Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

by Anne Valente

  Nick slid the paperback into his pocket and moved out of the waiting room, down the hospital hallway, toward the restroom. He leaned over the fountain and wet his fingers and pressed them against the heat of his forehead. When he stood he noticed the fifth floor’s only other wing beyond the special care nursery and the antepartum unit where new mothers healed. Cardiology. He peered into its waiting room, one just like the waiting room for his father’s division. Panoramic windows. Wall-mounted television. A wall rack of magazines and pamphlets, a receptionist desk of opaque glass. He knew his father wouldn’t be done until ten at the earliest. Nick opened the door and moved inside and sat among another group, another television. There was nothing different but the patients, one man completing a crossword with a pen and two women sitting side by side, their hands clasped in their laps. Everything else the same, the television broadcasting the same morning news as the maternity ward, but the room felt changed. Nick wondered where the neuroscience wing was and whether anyone there could tell him for certain what had happened to his brain. Flashbulb. Caleb passing by through the window of Mrs. Menda’s classroom door. Whatever image Zola kept of the library, what Matt remembered of Caroline Black’s body. Nick sat long enough for his father to find him there just before ten, his appointments finished early. When he felt his father’s hand on his shoulder, he didn’t flinch. He looked up and his father nodded and they made their way down the elevator, to the parking garage, then to the minivan, where they drove to the church in silence.

  WE SAT BESIDE one another. Nick, his father. Zola and her mother, Christina and her father. Matt came without his parents, his father working, his mother at home though Tyler Cavanaugh followed him into the church and sat down beside him. We said nothing to each other. We watched a procession of our classmates find seats and await the service. Family members. Adults in the first rows we could only assume were Principal Jeffries’s brothers and sisters, her mother and father. Stained-glass windows. The low dirge of organ pipes. A paper program in our hands, its edges crushed inside the damp folds of our palms. We knew what to expect after attending Caroline’s service. A minister. Organ hymns. A closed casket we avoided. Pews full of Bibles and passages the minister called to attention, thread-thin pages we never opened. Our hands in our laps, fingers clasped between our knees to halt the pendulum of their trembling.

  We expected the rites of a church. Stifled coughs. The soundlessness of tears. A clouded sky strained through patterns of glass. What we didn’t expect were hundreds of people pushed against the pews and filling the aisles. People leaning beside the church’s brick pillars. People crowding the back, standing behind the last pew. Love is simple. The minister waved his hands across the entire congregation. Look at everyone who loved her. All we need is love to push out the dark. We followed the movement of his hands across so many faces. We looked closely at the lines that edged so many parents’ eyes, the way their pupils tracked downward, how their necks strained with visible tension. How we recognized Jacob Jensen’s mother in the pews, her son gone barely a week. How we noticed Alexis Thurber’s father by himself, sitting near the back of the church alone, Alexis’s boyfriend, Russ Hendricks, nowhere in sight. How love was anything but simple. How love was the hardest thing any of us knew.

  Our principal’s partner gave a eulogy. A middle-aged woman, her hair frizzed, her glasses large. You were the love of my life. Her voice breaking. Principal Jeffries’s daughter standing beside the woman, barely the height of her waist, a family we never thought to consider. A principal we only envisioned within the walls of a high school. Behind a desk in her office. Circulating the cafeteria every so often as we ate our mayonnaised sandwiches and drank Hawaiian Punch. A woman who every year closed out the Homecoming Parade riding in a borrowed convertible and followed by police cars that took away the street barricades before the football game began. A parade we wouldn’t have this year. Just a game. A game we knew would be rescheduled elsewhere, at another school, a game none of us would attend.

  What we couldn’t have anticipated: how sorrow permeated the air of the church for Principal Jeffries but also anger, a bitterness that felt new and strange. How beyond hymns, beyond bowed heads and the carrying away of a casket, people stayed and milled through pews. How we saw Jacob Jensen’s mother clasp the hands of Georgia Tarkington’s mother, two peers we wouldn’t have imagined to have ever known one another. Jacob Jensen a soccer player. Georgia Tarkington a math wiz who served in Mu Alpha Theta. How their mothers were cemented to one another in their loss, a bind neither asked for. How our peers’ parents spoke around us. How we heard what they whispered: arson. Tips of culpability. Who’d been lurking at the Trenways’ house and who’d been seen walking along the empty sidewalks of Caroline Black’s street and who’d been taken in for questioning, the Greeley kid, what the paper mentioned and never elaborated upon. How we heard parents speak of guarding. Of tending to one another’s children. Of organizing collectives, a neighborhood watch, how they swore they would protect this community and help the police do their job. Parents who knew each other from parent-teacher nights at the start of each elementary school year, from the bleachers of Friday night football games, from dropping us off at one another’s homes before we knew what it was to drive. Parents who sent each other holiday cards and missives of school closings due to snowstorms, who we always imagined would gather together to celebrate our high school graduations on some warm May weekend, the future sprawled out like an unbroken highway. Parents inscrutable to us, how they’d first come to settle down in Midvale County, how it was that their choices had made us what we were, how we’d taken root beside one another because they found a house, a job, a community.

  We watched Principal Jeffries’s family trail from the church out into the weak afternoon sun. Her daughter’s curls. How they caught the light. How Principal Jeffries’s partner smoothed the girl’s hair and held a hand upon her head, fingertips we could almost feel. There was no lingering this time outside the church. No time for quiet, for standing beside one another as the sky tilted away from us. No time for stars, the sky hazed, the sun sliding behind the clouds. Chilled air. A breeze with muscle.

  Matt saw Jacob Jensen’s mother alone at the curb smoking a cigarette, her face calm, though he noticed her hand shaking as she brought the filter to her lips. He remembered her from a fifth-grade class party when she’d brought cupcakes but couldn’t stay long. How another parent had made a snide comment about her leaving. How she’d whirled back and said some mothers worked and did just fine on their own. How Matt remembered this, the first time he realized not every household had two parents.

  His own mother at home. How she’d woken up no longer angry with him, how she’d wanted to come to the funeral and sit beside him. How he knew Tyler would come instead, Tyler who’d stayed in his bedroom long past the darkest hour the night held. How Matt’s mother had embraced him and even still neither of his parents knew about Tyler. Matt wanted to keep it that way. He’d told her he would attend with his friends.

  He walked up to Jacob Jensen’s mother and stood beside her at the curb. In the city’s breeze whipping between buildings, he caught the scent of her perfume. He didn’t think. Your son was a good person, he said. The first words he could think to say though he barely knew Jacob, knew only the chisel of his legs from afar, the smooth curve of his calf, and once his daily schedule throughout the high school: an impossible crush he’d kept watch over in the hallways until he met Tyler.

  I’m so sorry for your loss, he said.

  Jacob’s mother exhaled a plume of smoke that dissipated in the wind. Her face still young. Her eyes ancient. The corners of her eyes cracked, fine lines spilling down and disappearing into the gaunt stretch of her cheekbones.

  I appreciate that, she said. She pulled a last drag from her cigarette and threw the filter to the ground. She didn’t ask who Matt was, how he knew Jacob. She said nothing at all before turning away from Matt, the tails of her black coat flickering in the w
ind.

  Tyler came up beside him.

  She used to scream from the bleachers at our matches, he said.

  You played soccer? Matt said, and hoped Tyler wouldn’t ask how he knew already what kind of match, how he knew Jacob’s sport without having known him at all.

  Just freshman year, Tyler said. She knew all the rules, the fouls, the yellow cards.

  Matt wondered how it was that there was so much about Tyler he didn’t know. How dating since summer, even confidentially beyond the gaze of peers and parents, hadn’t let him in much further than if they had never known one another. He slid his hand down the sleeve of Tyler’s jacket. Found his palm. Tyler let his hand be held for only a moment, then squeezed Matt’s palm and pulled away.

  WE DISBANDED. WE left one another at the brick steps of the church. We’d thought to collect ourselves, to go somewhere for the afternoon without discussion of yearbook or fire or funeral and found instead only exhaustion. Only the desire to be alone. Zola mentioned her first shift back at the Local Beanery, that she had to report by three. Nick said he’d been gone all morning and just wanted to go home and rest. Christina let her father’s car take her in with barely a goodbye, saying only that she was tired and wanted to change out of her dress. Matt stood at the curb beside his car with Tyler.

  Want to go somewhere?

  Anywhere, Tyler said. I don’t really want to go home.

  Matt started the car, Tyler in the passenger seat. They traveled along downtown streets filled with steel buildings that blocked out the sun. Matt navigated west, back toward Midvale. He didn’t take the highway, the quickest route. He meandered past Union Station, the train depot converted to a mall where his parents had taken him to a fudge shop and model train store when he was small. Past the castle-like towers of Washington University, a college he’d never visited. Past streets lined with trees. Silver maples. Black maples, their leaves exploded in yellow. Sugar maples, leaves like stars washed in red. Tyler cracked the window, a burst of cold air. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and Matt felt at once irritated.

  We could go to the zoo, Matt said. It’s close by. It’s free.

  Fine with me, Tyler said. He blew smoke toward the passing trees.

  Matt steered the car toward the entrance of Forest Park, the largest city park in the country. A landscape of grass and hills and trees. They drove past the Grand Basin, the park’s enormous fountain. Past the art museum on the hill, the statue of King Louis crowning its entrance. Everything deserted on a Wednesday afternoon. Matt parked the car along the street in front of the zoo and Tyler flicked his cigarette out the window.

  Where to? Matt asked.

  Anywhere. Really, I just need to be outside for a while.

  They moved through the turnstiles and headed past a stretch of small mammal habitats Matt remembered wanting to visit first as a child whenever he came to the zoo with his parents. One reclusive red panda, its straw hut in the rear of its pen. A striped tail he always located in the trees though today, the sky overcast, the panda was nowhere to be found. A Malayan sun bear paced in the adjacent pen, one corner of the enclosure to the other. Matt watched the bear track the same path, a worn groove in the dirt.

  I haven’t been here since elementary school, Tyler said.

  Me either, Matt said. What he didn’t say was how strange it was to be here again with Tyler. Someone he’d kept hidden from his parents across an entire summer, parents who’d guided him past these same exhibits as a child. Someone who’d left him in the hallway beside Caroline, an anger he knew he was still trying to leave behind. Tyler turned to the sea lion pool across from the small mammal enclosures. They could eat up to thirty pounds a day, Matt remembered a keeper once telling the crowd. He stepped to the pool’s edge and placed his hands on the railing and three sea lions darted through the water, gray submarines beneath the surface of an overcast sky. Matt tried to think of something to say to Tyler. Anything. The air stilted between them out in the open.

  Tyler moved away from the railing and they passed a wall of outdoor enclosures, small alligators and a bevy of tortoises that led toward the indoor reptile center. The building was warm inside, a reprieve from the crystalline chill of October sky. Matt approached a large window where a boa constrictor lay curled and stood with his face to the glass. The footsteps of children echoed around him. He felt their feet vibrate through the floor, stepping to the glass before moving away toward the amphibians and desert snakes. Matt felt himself planted. He watched the boa and imagined being swallowed whole. A body thicker than anything he could dream, what it would feel like to pass through the walls of a snake’s body and feel its muscle push in and contract.

  And then Tyler’s hands were against his back, breath against his ear. There’s a bathroom in this center, Tyler said. Empty stalls. A place to be alone.

  Matt felt his lungs grow tight. He nudged Tyler away before he could think.

  What the fuck, Tyler whispered loudly. A mother ushered her child away from them. Matt made his way toward the bathroom, Tyler behind him, and didn’t stop until they reached the last stall. He’d barely closed the stall door before he felt Tyler push him against the tiled wall, his tongue in Matt’s mouth. Matt felt something split inside him, a light, something aching and weightless and bright. A light broken quick by a flare, a red-hot flash of adrenaline that made him shove Tyler away. He thrust him hard enough for his body to hit the stall door, the sound echoing through the bathroom.

  Jesus, what’s your fucking problem? Tyler said.

  You’re my fucking problem.

  What, because I’m here? Because I want you?

  Because where the fuck were you? Matt felt his palms ball. Where were you, and why now? Why here? What makes you want me now? When you couldn’t bear to acknowledge me in public at school or even at the funeral this morning?

  Tyler rubbed a hand across his shoulder. Matt didn’t want to say it but couldn’t stop himself.

  You left me there.

  Tyler didn’t move. It’s not that simple, he said.

  Do you know what it felt like? For you to leave me there? Do you know what it was like to stand there and watch her—

  Matt felt his throat close. He couldn’t say what it was he watched Caroline Black do. Everything she’d been bleeding away across the carpet.

  You think this is easy for me? Tyler said. No one knows. You think I want to be caught with my pants down in a bathroom stall while a gunman shoots up the halls?

  No one knows what, Matt said.

  What the fuck are you talking about.

  You said no one knows. No one knows what?

  Tyler’s eyes flickered across the stall.

  You can’t even fucking say it, Matt said. Gay. No one knows you’re gay.

  Before he even finished speaking, Tyler’s elbow was across his throat. Matt felt his head slam against the tile, Tyler’s arm pinning him to the wall, his face drawn close. Tyler’s eyes swimming. An electric heat. For a moment, Matt thought Tyler would spit in his face. Then he pulled back and Matt drew in breath and watched Tyler’s shoes leave the stall. I can find my own way home, he heard him shout before the bathroom door opened and whispered to a close.

  CHRISTINA STOOD AT the edge of the diving board, water dripping down into the pool beneath her feet. Only a few swimmers populated the Midvale County Community Center pool, arms knifing through lanes and slick with water. Ryan hadn’t called. Two days of nothing. Two days of listening to the constant hum of the television in the other room, a droning newsreel. Two days of waiting for her father to come home, her brother playing video games or else locked away in his room and her mother at work across the river and calling every day, a comfort but a ringing nonetheless that left her chest aching. That it wasn’t Ryan. That he refused to call. That she’d come home from the funeral with her father and there were no messages yet again and she’d felt her lungs push against her breastbone and grabbed the keys to her car.

  She’d alternated drill
s of freestyle sprints with laps of kickboard flutter kicks, the same practice as her swim team. She knew they wouldn’t meet for weeks but her limbs were restless, in need of slicing the water. She pushed her way down the narrow lane, her goggles sealed across her eyes, and thought of the one time she’d been snorkeling, a trip to Florida in junior high to visit her mother’s sister. Shallows off the coast of Destin. Her parents and brother billowing somewhere in the water nearby. She’d identified sand divers, trumpet fish, the iridescent blue of angelfish before removing her snorkel and pulsing all the way down to the flat sand of the ocean floor. She gazed up through her mask and watched light shimmer at the surface. The water silent as a chamber, a stillness she sought in the community center’s chlorinated waters. She’d swum laps for a half hour, the dark stripe of the lap lane visible beneath her. Her body in motion, her flip turn the only rippling of the water’s surface. When she finished, she climbed from the water and noticed the deep end of the pool and its empty diving board.

  Despite her place on Lewis and Clark’s swim team, she hadn’t jumped off a diving board in years. A lone lifeguard sat on the stand watching the few other swimmers turn and glide through the lanes. She’d climbed the metal ladder. The same as climbing the water slide at Midvale County’s outdoor public pool when she was small. She walked out to the precipice and felt her toes grip the edge of the diving board. The water deep blue and dark beneath her. This community center a place where she’d practiced so many early mornings, so many afternoons beyond school. Elise. The habituated routine of her swim partner sliding through the water in the same lap lane, their bodies matched stroke for stroke, their hands pulsing in synch with one another. Christina stood at the edge. She shifted her weight to test the board and let herself jump.

  She dove headfirst into the pool, her goggles still on, a rippling of bubbles she could see as her body sliced through the water. She kept swimming to the bottom as she had in the ocean off the coast of Destin. Silent blue. The surface of the water winking back way above her. She swam down until her hands reached the rough base of the pool’s foundation and through her goggles she could see the faint, far-off movement of swimmers in shallow lanes. She let herself be still. Elise Nguyen. A lack of air. The deepest stretch of the pool. Christina felt her lungs fill with pressure. She thought of Ryan in his bedroom and the shattered picture frame and Principal Jeffries and a casket she’d seen only hours before, a woman she’d seen last week. Her lungs throbbed to resurface and she imagined a world beyond this. The ocean floor. The coast of a state she hadn’t seen since she was a child. Another elsewhere entirely, sea salt and blue, one she could almost feel from the bottom of a pool.