Kissing in America (6 page)

“Oh, it sucks. It totally and completely sucks.”

I felt warm all over, a hundred different kinds of warm.

He stood and put my plate back behind the counter. “Come in the back a sec—I have a couple of books to return to you.”

The back of the shop was brightly lit with long stainless steel tables, concrete floors, a giant sink, stand mixers, ovens, and stacks of metal trays. In the far corner were two large, messy wooden desks. One had to be his mother's—covered with files, a vase of dried flowers, a desktop computer, account ledgers. Two framed photos hung on the wall above it. One was Will at about ten years old—he looked like a tiny version of the way he looked now. The other was a baby, swaddled in a blue blanket in his mother's arms.

“Your brother?” I asked.

He nodded.

I touched the frame. He was so tiny—pink-faced—and all you could see of Will's mom was the back of her head leaning toward him, kissing the top of his head. I sent out a silent hello to his mom and the baby, and I thought of his telescope, staring down through the universe.

Will riffled through the stacks of mail and school papers on his desk. “Here they are.” He pulled out a Millay book and one of e. e. cummings's collections that I'd lent him. “I didn't mess them up. I promise.”

I walked over to his desk. It held his typewriter.

“This is where I write all those goddamned essays,” he said.

A blank page was rolled inside the typewriter. I typed
Hello!
, getting a feel for the keys. “It's nice,” I said. I typed:
I am griefy
.

Beside the typewriter, on top of the stack of mail, was a wedding invitation. Will picked it up. “Mrs. Jerkface's wedding,” he said. “I'm just going out there for two nights. My mom wants me to bring moldy cupcakes as a wedding gift.”

I noticed something else next to his typewriter—a little white tin box decorated with black paw prints.

I picked it up. “What's—?”

“Silas,” he said.

“Oh.”

“I had him cremated.”

“I'm sorry.”

“He was sixteen. That's like a hundred and ten in people years.”

“Still.”

“It cost four hundred and fifty dollars for the ashes. I paid for the rush service. This place is probably going under and I paid four hundred and fifty dollars for the ashes of my dead
dog. Well, I asked my dad to pay for it, actually.”

“It's worth it.”

He sighed. “I can't exactly explain why it's next to my typewriter. Inspiration?”

“Very inspiring. I mean, who wouldn't be inspired?”

“I'm glad you finally got to meet him.”

“Me too. I think it's nice having him near your typewriter. Kind of like a muse.”

“I can sprinkle him on the keys for good luck,” he said.

I put down the tin of ashes and he placed his hand over mine. I couldn't speak. He laced our fingers together. He pulled me to him until our waists were touching. My throat dried up. Everything in the room gleamed bright.

The phone rang. Loud, shrill. He rolled his eyes. “I better get that. Hold on.”

I almost had a heart attack. What had happened? What had almost happened?

“My mom,” he said when he'd hung up. “I have to go meet her in a half hour—we're checking out a new apartment to see if we can afford it. We can't pay the rent on the one we're in anymore.”

“Oh no, that sucks,” I said.

“We'll figure it out.” He shrugged. “She told me to lock up the bakery for a couple of hours. Not that anyone will care if it's closed. We've had about four customers all day.” He picked up my hand again naturally, as if it was no big deal at
all. He kept holding it. “I'm glad you stopped by. I'll walk you to the subway. It's on the way to where I'm meeting her.”

He picked up the books he'd borrowed from me, and we went to the front of the shop and I put them in my bag. He slung my bag across his shoulder and we walked up the street, still holding hands. On the way to the subway we stopped at a Rite Aid—he'd promised his mom he'd pick up one of her asthma prescriptions. I never enjoyed being in a Rite Aid so much. I loved this Rite Aid. I loved the bright lighting and shiny rows of gum and shampoos, and how the entire store pulsed with life, and even the shaving cream and soaps seemed happy.

We left the Rite Aid, still holding hands. His fingers were softer than I'd imagined, his grip gentle. I was floating. The sidewalk sparkled in the sun.

And then, just before we reached the station, he stopped walking.

He swooped down and kissed me. I was in his arms, suddenly, without warning, leaning back, I couldn't believe it was happening, I melted into the sidewalk and became two people at once. The person who was kissing him and the person who could barely think and absorb and believe that I was kissing him. Time stopped. The world stopped. There was only the kiss.

It seemed as natural as breathing—the kiss, good-bye, thanks for the book, thanks for stopping by, and I was off
into the subway, sailing through Manhattan and back toward Queens.

The whole subway ride home, I couldn't read, I couldn't do anything except replay the kiss, the whole afternoon, in my head again and again and again—I could have replayed it forever.

When I got off the 7 train, I called Annie.

“We
kissed
.” I repeated it three times. I told her about the bakery, the typewriter, the ashes.

“Only you would have a romantic moment over the ashes of a dead dog,” she said. She didn't sound sarcastic—she sounded impressed.

“It was perfect,” I said.

I
n romance novels, nobody ever asks, “Hey, what's going on here exactly? Why did you kiss me? What kind of relationship do you have in mind? Are we going to be together or what?” Instead, there are three hundred pages of cholera, explosions, amnesia, stabbings, natural disasters, and misunderstandings keeping the couple apart.

I can handle cholera, I thought. I can handle typhus, tornadoes, and packs of wild homicidal javelinas if it means getting to kiss him again.

It felt like he was still kissing me as I ate fried eggs for breakfast, washed the plates, and waited for the 7 train. He was still kissing me while I studied, grocery shopped, and as I fell asleep.

He texted me on Monday:

Apt hunting w my mom—out of school today & maybe this week—see you Friday at festival tho

His first text to me. I wanted to bronze that text. I wanted
to say back:
I love you come here now kiss me again please I can't wait till Friday
. But I wrote instead:

Ok—see you Friday!

“What do you think?” I asked Annie for the third time before I sent it. We were riding the subway to school. “I want to sound confident and not needy, you know? I mean instead I could say—”

“Send it or I'm going to kill you,” she said.

He didn't write back, and he didn't return to school. On Friday I didn't see him in the hallways, or in the cafeteria at lunch, or anywhere. At tutoring that afternoon—the last tutoring session of the year—I waited for him to show up. Annie wasn't at tutoring that day either—she had her own awards ceremony that afternoon at Hunter College, for the winners of the Schilling Science Prize. Her parents, her grandfather, and her sisters were going.

Mrs. Peech had brought juice and popcorn to celebrate the last session. I crammed handful after handful of popcorn into my mouth and watched the door, waiting for him to arrive. I pretended to listen to the other tutors talking about summer jobs and classes and TV shows, but all I could think about was Will. I glanced at the clock. Thirty minutes till the festival started.

Twenty minutes.

Ten.

My stomach dropped.

He couldn't miss this. It wasn't possible. I couldn't go to Urbanwords alone.

There was a reason, there had to be a reason why he wasn't here. Cholera. A car had struck him like in
An Affair to Remember
.

It was four thirty. “Let's clean up and head to the festival!” Mrs. Peech chirped.

I helped pack up the leftover juice and wipe down the tables and then picked up my backpack and followed everyone else out the door.

The Urbanwords festival had been set up in the lobby of our school—I wandered past tables representing literary magazines and poetry organizations from around the city. I kept watching the front doors, waiting for him to come, and when the ceremony started, I sat in the auditorium in a back row, alone.

The room was packed with kids and families, everyone hugging and picking lint off each other's clothes. All I had to do was walk across the stage and pick up the award. I stood behind the other kids, got the award, and followed along, but my knees felt wobbly. I returned to my empty row.

I could sneak out and leave, but where would I go? Home alone? I fingered the certificate in my lap. I touched its raised letters. “Honorable Mention.” Whoopee. Maybe if it hadn't
been a “mention” but a real prize, my mom and Will would've come. There had to be a reason why he wasn't here. There had to be. I clung to the belief that something had happened. A subway delay. Or something simpler: he'd gotten the time wrong. I checked my phone to see if he'd texted me.

Nothing yet.

I felt paralyzed. Glued in place. I checked emails and voice mails—nothing—and then went to the message board. I hadn't been on the message board for a week, not since the kiss. I hadn't needed or wanted to. I hadn't even thought about it.

Normally there was a slow trickle of new messages, just a few new ones a day. Now there were 114 new ones.

Fran Gamuto had started a new thread. I clicked on it. She'd posted a link to a newspaper article. From this morning.

Freedom Airlines Flight 472 Wreckage Is Found

By HUMPHREY COLES

Investigators announced that they have located the wreckage of Freedom Airlines Flight 472, which crashed in the North Atlantic two years ago, renewing hopes that the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder can still be located and may explain what caused the plane to crash.

A team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution led the search. Three REMUS 6000 autonomous underwater vehicles helped investigators locate the
wreckage nearly one and a half miles below the surface.

“It's a happy discovery,” Frank Longbrown, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a press conference. He noted that it could take weeks before specialized recovery vehicles can reach the site and begin bringing the wreckage to the surface.

The flight crashed in a thunderstorm while traveling from New York to Paris. All 228 passengers and crew members were killed.

My chest tightened. I felt dizzy and began to sweat.

I had known they were starting the search again, but I figured it would be just like the other searches—
like a needle in a haystack
, someone had written on the message board.
We shouldn't get our hopes up
, other people had said.

Try to breathe.

Was I dying? I wasn't dying. I'd felt this before. A panic attack. I'd felt exactly like this two years ago, when I had my first panic attack, before they identified his remains, when I was sure he was still alive. I was supposed to give an oral presentation about dolphins for school that day. Long-beaked, short-beaked, white-beaked, bottlenose, Indo-Pacific humpbacked. I'd researched almost every dolphin in existence. All the parents stood in the back of the room—my mom couldn't make it, of course, since she taught a class at the same time—and I kept watching the door. I knew he was going to come.
He'd never missed a presentation, school play, or anything. I went last—I'd asked the teacher if I could go last—I got up to speak and my dad still wasn't there, and everyone stared at me with this weird look. My chest froze; it felt like it was slowly filling up with cement. I woke up in the nurse's office.

I kept reading the message board.

Even if they find the data and voice recorders, the data might not be intact. As much as I want to finally put an end to the questions and misery and uncertainty, we have to accept that we still might not get any answers.

Tim (wife Beth, 3B)

I don't want to know what the recorders say. I'm at peace now and I don't want to know any more about it. I wish things had been left alone and this had not happened. I'm not sure why it was important to everyone to lobby for the search to continue all this time.

Jill (Jacques Bluelake, 14A)

I couldn't absorb it. I couldn't move or think or do anything but read message after message.

I didn't even notice when someone sat down beside me until I felt a squeeze on my shoulder.

“Hey—I'm sorry I'm late, I've been—” He saw my face. “What happened?”

I couldn't speak. I didn't cry—I was too stunned—I felt numb.

“What happened?” he asked again. When I didn't answer, he said, “Let's get out of here.” He took my hand and picked up my bag, and we walked out of the auditorium.

He led me toward an empty, quiet stairwell. We sat down. I was shaking.

“Are you okay?” He held my hand. “Should I call someone? Or—”

“It wasn't a heart attack.” I spoke quickly, and somehow, saying it aloud, telling him I lied, cracked the numbness and made the tears slide out for the first time.

I took out my phone and showed him the article.

He read it and held me for a long time, until I caught my breath and calmed down, and then I told him everything. I told him how there had been different theories—from the small amount of wreckage they'd recovered two years ago, at first some people thought the plane had broken up in midair. Then they decided it had hit the water intact. My eyes focused on a piece of old gum that had turned into a black spot on the stairs. “I always thought—I decided—that he didn't know it was coming. That he was sleeping and they fell into the ocean, and he was never scared or terrified or felt anything. That's what I've always thought. Hoped. That he didn't suffer.”

“I don't think he was scared,” Will said. “I know he wasn't scared. He didn't suffer.”

I loved that he said that. I loved that he wanted that to be true, that he knew how incredibly important it was for that to be true. Something relaxed inside me, like an unwinding coil.

He looked at me like I was the only thing he saw, not the stairs or the window or the trees swaying outside. He understood, without judgment or surprise. It was like our surfaces were peeled off and it was just our cores. He didn't ask for details; he didn't show the eager hunger. He just listened.

“What bothers me most of all is that I don't know what he felt in those last minutes. What happened to his body. Sometimes it upsets me more than even the fact that he's dead—that I don't know if he passed out and died peacefully, or if he felt pain . . . or if he was sort of asleep . . .” I had to stop and speak more slowly and keep my voice level. “It matters for some reason. I don't know why. But it matters.”

“Of course it matters.”

Once I started telling him things, I couldn't stop. “My mom got rid of all his stuff after he died, but one of his ties was hidden in a ball in the corner of their closet. She made this horrible groan when she found it months later, like she was so mad that he still had stuff in our house. She threw the tie in the garbage.”

He stared at me, listening.

“After she went to bed, I fished it out of the trash. I had to wash coffee grounds off it and egg and tomato sauce and it took me forever, it was silk, so I bought this special silk
cleaner and spent three days getting the stains out. It actually looks pretty good now. I keep it in my shoe box. I only have a few things of his, and I hide them in my closet in a shoe box.”

I'd never told anyone, besides Annie, about the shoe box. It had seemed too weird, keeping his receipt and candy wrappers and stuff hidden in my own closet. But Will was looking at me, not judging or anything, just staring at me patiently—it was okay to tell him; he was nodding like he understood exactly why I spent three days washing that tie.

“I wish I could've met him,” Will said.

“I can show you some candy wrappers. It sort of brings him back.”

I took a tissue out of my bag and wiped my nose. We were quiet for a while, sitting on the stairs.

Will said, “I almost killed myself—not on purpose—when I was a kid. We lived on the second floor of a brownstone, and one night I sat on the fire escape and I just jumped. I was eight. I guess I thought if I hurt myself really bad, it would make him come back.”

I asked if that was where the scar on his chin was from. He nodded.

“I also kind of thought that if my brother was dead, maybe I should be dead too. Or that maybe I could bring him back. I barely even remember my brother, but I still think about him all the time.” He paused. “I guess you never stop missing them.”

You never stop missing them. It was a simple thing to say. But I'd never heard anyone say it before. Not the grief counselors. Not my mom. Everyone seemed to think the opposite: you moved on, you forgot, it was impolite to keep talking about it. My mom had stopped missing my dad years ago.

We stayed on the stairs for a long time. I sat quietly in his arms until he said, “I want to show you something.” He picked up my bag again. He started up the staircase. It led to the south tower, the closed-off part of the school.

“Where are we going?”

“You'll see.”

We kept climbing the winding steps, higher and higher. At the third floor he stopped by a black door. “My coach came up here to propose to his fiancée two days ago. I snuck the champagne up here for him. He forgot to ask for the key back.”

He opened the door.

The walled garden looked like a surreal kingdom: birds fluttering, a blanket of weeds and tall grass and spindly dark trees sprouting from clouds of ferns and wildflowers. How was it possible that this place existed? A stone path wound through the terrace. Beyond the wall, the sun was setting, and the buildings around the park glowed like a bracelet of lights.

“Listen,” he said.

The wind whispered through the trees. We were in another world.

I saw the giant stone table from the photo book. Will went over to it and brushed off the dirt, dead leaves, and branches, clearing a spot for us to sit. Its surface was cracked, with grass growing in the crevices.

The sun dipped behind the buildings in the distance. He picked up a leaf and tore the stem off. He reached into his bag. “Here—I got these for you.” He handed me five copies of the Urbanwords book. “They had them stacked on a table outside the auditorium. I read your poem.”

This was my poem:

        
Fathers

        
My father died two years ago.

        
My mother met her new friend Larry

        
at a Children of Holocaust Survivors

        
social in the back room of Meredith's Restaurant

        
in Bayside, Queens. Apparently it's a regular

        
meat market at these things. They laughed

        
and drank and flirted over cocktail knishes