by Amy Jo Burns
“Sorry there was nudity,” Simon said, as if reading my thoughts. “I didn’t know.”
“Oh, it’s okay,” I lied, again and again.
Simon knew I’d never have sex with him, and he’d never ask me to. After he confessed how much he hated Mr. Lotte when we drove by the jail over the summer, I knew what happened to his sister Aria still affected his present actions. Though Mr. Lotte and his scandal buried so long ago had brought out the worst in some, it also revealed the best in others.
“I cried like a baby at the end of that movie,” Simon said as we climbed into the car and shivered, waiting for the heat to come on. “And I don’t even care.”
There it was again—that carefree honesty, the kind I thought I needed to squeeze from him in order to stay alive. I was still as rigid as I’d been on all those Saturday mornings before ballet class, and I’d surrendered the one spark that could melt what had frozen. I couldn’t continue to warm myself at Simon’s fire. I needed to build my own.
By the time New Year’s Eve arrived, a pall had been cast over the year’s end. The following week, I’d go back to school, and so would Simon. The rush I felt before Christmas had twisted into dread. January could never be as romantic as December. We hadn’t talked about what would happen once he left again, but the conversation loomed.
I decided to have a small party in my basement, and the mood was sour. A few of my other friends who were dating college boys found themselves in a similar dilemma. Nobody wanted to be alone on New Year’s.
By about ten o’clock, each couple had taken their corners. The basement lights were bright. Simon sat beside me on the couch, brooding.
“I can’t make any promises,” he said flatly.
I clenched my jaw. “You were the one who called me, remember?”
“I know,” he said. “But this is so hard.”
“Listen,” I said. “I want you to do one thing for me.”
“What?”
“E-mail me once a day,” I said. “Something short. Send a blank screen. I don’t care. Just so I know you thought of me at least once.”
He frowned. I was reining him in, and I knew he’d hate it. But I had made a decision. I would be an understudy no longer. I was ready for the lead.
“I can’t make any promises,” he repeated. “But I’ll try.”
When the clock struck midnight, we shared a lackluster kiss. We looked at each other, and I knew the spell had been broken.
After Simon returned to college, I welcomed my old routine, studying and preparing to audition for the junior class play. For five days, Simon sent his dutiful e-mail, short, innocuous accounts of his life away from home. Food in the cafeteria, trips to the library, antics with his soccer teammates. It didn’t feel as good to tame him as I hoped it might. When Saturday came, by afternoon I hadn’t heard from him. By late evening, I still hadn’t heard from him. On Sunday morning, I checked my e-mail and found an empty inbox.
The truth: I wanted him to forget. Sitting down in front of the computer, I crafted an e-mail. There was no greeting, no ending, just three sentences:
“I didn’t hear from you yesterday, so that means one of two things happened. Either you forgot to e-mail me, or you’re dead. For your sake, I hope you’re dead.”
He responded by Monday, full of excuses. But the curtain had been drawn, and I didn’t want another encore.
I warded off the chill of being alone by cloaking myself in spotlights and mirrors. A few weeks after Christmas break ended, I was cast as another old woman in the junior class production of Steel Magnolias. On opening night, I used the same silver hairspray as I had for Guys and Dolls, the same thick, black eyeliner pen to age myself. During the play’s run, a woman from town who had volunteered to help backstage took my long, brown hair in her hands and pulled it into a bun behind my head. She brushed and pinned, brushed and pinned. I watched her watch me in the mirror. When she asked me what size dress I wore, it took me a minute to answer.
“A three or four, I think,” I said as the brush tore through my hair. “I don’t have a lot of dresses.”
“A three or four?” She huffed, tying an elastic band around the ponytail she’d made. “That can’t be true.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because that’s the size I was in high school.” She wound my ponytail around and around, creating a bun. “And I was much thinner than you are.”
Becca, who had been cast in Dolly Parton’s role, came and sat beside me. In the dressing room mirror before us, we looked at each other. Her makeup had been done up—thick, black lashes, glossy red lips. A bouffant only fitting for a southern beauty shop owner. Together, we watched the woman in the mirror, dressed in an old sweatshirt and jeans, a fray of bobby pins in her mouth. Only after sticking in the final pin did she look up and stare back at the source of our reflections, a mirror that had become a glass dagger in the eyes of the envious.
As it was known to do, winter overstayed its welcome and hung around deep into March. The colder months were especially hard on the town’s elderly, and one frigid Sunday evening, Pure Heart Presbyterian asked the teenagers in the congregation to pay visits to those unable to leave their homes. “Shut-ins,” they were called. We met up in the church parking lot about six in the evening, just around the time most of the townsfolk would be closing themselves in for the night. Two by two, we paired up and got an address. No directions needed; there wasn’t a street or a face in this town we hadn’t seen a million times. Our town had fewer people in it than passengers aboard a large luxury cruise liner.
Aaron and I paired up, and I offered to drive. We’d both gotten our licenses earlier that year, but Aaron was still saving all of his tips from working nights and weekends at Coyote’s Pizza so he could buy himself a car. When my sister got her license a few years before, my parents purchased a car for their children to use, since all three of us were so close in age. With my sister away at college and my brother a year from turning sixteen, I had become the primary driver. When Aaron climbed into the seat, he fiddled with the knob on the side and the seat glided back, creating enough room for his long legs.
I hadn’t told Aaron or any of the other church boys about how I’d backslid with Simon over Christmas break. I’d failed myself by trusting Simon again, and I’d failed my faithful church boys, too. When he’d broken up with me in the fall, the church boys crowded around me like a soft, boyish blanket. “He’s a dick,” one of them said. Though Aaron had seen the end from the beginning and warned me, he never chastised me or said, “I told you so.” Even if he knew what had happened, he’d never say a word.
We went to visit a woman who lived alone at the end of a long, winding driveway not too far from where Aaron worked at Coyote’s on Ashville Road. The house was built far into a shallow hill, and as I turned down the driveway, we had to tilt our heads up to see the candles shining in the windows.
At the front door, we waited after ringing the doorbell. I could feel my entire body contracting in the cold. Inside the house, we heard a soft creaking as the shut-in made her way to the window. We saw her soft features in the candlelight as she peered out at us. Smiling, she pulled open the door wide and waved us indoors, as if to say, Come in, come in, before you catch your death.
Once inside her living room, we shed our layers quickly as the furnace blasted heat from the corner. I’d soon forget her name, but I’d remember the chiming clock, the floral wallpaper, the matching doilies on the couch and arm chair. She said she was “from Mercury, born and raised.” We entered, we sat. She served us water on a silver tray. The clock chimed. The wind blew. Someone’s stomach growled.
“Look at the two of you,” she said to us from her rocking chair. “So young.”
Sitting across from her on a velvet couch, I wondered if we were staring into our future. Born in Mercury, lived in Mercury, died in Mercury. She must have thought she was staring into her past.
Often, the young and the old in Mercury looked at each o
ther from either side of impenetrable glass. We—the young—wanted to get out, and they wanted to get back. Tock tock tock tock. I couldn’t help but wonder when the switch occurred, when someone went from what is to what was, like all those town fires. Was it high school graduation, the clock striking at midnight, and all the Cinderellas returned to their rags and soot?
Aaron sat on the couch and didn’t say much. He was never one to offer comfort, though I found his presence very comforting. Accustomed to emptiness, he never felt the need to fill the air with words. So the three of us just sat, drank tepid tap water, and stared at the moon.
Without any older boys to interfere, by summertime Aaron and I had become a close, platonic pair. He knew me like no one else. His voice could shoot through the fences I hid behind, and on the day we dove into the heart of a cave in West Virginia, it did.
Each summer, Pure Heart Presbyterian took a weeklong camping trip to West Virginia to serve the local poor and experience the mountains. On a stifling Wednesday afternoon, thirty of us packed into the vans and spent forty-five minutes winding around Appalachian roads, headed for a spot to go cave diving.
When we reached our destination, the trail of vans pulled over onto the side of the road. I looked out the window and couldn’t detect a cave opening. Instead, I saw a steep, green hill smothered with trees. When we all got out of the van, I realized this was no mistake. Somewhere in the mess of pine was the entrance to our cave. Tucking my flashlight between my skin and the band of my Levis, I started to climb.
The cave’s dark opening was tall and slender, the shape of a screaming mouth. Forming a single line, we entered it. I waited near the end of the group to watch girls with bandanas and boys with headlamps disappear into the dark. I hovered, turning on my flashlight and aiming its dim light into the opening. I saw nothing.
“Can’t we get lost in there?” I asked Aaron, who stood behind me in line.
“You’ll be fine,” he said.
Aaron wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t excited, either. He strolled ahead as I hung back until everyone entered but the experienced cavers bringing up the rear. Reluctantly, I fell in line.
Once I entered the cave, daylight shut off like a light bulb. As we climbed deeper into its throat, my teeth chattered and I slipped on the gritty sludge covering the ground. I lost track of time as the path got harder and harder to maneuver and the tunnels narrowed. The talking died down, and just the squeak of rubber soles on wet rocks echoed through the cavity.
We came to a spot with a wide gap between two rocks, and we had to jump across it to keep moving forward—or upward—or downward. I couldn’t orient myself. Two older boys crammed themselves into slivers between the boulders to help each of us across. When my turn came, one of them grabbed my arm. I resisted.
“I don’t want to.” I had an acute distaste for enclosed spaces like this one. Situations without an easy exit made me panic. I couldn’t remember it then, but Mr. Lotte’s basement felt a lot like a dark cave, with the piano and his body barring me from the closed door. The church boys craved the rush of fear that activities like this created, but the fear felt too real to me. I didn’t want anyone or anything blocking my escape.
“You gonna sit here in the dark, then?” one of the boys said. “You better hope we come back the same way.”
I pointed my flashlight into the crevice and saw nothing. No bottom, no sides, just black. I had no choice. I had to grasp his hand and lunge. Once I wedged a foot in between the crags of two rocks, they pulled my body across the gap.
Finally we reached our destination—a tomblike, shallow clearing. Everyone ducked as we crowded inside it. Some leaned against the wall, others crouched on their knees. I knelt rigidly, shivering and clutching my flashlight. It felt like I was breathing with a bag over my head.
The guide moved to the center of the group. “All right, everybody,” he said. “Flashlights off.”
One by one, the lights went out. A scorching imprint remained on my eyelids, but soon it dissipated. We waited. Throats cleared. We heard a dull dripping sound.
“This,” the guide said with a pause, “is what hell is like.”
I restrained my own urge to grab the person I couldn’t see sitting next to me. The air around me was the color of coke, the dark powder coal becomes after it burns.
I tried to hold my breath, but couldn’t. Somewhere to the left of me, I heard the smack-smacking of two kids making out. The air smelled like must. I started to wonder if this was where I’d die, squeezed into a hairline crack in the side of the earth.
I have to get out of here, I kept thinking.
I started to recite things in my head. One, two, three, four . . . For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23.
This is what hell is like.
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
This is what hell is like.
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
Thisiswhathellislike.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
This. Is. What. Hell. Is. Like.
Water spilled from my eyes, and I squeezed them shut. I felt the breath of an invisible moment on my neck, the specter of a man sitting on a piano bench in a brown basement, and I shivered. Don’t you cry, I told myself. Don’t you be a pussy. But then my eyes turned to waterfalls. I hid my face in my sweatshirt.
“Okay, everybody,” the guide finally said. “Lights on.”
I heard blessed murmurs, cracking knees, the click of my own thumb. I looked into the soft tunnel-glow of my flashlight and found Aaron at the end of it, staring back at me. I diverted my eyes and moved to the front of the line, hoping he hadn’t seen.
Later that night at the campground, I sat next to Aaron around the campfire while he played his guitar. The group was small; most had gone to bed after tiring themselves out in the cave. Aaron never went to bed early. He’d stay at the campfire until it went out, and the next morning he’d be up, the first person out of his tent to stoke it.
Beside me, Aaron turned the knobs of his guitar and tinkered with the strings. I watched them vibrate as he strummed and pressed them.
“You were scared in that cave, weren’t you?” he said. A soft melody formed beneath his fingers.
“So what?”
“So nothing.” He smiled.
He ran his thumb against the guitar strings and began to sing a hymn.
“You can’t sing,” I said. Aaron shrugged. “Neither can Bob Dylan.”
He started the second verse and I closed my eyes. I wanted to breathe in the smoke. I always felt closest to God in places like this, sitting by a campfire and a friend who loved me, no matter my sins.
“Hey,” Aaron said. “You were in my dream last night.”
“I was? What happened?”
“Can’t remember.”
“What did I look like?” I asked.
He tilted his head, and I saw the red sunburn on the back of his neck. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, did I look sweaty and dirty like this, or did I look normal?”
“That’s a stupid question.” He looked at me without blinking. “You were you.”
He looked back at the fire and tucked his guitar pick beneath the strings. Above us, the sky opened up to an unfenced pasture of stars.
So simple, his words. You were you, he’d said. I was I. So long ago, when I’d stood on the cliff of that diving board, wondering if I’d had it in me to jump, my father had asked me a question. Is fear going to rule you? Again and again, I had to remind myself of my answer. No. I didn’t let fear rule me then, and I wouldn’t let it rule me now.
I didn’t need a man to mirror. I didn’t need Simon. I’d sat in that dark cave, the closest estimation of hell, and it hadn’t killed me.
Yes. I was I, and I was getting out.
Just like the fires in our small town, in memory the past gets rewritten. When friends of the defendant take the stand on his
behalf, they urge the judge to see the Howard Lotte that they know and love, a man who is more saint than sinner. “I truly can say that I know of no good man that better exemplifies my view of what a good and decent man should be,” one of his fellow teachers says. “I can honestly say that he was one of the most caring mainstream teachers I have ever worked with,” says another. Truly, honestly, madly, deeply—we would have sworn such girlish words were used by one of us in the throes of infatuation (girls are so prone to exaggeration, so they say—isn’t that what brought this trouble on in the first place?) rather than a late morning courtroom, if we hadn’t seen the transcript for ourselves. Seven witnesses, including Lotte himself, all use different words to ask for the same thing:
Please, please, Your Honor. Don’t send him to jail.
No matter what the judge decides, half of Mercury will be outraged. The sentence will be too harsh, or not harsh enough, and each side will blame the other for sending our town to the shitter. This used to be a good and decent place to live, they’ll say. Now look at us. At the hearing, the judge is determined to set the record straight—not on Lotte’s behalf, but for the town itself.
THE COURT: Are you a victim of perceived impropriety?
THE DEFENDANT: No.
THE COURT: Are you a victim of parental hysteria?
THE DEFENDANT: No, sir.
THE COURT: A letter dated August 6, 1992: “We believe the charges brought against him are false and were prefabricated by the students involved.” What would you say to those people?
THE DEFENDANT: It’s not true.
THE COURT: Letter dated August 6, 1992: “My prayer is that his guilty plea is not the result of poor attorney advice.” Is your plea the result of poor attorney advice?
THE DEFENDANT: No, it’s not, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Is it a result of the fact that you are guilty?
THE DEFENDANT: Yes, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Letter dated August 12, 1992: “I believe that all the charges of corruption of morals of minors and indecent assault to be the result of a conspiracy.” Is that correct?
