You looked at Mark, swaying in the doorway. It was obvious what you were asking-you’d just gotten your permit but didn’t feel comfortable driving Mark’s car yet. This was usually a treat for us-Mark would drink too much at a party, and I’d drive you both home, dropping him off first, making sure he got into his house, sometimes even guiding him to his bedroom. Then you and I would drive for hours, rolling slowly across the bridge, along the winding roads to the woods, past the junkyard and lot of abandoned tires. Talking about everything and nothing, simply being together.
But we both knew there would be no after-hours drive that night. Looking back, if only I’d have ushered Mark into the back bedroom so he could lie down for a while. If only I’d have breathed, put things in perspective. I should have taken your hands and said, ‘I’m sorry. This is great.’ Instead, I rolled my eyes and said, ‘Give me the keys.’ On the way to the car, you said loudly to Mark that you didn’t want to run away and get married anymore, that you wanted to do it right here. You wanted to invite all of Cobalt. Mark threw himself into the backseat, groaning, and you got in the front, next to me. When you stared at me, imploring, I should have stared back, but I gunned the engine hard, gritting my teeth as Mark made a gagging sound. What you’d said in the house throbbed inside of me. The words paraded in front of my eyes, obscuring my vision.
I started down the slick, twisting road. One minute, it was peaceful, dark. The next, there he was, paused right in front of us, blinking in the moonlight. I saw his antlers first, then his broad, brown chest. You screamed. My foot fumbled for the brake. I met the animal’s wet, shiny eyes, and then there was that groan of metal. Things were white and chrome and loud and then quiet. Leaves fluttered to the ground. I came to with my head on the steering wheel. I saw your rose-petal hand first, folded neatly in your lap. The glass from the shattered windshield, shimmering on the dashboard and Naugahyde seats, looked like thousands of diamonds. I thought that I could mount a shard in a gold band and give it to you.
‘Hello?’ I cried out. No one answered.
I saw you once after that. The hospital walls were a sterile green. You were in a gown with faded blue flowers all over it, something you never would’ve worn in real life. I was afraid to touch you. Plenty of other people were there to do it for me. They did all kinds of things to you, tubes in places, bags in others, needles in veins, tape covering up half of you, a metal cage around your head. Did they find tiny Ritz cracker crumbs in your mouth when they tried to breathe for you? Did they remark on the strawberry smell of your hair? What did they do with your charm bracelet? Where did they put your diaphanous, paisley-printed blouse, the one that hid so much?
They say I should write letters to everyone, even those that are difficult to write, even to those to whom letters cannot be sent. But my hands feel like they’re being pulled toward the center of the earth, like they have extra gravitational properties. My thoughts plod like dinosaurs. I’ve had so much done to me in the past few years, so much prodding, so much electricity jolted into my head; and so much of it, I fear, hasn’t really helped. But through it all, I have never forgotten you, nor have I forgotten the secret you and I share forever. I hope you know that I am desperate to always remember. I hope you know I’ll cling to everything about you as hard as I can. Although, I guess you don’t know anything, now. I guess you don’t.
1
She’d been away for just a few days when a biology substitute told my class the most important and wonderful piece of information I’d ever heard.
And then he was pulled out of the classroom forever.
Before this, Mr Rice had been invisible. The blazers he wore to Peninsula Upper School-one of the finest schools in the Brooklyn Heights-to-Park Slope radius, to quote the promotional materials-were never wrinkled, and he always combed his thin, wheat-colored hair into wet-looking lines. There was nothing extracurricular in any of his previous lessons, and with his droning monotone, he made the processes of cell division and photosynthesis and the intricate innards of a paramecium seem far less fascinating than they truly were. But on this particular day, Mr Rice drew a double helix on the board, tapped it with his piece of chalk and said, ‘Everyone, this is what your whole life is all about. It’s all you need to know about anything.’