Know Not Why: A Novel (35 page)

All in all, it helped talk me down a lot.

Plus, cookies.

I still feel weird stepping into the house,
though: this bizarre feeling like everything’s changed and I don’t
live here anymore. It’s completely quiet. I drop my coat a few
times while I’m trying to hang it up. If this is an indicator of
how I’m gonna function on a basic level from hereon out, well, damn
it.

I go into the living room to discover Dennis
asleep in the armchair and Emily on the couch, still awake and hard
at work. She’s got a bag of microwave popcorn on the coffeetable
and she’s diligently stringing it together. Some old black and
white movie’s on TV. The volume’s turned down and the closed
captioning is on. She’s absently mouthing along with the words.

Suddenly, I can’t help but feel like it must be
really, really freakin’ wonderful to be Emily.

She looks up at the sight of me.

“Oh,” she says. She’s so naturally soft-spoken
that she doesn’t really have to whisper. “Hello, Howie.”

“Hey.”

“I thought you might be your mother.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, I see. How was the concert?”

“They did a song called We Text U A Merry Xmas,”
I tell her, “and then I got trapped in an elevator, I made the
nicest girl in the world hate me by being a former sick sorry-ass
pervert, and I told Amber about me and Arthur.”

Her brow creases in lightest concern.

“You should sit down,” she decides. She moves
the popcorn garland out of the way, then daintily pats the couch
cushion next to her.

I don’t have the energy to pass up on the
invitation. I sink down on the couch next to her, letting out a
long and long-suffering sigh.

“What did Amber say?”

“I dunno. I kinda just bolted.”

“Oh.” She’s quiet long enough for it to be
awkward. Then she helpfully adds, “I’m sure she would have been
kind about it if you’d stayed.”

“Yeah,” I say, starting to feel that
oh-so-delightful sick numbness again. “I guess.”

“She seemed so enthusiastic about gay people,”
Emily continues thoughtfully. “I’m sure she’d like one of her
own.”

“Thanks, Em.”

“Of course.”

We sit in silence. She reaches for the popcorn –
to keep on designing our very special Victorian Christmas, I
figure. But then she tilts the bag toward me. I grab a handful.

She sets the bag down on the coffeetable and
gets back to work. I eat the pieces of popcorn one by one. Without
meaning to, I start reading the subtitles on the TV. Looks like
this chick and this dude have a pet leopard by accident. Now,
that’s zany hijinks at their finest.

“When I started to date Dennis,” Emily says
suddenly, surprising me, “I was very nervous about it. I’d never
had a boyfriend, like I said before. I’ve always felt like I know
love stories very well, because of all the books I read, but when
it’s there staring you in the face in real life, it seems terribly
different. I’d liked a couple of boys, but they didn’t show any
interest back, so I didn’t want to bother them by letting them
know. I thought it would make them uncomfortable. I tend to do that
to people sometimes. Dennis was dating my roommate first, you know.
She always took a very long time to get ready to go out, and I’m
usually at home. And we’d talk while he waited for her. He was so
genuine and interested. It was so different from talking to most
other people. I liked him very much right away, but I didn’t even
want to acknowledge it to myself, really. He was Rebecca’s
boyfriend. It seemed awfully tawdry of me.

“I’ve never been a very lonely person. I’m very
good at being on my own. But after I met him, I lost a bit of that.
It was like he helped me find some whole new section of my heart,
one I didn’t even know existed before. One for just him to fill.
And when he wasn’t there to do it, I felt his absence so keenly. I
suppose this sounds very cliché and silly,” she adds. She doesn’t
sound all that abashed about it.

“Sure,” I say, and don’t throw in the part where
I’m starting to get how that feeling works.

“It’s not that I didn’t want to fall in love
someday. I did. I’m quite romantic, although I don’t know if it
shows very much. But it seemed like such an abstract idea before.
And something of an impossible one. And then I met him, and he was
real, and it was all so unsettling and wonderful. But it’s still
very hard business to really
let
yourself fall, I think.
Especially when you’ve come to feel like it’s something you aren’t
cut out for.”

“Huh,” I offer, so noncommittal.

“It was so frightening when he began to like me
too.” She gives a little sigh. “Isn’t that funny? You wouldn’t
think so, but it was. I didn’t know what to do with it at all. It
would have been much easier to turn him down. Much less scary, I
mean.” I look over at her. She isn’t looking at me anymore; she’s
staring at the TV, looking and sounding a thousand miles away. From
the side, in the almost-dark, she’s kind of beautiful. She’s got
this dainty little nose that slopes perfectly upward; she reminds
me of Amber’s favorite necklace, one of those cameo ones. The light
from the TV reflects in her glasses, flashing a little. Even that
seems weirdly lovely. “But he was very patient with me, and I just
really, really did love him. Eventually it came to seem worth all
of the struggle.” She pauses, delicately impales one more piece of
popcorn. “You know, I don’t think it’s worth it to deny yourself
happiness just so you can stay faithful to the person you think
you’ve become.”

For a little while, I just let myself take that
in. It feels good to hear it. For all her assorted weirdnesses,
it’s starting to dawn on me that this girl is very wise.

She doesn’t look at me. If she wants to check
and see whether she drove the message home, well, her
self-restraint is mighty great. She keeps her eyes trained on the
television. After a little while, her lips start to move along with
the subtitles again.

“I do get that you’re being all relevant on
purpose,” I inform her, trying to sound jaunty and unmoved. “You
can’t sneak nothin’ past me.”

“Mmm,” she replies serenely.

We sit in silence some more.

“All done, I think,” she announces at last,
holding out the popcorn garland. “Would you like to help me hang
this?”

“Yeah,” I say, “sure.”

She hands one end of it to me, and we start over
toward the tree. The lights are strung up already, but that’s it.
Quite frankly, it’s looking pretty sad and sorry. It’s really
decent of Emily to bother with any of this. One might even say
exceptionally decent. It’s like, how many people are gonna come
into your home, be treated like some kind of psychopath by pretty
much everybody, and still decorate your damn Christmas tree?

Looking down, I realize that she’s meticulously
unpacked and organized all the Christmas ornaments, grouping them
on different areas of floor. My eye catches one of the ones in the
Elementary School Art Project Works of Magnificence pile: it’s
covered in gobs of glitter and shaped like a gingerbread man. One
of his eyes is way bigger than the other one, but damned if the
little fucker isn’t rocking a broad glittery grin. Scrawled across
his belly in my finest seven year old scrawl is “
FOR MY DAD
MARRY XMAS LOVE YOUR SON HOWIE.
” I don’t really expect the rush
of feeling that comes along with looking at it, so I shift my
attention real quick to a different section: a little army of
delicately folded white paper angels. All Emily originals, I
presume.

“These are cool,” I remark.

Being conventional in the ways of conversation,
I expect a ‘thank you.’ Instead what I get is, “You have a very
dear heart, Howie.”

I look at her. She stares earnestly back.

“You too,” I reply honestly.

She gives me a quiet smile, and together we set
to work decorating the tree.

+

I have a hard time falling asleep. I lie in the
dark and stare at the ceiling. I think about Amber, saying all that
awful stuff, eyes hard, voice brittle. I think about the long, long
conversation we’re doomed to have, because she knows, because I
told her. It’s exhausting, it makes me feel like eighty years old
just to think about it, but even that’s not enough to help me keep
my eyes shut.

I think about Kristy. I don’t know how to make
it up to her. I don’t want to win her back, exactly. I don’t want
to charm her with my supreme good guyness or whatever. I’m not a
good guy. In fact, I’m fairly certain I’m a horrible guy. I don’t
deserve to be forgiven by her. The feeling that hits me when I
think about what she looked like all teary-eyed – I earned that. I
should just get used to that. Suffer, jackass.

I think about Arthur, too, in accidental little
snatches in between all the guilt. Him smiling at me from across
the stage. This is the part, I think, where I should want to give
up, because stuff’s awful and I’m tired.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been hanging out with
myself pretty regularly for the past twenty-two years, and in that
time, I’ve figured out a thing or two about me. One of the most
important being: when stuff gets hard like this, I give up.

Earlier, sitting in the stairwell with Arthur, I
shoved one of the cookies into his mouth, and he laughed and got
all fake-pissed about it, and for the smallest fraction of a second
I forgot about everything just enough to feel okay. It was this
dumb unexceptional little nothing moment, but it was with him, so
hell, I want to hang onto it. I want to hang on to all of
those.

It’s about twelve thirty when I hear the front
door open. I listen to the click of heels on the kitchen floor, the
dropping of keys on the counter: all those coming-home sounds.

I should just tell her,
I think, and am
immediately scared as hell of my own brain.

I listen to my mom humming as she walks past my
bedroom door. She falls silent, and I squeeze my eyes shut. Sure
enough, she pushes my door open just a crack, stares in at me for a
little while. I pretend to sleep, and ponder a world where maybe,
just maybe (a mind-boggling notion), I could stop pretending at her
all the time.

+

“This sucks,” I say.

“Hey, now, kid. Don’t knock it. The woods are
lovely, dark, and deep.”

“The woods are cold and cold and cold. Besides,
we already have a tree. With popcorn, and angels. Emily and me, we
totally took care of it. Well. Mostly Emily.”

“It’s not about the tree, Howard. It’s about the
quest.”

“Could I at least go back and get some shoes?”
I’m not wearing any. The snow’s not so bad – it’s more like walking
through powdered sugar – but still, I can recognize that this is
wrong. You don’t walk around the woods on a cold winter’s eve sans
footwear.

“Shoes,” my dad chuckles, and strides mightily
on. I struggle to keep up.

“How are we even going to chop it down?”

“I’m dead, son. I have powers.”

Pfft. Typical.

“Anything interesting happen at school today?”
Dad asks, conversational, as we trek past tree after tree after
tree. All of them have white paper angels in them.

“I made a girl cry.”

“Bad move.”

“Yeah.” I look down at my feet. They should be
cold, right? Just once, I would really love to do something right
for a change. “I’m really sick of lying to everybody.”

Dad throws a glance at me over his shoulder. “So
don’t.”

“I dunno,” I say. “It’s not supposed to be that
easy, is it?”

“It’s a quest. Of course it’s not easy.”

We keep walking in silence. In the distance I
can hear carolers. They’re singing We Text U A Merry Xmas.

My dad must slow down, because I find myself
catching up to him. Once we’re side by side, I say, “Do you like
Arthur?”

“Do you?” Dad asks, not looking back at me.

“Well, yeah. That’s sort of the problem.”

“Liking somebody, that’s not a problem. Your
toes are turning black. Now, that’s a problem.”

I look down. My feet are a discouraging shade of
purple, bordering on black. Shit. Shit. This is going to be such a
pain in the ass. The worst part, somehow, is that I still can’t
feel it at all. I can recognize that this is an alarming situation,
but it just ain’t hittin’ home.

“We should go back,” I suggest.

“Forward’s better,” Dad replies bluntly. “I like
forward.”

And so we go forward. I look at the moon for
awhile. It’s a deep spooky yellow, low in the navy sky. I feel like
I should be saying the important things, asking the important
questions. “Doesn’t it bug you? About me?”

“No,” he says simply. “Ah. Here we go.”

I look up to see that there’s a door. It’s not
attached to anything. The forest stretches on and on behind it, on
either side of it. It’s just a door hanging out in the middle of
the woods. I think that’s kind of questionable, personally, but Dad
twists the handle and heads right on through, and doesn’t seem to
be worried at all. So I follow him.

We’re in the auditorium. It’s kind of a
pain-in-the-ass discovery, considering I’m pretty sure I never
wanted to come back here after everything that happened. It’s
empty, which makes it seem huge. Cavernous.

Kristy’s sitting in the middle of the stage,
crying. Amber’s behind her in the spotlight. She’s staring up into
the light, looking cold and sad and beautiful, and talking, but
silently. It’s just her lips moving. I wonder what she’s saying.
Off to the side, Arthur’s sitting at the piano, playing something
melancholy. It’s quietly raining glitter.

“You know what you have to do,” my dad says,
clapping me on the shoulder.

“Shouldn’t I have bigger problems to deal with?”
I ask. “Like, say, my shiny new case of frostbite?”

“Ehh, you don’t need feet. Just love.”

“For real?” I say. “That? That’s what they teach
you at the Glowy Afterlife School of Omniscience?”