Zac-
I thought I saw you yesterday in front of me in line at the supermarket. It was stupid--even during the first giddy heartbeat of hope that I found coursing unaccountably through me, I know it couldn’t really be you.
His hair was a little like yours, maybe, a wheat colored, slightly uncared for shoulder length mop. And maybe something in his stance echoed you, too, in the way his shoulders hunched a little, the way he seemed vaguely uncomfortable and apologetic for his bulky height, as if he didn’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to himself. It wasn’t you; I knew it wasn’t you. But for a second…I don’t know. I think that a ghost of my early hope came back to me, a shadow of that hidden suspicion that this whole lunatic nightmare is just a joke waiting for a punchline, waiting for you to come back to me.
The cashier scanned the boy’s purchases--looking back, I think he really was a boy, no more than fifteen or sixteen--one after another so fast that the beeps of the register blurred into one sound, merging with the constant electronic buzz of the other aisles all around us to form a unfaltering wall of digitized sound. I watched the register’s glowing LED display, fighting mingled urges to step close behind the boy and wrap my arms around his slender waist, bury my face against his back and breath him in, and most of all never, ever let him go. The sickly green, straight-line letters of display hiccuped product after product in a litany of dt-coke-6-pack-Kellogg-cereal-assortment-anjou-pears and I hid my mind in the constantly changing words, letting the meticulous sorting of symbols and spaces take control of any thought process that may have been struggling to emerge.
When the transaction was done, I still hadn’t seen his face. The boy had handed the cashier a fifty dollar bill and waited patiently for his change, never turning back towards me. I had leaned and stretched, coughed and rustled closer, but nothing made him turn to me, nothing made his strange face prove your loss. He was deaf to my frantic psychic pleas, but it seemed hard to believe that standing so close he couldn’t feel my need to see him as it pounded desperate through my veins, stealing space meant for blood and making me weak at its expense.
He began to leave, gathering his things and putting long strides between us, and I couldn’t move. The world felt different around me, somehow slid into an impotent, quicksand dream of reality where my mouth wouldn’t open and my hands wouldn’t unclench from their position at the handle of my grocery-filled gray steel cart. I was shaking a little, I think, and I could feel cold pinpricks of nervous sweat unaccountably burning along the backs of my knees and across my clammy-hot forehead.
All around me everything was so achingly normal, so completely mundane, the air shivering as it did with mechanical hums, the drone of incomprehensible conversation, the programmed clucking of a twenty-five cent slot machine. I wanted to scream, to cut through the drone with the frantic words that were racing chilly through my mind: How can this be life? This not knowing, this not caring, this everyday? No one in that whole store knew that my heart was fluttering so rapidly against my breastbone that I thought it might explode, or that my life had been changed forever, or that your precious life was over. And about them? The squirming squawking masses of late night grocery shoppers? About them I knew nothing, and never would.
The boy was out the automatic door, his hands looped through heavy-looking plastic bags, his red sweatshirt already zipped against the mid-February cold that hovered just outside the store’s big plate glass windows. I watched him; couldn’t take my eyes of him any more than someone dying of slow thirst could close their eyes in the face of an impossibly beautiful oasis, even knowing as I did that it was only a mirage.
I don’t know what happened next, how it was that I left behind my cart in the narrow aisle in front of the cashier. I can still hear the sound of the girl at the register calling after me, though, her wispy voice sounding a hundred thousand light years away. "Hey, lady! Where are you going? What about all this stuff?"
I didn’t reply, and didn’t concern myself with the winter-white faces that turned from all over the room to watch me, instead focusing all of my energy on catching up with him, with you. I sprinted into the cold of the dark parking lot, the starless night illuminated only by the frozen twinkle of the street lamps, hovering tiny moons above the glistening black pavement.
He was unlocking the door of his car when I got to him, absently shrugging his golden mane over a shoulder and struggling to slide the key home with only half a free hand. I didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t breathe as I drank in his thoughtless motions, twisting them in my mind to match what I thought would be yours.
The boy finally got the door open with a creek and a grunt at almost the same time as he noticed he was being watched. He looked blankly at me, finally now feeling my nearly-hysterical reaction to his presence. The need to see him was a million times what it had been in line, because in the silvery night he looked even more like you. Or it was easier for me to imagine that he did.
I shuddered as he watched me; I stared hungry into his eyes, not soft, rich brown like I had hoped but instead weary blue. We stood facing each other for a long time, the brightness of the interior light in his car caressing the stingy curves of his angular face.
"I’m sorry." I had finally choked out, disappointment thick around me like a shroud. What was I thinking? God. What was I thinking?
"Are you okay?" The boy stepped forward at my words, a look of sympathy flickering across his face as he lost his fear in response to my obvious panic.
"I’m fine." I don’t think he heard me the first time, so I spoke again. "I’m fine. I just thought you were someone else."
So that’s it, Zac. I must be going crazy, loosing whatever tenuous grip on this world I’ve managed to achieve throughout my life. The boy looked at me like he would probably have agreed.
I guess what happened yesterday is why I was so desperate to see Zoë this morning, why I left early to pick her up for her swimming lesson when normally it’s all I can do to drag myself out of bed to be barely on time for my eight o’clock pick up time. Your mom had given me a big, warm hug when she saw me at the door, but her smile was sad and slow. "Zoe’s upstairs getting ready, sweetie. Do you want me to get her?"
It was funny that she asked that. Normally she would have pointed me in the right direction to find whoever I needed and then gone back to any one of the staggering number of things she has to do in one day to keep a family as big as yours clean and fed and alive. But today she was trying to spare me the walk through the house, I think. And maybe spare me a run in with Taylor.
It had been almost two weeks since our fight at my house, and, thankfully, I hadn’t seen or heard from him since. I still can’t even bring myself to imagine the horrible things he probably thought about me for what I had done, let alone see them written plan as day across the betrayed blue of his eyes. Mostly because I was afraid that I would agree with him, and I’m afraid of what would happen if I really gave in and hated myself like I think I deserve to be hated.
I was just about to give in and ask your mom to do as she had offered and get Zoë, but, naturally, the phone barked a shrill ring before I could speak. "I’m sorry, Lydie. I should get that. Isaac, Emily and the girls are coming over for lunch this afternoon with a business partner, and you know how Ike is at giving directions. Would you mind getting Zoë yourself?" She spoke as she reached for the phone, and it was clear that I didn’t have any other option. I had wandered up the wide, main staircase, dragging the tips of my sneakers across the heavy green carpeting, focusing my attention downwards in hopes of avoiding any potential Taylor eye contact.
I heard the piano before I had even gained the first landing, the resonant tinkling of its keys tracing a smooth, hesitant melody in the air. Taylor’s like a cat with a bell, I thought to myself, his never-abscent music a siren’s call of warning to unwary prey. I all but tip-toed past the half open door to the second floor music room, not daring a look inside.
I was well past the door and nearly to Zoe’s room when I heard her little girl voice, mixing unevenly with the fluid sounds of Taylor’s playing. She was singing along, sorrowful words to a slow song that I didn’t know. Words about loss, and pain and tears that I hate the world for making her understand.
"Will you show me how to play this song, Tay?" Taylor, I know, is not the kind of musician to look kindly on interruptions to his work, even from people he loves. Zoe’s awareness of this fact was obvious in her hesitant words, in the way she sounded afraid her changeable older brother would make her leave in a heartbeat.
By the time he spoke, I had worked my way back to the music room door, silent as the rustling of my clothes would allow. "I’d love to, baby." His voice was different for her, softer, kinder, its raspy strength tempered by an unexpected tenderness. I’ve only ever heard him sound like that when talking to one other person. Me.
His big hands were under her arms as I peeked into the room, and he lifted her easily to sit on his knees with her back against his chest. "You’ve got too much hair, Zoë!" He brushed her white-blond curls from his mouth, dramatically coughing as he slid his hands around her middle, pulling her close against him. From my position across from the piano I couldn’t see any more of Taylor’s expression than the faint edge of a smile, but it was evident that he was maybe the happiest I’ve ever seen him.
"Sorry." She giggled, slouching down in an attempt to allow Taylor space to breathe without inhaling her baby shampoo scented hair.
"Take your hands like this," he was whispering as he placed Zoe’s tiny hands splayed across the center white keys of the piano, resting his own above hers. "And then you just push down soft," the mournful song resumed, and I brushed a hesitant hand against my rapidly dampening cheeks. He loves her so much, Zac. He loves her as much as he loved you.
After playing a bit of his new song himself, Taylor led Zoë through some easy scales, guiding her with his hands and his words. As I watched I could imagine how your mom must have sounded teaching both of you how to play, how the peaceful tenderness in her voice probably wasn’t so different from that of her son’s. You had been where Zoe was when you were four, your mom would always say, sitting by Taylor’s side as he had his lessons because back then, back in the struggling early days of their life together, your parents hadn’t been able to afford a babysitter.
Watching, I dreamed I could see the three of you: Your mother’s was hair so long that it brushed the back of the piano bench behind her, swaying soft with the movements of her hands. You and Taylor would have sat on either side of her, your tiny, Wrangler jean-covered bottoms slid all the way to front of the seat so that you could reach the keyboard, your heads bobbing with concentration. Both of your hair was nearly as blond as Zoe’s, and your backs were perfectly straight as you listened to your mom talk about the mystery of the sounds she was making, the rhyme and reason behind the notes and the spaces between them that were equally as important.
I think that Taylor saw me first, but it was Zoe’s excited cry of "Lydia! Taylor’s teaching me how to play the piano!" that alerted me to their awareness of my presence.
"That’s so great, Zoë." My cheer was thick and false, and wasted on both of the occupants of the room before me.
"Will you come to swimming lessons with us, Taylor?" A hint of the earlier fear of his reaction had worked its way back into Zoe’s voice, but as I watched Taylor merely shook his head no, still not turning to look at me. "I’m gonna go get my towel."
She slipped past my position in the doorway, reaching out to take my cold hand in her warm one for a heartbeat and offer me an uncertain smile. "I’ll hurry."
Neither Taylor or I spoke at first, but I found myself stepping into the music room, wiping surreptitiously at my still-escaping tears. The small, bright room was cluttered with drums and guitars, music stands, and hastily rigged up and informal looking recording equipment. The slick looking black grand piano that Taylor sat at seemed to take up more space than the laws of phsyics dictated to be possible. His shoulders were stooped as he leaned above the piano, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on the keyboard before him.
I walked around him, wandering to examine a Grateful Dead poster that hung on the wall. I’ve seen that same colorful, abstract drawing probably a billion times, but it’s distracting brilliance was feign fascinated at, perfect to avoid looking at painfully dazzling beauty of your brother. My apology was whispered, and unspecific, when if finally came. "I’m sorry."
"You should be." His voice had lost the sweetness that it had held for Zoë, the sweetness it had once held for me. I hazarded a glance over my shoulder, watching the way Taylor’s restless hands smoothed their way again and again through his shaggy hair. He still refused to look up from the keyboard, instead tracing it’s perfect, straight lines with his gaze as he struggled to maintain some degree of aloof coldness. "I’m going back home this afternoon. Back to California. There isn’t anything left for me here anymore."
"There will always be something for you here." The tears finally took over, even as I fought them, and my words broke a little with the power of my first real sob. The second I finally gave in to the tears I heard a rapid, sharp scrape, and felt a cool displacement of air. Taylor had jumped up from the piano, I realized, and before his could even stop himself his protective instincts had demanded he rush to my side. As you’ve both proved time and time again, no Hanson man can bear to see a woman cry, after all. I could feel him standing a little behind me, and as I turned around he fidgeted helplessly, fighting against what I hoped was an urge to hug me rather than hit. "I’m so sorry." I looked at him, then, not allowing pride to demand that I hide my the weight of my words.
"Lydie," Taylor held his arms open to me as his face broke with tears, waiting for me to step into his embrace.
"I really do love you, Taylor. So much it hurts." He felt so warm against me, Zac, and I needed that feeling so bad. When Taylor wrapped me in his wiry strong arms I couldn’t remember feeling so safe since the arms around me were yours. "Not like you want me to, though."
"I know." He pulled my head against his chest, and we melted into a seamless being. It felt better than the other times, different, like we were closer to each other than we had been even when he was inside of me. "I love you, Lydie. And you’re beautiful. Without him I was so afraid, and it was like you were the only life preserver I could find. You were the only person who really understood…" He was shaking hard, and I nuzzled against his tight black t-shirt, my eyes clenched tight, breathing in the soapy smell of his skin.
"I thought I saw him yesterday. It was so stupid, Taylor. But I wanted it to be him so bad I thought I’d just dissolve when I realized it was just some stranger… It feels like everybody is a stranger." The confession embarrassed me, but felt good to finally say.
"Oh Lydia," his hands moved to etch invisible patterns on my back, and I pulled away to look at him. It was the first time I’d seen Taylor really cry, tears slipping sullenly down the porcelain white of his cheeks, and we just watched each other for a second. "He’ll never really leave us, you know. He loves us too much." Behind the pools of his salty tears, Taylor’s eyes glowed with the same certainty at this words that I felt.
I just nodded.
"I think we’ve got someone to take to a swimming lesson." His voice was a murmur on my skin, and his lips brushed gently across my forehead as we tightened our arms for one, final embrace.
And now I’ve got someone to drive to an airport. And another goodbye to say.
-Lydia
Dear Zac,
When I got home from work today there was a UPS package propped up by the front door. The hand that had addressed the red overnight slip was a familiar one; it’s lines were drawn thick and heavy with painstaking, practiced precision. Handwriting like that is wasted on anything less special, less extraordinary than a diploma or a birth announcement. Funny how you had learned to write together, with the same teacher, with the same paper, with the same fat, stubby pencils, and yet the finished product is be so different. I still don’t think I have the knack of deciphering your handwriting, and Taylor’s rivals calligraphy. That’s the thing about the world, I guess; we make ourselves and our world, not the other way around. How could it be that you--you who had the same tools, you who had the same genes--turned out to be so different?
I sat on the dusky porch to open the package, in a navy-blue evening empty save for the far-away, dreamy sound of my mother’s favorite radio station drifting out from the backyard. Wrapped up safe and protected by what must have been a hundred layers of meticulously folded tissue paper I found the flat, wooden box that’s sitting on my lap right now. There was no note, really, nothing but a single sturdy, creamy white sheet of paper pristine but for four words: "For something precious." The intent of this present is obvious; it’s for this, for us, for these letters that I write to you, for my memories.
For a long time, it felt like my life had ended with yours. And when that feeling stopped, it had been overtaken by a new one, something more frightening and more devious. Wishing that my life had ended with yours. I could have been in the car with you; I could have maybe suffered; I could have died. And that would have been that, finis, exit stage left. Fate or God or whatever didn’t take me with you, though, and despite it all I never really thought about pushing it: about pills, or razor blades or ropes. I did it in a way more insidious, I guess. More subtle, less flashy. I dropped out of school. I dropped out of life, leaving phone calls unanswered, e-mails unopened. Mine has been a subtle suicide. And a reversible one.
I’m going back to school for the winter term, and I know I’ll slip into some semblance of the life I had before. I’ll also know what the world has lost; what a sadder place it has been left without you. Every time I get up in the morning, every time I see a star or sunset or a grocery store or a river, I will think of you. But I will stop writing these letters, because they have been part of my self-destruction.
These are the things I remember: the way the riverbottom felt beneath my feet, a never-quite dependable puzzle constructed of perfect, smooth-worn rocks that slipped like porcelain against my skin; The sunlight on me, a hot and tingling foreboding of late summer sunburn; the way the sound of the languidly running water blended into the hum of tree branches in the hot wind.
Mostly, though, I remember how you climbed, ever-daring, high onto the wall of jagged rocks that formed one edge of the streambed, and how you stood so far up, laughing at me from above.
"Come on, Lydie," you had stretched my name out, the familiar notes of your voice light with equal parts plea and tease. "It’s not so far down, and if you don’t just jump already you’re going to regret it for another year."
You’d had an entire year, actually three, to think up convincing arguments; But that was the best you could come up with, I guess. I wasn’t impressed.
Those trips your family made every summer to Eres creek were always so fun, so dizzy with games and sun and your mom’s lemonade, but this summer’s will be the one I always think about. Not even just because of—well, you know. Not just because I’ll never be so privileged as to spend another sticky-hot afternoon with you, racing you against choppy currents until it seemed I would collapse of exhaustion—but because it was so right.
Your mom and dad had been there, handing out pop and bandages, sitting side-by-side under the big, striped umbrella your mom always insisted on bringing for shade. Whenever I looked toward them they were always smiling and laughing, hands entwined, the only things separating them from being sixteen some gray hairs and a few extra pounds. Isaac and Emily had been there, too, teaching little Marissa and Gabriel how to doggie paddle in the shelter near the rocky beach. Zoë had been hovering around them when you called your challenge, always happy to step in to demonstrate the complexities of the back float, fulfilling her auntly duties.
Weightless and free, I had floated effortlessly in the center of the stream, tiny cold eddies of water dancing around me, eddies never quite able to gather up enough strength to pull me downstream. From that vantage point in the water below you I had seen you as I see your now: a thousand miles away. Your hair was bound tightly in a rumpled, water-darkened ponytail, your skin dark brown with sun, and you were somehow dizzily out of reach.
"Lydia, you know these Hansons! They don’t give up until they get their way, so you shouldn’t even bother fighting." Emily must have heard you attempting to bully me into the jump, but her advice was nothing that I hadn’t already figured out.
"Hey, Hanson, that’s not a very nice thing to say." Isaac’s righteous indignation was feigned, unlike the tenderness with which he brushed a kiss across Emily’s lips.
"Hey, Hanson, it’s the truth. None of y’all ever do give up." A little bit of Alabama was always in Emily’s voice, even though for Isaac’s sake she had made Tulsa her home for ten years or more.
"Aren’t you glad?"
"Of course." I had turned around in the water to watch their gentle flirtations, the way they touched each other, the way they had seemed to forget the rest of us existed. Emily was huge then, seven, maybe eight months pregnant, and I remember thinking that I didn’t ever want to go swimming again without a mother-to-be nearby. There’s nothing to make you feel confident about yourself like someone who hasn’t been able to tie her shoes for three months.
"Lydie, it’s no fun alone. Get your butt up here!" When you realized I wasn’t moving, petulant frustration had crept into the depths of your voice. "Fine. I’m coming down to get you." Three stretching strides and you were in the air, gliding in a helpless arc toward the mirrored surface of the stream. If there’s one way to convince me not to do something I’m afraid of, I had decided at that moment, then it’s to do said terrifying act right before my eyes. Your splash had been tremendous, sending cold, black water spiraling away from your impact in frantic concentric circles, and you didn’t surface until you had swam all the way to my side.
My mind had been made up during the half-hour ride to the stream, sitting beside you in the backseat of your parents car, watching the placid thoughtfulness of your face reflected in the window that you had leaned your forehead against. I would finally give in and do it this year, the big leap. One can only hold out so long, especially in the face of pleading so sweet.
Next to me, your breath come in ragged waves and it was obvious that your smile was withheld only with the fiercest of effort. You had paused in the water for me to tug at my bathing suit, worn from a hundred college swim meets, but that was the last interference you booked. I don’t remember the climb up the steep, barren cliff as being too horrible, but I suspect that’s mostly because you held my hand softly in yours the whole time, belying your casual jokes about my bravery, or lack thereof. The thing is that I knew everything would be okay. Because you said it would.
You had called a huddle at the culmination of our climb, wrapping a wet arm around my shoulders. "You sure?" Your body was warm against me, and the faint flutter of your pulse at the base of your neck, the way your lashes were still beaded with water, filled my vision and my mind.
We were both aware that it was okay if I didn’t have the courage, but we were both also aware that you would have picked on me mercilessly until the end of time if I backed out then. "Yes."
"You’ll love it."
Wanly, "I’ll love it."
"Say it with a little feeling, next time!" I can hear your laugh, broad and easy, as you squeezed my cold hand in yours.
"I hate you," Staring down at the distant, sparkling water, your hand tightened around mine.
You had pulled me close then, the full length of your bareness against mine, and whispered so soft that I more felt than heard your words, "You don’t."
"I know." I can’t describe your eyes, the way they refracted the bright sunlight golden from their comfortable brown depths; I can’t describe your smile, so mischievous and enveloping; I can’t describe the way you smelled, like sunblock and wet swimsuit, but if I close my eyes I can almost be there again, Zac, almost be with you again.
"Live a little, Lydia. Live just a little." Those were your final words as we stood there, hand in hand high above the stream. Your family was watching, all of them indulgent in their smiles, and even as we stepped to the edge, I was happy.
It was an exhilarating three second plummet, and we remained side by side, hands clasped together, the whole time.
So that’s what I think I have to do now. First remember that I love you—which I know I’ll never forget—and second, live a little—which I think might be easier to neglect. As soon as I complete these final words, I’m putting this whole stack of letters in the box that Taylor gave me for them. I will say my final goodbye to you, and resume whatever life I have left. It will take some work, maybe, becuase somehow I think that my future has unconsciously written itself around you since the day we met. I won’t marry you; I’ll never be big with a life half belonging to you inside of me. Someday I will close my eyes for one, final, forever time, and you won’t be there. But your memory will be.
These pages will be unintelligible soon, with the way the words are already blurring into a faceless, murky puddle of black ink. But that doesn’t matter, because this letter is alive in me.
And because I’ll never forget you: that you jumped; that you lived.
—Lydia
| Llamaesque@aol.com | Back |
| About the Story |