Bright Before Us (11 page)

Bless you,
I said. And then we drove to Taco Bell in my screeching truck, to eat bean and cheese burritos and begin the short trek back to friendship. For seven months, that was all it would have taken: a lost necklace, a sealed invitation—you sneezed, God bless you, and I knew you again.

You decided you were going to keep the house. After I dropped you off, I found a message on the machine: you needed help moving in, quick, before you changed your mind—
Meet me at my place at 10:00 AM sharp
, you said. You had already phoned the lawyer, though it was nearly midnight. The decision didn't surprise me; it would let you avoid a lot of cumbersome paperwork. Most choices you made right after the accident had one criterion: you chose whichever option required no further choices.

The next morning, the streetlights shone in protest of the persistent fog. The rain had washed the city clean. You had said ten, but I was in my car, ready for the fifteenminute drive, by nine, having waited as long as I could—that is, were I to say that
I couldn't wait to see you
, it would be painfully literal. I came to a four-way stop a few blocks from your apartment, waited my turn and pushed forward. A kid in a rust-marred Honda rolled through the stop sign, and the thought came as clearly as if someone had spoken it: he's going to hit me. He did. The small impact pushed my car sideways, and I felt the skidding
vibration of tire treads scraping asphalt. The door on my side crumpled, one side of my elbow hitting the armrest, the other bruising my ribs. I tried to get out to look as the kid rubbed a hand through his white-blond hair—so light his eyebrows were nearly invisible against his cherry skin. I pushed the driver-side door a few times, gave up when it wouldn't open, and exited from the passenger side.
Fuck,
the kid said, his voice thick with mucus. He sniffed some of it back, approaching me. I felt a twinge of pain progress the length of my neck. He didn't have insurance, he said, already had a point on his record, was on probation besides.
Don't do this, man,
he said.

Do what?
I said, sneering.
Fucking idiot. Do what?

Don't, man—I can make it up to you.
He held out his hand as though I might shake it and then we could be friends. I stared at his palm.
My name's William,
he said, fishing in his jacket pockets.
It's all good.
He pulled out a foggy plastic bag of weed. I collected myself as he twitched with worry, standing there like a stupid animal, mouth half-open. A double helix of repulsion and mercy wound around me—I could have hugged him, I could have killed him. I said,
Watch where the fuck you're going.
There was nothing more to say. I got back in through the passenger side, and the adrenaline flood subsided, giving way to tremors in my hands. When I got to your street I just sat there. The previous twelve hours' irrepressible excitement, reborn every time I remembered our clasped hands, was flaking off, scraped raw by my jangled nerves and sore body. I got out and didn't bother to lock the car. My neck felt as though something inside had ripped. I knocked, but you didn't answer. Your car was there. I tried the door and found it open.

I yelled a hello toward your bedroom at the end of the narrow hallway.
You want me to start loading the car?
In the living room were three measly boxes piled in front of the built-ins. All you had was a small collection of movies you never watched, thrift-store clothes, a half-dozen used textbooks never traded in after college.
This should be easy,
I called.

You didn't answer.

I walked down the hall and knocked on your bedroom door, the ache in my neck sending shocks down my arm.
Nora,
I said. A few seconds passed. I rapped on the door with the fleshy side of my fist, hard enough to rattle it.
Nora, open the door.
I went short of breath, air clotting in my lungs. The intuition gripped me, hard: I didn't know what you were capable of. I pushed the door open, and after a searing moment my eyes adjusted to the glare of your desk lamp.

You were naked except for yellow cotton panties and a pair of headphones, which were screaming as you stepped into faded jeans. Where you bent, ripples formed in your skin. Your vertebrae were knobbed punctuations along your freckled back, your wet hair a red curtain against your pale arm. That was all I saw in the half instant before I moved back, taking the door with me. I listened in the hallway to the faint, bleating echo of your private music, barely audible through the lit crack at my feet. An involuntary smile came to my face—a pleasant ache stabbed me somewhere deep, followed by an aftershock of guilt.

You came out, clothes askew, startling at the sight of me in the hall.
You keep sneaking up on me,
you said.
Why are you rubbing your neck like that?

I tried to think.
I just got here.

You were jumpy. You smelled like a shower. In the kitchen you held up two beers.
It's nine forty-five in the morning,
I said. But we each emptied a bottle and you finally said what I knew you were going to say:
I don't really feel like moving today.

I rolled my neck and felt tendons grating, a distinct pop as something already tender slipped farther out of place.
What then?

Let's get out of the city,
you said.
Let's get out of the state! You have to be anywhere today?

I hesitated.
No.

Outside, you went toward my car, but I scrambled to dissuade you.
I'm almost out of gas,
I lied.

I drank a beer,
you said.
Can you drive my car?

I nodded, and you tossed me your keys.

 

We skirted the north-facing lip of the city toward the Bay Bridge, looking for something new in places we had been a thousand times. We played songs over and over, muttersinging the lyrics. You asked me some Who Would You Rather Do's: Bob Barker or Pat Sajak, Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee. As I hunted the Alameda streets for a good burrito, you slept. Waking up, you asked if we were still in California.
It's been an hour,
I said. On Buena Vista Avenue you saw a heap of junk with a sign saying FREE and wanted to investigate. In the pile was a citronella candle with four wicks, cylindrical and flesh-colored, the size of a small keg. I held it at crotch level until you swatted at me, laughing. A woman walked by.
That lady saw you,
you said, like we were in trouble.

Watching you right then, I fostered a self-satisfied burst of foolishness. I looked at your smile, coming easier than
it had in days, and imagined that I knew what you were thinking, what you needed. But I didn't know shit. My parents, after all, were alive—divorced, watering cacti on their patios, arguing over who got to ignore my little sister on Thanksgiving. I didn't have the first idea what you felt.

 

In a Berkeley shop that sold animal bones you lifted a fossilized fish, wiggling it like it was swimming. I ran my finger over the rigid, pearled surface of a severed chicken foot. Tremendous antlers sat in vases like branches. In the corner a little boy was wailing, terrified, his mom laughing nervously. You leaned toward something but abruptly stood up and cursed. I looked over your shoulder at the hollow blue eggshell in your hand and the hole you had crunched through the top of it. We set down the pieces and walked briskly outside, something pulling at the edge of your mood. I knew what you were thinking—that you were always so goddamn clumsy—because I had heard you complain about it a hundred times.

 

We ate lunch at a place in Oakland that had peanut butter and jelly pizza on the menu, but even though you dared me I was too strapped to throw money away on chances.

Where now?
you asked.

Vegas!
you said.

You spoke with a mouth full of bread.
Tahoe! Reno!

New York City,
you said.

I stole one of your bread sticks.
You're not very good with numbers.

I've always wanted to live there,
you said.
Like every Bay Area kid.

It was true. We all fought the suspicion that San Francisco was a sort of training-wheels city. Life in northern California was embarrassingly easy—yes, the rents necessitated lifelong roommates, but there were also working wages and reasonable parking, Mediterranean weather, proximity to an array of natural wonders, access to exceptional weed. The prevailing wisdom held that the breakneck glory of that fabled East Coast city was one of the few draws worthy of giving all this up.

In the end we landed about twenty miles away, at your alma mater, a wooded, bright campus beneath a drooping halo of eucalyptus, their little pods plinking around us like dangerous brown hail. We parked at the bottom of a steep hill, a thin walkway worming up the incline to a cluster of dorms. It was a pretty, improbable place, located just off the rank, decrepit avenue that plowed through east Oakland's cement ruins. I had visited your dorm, but only rarely and usually after dark, summoned to comfort you when some guy did what all guys do. I remember us eating a lot of packaged cookies in there. A creek ran through campus and now we walked over the footbridges that strapped chunks of earth together, relaxed in the shade of all those trees.

I want to show you something,
you said, taking me on a short hike rife with poison oak. We stepped carefully, our canvas shoes growing damp. You put your hand through the triangle of my elbow and I hardened my bicep: the only thing to do when a girl touches your arm.

I'm allergic to poison oak,
I said.

You pulled your gloves off and gave them to me—pink with a velvet ribbon around the cuff, about two-thirds the necessary size. And then we reached a concrete drainage pipe, roughly eight feet in diameter, emptying into the creek. Beside it was a large flat rock.
See, just down that little slope,
you said.
I used to come here to read.

The slope was more like a three-foot cliff.
How do you get down there?

I didn't think, just moved, covering the distance with more grace than I had hoped. I took a breath and turned.
I've got you,
I said, holding out my hand. You took it.

 

From that planar rock we watched the afternoon die, the orange light shifting to gray. I asked you an idle question, forgetting myself.

Do you still believe in ghosts?
I said—cursing silently as soon as the words left my mouth.

You retied a shoelace.
Yes,
you said.

I want to say it now, because I was too afraid to say it then:
I'm sorry I asked you that.

I drove us through the quiet residential streets. We were holding hands again, and we were happy. Do you remember how that felt? It fed itself, existing not because everything in our lives was perfect, but because nothing was and we were
still
, in that moment, content. Right then, we could both say something monumental: we didn't want to be anywhere else.

I never told you how I felt in high school—not because of Greta, but because I was a coward. If you knew, you never said. And then we went to college in towns separated by an hour's drive, and things changed. Though we spoke less and less, the conversations morphed, intensified: now, the quotidian minutiae fell away, and we talked only of tremendous things—careers and death and Achieving our Visions. I didn't know what classes you took or who your friends were. I didn't know what you did for fun or what music you liked. It didn't matter. We were vaults for one another. I heard from you every five months or so—I don't think I could have withstood more frequent interaction. Every time we spoke I felt like I had been laid bare, fully seen.