Say What You Will (22 page)

F
OR ALMOST TWO MONTHS,
Amy spent most of her days sleeping in her room. When her mother finally came in, sat down on her bed and said, “We’re taking you to a doctor to treat this depression,” Amy didn’t protest.

At the doctor’s office she didn’t say much. Talking required energy, and she didn’t have much. When he asked how often she thought about her baby, she managed to type, “ALL THE TIME,” which was true. At least she dreamed about her all the time, and since she slept so much it seemed like the same thing. Every night she imagined nursing Taylor; every morning she woke up, her breasts soft and empty and aching.

She’d never felt so unmoored by anything in her life.

Finally Amy told the doctor the truth: “I WISH I’D KEPT MY BABY. I KNOW IT’S TOO LATE NOW, BUT I STILL WISH I’D DONE IT.”

In the end, the doctor wrote her a prescription that didn’t do much except help her sleep without dreams haunted by babies. She couldn’t bear to think about Matthew, because she vaguely understood that she’d done something terrible to him. She’d talked about moving on, and starting school again as if everything they’d gone through together—having this baby, giving her up—would be nothing to recover from. She’d been wrong about that. She’d also been wrong to diminish everything he’d done on her behalf—coming to the hospital, sitting at her bedside.

Christmas came and went. Her grandmother visited, and her aunt from Boise, Idaho. Someone cooked a duck. Other people made bread pudding that Amy tried to eat but couldn’t.

In the first week of January, a package arrived from UC Berkeley, welcoming Amy as a transfer student. The semester started at the end of January, meaning Amy had been home for almost two months and on medication for one. She didn’t know if she could survive starting a new school, but she was fairly sure she wouldn’t survive her only other option: staying home all semester.

None of it was easy. Packing up and driving six hours north. Registering for classes at a huge university. Navigating a campus that was five times the size of Stanford. It helped that this time she was in a real dorm, the handicapped-accessible one with two wheelchair users on her floor. Compared to them, her motorized scooter maneuvered like a dream and went twice as fast. She felt like a show-off every time she passed one of them coming or going to class, but they didn’t seem to mind. They always waved, and she beeped her horn to say hi.

She was surprised to discover that her favorite class by far was playwriting, which met once a week for three hours. There were fifteen students enrolled and an ensemble of student actors there to perform the scenes the writers brought in. From the very first class, Amy couldn’t get over the miracle of hearing her words read aloud by real people. The wonder of inflection! Of a real person delivering one of her jokes with comic timing!

She loved watching actors play with her lines—deliver them one way, then change their minds, and try another. It was almost like the thrill she felt in fourth grade when she got a DynaVox, her first talking computer, and then again with the Pathway, her first computer that sounded (more or less) human. But this was even better—her words being spoken by real people.

Unfortunately none of her early playwriting efforts were very successful. Her comic monologue had some good lines, but overall fell flat; her two-character confrontation—old people fighting over a bench—was overwritten and screechy. The teacher didn’t soft-pedal his critiques for Amy. (“A comedy should never look like it’s trying too hard. . . . The conflict was compelling but I’m not sure these
characters
were. . . .”) Amy hated that she wasn’t good at this right away. With every failure she flew back to her room and started a new play.

By March, she was writing all the time, at the expense of all her other classes. Some nights, she stayed up until one or two o’clock in the morning writing. She could say this much: for the first time since she’d had her, Amy went a whole night, and then two, without dreaming of Taylor. Instead she dreamed about writing bad plays that everyone she’d ever known showed up to watch. She also dreamed about failing every other class she was taking.

That dream almost became a reality as she got more obsessed with her theater class. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t get over the fascination and frustration of writing scenes that were almost good, but not quite. She spent one weekend reading the entire textbook (
Scenes for Student Playwrights
) and another weekend buying and reading more plays online. She’d never heard of Mamet until she fell in love with him over the course of a long Sunday spent happily holed up in her dorm room.

By the following week, she’d produced her own Mamet homage, abounding with expletives and unfinished sentences. “THE SWEARING IS ESSENTIAL,” she told her classmates the next week because she felt that it was.

“Amy’s finding her own voice,” the teacher said afterward. “This is part of that process.”

Amy interpreted his remarks to mean,
another failure but closer.
Then he added this: “I’d be curious what would happen if Amy wrote her final one-act on a subject closer to home. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be true, just something inspired by her own experience. For some people that produces weaker, self-conscious writing. For others, it produces by far their best. Everyone should try it at least once and see.”

A boy in the back who wrote exclusively science-fiction vignettes that read like video games without special effects groaned in protest, but Amy went home that night and started something new.

She wrote a ten-minute play about an agoraphobic boy who hadn’t left his house in over six months, and his old friend, a girl, who tries to talk him into going out to dinner with her. When she read it over the next morning, something happened that she never expected. She found herself crying.

A week later, hearing it read aloud in class, she almost cried again. After the scene ended, no one spoke for a few minutes.

Finally the teacher said, “Lovely work, Amy. Just lovely.”

The short-play festival it was selected for was meant to showcase the work of theater majors, which Amy wasn’t yet. “I’LL DECLARE TODAY,” she said to the teacher when he told her she’d been selected.

“Only if you’re sure this is what you want to do.”

“YES,” she typed quickly. “I’M SURE.”

She didn’t know many drama majors, but she liked the ones she’d met. They filled a room in ways that took her out of her own head. Around them, with all their many eccentricities, she didn’t feel disabled so much as eccentric in a different way.
You talk with your hands flying around your body and I talk with this computer.

The three weeks of rehearsal were intense and overwhelming and some nights she hardly slept at all. Working so intensely with such a small group of people made her think of Matthew and the group he found working at the movie theater. A week before opening, she wrote him a note:

She sent it before she could think about it too much. Who could be sure if he’d even open it and read it? She’d sent him messages before and hadn’t heard back.

Probably he wouldn’t.

Which was fine, she told herself. Even if it wasn’t fine. Even if none of it would seem real unless he came and saw it. Because she’d written it for him. To say what she’d been trying to tell him all along.

I
T WASN’T REALLY AN
invitation, Matthew thought. It didn’t include dates or times or anything like that. It was typical Amy—full of feeling without too much in the way of practical logistics. Still, he was curious. He looked up UC Berkeley Shorts Festival online and discovered it was running the same weekend that Hannah would be away at her cousin’s wedding. “They said I could bring you,” she’d told him. “But I’m not sure I should. Considering everything. Then years from now people in my family will keep asking me about you. I’m just not sure that’s a good idea.”

Matthew wasn’t sure what Hannah meant by this; he only knew that in the few months they’d been semidating, he’d mostly been a disappointment to her. He didn’t call when she expected him to; he bowed out of most of the group activities. The one time he went with everyone to see one of Carlton’s shows, he had a mini panic attack on the mosh-pit dance floor. She found him outside, sitting on a curb still trying to calm down.

He took it as a sign that Amy’s play was running the same weekend Hannah wasn’t taking him to a wedding.
Maybe you’re meant to go,
his old voice told him. These days it was interesting: sometimes his voice told him to do things he wanted to do.
You probably owe her at least that much.

His first surprise: Nicole offered him a ride when he called them to find out the times of the play. He’d been researching buses, which took between eight and twelve hours depending on which schedule you looked at. Then there was the matter of navigating a strange city once he got off the bus. It was all a little harrowing, like the old challenges Amy gave him last year. This felt like one of those, only Amy didn’t even realize she’d given him a challenge.

“We’d be happy to have you ride with us,” Nicole said. “We could even keep it a secret and surprise Amy when we get there.”

Is she serious?
his voice asked, and then it answered itself:
Yes, she might not like you that much but she appreciates everything you did last winter. You shouldn’t say no just because it sounds awkward to sit in a car with her.

“Thank you so much,” he heard himself say. “That would be great.”

As it turned out, the car ride was pretty awkward. They were classical music fans, which he thought meant it was okay to talk as they listened to music, but apparently not. Finally Nicole said, “We’ve been looking forward to listening to this sonata, Matthew, if you don’t mind.”

As they got closer (and the music ended) they talked a little more. Nicole told him that Amy had really thrown herself into the drama program at Berkeley. “She’s already saying this is what she wants to major in. . . .”

Matthew couldn’t tell how Nicole felt about this. Probably not all that happy.

“We worry of course about whether she’ll ever find a career in this. Or even get paid.” She was trying to smile, he could see.

“I think she could,” Matthew said. “People are fascinated by Amy. Look at all the newspapers and TV stations that did a story on her getting into college. I bet the same thing will happen when she writes a play. People want to know what she thinks.”

He was surprised at how certain he sounded.

Nicole smiled from the front seat. “I hope you’re right, Matthew.”

The theater lobby was crowded but it wasn’t hard to find Amy, sitting in a scooter with a small basket on the front that already had a bouquet of roses in it. Matthew felt nervous and a little stupid. He hadn’t even thought about bringing flowers.

Amy looked beautiful. Older, and draped in a theatrical, fringed scarf that looked great on her. They’d gotten there a little late, though. The show was starting so quickly, Amy could only wave in surprise before they went in to get their seats.

They were in the fifth row, across the aisle and behind the cutout space where Amy parked her scooter. Before her play started, he spent almost as much time watching her face as he did watching the actors. He had no idea what she was thinking or if she was happy that he came.

Amy’s play was the second to last one. It was called
Alone Together
and was about a boy with agoraphobia, and his friend—a wildly dressed, bubbly, sort of hyperactive girl—trying to convince him to go out to dinner with her. For a while, it’s funny. He keeps saying, “No, thank you, I’d prefer not to,” and she keeps calling him Bartleby the Scrivener, a story he read over the summer at Amy’s recommendation. Apparently the whole audience had read it as well, because everyone around him laughed at the joke.

Matthew felt self-conscious sitting there next to Nicole. He dreaded where the scene was headed—the boy hasn’t walked outside in six months; the girl keeps trying to talk him into doing it. There is even a doorway built into the set that the girl keeps pointing to. “Let’s just try it,” she says. “Let’s walk into the hallway.”

Of course it made Matthew nervous. Everyone watching a jokey version of his own terrible struggles a year ago. That panic attack in yearbook. And later at prom. Then it was interesting—the actor didn’t play the panicky part. He didn’t sweat or shake. He simply sat on the sofa and refused to move. “I’m not ready,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I am.”

The more the girl pleaded, the more she seemed like the crazy one.

“This is my life, not yours,” he said. “I’m allowed to make the choices I want to make.”

She stood in the hallway and pleaded. She dangled money and food. She promised him all sorts of favors and rewards if he’d walk outside with her and eat dinner in a restaurant.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I’d prefer to stay here.”

Finally she got mad and stormed out. She cried in the hallway and screamed at him for almost four solid minutes. By that point, Matthew had to admit it was an effective piece of theater: watching the actor register the drama taking place offstage. A slow smile spread over his face, as if he knew what was coming: finally the screaming stopped and the girl came back in, carrying a bag of food. “Move over,” she said, sitting down on the sofa beside him. Then—this was the part he liked best—they moved on to other topics. She had a story to tell him; he had one to tell her.

It was about acceptance, he thought. About realizing no one is perfect and no one can expect to change someone else. Which was a nice message, but also—he had to admit—sort of a confusing one. Did she really think he hadn’t changed at all? What about everything that happened in the hospital? This was a play about friends, and hadn’t they been more than that?

After it was over, Matthew waited in a small line in front of Amy’s scooter. “It was a great play, Aim,” he said when it was finally his turn to talk to her. He hugged her, though it meant bending over, which was awkward.

“NOT REALLY.”

“It
was
. It reminded me a little bit of that book I read you.”

“JUNIE MOON? REALLY?”

“You know. Oddballs finding each other.”

“IT’S A THEME I ENJOY.”

“You do it well.” He smiled and then looked away. There was more to say, but he didn’t want to do it here. Other people were lining up behind him. “I can’t believe you wrote this thing and took three classes. How did you sleep?”

She made a funny gesture with her hand, something he’d never seen before. He realized she was telling him to lean closer so she could say something softly. “I GOT TERRIBLE GRADES THIS TERM. DON’T TELL MY PARENTS.”

He laughed because he knew: terrible for her probably meant Bs.

“MOSTLY I JUST WROTE THIS THING. THAT’S ALL I’VE DONE THIS YEAR.”

He looked at her. “Not
all.
” He wanted to ask if she kept Taylor’s picture next to her bed the way he did. The latest one had a big, toothless smile. She looked so happy it was hard not to smile when he saw it.

“NO. YOU’RE RIGHT. NOT ALL.”

He couldn’t say Taylor’s name here. It might make one or both of them cry, and he didn’t want that. “Are you thinking about coming home this summer?” He tried to make it sound like a casual question, even if it wasn’t. “You know, just for a visit.”

“YES. I’LL BE HOME FOR THE WHOLE SUMMER. I HAVE ANOTHER PLAY I WANT TO WORK ON.”

“That’s great, Aim.” He was happy to hear this, but he was also aware of the line forming behind him. “I should probably go. I’ll talk to you maybe, when you get home.” He held up a hand in one of his horribly awkward windshield-wiper waves. He felt like a cartoon character miming,
See ya!

Then she did something else he’d never seen before: her bad hand shot out and caught his shirt. “WAIT,” she typed. She kept holding his shirt. “JUST WAIT.”

She couldn’t let him just leave. Not after four months of waiting.

She nodded to the people standing around him. With one hand still clinging to his shirt, she typed, “WILL YOU EXCUSE ME? I NEED TO TALK TO MY FRIEND.”

He blushed, but it worked. The other people walked away.

She steered her scooter over to a corner of the greenroom with an empty chair that Matthew could sit in. “I DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE COMING. I HAVE THINGS I WANT TO SAY BUT THEY’RE NOT TYPED IN—”

“I know. I’m sorry. Your mom wanted to make it a surprise. Which sort of surprised me, obviously.” While she typed, he kept talking. “We drove up together and I have to say, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Only about a six on a scale of ten for uncomfortable. Maybe a seven in the middle there . . .”

Amy stopped typing for a moment and pressed Play. “BEFORE I LEFT THE HOSPITAL, YOU WERE RIGHT WHEN YOU SAID I HAD TAYLOR AS A WAY TO PROVE SOMETHING TO MY MOM. BUT I ALSO WANTED TO TELL YOU SOMETHING. I WAS TRYING TO SAY IT ALL YEAR.”

“What?”

“THAT I LOVE YOU.”

He smiled. And then he looked away and laughed. “You got pregnant with someone else’s child as a way to tell me you loved me?”

“IT WAS BYZANTINE, I’LL ADMIT. NOT THE CLEAREST WAY TO DELIVER MY MESSAGE.”

“Maybe not.”

“BEING FRIENDS WITH YOU MADE ME FEEL LIKE I COULD DO MORE THAN I EVER REALIZED.” Did he understand what she was saying? She was typing as fast as possible, but the room was crowded and this was hard. “I NEED TO BE HERE FOR SCHOOL, BUT I KNOW I’LL NEVER LOVE ANYONE ELSE THE WAY I LOVE YOU.”

For a long time he didn’t say anything. He still smiled a little, like he didn’t mind hearing this, so she kept going:

“I DON’T THINK I’LL EVER TRY TO DATE. I DON’T SEE THE POINT.”

“Well, I’m trying it,” he said, and then laughed a little. But this obviously wasn’t funny.

She hadn’t expected this. “YOU’RE DATING SOMEONE?”

“A little,” he said, and drew a deep breath. “And there isn’t really much of a point. What I’ve learned is that I have certain qualities that are annoying to other people.”

She typed without looking away from him. “SO DO I.”

“Like, really annoying. I had a soda thrown at me.”

“OH, MATTHEW.”

“I know, right? One time she told me I wasn’t over you or something like that.”

“WHAT DO YOU THINK SHE MEANT BY THAT?”

“That I wasn’t over you, I guess. Or that maybe I loved you, I don’t know.”

He was really smiling now. They both looked away. It was too much to look at each other, with everything they were saying.

He took her good hand and squeezed it, then bent down so his mouth was close to her ear. “You’re going to be a great playwright someday,” he whispered. “You’re going to think of all the right things to say.” He had her hand so she couldn’t say anything back. She turned so her cheek touched his lips. They stayed like that. Him breathing next to her cheek, pressing his nose to her hair. She felt his touch all through her body.

“Let’s have a nice summer,” he whispered. “Let’s start with that.”