Wish You Were Here

by Barbara Shoup

  Sometimes I half convince myself that I’m not really in love with her. I mean, if I actually did love Amanda, how could it be so easy between us and so good? It must be friendship, after all. Then she’ll look at me a certain way or come around a corner when I haven’t seen her for a couple of hours and a kind of shock goes all through my body. Why kid myself?

  twenty–two

  The last day of our vacation is a day like all the others, warm and blue. There is the whisper of the waves, the whisper of the wind in the palm trees. There is Amanda in her lounge chair, reading, when we come down to the beach. She smiles.

  Amy and Kristin fly to her; they won’t let her out of their sight. Kristin braids her hair. She brings her pineapple juice from the pool bar. “If I write you a letter, will you answer it?” she asks.

  “Sure,” Amanda says. “Will you send me copies of the pictures your dad took?”

  Kristin nods eagerly.

  “Too bad you’re not Kristin’s new stepsibling,” I say, only half joking, when Kristin’s out of earshot. “If Ted had married your mom, she might not have been so traumatized.”

  “Oh, no,” Amanda says. “Kristin loves you, Jackson. She just doesn’t dare show it. Not yet. Not till she figures out that loving you doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her mother. I mean, how could she not love you?”

  I swear my heart stops. I feel the way I did that first day when I sat down beside her to help build the castle. Chill, I tell myself. She’s saying Kristin loves you. She’s not saying anything at all about the way she feels herself.

  Obviously I’m right, because she changes the subject and we’re off talking about books and people again, solving world problems. We take our last run. I stay a little behind her so that I can watch her long ponytail fly out with every step, so that I can memorize the way she looks flying toward the horizon. Walking back, she says, “Jackson, I’m going to miss you so much. You’ll write, won’t you?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Definitely.” Above us, gulls swoop and soar, and I think of the words I will write to her. I’ll write them so well, so carefully. I’ll send them off across the sky, into her life, and they’ll make her happy, and in time maybe she’ll realize the words are me, that it’s me who makes her happy. No, not maybe. She will want me. I’ll make her want me. The late afternoon sun makes the water shimmer. The breeze picks up, and I have the feeling that if I took off running, it would lift me like a rainbow kite. I could see everything, know everything. But I keep walking beside Amanda. It’s enough right now just to be with her.

  She has dinner with us that night, comes back to our bungalow to play Old Maid with Kristin and Amy until it’s their bedtime. “I told my parents you’d walk me back,” she says to me after she’s hugged the girls and kissed them good night. “They’re paranoid. Do you mind?”

  Outside, it’s breezy. It smells of gardenias. Amanda picks one and sticks it in her hair. “Want to take a walk on the beach first?” she asks.

  When I don’t answer immediately, she says, “We don’t have to. I mean, I know you have to get up really early—”

  “No,” I say. “I mean, yeah—sure, let’s walk.” I start off, taking huge strides, trying to figure out how to act. I mean, after this afternoon, I had it all worked out. I’d write, I’d be patient. Now this.

  “Jackson?” Amanda says, skipping to catch up with me.

  I slow down, but I don’t speak. I can’t.

  The tide’s out. The beach is hard and flat. We walk until the lights bordering the resort look like a long strand of pearls, like the pearls Ted gave Mom for her birthday. Until there’s nothing but ocean and jungle before us as far as we can see.

  Amanda stops suddenly, puts her hand on my arm. She’s so close I can feel her breath on my cheek. I can smell the shampoo she uses on her hair. “Jackson?” she says again. Then she kisses me. Just a little kiss first, then when my arms seem to lift themselves around her, pull her closer to me, she kisses me again, a real kiss that leaves me stupid and breathless.

  “That day when I got Amy the drink,” she whispers, “it was because I wanted to meet you.”

  “Me?”

  She pulls away from me then, begins walking away.

  “Wait, wait!” I hurry after her, feeling like a dork actor in a movie.

  She stops, and I nearly run into her. “Listen, I love Kristin and Amy,” she says. “I love being with your family. I really do. Don’t think that’s fake. But at first, I only played with Kristin and Amy because I thought it might make you like me. Then I saw things wouldn’t work out that way. I mean, I know you like me, Jackson. But I saw that you didn’t want, you know—oh, my God,” she says. “This is so incredibly idiotic. What am I telling you this for, ruining everything?”

  “Amanda,” I say. Then I don’t know how to go on. I just look at her, thinking can this possibly be real?

  She waves her hand vaguely and starts to walk away again. “No, no. It’s okay. I understand. Boys never, I don’t know … ” Her voice sounds wavery. “They never like me. I’m a disaster. And anyway, I mean, with us, what would be the point? We don’t live anywhere near each other. So what if you did like me? I’d hardly ever see you. It’s better if we’re just friends. But now I’ve probably spoiled that.” She starts to cry.

  “I do like you.” I practically yell because she’s gotten so far away from me.

  She stops again.

  “I like you,” I repeat when I catch up. “I love you. Jeez, I’m in love with you. I just never thought you—” Now I kiss her.

  She presses against me, and it’s just the way I imagined it would be, up in my loft bed. We collapse onto the sand and lie there together. I wipe her tears away. I run my hand all along her as if it is a pencil and I’m drawing her—the curve of her hips, her ribs. When I touch one of her breasts, she breathes in sharply, makes just a little sound, like someone dreaming. I put my arms around her then, hold her for a long, long time, both of us taking deep breaths, both of us shaking. She feels so small against me. I don’t ever want to do anything to hurt her.

  Hand in hand, we walk back to the hotel. We pull one of the rental lounges out from underneath the boardwalk, where the beach boy stores them every night, and drag it to a secluded spot. There’s enough room on it for the two of us if we wedge ourselves into it just right. We lie there, kissing, talking, while strains of reggae music float down from the hotel terrace. In my whole life, I have never been so happy. My whole world is Amanda, breathing here beside me. Amanda and music, beach, ocean, vast black sky.

  twenty–three

  It’s still dark as Ted and I load the luggage into the trunk of the car the next morning. Kristin and Amy fall asleep as soon as we get going. Mom and Ted talk in low voices. I pretend I’m dozing. Dawn breaks, and through the slits of my eyes I watch the world emerge, a flowing stream of color carrying me farther and farther away from where Amanda dreams. I can’t let myself think of that. When I do, a ball of darkness forms inside me, hard and clenched, like a fist.

  Instead, I think about how wonderful she is, how right she was about so many things in my life. Maybe even about Kristin starting to love me. She sticks close to me at the airport, allows me to watch her book bag when she takes Amy to the bathroom. When we board, she takes the seat next to me. The whole time, it’s Amanda-this, Amanda-that. What she wore, what she said. What to write to her, how to get her to come visit. Kristin can’t know that hearing her speak Amanda’s name again and again is exactly what I need. If she weren’t talking about her, I’d probably be doing it myself, giving away what happened between us last night just by the sound of my voice.

  On the flight from Miami, Kristin falls asleep. I occupy myself composing the letter I’ll write to Amanda a few days from now—not too soon—writing and rewriting it in my head. It will be funny, I decide. It will say how I feel without being sap
py. I wonder how long it will take her to write back to me.

  “I guess it’s really over,” I hear Mom say with a sigh as the plane begins its descent. “I can just see Mother right now, elbowing everyone out of the way so she can be right at the gate when we come out.”

  Ted laughs.

  I figure Mom’s right; Grandma will be on us like a rug. I’m surprised when I don’t see her right away. People stop short in front of us, hugging and kissing and already starting to tell the stories of their trips to their friends and relatives who’ve been waiting for them. Then I spot her, stubbing out her cigarette in one of those standing ashtrays. She gets this strange look on her face when she sees us coming toward her.

  “Mother!” Mom calls. “Here we are.” She hands Ted her carry-on bag, about to give Grandma a hug, but Grandma takes a step back.

  “Ellen,” she says. “Oh, Jackson, your dad—” And bursts into tears.

  “What?” I say. But she’s crying so hard she can’t answer me. “Grandma, what?” I’m almost crying myself. Oh, please, I think. Don’t let him be dead.

  There’s been an accident, she’s finally able to get out. A fall, a bad one. Last night. Bones broken, internal injuries. Something about surgery, intensive care, how much each moment he can stay alive matters.

  “Oh,” is all Mom keeps saying. “Oh. Oh. Oh.”

  In the car, no one speaks. Ted navigates Grandma’s big Cadillac to the interstate; we pick up speed. I look through my own reflection at the cars we whiz past, at the people driving them who look straight ahead, their eyes on the road. I wonder, if one of them were to glance over and see my face, would he be able to tell that something terrible has happened?

  Grandma leans forward from the backseat, sticks her head between mine and Mom’s, and starts to talk. “It was Tom who called me—you know, Oz’s friend. Well after midnight.”

  “You knew last night at midnight?” I say. “You didn’t call us?”

  “Jackson,” Mom says.

  “Tom was the one who decided. When he called the airline and found out there was no earlier flight, he said, ‘There’s no point calling. There’s not a thing they can do but worry if they know.’ Dear Lord, I’ve been a basket case all day,” Grandma says, “thinking about how I was going to tell you what happened to your dad.” She sounds teary. “Jackson, I’m so sorry about this. I know your dad and I don’t see eye to eye. You must think—honey, I’ve been praying for him every minute since I found out.”

  She puts her hand on my shoulder to comfort me. I try to ignore it, to pretend it’s not there, but I keep feeling it anyway. It makes me feel trapped. I shrink away from her, from all of them—as close to the door as I can get.

  When she starts babbling about how it was a miracle that Dad had survived the fall, how good God was to have spared him, it’s all I can do to keep from saying what I know Dad would say if he could hear her: “Ha! Some miracle. If God were really on the job, I guess he’d have kept me from falling in the first place.”

  I try to see Dad saying it. I have the weird idea that if I can concentrate hard enough to hold him in my mind’s eye, if I can keep thinking about him as his usual malcontent self, I’ll get to the hospital and find him bossing the nurses around, making smart-ass comments.

  But when we actually get there and I see Tom sitting on an ugly orange couch, his head in his hands, I know Dad’s bad off, really bad off, and I feel like crying again. I have to clench my jaw hard not to.

  “Jax,” he says, and comes to me, first folding me into a bear hug, then cradling the back of my head against his chest with his big hands as if I were a hurt child. “He’s pretty beat up, buddy.” He’s almost crying himself. “Let’s sit down a minute before we go in to see him, okay? Ellen,” he says, noticing Mom for the first time, grasping her hand briefly. “You sit, too. All of you. I’ll tell you what I know.”

  I hear his voice, but as if from a distance. It happened when they were pulling the show down, he says. Something came loose on the truss, and when it tipped, Dad lost his balance, fell to the stage. One arm was broken and his shoulder. His legs were broken, nasty breaks. He’s in traction.

  “The surgery,” Mom interrupts. “Mother said—”

  “He kept losing blood.” Tom puts his hand on mine. “More than he should have from the broken bones. It was his liver, it turned out. It split open from the impact, and they had to go in and repair it. Scary shit, but it’s okay. The trick was catching it in time, and they did.

  “It’s the head injury they’re watching now. ‘Minor closed head injury’—that’s what the doctor called it. Which, as far as I can figure, translates into a real bad concussion.” Tom hesitates. “He hasn’t come to yet, Jax. They think he will soon,” he adds quickly. “But right now he won’t know you’re there. And he looks awful, all swollen from the fluids they pumped in during the surgery to make sure his kidneys would keep working. And, Jax, he’s on a ventilator, a breathing machine. It’s not that he can’t breathe … The machine keeps everything regular, keeps the blood flow to his brain even, and that keeps down the swelling.”

  “His brain’s swelling?” Imagining this, imagining Dad’s liver splitting like a thrown tomato makes my stomach turn. I taste bile.

  “No, no,” Tom says. “It hasn’t so far, or not any more than they consider normal. The machine is a precaution. You ought to be forewarned, though: it looks like Star Wars in there. Monitors. Bells and whistles. So don’t let it freak you out, okay? It just means they’re taking real good care of him.”

  He stands abruptly. Mom and I follow him out of the waiting room, down the long white corridor, through the double doors marked Intensive Care. Just inside, he stops, puts his hand on my shoulder. “He’s going to pull through, Jackson. I wouldn’t have said that to you when they brought him out of surgery this morning; I didn’t believe it myself. But these last few hours have been important—everything’s happening the way it should. And Oz is a stubborn son of a bitch,” he says with a wry grin. “Yeah, he’s stubborn all right. Anyone ever asks you to define irony, buddy, here it is. For the first time in his life, being the stubborn shit he is is the best thing your old man has going for him.”

  He keeps his hand on my shoulder as we move toward Dad’s room. I’m glad to have it there because I feel weightless, as if I might float back through the double doors, back through the maze of corridors, and out of the hospital right up into the darkening sky. I glance over at Mom. All the suntan has drained from her face. She’s looking straight ahead, moving as if she’s being pulled by a magnet. She reaches the room first and enters.

  “Oh,” she says when she sees Dad, more like a breath than a word.

  Then I see him. At first I think there’s been some terrible mistake. This person can’t be my dad. His head is huge, his features distorted so that he looks frightening, like a monster. But it is the blankness, the stillness that makes my heart twist. My real dad constantly drums his fingers, rakes them through his hair. He fiddles with whatever object he finds within his reach, taps a cigarette on the tabletop a half dozen times before he lights it. His hands shape the feel of the words he speaks. It can’t be him lying here so still, his head in a brace, his legs immobilized in slings, his arms restrained—not complaining about being so still. Not even noticing it.

  Mom grips the iron rail at the foot of the bed so tightly her knuckles are white. She’s crying; I know because her shoulders are shaking. She doesn’t make a sound. In fact, there’s no sound in the room except for the unnatural breath of Dad’s ventilator. Then the hiss of my own breath, suddenly let out. I didn’t even realize I’d been holding it.

  “You okay?” Tom asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “You can talk to him,” Tom says. “The nurses say it’s good to do that. Even though he doesn’t show it, he might hear you.”
>
  “Dad?” I say. My voice comes out a whisper. “Dad? It’s me, Jackson. Dad?”

  I touch his hand. It’s warm, curled in a loose fist. I lean down, working my own fingers into it so that our hands are in the same grip they’re in when we arm wrestle. My forearm rests against his on the mattress. “Dad?” I say it louder this time, right into his ear. But his eyelids don’t even flutter.

  I lay my head on the pillow beside his head. I want to stay with him this way until he comes back, until he knows I’m here with him. But the bed rail digs into my chest painfully. My thighs are burning, bent as they are to allow this closeness to my father. My arm’s falling asleep.

  It’s stupid, but that’s what makes me start crying: the fact that I finally have to stand up, the fact that I can’t be there in the bed with him. I don’t even try to explain it. I just stand there sobbing.

  Mom puts her arms around me and holds me tight until I stop. “We’ll stay with him tonight, honey. Okay, Jackson? We’re not going anywhere. Ted will bring us what we need. We’re not going anywhere until we know he’s really going to be all right.”

  twenty–four

  Oh, Jackson, you got here. Thank God,” Kim says, bursting into the room. “Oh,” she says again when she sees Mom. She takes a step back so that she’s framed in the doorway.

  Tom says, “You haven’t met Ellen, have you?”