Love Story (15 page)

I remember that a doctor told me my hip wasn’t broken but I would have a bruise the size of a grapefruit or, since citrus fruits were out of season, an acorn squash. I laughed at this but Hunter did not. He stood there with his arms folded. Some trick of the fluorescent lights overhead formed deep shadows under his eyes.

We began to talk of leaving. I mentioned the subway and he got angry, I thought, so I didn’t press it. My overcoat was retrieved, thank God, because I couldn’t afford another, but they’d cut my clothes off me when they brought me in. Hunter went to change out of his scrubs and stole some for me.

Toward morning I was too sleepy to protest as he stood between flashing ambulances in the driveway, hailed us a taxi, scooped me from the wheelchair, and placed me inside the car. I lay along the seat on my good hip with my head on Hunter’s hard thigh and his callused finger stroking soft patterns on my neck where my hair fell away. In a burst of adrenaline I might have run screaming into the street again if Middle Eastern rock had played on the radio, but this cabdriver had a taste for disco.

Under the throbbing beat I asked, “Why are you volunteering as an orderly in the middle of the night?”

“I’m a white male, so I need all the help I can get for admission to med school. The assumption is that if you’re a white male, you’ve had every advantage.” He yawned.

“Why do you want to go to med school?” I asked. “Were your broken ribs a turning point for you, and you’ve been driven to become a doctor and help other people like you ever since?”

“No.” I thought he laughed a little, but I couldn’t quite hear over the music.

I glanced up at him and saw only the lights of late-night clubs flashing pink and green across his face. Looking up at him caused me to shift my weight, which hurt, so I settled back and closed my eyes again. Talking to him this way was easier, especially considering my next question. “Are you sick?”

Suddenly I felt the same fear that had propelled me into the street at the hospital without looking both ways. He would be taken from me before we even knew what game we were playing.

“No,” he said.

I sighed my relief very slowly and carefully against his thigh so he wouldn’t notice. “Is your mother sick?”

He paused long enough that I thought I’d hit on the horrible explanation. But his finger never stopped stroking my neck. Finally he said, “No. She lives in New Jersey. She’s never taken much of an interest in me. My dad does not have good luck with women. Why do you ask?”

“I’m trying to figure out why you’re not majoring in business at the University of Louisville. I know you wanted to come back to New York, but you could have taken six or seven years and worked your way through Louisville. Swindling my grandmother out of a college education, volunteering at night—you’re going to a lot of trouble here.”

“That’s true.”

I waited for his explanation. When he didn’t give me one, I guessed. “Did you mention medical school to a high school teacher who told you that you couldn’t do it?”

This time his finger stopped on my neck.

“That’s it,” I declared. “They knew you weren’t well off and your mother wasn’t around. They assumed you weren’t med school material. Therefore you became med school material. You’re Gatsby. You’re working your way up. You probably have a journal where you keep track of your calisthenics.”

“You need to learn not to say everything that pops into your head.” His sharp tone cut across the disco beat.

“You’re right,” I said immediately. I had finally reached a friendly place with Hunter—very friendly, if you counted fake dating for the purpose of cheating the medical system—and then ruined it. “Hunter, I’m sor—”

“In the guidance counselor’s office in high school,” he interrupted me, “what they say to
you
is, ‘We can get you into a great college where you can learn to be a better millionaire.’ What they say to
me
is, ‘We can get you an entry-level job at UPS. You can work your way up. If you wanted to take a few college classes to make yourself feel like you’re going places, that’s fine as long as they don’t interfere with work. Someday maybe you will even get to drive the truck.’”

“I’m really sorry.” I had seen Hunter angry, but I had never heard him bitter, and I desperately needed to fix what I’d broken. I pushed up through the pain so I could sit upright and face him across the taxi.

He held me down with one heavy arm. “No,
I’m
sorry. I just …” He looked down at me and stroked his finger across my neck again, more deliberately now, as if forcing himself. “It’s not strange that I’m fooling your grandmother into paying for my education. It’s strange that you’re not. You could have lied to her about majoring in business and taken English classes on the side. You could still do it. Why is it so important that she doesn’t help you, and that both of you
understand
she’s not helping you?”

“Because.” I shouted the word. The taxi driver half-turned in his seat. I watched him to make sure he put his eyes on the road again and didn’t hit any love-starved novelists.

“My mother wanted to be an actress and my grandmother told her she was cutting her off, surprise. So my mom booked for L.A. when she was eighteen. Maybe she would have made it if she hadn’t gotten pregs when she was twenty.”

“With you,” Hunter said.

I nodded on his thigh. “Even after I was born she got a few bit parts, but mostly she would work as a secretary, and then she got training as a paralegal. My dad mostly didn’t work. That was a big thing they fought about. He always had some reason for why he wasn’t working. He was always saying she was the one with the rich family, why didn’t she ask her mother for money, and she always said she wasn’t asking that bitch for shit, not after what her mother had said to her when she left. But she wouldn’t marry my dad, either, and I never knew why, but now I wonder if it was because she didn’t want him officially part of her family, with access to the family money that he talked so much about and seemed so eager for.”

“So you’re a bastard,” Hunter said.

The question caught me off guard. “You mean—was I born out of wedlock? Yes.”

“Then I’ve got one up on you after all.”

“What do you mean, you’ve got one up on me after all? Are we in some sort of contest? A birthright contest?” I watched the colored lights from the shops we passed reflecting on the vinyl seat. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. I guess we are.” After six years we’d finally admitted we liked each other. It had taken us all of an hour and a half to hate each other again.

Or did we? His hand had moved to my face, brushing my bangs lightly away from my forehead with his calloused fingers. “So, you have to win this battle with your grandmother because that will prove she was wrong all along. If you win, your mother wins.”

I adjusted my head on his thigh, unable to find a comfortable position. He was way too muscular to be a pillow. And I murmured, “My mother is dead.”

12

D
eep in the night he laid me on my bed. Summer and Jørdis whispered questions. I got lost in sleep and painkillers but at some point during the next day or the next, Summer brought me a walking cane and a huge breakfast and said Hunter had dropped them off. When I limped back to class, he started sitting next to me in calculus—not flirting with me or hovering over me but acting routinely pleasant and torturing me with wonder at whether he’d really wanted to kiss me that night in the hospital. Summer was all aflutter at the whole incident. She agreed with the X-ray tech that getting hit by a taxi while crossing the street to see Hunter was romantic, until I showed her the black bruise on my hip and the slowly healing gouges in my back.

But a week and a half after my accident, when I’d already come back from the coffee shop and delivered a cup to Hunter for his long trek to volunteer at the hospital, Summer peeked her head into my room and asked me with wide eyes whether I’d read his new story. I had gotten wise by then. I did not get my hopes up. I could have rushed to the library and read it when he was scheduled to put it there for us, but then I would have obsessed about it until class time.

I knew better. I waited until the last minute, Thursday, after a lunch of peanut-butter crackers, to limp to the library and read all the stories for class. Hunter’s last.

That way I was furious for only ten minutes, the space of the walk between the library and the honors classroom building, before I faced him.

The Space Between

by Hunter Allen

His eighth-grade science teacher tried to explain how big space was. Space was so big, it seemed, that there was hardly anything in it, thus its name. Space.

He did not get it, and he wanted to. He hated the rare times when he didn’t understand something in class. So that night after he had fed the horses and eaten the dinner he heated for himself in the microwave, and his dad was ensconced in front of the television with a pack of cigarettes and a cooler of beer at his feet to save trips to the refrigerator, he sat at the kitchen table with a pad and a calculator and worked out the relationship between the scale of the planets and the scale of the space between them. He started by making Mercury the size of a baseball, but that made the sun sixty-six feet wide. He shrank everything again. Mercury was now the size of a pencil eraser, and the sun was six feet wide. Mercury was eighty-five yards from the sun.

He still didn’t get it. Could space truly be that big? He decided to walk out the model. Then he would understand. He crossed his father’s line of sight and opened the front door. Standing on the porch, he could see the orange ball of the sun just disappearing behind the grassy hill on which the boss’s house sat. The black silhouettes of trees slashed across the bright pink sky.

He leaned back through the door and called to his dad, “I’m going for a walk.”

“Stay away from that girl,” his father said.

He didn’t respond to this. He didn’t have to, because his father was watching TV, not him. He simply closed the door and walked out into the twilight, face burning, chest tight with embarrassment and anger and dread and longing.

He stepped off the wooden porch, onto the walkway of stone pavers a hundred years old. They led down a grassy bank to the gravel road that wound through the enormous farm. In New York, where he had come from not too long before, in early springtime the grass still would have been brown. Here in Kentucky it was already long and green and juicy for the horses.

He retrieved a measuring tape from the truck. Standing in the gravel road in front of his small house, he looked to the right. The road disappeared over the hill, but he knew it bumped from grassy hill to grassy hill until it finally met the two-lane highway a mile off. That was the direction his father wanted him to go.

He looked to the left. The road disappeared over that hill, too, but he knew it pitched higher and higher with more and more hills until it reached the high point of the farm, where the boss’s house perched. That was the direction his father forbade him to go.

He loosened a large limestone rock from the century-old wall next to his house—fuck this farm, anyway—and set it on the end of the tape measure to keep it secure in the middle of the road. Then he started walking up the hill. The tape measure was only a hundred feet long, so he kept having to mark his place in the road and start over in order to make progress. After eighty-five yards, he stopped and looked around. He was standing beside an enormous old oak. If the sun was six feet wide and sat directly in front of his house, this was where Mercury would be to scale, a barely visible pencil eraser. He wasn’t sure his classmates would understand this analogy, but he did, and he appreciated for the first time the vastness of space, the emptiness, the vacuum.

He walked another sixty-four yards up the road, gravel crunching under his work boots. The sky had deepened to rose now, and he might have been worried about a car creaming him without ever seeing him in the dark, except that there was nobody out here to run him down—only the boss, and the people who worked on the farm, most of whom had gone home for the night already, or lived here like his dad in an ancient house built back when it was acceptable for workers to live on their employers’ land.

He stopped and looked around. He was standing next to a large mossy boulder that jutted from the grass, maybe a marker of something long gone, maybe a tombstone, maybe just a boulder. He had wondered about it since he’d arrived here at the farm. Now he set his tape measure down on the road and walked over to the boulder. The moss was soft, with creepy-looking white flowers that glowed like an alien species in the disappearing light. He looked back toward his house. It was a football field and a half away now, and if the sun were six feet wide in front of his door, Venus would be here, the size of his thumbnail.

He slid a piece of paper out of the pocket of his jeans and consulted his calculations.

He tugged the tape measure so the end of it escaped the last rock he’d placed in the road. The tape measure zipped back into the case. He made a mental note to pick up all his rocks when he was finished. If a farm truck was damaged running over one, his father would kill him.

He set the end of the tape measure down in the road again and secured it with a new piece of the heirloom fence. From Venus, he walked another sixty-four yards, down the other side of the hill and halfway up the next one, and stopped. If the sun was six feet wide in front of his front door, which he couldn’t see anymore because the hill was in the way, but he knew how far away it was, Earth would be here, also the size of his thumbnail. He looked around. Now he could see the boss’s house on top of the highest hill of all, looming regally in white-painted brick over the wild and verdant rolling hills, like a Victorian lady in a hunting party.

He considered his calculations again. He thought the experiment was working out well. Of course, if he performed this demonstration at school, he would lay it out starting in the science classroom. He would take the whole class on a walk out of the classroom (Mercury), down the hall (Venus), outside the building (Earth). They would have to walk a third of a mile to get to Neptune. That was the only drawback. But Neptune needed to be a third of a mile away, or he would have to reduce the planets so much that nobody could see them, which was not good for the purposes of demonstration. He thought his teacher might balk at the class taking fifteen minutes to walk two-thirds of a mile just to see where Pluto would be at the darkest reach of its orbit, because it would seem to her that they were goofing off and were not on task when nothing could have been further from the truth.

But as he shivered in the twilight, he realized that she might have a point. He himself had no desire to walk the entire two-thirds of a mile to Pluto over another eight hills and up a grade to the stables. Three planets had been enough for him and he got the gist. Pluto had been downgraded to a dwarf planet anyway.

Satisfied—really wanting to finish what he’d started and walk the rest of the solar system, but cold and satisfied enough—he pocketed his calculations, zipped the tape measure up, and started back toward his house, remembering again that he needed to pick up the rocks and put them back in the fence where they belonged.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a movement in the grassy valley below the white mansion. It was the girl, urging a black filly into a gallop, hair streaming behind her. He had thought he might run into her, but he’d assumed that if he did, he would be looking up at her. Now she was in the hollow, and he was on the crest of a hill, looking down.

I
COULD HARDLY SPEAK WHEN
G
ABE
asked me what I thought of Hunter’s story. I definitely couldn’t think. I said something about his penchant for scientific jargon that distracted the reader from the emotion of the story, and I wondered, along with Summer, whether he was writing that way on purpose.

I did not wonder out loud whether he’d moved the setting of his story to Kentucky in order to hint to Gabe that we knew each other and had been toying with each other in our stories. I did not tell him what I thought of his story:

After living the life of a self-made chick for the last five months, and having Hunter psychoanalyze that experience for me, I realized that maybe there was an advantage after all to growing up with money. Maybe I did think better of myself because my grandmother owned a Kentucky horse farm. I didn’t worry as much as someone else would when I was down to my last pack of ramen noodles, or when I got hit by a taxi. I knew that if I ever did deign to call her for help, she would send me money.

But if I did have those feelings of superiority, they did not survive Hunter writing a beautiful story in which he gazed down on me as if I were someone to be pitied. I saw myself exactly as he saw me.

And that made me angry.

The interminable class finally did end. Gabe gave me a look I didn’t really see, hefted himself out of his chair, and left. The rest of the class got up giggling, as usual. Their chatter about Hunter unexpectedly turning out to be a space nerd had already changed to chatter about heading to the dining hall together as they passed over the threshold to the hallway.

Hunter stood with his back against the open door, blond head cocked at me in question.

“Coming?” Summer asked me.

I shook my head, never taking my eyes off Hunter. She stood beside me a moment more, hand poised on the table. I could tell she was looking from him to me, sensing the electricity, knowing we had communicated something awful to each other through a story. Again.

“I’ll wait for you.” She walked through the door. I listened for her voice and Manohar’s and Brian’s to recede down the hall, but they didn’t.

“Everything okay?” Hunter called to me.

He sounded like a noncommittal friend asking after my health. I looked like a crazy person sitting at the table after everyone else had left, staring at “The Space Between.” I was going to sound like a crazy person no matter what I said to him next.

It had to be said. I stood with my book bag, swept up “The Space Between” without a single mark on it, and crumpled it in one fist. Rounding the table, I shoved his story at his chest.

He took the wad of paper. “What’s the matter?” he asked innocently.

I thought of Summer, Manohar, and Brian just outside the door, listening. I did not want them to hear this. But if I asked Hunter to step away from the door and close it so we could have a private conversation, I would be showing him how much I cared. I was through with that.

I moved even closer to him and met his gaze. “I’m below you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said evenly, looking me straight in the eye, obviously waiting at the door for exactly this altercation, which proved he did in fact know what I was talking about, and I had had enough.

“I’ll tell you what I’m talking about.” I touched the thumb of my opposite hand. “I wrote a story about how much I liked you. I never meant for you to read it.” I touched my pointer finger. “You wrote a story about how much you hated me.”

Hunter’s grin melted from his face. He took a breath to say something.

“No, you’re right,” I interrupted him. “Not one story. You wrote three stories like that.” I touched my third finger. “I wrote a story about my mother, hoping we could talk about it.” I touched my fourth finger. “In response, you wrote a story about looking down on me.” I touched my pinkie, really banged on it with my other finger, until I bent it backward and hurt it. “Don’t write any more stories about me, Hunter. And I won’t write any more stories about you. Deal?” I whirled toward the door.

“Wait,” he said.

Whatever. I’d reached the threshold. The light was brighter in the hallway, and Summer, talking to Manohar and Brian, looked up at me with concern in her eyes.

“Erin.” His hot hand was on my shoulder. He pulled me back into the room, against the door, out of their line of sight.

He leaned close. This must have been because he didn’t want the others to hear, but I could almost have pretended that he wanted to be near me as he growled against my cheek, “If that’s all you got from my story, that I hate you, you’re not a careful reader.”

Even though my heart raced with his closeness, I tilted my head and stared at him blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Two could play that game. I rolled away from him and stepped around the door frame.

He caught me and pulled me back again.

Pinned me against the door.

Crushed my lips beneath his.

I let him sweep his tongue inside my mouth and take over my body there in the rich room for one long, taut minute. Then I realized what I was doing, and what he was doing. I pushed his shoulders. Hunter did not push easily. I shoved him away hard and nearly toppled over myself, bouncing my sore hip against the door and sliding off.

Hunter grabbed my forearm before I fell. “What’s the matter?” he asked, eyes glassy.

I started to speak and realized I’d pressed my fingers to my tingling lips. I put my hand down. “What’s
always
the matter? You’ll be nice for the next two weeks, and I’ll agonize over what we mean to each other. Then you’ll write another story for class. You’re experimenting with me like you play with the women in your stories. All my stories are about you. And I can’t do this anymore.”

I jerked my arm out of his grasp and stalked out of the room, past my wide-eyed friends.

As I descended the stairs, holding on to the rail to keep from wrenching my hip, I heard Summer stage-whisper to Hunter, “What did you do to her now?”

The coffee shop was slammed and just got busier as the night dragged on. A new off-off-Broadway play in the theater next door had gotten great reviews—I’d wanted desperately to see it but hadn’t had a spare second—and when it ended each night, it dumped the patrons into the shop, thirsty for lattes.

Somehow I managed to write my story for next Monday’s class anyway. I scribbled sentences on discarded receipts and a hundred napkins when my boss wasn’t looking and stuffed them in the pockets of my apron. Late in the night when I got off work, I wondered whether Hunter expected me to bring him coffee again for his trek to the hospital. I trudged in the other direction, to the library, where I typed every receipt and napkin into my laptop, printed off the file in the computer lab, and turned in my story to the front desk before I could chicken out. I constructed my sentences of the strongest steel, honed them to fine points, and hurled them straight at Hunter’s heart.