingers were too long and slender and delicate. I had picked apart every last thing I wanted to change about myself as I’d waited for the question. But now that it was out, I didn’t know what to say. Her face was open and curious and soft as she watched me, waiting for my answer.

  “You lost someone?” I asked. “Who?”

  I watched her swallow, like she was having a hard time getting the words to come out of her mouth. But then she finally said, “My sister. Mallory—her name was Mallory.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was last year. She just . . . died.” She said it like a question, like “died” was a foreign word that she hadn’t quite figured out the meaning of. “She had this heart problem no one knew about, and she just died.” She waved her hand through the air like she was trying to catch something invisible. “Did you know that already?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I just thought maybe you heard, the way people talk around here.”

  “I don’t really talk to anyone other than you.”

  She laughed, and even though I wasn’t necessarily joking, I laughed too.

  “I’m sorry about your sister, Maia.” And I was sorry. “Really, that sounds awful.”

  She looked down at her feet, and said, quietly, “Thanks.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked her, and I could barely stand how much I wanted to take her hand right now, how much I wished I could put my arms around her.

  “No,” she answered. “But I think maybe I’m starting to be.”

  She stopped walking when we came to a fork in the pathway, and turned a full 360 degrees, shielding her eyes from the setting sunlight that was filtering in underneath the tree canopy.

  “What time is it?” she asked me.

  I pulled out my phone to check and saw that Cole had texted me back:

  Thanks. It’s all right.

  “It’s 8:09,” I told her.

  She squinted into the distance, shaking her head. “I don’t think I’m gonna find it.” Her shoulders sloped forward and her hands loosened their grip on the camera that was still hanging around her neck.

  “We can always come back again when we have more daylight,” I offered, trying to lift her spirits. She nodded and glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the coming sunset, and did a quick double take.

  “Wait a minute,” she whispered, more to herself than to me.

  And then, without another word, she began walking due west, taking a straight diagonal line directly to where the sun was sinking into the horizon.

  MAIA

  THERE, IN THE SUNSET, WAS a statue that stood in silhouette, the sun breaking all around it like a halo of golden rays. How could I not notice it? Maybe that’s what drew Mallory to it in the first place.

  My feet made their way, no longer concerned with keeping to the pathways or stepping over the graves. The closer I came to it, the more sure I was of everything. I was sure that this was the statue in Mallory’s picture. I was sure I was supposed to be here. I was sure that anything I had said or done or thought leading up to this moment was justified. I was sure I was doing the right thing. I was sure, most of all, of myself.

  I circled the statue. It stood tall, on a platform. I looked at it from all angles. It wasn’t like any of the other statues around. It wasn’t a famous saint or an angel with wings. Not any deity I was familiar with. It was just a woman. An ageless woman in a draped garment with flowing, shoulder-length hair. She was larger than life-size, and she didn’t carry anything with her that would give any clue as to what or whom she was supposed to represent.

  We stood in front of her and looked up at her face. She gazed down, almost as if she was looking directly at us.

  “Emily,” Chris said.

  “What?”

  He pointed to the base of the platform. There was a small, rectangular, bronze plaque attached to the stone.

  EMILY

  DAUGHTER, SISTER, FRIEND

  That was all it said. No last name, no dates.

  “Wow,” was all I could manage to say.

  Maybe the statue really was just a person, an ordinary human being who once lived and who was once loved enough for her family and friends to erect a statue in her memory.

  I readied the camera and stood where I imagined Mallory must’ve also stood. Chris walked away from me and the statue, out of what would be the frame if I was really taking a picture, and leaned against a nearby oak whose trunk was so enormous that if he lay down in front of it lengthwise, I think the trunk would still be wider.

  I was supposed to take a picture. But as I brought the camera to my face and looked through, the magic was gone. I lowered the camera, and looked with my own two eyes, and I felt the magic simmer around the edges of my vision once again.

  I raised the camera again, peered through the viewfinder, and pressed the button, as was my plan. But I couldn’t fight this sneaking suspicion that somewhere along the way I had been missing the point.

  I walked over to where Chris was standing, and glanced back at the Emily statue.

  “Get what you needed?” he asked.

  When I looked at him, I realized I hadn’t thought about those questions
that had been buzzing around my mind these past two days. “Yeah, I think so.”

  • • •

  Once we made it out of the maze of the cemetery and were standing on the other side of the gates, planted back in reality, Chris was the first to speak. He had his hand placed over his stomach. “Are you hungry at all?”

  “Starving,” I answered.

  “Good, me too,” he said, relieved. “What do you feel like?”

  “Anything without a face. I’m vegetarian,” I elaborated.

  “I love vegetarian restaurants.”

  “Well, I doubt we’ll find any around here.”

  No sooner had I spoken the words than he was on his phone, tapping away.

  “The Green House,” he said, tilting the screen toward me. “Five-minute walk.”

  “Really?” I asked in disbelief.

  He shrugged. “Wanna try it?”

  We made it there in four. The outside of the building was painted a leafy green, and there was an outdoor seating area cordoned off with a row of live bamboo plants. We were greeted at the door by a girl with floral tattoos up and down her arms. Her smile was warm as she led us to a table that looked out onto the street.

  She pulled a lighter out of her apron pocket and reached for the candle that was sitting in the center of our table.

  I read my menu in the flickering light, and tried not to stare at Chris again, at the way the candlelight made him look so vibrant and alive and gorgeous.

  “What looks good to you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, fighting the voice in my head that wanted to answer: You. “I’ve never been to an actual vegetarian restaurant before.” These were foods I’d never tried, and had barely even heard of, except for on TV. Like Chili Roasted Garlic Black Bean Hummus with Pita Chips. Crispy Baked Tofu Lettuce Wraps with Peanut Sauce. Super-Loaded Veggie Ramen. Eggplant Lasagna Rollups.

  Chris’s eyes widened as he leaned across the table toward me just slightly. “Are you serious?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, the vegetarian cuisine in Carson is mainly cheese fries.”

  I laughed, but he didn’t.

  “Oh my god, where do we even begin?” he said, studying his menu with a new intensity. “We just need a good strategy.”

  “A strategy?”

  “Yes.” He continued flipping through the pages of the menu. “Okay, I think the thing to do is order a bunch of dishes and split them so you can try as many things as possible.”

  “Um, okay,” I agreed.

  We took turns ordering something from each section of the menu. The waitress arched her pierced eyebrow when we first started rattling off the list of dishes, but then smiled like she was in on some secret joke.

  In a short time, our entire table was filled with plates. We barely spoke while we ate, save for all the sound effects, the “Mms” and “Yums” murmured through full mouths.

  I’d tasted some of everything and I’d arrived at a verdict. “Okay, it’s official. I want to marry these tofu lettuce wraps,” I announced. “But only if the peanut sauce can come too.”

  “And leave the eggplant things in the cold? Really?”

  “The heart wants what it wants,” I said, shrugging as I took another bite.

  “Okay, then I’m marrying the Vegan Taco Flatbread,” he added. “Wait, or the Quinoa Stuffed Banana Peppers.”

  “Mm, yeah.”

  The waitress appeared again as we sat there swimming in the table of half-eaten food. “Boxes?” she asked.

  On the way back to the car, we took our time, our footsteps unhurried and loose. I watched him looking up at the sky as we walked side by side. I had this sense that, for the first time ever, I was finally a part of the world and not just in it. I wanted to hold on to this feeling, whatever it was.

  Because for a moment, a sliver of a moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything. I had forgotten about Mallory, and the gas station wall, and the spring break party, and Bowman’s, and my bike tires, and the cemetery gates, and the whole reason we were here to begin with. I wanted to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and grab on to Chris’s arm and make him hold still too. I wanted to put everything on pause while I memorized what it felt like to just be me.

  I swung my arm as I walked, so that it bumped against his. He shifted his gaze from the stars to me. I smiled at him as I hooked one of my fingers around one of his.

  He looked down at our hands, our fingers weaving together. “Is this all right?” he asked.

  My heart was pounding so hard, I could barely respond, but to murmur, “Mm-hmm.”

  I didn’t care that Chris was trans. He was Chris. And there was nothing in the world I would rather be doing in this moment than walking down the street holding his hand.

  • • •

  As we drove home in the dark, the windows all rolled down again, I kept finding myself smiling for no reason. The radio was turned down low, and it was the perfect kind of evening—cool and breezy. I was tired, but in a good way.

  Something had happened today. Maybe many things had happened.

  I couldn’t say what exactly it was, but I suddenly felt as if I’d known Chris for a lot longer than just a couple of weeks. I looked at him now, and it seemed like so much had changed from only a few hours earlier when he’d approached me at Bargain Mart and I’d felt so weirded out, or in the car ride to New Pines, when I couldn’t stop myself from staring at him, trying to find traces of what I’d seen through that window. But now, as I looked at him, I wasn’t seeing any of that.

  “Hey, Chris?” I said. I could be honest with him. I could explain the entire situation. I was going to. It was better to get it all out in the open. But then as he turned toward me and our eyes met, I couldn’t do it.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I answered. “It’s just that today was the best day I’ve had in a long time.”

  He nodded and said, “Me too.”

  CHRIS

  I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY, the glow of the day on me. I parked and shut the car off and sat there for a minute. It was so stupid, but I missed her already. I held my hand up and touched my palm lightly—I could still feel the imprint of her hand in mine.

  Isobel’s headlights were shining on me as her car rolled up behind the station wagon. I was holding a paper bag full of my half of the Green House leftovers as I waited for her to get out of her car.

  “Did you have dinner yet?” I asked her as she walked up to me.

  “No,” she said, eyeing the bag. “Where did you get that?”

  “Maia and I drove out to New Pines today. We checked out this vegetarian place.”

  Isobel gave me a look as we walked inside.

  “Sit. I’ll get the forks,” she said as she gestured to the kitchen table and started pulling out the boxes and opening them. “Okay,” she began, picking up a citrus-glazed brussels sprout between her thumb and forefinger, examining it with curiosity before popping it into her mouth. “You gonna tell me what’s going on over there?” she asked, tipping her head in the direction of the door.

  “Nothing,” I lied, realizing that our usual back-and-forth banter was not going to cut it tonight. “We’re just friends.”

  “You sure?” she asked, and I thought I heard something in her tone that was disapproving.

  “Why are you asking like that?” Wasn’t she the one who encouraged me to live my life and not make apologies for trying to be happy? Wasn’t she the one who always set that example for me in the first place?

  She drew her eyebrows together and narrowed her eyes.

  I continued, “I mean, would it be so bad if we were more than friends? I’m not saying we are. God, this would actually be supremely shitty timing, and I’m honestly not trying to start anything up, but what would be so wrong with that? Just because I’m—”

  “No!” she shouted, cutting me off once she realized what I was leading up to. “Chris, don’t be ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with getting into a
relationship because you’re trans. How could you even ask such a thing?”

  I marveled at the way the word could just roll off Isobel’s tongue without hesitation or uncertainty; I still wasn’t that comfortable with naming it.

  “I just want to check in to see where you are. If things were moving in that direction with you and Maia, or you and anyone, I’d think that’s fucking incredible.”

  “Okay, fine,” I relented.

  “I only want to make sure you’re okay and you’re taking care of yourself and being safe.”

  “Safe?” I snorted. “It’s not like I’m gonna get her pregnant.”

  “Bad joke, kid.” She scrunched up her face and shook her head, giving me the thumbs-down with both hands. She was right. I was being defensive, and that wasn’t funny. “I’m talking about you guys being safe, as in safe with your heart and your trust, and yes, okay, your bodies too.”

  “What, you don’t think she’s trustworthy?”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. But . . .”

  “What?”

  “Does she know that you’re trans?”

  I sighed, shaking my head. “You know, it’d just be nice for once to not have to provide some kind of disclaimer before saying hello to someone.”

  “Hey, I’m not telling you what to do one way or another. I honestly don’t know what the answer is, Chris. But . . .” She took a bite of the flatbread and said, in between chewing, “From where I’m standing”—she paused to swallow—“it looks like you’re saying more than just hello to her.”

  She had a point. But every time I thought about having the conversation, it made me want to run.

  “When the time is right—if the time is right—you’ll figure it out.” She reached across the table and squeezed my arm. “I wasn’t trying to upset you. You know that, right?”

  “I know. It’s just—”

  “Scary?” she finished. “It’s always scary to be honest, to show someone who you are. Why do you think I’m still living way out here, all alone?”

  “Because you want to be,” I answered.

  “True.” She smiled at the bite of stuffed pepper in her hand. “And you know what? I’m pretty damn okay with my life. But sometimes I ask myself whether I’m alone because that’s what I want, or because it’s the price of keeping myself safe.”