We Were Never Here

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “You did?” I asked.

  “We did. I had a springer named Daphne. Can you believe it?”

  I looked at him. My father. He was graying, and I only noticed it then. I’d seen so many pictures of him young, with a mustache, wearing army pants and tie-dyes, and then when I was born. Now he looked like a professor. Like a dad.

  “That is hilarious.” I pictured him as a kid, calling Daphne! Daphne! and my mother in the form of a dog running up and licking his face. “I’d thought you rescued Mabel.”

  My father shook his head. “No. That would have been nice, though.”

  But then she wouldn’t be Mabel.

  “You okay?” He turned to look at me.

  I nodded. “I just have this eye thing,” I said, touching the corner of my eye. “You know, Mabel is seven,” I said.

  “She is.”

  I stopped walking and turned to him. “Okay so, I really want to rescue this dog. She’s like, part beagle, part border collie, a little Lab, I think. She came from North Carolina, from a batch of puppies just left in a Dumpster in the horrible heat. Her hair was matted and her skin was raw from hot spots, but she’s doing really well now, with some of her siblings at a shelter. A kill shelter. In Manassas.”

  “She needs to be rescued? I see.”

  “She does.”

  “I see,” he said again.

  “It’s a kill shelter. I don’t know how much time she’s got. She needs to be saved, Dad.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s save her then.”

  I was stunned because it’s usually, let’s talk to Mom, let’s see, let’s see if Zoe is comfortable with this, blah blah, but not today, apparently. Post-hospital rules.

  “That’s great.”

  “It is,” my father said.

  My dad stuck his hands in his pockets and I stuck my hands in mine. Well, his. There were some kind of strips of soft plastic, and I fingered them for a second and then took them out of his pocket to see what they were.

  My hospital bracelets. The one that was handwritten and the typed-out one. The one Collette cut off only a week before.

  I looked at them, flat on my open palm, and then I looked at my father.

  “You know, when you were born, your mom wore a bracelet just like that. It said ‘Baby Stoller.’ We hadn’t named you yet. We were waiting to meet you. I have that one too.”

  Mabel had her face in the bushes, sniffing deeply and loudly.

  “So this first one I took because I was scared. Really, really scared. The second one I took because I wasn’t, but you had worn it every day in there, and you had left it behind. All your bracelets,” he said.

  I just rubbed my naked wrist as we made our old loop around the long, tree-lined blocks of my neighborhood.

  “So when do you want to go get this puppy dog?” he said, as we turned the corner for home. He looked at his watch. “Don’t know about you, but I’m free this afternoon.”

  Next thing I knew we were all in the car, heading to Manassas for Greta. We were heading to her to save her.

  “We’re getting you a sister!” I said to Mabel, to explain why she wasn’t coming with us, as we left her, stunned, behind.

  In the car I stared out the window along the highway.

  “Want to play I Spy?” my mother said from the front seat.

  “Um, no?” Zoe put in her earbuds.

  “How often are we all in the car together?” my father said, turning to us.

  I peeked over at Zoe’s phone. Revolver. I motioned her to give me a bud, and when she handed it over, we both leaned back: “I will be there and everywhere. Here, there and everywhere.”

  “Play it again,” I said, and she did: “To lead a better life, I need my love to be here. . . .”

  At the shelter Zoe and I knelt down and gripped the metal of her caged-in kennel and watched her. Greta. It means pearl. And that’s what she was, once we got to her, pried her out of that sad, abused shell of hers. The eyes. Such sad, hoping, long-lashed eyes. She jumped and jumped and then she growled as the human at the kennel opened her cage.

  “She just needs love and some training.” The human leaned down and scratched her on the neck. “Love, love, and then some more love,” she said.

  “Well, we sure have that aplenty!” my mother said, and Zoe rolled her eyes.

  They called the puppy Blue Eyes then, and I swear she bent her head and smiled.

  Dog smiles. Like no other kinds of smile. It made me think of Verlaine. I would have liked to tell Connor about it.

  I also wanted to tell him what I decided on our way back to the car, which was that I was going to take her to get her Canine Good Citizen certificate. So she could go into hospitals. Like Verlaine. Because maybe Connor would come back and maybe Verlaine and Mabel and now lovely Greta, who wasn’t a stranger to suffering either, and I could all go visiting—go candy striping—together. I would finally get the handbook! I would finally see all the secret instructions that were written inside.

  Of course, there was no Connor, and it’s not like I didn’t know this when we got into the car, Greta freaking out in the backseat, Zoe on her knees leaning toward her, trying to calm her down. I knew all this. But it is still possible to unknow what you know.

  “A new family member,” my father said.

  “Perfect,” my mother said. “She’s clearly gotten the memo about how being rabid is an important feature in our household.”

  “We’re not going to hurt you!” I placed my hand palm up for her to sniff and then petted her softly on her back, the way the handler had shown us.

  “We’re here to save you!” Zoe said.

  Poor Greta. Even though it wasn’t even an hour home, we had to stop at a rest station to let her get some energy out. Trucks were idling at the stop as she ran in the little stretch of grass. And she looked so beautiful, all her kinds of dogs inside her, her spotted fur, her pointed face. Watching her, I thought how maybe Connor hadn’t left me. Because maybe, just by coming home and being with my family, by not being so sick anymore, so blue inside, maybe I had left Connor. He could feel that way. That he was the one who had been left behind.

  That’s when I decided I would try to find him. I would find Connor the way Connor had found me.

  Returning

  That’s what I tried to do, anyway. I called his phone and only got a voice mail on the first ring, the kind of VM that is just a robot reciting a number: you’ve reached blah, blah, blah. Blah. I didn’t even get to hear the sound of his voice—that old voice mail he’d left me in the hospital was getting a little stale. I didn’t have an email address for him, and when I searched for him online again, this time, like, hunting, with places I knew he lived, with names I thought might be his parents’, all I found was his mother. I’m pretty sure it was his mother, and she seemed to be a powerful lawyer. But nothing else. Connor was a ghost.

  Or that’s what I hoped, because it meant that he could return somehow, scratching at my window maybe, slipping out from my closet door, Wuthering Heights–style.

  He could rise up behind me in any mirror, I thought, but still I avoided looking at myself in the mirror then. I only looked at myself in segments: here is my leg, here is my face, my arm—like a chicken cut up for frying maybe—because all of me, I couldn’t. Sometimes, though, I would look in the near distance of the mirror to see if he was standing there maybe, leash wound around his hand, Verlaine smiling beside him.

  Of course Connor was the one who found me. It was how it worked with us. He would always be lost and I would be found.

  But it took a while.

  It happened when I least expected it, just like when he showed up in the hospital unannounced. How random was that, how lucky, that in that big old horrible place this perfect person showed up? This time, I was already back at school. It felt like it had been forever, but really I had just missed six weeks. October 7, just in time for homecoming that weekend, which I found incredibly annoying. Also annoying? Dee-Dee an
d her Rizzo attire, her constant back against the locker, notebook at her chest, her boyfriend, who of course was playing Kenickie, panting at her side. It was all so 1955; I was surprised she didn’t have a chiffon scarf around her neck, like the green one Nana gave me from her drawer when I was a kid. I loved the feel of it on my face, and the smell of her lingering perfume, but it did not, I repeat it did not, belong on a junior in high school. Also? Lydia was practically stitched to Dee’s side. Also annoying.

  I guess I was in costume too, though. That first day back at school I felt I could be anything I chose, but there were basically two options: (1) I could be dressed up now, lipstick, nice clothes. I could cover myself up that way, I guess. Or (2) I could match up my insides and outsides better, wear my father’s old sweats, his T-shirts. Old ripped jeans and some Vans of my own. Never be seen.

  I went with option two.

  What’s to report about returning? Mostly weirdness. I don’t know why I thought people wouldn’t know. Or that they wouldn’t know the specifics. But they did. They were either overly nice, smiling at me in the hallways the way I always smile when I see kids in wheelchairs or on those metal crutches with the arm grips. Teachers welcomed me back as if I’d been lost in space, and in homeroom I received a summons by the school nurse to let me know that she—her office—was my safe place should I need it. That was nice, I suppose. I didn’t think I’d ever take her up on it though.

  And Michael Lerner.

  “Hey,” he said, like, sliding up beside me while I was at my locker.

  “Hey!” We had been such good friends once. Now? Nothing really.

  “Did you get my gift?”

  I had totally forgotten about the necklace. “Yeah,” I said. “So sweet. Thank you.” It was nice to have his attention, I will admit.

  “How you doing? Like, what was it like?”

  “What was what like?” I pretended to be looking for something important inside. But there was nothing in there. Nothing even hanging on the door.

  “The hospital. Surgery. Now.”

  I shook my head. He was saying: Like, what is it like, what are you like now? Now. Now. “It was fucking fantastic,” I said. He wasn’t really interested in me. He was interested in what had happened to me.

  He looked stricken. “God,” he said. “I was just asking.”

  “And I was just telling you.” I slammed my locker closed. You know the person who wants to be close to the sick person, the person whose mom died, the person who has seizures in the hallways? The one who will have all the inside info on this person’s . . . stuff? That person was Michael L. And oh yeah, the sick person in this equation, that was me.

  “You’re welcome for the necklace!” Michael said as I shuffled away from him and down the hall.

  Down the hall: flyers for the homecoming weekend hockey game. A color printout of everyone in their plaid skirts and polo shirts, their shin guards and cleats, two hockey sticks crossed in front of the first row. Correction: a color printout of everyone but me.

  Anyway; Connor. I had just gotten in from my third day of school, a time that was always of note because of the mad relief I felt. Nora and I were trying to make a plan to actually see each other.

  “Luv, luv,” she said, “you’re like a little lag in there, never going out, after being all pent up with the gerries. Totally jammy for me to come. When works?”

  We agreed on the weekend. She would take the train up.

  “We’ll meet you under the clock at the station!” I said to Nora. “Text me when you get off the train.”

  “Under the clock,” she said. “Chirp chirp!”

  Was that even British? No idea, but didn’t have much time to think about it, because as soon as I’d hung up, my mother came up the stairs. It was sweet that she worked afternoons from home now, but it did always take me by surprise to see her.

  “Mail call!” she said. Mail call, when it happened, usually involved a postcard from Nana or a letter from Tim for Zoe. He wrote her letters! That guy was so in love with Zoe; it was kind of sad but also kind of beautiful. I think Zoe actually loved him back. I’m sure of it.

  My mother lifted her eyebrows and tilted her head as she sliced the air with an envelope.

  Plain white, handwritten address.

  Connor. It had to be.

  How can I explain? The fluttery weird crazy in my chest. What was that?

  I snatched it from her. I ran into my room. I closed the door. I brought Frog out from her aquarium and set her on the floor. I put Birdy on, “Fire and Rain.” I sat down, back against my bed, and closed my eyes to calm myself. I opened the letter and it was true. Finally it was news from Connor. He’d been found.

  Letter 1

  October 6, 2013

  Dear Lizzie,

  Dear Lizzie,

  Dear Lizzie,

  Sorry. I can’t figure out just how to start this letter. I’ve got a lot to tell you. I wanted to write a letter to you so I can think of what to say and how to say it. And because where I am we’re not allowed to use our phones and there is only one public phone.

  Remember landlines?

  What am I saying? Of course you remember landlines.

  Okay. Let me back up. First of all, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when you came home from the hospital that I was leaving. I have been craven. This is a word I have learned here, and it’s a good word and it applies to me because I meant to tell you I was going, and then there you were with your family, almost back to the person you must have been before you got sick. It was so strange to see you out of the hospital. Like a person. It’s not that I saw you as a nonperson before, I just saw you differently. You like rose up into yourself, or maybe out of yourself.

  It was great to see you, both ways. All the ways you are. I mean that.

  That day was my last day home. I’m at boarding school now. This place in New Hampshire. Stone Mountain. As if. My parents sent me here after the semester had already started—so it was a lot of hurrying and packing and throwing things away. I had to say good-bye to Verlaine. I can’t really even write about that.

  That’s part of why I didn’t write or call, but mostly it was because I didn’t know how to tell you and everything was so chaotic. Basically, I couldn’t get the girl out of my head. I saw her everywhere. I had this feeling that I was . . . breaking apart. So I started skipping school. And not doing my homework. And also, I was smoking a lot of pot. Alone. We never talked about this stuff, so I’m not sure how you feel about it, but I’m just trying to be honest. So my mother caught me and then my parents sent me to Dr. Farrell, who said I was self-medicating, that I was finding a way to make those thoughts stop.

  I was at sea was what he told me. And I really felt like that.

  And now I keep thinking about your surgery. How I know it must have been horrible, just awful and painful, but now it’s gone. The sickness. I feel like my thing is unfixable, like I can’t get it out or something. I was so stupid. I think I really thought going into the hospital, I could save people. I think I truly thought that visiting you would help—like you would get better. But you had to get that surgery anyway. And patients like Thelma died.

  So here I am, at this place. It’s teeny. There are, like, twenty-five kids, all boys. It’s super strict. Everyone has their own little garden plot! The theory is that taking care of a garden teaches you about growing and tending and caring. I know a little bit about that already, but just a little.

  It’s all kind of complicated.

  I just wanted to write you, now, to tell you where I am. I want to say that I miss our visits, my visits to you. I want to say that I miss everything about everything. I see you everywhere. But I don’t want to keep you from starting over. From beginning your life all over again.

  Your first day home was my last day home. So it goes.

  I think that’s all from me for now. But more from me soon.

  Yours always,

  Connor

  Blue All Over Again

/>   I was shaking as I read that letter. It was in Connor’s handwriting. And Connor’s handwriting? ALL CAPS. Little blocky neat all caps. Beautiful and perfect.

  Of course.

  As I read, Frog sat there as if she were deciding if she should walk or just enjoy the break from her usual home, but I was having feelings. So many, all over. I was happy to hear from Connor and shocked to hear what had happened and then I was so, so, so sad. Like blue all over for him.

  I went downstairs and found Mabel and Greta. There are strange ways you realize you’re getting better, and one of the goofy ones was that I could take them out together now. (The bad ways involved, sadly, my thighs starting to get back to my prehospital thighs.) Greta was so manic and crazy, and Mabel was kind of over it, sort of looking at me like, This is how I’m going to spend my old age? But as I untangled their leashes and made my way up the rise of our street, I tried to picture Connor all alone at some freaky boarding school and all I could think of was some Vampire Academy place where the school seems like this place of safety and protection but really it ends up to be the worst place of all.

  I imagined him alone in his bed in the country in the dark like I was alone in the dark.

  When I got home, I did this strange thing I still don’t understand. I put his letter in my top left desk drawer, just underneath David B’s God’s eye, where my pens and scissor and Scotch tape were. And then I shut the drawer.

  I didn’t write Connor back.

  It just happened. Connor wrote me when he was ready.

  And so I would write him back when I was.

  School Spirit

  I went to the damn pep rally.

  Oh sweet Jesus, the pep rally. I ask you: Is there anything worse? I only mention it to say, if it wasn’t clear already: I was not voted princess. No matter what, there’s always that crazy secret hope, isn’t there? So pathetic, but true. But Michael Lerner was, of course. Voted prince, I mean, which just seemed so, I don’t know, ironic I guess. Yes, ironic, because here he was paying attention to me finally and here he was all validated in the world and I didn’t care. Our class princess was actually an amazing girl, Leandra Robbins, who had built houses in West Africa this past summer and who was also really into all kinds of equality and always got people to march on the Mall when there was something important about equality to march about. It made me feel kind of sorry for Michael L. He looked so, well, empty compared to her.