by Amy Jo Burns
Aaron’s laugh sounded its high-low notes, but I could tell he didn’t think it was funny. I never quite knew how Aaron felt about me, and I liked it that way. He was careful about laying his feelings bare, and I liked leaving things unsaid. Lately, I’d felt our relationship bucking, trying to free itself from my grip.
Those words belonged to a colder version of myself, the one I used to get what I wanted, the one I needed to hide my worst secrets. I didn’t know where the thought had come from, but I knew an uncomfortable, unsolicited truth had just slipped out. Honesty, I was learning, bowed to no one. Aaron examined me with a troubled expression, and I couldn’t tell if I’d just confirmed what he already knew to be true, or if he’d just realized that he didn’t know me at all.
On the night of the prom, 1999 had never felt so neon-bright. Aaron was my date, and I let him drive my car for the first time. The night became a supernova, and the golden lights against a navy sky made romance appear where it hadn’t been before. Throughout the evening, my body orbited Aaron’s. As we traveled side by side with windows down and the wind pushing in, we laughed. At a stoplight, I took a picture of Becca and her date, who were driving in the lane alongside ours. Aaron’s hazy profile appeared along the outermost edge of the shot. He looked relaxed as we remained concentric, a safe distance apart as we circled Mercury’s outer limits.
But the optimism of the evening quickly dissipated. This life we led was all imaginary, and it was about to expire. At the dance, Aaron seemed to close in on himself. I maintained my orbit, all the while keeping him as my beacon. He danced, he talked, he sat, he ate. Regarding him from varied distances, he seemed to be working hard at feigning happiness. I’d never seen him fake anything in his life. Why now? When I came near, Aaron retreated. He looked away, stepped toward the door, and pulled his hands behind his back.
During the evening’s final dance, his body felt rigid next to mine. He looked past me, keeping his eyes on the parquet dance floor. It felt like dancing with a scarecrow.
“Are you all right?” I asked. Finally, he looked at me. I wasn’t used to seeing his face so close to mine. His eyes had bags under them.
He gave me a half smile. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Have you been sleeping?” I asked.
“I’ve just had a few late nights, that’s all.”
We continued to dance, our bodies unyielding. He maintained a set distance between us, which he’d never done before. Out of curiosity, I leaned my chin into his shoulder. He pulled away.
After the dance, a few friends of ours rented a hotel room at the Super 8 Motel by the outlet mall. Aaron had said he wanted to go, and I agreed even though I wasn’t much for crowds or parties. We rode quietly in the dark, listening to the radio. When we pulled into the motel’s vacant lot, Aaron shut off the engine but neither one of us got out of the car.
I waited for his hand to leave the wheel. Around us, the gleam of the lampposts shone like the beam of a flashlight on the grid of the empty parking lot. The face of the hotel had a hundred lit eyes that poured glazed light into the dark. With the windows up, the air inside the car was thick.
“You don’t want to go in, do you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Do you?”
I shrugged back.
“I think we should call it a night,” he said. “It’s late.”
I frowned. Eleven-thirty might have been late for me, but it was early for Aaron. I turned toward him.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Didn’t you have a good time?”
“I’m fine. I had a great time.”
Aaron hardly ever used the word “great.” For the first time, he had lied to me and I couldn’t understand why. I thought about my ugly confession on the hood of his car not so long ago. Maybe Aaron had seen the real me, and he didn’t like it.
“Nothing’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
The engine turned, and the impulse to grab him around the neck almost overtook me. Not to choke him or kiss him, but to keep him. I stayed my hands at my sides as he merged onto the main road. I realized then the hard truth I’d been avoiding. When I left Mercury, it would be a clean break. If I kept looking back to this place I loved, regret would devour me. Standing on my empty driveway, watching Aaron’s car disappear, I feared that I was about to lose everything precious to me.
The last time we sat on the hood of Aaron’s car, he was jonesing for a cigarette. It was humid and the air smelled like hot tar and automobile exhaust. From the asphalt parking lot, we watched the track team run drills around the football stadium. School had just let out, and horns beeped. Whistles blew. The rusty fence in front of us jangled in the wind.
I knew he wanted to smoke because he flipped his Zippo open and shut. Like the valves of a heart, it opened and shut. The top of it snapped back with the flick of his thumb. I knew he wouldn’t smoke in front of me because he never did. I knew Aaron. He was always honest. He loved this place. He thought that I didn’t. He’d never speak of this conversation again after it was over. It wasn’t his style.
Graduation was close, and talk of leaving town was closer. We all dreamed of getting out and eluding the betrothed epitaph: “Born here. Lived here. Died here.” Some of us would escape it, and some of us wouldn’t. I had my ticket out, and Aaron wasn’t interested in buying one.
I heard the friction of a metal wheel scraping against flint. We watched the blue inner flame consume the air that would have held the ash of the cigarette he wasn’t smoking, the breath of the words we weren’t speaking. This was it: the moment after which nothing would be the same. If I was nothing more than a wick, I’d turn to smoke at the strike of Aaron’s match. But first, I’d burn.
“I’ve been seeing someone,” he said. Open and shut. “I thought you should know.”
The earth stopped on its axis, but not because I didn’t want Aaron to find a cure for his chronic loneliness. It was because I knew that cure would replace his need for me.
“How long?” I asked.
“About a month.” Open and shut.
“Who is she?”
He paused and winced, though I knew the wince was meant for me. “She’s older,” he said.
A sharp whistle trilled from the football field. My mouth had gone dry. All this time, he’d kept it a secret. I opened my mouth to speak, but he interrupted me.
“I know you don’t approve. Just promise me you’ll keep it a secret until we graduate. She could get in real trouble. Just do it,” he said. “For me.”
Aaron stared at me with tight lips, a tense brow. I realized he was holding his breath. I felt sick. He had found his own way of moving on before it was time, and the reality rocked me. Leaving Mercury had become my lover, and I was consumed by it. My life depended on my exodus. I needed to get out of this town, and Aaron needed to stay. The origin of me meant the end of us.
“Promise me,” he said.
“I promise.”
He exhaled. “Thank you.”
A soft wind passed and rattled through the fence gate. I leaned back. Aaron leaned back. A plane passed overhead on its way to Pittsburgh. If anyone from above looked down on us, the soft eggshell of his car, bright as a clean piece of drawing paper, would stand out against the dark asphalt like a black-and-white frame from a movie reel. From above, they’d see us, leaning back on the hood of his car. Our outlines, side by side, would burn into the backs of their eyelids. After they passed and for the moments before the plane began its descent into the Steel City, they’d close their eyes and see an imprint of Aaron and me and our empty-beer-bottle hearts, palms up, looking into the sky.
If I wanted to live my life, I had to let Aaron live his. For the period of time I’d needed him most, Aaron had been the one to truly see me when I couldn’t even see myself. In spring, before the bomb threats, before the prom, and before I left for good, I gave Aaron my yearbook and asked him to write something for me.
“Write something funny in it,” I said.
He took it and kept it for over a week.
“What’s taking so long?” I asked him after he’d had it for three days.
“I’m working on it, okay?”
“Fine, fine,” I said, and I waited.
Yes, Aaron had been the one to see me, but he’d also allowed himself to be seen. He taught me that a quiet baring of oneself didn’t have to invite harm. It could be beautiful instead. On one of the summer afternoons Aaron and I spent together in West Virginia, the group of us from Pure Heart Presbyterian went for a long, steep hike to the top of Seneca Rocks. When we reached the top, the view gave us endless, rolling slopes of evergreen. They were soft and elegant like the curves of a nude woman’s back. We all stood in a row, catching our breath and inhaling the view. We sweltered in the heat. Aaron took off his shirt, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and bent over with his hands on his knees. His pale back had even strokes of purplish-blue on it, almost like a ribcage. The sides of his chest expanded and contracted as he breathed, and the strokes grew and shrank.
“Aaron, what happened to your back?” I asked.
He stood tall and faced the valley. “They’re stretch marks,” he said, pulling his damp shirt over his head. From then on, he swam with a shirt on. That kind of nakedness, however momentary, inspired reciprocity. I’d remember it years later as I gathered the strength to tell the truth about my own life.
When Aaron finally returned my yearbook, his message filled an entire page. At the end, he wrote:
I hope I have done half as much for you as you have done for me. You have really been something special to me and I will miss you when you become rich and famous and move to China or Japan or wherever else you want to go, and when I become a famous rock star. If you want I’ll get you backstage passes and you can come to all of my shows.
I’m sorry I burned you at camp when we were CITs. I don’t know what I was thinking. Anyone else would still hate me, but you forgave me in a limited amount of time. Save that song I gave you and when I do become a rock star you can sell it, but you will already be rich and famous so you might want to hold onto it.
Love,
Aaron
The song he mentioned was one he’d composed himself. For you, the paper had read when he handed it to me. The song was about the lengths we go to for those we love. Maybe one of the reasons Aaron and I understood each other so well was because we each had our secrets, and we were learning the art of coming clean.
We kept your secret, Mr. Lotte. We kept it. You were forty-eight and had tea breath. We had perms and sunburns. You took more than your fair share of the piano bench, and we wore sleeveless shirts. You had an affinity for dull pencils, and we couldn’t read your handwriting. Your house smelled like green beans. You told us to close our eyes and gave us Hershey’s kisses. We kept our shoes on so our feet could reach the pedals. You never said our names. We knew there were prettier girls.
Each spring, we practiced our pieces for the recital. Some of us performed well, others of us kept striking the same sour chords. You turned our pages. You clapped. You told us we had no reason to be nervous.
In summer, we took lessons to improve. Some of us did, and some of us never practiced. We swam every day, and we came with wet hair. We handed you five-dollar bills out of our parents’ wallets. We watched soap operas with your wife. We knew it was impolite to make fun of your fat fingers.
Often, your hand drowsed on our thighs while the beat hypnotized you. Slow down, your hand said. Speed up. You patted the smalls of our backs. Then our spines. Then our shoulder blades. Then our chests. You followed your own sheet music. We kept playing, because you had created a league of girls who were consummate performers.
Later, you got sick. It would be kind to say you were portly. It would be honest to say you were fat. You needed to drop some weight, Mr. Lotte. You dropped some students instead. When some of us heard, we dropped our ice cream sandwiches. You chose Leah. You chose Monica. You chose Annie. You didn’t choose us, and you never told us why. We passed you in the school hallway, and you said nothing.
In fall, we heard the rumors about you. The police came to our houses. They asked questions. We lied. You weren’t guilty. Then you were. We won spelling bees and the hearts of young men. You got one year. We didn’t feel sad or feel regret. We didn’t feel. We didn’t want this to be about you.
You disappeared. You returned. You shopped at the grocery store. You went to the bank. You ate out. You kept your beard. You kept your wife. You found a different job. You took up space. You let the metronome battery die. You played your piano alone.
We forgot you. We got our braces removed. We got phone calls and did a thousand pirouettes. We drew hearts over our i’s. We learned about photosynthesis. We learned how to win at euchre. We stopped swimming so much. Some of us rode in convertibles for the homecoming parade. Others of us cried in bathroom stalls. We moved away. We came back. We didn’t want this to be about you. We, the ones who lied, never spoke to one another. We are still in disguise, and we wonder why the past bothers us still.
When the time for telling the truth had long since passed, we remembered the wiry red flecks in your beard. The squared bottoms of your teeth. We remembered the weight of your palm and the squeak of the basement door. We remembered squeezing the handle of your motorcycle in the garage. We remembered saying no, officer, no. No he didn’t. And we remembered that yes, Howard, yes. You did.
We felt the need to tell someone. But it was so long ago. We called hotlines, we shut off our cable. We took up running. We grew out our nails. We cut our hair and found therapists. Some of us confessed that we couldn’t stop eating Cheetos for breakfast. Others of us confessed our sins to one or two of the seven girls and asked for forgiveness. Somehow, they understood.
Now we sleep with the fan on. We cry when we listen to country music. We use well-sharpened pencils. We worry about buildings tipping over. We put too much salt on our popcorn. We miss home most in autumn. We keep our eyes closed underwater. This is about you, isn’t it?
We hold our breath when we drive past your house. Some of us don’t play piano anymore. Others of us play the opening riff of Fame at parties. It depends. Some of us are no longer here to see you walk through town. Others are around to see people wave. Some people now claim they always knew there was something off about you. Others still think you were set up by a group of ten-year-old girls. Most don’t remember what happened anymore. It was so long ago.
We did it. You never asked, but we kept your secret, Mr. Lotte. We kept it.
Cinderland
ON MY LAST NIGHT AT SUMMER CAMP, we set our sin on fire. As the sun sank over Lake Erie, the sky turned marigold and violet against the water’s silvery expanse. The campground fell quiet as the other counselors, campers, and I took our flashlights and made the slow hike up to the far hill’s highest point. The outdoor chapel overlooked the shallow valley, and as we filed into the ten rows of stone pews chiseled into the hillside, the trees cast their charcoal outlines onto the grass below.
The air held a silken chill, much like the feeling I used to get when emerging from the Silver Pulley pool on an overcast day. A chill that wouldn’t hang around long enough to grow cold. The soft twang of Aaron’s guitar floated through the air as he tuned the strings. I sat in the middle of the crowd, watching his fingers move, his body a shadow against the backdrop of the summers we’d spent together. I wondered if I’d ever be as close with anyone else as I was with him. His expression, still and reserved, could have been dismissed as blank by someone who didn’t know him as well as I did. He was pensive, careful. Removing a pick from his pocket, he strummed through the opening chords of “Sanctuary,” a song we’d sung almost every summer camp night for the past four years. G chord–A chord–D chord.
Our voices came together, timorous and somber. When we’d first sung this song together, we were young. We felt young, running through the woods with our flashlights. The first night I’d slept beneath the star
s had been at camp seven years ago with the friends who surrounded me now. At the end of that summer, Mr. Lotte started his prison sentence. But I didn’t think of him as I lay beneath the stars, my sleeping bag getting damp from the grass beneath it. Instead I looked upward, feeling safe as the church boys chased each other in circles around me.
Now, though I wasn’t yet eighteen, I knew I’d grown too old for this town. It had happened during my final performance on the MHS auditorium stage, seated among my classmates dressed in slippery blue commencement gowns, as we took our hats and tossed them in the air. A hundred caps rising, peaking, and falling to the floor. If I returned to this campground next year, I’d be an anachronism. I would no longer belong in a place I once called home. In Mercury, you were either young or you’d aged too fast. On to another life, I’d never find this kind of quiet intimacy again.
After a few choruses, Aaron resolved the melody and the chaplain came to the front. He opened his Bible to the gospel of John and started to preach from it. The Gospel, he said, meant “the good news.” And “sin,” he said, came from the verb “to miss.” We had all missed the mark.
Even as a camper, I’d always loved this final night of camp. This land, these stars, even the gray, frigid water always seemed to wash me clean. All the other nights of the year, I fell asleep with my guilt lying next to me. After burying Mr. Lotte’s transgressions, I couldn’t find the guilt’s origin any more than I could deny its presence. Years later, I’d trace the shame back to a trinity of antecedents: I’d lied about Mr. Lotte, I’d abandoned the other girls who told the truth, and though I confessed the sins I committed, I wasn’t sure if I fully regretted them. I knew I’d make the same choices if given the chance, and it was a fault I couldn’t reconcile. What I would learn to do, in time, was to own the pain that Mr. Lotte had caused. Not just to my body, but a pain that cut deeper when he’d allowed me to betray myself. For so long, I denied myself the right—the need—to grieve it. When I finally did, I welcomed the hurt. After years of silence, it was finally mine.
