Chapter 1: Down at the Docks (Amber)
This night I had a dream that I reversed time, or rather, that time and other things had flown backward and I moved with them. My grandfather, in his grave these fifteen years, was supposed to drive me home from Seattle, but the route took us backward through an undeveloped subdivision where my home should be but where the map we consulted marked only "Streets A through Z." Oh, how I had missed my grandfather's face, his white hair combed back, his expression of abstraction as he moved his finger along the map. I said, "Are you supposed to drive me home?" and he responded, "It certainly seems that way." I couldn't see how he would, the route was so uncertain, and he was so frail, but he was determined to take me home, and there was no one else to do it.
When I wake up, it is four-thirty in the morning. Brett is buried in bed next to me. There are pre-dawn birds and gray light setting up outside. June is deepening. Thayer had left a stuffed owl at the foot of my bed and my heart leaps in my chest when I see it. It is a thing to be cherished when your three-year old child oversees your sleep with love. How I had fallen asleep before my child is another matter best explained by the insomnia I've had since he was born. At first I supposed I would find my sleep again. This was new parenting and once Thayer slept through the night so too would I. But my mind kept a vigil instead, seeming to burn brighter with the passage of time, and it wouldn't let me sleep. He is always on my mind, Thayer…
I take myself to the lake as the household is still sleeping. The morning is damp and cool and fog shrouds the lake. I am dressed for running, though I don't do that as such anymore. An old knee injury from cheerleading bothers me, and when I feel it I think of high school, and I think of Thayer. How it came to be that he now dominates that landscape, so much more vivid than the blurred images of friends, boys, classes, even the interstices of nights and weekends. I reimagine all of the hours of those days as ones I might have spent with him. Twenty minutes later I am at the dock, looking out across the water to the place where Thayer used to fish, and where, once upon a time, he used to watch me.
I always felt the weight of his gaze. It seems now as though it clarified my actions, slowed time, created an etching of what was otherwise unthought, unnoticed, and unremembered. I remember who I was because I remember him watching me. Whatever I had of beauty or love-and it was little enough-I had through his eyes. I seem now to have admired myself only when he did. I hate myself for ever saying I hated him.
I dive into the lake and swim up to pier where he leaned. I pull myself up to the boards and lean against the pier myself. It is entirely too cold, old, smooth, wet, indifferent. I close my eyes and wait for the sun to come up. Sprawled there, I see an image in my mind's eye of Thayer jumping into the water. I hear movement, splashing, I see him go under. I feel a beat of time pass. Ripples. He doesn't break the surface. I press my hands to my heart. He is going to live forever. He does live. His vitality is undeniable, ineradicable. I move my hand off my heart and onto the edge of the wood, where it catches something cold and substantial. It warms beneath my fingers. I do not open my eyes to see what I caught hold of, but just hold it, and tell it that Thayer will live forever.
I listen to Thayer say, "I've been dead for four years."
My voice, in my head, outside my body, vibrating against the pier, says, "No, it was only five seconds ago."
The thing slips beneath my fingers, seems to hesitate, like a tide returning, then pulls away again from me. "Don't go, please. Not yet." Again my voice issues forth like a real thing, on a puff of watery air.
"I wanted to tell you that I brought Thayer to the lake last week." I say. "It was warm enough, and he spent some time picking out stones on the shore and making a yellow brick road. I waded into the water and caught a small silver fish. Then I swallowed it whole, just to see how you felt when you had done it. It tickled and writhed, and I wanted to throw it up, but then it went down and I no longer did. Want to throw it up. I had gotten past the point where I could save it. Thayer, I…"
My voice dwindles as the water next to me ripples and thrashes under, and a body hauls itself up out of the water and on top of me. All at once I am hot and cold. I am damp, then soaking wet as the water from the body drips onto me. I shiver as I feel cold thighs against my legs, a wet belly pressed to mine, the gravitational pull of arms anchored ever so slightly apart from my own body. Then a firm chin meets my own, rough stubble scrapes against my jaw, and, my eyes still closed, I lift my hands to touch his face.
The sun is suddenly blindingly bright behind my eyelids, red, and then grey where the shadow of his head blocks it. I open my eyes and see the outline of this body on top of mine, a head and neck on arms only inches from mine, a jaw, an ear, wet hair now sliding through my fingers. Wonderingly, I cradle his head in my hands as he rests his forehead against mine. His wet nose touches mine, bumps upward, and I feel his erection stir on my thigh. My nerves fire, I feel my breath leave my body, my shoulders burn straight up to my ears and my belly tightens.
"I no longer love you, you know." His voice rumbles through his sternum and flashes across my chest, the same tenor as it always was, the same inflections, none too slow, and burns my heart. My heart stops, then starts to beat again wildly. My hands are still in his damp hair, my body is pressed along his and somehow I've slid from the pier onto my back straight underneath him.
"Are you one of them?" I whisper, breathlessly.
"I am one of them," he returns, and nips my mouth with his own. I think I am crying, I feel it behind my eyes, but I cannot be sure with all of the water everywhere on my face. I pull his head down to mine and kiss him fiercely. I scrape my teeth along his lips. I suck on his bottom lip and then, when his mouth opens onto mine, I plunge my tongue into his mouth. He returns the kiss, his tongue entering my own mouth and dancing along and then underneath mine, then over again, touching my palette. My chest surges up to his, and his arms, blessedly, come around beneath my back, pulling me up to him. He's entirely hot now, dampness steaming from him, and he grinds his hips into mine.
I become aware of the discomfort of the hard dock beneath my back and I struggle to sit up. My mind and body are dizzy, flooded, breathless, aching. As I move up, he moves his lips from my mouth to my jaw, then my throat, and uses his hands to pull me just so, up into the path of his marauding lips. Everywhere he touches brings fire to the surface of my skin. And all at once we are like and unlike everything else that has ever been. We are alone together in the world within and without lives, reality, husbands and sons, protectors, them, us, what we were, how we are, hands and lips and souls, in and out of time. And then I am alone again.
I look down and see him settling on his back next to me. Why he stopped touching me I don't know. When ten years became five seconds I don't know. His eyes are now closed, he has pulled his hands beneath his head, long biceps curled around, elbows up. His nose rises in the air and his hair falls back on the wood. I see with my own eyes that his chest rises and falls. I wait what seems like five seconds, or ten years.
"Do you want this to be then or now?" I ask softly, trying to keep my shadow off his face.
"I don't want this at all," he replies, peacefully.
At those words, I feel a suffocating weight on my solar plexus. Thayer's death had finally allowed me to acknowledge my feelings for him. I wrote them in the very notebook in which he had gifted me with his closest, most desperate thoughts. I did this after his death, to honor his instruction to me that I do so. No, that's not it exactly. I wrote it down because I felt his loss so keenly that I couldn't contain it inside of me. We had no "relationship" to speak of. I couldn't speak of him to anyone the way I truly wanted to… I didn't have the right to mourn him publicly. So I had to write something down. First, to release it, then to read it back to myself as though it contained wisdom separate from my own mind and heart, as though it saw how I was suffering and commiserated with me. I wrote it down, and then I wrote more on top of it, and kept writing until I ran out of space. Now the notebook is back where it was, in the closet, where I can feel it vibrating strangely.
Pride has ever had its way with me, however. I struggle to contain the depth of my emotion. There would be no shared wonder, then, no mirrored limpid gazing into one another's eyes. I feel the bitterness of this overwhelm me, have flashbacks of the tasteless flesh-groping I invited in high school and college. The bile rises in my throat as I hear Thayer's own bitter voice lashing out at me, describing me on my back. What is this, then? A comet strikes the lake while I'm out for an early morning "run" (walk, hobble…), and sorry, honey, I fucked a guy I knew in high school who I thought was dead but who really wasn't and is just… hanging out… in an alternate universe available only to those of us who have been blown out of the water by a comet. Honestly I don't know how I made it back in one piece… not that it was that good…
I try to drive deeper into the fury I feel: that I am both just an object, a piece of flesh, and yet classically, insufferably, a "betraying woman." And though the kiss, temporally speaking, might be described as just a momentary loss of sanity on my part, it isn't really. It is one of those kisses that foretells the rest. From the moment Thayer placed his hands on my back, I gave myself up to him. I am still trembling with the force of it, my mind and heart strung out like taffy, just waiting to fall from the things to which they used to cling.
It strikes me now, looking down at Thayer's serene face, how little I have ever been the author of my own fate. In high school, when I wanted him, I wanted too much and I didn't see how limited were my real choices: Thayer or some other boy. Easy popularity, or Thayer and a dose of social isolation, loss of focus and control, a detour away from the college of my choice and a future of overstuffed furniture and biannual vacations. Even as I pushed Thayer away to partake of the other things, I felt certain that I had him. He lived, after all. He burned, and I felt him, and the possibility was enough, or perhaps even better than any realization. And then suddenly he was gone, and I was left alone to fantasize for the both of us. And now here he is again, basking in the early morning sun, still young, shot from the water like a new bright penny, no anger, no misery, no love.
Had I really yearned for him to come back from the dead? Had I truly wrote "I whisper words of love into the wind; may it amplify them around the cold corner of life into death, to ring in the ears of my beloved"? To what end? To leave my husband, hurt my child, my very own Thayer, to whom I had promised at birth some measure of attention, love, and security? That I could cut loose so quickly tells me how mendacious is my life. A wedding ring, a mortgage, and a baby, stalwart columns of crumbling sand in the face of a washed-out love.
Brett and I got together as people with compatible ambitions. For my part, I was drawn at first to a certain enigmatic reticence and softness in his character. He played lacrosse, which meant he had a certain measure of built-in social status, but, as a non-pre-professional league sport, this did not dominate his life. He was an economics major, and came from a family with connections. He interned at the World Bank the summer after his junior year, worked for a year in Washington D.C. after graduation, and then came back to school for his M.B.A. We met when I was a freshman and he was a senior. We got snookered at a Halloween party and made out messily on a rec room couch that year, but we didn't get down to actual dating until my senior year, and then things progressed quickly.
I was certain that Brett had never spoken of me as a sexualized creature to any of his friends, which, when I was twenty-three and not quite done yet with college due to an ill-advised European year… on my back… pleased me inordinately. I thought at the time that this was respect, whereas in recent years I had come to view it more as mildness of character. He's the kind of man who blushes and smiles delightedly when you tell a dirty joke. Somehow, that enigmatic reticence had, with the passage of time and increasing familiarity, blanded out into mere mildness. We wanted the same things, but he seemed satisfied with them.
All of this flashes through my mind as I turn from Thayer and look out at the water. I damn myself silently for still wanting to touch him. I know it is some pre-programmed impulse to speak my own heart physically, and in turn to alchemize his desire into love. I finger my collarbone. I know this particular path has never been successful. Men just, well, they can grind against anything. Where once there had been true desire and love with Thayer, now there is only-I don't even know what- since he pulled away.
So, instead I say, not looking at him, "I had a dream last night that I reversed time, or rather, that time and other things had flown backward and I moved with them. In my dream, I felt close to figuring out how to reconcile myself to your death, which is to say, I seemed to have grasped a way to undo it."
"And here I am," he remarks, as though mock-surprised to find himself conjured up.
"And here you are," I say, unable to keep from looking at him. He has sat up now, and is gazing at me sideways.
"But this reunion is not what you thought it would be because you're not seventeen anymore. You wanted this to be then, didn't you?" he states, trenchantly.
I am overwhelmed with what I want to say to him. Yes, I needed you, or rather, the you that loved me, and I'm sorry. Of course you are not what I dreamed you might be, frozen in carbonite, with a heart that beats only for me. Instead I am humbled by the meagerness of what I have the right to say to him.
"I did." I am speechless now with misery.
"I am back in town to help my sister move," he says musingly, as though we are trading equivalencies: I with my broken-hearted confession, he with his current-weather-I-am-going report. I nod, and chew the inside of my cheek to make sure my nerve-endings are still capable of transmitting ordinary pain.
Then Thayer remarks, "Just for old-times sake I haunted the lake last night. Same large-breasted cheerleaders and horny jocks writhing on top of one another. And then, just when everything's finally getting quiet, you come along for a swim at dawn."
He stops talking now.
"And you thought?" I ask abjectly, certain he can feel my embarrassment at being so invested in this line of conversation.
"And I thought, I don't know… there's Amber out for a swim. I think I'll scare the shit out of her." He puts together an inward, half-grin, and rubs his chin on his knees.
"You wanted to scare me?" I ask, incredulous. "You manage to fake your own death, disappear for four years, you've likely killed your father and brother, and you think, just for the sake of a good laugh, you'll blow it all up by revealing yourself to me?"
Thayer smiles a satisfied, jocular smile. "Jeannie thought the whole world had gone crazy to begin with. We didn't even have a funeral, but then somehow everyone was talking about the funeral, and my body, and then some friends of mine had a bonfire down by the lake and it was kind of like that was the funeral and the whole event got mixed up in people's minds. So, yeah, I kind of think it's worth it," he concluded, still smiling.
"Besides," he added, his mouth thinning out, "it's not like there's anything you could or would do about it. Report a sighting of a dead man who's not wanted for anything? Anyway, Jeannie just lucked out with my dad and my brother. They're such drunken assholes they each managed to kill themselves a few months apart." A bit of a crease forms between his eyes. I look at his eyes, looking out over the water. They do look a bit older, and for a moment something burns in them.
"But why kill yourself? Even you didn't think it would work. It's crazy and stupid and there's no point to it." My voice rises in pitch and volume, and I shift uncomfortably on the dock, feeling an echo of the roaring dread I experienced in the check-out line at the supermarket when I was first told he had died.
"No, Jeannie convinced me. After my dad and brother died, I kind of felt haunted, like I had spent my whole life holding out against them and now my arms were weightless, and kept pushing against something that was no longer there. I came home one night from the lake with a gash on the side of my head, because I'm an asshole too and there's nothing left to fight anymore but I was literally throwing myself off a cliff; I still wanted to die." He laughs at this, a short bark, and shakes out his hair with his hands.
"Jeannie saw where this was going and she convinced me to try it. I think she and I both thought it as more of, like, a symbolic act, to get me out of that house, out of this place, onto anything else. She told me she would throw herself into the hole after me if I finally got myself killed, so I had better just cut ties and get out. I didn't even get the death certificate. We just wrote an obituary and had it printed. It's ironic because since no one other than Jeannie knew what happened, it somehow became more convincing." He's back to smiling now, and I can't help it. Just seeing him fills me with happiness. My ears are still burning with mortification, but I am happy. I smile, too, though my face feels scrunched.
"So what have you been doing on the other side of death?" I feel compelled to ask the obvious question, though it somehow feels awkward to do so, as though my social skills have gone missing or are out of place in this context.
"I went to Chicago. I waitered, bartended, got my GED, took writing classes-"
"Oh, my god. Writing classes." I couldn't help myself from interjecting. He looks at me, eyebrows raised, as though waiting for the conclusion of my thought. "That's all," I say, defensively, after a moment. "I just, um, like the idea of you taking writing classes," I finish lamely.
"I don't write about you." He gives me a queer look, now, sort of sour, almost suspicious.
"I know," I say, with some heat. "You don't love me, you don't want me, you don't think about me or write about me. I get it!" Now I am shouting. "You were always such an asshole," I add, somewhat less forcefully, feeling frustrated that the saw only seems to cut one way through this conversation.
"Meanwhile you're eating little fishies to see what it feels like to be me." He says this with a malicious glint in his eyes, and I suddenly want to push him into the water, and keep him under until the job gets done right. I imagine sitting on his shoulders and pushing his head under. My muscles bunch in anticipation, but I know that touching him is the worst thing I can do—an admission of total and utter defeat. Walking away is really the best thing I can do, but somehow I can't make myself do it. Years of yearning, of learning the lesson not to walk away, have conditioned me to think of any time spent with Thayer as precious. Still, I fume at his vicious use of the story I thought I had related to myself and to the ghost of his hand. Damn his real hands, I think, looking at them.
"Oh, my god," he mocks, looking at my face. "You totally want to drown me right now." I stare at him, open-mouthed, as he affects my accents and plucks my thoughts out of my head. "You want to push my head under until I choke and then you want to lay me out in state on the beach, arms at my sides, shells all around me… naked. You sick little cat! Just make sure no one sees you rubbing up against my dead body." He laughs now, deep in his throat, and slaps his knees. That gesture, that little slap, sets me off.
"Oh, yes, Thayer," I say acidly. "That's a real knee-slapper. You were always so funny. Oh, no wait… that's right… I was thinking of anyone else but you. Eating fish, drinking pig's blood mixed with formaldehyde, OD'ing on… whatever… You basically came to school every day begging everyone to notice your pain. 'Oh, woe is me! My brother shot me and raped my sister. My father's a drunken menace of fists and foul breath.'" He stares at me, half-animated, a ghost of a smile lingering on his face.
"And you basically came to school every day to execute your agenda. Stick my ass in the air, twirl and kick for 'exercise'? Check. Slut around with nameless jock? Check. Torment the loser across from me in study hall with nacho chips and patronizing smiles? Check. It's so totally predictable. Was that even your agenda, or did you pick it up from the front desk because your parents told you to?" The smile has vanished. Thayer seems to be breathing a little bit faster now himself.
I take a moment to absorb this, not so much his words as the uptick in his heart rate. I don't precisely know what it means but it takes the edge off my desire to hurt him.
"My parents told me nothing except when my boating or after-school privileges were suspended, usually as a result of getting a 'B' on a math exam or forgetting to put a Flemish curl on the end of a cleated rope." I rub the back of my neck and sigh, look at the sky, fully bright now, cumulonimbus clouds glowing in front of the sun. "Thayer, I'm sorry for being such an unreconstructed bitch all these years. I wasn't ever supposed to make anyone happy, least of all myself. I was just supposed to… achieve good grades and keep from embarrassing my parents, I guess. You know you were like a walking embarrassment. Your eyes were always red from smoking something, when you could even be seen in school not cutting class. God, what was I supposed to do?" I say this faintly, to myself. It feels familiar, as it should. It's a lament I've posed countless times before, a sort of sullen riposte against the cruelty of never having let myself be with Thayer.
"What was I supposed to do?" He echoes. "I am born into this … box … of pain. The only love I know is a mother who dies of ovarian cancer when I'm nine and a sister who's enslaved to my shithead father and brother. Teachers think I'm like this, thing, dredged from the bottom of the lake, putrid and oozing all over their orderly classrooms. Kids think I'm like this thing, too, only they're psyched about it. The ooze from the bottom of the lake! Maybe it'll do something crazy and class will end sooner because of it. And none of them are wrong. I'm pretty much capable of anything, as long as I'm supposed to do it to myself. Because I hate the thought of contact with the rest of the world. Happiness is perverse, it casts everything else in shadow, and I was always cold and numb from looking at it. Then you come along, and you're, like, this horrible, cold, dormant bitch from the skies. You seem to hate everything, me included, and somehow I suddenly feel warm…" he leaves off, stretching his legs out in front of himself, looking at his horny toes playing off the end of the dock.
Now it is my turn to smile. "You liked me because I was horrible?" I ask, happily.
"I would think that was obvious," he says dryly. "That and you were sooo fuckable," he drawls. I once again feel a funny tightening in my belly, and think momentarily of how I used to feel about Brett's circumspect ways.
"So, I really don't understand," I say slowly, but feeling suddenly right again, waiting for him to look over at me. When he does look over, I look back, covering his beautiful face with my eyes. "I'm, like, this luscious fuckable thing, right? Cold and mean and whatever. I act true to form and do what I'm meant to do," I take in a breath and struggle for a moment not to feel angry at myself, or resentful of men in general, "and you riot in the classroom. What's that all about?"
He looks at me for a moment, squinting. "It's getting hot out here," he says then. Suddenly he's off the dock and in the water, swimming like an otter, belly up, then suddenly head down. I look around. The sun is up and everything is bright, but it's demonstrably not hot. It can be no later than seven o'clock. I look at him. He's so desirable, his long body and large hands, his wicked mouth and expressive eyes. I imagine my son stirring at home, my husband buried into his pillow. I watch Thayer cut through the lake and realize I have no time. No time to devote to learning what he's done these past four years, no time to spend trading insults and confessions about high school, no time to bring my body closer to his or to carve out my regrets from the past and explore what might have been. I want to spend this day with him but I could never justify it.
I dive in myself and swim toward him. He's heading back now in a wide arc toward the pier where we were sitting. I intercept him and put my hands on his shoulders, pushing down.
"Oh. You want a push up, huh?" He appears to be teasing. A little tension eases out of my chest as I sense his meaning. Articulating each letter and clapping his hands above the water line he declares in a spirited shout, "O.K.! Let's go! G-O! G-O t-team!" and he clasps me by the waist and shoves me upward. I bend my knees, find his knees with my feet, and together we bend and push up and I surge out of the water, finding purchase on his shoulders. His hands grasp my ankles as I balance momentarily, then I push off and dive in.
"That was awesome!" I shout breathlessly as I break the surface of the water, exhilarated. I turn toward him, "Not the cheer. That was lame. But really, the school of hard knocks or whatever has really built you to support a cheerleader. Shame you were so busy back then ditching school and setting things on fire."
"I bet you imagined me setting things on fire," he retorts, waggling his eyebrows. I laugh now, loud and big, feeling utterly at ease with his jokes about my attraction to him.
"Uh huh. Yeah, whatever you say," I say, still laughing. "Listen, I've got to get back home. Thayer—"
Suddenly I'm shy because I realize I'm using my son's name in front of the man after whom he was named. "… Uh, my boy usually wakes up about now and I've got to get breakfast ready." I start backing away toward the shore, still facing him.
"Yep, you got to do that," he says with equanimity. I can't leave, however, without saying something. I search my mind, etiquette, heart, toes, for something I can say that won't be too much, too out of place. I open my mouth, then close it.
"I just…" I back away, my heels hitting the sandbar. "Um…" I'm about fifteen feet away from him now, so I raise my voice. "I'm really glad you're not actually dead. For your sake, and mine I guess."
"I know that," he sends back forcefully enough for me to hear.