She, Myself, and I Read online

  I take a deep breath. “I think maybe this is something I have to do on my own. But thanks. Will you wait here for me?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he says.

  I guess there’s only so much even the most reassuring words can do to a body in a situation like this. And now that we’re here at the reservoir, mine is veering toward panic. If I get out and walk fast, at least there’ll also be a physical reason for why my heart is pounding like this.

  I grab my jacket from the backseat and get out.

  After a couple of steps, I glance back, into the strengthening sun. It’s pale gold, and it’s bursting above the houses beyond the road.

  There’s no sign of anybody else. No other cars in the parking lot, and no one around. Not even an early dog walker. Only us and invisible birds sounding a high chirp.

  Joe watches me through the windshield. I want him beside me, but going down to the reservoir really does feel like something I need to do alone, despite what he just told me about a resurgent sense of positivity, and meaningful action. Which I’m not going to think about right now. Partly because I’m not even sure how to think about it.

  Focus.

  What can I see?

  At the other end of the parking lot, there’s a wooden bulletin board on a pole, with a miniature pitched roof. Beside it, the beginning of a gravel path.

  Dead leaves crunching beneath my feet, I walk over to the bulletin board. I pull the zipper of my jacket right up to my chin. The cold air smells faintly astringent. Pine trees grow here, I realize, as well as oaks.

  When I get close to the board, I make out a yellow sign pinned to it:

  THE OLD RESERVOIR IS CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. THANK YOU FOR COMING THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER.

  And another, for a special screening of The Orson Welles Show at the Somerville Theatre, dated the previous month.

  Closed? And yet Sylvia came here a little later in the year.

  I glance back. Joe’s still watching me. A resurgent sense of positivity? From me?

  I set off along the gravel path.

  Through light and shade, I follow it. Tree roots protrude in gnarly loops from the ground. I have to pick my way carefully over them, so I’m looking down as I walk, which is why I almost collide with the fence.

  It’s made of wire. There is a gate. It’s padlocked. On the other side, scattered with decaying acorns and leaves and patchy brown grass, is a small beach. Past that, the water ripples, and I can see all the way to the other side . . .

  Trees. And more trees. From here, it looks as though they stretch on forever.

  I keep on the path, following it around to the left. The going gets more difficult, my way obstructed by tangles of branches and saplings. Still, I see no one, hear no one—only the invisible birds and the occasional engine back on the main road. As I push on, I try not to think that those bare gray branches resemble human bones. I try not to think: That root looks like an arm rising from the grave to grab me.

  A bird shows itself, shooting up from the undergrowth. Startled, I follow its flight path, and I realize that the fence ends a short distance ahead. A few more steps. A few more steps . . .

  I round the fence.

  Now I can get to the water.

  Three strides over rough ground . . .

  I crouch. I smell rot. The shallows here are thick with oak leaves and yellowing pine needles. Trees are reflected, brown and burnt-gold. I watch as a single oak leaf makes its one and only journey through the air, swinging from side to side, trembling, fluttering, all the way down to the water.

  Farther out on the reservoir, ripples are forming, rolling toward me. If it was frozen solid, someone could walk across in, what—five minutes? Ten?

  Sylvia can’t have set off from the beach, because at that time of year, it would have been closed, the gate to it locked, as it is now. Did she stand here to call to her friend? Did she feel this wind? Was it from this spot that she stepped onto the ice?

  My heart races.

  When the ice cracked and Sylvia sank beneath it, every cell in her body would have been in revolt. Her heart would have been frantic; she’d have been scrabbling for the surface, desperate for an opening, fighting for her life, and losing.

  I lift a hand to my forehead. A fizz—like an electrical burn—seizes me between the temples. I jerk. There’s a thwack in my skull. Suddenly, I can’t see. Only blackness, then whiteness. I’m falling and freezing, and my arms flail. I realize I’m groping in rotting leaves. Gripping at tree roots. I know I’ll have to fight to stay conscious.

  I blink wildly to try to shake off the blankness. I’m sprawled on my back. I have to sit up. I can’t. Still, I tense my muscles, determined to do everything I can to hold on to what I know to be real.

  Dizziness billows through me in a wave. Then another.

  I gasp.

  . . . It’s gone.

  Very slowly, I haul myself up until I’m sitting, hunched over, my palms dirty with fragments of decomposed leaves. I try to rub them off on my jeans.

  I hear a voice. “Rosa?”

  Joe. He’s emerging from the path, pushing saplings out of his way. “Hey!”

  I do see him, and his voice registers—though not absolutely as belonging to him. I’m no longer dizzy, but I am floating. I feel as insubstantial as a ghost.

  Joe squats beside me. He touches my arm, and my nerves explode. My heart pummels my rib cage. I’m not sure I can breathe, and I know that I’m alive.

  “What are you doing?” he asks. “I was worried.”

  I manage to say, “What did you think would happen?”

  “What did happen? Why are you on the ground?”

  I don’t answer.

  He brushes leaves and pine needles, I guess, from my back. Rubs his hand on his jeans. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you fall?”

  When I don’t answer, his jaw clenches. He looks past me, at the reservoir. Then he stands up straight, his back to it.

  “Here.” He’s reaching for my right hand. I don’t give it. After a moment, he takes my left instead, helps me up. He must have noticed the weakness on my right side. Ashamed, I hide my hand inside my jacket. This body is not really mine, not yet.

  For maybe a minute, we just stand there, listening to the empty rustle of wind in the trees and over the water. My head is aching. From the faint, I guess, if that’s what it was. Very gradually, the brain clamp releases.

  “You ready to go back?” he asks, and before I can answer, he says: “If you’re not, it’s okay. I can stay with you . . . or I can go wait somewhere.”

  “Where you can see me?” My voice sounds so small out here.

  “Maybe this isn’t the kind of place anyone should be on their own.”

  “It’s just a reservoir,” I say. “People must swim here in summer.”

  I close my eyes and I can hear them—people laughing, picnicking, opening bottles of beer, flirting. Then I feel the wind on my face. It’s winter that’s coming.

  “We can go,” I say.

  “Sure?”

  I nod.

  “Okay.”

  Again, he holds out a hand. I hesitate, but not because I don’t want to take it. At last, I close the gap between us. I let him wrap his fingers around mine. We walk back over the gnarled roots, around the bare limbs of trees. All the way to the parking lot. Holding his hand.

  Now we’re back near the car, close to houses and regular life, and what seemed natural somehow feels awkward. I pull my hand toward me to release it, but he doesn’t let go.

  He keeps his gaze on my face, forcing me to meet it.

  There’s a conflict in his eyes. I watch him consider something, reject it, then change his mind. “You look a lot alike,” he says quietly. “But I could tell you apart.”

  I half hear myself whisper, “How?”

  “She was pretty. You’re one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever experienced. Not one of.”

  I sw
ell and contract, swell and contract.

  I float outside of myself, then shoot right back in. I have no idea what to say. Who says something like that? And to me. To me.

  Maybe it’s something about the early light, or what happened inside my brain by the reservoir, but he’s glowing. He’s so close I can feel the pulse in his neck and the tension in the muscle between his neck and his shoulder. His fingers touch my cheek. My body rings. I lift my face, and I kiss him.

  If I were to believe in a god, now would be the moment. Every cell in my body fires. My lips are electric.

  Then I think: I was falling, I was freezing, and I saw someone in the mirror who wasn’t me.

  23.

  That kiss. I don’t know how long it lasts, because time stops. All I’m aware of is the soft pressure of his mouth and the solidity of his body.

  My familiar rush of self-doubt threatens to take the moment. But it doesn’t steal all of it. As we climb back into the car, I feel the ecstatic tension of it still.

  We sit side by side, in intimate contact in every sense except literally. Joe starts the car. I turn on the radio.

  “No one’s ever called me beautiful before,” I tell him, my voice quiet. “At least, not including Mum or Dad.”

  Silence. Then he says, “I don’t understand why not.”

  “She was beautiful,” I half whisper.

  “She was pretty,” he says. “I guess it’s hard to tell just from a photograph.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Haven’t you ever thought some guy was hot, then he opened his mouth and said something stupidly arrogant or stupidly childish or just really stupid? Still hot?”

  I nod. He’s right.

  Then I find myself thinking of a documentary I watched in the rec room with Dmitri last week. It was about the high-end food industry that services London’s multibillionaires. About the caviar tasting sessions, eighteen-carat-gold-bedecked desserts, five-thousand-dollar shots of antique liquor, and steak that some restaurateur exposes to Mozart, because, so he insists, it enhances the taste.

  Dmitri was really into it. He wanted to be the guy paying five thousand dollars for a few sips of whiskey distilled when Abraham Lincoln was alive.

  I felt sick. So many frauds. So much greed. I guess that’s why I’m thinking of it now. I feel like a fraud. And I’m greedy for something that I—the old me—would not have had.

  I want to wrap my heart around what Joe said. But it’s a mirage. And so, at least for now, I can’t.

  I take a long breath and give him a small smile.

  “Has Althea replied?” I ask.

  The expression on his face tells me he’s wondering why I’m changing the subject. But after a moment, he pulls his phone out of his jacket pocket. Checks it. “It’s Saturday morning. She’s probably still asleep . . . What now?”

  “Maybe I should find someone else to ask to meet.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Can we find where she used to live? And her memorial book? It was tagged—”

  “Cary Memorial Library. I remember.”

  “But I should probably get a disguise.”

  He nods. Types something into his phone. A map appears. “There’s a place not far away,” he says.

  We pull out of the parking lot, and my irregular life resumes, like vegetation sprouting after an earthquake.

  We drive to a party superstore next to a dentist’s office in a strip of shops just out of town. Past rubber bats, ghost-themed party-ware, plastic devil’s forks, and jumbled racks of Halloween costumes—including one of Frankenstein’s green-headed monster—I find a wig. It is blond and long.

  Once the wig is in place, my own hair tucked up inside it, we drive off in the direction of Courtyard Place.

  Now the town seems less deserted. There’s a mom in gym gear with a couple of kids on scooters, a man in overalls with a leaf blower, a woman kneeling on her front step, chalking something onto a blackboard: Enter if you dare . . .

  “This is it,” he says.

  And I see the street sign, in capital letters: COURTYARD PL.

  So this is where Sylvia lived.

  I have no idea which house was hers, but as we drive along, I realize they’re all slight variations on one theme. Modern. Detached. Modeled on a colonial style, with integrated garages and glossy white-painted porches. Into their steeply pitched roofs are set half-moon windows to what real estate agents must surely describe as “cozy bedrooms packed with character.” Was one of those rooms Sylvia’s? Did she look down at the exact spot from where I’m looking up?

  These houses are so different from the one I grew up in. I think of our redbrick Edwardian terrace, with its drafty front windows and rambling stepped garden. As time went on, a bungalow would have been easier, but Mum and Dad had the place modified to accommodate my chair, because I was determined that my disease wouldn’t kick me out of my own home. My old house and hers are so different, except for this: From the outside, they look pretty much the same as all the others on the street.

  As Joe crawls the car down around a curve in the road, we pass a garage that’s open. The light’s on, showing well-ordered racks of tools, kids’ bikes and scooters, and a black car that seems to be plugged into an outlet.

  To my eyes, this is all too good to be true. A world with everything anyone could wish for. Still like something from TV.

  “Is it like this where you’re from?” I ask Joe, trying to make my voice as normal as I can.

  “I think they’re pretty similar, Lexington and Burlingame,” he says, peering out. “Our neighbor to one side had a Tesla. Our neighbor to the other side had a Prius.”

  “You had an electric car, too?”

  “Actually, Dad had a mountain bike. Mom had a Honda VTX1300S.”

  “A motorbike?”

  He nods.

  “How did you get around?”

  “I walked to school. They had this old Ford for when they really needed a car. Mom sometimes took me on her bike.”

  “I used to have a bike,” I tell him.

  Then I think, Did I?

  I’ve made so much up.

  But I did. I’m sure I did.

  I dredge for memories, and I do remember hurtling along the path that ran beside the duck pond, Elliot yelling, “Just don’t fall in!” And then—even more than I hated standing, dripping, thigh-deep in scummy water, my new bike half submerged—I remember hating the fact that I’d lost control. Five years old. I had a lot to unlearn.

  Looking out at this neighborhood now, I know Sylvia would have had a bike. She’d have ridden it all over with her friends.

  Every Halloween, she’d have put on a costume and trick-or-treated along Courtyard Place. Maybe she took her haul of candy back to her attic room. Perhaps, like me, she once stashed the lot under her pillow, and woke to find that, contrary to her mother’s predictions, not a single piece had been squashed.

  Tears fall down my cheeks.

  I brush them away, hoping Joe doesn’t see.

  I’m here, where she lived. Where people loved her . . .

  It strikes me: Maybe there is a way I could let Mum know I’m still okay without potentially giving my location away.

  “End of the road,” Joe says. “You want to drive back along for another look or go to the library?”

  Deep breath. “Library, I think. Thank you. But can I borrow your phone? I guess I could email Mum.”

  “Sure,” he says. Enters his passcode. Hands it over. As we pull away from Courtyard Place, I sign into my email account.

  My inbox appears.

  There’s the usual stuff from mailing lists I haven’t bothered to unsubscribe from—and then this:

  From: Elliot Marchant

  Time: 01:45 A.M.

  Subject: READ NOW!!

  It takes me a couple of attempts to successfully click on Elliot’s email, but at last I get my finger to work properly. And I read:

  FIRST, know this: Mum had security go through all t
he CCTV footage from the hospital and they talked to everyone in rehab. It shows you in the café with some guy that JARED says is a journalist who hangs out in the park. Are you with HIM?? Mum’s talking to the police. They’ll be after you, Rosa.

  There’s more, but I don’t read it. I think the phone falls onto my knee.

  “Rosa?”

  I knew Mum would be worried. I didn’t even think about CCTV.

  How does Jared know who Joe is?

  Then I remember seeing Jared in yoga sessions in the park. Joe’s around there a lot. Maybe Joe has even interviewed him. Still, I can’t believe Jared told Mum.

  “Rosa?”

  I make myself look at Joe. I cannot keep this from him. “Mum’s had hospital security go through all the video footage. They know I was with you in the café.”

  He seems to think about this. Then he says, “Okay . . . and?”

  "And she’ll get the police to look up your license plate and the car park camera will show your car leaving. Maybe they can even track us all the way here with satellite images and—”

  He interrupts: “You told me you told your parents you left, and you’re eighteen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know how many assaults there are in Boston every year? Nearly three thousand. Which is—what, like, eight every day. There are thirty thousand gangs in this country, Rosa. Three hundred million illegal guns. The police have a lot better things to do than go after an adult who was well enough to walk out of a hospital less than twenty-four hours ago. I wouldn’t worry about satellites.”

  “Someone at the hospital recognized you. Mum might call Bostonstream—”

  “Who would not give out any details about me. Not without police involvement. And like I said, they’re not going to get involved. Not yet, anyway.”

  I lean back hard in my seat.

  I didn’t personally read all the fine print in the agreement that I signed before the surgery. I left Mum and Dad to do that. But there might have been something in there about me staying at the hospital until the doctors say I can go. The hospital must have spent a fortune on my treatment.

  In the end, yes, I am eighteen and I went voluntarily with Joe. I can’t see why he should get into trouble. But it could be different for me.