I called Will. “Coach,” I said. I knew I was laying it on a bit thick with the “coach” bit, but I needed Will to be in as good a mood as possible.
“What do you want?” Will asked.
“So the thing is,” I said, “I sort of need you to drive me to Albany tomorrow.”
“Why in God’s name would I do that?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t. It had basically been a Hail Mary. I’d been a jerk to Will. So I told him goodbye and I started to hang up the phone.
“Wait a second. I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it yet.”
“Okay.”
“What’s in Albany?”
I told him.
He lowered his voice. “Honestly, Naomi”—he’d stopped calling me Chief ever since I’d quit yearbook, and now that I had my memory back and could remember what good friends we’d been, it stung—“don’t you think I have better things to do on a Saturday than drive you to see your crazy boyfriend?”
“Yes. I’m sure that you do.” I wanted to add that James wasn’t crazy, but I knew by Will’s question that he was coming round.
“I have a yearbook to run. By myself, I might add.”
“I know.”
“And a girlfriend now.”
“Yes.” I’d seen him and Winnie Momoi. Everyone said how cute Winnie and Will were together. Even their names were alliterative.
“Well, I just wanted to make sure you appreciated that my whole life doesn’t revolve around you anymore,” he said. “You’ll pay for gas. And meals. And incidentals.”
“Incidentals? Like what?”
“Like…like sundries and vitamins and pens. Like I don’t know like what. I was just on a rhetorical roll. Incidentally, how long does it take to get to Albany?”
“Two hours, I think.”
“Okay, that’s two CDs. I gotta get started on a mix for tomorrow. Because even though I’m driving you, I’m still not speaking to you, Naomi.”
I decided not to point out the obvious: that he was, in fact, speaking to me.
I heard him flipping through his CDs in the background. “Songs for Visiting Naomi’s Crazy Boyfriend in Albany.” Will and his mixes.
“Catchy title,” I told him.
“I’m gonna fill it with all the famously mad and/or suicidal recording artists. Jeff Buckley. Elliott Smith. Nick Drake. And maybe a couple love songs, too. But the really, exquisitely tortured kind.”
“There’s one other thing,” I told Will. “I need you to call my dad and tell him that it’s something I have to do for yearbook.”
“Christ, Naomi, I am not going to lie for you.”
“Please, Will…He’ll believe you. I can’t go otherwise.”
“He knows you quit,” Will said after a moment.
“I know. Just say it’s something I committed to before that only I can do.”
“I’ll think about it. I’m not promising anything. Not to mention, I don’t like the idea of lying to your dad.”
That night, Will called my dad and told a very short story about my having agreed to photograph the Special Olympics.
Dad didn’t question Will. Everyone knew that William Blake Landsman was no liar. Besides, I think Dad could tell I needed to get out of the house.
We left at noon on Saturday. Mainly I pretended to sleep in the car. I was too nervous to even talk to Will.
When we got there, Will told me he would wait in the car.
“I need you to come in with me,” I said.
“Why? Are you scared?”
“No…well, I think there’s a small chance that he might not want to see me, so I need you to give your name at the desk.”
“He doesn’t know you’re coming?” Will was incredulous.
“Not exactly,” I admitted.
“Congratulations. This sounds exceedingly well planned,” Will said as he opened his door.
I had expected a prison, but Sweet Lake reminded me of Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, where I had taken a field trip in fourth grade. Or maybe it looked like a very large B&B.
Visiting hours on Saturday lasted from noon to seven. I had called ahead. It had been that same receptionist, and I’m pretty sure he recognized my voice because he said, “You do know that patients have the right not to see someone.”
Will gave his name at the desk, and then we went to wait in the visiting room.
“Will,” James said, coming through the door. “Is something wrong with…?” Then he saw me. At first, I thought he was going to walk right back through those doors the same way he’d come, but he didn’t.
He walked to the sofa where Will and I were. After a while, James sat down, but he wouldn’t look at me.
When he finally did look at me about five minutes later, it was not in a very pleasant way at all. “So?” he said.
I had rehearsed what I wanted to say ever since I’d decided to come. I took a deep breath.
I thought about asking Will to leave, but I didn’t. “I think you”—I turned to James; I didn’t care if he wanted to look at me or not—“have gotten the idea that if I could remember everything, I wouldn’t want to be with you. And since that is the case, I shouldn’t be ruining my life by being with you in the meantime when you’re so…flawed. Is that right?”
He nodded and muttered under his breath, “Something like that.”
“Well, here’s the thing. I haven’t been an amnesiac since January. I love you now. It’s not gratitude or amnesia. It’s love. And I know you’re screwed up. Everyone is screwed up. I don’t care.”
“You’re a goddamn liar,” James said.
“I can’t believe it,” Will said. “How could you not say?”
I looked at Will.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
His face was flushed. “I’ll wait for you by the car,” he said. And then he left.
James didn’t speak to me for a long time. Finally, he said, “Let’s go outside. I can’t be in here anymore.”
It was a nice day, and I don’t mean that it was sunny either. It was humid and not too cool, like winter was getting annoyed with itself and wanted it to be spring just as much as everyone else. We sat down at a picnic table.
I remember wanting to touch him, but not feeling like he would let me. Eventually he took my hand. “It’s cold,” he said. He cupped his hands, which were dry and warm, around mine.
“Sometimes,” he said after a while, “I was sort of jealous of your amnesia, I know how crazy that probably sounds. Because for so long in my life, I just wanted to forget everything that had ever happened to me…
“After my brother died, it became real easy to picture myself dying young. But recently I’ve realized that I’m probably not going to unless I do something to make that happen. I know this probably seems evident to you, but it’s, well, it’s news to me. And if I’m not going to die young, that means I’m stuck with the consequences of my actions. That means I have to figure things out, do you know?”
I did.
“Because now, I’m older than my brother ever was. And I’m going to go to college, which is something that he never did. The way I see it, now’s a really good time for me to get a handle on all of this.
“As for you…well, I just don’t want you to turn into another Sera,” he said. “But you make things difficult for me.
“I wish we’d met some other time,” James said. “When I was older and had my shit together. Or younger, before everything got so messed up.
“Someday,” he said, “we’ll run into each other again, I know it. Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens, that’s when I’ll deserve you, Naomi. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, ’cause I’m liable to sink us both.”
I promised to leave him alone until he got out. And then I couldn’t help it, I asked him when that might be. I’m ashamed to reveal this, but I might have been thinking a little about junior prom in May.
He
said that since he was just in the “transitional” program, he was doing his schoolwork over e-mail and that he hoped to be back for graduation, maybe sooner, but he wasn’t sure.
“I’m…well, I’m glad to see you, but I’m embarrassed that you’re here in a way,” he said. “I kind of wanted you to think I was perfect.”
I told him that I knew he wasn’t perfect.
“Yeah, but I wanted you to think that I was.”
We sat on that picnic table for a really long time, until the world became darker and darker. For a second I wished that time might stop, and it might stay twilight forever. Maybe I could live my whole life on this park bench with James, who I loved, next to me.
The sun went down.
Visiting hours were over.
I kissed him goodbye, and Will and I drove back home.
Will didn’t talk to me for the first hour and a half on the way back, and when he finally did speak, it was only to alert me to the fact that he wanted to stop at a diner.
“I just want to remind you that I am at liberty to order whatever I want on the menu,” he said.
All he ordered was a patty melt and a chocolate milk shake, which was lucky because I only had forty bucks on me and that had to get gas, too. I didn’t feel like eating, so I just watched him.
“So…so…if you’ve had your memory back all this time, does that mean you remember everything?”
I looked at him. “Yes.”
“Everything everything?”
I was pretty sure he was thinking of that time he and I had kissed, but I didn’t necessarily want to talk about it just then. “Yes.”
Will nodded and ate a couple of French fries.
“But that day I made you go back for the camera? Normally, I would have just gotten it myself. I was only being so difficult because I didn’t want you to think that things had changed between us. I guess I was overplaying the friends thing.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “I was the one who tripped.”
Will nodded. “I was hurt,” he said. “That day, I can truly say I was hurt. I was in love with you, and the next day you acted like us kissing was no big thing.”
“Will…” I sighed. “Of course, it was a big thing. How could it not have been? You’re my best friend, right?”
“I know I should have said something, right then in the parking lot, but by the time I had a chance, you’d forgotten everything. Me entirely. Then you quit yearbook. You met James. It was all too late. But the worst of it is, somewhere in there…somewhere after you and that idiot Zuckerman broke up, maybe I had a chance? But I didn’t say anything then either.
“But I don’t love you anymore,” he said firmly.
“Will.”
“I don’t love you so much.”
I couldn’t figure out anything to say. In a way, I sort of wished I was in love with him instead of James, because it would have been easier on everyone.
11
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I GOT A POSTCARD FROM JAMES.
First off, the picture made me laugh, but he probably knew that it would. Big-eyed, cherubic, blond cartoon toddlers (were they brother-sister, or were they more?) on the beach, and the caption at the bottom, Wish You Were Here…Albany, NY. Are there even beaches in Albany? And considering where here was for him, I doubt he actually wished I was there.
Then I flipped the postcard over and read his personal message, which was only two words long and had no signature. “Forget me,” he wrote. That was it, that was all.
It seemed like the worst possible thing a person who knew me at all would ask.
Yes, I would leave him alone.
No, I would not forget him. It wasn’t his choice.
The only person I wanted to talk to about all this was Will.
I tried him on the phone, but he wasn’t picking up. I ran to school—the exertion felt strangely good—and he was still in the yearbook office, but he was talking to Winnie Momoi. I didn’t want to go in and interrupt, so I waited in the hallway for him or Winnie to leave. I guess he must have seen me through the window on the yearbook door. He came outside like fifteen seconds later, and I burst into tears, even though I could see Winnie watching us curiously.
I could tell he wanted to ask me what was wrong, but he didn’t. He put his arm around me, and we started walking out to his car.
The only thing he said to me was “You’re not wearing your coat.” He went back into the office and returned with his coat (this crazy orange suede one with a lamb’s wool collar) and he told me to put it on. I did. It must have weighed about sixty pounds. It was huge on him, so I was basically drowning in it.
He drove me home.
“It’s really over,” I said.
“I know,” Will said.
“I’m such a jerk,” I said.
“No, you’re not, Chief. You’re great.”
Somehow Will calling me great started me crying all over again. I didn’t feel at all great.
I wasn’t crying for James, though. I think I was crying for how much he didn’t know me and how much I didn’t know him and how I’d acted like such an idiot. How messed up it was that I didn’t feel like I could even tell him when I got my memory back.
I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.
And I was crying for gravity. It had sent me down the stairs, and I’d thought that meant something, but maybe it was just the direction that all things tend to flow.
My heart was a little broken (is there such a thing?), but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn’t show too much.
A sort of funny thing happened the next afternoon. I was standing at my locker talking to Alice when Will’s Winnie confronted me.
Winnie had long dark hair that reminded me of my mom’s, and made me miss my old hair a little. My hair was starting to look like crap by the way—it wasn’t short enough to be short or long enough to be anything else. I hadn’t considered how long it would take to grow out when I’d cut it in the first place.
Back to Winnie. She was five inches shorter than me, but that didn’t stop her from getting right up in my face. “Look, Naomi,” she said, “he was in love with you. We know it. Everyone knows it. But Will is a person of value, and you threw him out when you had James, so now you should just leave him alone.”
“Gauntlet thrown,” said Alice. She let out a low-pitched whistle.
I was shocked. Winnie had always seemed so sweet and like the least likely person ever to confront you in a hallway with a “stay away from my man” speech.
I told her that Will and I “are just friends and barely that.”
Winnie narrowed her eyes at me before storming off.
“Cookie, do you need me to kick her butt?” Alice asked. “We’re about the same height, but I’m fiercer than I look.”
I shook my head. Even though Winnie was being absurd and I could have used a friend at that particular moment, I decided to keep my distance from Will. I needed his friendship, but I wasn’t sure that I deserved it.
I will
12
I WAS STILL GROUNDED, NOT THAT IT MATTERED anyway. I didn’t have anywhere I wanted to go.
To pass the time, I studied, I tried to come up with a new photography project, I ran laps around my neighborhood.
I read my dad’s book in its entirety. It was much the way the jacket described it, but there was this one part where he talked about how he had been “emotionally unfaithful” to Mom even before the split. He wrote how he was always flirting, always wanting people to like him, even needing their kid (me) to love him more. He wrote, “At times, it must have been exhausting to be my wife.” It was strange to know that my dad had such thoughts.
I listened to music. I went through all of my own CDs first. Then I listened to the CDs Will had made for me, and when I was done with those, I listened to them again. It was a completely different experience,
listening to his mixes with my memory back. All the songs meant a little something to me. They were a sort of shorthand between us, a common language that I never could have guessed at. The last song of the first one he’d ever given me (Songs for a Teenage Amnesiac, Vol. I) was called “I Will.” It was sweet and old-fashioned, kind of like him.
About a month into my punishment, Dad got tired of seeing me mope around the house. “I’m letting you out this weekend, kid.”
I asked him if that meant the grounding was over.
“Nope,” he said. “But I am packing you off to your mother’s.”
I could have argued, I suppose. I could have put up a fuss, but what was the point? I knew this visit was long overdue.
When I got to her apartment, my mother answered the door. She said she’d sent Fuse and Chloe away for the day so it would just be us.
She smiled very casually. “I thought we could talk about your photography project today. Tell me what it’s supposed to be.” Her wording seemed a bit canned, like she’d been practicing it for days. Her nervousness touched me, I guess.
We went into Mom’s studio and she showed me pictures, her own and other people’s, and we tossed some ideas back and forth.
One of Mom’s personal albums was a pregnancy album. She had taken a single picture of herself each and every day for eight months. Beginning with the day she found out “for certain” from the doctor, she had fastened one of her cameras to a tripod and positioned it in front of a burgundy velvet wingback chair. I remembered the chair from my old house because Dad had always hated it. Also, Mom happened to be sitting in it now as I looked at the album.
Every picture was the same composition—my mother in the chair—except her clothing changed and her bump got bigger. Here and there, you would find one with Fuse’s hand on Mom’s belly. There were 225 pictures total. If you stacked them in a pile and shuffled through them really fast, it was a cartoon flip book where nothing much happened aside from the miracle of human life, if you’re into that sort of thing…
The last one showed a gray sky, with my mother wearing blue jeans and a white V-neck undershirt that I guessed belonged to Fuse. Her expression wasn’t one of the obvious ones like happy or sad—it fell somewhere between greeting a person you haven’t seen in a long time and stifling a yawn, but it really wasn’t either. You’d probably have to see the picture to know what I meant.