Cures for Heartbreak (15 page)

“You really weren't scared when you were traveling all by yourself?” I asked him.

“Of course I was scared. There was one time I got sick—I thought I was in trouble—but it was just diarrhea.”

He said it so casually, tossing it off.
Just diarrhea.
Such an embarrassing word. I couldn't imagine the guys at school saying
just diarrhea
in that soft voice.

“It was lonely sometimes too, but I met a lot of people traveling and made friends. We still write letters. I'm planning to travel again next summer. India, maybe—that's where I'd like to go next. My mom's not exactly overjoyed with the idea—there are more risks of getting secondary infections in third-world countries. But I think I'll wear her down.”

He shrugged. He had the same gentle, unflappable tone about this. He yawned, then leaned back and closed his eyes. “You don't mind if I take a nap?”

“I don't mind—I'm tired too.”

I loved being this close to him, watching him, his elbow touching mine. I was glad he closed his eyes so I could stare at him blatantly.

I'd had a dream about him the night before. I was hiking with my sister in the Himalayas (though in the dream the mountains looked more like the Abominable Snowman's stomping grounds in Rudolph's Christmas TV specials). As we were trekking through them, we found a place where the earth started to peel off in layers, like old carpet. Underneath the top layer was Sasha, who smiled and said hello; underneath him, in the next layer, was my father, who told us a few bad jokes; beneath that layer was my mother, looking healthy and happy, relaxing in a lounge chair. She hugged us and thanked us for visiting, and said to come back again sometime soon. Then we put the earth back in place.

What did the dream mean? It was different from the Rolf dream—it didn't leave me with questions or confusion. It was just a happy fact:
Oh, there she is, under the earth, same as always.
I'd felt content when I woke up.

My mother would have liked Sasha, I was convinced. His handsomeness, his gentleness, that unassuming calming voice. He looked so healthy, and as I stared at his skin I almost wanted to see scars, some proof or sign of what he'd been through. But he looked fine. You'd never know he had cancer, looking at him. I wanted to ask him what it was like, to know he might die, but I couldn't—it would be the wrong thing to say. It would affect some balance, some unspoken arrangement.

An hour later he blinked awake; he took out a water bottle and offered me a sip. He unfolded a topographical map
and showed me where we'd be hiking, and a half hour after that the train pulled into the station. “This is it,” he said. We walked down the quaint white station platform and through a tiny town with clapboard houses and immaculate streets, then made a turn onto a country road. It was a quarter mile to the trailhead. A few cars sped by, the drivers staring at us strangely, as if we were homeless people ambling along.

“You don't see a lot of people on the trails here. I think mostly hunters use them.” He saw my expression and laughed. “Don't look so scared—it's not hunting season.”

We soon reached the trailhead. I was sweating already; I hoped I was in good enough shape for this. But as we started hiking, it didn't seem too bad, though my pretty new maroon sneakers soon looked like they'd been dipped in chocolate cake batter.

I watched him go in front of me. He moved smoothly, more comfortable with his body than I was with mine. He was lithe and graceful as a deer, while I felt awkward, a little too aware of my arms, my legs, my clunky feet.

We hiked past old stone walls and the foundation to a long-gone home; the forest had taken over, growing inside where the house had once stood. We stopped to check it out. “It's like the Chronicles of Narnia,” I said.

“
Prince Caspian
—when they return to that house after all those years and trees have grown up in it?”

I nodded. “I loved that part. It gave me goose bumps.” I
remembered how it had thrilled and frightened me, the first time I pictured myself as being such a small blip in time.

The trail grew steeper, and I started breathing too hard to talk. I didn't want to go first and have him look at my butt the whole time, but he was hard to keep up with. We stopped for water breaks; he was breathing hard also. Finally, after a long while, the trail leveled off near the top. Then we reached a bare rock incline.

He scrambled up the rock quickly. “Be careful—it's a little slippery,” he said.

I tried to place my hands and feet where he had, but I couldn't reach as far. I held on to a root for balance but the root snapped, my foot slid, and I skidded down the rock, landing on my hands and rear end.

“Shit!” My knee was gushing blood, I had a hole in my pants and a huge gash in my leg. My hand was bleeding too.

Sasha climbed down the rock in half a second. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said weakly.

“God—I'm sorry, I should've been spotting you. Can you move your knee okay? Your ankles? Wrists?”

I flexed them all for him. I stood up, a little wobbly, but fine. “I think it's just scrapes,” I said.

“Sit down—let's clean you up.”

We sat below the rock and he took out his first-aid kit. He dabbed antiseptic on to my leg and knee, which stung so
badly the word
motherfucker
leaked out of my mouth in a very unladylike voice. He applied a huge bandage, then cleaned off my hand too. That didn't hurt so much, him holding my fingertips as he pressed down on the gauze to stop the bleeding.

“It's not so bad,” I said, his hand still holding mine.

“You're very brave.”

“Ha.”

“Do you want to keep going?”

“Of course,” I said. I didn't want him to think I was a wimp.

“You sure? We're almost to the top.” He let go of my hand. “Then you go first this time—I'll spot you.”

It wasn't as romantic as I might have imagined—he egged me on as I sprawled across the rock, clinging to it like a spider. “Put your hand there, and your foot there—that root's not stable . . . there . . . good . . .”

Finally I made it up the rock, and a half hour later we reached the top. The view was fantastic—the huge broad sky, the rolling mountains, and the roads and houses far below, like a toy train model. I was exhausted and exhilarated, sweaty and dirty, relieved and proud.

We ate our sandwiches and lay back on the rocks. After a while the wind made me shiver.

“You cold?”

I had only packed my stylish lightweight black sweater.

“Here.” He gave me his fleece jacket.

“Don't you need it?”

“I'm fine.”

Guys had done this for thousands of years—given girls their jackets (or pelts). But it had never before happened to me.

“It's beautiful,” I said, staring at the view, snuggling into the soft jacket, which smelled like laundry detergent and something dark and sweet, like chocolate. “No Himalayas, though.”

“Still nice,” he said.

“What made you decide to go there, to Nepal? I mean, if there was a risk, like you said . . .”

“I know. Maybe it was stupid. But I was feeling really good, I loved traveling, and I met an Irish couple, Robert and Sue, in a hostel in Amsterdam. They were going and invited me to come. I was reading all these books at the time—that's what I'd do in the hostels at night, and on the trains, read. I'd read Sartre and all this stuff about how you not only choose what to do but who you are . . . and Heidegger, who says it's up to you to make the most of your being . . . and Kierkegaard—at least I think it was Kierkegaard—about beliefs being leaps of faith. I guess I decided I should just take that leap of faith.”

“Wow.”

He shrugged. “At least that's how I interpreted what they said. I probably got it all wrong.”

“But you didn't. You were right to go after all. Don't you think?”

He nodded. “I was.” He stood up. “Can you excuse me for a sec? I have to go pee.”

I had to also, but I was embarrassed to mention it in front of him, so I went off quietly. It didn't seem like anything would embarrass him. He was so different from guys at school—he didn't care about what clothes you wore or what part of the city you lived in (downtown or Upper West Side, cool; Upper East Side or outer boroughs, uncool). Or if you played ultimate Frisbee (cool) or handball (uncool), or listened to ska (cool) or metal (uncool). All of that seemed on another plane of existence from him. All that was meaningless. Beside the point.

He returned a few minutes later. “It's nice being here with someone else. I love this spot. I think after college I'll move out of the city.”

“Where would you go?”

“I don't know. Maybe somewhere abroad.”

I felt sad already—nothing had happened between us—and still I felt he shouldn't move abroad.

I watched a bird winging its way through the valley, and hugged my knees under his big jacket. I noticed a dark splotch on the jacket near the zipper. “Oh my God, I'm sorry—I think I got blood on your jacket.” I tried to wipe it off, but the stain didn't rub out.

“Don't worry—it's fine. It doesn't matter.” He touched my shoulder, and a quiver ran through me.

“I guess a fall like that sort of disputes the ‘Everything in nature always works out right' theory,” he said.

No, it doesn't,
I wanted to say,
not if it made you touch my shoulder right now.

He surveyed the sky. “We should probably head down—it's going to get dark soon.”

We packed up the garbage from our lunches and started to hike down the mountain.

“So what do the other philosophers say about that theory, that nature always works out right?” I asked on the trail.

“I don't know.” He held back a branch so it wouldn't snap back toward me. “Honestly, it's hard to keep all their ideas straight. So many of them disagreed with each other, too. I remember Spinoza said matter could think, that all of reality—trees and dirt and rocks and turkey sandwiches—is alive and can know things. Others thought he was crazy.” He hopped onto a rock, avoiding a patch of mud. “Plato believed in an ideal world beyond nature—that ideas exist in their own realm, and we don't invent them, we discover them.” He paused and leaned against a thick tree. “And he believed that the soul is immortal. Aristotle disagreed—he said the soul is part of the body and dies with it.”

“I don't believe that,” I said, jumping off a wobbly rock. “I think there is some strange force, or something unexplained, about death. When my mom died we were all there, and at that moment it really felt like passing, like her body was just
a shell and her soul was somewhere else, and I wasn't scared. And I feel like she waited for us to be there to die, for the three of us to be in the room with her, even though she wasn't conscious . . . I just feel like there's something we can't explain about it. I've felt her presence at other times too. But sometimes I just don't know, I wonder if maybe I'm just making it all up.”

I told him about the dream of my mother, peeling back the layers and finding her there. Except I left out the part about him being in it, not wanting him to think I was obsessed with him.

“Wow. Interesting dream. What do you think it means?”

I climbed over a tree trunk that had fallen across the trail. “I guess . . . I was thinking about it on the ride up. I don't know. Maybe that . . . love is in layers, or something? Like, you can peel back one and the old loves will still be there. More people you love will accumulate on top, but the old ones stay there, and . . . you can check on them and return to them whenever you want.” I smiled and shrugged. “At least, that's sort of the feeling I had when I woke up. This kind of . . . permanent contentment.”

We reached the rock where I'd slipped before. I slowly edged down it on my butt. He spotted me from below.

“I don't think it's all over when you die either,” he said. “After Nepal I read about Tibetan Buddhism—they see life and death as parts of a whole, and they believe in reincarnation.
My mom's also really into these books by this psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross? She worked with dying patients, and she wrote that before she worked with them she didn't believe in life after death, but afterward she did, ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt.'”

“I should read her.” I paused. “Are you—are you afraid of getting sick again?”

“Sometimes.” His voice was harder, more forceful. He snapped off the stem of a wildflower, and I regretted asking. I worried I'd overstepped a boundary or broken the silent arrangement.

We heard crackling branches in the distance and stopped. A fawn pranced across the path, followed by its mother. In a second they were out of sight. We started walking again. The sky was orange through the trees.

“Who's your favorite among all those philosophers?” I asked.

“I'm not sure. I like the Tibetan Buddhists, and the Taoists. They seem sort of similar in ways . . . they both believe that life is about change and impermanence. You're supposed to accept things as they come, focus on what's happening right now, and not let changes upset you, because all things in nature exist in a state of constant flux. Even death isn't a bad thing—it's part of the changes.” He hesitated. “I should stop talking about it so much—my mom said it sounds kind of pretentious.”

“That's not true,” I said. “It doesn't.” I loved all this; I drank it in. I'd never had a conversation like this with anyone before.

We'd reached the bottom of the mountain, and the path leveled off and widened.

“How's your hand?” he asked.

“Good. The bleeding stopped.”

He picked my hand up in his. I couldn't breathe.

“Your hand is so cold.” He warmed it between his palms and held it gently. The forest was dazzling. The failing light dappled the ground with splotches of orange and pink. We walked side by side and he kept holding my hand, gently stroking my fingers. My skin felt damp.