I stopped walking, faced him, waited. He looked flushed, his cool-boy composure rattled.
“I just wanted to talk to you; I got nervous. You’re the judge’s daughter and everything.”
I sighed. My father’s profession, sitting on the bench in county court, caught up with me at the weirdest times.
“So we’re cool now?” I said with exasperation.
“We’re cool,” he said, and fell silent. We stood in the dark.
The humming of a car motor and a quick siren, a one-note
buh-wip
, cut through the air.
“What’d I tell you,” said James. He turned and started walking, quickly, back into the dark of the woods.
“Where are you going?” I asked, watching through the trees as the firelit crowd by the river turned, with expressions that ranged from full-out panic to resigned sheepishness, toward the police cruiser.
“Come on,” he said, beckoning.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m taking you home,” he said.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, he pulled carefully into my driveway. The house was dark. Surrounding us again were the sounds of nighttime, things that chirped and twittered, singing into the black, a song that would go on until dawn.
He circled the front of the truck, opened the door, extended a hand toward me. I swatted it away and hopped out unassisted.
“You think you’re such a fireball,” he said. His voice was husky. I laid my head against his chest, inhaling his scent as it mingled with the night air. Deodorant, soap, cigarette smoke, the light smell of his sweat—all rising from his skin and fusing with the heavy, rich scent of soil, the moist dew. The ethereal, muted tones of wild roses in the back garden. The sharp, sweet smell of alcohol.
And then I tilted my face toward his while his arms came up around me.
CHAPTER
4
J
ames nodded at me through the grit-covered screen door, standing awkwardly on the front porch of the house, hands buried deep in his pockets. We had once spent an afternoon like this, on either side of the door, experimenting with the barrier it created.
“If I got sent to prison and you visited me, this is what it would be like,” James had said. We were pressing our hands together on either side of the screen, the pads on our fingertips straining through the tiny holes.
“I don’t think they have screens in prison,” I replied.
“You know what I mean,” he said, lunging forward with mouth open, moaning melodramatically. His lips pressed fleshily against the mesh.
“Now,
that’s
disgusting,” I said. “Do you know how long it’s been since that thing was washed?”
“C’mon, baby,” he said, his face straining, the tip of his nose mashed against the side of his face. He moaned and grunted, the screen turning his tongue gray, painting dirty grid marks on his forehead, while I’d dissolved in laughter. “C’mon, let’s make contact! I’m in for life, dammit, this is all I’ll ever know of looooove!”
Now, as James stood uncomfortably on the porch, it seemed impossible that we’d ever been so unguarded.
I opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind me.
“Hey,” James said.
“Hey,” I said, eyeing him.
He tried to meet my eyes and failed, looking instead at a spot of peeling paint, exposed wood, to the right of his foot. He looked like hell. His shaggy hair, always uncontrollable and mussed and flyaway, was matted in clumps. The skin on his face was gray and slack, sagging under his eyes and against his cheekbones, sinking into the pitted hollows above his jaw. His bloodshot eyes darted between my face and his own feet.
“I look like shit, right?” he said, smiling wanly.
I bit down against love, fought against moving toward him or touching him or asking if he was all right. I thought to myself,
I don’t care, don’t care, don’t care
, until the thought had taken on a life of its own and beat with dull pulses against the inside of my skull. I didn’t care. I would not care, refused to care.
His smile faded. “Okay, so let’s talk.”
“Let’s go out back,” I said. “Where it’s more private.”
James nodded. We walked, a foot of self-conscious space in between us, across the sunny lawn to the place where it suddenly dipped and gave way to a steep, rough incline studded with trees. At the bottom, only a couple feet deep and making inconspicuous babbling sounds, was a small creek. This was where we had always sat together, in lazy conversation, in the permanent shade of one enormous maple tree whose gnarled roots had pushed their way through the lawn in reaching, fingerlike knobs.
I settled against the tree. James paced nearby for a moment, then dropped to the ground in front of me. He picked at the dirt, collecting tiny stones and flinging them halfheartedly into the creek, while I waited.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said finally.
“How about, ‘I’m sorry,’” I replied flatly.
“I—” he said. His voice cracked. “Of course I’m sorry. The last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt you.”
I glared at him, willing myself to be hard-hearted. Tough. Unflinching in the face of contrition.
“That’s funny. Because fucking and then dumping someone in the same fifteen-second period? I’d call that hurting.”
He flinched at the word
fuck
.
“Please don’t do that,” he said.
“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” I snapped.
“It wasn’t like that!” he cried.
“Then tell me what it was like, James. Tell me what happened. Tell me what
you
think happened in your truck last night. Because to me, it was pretty goddamn clear.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I wasn’t thinking.”
“So what, it was instinctive?” My voice rose. “Is that what you’re saying? To get in my pants and get inside me and then just ditch me like some
thing
? Like a piece of trash?”
“No,” he said, and stopped. He only managed to get out two more words—“I just—”—when his voice broke.
The sight of his wide-open face made my stomach clench.
James was crying, something I’d never seen him do. He had been close, once, the one and only time I had asked him about the day his mother died, when his voice had cracked and I had immediately regretted ever asking, had fallen down apologizing and begging him to pretend it had never happened. Now he was looking at me, finally, eyelids swollen with tears, red and wet and with only dark, oily slits where his iris showed between.
He swiped at his eyes, coughing, and then cleared his throat.
He said, “I was thinking, all right. I was thinking about everything.”
I watched him regain control of himself, willing myself to stay silent.
“Everything,” he said again. He gazed into the distance and kept talking.“I always knew you would leave, you know, at the end of the summer. I knew that you’d leave, and I’d still be here, and that’d be it.”
“We never talked about that,” I started, but he waved a hand to shut me up.
“Come on, Rebecca,” he said. “You’re dying to get out of here, you’ve said it a million times. I get that, you don’t really fit in, or whatever it is. I thought you could’ve tried harder. But I just kept thinking about that, the whole time that you were on the stage, how everybody up there was moving on. Except for me. Tons of those kids are leaving town, but not me. I have to stay here.”
“That’s bullshit. You could have had your diploma this year. Hell, you could go back in the fall and be done in a semester,” I said.
“But for what?” said James. “Where would I go? My dad can’t send me anywhere. And I couldn’t leave him alone.”
I sighed. “He would understand.”
“It wouldn’t be right.”
“No, it just wouldn’t be easy.”
He looked at me again. “Maybe. But . . . I was so pissed off, so angry. I didn’t want that, to be here forever. Watching you up there, it made me feel like I’ve got no choice, and it made me so goddamn angry, and then you said that thing about being salutatorian and it was like a fucking slap in the face. Like you’d already moved on and left town, like I wasn’t good enough for you anymore.”
“Christ, James,” I said, “it was a fucking joke.”
“I know,” he said.
“So, what, that’s it? You just got pissed, and you decided to hurt me before I could hurt you?”
“I never wanted to hurt you.”
“Well, you did.”
We sat together, the rushing breeze making rustling sounds in the trees, the branches above our heads creaking, groaning, moving in time with the wind. The air was thick with the scent of wild roses.
So thick, that smell. It stifled, pressed back against the golden thrust of the sun. The wild rose wants to be remembered, wants to color the afternoon with its heady essence, so that every summer recollection is tinted with its sweet, soft-petaled scent. It was a blanket that covered everything, crept into my nose and flooded my eyes with perfume that couldn’t be blinked away.
The heat, the same heat that had tormented the police that morning as it stripped down the dead girl and urged her stiff, dry flesh into baking decay, was beating against my skin. It was crushing. I wanted to succumb, let it force me prostrate against the ground. It wrapped wetly around my sweating thighs and blew against the beads that trickled down my forehead. It soaked James’s shirt with perspiration, sticking it against his ribs and under his arms.
Sitting there, making heavy indentations in the thirsty grass, we looked at each other and wondered who would collapse first.
“Listen,” he said. I kept my eyes on him.
“We can wait it out,” he said. “No pressure, no expectations. Whatever you want, whatever feels right to you, that’s what we’ll do. But . . . but I was wrong. I don’t want this to end.”
“I’ll be gone,” I said. “I’m going.”
The words felt hollow. The thick and faraway voice didn’t sound like mine.
“That’s what you should do,” James said, so forcefully that it startled me. “But we can still have this summer, can’t we? I want to make this up to you.”
I shook my head. “I don’t—”
“Becca, at least let me try. Wouldn’t you rather have it that way? You leaving, and thinking that last night was really who I am, that’s what I can’t stand.”
Looking at him, my stomach churned. He had hurt me, pulled the rug from under me, knocked my breath away so swiftly and abruptly that I thought I might never get it back. I tried to focus. To care only for myself, to think about last night. Its reality, its physicality.
The smell of the grass.
The sound of his breathing.
His voice, floating down from the ambiguous dark overhead, saying, “This is done.”
Instead, as he looked at me, waiting, I felt my conviction falter.
What happened had been shocking. It had hurt. But it wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
I wasn’t ready to let go.
James moved toward me, the grass sighing and springing back with relief from his weight, and cupped my face with one of his hands.
“I love you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I love you.”
Nothing moved.
I held my breath.
James held my hand and looked past me, his eyes unfocused and far away.
He said, “It’s going to be okay.”
* * *
I awoke an hour later with my head resting heavily on his chest. In the moments that followed our conversation, I was suddenly, crushingly exhausted. I had fallen asleep almost instantly, cushioned by the soft grass at the base of the maple tree, to the feeling of his fingers in my hair.
I sat up, hot and disoriented in the muted pink light. Behind me, the sun was creeping toward the horizon.
“How long was I out?”
James looked down at his chest and said, “Long enough to drool. A lot.”
“Oh,” I said. I felt awkward and unsure of myself. “Sorry.” He smiled and shrugged, moving stiffly to his feet. A lightning bug flashed over his shoulder.
“Do you want to get dinner or something?” he asked. He shifted from one foot to the other, as though uncertain, in the wake of our last words, whether the relationship had changed completely. Where did we go from here? Forward? Backward?
“Not tonight.”
He sighed. “Okay.”
“This is . . . a lot.”
“I understand.”
He squatted down beside me, traced a finger along my temple. Gooseflesh broke out on my arms and legs at his touch.
“There’s something I want to know,” he said.
“What?”
“I understand that last night, what happened . . . well, that it was wrong. I understand why you feel the way you do. But after today, after what I told you, does it make any sense at all?”
His voice was pleading. I thought about James, his insecurity and his fear of being left alone, and about the night before—not how it ended, but how it began. I remembered the swish of polyester as each kid tripped awkwardly across the stage to shake the principal’s hand, the sweaty grip, the diploma handoff. I remembered looking out, over the sea of audience members with upturned faces, perched on groaning folding chairs. I remembered seeing James, standing just behind the back row, with his hands deep in his pockets and his eyes fixed, unblinking, on each of his friends as they closed the high school chapter of their lives and shuffled back to their seats. He had felt the weight of stagnation, seen nothing ahead but a lifetime of desertion, friends who never came back, and day after day of unbearable small-town shit.
“Becca?”
“Yes,” I said.
I understood.