Nature of Jade (17 page)

"Isn't it?"

"The best." I put my fork down. Maybe it's the faux fire and the rain and the sinking couch, I don't know. Or maybe it's his soft clothes and warm eyes, but I'm just comfortable there with Sebastian. Some guys give you the edgy feeling of dogs behind chain-link fences, and some give you the nervousness of high heels you're not used to. But Sebastian--he makes me feel like I just buried my nose in warm laundry. It gives me a casual bravery--not how I'd be with anyone at school. With Sebastian, I am new.

"Okay," I say. "Here's what I know about you. Your name. That you work in a nice place and know a lot about books. That you have a son; that you appreciate elephants and live in a houseboat with your grandmother that you call by her first name."

"Tess isn't the type you call 'grandmother,'" he laughs. "She sounds unusual."

"That's one way to put it. She raised my mother and my aunt by herself, used to have a community theater . . . But she's always been an activist. Give her a cause, she's happy.

Old-growth forest--great. Picketing the NRA--no problem."

"Wow," I say.

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"Tess is one to get carried away. She once led this secret uprising to switch the voice boxes of Barbies and G.I. Joes. When they hit the shelves, G.I. Joe said, 'Let's go shopping!' and Barbie said, 'The enemy must be overtaken.'"

I laugh. "No way."

"Yes way. Sex-role stereotyping in children's toys, all that. She calmed down for a while when she hooked up with Max. Weaver. You ever heard of him by chance?" I shook my head. "He used to run the Iditarod. He was an early climber of Everest, too. Great man. She was peaceful with him. But he died last year. Lung cancer. He didn't even smoke."

"I'm sorry."

"Me too. I think Bo gives her a distraction from her grief."

"I'm sure." We sit quiet for a moment. "So, what else is there to know about you?" I ask.

He sips his chocolate. He has cream on his upper lip. "That's a big question," he says. "Although maybe not so big. I wish I had more to say. Mostly, I'm all about Bo right now. I'm Bo's father. It freaks me out to say it sometimes. I'm someone's father. God. It shouldn't be allowed. But you have a baby and they take over your world. One little person and ..." He put his palms down, gestured a spreading, a widening. "Your whole life."

"Was he planned?"

"Oh, shit, no," Sebastian says. He half laughs, runs his hand through his curls again. "When I found out... I thought my life was ruined. I was pissed, scared . . . Man, so scared, I cannot tell you. I was ready to start college ..."

"Did you ever consider other ..." I looked around for the right word. "Options?"

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"I would have, absolutely, only I didn't know she was pregnant until too late. She hid it from me.

Everyone. Herself." She. Bo's mother. I wonder where she is. Who she is. "Now that Bo's here, I can't imagine him not here. The first time I saw him, man, that was it. Something happens to you I can't explain. But then, I was ready to start college ..."

"You were just out of high school?"

"Just finishing. I wasn't even eighteen."

Quick math calculations. Sebastian is somewhere around twenty. We have a two-year difference, no big deal. Not to me. But with me still being in high school and him with a child, we are a lifetime apart.

I decide to let him know, get it over with. "That's where I am," I say. "It's hard to imagine dealing with that now."

"Oh, yeah?" Sebastian says. "I thought you were older." So that's that, I think. I consider taking a last swig of chocolate and heading out. What was I thinking ? He had a baby. I had a locker.

But Sebastian seems to have moved on from our age difference just fine. "You seem older," he says. "Maybe it's the way you care for the elephants."

"I graduate in June," I say. Might as well hammer a few nails into the coffin lid.

Sebastian holds his mug between his hands. His elbows rest on his knees. "Are you going away to college?"

"Probably not. Probably here. Is college out for you now?"

"I hope not. I wanted to study architecture. Want. When Bo gets a little older ... I can't burden Tess too much. It wouldn't be right."

I sip my chocolate. The mother question is there again--I

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can almost feel it. It is the rain on the windows, though, the music, the feeling of being in a cocoon, that makes me slip off my shoes and tuck my feet under me and ask. There is nothing like safety to make you feel bold, I was learning. "What about Bo's mom? Can she help you?"

"She's ..." It almost seems as if he has to think about this. "Dead. Died."

He gets up from the couch. Walks to the window. Folds his arms around himself.

"Oh, my God," I whisper. Oh, my God, oh, my God. He hadn't wanted to talk about it, and now I know why. Shit, that explains things. And I had to go and open my big mouth. I could be so stupid. I could be so bad at reading signs. My instinct spoke in a foreign language.

"Yeah," he says.

"What happened?" I whisper. This--it requires soft voices. I feel sick with horror. He doesn't speak for a while. "She died. . . . Childbirth," he says finally. "Oh, my God," I say. "Yeah."

Childbirth. Oh, God, how awful. How traumatic. How rare was that? And what guilt he must have. I can't take it in. I can't picture his life. It's like seeing some disaster on TV. The words go in, even the pictures, but there's no way to grasp it and make it real. Real tragedy, not the kind of my imagination.

"I'm so sorry," I say.

"Can we . . . talk about something else?" Sebastian says to the window. "You know ..." "I am so sorry," I say.

"It's . . . what happened." He stares into the street. "I just the nature of jade 154

want to say one more thing," he says at last. A gust of wind blows the trees outside, and splats of rain hit the window. I picture people under umbrellas on the grounds of a cemetery. "This thing that happened between Tiffany and me ..."

Tiffany. A real girl. "With white-blond hair . . .

"Getting pregnant and all . . ." Sebastian crosses his arms, looks up at the ceiling for a moment.

"I didn't go around doing that, you know, having sex with people. Tiffany . . . She was someone I loved since I was like, eleven. Her parents were really overbearing. They put all this pressure on her. She would cry and tell me about it and I would just break in half. This sad, beautiful little person I wanted to watch over. She said when she was with me was the only time her life was true. When we finally got together, I mean really got more serious ..."

"It's all right," I say. I don't know what is all right. Nothing, really.

"We don't know each other, but I don't want you to get the wrong idea about me because of Bo.

Me having Bo. 'Getting a girl pregnant'--I mean, it sounds like someone who's this ... I didn't even go on dates."

"I appreciate your telling me. I didn't think that, anyway. ..."

"You--you're like the only other one I've even noticed."

I don't say anything, mostly because my insides are tangled. Sad, happy, heavy, dancing. I want to cry. I want to smile.

"When that baby elephant put his trunk up to your hair, and you kind of pulled back, surprised ...

And then you rubbed his trunk. Her trunk. It was really ..."

"I UJOS surprised. . . ."

"Caring," he says.

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"You can't not love them," I say.

"Oh, I'm sure some people could manage," he says. "Most people, it seems like they've only got one part of the equation down. Caring for themselves, or caring for someone else. And I've learned how important it is to have both. I don't know. . . . Look, I'm sorry about all the deep talk for one night. I feel like a fuck-up. First date, and I make you work in the store and then we discuss these things, and I don't even take you to the movies or something. And I don't even know your last name. ..."

"DeLuna," I say.

"Jade DeLuna. God, that's pretty," he says. "It fits you. I'm so glad to know, because it's been bugging me. One of those things you're embarrassed to ask after too much time passes.

Something I should have found out a while back."

"Like how old Bo is," I say.

"Fifteen months," he says. "Tess tells me we stop counting his age in months after a year and a half. If not, he'll be five and we'll still be saying he's sixty months."

"Yeah, that might embarrass him."

"That's supposed to be part of the job, right? I'm looking forward to that."

"My mother was great at it," I say. "She brought me my lunch once, when I forgot. I was a sophomore. She came to my math class."

"Ouch," Sebastian laughs, and then we are off, talking and laughing, and things are easy and there are no sudden roadblocks. We are in front of a blazing faux fire, surrounded by books, the reflection of the streetlights showing on the wet pavement outside. Later, he reaches for my stockinged feet, puts them in his lap.

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And that hand on my foot--just that, is one of those uncommon moments, those times when you don't wish for something else, for even one thing to be different; when you have no other needs and no worries, where your insides are calm, and everything you were ever restless about, anything that had ever given you angst, is quieted to stillness. No steel ball in your chest, no breathless fear. No blue numbness of nearly passing out, no nagging doubts of the backstage mind. All of that, forgotten. It is just rightness, so rare.

We say good night outside the store, hug briefly. He'll be coming by the zoo soon, he says. I head to my car. The fir tree I parked under is decorated with raindrops. They glisten white and magical under the streetlight, cling to the needles of the tree, and then slide off. I tilt my chin to the sky, to that treetop. I take in the night, Sebastian-style. I let the drops dot my face. I feel that hand on my stockinged foot again. I breathe the night air. I drink in its cold, wet happiness.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

A rhesus monkey mother will sometimes do a "double-hold." She will grab her own baby, along with the baby of a high-status monkey, when its mother is not looking. She will hold them both together in her arms, thereby encouraging a bond between her child and the high-status offspring . . .

--Dr. Jerome R. Clade, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior

When I get home that night, I see that Mom's been waiting up, reading. I tell her I'm too tired to talk, that the party had been great. She's obviously pleased. She tightens the tie around her robe, puts her arm around my shoulders, and kisses my cheek.

The next morning before breakfast, I switch on the elephant cam and watch for a while. I won't be going in to work--I've got so much homework, I'll need a shovel and one of those hats with the lights that miners wear just to get out from under it-- so I want to see how everyone is.

Watching the elephants also makes me feel closer to Sebastian. I replay our night in my head--

restocking the books, drinking hot chocolate, hearing about Tess and Bo's mother.

It was such a perfect night, but when I play it back, my brain keeps snagging on something.

Maybe it's a sabotaging snag. Maybe it's an important listen-to-me-now snag. How can you tell the difference? My body sometimes told me I was

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in mortal clanger when I was taking a calculus test, so, you know, how can you trust your instinct? I want to tell my thoughts to shut the hell up, but I still keep going over what Sebastian had said about Tiffany. Dying in childbirth. The way he'd told me she was dead. The way it had almost sounded like it was a surprise to him, too.

It's stupid, I know, to think like I'm thinking, because what did I know about any of this? I couldn't have any idea how someone might feel or act if something so awful had happened.

Maybe you'd feel distanced from it. And he did seem a little distanced. He had sounded sad about his grandmother's friend, Max Weaver, dying. When I'd said I was sorry, he'd said that he was sorry too. But not so with Tiffany. Had he said "I'm sorry too" about her? I didn't think so, but maybe I was remembering wrong. Maybe this was more of the psycho revisionist editing my brain was so fond of. Maybe he just couldn't bear to think about it because the pain was too much. Maybe he didn't want to overwhelm me. Maybe my backstage mind just likes to screw things up whenever something feels okay. Whenever something feels great.

I am watching Chai and Bamboo hanging out near the water when an instant message pops up.

YOU MISSED OUT, Michael types in these huge letters. So sad, I write back.

More booze than a liquor store convention

I smile. Tap the keys. You drink?

Had half a beer and I could barely talk

Moron

No answer yet. I wait. Felt like one of those foreign films where the soundtrack doesn't match the moving lips

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Lost all respect for you. Not that I ever had any Stupid party. Should've done homework. Alex's dad came home early and ...

My door opens. Shit, my door opens, and Mom stands there in her robe.

"Hi, honey," she says.

No knock, nothing. My heart pummels my insides, fueled by this panicked surge of guilt, and I reach around for the mouse to click off Michael's messages. Getting that little arrow into that little X is tough to do with shaking hands, suddenly as tricky as those pathetic vending machines where you have to pick up a stuffed toy with a mechanical claw.

"What was that?" she asks.

"What was what?" God, I'm guilty. I sound so guilty. I'm so guilty, my hands are trembling with double-shot espresso shakes. Man, I'd make the worst criminal.

"Up on the screen."

"Just Michael, messing around." She saw. I knew it. She saw, Goddamn it.

"It says, 'You missed out.'"

"Oh, yeah. He went with Akello to a party for Akello's dad."

"I thought you said he was going to Alex Orlando's last night."

"I did say that. But he changed his mind at the last minute. Akello's dad had this thing and his parents made him go and he was just begging Michael to go, so, you know, he wouldn't be the only one under forty, and so, you know, Michael went, because that's the kind of guy he is. ..."