Losing It (20 page)

“Yeah, you're a swimmer, right?”

“Yeah, but I have— There's something I have to do.”

“I used to go there all the time in high school,” he said. “It's not far from here. Remember where Karen lived? There's this creepy old ice-cream shack. We'd swim out to the water filtration tower, or whatever it was, in the middle. We could race, me and you, to the tower.”

“I mean,” I said, “I will beat you.”

He smiled.

“No, it's just”—I wiped my palms on my dress—“I can't really. I have to do this thing. I promised my aunt. She has an art show, at the McCormick Center?”

“It's really secluded,” he said. “There's a little beach area. I haven't taken anyone there since high school.”

Under the table, he put his foot on top of mine.

We stared at each other.

My phone buzzed in my hand. Viv again.

“Who is it?” he said.

I looked down at it. Secluded lake area, I thought. I liked the weight of his foot on mine, and I wanted to keep feeling that weight and to never stop feeling it, and it seemed preposterous that I would be the one to cause it to do so.

“No one,” I said, and turned it off, and put it in my bag. “Is it close? The lake? Should we go?”

He leaned back and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Let me just get my stuff.”

Then we were walking through the hot parking lot toward his
car, a beat-up green sedan. Inside it smelled like weed, and there was trash on the floor. “Sorry,” he said, as I kicked away a balled-up paper bag. “It's fine,” I said, laughing. We pulled out and started driving on Route 29, out toward Cismont, and then took smaller, overgrown roads. The sun hadn't gone down yet, and the warm, dusky air seemed to shimmer with magic dust. The trees, the ivy crawling along the power lines, a faded and half-burnt billboard for an old zoo, the sound of the cicadas, it was all humming with possibility. His hand was on my leg, sitting there like a frog. I didn't want to move, didn't want it to hop off.

Viv's face swam through my mind, but I pushed it away. I would make it up to her. Maybe this guy, Pete Wexler, would still be here tomorrow. Of course he would. I would personally take the plates to him, wherever he was. It was all going to be fine. I pictured Viv in the center, looking around anxiously. Something tugged at me and I felt a little sick. But then I took that picture and put it in a box, and put that box in the back of my mind. The alcohol helped, it helped swirl it all away. For now I just had to rest my hand out the window while Jack's hand rested on my leg, and stare out at the orange sky, and keep shimmying myself into the opening the night was giving us.

We drove in a comfortable, anticipatory silence. It had been about twenty minutes when Jack said, “Uh-oh,” looking at his dashboard. “We are out of gas.” I hadn't seen anything in miles. “There's a place coming up,” he said.

After a minute we pulled into an old station with a busted sign and car parts strewn around the lot. In the shop there was someone
at the cash register, leaning back, his feet up on the counter. “You have to pay cash first,” said Jack. “I'll be right back.”

“Sure,” I said, and then watched him go up to the store, swing the door open. I looked to my other side. The trees across the street were filled with darkness. A streetlight flickered on. I watched a pickup truck pull up to the pump in front of us. A man without a shirt hopped out and walked into the store. A child with lank blond hair stared at me from the back window.

Jack was behind a rack of newspapers. Then he walked to the back where I couldn't see. I looked down and straightened my dress and stared at my nails. I put my hair up, then took it down. After a few minutes, the man without a shirt came out and shook some candy at the kid in his truck. The kid laughed and soon they were gone.

I shifted uncomfortably. It had been fifteen minutes. Without the wind coming through the windows the heat was close and stifling, and I felt beads of sweat forming at my hairline. I opened the door and stepped out of the car. I walked across the lot and went into the store: fluorescent-lit, sticky cold air-conditioning, a few bags of chips on the dingy ground, fallen from a rack. A teenager sat blankly at the cash register. I looked around and saw Jack next to the ice machine in the back. He was standing with someone taller and roughly his age.

“Oh, hey,” said Jack as I approached. “Sorry. This is Scott.”

Scott was tall and had small, dark eyes and looked at me dismissively before turning back to Jack.

“So then JJ is like, ‘Let's firebomb it,'” said Scott. “And he lights
a firecracker and drops it in. And all the fish are like—” Scott made convulsing motions as if he was being electrocuted.

“Oh, shit!” said Jack, covering his mouth, laughing.

“You should have been there.” Scott reached into a glass case and pulled out a hot-pink energy drink and twisted off the cap.

“Tzzzz tzzzz tzzzzzzz,” Jack said, shaking in the same way, imitating Scott's electrocution.

They both burst out laughing.

Jack's whole bearing was different. His hands were deep in his pockets and he was hunched over and there was a mean glint in his eyes.

Scott had turned away from me just enough to indicate I wasn't included. He took a swig from his drink.

“So you're gonna be there tonight, right?” he said.

Jack's eyes cut to me for an instant. “Yeah,” he said. “Definitely. Wouldn't miss it.”

“I don't know,” said Scott, putting his hands up, defensive. “Ever since you went off to that big fancy college . . .”

“I know, I know,” said Jack, affecting a deeper Southern accent. “All right,” he said quickly, starting to back away. “Munger Road, right?”

“Yup, yup,” said Scott, pointing to Jack as we walked away. “Munger Road.”

We went out of the store together, Jack now walking with a swagger he hadn't used before. I got into the passenger side and he pumped gas and got back in and started the car all without looking at me. He shifted gears and we peeled out of the lot, going back the way we had come.

“Wait—where are we going?” I said.

“Change of plan,” he said.

“What is it?”

“I haven't seen that guy in forever!” He slapped the steering wheel. He glanced over at me. “But, there's this party, and I kinda have to go.” He was walled up, far away.

“Really?” I said. “What about the lake?”

A ripple of discomfort went through him. “I have to go to this party,” he repeated. “I'd invite you but it's just a bunch of old friends.”

“So, we're just not going to go? To the lake?”

“It's not that great anyway,” he said.

Grand, majestic disappointment. An ocean liner sinking lusciously into the sea. I looked down at my lap. I felt scatterbrained and jittery. Jack sat forward, sat back. He turned on the radio, turned it up loud. He fished around behind him and withdrew a baseball cap and put it on. Readjusted it on his head.

“I . . .” I started.

“What?” he said, and then looked back at the road, ignoring me.

Back in the parking lot of the restaurant, I pointed to my car and he pulled up next to it. We sat there for a few moments. “Well,” I said.

“I just haven't seen those guys in a really long time,” he said, still gripping the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. He finally looked at me, and for a second it seemed like he was back to his normal self. But then his face clouded over. “Take care,” he said, and then took out his phone. I climbed out and had barely shut the door before he zoomed off.

In my car, outside the restaurant, I stared at the patchy grass on the concrete divider in front of me. It was dark now, and across the highway you could see a construction site, plastic sheeting billowing in the breeze. For the first time in my life I wished I had a cigarette, something to do with my hands. A jeep pulled up next to me, and three laughing women got out, all wearing heels. They stumbled toward the restaurant. I dug my fingernails into the worn padding on the steering wheel.

The night whittled down in my mind, and I had a moment of clarity—I was never going to see Jack again. He wasn't going to solve my problems, and I knew what I had to do. I fished my phone out of my bag and turned it back on. It vibrated with messages, but instead of checking them I brought up my e-mail. I typed the words that were streaming through my mind and pressed Send:

Dear Elliot,

Could we make an appointment for you to fuck my brains out?

Very best,

Julia

I turned on the ignition and started driving. The night swirled around in my head as I pulled onto the highway. I passed a megaplex movie theater, some car dealerships and empty parking lots. I felt like I was filled with a jumble of blocks and I didn't know how to get them to fit together. It was eight thirty. By the time I got to the McCormick Center it would be nine. That left half an hour
until the reception was supposed to be over. We wouldn't get to hang the plates, but at least Viv could show them to the guy from Southern Imports. I would make up an excuse, car trouble, something like that.

My eyes settled on a red sign in the distance with a kicking boot—the Boot Warehouse—and then a thought occurred to me that nearly stopped my heart.

I needed my phone.

It was in the backseat where I'd flung it after sending the e-mail. I twisted around to look but didn't see it. A few seconds later I wrenched around again and flung away a parka, and there it was, next to an empty water bottle. After reaching back a few more times, almost swerving into oncoming traffic, I was finally able to grab it. My hand shook as I brought up my e-mail, and a dizziness that was hot and cold at the same time came over me as it was confirmed: I'd sent the e-mail to the whole office.

I stared at it, my face burning.

And then it all happened so fast—the peal of a car horn, then another. I looked up to see white flashes, cracked light, the side of a turquoise van. There was a terrible jolt from behind, screeching brakes, and the sickening sound of breaking glass in the back.

For a moment, all was still. I was in the middle of an intersection, and the cars around me were positioned crookedly, as if everything had been shaken up and then settled in the wrong way. Slowly, it all started moving again, the cars straightened themselves out, someone honked at me; it blared and blared well after they'd passed. I continued through the intersection and pulled off to the shoulder. The plates, I kept thinking. The plates, the plates.

—

It must have been two or three minutes before someone knocked on my window. My hands were shaking as I rolled it down. I saw a gray woolen cardigan, the kind that cinches at the waist with a belt. A woman's small, pointy face lowered. She had short, spiky hair and was holding a phone.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said. I brushed some hair out of my face. “I think so.”

She looked quickly around the inside of my car, noticed the phone in my lap.

“You were texting.”

I didn't say anything. Her fingernails were painted purple.

She sighed, straightened up, cinched her cardigan. “Well, look, do you want me to call the police?”

I saw her car parked behind me, the hazard lights blinking.

“Are you okay?” I said.

She looked really angry now. “You realize you ran a red light? You could have killed someone? How old are you?”

“I'm—”

“Look, what do you want to do? My car is fine, a few scratches. Do you have insurance?”

I pawed at the glove compartment. Some candy wrappers and a mini-umbrella fell out. Lights kept tracing by, cars on the highway. When I looked back at the woman, she was texting, shaking her head in disbelief. She cinched her belt again and looked at me. “Well?”

Standing at the edge, the lake looked like a wide, raggedy black hole. Along the shore were swaying reeds, and the night roared with crickets and frogs. It was so loud when you really listened to it, I thought. Something plunked in the water. I was in a small beach area, just like Jack had said. I'd climbed over the chain-link fence he'd mentioned. And to my right, I could make out the outline of the dilapidated ice-cream shack. I looked around. A car drove by behind me, in the distance. The hair stood up on the back of my neck when I thought I heard the crunch of gravel, like it was coming my way. But I must have imagined it.

After exchanging information with the lady in the gray sweater, I'd gotten out of the car to look at the damage. There was a large dent on the right back door, and when I opened the trunk it revealed what I already knew would be there—because of the hasty way I'd packed the crates, because I hadn't taken the time to arrange things so they could lie flat, they'd tipped over. Most of the plates had fallen out and broken. I stared at the shattered pile. I picked up a shard and looked at the meticulous gold trim, now dusty with white powder.

I'd pulled back onto the road and kept driving. But instead of going back into town to the show, or heading back to Viv's, I turned around and went the way Jack and I had gone, toward Cismont, toward where Karen lived, toward where the lake was supposed to be. I passed the faded billboard for the zoo, and the gas station. Even though it was dark now, it wasn't hard to find the turnoff Jack had
mentioned. There was really only one small, scraggly road it could have been. I drove down this road, through low foliage, the path getting narrower, until I came to what looked like a parking area.

I stepped back from the waterline and pulled my dress over my head, and left it in a pile along with my shoes in the sand. I wondered how deep the lake got. Where it dropped away under you, and whether it was man-made, or what kind of creatures were breathing rapidly in the prehistoric depths at the very bottom.

The hotel room I stayed in after the trials in Tallahassee blinked into my mind, as it often did at the most random times. There were wet towels on the floor. The smell of coconut hand lotion came from the bathroom. My roommate, Cissy, was outside, on the balcony, her feet up on a plastic chair, telling her parents all about it on the phone. She'd made the team. I was sitting against two overstuffed pillows, my face chlorine-tight, not feeling. I was floating above it all—there was a show on the television, a stern-looking female lawyer said, “The winter palace is the only place”—and trying to determine where it had been, the silent hinge where I'd ceased being an Olympic-class swimmer.