Of Stillness and Storm

by Michele Phoenix

  LCC: Please, Aidan. What did your doctor see on the scan?

  AD: i do have a brain—that’s the good news.

  LCC: Can you please not make jokes? Not now. Tell me.

  AD: it’s growing.

  LCC: The tumor?

  AD: that’s a silly question, ren.

  LCC: How much?

  AD: nearly double since last month.

  LCC: Oh, God.

  God, no. God. No. I stared through tears at Aidan’s words on the screen. Nearly double since last month. I berated myself for not knowing more. What did this mean? Why was it progressing so fast? Who was there with Aidan? That was my gravest concern in that moment. He couldn’t be alone.

  LCC: Are you alone?

  AD: yup.

  LCC: Are you okay being alone?

  AD: aside from a fast-growing tumor, you mean?

  LCC: …

  AD: i’ll be okay. just need awhile to absorb this.

  LCC: Tell me what your doctor said. How worried was he?

  AD: she. she was more pissed than worried. this wasn’t supposed to happen on this protocol. ren, i told you i had a bad feeling about this one.

  LCC: But there’s still stuff they can do, right? I hate not being able to see you. I hate it so much right now.

  Aidan, are you there?

  Aidan?

  AD: skype? please.

  He gave me his username again and I clicked on my Skype icon with shaking fingers, moving to the chair by the dining room window for optimum signal. The wait for connection was interminable. My fear of seeing Aidan face-to-face was as keen as the terror of losing him. A battle erupted between my heart and mind—the visceral, desperate need to get as close to him as I could and the cautionary voice that urged restraint and promised greater pain.

  Aidan accepted the call. I heard him click on. Saw flashes of a room—ceiling, painting, lamp. And then his camera settled on a face I hadn’t seen in twenty-two years. My mind desperately inventoried what it saw. Signs of age. Hollow eyes. Thinner lips. A bandana covering his bald head. But Aidan’s face. Aidan’s—face.

  “Easy there,” he said with a sad smirk that took my breath away. “I’m not a ghost yet.”

  I’d forgotten that he could see me too. I pulled back a little and tried to school my expression into something that wouldn’t add my terror to his. “Sorry.” I saw myself smile in the small screen embedded in the Skype window. I wondered if he could tell how strained it was. Then the enormity of being able to see him struck me again. I stared.

  “Older, huh?” he said.

  “But still you.”

  He seemed to be engaged in the same activity I was. He leaned in, scanning the picture of me on his computer’s screen. And despite the death knell of his verdict, I couldn’t help but wonder if I looked a mess. I put a hand to my hair.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  My own gesture shamed me. “I’m sorry.”

  He smiled again. “Still you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The shorter style suits you.”

  “A case of temporary insanity a couple years back,” I said, blushing despite the untenable circumstances. I savored the sight of his face on my screen. Though he’d aged, his eyes held the same depth. His smile the same mischief. His skin was more wrinkled and somehow lived-in, but he was Aidan. My friend.

  “Tell me what your doctor said,” I prompted.

  He nodded and looked away, biting the inside of his lip. When he’d gathered his thoughts, he looked back at me, his gaze just shy of meeting mine, as the camera was above my picture on his screen. Just when it looked like he was about to speak, he leaned back and ran his hands over his face. He seemed older when he leaned in again.

  “It’s good to see your face, Ren.”

  Tears blurred my vision. He saw them and smiled that sad smile again. “That’s what I’ve missed,” he said.

  “Watching me cry?”

  His laugh lines deepened. I found them beautiful. “Watching you love me.”

  Any semblance of composure I’d maintained until then drained out of me. “Tell me what she said,” I repeated as tears fell down my face and my throat constricted.

  “Aw, Ren. Geez. I’m so glad you’re back in my life.” He squared his shoulders and sat up a bit straighter. “Doc said we need to go in and clean it out again. She’s trying to schedule the surgery as quickly as possible.”

  “And then more chemo?” I tried to stem my tears, not wanting my distress to add to his.

  “She doesn’t know. This thing is … Nobody knows what works on this kind of tumor.”

  “But there’s more they can try, right?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. We’ve thrown the best stuff at it already, and—”

  “And it grew.”

  “Pea with grape ambitions. I called it.”

  The enormity of being able to see him struck me again. He sat with his eyes on the screen in front of him and I saw only fatigue in his face, not the paralyzing sadness I’d expected. He’d lived with the reality of his mortality since the diagnosis five months before, and while it was all coming at me so fast that I was reeling, he’d already had time to absorb some of the direness.

  I wiped under my eyes, rubbing off the mascara that had run with my tears. “What’s in your mind right now?” He seemed lost in thought. It was an expression I remembered well.

  “You used to be better at letting a person sit in silence.”

  “I’m sorry.” Age seemed to have increased my impatience.

  “No, it’s good. It’s good. Just feels like we’re running out of time too fast to give silence too much space …”

  I tried to convey hope and optimism with my eyes. It made me feel like a fraud. But he was off in his thoughts again, his gaze unfocused and slightly averted from the screen. I didn’t interrupt him this time. I watched him blink and breathe. I tried to still the emotions still rioting in my mind. I watched his face as I had for countless hours as he painted in his parents’ shed.

  He seemed to snap out of it after a couple of minutes. His expression shifted to matter-of-fact. He cracked his neck from side to side and took a deep breath. “Still there?” he asked a bit sheepishly.

  “Still here.”

  He sat back and crossed his arms, concentration drawing his eyebrows together. “I don’t know how to answer your question. If you’d asked me what I was thinking when I first heard the diagnosis, I’d have had no problem. Terror, anxiety, despair, anger—lots of anger. But … I don’t know anymore.”

  “Have you told your parents about today?”

  “Not yet.” He paused again. “I’m really not looking forward to surgery again.” There was weariness in his voice.

  “Painful?”

  He chuckled. “I’m not sure there are strong enough words to describe it. Plus the short-term effects.”

  “Did you have any last time?”

  “Just peripheral vision and balancing stuff. Nothing major. But you never know.”

  I had to ask. “Do you have it in you to fight some more?”

  He considered that for a moment, frowning. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”

  My voice was raspy. “I wish there was something I could do for you …”

  “I know you do,” he said, smiling. “If there’s one thing that defines our friendship, it’s you wanting to help me.”

  “Interesting.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure I agree with you.”

  “What—you’re going to argue with a guy who’s fighting a pea-to-grape tumor?”

  “No, I’m going to set him straight.”

  “All right, lay it on me.”

  “What defined our friendship—”

  “Defines. Present tense.”

  “Right. What defines our friendship is … familiarity.”

  He looked at me sideways through the screen. “Explain.”

  “Just—knowing.”

  “Knowing.�
� He seemed to mull it over for a moment. “Yeah, that’s about right.”

  His gaze grew distant again and I wondered if he was remembering what I was. It was the night before graduation. We’d been out with friends to celebrate, and Aidan had predictably had a little too much to drink. I drove him home in my dad’s car and told him I’d see him at the ceremony the next day. I couldn’t help myself. Just as he was closing the door, I said, “You know, the one advantage of going to different colleges is that I won’t have to come to your rescue every time you get drunk anymore.” He gave me a look. “Maybe you’ll find yourself a cute little blonde to do the honors and call it an upgrade. Tell her good luck from me, okay?” I motioned for him to close the door and drove away.

  I should have known that I’d be woken by the sound of stones hitting my bedroom window a few hours later. I didn’t take the time to look outside and confirm that it was him. That familiarity. I just knew.

  My mom poked her head out of their bedroom as I headed downstairs. “Aidan again?” she asked. I guess she knew too.

  He was waiting by the garage door when I stepped out in my pajamas with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. “I brought you something,” he said. He seemed calm. Determined.

  “What are you doing here, Aidan?”

  He turned and headed back down the lane, toward the car his grandfather had loaned him for most of his senior year. I followed him in the dull light of a full moon. He opened the back door and pulled out a fourteen-by-eighteen canvas, holding it with its back to me. I looked at him suspiciously, wondering what kind of manipulation would follow. He knew my soft spot was his art.

  “Can we go sit on your mom’s bench?” he asked.

  “I …” Suspicion dueled with curiosity. “Sure.”

  He seemed calm as we walked around the house and down my mom’s rose-lined path to the bench under a maple tree. He sat us down and propped the painting, still averted, against his knee.

  “What’s going on here, Aidan?”

  “I’m sorry about prom night,” he said. There was a seriousness and sincerity about him that I’d seldom seen before.

  I laughed. “Is that what this is about? That was weeks ago. I don’t care about prom night.”

  “I do.” He said it forcefully. “I shouldn’t have taken you to prom and spent the night making passes at Darcy.”

  “It’s not like I expected you to have eyes only for me.”

  Those eyes were riveted to mine with a frightening intensity. “We’re graduating tomorrow.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “And my parents are moving to Pennsylvania.”

  “Again—aware.”

  “And you’re—”

  “Aidan.”

  He squeezed my hand. “Listen to me.”

  There was something so purposeful in his gaze that I complied, curiosity and alarm battling in my mind.

  “I’ve been working on this,” he said. “And I want you to have it as a grad present. Or something.”

  He turned the painting around and handed it to me. I held it up to catch the light from the full moon. Something clicked in my mind. I knew.

  He said, “It’s called Kindred.”

  Though it was far from dawn, the light of the moon illuminated a painting of such soul and clarity that it took my breath away. A woman’s hand rested palm-down on the surface of a multihued liquid. His use of reflection and depth was stunning, as if a universe of northern lights hovered above the painting, its aura captured in the shadow play across the surface. The hand barely skimmed the surface, but fragments of the liquid’s color seemed to have seeped over the skin, coloring it gradually from fingertips upward. The symbolism was arresting. He had painted with such conviction that the piece was nearly three-dimensional, natural lines and nuances exchanged for brash strokes and hues charged with meaning.

  He’d never painted anything more powerful.

  We’d decided long ago that I’d never ask him to explain his work. As an artist, he valued the mystery of audience interpretation. But on this night, he dispensed with our agreement.

  “You’re more than the girl who drives me home when I’m half-sloshed,” he said as I contemplated his painting. The intensity of his voice startled me. I looked from the suspended, painted hand to him and saw something in his face that made my breath catch. He went on before I could say anything, his eyes averted. “I know you think you’re only good for rescuing me or talking me down when I get stupid or telling me I’m good at art.”

  “Well, I do have some experience with—”

  “Is that really all you think this is?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t sure what to think either. I knew our friendship was more than a series of rescues and exhortations. It was rich with words and shared passions, saturated with a minutia of life that somehow took on substance and value when we experienced it together. He was the first person I wanted to talk to when something went right or wrong. His dizzying trajectory seemed to keep mine straighter. He knew me with a fidelity and lucidity that were rare and intimate.

  “No,” I said. “It’s more than that.” I felt the next day’s milestone and its implications settling over me.

  “This,” he said, laying his painting on the ground and jutting his chin toward it, “is what this feels like to me.”

  I searched the dimly lit surface for the meaning he’d infused into each ridge and hue.

  “You calm me,” he said. “And you … I don’t know … you make me think twice. And I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything for you, but … I hope it would be this.” He motioned at the color filtering over the skin in the painting. “I’d like to think I brought you something—you know—colorful?” What had started as a statement had ended in a question.

  He grabbed my hand where it lay in my lap and held it firmly. I looked into his face, unsure and disconcerted. The night was warm. The silence was complicit.

  “I think I love you,” the earnest boy in front of me said. And I believed him. I knew I loved him too.

  “Aidan,” I said, prepared to temper his fervor with a dose of reality.

  He reached an arm along the back of the bench and leaned in, his ardor beautiful under the soft light of the moon. “I don’t want to lose this,” he said. He brushed a hand against my face and wove his fingers into my hair. And everything in me seemed to sway. I wanted to lean and wrap and rest. I shook my head, denying his plea and my compulsion to accept it. “Aidan. This is …”

  “I’ve known since the night in your dad’s garage,” he said. I stared wide-eyed, realizing in that instant that I had too.

  I felt completion when he kissed me. A void filled and sealed. A yearning sated. My arms wove around his neck as we strained toward each other, our breaths ragged with desire and despair. We slipped off the bench and into the damp grass, rendered mindless by an ache ten years growing. Sacrilege and sacrament wrapped in urgent need.

  I’d lost my grip on time and reality when Aidan pulled back and said, “Let’s ditch college.” He didn’t realize as the words came out of his mouth how irrevocably they would change our lives.

  They reached me through a fevered haze, and I think I felt their warning before my mind could register it. “What?” He’d applied and been accepted. He was leaving in two days to work a summer job on campus and save up for his tuition.

  “Let’s ditch college.” His face was luminous with adventure. “Go to New York. Get a studio. I’ll paint, you’ll write.” He framed my face in his hands. “Ren—let’s do this!”

  I pushed into a sitting position and turned on him. “What?”

  “You and me.” He reached for the painting and turned it toward me. “You and me, Ren. I told you—I love you.”

  I shook my head, finally understanding where this was going. “Aidan—I can’t ditch college.”

  “You’re a writer, Ren. Just write.”

  “I—”

  I saw his smile dim a little. As I searched his
face, I realized this was about more than his feelings for me. This was about his fear of starting fresh, about losing the universe he’d grown up in, and about wanting to hold on to the one person who’d consistently been a source of reason and support. I loved him. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t. But I couldn’t dispel the certainty that Aidan’s wild idea, as intoxicating as it was, was neither viable nor sustainable. I wanted the dream as desperately as I feared it. It was my love for Aidan that made me reject it.

  “I can’t go to New York with you and just … write.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m eighteen. Because we’re eighteen.”

  “College sucks.”

  “You haven’t tried it.” I heard the firm, persuasive tone I’d so often used to talk him down from far-fetched plans. Whatever the nature of the love he felt for me, this plan was little more than license to quit—permission not to attempt something he wasn’t sure he could pull off. I would not be his escape from a future he couldn’t yet imagine.

  With the taste of his lips still on mine and the warmth of physical hunger still heavy in my limbs, I saw with devastating clarity the only choice I had to make. “You have to go to college,” I said, the hardness in my voice masking my staggering loss.

  “Ren …”

  I tried to sound unequivocal as I sealed our fate. “We’re not ditching college. We’re not going to New York. You’re starting your job in two days, and I’m doing exactly what I’ve been planning on for the past few months.”

  His expression shifted from passionate to distraught in an instant. “But …” I saw disbelief hollow out his gaze. He pointed at the bench where we’d sat minutes before. “But—we just … we said we—”

  “You did,” I said. I felt an intimate, impossible hope shatter. “You said it, Aidan. I didn’t.”

  As my love for him screamed across my nerves and synapses in a physical ache, I watched him stand, pick up the painting, and walk away.

  I grieved as graduation unfolded without him there. I grieved on the day I knew he left for college. I grieved as my new life began far from the place that had sheltered the simple richness of our love. I grieved, and then I could no more.

  “Graduation?” Aidan asked from his townhouse in Pennsylvania.