by Karen Rivers
There was a baby! The baby bothers you as much as any of it. The baby and Kath. Everyone else blurs together in your memory: the flight attendants. Mr. Appleby. The Other Max.
There’s been a lot of news since: hurricanes and forest fires and bombs in foreign countries, but somehow you know that they will remember. They will know who you are. And they’ll stare at you, like they’re waiting for you to answer all the unanswerable questions: why it happened, how it happened, why it was you who didn’t die. Like you have any answers. No one ever wants to hear about how you undid your seat belt and leaned forward. How you rolled down the impossible slope. How the plane exploded. How there wasn’t a reason. How no one will ever know, probably. The black box was never found.
You frown.
You think you Googled that but maybe you didn’t.
You open your mouth to form the words to ask Josh Harris if he knows but then you realize you don’t want to know, you’d rather it was a mystery.
A freak accident.
An unknown, like all good mysteries.
“If we don’t see a meteor pretty soon, I’m seriously going to tweet NASA,” you say.
“We think alike,” he says. “Because I did that earlier. And they just tweeted back! Look.” He tilts his phone screen toward you and you read the tweet he’s pointing to: “@FreeThrowJosh00 Here’s the secret: You just have to keep looking up.”
“Ha ha,” you say, even though it isn’t really funny. “Sounds like a good life philosophy. Or a future tattoo.” You think about it for a second. “Or maybe a poem.”
“I’d like it to be a song lyric. It totally works,” he says. He picks up his guitar and strums it a few times. “Looking for meteors,” he sings. Then he changes it. “Waiting for the stars to fall is like . . .” He stops playing. “What is it like?”
You shrug. “Watching paint dry?”
He makes a face. “That’s a terrible line, Schmidt.” He strums again. “Waiting for the stars to fall is like falling. Falling in love with a girl, with a girl, with a girl. You just have to, just have to, just have to keep looking up.” Strum, strum, strum. “Dramatic finish,” he says, then he howls like a wolf into the night.
“Hmmm. Needs work. Too much repetition.”
You put your hand on Josh Harris’s hand and he covers it with his other hand. You put your other hand on top, and he pulls out his bottom hand and tops yours.
“Are you okay?” he says. “Panic gone?”
You nod. “Yep, all good.” You stare into his eyes. Staring into Josh Harris’s eyes saves you over and over and over again. Maybe, after all, he is the leaf.
The panic subsides, like the slow roll of a retreating tide.
“I’m okay. I’m good. I’m sorry. Let’s look up. Always do what NASA says, right? We’re probably missing all the good stuff. Meteors crisscrossing the sky like . . . I don’t know. Fireflies? Do they have fireflies here?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Anyway, don’t worry about the panic. It happens to me, too, Elyse Schmidt. You don’t have to feel bad or be, I don’t know . . . embarrassed.” He puts his guitar down and smooths out the blanket, then gestures for you to lie down. You take a sip of the bitter, now-warm beer first, then you do. Your breath is going to be terrible, beery and stale.
“I’m not embarrassed.”
“Panic is a normal reaction,” he says. “To this.” He gestures.
“To Wyoming? To the sky? Nuh-uh, I don’t think so. Let’s not talk about it. Really. It’s fine.”
“You know what I mean, Schmidt. I get anxious, too.”
“I know,” you say, but secretly you don’t think it’s the same thing at all. His panic attacks are so small, you can barely notice them happening. He’ll just close his eyes for a second and take a deep steadying breath. It’s like a blip. A panic blip. A flinch. A few words that he mutters under his breath. “I do not fear death.”
You shiver.
“I’ve got you,” adds Josh Harris, somewhat pointlessly. “I’m right here.”
“I’m fine now, I already said,” you snap, but you don’t move. “I don’t need to be gotten.” Josh Harris is sitting up and you sit up and then suddenly, without deciding to do it, you are sitting on him, and he is rocking you back and forth, like a baby. You want him to stop but you also don’t want him to stop. Everything is blurry, like a memory of something that is happening at the same time as it is happening.
Ice, you think. There was an ice storm. Everything was encased in ice.
The memory skitters away.
You lose time, that’s what happens now. You lose whole scenes, not just from your past, but from your present. Your life seems to fast-forward, like you went to the bathroom and missed the main part of the movie and are doomed to be forever confused by a plot twist.
You’ve started seeing a new doctor, someone who will help you figure out how to manage the blank spaces in your memory. It doesn’t matter how big or important an event is, you still seem perfectly capable of having it shimmer in front of you and then permanently vanish, erased for all time.
He is expensive. He is something else your parents fight about, although technically, it is your money.
Another memory or idea or something flashes by you as silver and as quick as a fish.
It’s unnerving that ever since you got home, since you woke up, surrounded by cards and stuffed bears, like you’d just been born—Congratulations, it’s a girl!—you feel like you’re only barely hanging on to yourself, clinging by your fingernails to the edge of the cliff, and you have no idea what would happen if you just relaxed and let go.
11.
“What are you thinking about?” says Josh Harris. His lips move against your forehead like the soft touch of wings. You lean into him so they press harder, so you can feel something.
“I’m thinking about nothing,” you lie.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Trying not to be crazy, I guess,” you add. “Thinking about not being crazy.”
“You aren’t crazy.”
“Ha, you have no idea.” You trace a pattern of freckles on Josh Harris’s arm.
The new, expensive doctor—why can’t you grasp onto his name?—looks like Dr. McDreamy from Grey’s Anatomy, a hospital show that your mom watches on old DVDs when she can’t sleep, which is often. You don’t know how she can stand it, watching that show. People are always dying, sick, in pain, or crying. It makes you want to claw out your own ears and eyes—well, eye. How is it possible that people can be entertained by trauma? Footage of parents flinging themselves down long ER hallways after kids on stretchers . . . Doesn’t it remind her of what she went through, what she must have gone through?
You can’t figure it out.
How can you stand it? you want to ask.
But it’s not just her beloved medical shows; all TV shows make you feel unglued. The flash of the images, the bright colors, the laugh tracks—it all makes you dizzy. You can’t concentrate on following the stories, and by the time you drag yourself away, your nerves feel frayed and raw.
The news, though, the news is the worst.
The news is impossible.
12.
“Do you watch the news, like ever?” you ask Josh Harris. “I had to stop watching. I don’t know what’s happening anymore. Earthquakes or tornadoes or, like, an alien invasion. I have no idea.”
“We don’t have a TV. You know that. Dad hasn’t watched TV since Mom died. We have books.”
“Oh,” you say. “I forgot. Yeah, actually, maybe I do remember. But wasn’t your dad an actor? I remember that he directed the play in fifth grade. What was it? Our Town? I guess I thought that actors would like TV. You know, to observe the acting.”
“He was a stage actor, so it was different,” he says. “Now he doesn’t want to watch other people acting. He says it’s too ha
rd. He believes there is more to be learned by reading fiction than by following current events. And it freaks him out, watching TV. Falling into a story, being too distracted in case something happens.”
“I get it, I think. I haven’t watched since . . . you know. But one of us should watch! Or at least Google the news. What if there’s a nuclear war or something?”
“The internet is garbage. And we won’t need to see it on TV, if it happens,” he points out. “We’ll all be dead.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works. It’s not like everyone immediately dies. Some people live and then get sick and die later.”
“If there’s a nuclear war, I don’t think the reporter will be going to work to tell us what is happening. Who would be like, ‘Well, got to get to the office and report this!’ Everyone would be running for shelter or shooting each other or stealing computers or something.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Or dying. More likely, everyone would be dying.”
“Why are you always talking about dying?” You are suddenly irrationally irritated. “Stop it.”
“You brought it up!” he says. He pushes you gently and you slide off his lap. The ground seems too hard under you, so you stand up. You stretch. You feel strange. Jostled. Shaken up. Like you’ve just stepped off a ride at the fair and can’t quite get your equilibrium.
“I’m sorry,” you say. “I’m feeling weird still. Like, not myself.” That’s the understatement of the year. You aren’t yourself. You don’t even know who yourself is anymore.
He gives you a funny look. “I like to read books more than I like to watch television anyway. The stories stay still.”
“Good for you, smarty-pants,” you say. “I used to . . . I mean, I still like graphic novels. I think. I haven’t read one for a while. But the other books, regular ones, not so much.”
“We’re different people, Schmidt,” he says. “That’s what makes this work.”
“I know,” you say. “I see what you mean about standing still, though. A book is always on hold until you start reading it again. You know what would be sad? If you were reading a really good book and then you died before you finished it. You’d never know how it ended!”
“You could come back as a ghost and read the ending. Maybe we should start reading the last page first, just in case. I guess you never know.”
“That’s dark, Harris. Even for you.”
“I’m not dark. I’m just a realist. People die.”
“God, would you stop? Where are those stupid meteors?”
You lean away from him and finish your warmish beer, which now tastes like it has absorbed the muggy summer night: You’re swallowing the dark blue sky, the humidity, the thick heat of the air. There is something stuck between your teeth that might be a mosquito. You try to subtly spit it out. What if it has Zika? Or worse? You try to think of something clever to say to Josh Harris. Something funny or cute that will make him like you even more but you can’t think. You are just so tired. You wish you weren’t because you want to be enjoying this now-stupid, romantic night. You pinch your wrist, hard. Now is not the right time to fall asleep. You can’t sleep at all lately. You think you must lie awake all night, every night, because sometimes—like now—the sleep creeps up on you so suffocatingly that you can barely fend it off.
You hear your mom at night while you are not sleeping, walking around, making tea in the new kitchen. Sometimes, you go downstairs and you find her wrapped in the quilt that grandma sewed when she and dad got married, steam rising from her cup of peppermint tea, the TV volume on low, Dr. McDreamy saving another beautiful patient from certain death. Most times, you don’t go downstairs because you can’t stand the sight of that show.
Back home—Before—you’d have watched it with her, but not now. That would be impossible. You lie awake instead, flat on your back, watching the stars slowly moving past the skylights, watching the sky fade from black to denim to gray to morning, bleached out and too bright, which somehow seems to happen too fast to process, to be too much to absorb.
Coincidentally, bleached out and too bright is how you look to yourself. By being colorless, you are now extra visible. Blinding. (Like sun on snow or diamonds under a bright jeweler’s light.) Your hair, white. Your skin so pale, it’s paperlike.
Be careful what you wish for, you think, remembering the Swedish band, their pale, bleached, skinny beauty, the way they wafted.
You should ask your Dr. McDreamy about all of this, about the TV, about the bleaching of you.
You should, but you won’t.
Not yet.
How do you ask that kind of question, anyway? You’re still on answers. Like, “Um, I don’t know.” You do a lot of “I guess” and “Maybe.”
You can’t seem to get Dr. McDreamy’s real name to stick in your head. But then again, you’ve only met him twice. Both times, you were unable to make out most of what he was saying, his voice taking on the soft edges of clouds, drifting around you meaninglessly. But you do remember the chant. He made you repeat it. It was funny because you vaguely remembered it from elementary school, when you used to sometimes have anxiety attacks during tests and you’d faint and have to go to the nurse’s office. She’d taught you the same thing: Touch, listen, see, smell. Anchor yourself and you’ll be well. He even sang it to the same tune.
You wish you’d been able to tell him more, to present him with all that is inside you, the broken parts, so he could fix them. But you couldn’t. Still, there was something about him that made you feel reassured, safe, as though if and when you could finally tell him the truth, he’d be able to handle it.
He’d be able to fix it.
You feel the soft plaid blanket. Touch.
Josh Harris is playing his guitar again. Listen. “Keep playing. That’s really good.”
“I’m writing it for you,” he says. “That’s what boys do when they want to win the heart of the girl, right? I’m trying to win your heart.”
You laugh so hard that you snort. “Liar!” you say.
He smiles. “I didn’t write it,” he says. “It’s a famous song by the best band in the universe, which, as everyone knows, is the Hoppers.”
“The Hoppers are terrible!” you tell him. “I can’t believe they still even exist!” Then, “You make their song sound way better than they do. They should thank you.” You love the way that you don’t have to pretend with Josh Harris anymore. You love the way that you are just yourself: a person who does not like to hear screechy violins.
He strums louder, “Big finish!” he says, which he always says at the end of every song, and then he screams the last line. His voice is swallowed up by the sky, by the grass, by all of Wyoming. You frown. You remember a talent show from before, when he won (he always won) by playing the guitar and finishing this same way.
It may even have been the same song.
You are sure that it was.
“Too much screaming,” you say, covering your ears. “Who likes music that screams?”
“Everyone but you, Schmidt,” he says. “It’s our way of experiencing all of our existential rage about being human without, you know, actually screaming.”
“Huh. Well, you did actually scream.”
“It was a metaphor, Schmidt.”
“I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” You don’t remember a time when you’ve ever laughed this much. Before, you were never a person who was just smiley. You were definitely not a person who laughed so much and so often that her stomach hurt.
Right at that moment, someone at the party screams, and then another person.
“See? Existential rage!” Josh Harris says.
At first, you can’t tell if the screaming is panic or fun and for a split second, you get that falling feeling that makes you gasp, but then there is the sound of laughter.
/> Someone applauds.
You put your head on Josh Harris’s shoulder. He puts his guitar down and tilts your face to face his own. There is a jagged scar on Josh Harris’s perfect cheek. You reach up and trace the scar. It is from Before, from something that happened to him as a child. You don’t know what it was. It can’t have been from the attack on his mother, because he was hiding behind a houseplant. He wasn’t hurt. So what was it? You want to ask, but you’re almost afraid to know the answer.
Josh Harris doesn’t appear to have plane crash scars, which is unimaginable when you think about it, so you try not to think about it. As far as you can tell, even though you know he was in the hospital for as long as you were—he must have been—nothing on his outside reveals anything that happened to him in the crash.
He is unmarked.
You have scars, fine silvery-white threads embroidered into your skin.
Your glass eye is the most visible evidence pointing to the fact that it happened at all. You reach up and touch it. Under your eye, it feels wet, like you’re crying without realizing it. You pull your hand away, quickly. The glass eye is not a scar, it’s something different. The sparkling beauty of it makes it seem less like an injury and more like something dreamed of.
“Hey!” he says as you trace his scar up and down. “That feels weird. Stop. Don’t stop. Stop. Don’t stop.”
“Make up your mind!”
“Ummmm, don’t stop. Hang on, I’m going to kiss you.”
“I won’t say no.”
He kisses you. “Oh, man, I like it when you touch me, Schmidt.”
You try to think of the right thing to say back, something pithy and cute. Funny and smart. But what comes out is, “Uh-huh.”
“Schmidty, Schmidty, Schmidt.” He pulls away from you, so you can see his face, his teeth so white and straight and perfect. “This is better than any party, right? I should have brought romantic food. Frog legs or chicken. Crusty French bread and wine and some very good cheese. And music. A soundtrack!”
“Nah,” you say. “Your taste in music sucks. Besides, you’re playing a guitar. That’s music.”
