He said it solemnly, but his eyes were laughing and I found myself smiling at him. “My dad never published. He was a professor. The poetry was just a hobby.”
“Obviously it rubbed off on you.”
“Yeah.” I stopped smiling. My throat went tight.
“Where is he?”
“He died. Three years ago.” And then for no explicable reason, I started to cry. “I miss him.”
Pete put his arms around me. “I bet. I bet you miss him right now especially. I know how lonely it can be when your view of reality doesn’t match everyone else’s.”
I pulled away. “You do?”
“Actually, yeah.” He used the sheet to wipe the tears from my cheek. “Now put your arms around my neck so I can get you into this chair and you can wash your face.”
I did and he put an arm under me and lifted me out of the bed. He went to put me in the chair, but it rolled backward. “This isn’t as easy as Loretta made it look.”
“Don’t tell me it’s the first time you’ve had a lady in your arms.”
Grunt. “No, its just”—the chair moved another foot—“usually they’re more complian—gotcha!” The wheelchair hit the back wall and he spilled me into it, trapping his arm behind me.
Which brought our noses right next to each other. We looked at each other like that, barely able to keep one another’s two eyes from merging into one.
He smiled. His eyes got cute crinkles around them when he did that, and for the first time I noticed he had dimples.
His chin had a little growth of beard on it and he had really nice teeth and his lips looked soft and smooth, like a movie star’s, curling up at the edges.
He raised his free hand to the back of my head. My heart started to pound. He was going to kiss me. He was going to kiss me and I wanted him to. I really wanted him to.
I wanted to feel his mouth against mine, feel the stubble of his chin against my neck, feel his tongue parting my lips. This boy in his ridiculous T-shirt with his blunt way of talking, I wanted him to want me, to like me. Because I liked him. He leaned in closer, urging my head forward, closer to his. My heart was racing. I closed my eyes and felt—
Him pulling his other arm from behind me. I opened my eyes.
“Sorry about that, I guess I need some practice,” he said, taking a step backward. When I didn’t answer, he bent down in front of me. “You okay? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
I swallowed. I was not disappointed, I told myself. “No, I’m fine. Just a little dizzy.” Maybe I was crazy! I had a boyfriend I loved. I did not indulge in fantasies about other guys.
“Good. I’m pretty sure adding to patients’ injuries isn’t considered doing a good job as a volunteer.” He started pushing me into the bathroom.
“What did you mean when you said you weren’t quite a volunteer?”
He maneuvered me over the bathroom threshold. “My father is making me do this. It’s penance.”
“For what?”
“He’s rescuing me from turning into a college dropout and a low-life deadbeat thug.” I watched his face reflected in the mirror in front of me and saw a flash of something like disappointment flit across it. It disappeared and he winked at me. “Told you I was dangerous. You okay in here? Got everything you need?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be outside when you want to come out. Just knock.”
“Thanks.”
He smiled and patted me on the head. “Don’t let them make you doubt yourself. All the greatest visionaries in history have been told they were insane at some point.”
The door closed behind him and I was left staring at myself in the mirror.
I knew it was me, but it didn’t feel like me. The swelling had gone down a lot and the contours of my face were mostly back, but I still felt like I was seeing myself for the first time. Were those my eyes? Was that my nose? Were those my lips? I leaned across the sink and rested my hands on the cool glass of the mirror, covering up the parts that were still swollen with my palms to see if that made a difference.
A stranger looked back. A stranger with a black eye and a swollen lip. And now, as I remembered how I’d thought Pete was going to kiss me, a stranger who was blushing furiously. Was I out of my mind?
Why, yes, yes, I was. Everyone else thought so. And here was more proof.
I started to laugh, but not in a normal way. In a way that felt out of control, like I was hysterical. I was going out of my mind, losing my marbles: nuts, crazy, bonkers. I could have sworn the phone call was real, I could have sworn the writing was real. I thought Pete liked me.
I thought my mother loved me. She had, once.
On the day of my father’s funeral I sat on the side of her bed—their bed—watching her get ready. She’d looked beautiful in her black suit, I thought. Perfect and polished and together. When I grew up, I wanted to look like that.
She’d reached for the pearl-and-gold chain necklace my father had given her for her last birthday. I had my nose buried in the puff of the Jean Nate powder she kept on her dressing table, the only thing she wore because my father didn’t like perfume, so I didn’t notice that the necklace had gotten tangled. Suddenly she held it out to me and said, “Jane, fix this, will you?” and I saw her hands were shaking. I looked up and she was crying.
I went to her, kneeling next to her, and she buried her face against my hair. We stayed like that for a long time, me comforting her, being comforted by it. I hadn’t realized until that moment that it was hard for her too, hard maybe in a different way than I could understand. That he’d left her alone too.
When she pulled away, I handed her the unknotted necklace. She smiled at me, smoothing my hair, and said, “We’re a good team, aren’t we, darling? We can get out of any knotty situation if we just stick together.”
I nodded.
“It’s going to be hard in the months ahead. I’m going to have to work a lot to support us. I know you’ll help me with Annie. I know you’ll be brave.” She’d smoothed the hair off my forehead. “You are such a good girl, my beautiful Jane. I love you.”
“I love you too, Mommy.”
The memory pierced me now. She loved me, she’d loved me then, and she still loved me. She did. We could get through anything if we stuck together. So if she said that the calls weren’t real, that no one was trying to kill me, that had to be right. Didn’t it?
I beseeched the stranger in the mirror. Didn’t it?
Should I trust my gut? Even though everyone else said it was faulty?
Which was better, to be insane but safe or to be sane but have a killer after you?
I washed the face that belonged to me but didn’t feel like my face and dried it on the rough institutional paper towels. I found myself wishing my mother’s makeup were still there so I could do something to look better—Not for Pete, I rushed to tell myself. For who, then?
“So you’ve become a true stall sister,” a voice said. “Worried about makeup when she should be worried about recovering.”
I was alone. There was no one in the room. And yet it was Bonnie’s voice, clear, laced with irony, back from the grave. And in my head. Where it belonged.
I knocked on the door to be let out.
“I think I must be immune,” I said as it opened, working to keep my tone light. “I tested myself and I haven’t fallen in love with you yet.”
But it wasn’t Pete standing there.
Chapter 19
“Oh, I’mall too aware of that, J. J.,” Scott said. He’dbeen sitting in one of the blue nubbly chairs, but he jumped up when I opened the door and rushed toward me.
“Sorry, thought you were someone else.”
“Someone else you’re not in love with?” he joked. His tone was a little perplexing, but he was smiling as he leaned against the wall now, hands in his pockets. “Man, you’re tough.”
I didn’t know if it was how close he was standing or just being in the chair, but I was acutely aware of how tall and bu
ff he was. It was easy to see why he had such a hard time believing that I alone of all the women in the world wasn’t in love with him and why he was routinely stopped by modeling agents. He was wearing black jeans and a linen shirt open at the neck. Scott’s family was originally from Haiti, and he described his skin tone as being the color of polished teak. To me it registered as the perfect burnished tan. He had high cheekbones and a delicate mouth that was just full enough to miss being too feminine. His eyes were a light caramel brown that matched his curly hair and skin, making him look exotic and incredibly cool. Whenever anyone begged him—and it had come to that—to model, he always explained that his place was on the other side of the camera.
And he was a very talented photographer. He was very good at everything he undertook because he wouldn’t let himself not be. He was intense that way.
“It’s great to see you. If I’d known you were out here, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time in the bathroom.”
“I just got here.” He wheeled me out and turned me to face him. His fingers lingered on my arms and he breathed deeply. “You look fantastic.”
“For a girl who was run over.” He always seemed like he was looking into me, through me. I wondered if he even saw how bad I looked.
“For anyone. Even someone who didn’t get to use her favorite shampoo and who’s not in love with me.”
“Stop it!” I insisted. “It was just—”
“Nothing,” he finished for me. “I know.” He reached out to tuck a piece of hair behind my right ear. “Sorry I couldn’t get here yesterday, I had to work,” he explained. Scott was the oldest of four children being raised by his grandmother. She was a physician’s assistant, which paid okay, but not well enough to support the family, so Scott helped out doing a bunch of different jobs. He never complained, but I knew he would rather have been taking pictures.
“You didn’t miss anything. Not much goes on around here. The machines do all the work.”
“I don’t know, your mother certainly seemed busy when I saw her out there in the hallway.” Scott sat down in one of the blue chairs and pulled me toward him. He picked a hair off my knee. “She was surrounded by a bunch of people plotting your recovery.”
“More likely an intervention. Do you think I’m crazy?”
He frowned and was silent.
That wasn’t good. “You have to ponder that?”
He grinned. “Naw, I’m playing. No, you’re not crazy, why?”
I told him about the phone call and how everyone thought I’d made it up. Or at the very least, that I was taking it too seriously, that it was just a prank.
“I can see that,” Scott said. “It being a prank.”
“Why?” I demanded.
He shook his head. “Nice, J. J. Putting me to the metal. You’re right, I have no reason to be sure. But I want to think that because I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt you. I imagine that’s true for everyone.”
When school first started nine months ago, Scott and I talked every day, sometimes more than once. He’d call five or six times, text a bunch. But we hadn’t been that close recently and I realized now I missed it.
I reached out and took his hand. “Thank you.”
He shifted in his chair. “I don’t want to insult you, but I don’t think much of the decor here. Luckily I have an idea of how we can spice it up.”
Without letting go of my hand, he reached down and I heard him rustling around in the messenger bag he’d propped next to the chair.
When he came up, he was holding a snow globe with the Statue of Liberty inside it. “It’s even better than it looks. See—” He let go of my hand to wind something in the base and it started playing “New York, New York.” “And there’s no way to turn it off. Do you love it?”
“Yes.” I held it up in front of me and looked at him through it. “I do.”
“You have to get better so we can have a day like that again,” he said.
The weekend after my first date with David, a brisk October Saturday, Scott and I had gone to New York for what he called the Cloud Challenge. It was based on the concept that some people see faces in clouds, while other people see clouds in faces, that people’s perspectives condition both how and what they see. His idea was that we would spend the day in New York taking photos of the same things and that by comparing them, we’d learn something about our individual styles.
“Should we buy a map?” I asked as we got off the train at Penn Station.
“We don’t need one.”
“But what if we get lost?”
Scott laughed. “There’s no such thing as lost; there’s just adjusting your perspective.”
“I’m buying a map,” I said.
“Suit yourself.”
The air was crisp with a tangy bite like a good apple when we got off the train and made our way to the Met without the map. In Central Park the trees were starting to turn and we kicked leaves around as we walked over from the subway.
Inside the museum we got lost on our way to the photography section in a series of rooms filled with medieval altar paintings, saints, and Mary and angels all crouched together against lapis-blue or reddish-gold backgrounds, looking toward Jesus standing proud in the middle. That led us to a conversation about what it meant as an artist when you worked with really iconic subject matter. And I started to understand what Scott meant about never being lost.
From there we made our way downtown, without a plan, letting our feet and the traffic lights determine where we went. We ate roasted nuts from a cart on Fifth Avenue. We took self-portraits in the windows of Tiffany’s and Barneys. We photographed manhole covers, solitary flowers in planters, and a dog tied next to a sign that said WILL WORK FOR FOOD. I never once took out the map.
Around Union Square, Scott said, “Keep your eye out for those,” pointing to a black, red, and white sticker of a man’s face looking very stern with the word OBEY beneath it. “They’re all over the city, like an underground art show.”
“Who put them up?”
“Anyone who wants to. The idea is to get people to think about how much they obey, follow the rules, in daily life.”
“But the rules make civilization work. Without rules we’d all just kill each other.”
“That’s what everyone wants you to believe. But they’ve done these studies in Europe that show that in places with fewer traffic signs, people drive better. Because they pay attention to one another.”
“I don’t know. I feel like I already spend a lot of time thinking about other people.”
“You think about what they think of you. It’s different.”
“Do you think I’m self-centered?”
“There you go again.”
For our final set of photos we’d stopped at a stand on Canal Street where we’d each bought a snow globe with the most iconic thing about New York we could think of, the Statue of Liberty. We went away by ourselves to take pictures of it and agreed to meet half an hour later at a Chinese duck place in Chinatown Scott knew about.
I have to admit, I was feeling smug when I got to Great New York Noodletown. I thought my Liberty photos were smart and looked great.
I had taken the snow globe and put it near one of the OBEY posters that had a homeless man smoking a cigarette in front of it. The Statue of Liberty on one side and the word OBEY on the other were like a frame for the portrait of the homeless man. I named it Triptych of Modernity based on the altar paintings we’d seen at the Met that morning and I was really proud of how clever it was.
But Scott kicked my ass. He broke the snow globe open and photographed each piece separately. The statue, pieces of foam that faked snow, the music box, the black molded base, the empty plastic globe, the plaque that said LIBERTY and called it My Mistress at Her Bath or Patriotism Revealed.
Over duck and strong hot tea and water Scott told me about how he’d found Great New York Noodletown when he used to go visit his dad during his arraignment hearings at the courthouse
nearby. Even though they both lived with their grandparents, I couldn’t help think about how different he was from Langley. But they both shared a steely core, the kind of thing I decided that makes you a survivor. And a great observer.
“You’re nervous about something,” he said.
“Have you heard about the Getty Images internship?” I scrunched up my straw paper into a worm.
“Yeah. I would kill to apply, but I have to work. You should do it. Without me in the running, you’re bound to win.” He winked.
“Modesty so becomes you.”
“Come on, I kicked your ass on this last photo.”
“Maybe. Do you really think I should apply?”
“What I think doesn’t matter. Don’t you want it?”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
“Hold on.” He got out his phone and held it toward me. “It’s the cop-out hotline calling for you.”
“I’m not copping out.” I dropped water onto my worm so it started to grow.
“You’re afraid. You’re afraid of trying and not succeeding. What’s the worst thing that happens if you apply and don’t get it?”
“I’ll be mortified.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. My friends?”
“Your friends will think it’s cool you tried. Or don’t tell them.”
“Sure. You’re right.” I pushed a piece of rice around my plate with my chopsticks.
“Chicken.”
“No, we’re eating duck.”
He pointed at me with his chopsticks. “You’re always waiting for approval from someone else. Why don’t you just do what you want?”
“It’s not like that.” He was getting that intense look.
“You know one thing that makes your pictures different than mine?”
I rolled my eyes. “Your hubris?”
“You use autofocus. You cede part of your vision to someone else.”
“But it does a good job. And if I don’t like it, I change it.”
“Always?” He swigged the rest of his tea and poured us each some more.
“What does that mean?”
“I just think that once you begin to see things the way the camera says is the average way, the way most people want to see them, it can be hard to remember to go back and find your own focus, your own point of view.”