Willow

by Julia Hoban

  “So.” Guy tears his eyes away from a model of a reconstructed jawbone and looks at Willow. “Where to now? What’s your favorite exhibit? Wait, don’t tell me. I know I’m going to get it, just gimme a sec. Okay, you probably like the gems and minerals, right? I’m not talking about that room with all the really fancy stuff, the crown jewels or whatever, those are too formal for you, I mean the semiprecious stuff, those great hunks of amethyst and topaz.”

  “You’re right,” Willow says. In fact, the massive purple and golden crystals with their peculiar luster are among the things that she likes best in the museum. She’s not surprised that he’s guessed that, not after everything that they’ve shared. But still, the fact that he can so easily pinpoint her wants and desires makes her slightly uncomfortable. The ambivalence she felt earlier that morning comes rushing back.

  She steps away from him a little, twists her hands together, and thinks. It’s not like she feels ashamed the way she did before. His knowledge of her isn’t necessarily bad, far from it. The bond that they’ve forged is the only positive thing in her life. It’s more that he knows everything. He knows the most awful thing about her, and, as she stands there in front of him, it is impossible for her not to feel horribly vulnerable.

  “So, how about it, do you want to go downstairs?”

  “You know everything about me,” Willow bursts out. Guy looks startled and she realizes that she’s not making any sense, that as far as he’s concerned what she’s just said came out of nowhere. “I mean, it’s not just that you knew that I’d want to see the amethyst . . .” She trails off, unsure of how to go on.

  “Well, you knew that I’d want to see the dinosaurs, I don’t get—”

  “That’s different,” Willow interrupts. “You’re a guy, you’re hardwired to like dinosaurs.”

  “You know, if I said that because you’re a girl you’re hardwired to like jewels, you’d be telling me that was some sexist—”

  “You’re not getting it,” Willow says somewhat wildly. “I mean that you know the worst thing about me, and I . . . don’t know the same about you. I know all the good things, but I don’t know what you’re ashamed of, I don’t know something about you that you’d want to hide from everyone else.”

  “Oh.” Guy still looks a little surprised at the turn the conversation has taken.

  “Never mind,” she mutters after a second. “Look, let’s just go look at the gems, okay? C’mon.” She tugs his hand. “Forget I said anything.”

  But Willow is having a hard time forgetting. Unfortunately, holding his hand isn’t making things any easier. With anyone else, holding hands would be so innocent, but that isn’t the case with Guy. His hands, his big and beautiful hands that have bandaged her arm and felt her scars, only remind her that he knows her deepest secret.

  “This is it,” she says as they enter the hall of gems and minerals. As with the dinosaur exhibit, they’re alone, without even a security guard, most probably because everything here is behind shatterproof glass.

  The room is underground, without windows. But the whole place is illuminated both by artificial lighting and the luminosity that the jewels give off. The strange ghostly radiance and the uneven crystal formations have always made Willow feel as if she were walking on the surface of the moon.

  “You know, there’s a huge oyster here somewhere. You might not like it, but I think it’s fascinating. It had the biggest natural pearl ever. I forget how much it weighed, but . . . Wait a sec, it’s right over here, if I remember . . .” Willow feels like she’s babbling, but she doesn’t know what else to do. The things that she said upstairs are still hanging in the air, and she’s desperate to get back to the carefree banter that they shared in the park.

  “What do you think?” she asks with artificial brightness as they stop in front of the oyster.

  “I don’t think that I’m, well . . . I don’t think that I’m ashamed of anything,” Guy says, completely ignoring the oyster and turning to look at her. “There’s nothing I’ve donethat I have to hide from other people. Or nothing that’s not completely trivial anyway. I’m sure I cheated on some algebra test back in eighth grade or something else like that.”

  “Oh,” Willow says faintly.

  “What I mean is, it’s not like there’s some particular act that I’m afraid people will find out about,” Guy continues. “That isn’t the way things are for me. I’d say that it’s more like I’d hate for people, my friends, Adrian even, to know what’s going on inside me most of the time.” He pauses and looks into Willow’s eyes, and she can see that even with all his strength, he’s just as vulnerable as she is.

  “You see, I’m . . . well, I guess the best way to describe the way I feel is that I’m scared, completelyscared. And I know that deep down a lot of people are, but still . . . I mean, I know Laurie would tell you that she’sscared. She’s afraid that she won’t get into the right school, or that she and Adrian will have to go to different schools. And I’m not saying that those fears aren’t real for her, but with me it’s something different. I’m more afraid that maybe I’ll get into the right school, and maybe after that I’ll get the right job, and that from the outside everything will look great, but I’ll never really do anything or think anything special. And even if it all looks good on the surface, I’ll know I’ve failed, and not at something unimportant like school, but at life.” He stops talking for a second.

  “Keep going,” Willow says. She squeezes his hand.

  “Okay, remember when we were in the stacks that day and you were telling me about what fieldwork is like?”

  “Yes.” Willow nods.

  “Well, we were joking, and I know that this sounds like a meaningless example, but I said maybe I wouldn’t like fieldwork either, because I like my showers. Well, sometimes I worry that my whole life will be based around what’s comfortable and easy. I’ll care too much about what makes me feel good to ever really reach for anything. And then I worry that even if I do, I won’t succeed.”

  Willow doesn’t say anything. She’s too busy mulling over everything that he’s told her and she can’t figure out why, when he’s exposed himself so completely, made himself so vulnerable, he only seems stronger.

  “But these days, I haven’t been worrying about those things so much,” Guy says. “I guess what scares me the most now is the thought that I won’t be able to protect you.”

  Willow stares at him. She doesn’t know how to respond to this extraordinary thing that he’s told her. She squeezes his hand more tightly and she’s aware that he’s slowly moving closer to her, very slowly. She feels as if they’re both underwater, and she knows that he’s going to kiss her.

  “Ahem.” They jump apart as a security guard comes into the room and clears his throat.

  Guy gives her a lopsided grin. Willow can tell that to him, the interruption is unwelcome but amusing.

  But Willow feels differently. As much as she would love to have kissed him, she is also somewhat relieved that the guard prevented it from happening. Her heart is beating wildly, both from anticipation of how that kiss would have felt, and from fear.

  Because now she’s the one who’s scared, very scared. Not of him, but of herself, or rather, of her feelings for him.

  Didn’t you know? Well, didn’t you know that this is the way things would go?

  She should have known better. Couldn’t she tell from the first time she talked with him in the library—talked to him the way she’s almost never talked to anyone else—couldn’t she tell thenthat this would happen? And she tried to prevent it too. That first day when he wanted to walk home with her, she tried to send him away then.

  What happened to her resolve? She should never have called him last night. She can’t believe that she’s spent so much time talking to him and finding out about him, that she practically begged him to show her the deepest recesses of his soul.

  And most of all, she can’t believe that she let him get under her skin and mean so goddamn mu
ch to her.

  Willow knows that a year ago, if she found herself in such a situation, with such a guy, she would be happy beyond belief, but her life is not as it was a year ago.

  It is nothing less than astonishing that her new world—so far from brave—has such a person in it. But most unfortunately for Willow, she cannot let herself feel for him the way she would have if she were still living in her old world.

  The silence between them is starting to become awkward. Willow knows Guy is expecting her to say something first. That he’s waiting to hear her response to the things that he told her, and maybe even more, her response to his attempt to kiss her. She should say somethingto him, she should respond to this gift that he’s offering her. But she can’t. She can’t tell him that she’s moved, because she won’t let herself be moved. She can’t tell him that she cares, because she’s trying very hard not to care.

  Willow doesn’t know what to do. She needs to get away from him, get away before things get any more complicated, but she doesn’t know how to make a graceful exit. She doesn’t know how she can ignore the appeal that’s written so clearly on his face.

  “I bet it’s stopped raining by now. I should head on home and see if I can get anything done on that paper,” is what Willow finally does choose to say. She can tell from the change in his expression—he looks like he’s been slapped—that it’s possibly the worst thing she could have come out with.

  “Your paper?” he says incredulously. “Are you kidding me? That’syour response? Fine.” He backs away from her, pushesher away. Unlike before, his movements are quick; clearly he can’t wait to get away from her either. “Fine, you do that. I guess I’ll head up to the library, see if I can get some work done too.” His voice is cold, and Willow can tell that he’s hurt and confused.

  “I’ll walk you there,” she says in a rush. Now he looks more confused than ever. And why not? She knows how crazy she must sound given the rejection that she’s just handed him. But Willow’s not quite capable of walking away from him yet.

  And she can’t bear to leave him with that look on his face.

  “If you like,” he says diffidently. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

  It has indeed stopped raining. Once again the sun is shining and there is a light breeze, but they are both oblivious to the beauty of the day. Neither one of them speaks a word during the entire walk to the library.

  “Well, I’m headed for the stacks as usual, you want to come?” Guy doesn’t look at her as he says this, and Willow wonders why he’s even bothering to ask. If their situations were reversed, she doesn’t know if she would bother to talk to him. Maybe, like her, he feels that there’s something unfinished in the air.

  “All right.” She nods.

  They walk silently through the campus and into the library. After flashing their ID cards for Carlos, they take the elevator and get off on the eleventh floor. As usual they’re alone. Guy presses the button for the lights and Willow blinks in the sudden glare.

  “It’s not that I wasn’t moved by what you said,” she says suddenly, grabbing his wrist and pulling him close. “It’s not that I didn’t want you to kiss me. It’s that I can’t let myself be kissed. You don’t understand, I can’t letmyself.”

  Guy gently disentangles his arm and places both hands on her shoulders. “You’re right,” he says. “I don’t understand.” But the coldness is gone from his voice.

  “I want to tell you something. I’m going to tell you something,” she amends. Willow has made a decision. He’s done so much for her, given her so much, that she simply has to give him something in return. She reaches up and covers his hands with hers. “C’mon, let’s be comfortable at least.” She walks him over to the place where they sat and talked about her parents’ lecture.

  “I’m going to tell you something,” Willow repeats. She sits down cross-legged on the floor, and pulls him down alongside her, close, so close that it is as if they are joined from shoulder to hip.

  “I’m listening.” Guy seems reserved, but attentive.

  “All right.” Willow takes a deep breath. “After the accident, I was in the hospital for a week. There wasn’t anything wrong with me, but, you know they keep you in there for observation or something. Anyway, the one good thing about it was that I was so drugged that I didn’t really get what had happened. Oh, I knew, all right, but I didn’t getit. I was conscious maybe two, three hours a day, I just slept all the time.” She pauses for a moment to gather her thoughts.

  “Then David and Cathy came to pick me up. Of course they’d visited me all the time, I mean that they came to take me home, well, to theirhouse. Obviously I had to move in with them, I couldn’t go back home and live by myself, and David didn’t want to leave the city. He worked out how I could finish the school year by sending in some extra papers and things. I was always ahead in my classes, and anyway, my old school got out mid-May, so there were only about eight weeks left.” Willow stops talking. She knows what she’s going to say, it’s just hard to come out with things that she has never before spoken of to anyone.

  “It was terrible after the hospital. The hospital was, I don’t know, oblivion. But being with David and Cathy, not having sleeping pills or pain pills, was just awful. I was dazed all the time, not from drugs anymore, but because now I really knew what I’d done. I mean, I got it in my head, I understood what had happened, but I didn’t feel any pain, not then anyway. I guess I was still in shock.

  “Well, after about another week of just hanging around in my bathrobe and sleeping all day, David decided that he wanted to go home and pack up our parents’ books to take to his apartment. You can imagine that our house has a lot of books—I’m talking thousands upon thousands. Anyway, when we got home, David gave me a screwdriver. He wanted me to take apart this old bookcase down in the basement, while he got to work on some of the ones upstairs. Now that I think about it, what he did doesn’t make any sense. I mean, there’s no place in his apartment for all of those books, and why would I have to dismantle this crappy old bookcase anyway? Why not just pack up all the books? You know what I think was going on? I think for David, destroying the bookcases that way was like when the ancient Greeks would rend their clothes and tear their hair as a way of mourning. I think that’s what it was all about, even though, in the end, we didn’t get very far with it.

  “So I was downstairs in the basement, with this screwdriver. Now, me and a screwdriver is not a good mix, it’s like high heels on Everest, something you never want to see together, and I’m trying to take this stupid bookcase apart and it’s just not happening. And all of a sudden, maybe it’s being back home, I don’t know, maybe it’s what books meant to my parents, and the fact that I’m trying to dismantle their collection, but all of a sudden, I start to getit. I don’t mean thinkit, I mean getit. It was like there was this extraordinary pain just knocking at the door of my consciousness—this overwhelming, extreme sensation, and I knew that if I let it in, I would go under.

  “And then, just when I thought that I had no control over what was about to happen, I realized two things. The first is that the emotional pain was going away, it was leaving, it wasn’tgoing to consume me, and the second was that I was stabbing myself, really attackingmyself with the screwdriver, and that the physical pain that I was causing was better than the best drug the hospital had. It was just forcing everything else out. This pain, this physicalpain, was flowing through my veins like heroin, and I was numb, immune to the rest of it, I couldn’t feel anything but the pain, and I knew that I had found a way to save myself.

  “When you found me out, you thought that I wanted to kill myself, that all this slashing was like target practice until I got up enough courage for the real thing. You don’t understand at all. You just don’t get it. I’m savingmyself.

  “I’ve taught myself, I’ve trained myself, not to feel anything exceptphysical pain. I’m completely in control of that. Do you understand? Do you get what that means?”

&n
bsp; Guy doesn’t say anything. He is ashen-faced. Willow is also silent, spent from having revealed so much, but something else is happening too. As she sits there next to him she is acutely aware of the way his body feels, of the way his arms look with his sleeves rolled up, of the texture of his bare skin as it brushes against hers, and of the sensations all of those things evoke deep inside of her. And she realizes that try as she might to prevent it, try as she might to only feel pain, now there is something else she feels as well, and there is nothing she would rather do than kiss him.

  She’s shocked that her mood has swung so wildly. How did anguish suddenly morph into desire?

  Maybe it’s because she has never revealed so much of herself to another person. Maybe it’s because she wants to test if her hypothesis is true. Is it really so dangerous for her to feel anything? Will kissing him, feeling for him, falling in love with him,really be so disastrous?

  This time she is the one who leans forward. She is on her knees in front of him, grasping his shirt collar, pulling him close to her. He is clearly as startled by this as she herself is, but he allows himself to be drawn in. Their mouths meet, she moves even closer still until she is sitting on his lap, takes his hands from her waist and puts them on her breasts, does everything but devour him, desperate to see if she can have something beyond her bondage with the razor.

  Willow doesn’t know the exact moment that the extraordinary pleasure she’s feeling turns into the pain of her worst fears. Pictures of the accident start writhing beneath her closed lids, competing for attention with the image she holds of his face. A tidal wave of emotion threatens to engulf her. She is suddenly back in the basement with the bookcases.

  “I can’t.” Willow pushes him away. “I can’t!”

  She’s breathing heavily. She barely even registers that Guy is on his knees in front of her. The bloody dashboard, her mother’s crushed limbs, these are the things that she sees. Willow claps her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to drown out the dreadful sounds of the accident.