Collide (39 page)

I was just about to head back into the main room to tell her when something caught the corner of my eye. Along the back wall, set apart from the rest of the art, was a display I’d never seen yet I instantly knew. The crowd parted, moving away, and I moved forward.

Blank Spaces.

The work that had first given Johnny recognition, real respect as an artist. Not a single piece but a series of sketches and paintings, all with the same subject in slightly different poses. The most famous of them, the biggest, the one in the center of the display, I’d seen dozens of times in .jpgs of varying quality on the internet.

A woman, head turned so her hair fell over her face and shoulders, in a yellow sundress. She stood in green, green grass. One hand outstretched. There was a hint of water in the background I’d always thought was a river or a lake, maybe an ocean, but in this version, at least eighteen by twenty inches, I could see it was a swimming pool.

The other pieces were smaller, some of them no more than pencil sketches, though the frames made them more impressive. I could see the progression of some of them from first pencil strokes to the final piece. Fascinated, I studied them all, for the first time able to have a glimmer of understanding about what made the difference between a picture and a piece of art.

The woman wasn’t the same in every pose. In some she was facing away altogether. In others, her hands were at her side. Sometimes it was as though a wind had tossed her hair and hem of her dress.

I didn’t smell oranges. The world didn’t waver. I didn’t even blink. One minute I was standing in front of Johnny’s most famous painting and in the next I was in a dark kitchen smelling booze and pot, staring at an empty chair and an ashtray full of crushed cigarettes.

“No,” I whispered.

The calendar said August 1978. I could still smell sweat and booze. Ed’s notebook was still on the table, but he was gone. From outside, the sounds of the party got a little louder, more frantic.

I left the kitchen, went into the backyard. People spoke to me, and I ignored them. I knew the date on the calendar. I knew this place, and what was going to happen.

I found him on the far side of the swimming pool, on the grass, in a pocket of shadow.

“There you are,” Johnny said. “Been lookin’ for you.”

“Johnny.”

“Yeah?” He pulled me closer, and I let him kiss me.

So much to say, no words to say it. I knew so much, but nothing. I took his hand and put it on my belly. I kissed his mouth. I looked into his eyes.

“I have something to tell you.”

Something shifted in his gaze as his palm moved in a slow circle over my stomach. I didn’t say anything. He smiled.

“Yeah?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Really?” Johnny looked at my belly, his hand still rubbing. He looked back at my face. “Emm, really?”

“Yes,” I said.

He kissed me, taking me by surprise. His lips bruised mine. He laughed into my open mouth and pulled away to put both hands on my stomach.

“I’m gonna take care of you, Emm,” Johnny said. “I want you to know that, okay?”

I knew he meant it. I could see it in his eyes. Hear it in his voice. And my heart broke, knowing I was breaking his.

From somewhere, a breeze rose up. It blew my hem. It blew my hair. I stepped away from him.

“I have to tell you something, Johnny.”

In a few hours, Ed would take his own life, slitting his wrists and bleeding to death in the swimming pool. His death would break up the Enclave and push Johnny into a spiral of drugs, booze, sex and excess, then into the mental hospital, taking away the opportunities that had been laid out for him on a golden platter. It would change his life forever.

I couldn’t let that happen. I could stop this. I could warn Johnny what Ed meant to do. They could keep him alive, at least for tonight. And that would, could, might change everything.

I had a butterfly beneath my foot, ready to step and crush it into the mud.

I looked at his lovely, perfect, beautiful face. His young face, young body. I looked at Johnny-then and felt like I held his future in my hands. I could do this for him. Give him the life he’d surely have had if not for this night.

A life without me in it.

I knew that as certainly as I knew everything else. If Johnny went on to trade his face and that body for fame and fortune, he would never become an artist. He’d told me so himself, several times. If I changed this for him, it would change everything else, and some thirty or so years in the future, I would walk into a coffee shop and never find him.

I couldn’t do it.

“Emm?” Johnny reached for my hand.

Another breeze came up. My hair blew over my eyes and I pushed it away, desperate to keep anything from blocking him from my view. I loved him—both the young man he’d been and, more importantly, the man he was now. I wanted him, and I wanted this child of impossibility.

“I’m crazy,” I said aloud.

“I told you, I don’t care.” Johnny reached for my hand. “I’m gonna take care of you, Emm. I told you that, too. It don’t matter about anything else. Okay?”

“I love you,” I told him. “No matter what else happens, promise me you won’t forget that. And…forgive me?”

“For what?” Johnny said.

The smell of oranges swept over me, overpowering, and I fought against it. I turned. I had never gone in front of him. I didn’t want him to see it. But I was going, I couldn’t stop it, and somehow this time felt different.

This time felt like the very last time.

“There’s more to you than a pretty face and an epic ass,” I told him. “And I love you. Remember that. I’ll see you again. Just hold on to that, okay?”

Chapter 32

“Y
ou’re back,” Johnny said.

I blinked and sat up. A wet cloth fell from my forehead into my lap, making it damp. I was on the couch in his office.

“Oh, no.”

“Shh. Don’t worry. Nobody saw.”

I shook my head. “Johnny—”

“Shh, I said. Emm, it’s okay.” Johnny took my hand, stroking each finger. Soothing. “I’m taking care of you.”

I squeezed his hand. “I have something to tell you.”

He smiled. “Yeah. I know.”

I waited for my mind or the world to whirl, but it all stayed steady and still. “How?”

“You told me.”

“When I was dark? Just now?”

“Not now.” Johnny shook his head. “Then.”

I gave a small groan and rubbed at my forehead. “I don’t believe this. This can’t be happening. Can it?”

“I don’t know, babe, but it did.” He kissed my hand and then handed me a glass of water with ice in it.

I sipped gratefully, then swung my legs over the couch to face him. “How?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know that, either.”

My laugh surprised me. “Am I crazy?”

“Nope. I’m not, either, though I thought I was for a long time.”

“I tried to tell you. About Ed. I wanted to warn you,” I said, guilt filling me with heat. “So you could stop him, or at least not let it get to you….”

“Emm, Emm, shhhh. Listen. That bullshit with Ed, that wasn’t what… It’s not what made me lose my shit.”

“No? But you said—”

“I said what you thought you knew,” Johnny told me. “The truth is, I lost it all when I lost you, back then. I was so fucking crazy in love with you, and you kept leaving me. Then you left for good, right in front of me, and I knew you weren’t ever coming back. Shit, I figured you were dead or something. A ghost. Whatever it was, I knew I’d lost you for good. That’s what made me nuts, baby. Not Ed, that prick, God rest his soul.”

“I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know.” I shook my head. “All these years, all those times I went dark. And only when I met you did it change. It’s like…”

“Fate,” Johnny said. “Karma. Kismet. Whatever the fuck you wanna call it. That’s it.”

I thought of what he’d said before. Two objects meeting at a great force. “Collide. That’s what we did, we collided.”

“We sure as hell did.”

“Tell me what really happened,” I asked him. Ready to believe the impossible.

“I told you most of it. You disappeared right in front of me. I went a little nuts. Best thing for me, in the end. I kept thinking about what you said. What you told me I could be. I believed you, Emm. Nobody’d told me anything like that before. Sure, I had people crawling so far up my ass they ate my breakfast for me before I could, yeah, but it wasn’t the same. Nobody really believed in me. But I kept thinking about what you’d said, and the doctors said it would be good for me to draw. So I started. Shit at first, real shit. Talent but no skill, you know?”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“I could show you, but you wouldn’t be able to appreciate it.”

We laughed together, a strange feeling in the midst of all this chaos.

“And then, I got my life straightened out. Got out of the hospital, got sober, got my head on straight. I tried some acting work, that shit, because, hey, someone was willing to pay me for it. But I knew it wasn’t going anywhere, not after all that time. They’d moved on to the next big thing. But it paid the bills, and gave me time to work on the drawing.”

“And then you did
Blank Spaces.
”

Johnny nodded. “Yeah. Big break. From then on it wasn’t wine and roses, but it sure as hell beat panhandling. I was doing something I was proud of, you know? Something I was good at.”

I squeezed his hand again, looking at it. His age showed here the way it did in the corners of his eyes, but I put the back of his hand to my mouth and kissed it, because it belonged to him. I cupped my cheek with his hand.

“It was you,” Johnny said. “Without you, I’d never have done it.”

I didn’t want to take credit for it, the blame of sending him into crazy easier to bear somehow. “That’s not true.”

Johnny laughed. “Emm. It is fucking true. Don’t you get it? You don’t, do you. How could you?”

He got up and went to the armoire in the corner, unlocked the door, pulled out a thick sketch pad bound with rubber bands that looked worn and cracked, ready to give at the slightest tug. One broke when he pulled it, and Johnny tossed it to the side.

He opened the book. Showed me some sketches. Turned the page. “See?”

Harsh, bold lines, the strokes of pencil cut through the paper in some places, and yet created a delicate and intricate pattern of graphite on paper. The same woman from
Blank Spaces.
Similar pose. Only in this one, she wasn’t turned away, and her hair wasn’t obscuring her face. I could see her every feature.

It was me.

I gasped, and yet…wasn’t surprised. Hadn’t I somehow known all along? Had some part of me not guessed this, from the first time I’d stumbled on the ice into his arms and into his past?

There are some things that make no sense. Love is one of them. Falling in love is jumping face-first into a vast abyss, hoping the person you love will be there to catch you. Love is a connection.

Something had brought us together, Johnny and me. We didn’t have to understand it. We just had to accept it.

I looked at the bottom of the picture. Johnny’d scrawled his name and the date. I traced the lines of it with my finger, and even now, years later, the pencil smudged my fingertip.

“This was the first one I did,” Johnny said. “I just sat down one day and started drawing. I couldn’t stop.”

“You started on that day?”

“Yeah.”

I traced the date again and looked at him. “I know why.”

He looked back at me. “Do you?”

“It’s the day I fell. The first day I went dark.”

We both looked at the picture he’d drawn so long ago. The lines and swirls he’d created that made my face. Everything had started and ended on that day, and we’d never know why. Was it important? I didn’t think so.

Johnny closed the sketch pad and set it aside. He kissed me. He put his hand on my belly, over the place where we’d made a miracle. I kissed him, too, no longer afraid the world would spin out from underneath me. Knowing that no matter what had brought us to this place, or what might happen in the future, this was exactly how everything had been meant to happen all along.

I knew all of him in that moment. I no longer feared this was a dream. I knew it was all real.

Author’s Note

I could write without listening to music, but I’m so glad I don’t have to. Here’s a partial playlist of some of the music I listened to while writing
Collide.
Please support the artist through legal sources!

“Breathe Me”—Sia

“Bulletproof Weeks”—Matt Nathanson

“City Lights”—Mirror

“Closer”—Kings of Leon

“Collide”—Howie Day

“Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover”—Sophie B. Hawkins

“Don’t Pull Your Love”—Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds

“Dream a Little Dream of Me”—The Mamas and the Papas

“Ghosts”—Christopher Dallman

“Goodbye Horses”—Psyche