The Memory Thief (25 page)

I tell myself that it is just dancing. What harm can it do? “Come look through my iTunes, then.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes,” I say, and he pulls me to my feet.

My iPod dock is in the bedroom. J. C. sits on the side of the bed, takes off his sandals, and gives a lot of serious consideration to his song selection, during which time I drink a glass of water, pee, check on Gabe (fast asleep), and brush my teeth. After much deliberation, he settles on a remix of U2's “Mysterious Ways.” He turns off the overhead light and flips on the bedside lamp. Then he sets the volume low, in consideration for Gabriel, and presses play. The music fills the room as he says, “Close your eyes.”

“What? Why?”

“Don't argue with me. Close 'em,” he says, so emphatically that I do. His arms come around me, and his hands spread out on my back. He dances like he kisses, like he talks … conversational, a natural give-and-take. But he also dances like he makes love, confident and questioning, tender and rough.

The music fills the spaces between us, driving us forward, Bono telling us that to touch is to heal. This makes me smile—J. C. is such a deliberate person, and tonight I guess he's decided that subtlety isn't the better part of valor.

There's something about having my eyes closed like this that intensifies the heat between us, pushes it to the next level. I should back away, I know I should, but instead I press against him and he makes a small sound. Then his lips force my mouth open, his tongue finds its way inside. His mouth is hot, his hands are everywhere. “Sweet Jesus,” he says. “What you do to me, girl. You don't even know.”

“I'm beginning to get an idea,” I say, and my voice is as uneven as his.

“You ain't seen nothin' yet,” he says, backing me against the door. He removes my shirt, then my jeans, then my bra, taking his time with each of them. He takes my underwear off with his teeth.

I try to pull him up, but he won't let me. “Slow, baby,” he says. “Slow.” He runs his hands over me like he's trying to commit the lines of my body to memory.

“J. C., come here,” I say. I have my hands in his hair, and I tug.

“What's your hurry?” He lifts his head and smiles at me.

“You're a tease,” I tell him, and he laughs.

“Remember I told you I had many hidden talents? Well,” he says, his face against my belly now and moving lower with each word, “this is one of them.” His tongue is inside me then, his hands on my bottom, pulling me closer. Somehow he can read my body; he anticipates what I want before I know it myself. There's no awkwardness, no need for direction. It's uncanny, is what it is, and erotic in a way I've never experienced before. By the time he backs me onto the bed and takes off his clothes, I am digging my nails into his shoulders so hard it's a wonder he isn't bleeding. His eyes don't leave mine as he slides inside.

“My mama always told me anything worth having was worth waiting for,” he says, his voice hoarse, “and damn if she didn't know what she was talking about.” Then he starts to move, and this time when I close my eyes, he doesn't stop me.

We lie together afterward, stretched out on top of the quilt, letting the air from the fan cool our bodies. I catalog how I feel. Disappointed in myself, that's at the top of the list. That, and guilt. I imagine what Beth would say if she could see this, what Roma would think. Probably that the whole grieving widow thing is a front, that we were just waiting for disaster to strike so that we could hop into bed together and fornicate our little amoral hearts out. On top of which, as bad as J. C. probably feels for lusting after his best friend's widow, I feel equally crappy for taking advantage of him in a misguided attempt to assuage my own loneliness. In this moment, it doesn't matter what Aidan said he wanted. I might as well pin a big scarlet
A
to myself and be done with it.

It would be so simple if that was the sum total of my emotional state. Shitty, yet simple. But I'm introspective—or maybe masochistic—enough to look a little deeper, and what I see confuses me, badly. I think about J. C.'s confession the night before, the way he looks at me when we're alone, and have to suppress a shiver. Regardless of how much I care about him, I'd figured that in the light of day, our little indiscretion would seem more or less like an accident, a little grief-stricken sex between friends, at least for me. I expected to feel self-conscious, for us to be awkward together. Instead, we're like we were before, just—more, I guess. It doesn't feel strange. It feels right, or at least like one possible version of right, if that makes any sense. Lying here with him, I feel sated, content, safe. Peaceful, even. My heart aches for Aidan, but it feels separate from this moment, like one has nothing to do with the other. My head throbs, right behind my eyes.

“J. C.?” I say with sudden conviction.

“Hmmm?” he says, slow and lazy. He's tracing a figure eight on my back.

When I don't respond, he slides out from under me and leans on his elbow, so he can see my face. His eyes sharpen then, and he sighs. “It's like that, is it,” he says.

I don't know if it's easier or harder that he isn't going to make me say it. Easier, probably, except now I can add cowardice to my list of transgressions. I attempt anyhow, opening my mouth—most probably to put my foot in it, but I have to try. I owe him that, at least. I am vacillating between
It's not because I don't love you
and
You deserve so much better
when he places a finger across my lips. His eyes are sad.

“Don't,” he says. “I'll just go.” He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls on his shorts, then yanks his shirt over his head.

I'm relieved and alarmed, all at once. “It's the middle of the night, J. C. You don't have to leave.”

“Yes, I do.” He slides his feet into his sandals.

“I'm sorry,” I say to his back. It's not much, but it's something. And at least it's sincere. I'm not sure about a lot of things, but I am sorry for hurting him. It's the last thing I intended.

“I know that better than you do,” he says, reaching down to the foot of the bed for the extra blanket. He shakes it out, tucks it around me like he's putting Gabriel to bed.

“You know I love you, right?” I say, putting my hand on his arm. I don't want to make a bad situation worse, but he looks so unhappy, I can't help myself.

“Sure,” he says. “I know. But that doesn't mean you want to do this.”

While I'm thinking of a good rejoinder, he leans over and kisses me on the forehead. “Good night, Maddie,” he says, and those two words are full of emotion, like he's saying something else.

I resist the urge to reach out to him, to make this better.
Stop,
I want to tell him.
Stay.
But I say nothing, and he walks out the door.

You would think that asking J. C. to leave would make me feel better, or at least more morally upright. It does, and then again, it doesn't.

After he left, it took me a long time to fall asleep. If I'd been less exhausted, I probably wouldn't have slept at all. But somewhere close to dawn, I passed out, only to have a nightmare about Aidan, struggling underneath the snow. I shot upright, sweating, with the weirdest sense that Aidan was in the room watching me, and that was it for sleep. Instead, I took a shower, made coffee, and then sat down on the couch to assess what to do next. And what I did was nothing, at least until Gabriel got up and I had to go through the motions of being a functioning parent.

I wish I could be angry at J. C., that he would pressure me to be with him or at least talk about what happened, but nothing could be further from the truth. Instead he is back to being his normal helpful self. He calls the next afternoon like nothing's amiss, asking if I need anything from the store. His timing is perfect: I've been scrubbing the kitchen floor while Gabriel builds a Lego fort for his Star Wars guys, periodically opening the refrigerator and examining the empty shelves. After we threw out the leftovers from the memorial service, not much was left. I need cereal for Gabe, milk, eggs, fresh fruit, the basics.

It shouldn't be a big deal, but the thought of going to the grocery store, traversing the aisles, and having to make decision after decision floors me. I can't even decide what to wear in the morning. Choosing between five brands of granola, followed by seven types of apples, is out of the question. I'd probably wind up abandoning my cart in the middle of the cookie aisle—Oreos or Chips Ahoy? Who can tell?—and fleeing, Gabe in tow, for the relative safety of my car.

“How did you know I needed food?” I ask J. C.

Over the phone, I can almost hear him shrug. “I just did. You want to give me a list? I can come by and pick it up. Or you can email it to me.”

I am tempted to take him up on his offer to send the list through cyberspace, but then I think better of it. Not even I am that big of a wimp. “Come by,” I tell him. “I'll give you my debit card. And thanks.”

“No worries,” he says. He arrives. He gets the list and the card. He shops, he returns, he unloads the groceries, he helps me put them away. Then he stays and plays with Gabriel, who is thrilled to see him. He is careful with me, so careful—back to how he was before the avalanche, except now I know what's behind the distance he keeps.

The odd thing is, the more appropriately J. C. behaves, the more I feel for him. I am floored by the simplest things—how he sits on the floor with his eyes focused on Gabe's face, nodding intently like the world is no bigger than this small boy and his pillow-fort-in-progress, the long, lean line of his back as he stretches to put the spaghetti sauce in the cabinet above the stove, where I can't reach. Watching him, I find myself thinking of the amethyst cathedral geode that Aidan brought me from Brazil, the time he and J. C. climbed Tres Picos. I remember cradling the hollowed rock in my hands, its unremarkable gray exterior transformed through some strange alchemy to conceal a mysterious, glittering heart: clusters of progressively purple quartz crystals, translucent lavender to deep shadowy violet, an alien landscape in miniature. Amethyst, for healing, restful sleep, meditation, and peace. And also, as the little card that came with the geode attested, for awakening the soul, bridging the gap between this world and the next.

If J. C. notices how I look at him, he doesn't acknowledge it … but I know, which is bad enough. Here he is, treating me exactly how you should treat your best friend's widow—running errands, helping out around the house, entertaining Gabe—and here I am, wanting to feel his big hands trace my body, wanting to hear him say my name the way he did that first night. Then he leaves, and I spend the hours until he comes back missing Aidan, cleaning my house obsessively, and trying to be a good mother to Gabriel, or at least a competent one.

It is all beginning to overwhelm me, and I begin to think that maybe I need a geographic cure. Maybe if I go home for a little while, to stay with my parents, I'll find myself again. Gabe and I will spend some quiet time together. I will figure out what we are going to do next, when I'll be ready to go back to work. I'll return phone calls and emails, I'll do yoga, I'll let myself miss Aidan, and life will begin to make sense.

I say as much to J. C. the next time he comes over. It's nighttime, and Gabe is already in bed. J. C. made dinner, gave him a bath, even put him in his pajamas and read him stories. “Relax,” he tells me, and I try, but serenity eludes me. When J. C. comes out of Gabe's room I am at the sink, scrubbing the pot he'd used to make couscous.

He walks up behind me and takes the sponge out of my hand. “You are not a good listener,” he says, his tone light. I try to take the comment at face value, but I can't. I am too aware of the way his fingers don't brush mine when he removes the sponge from my grasp.

“I know,” I tell him. “I'm a disaster area.”

I wait for him to contradict me, but he doesn't. Instead he squirts more soap on the sponge and finishes off the couscous pot. He starts on the cutting board next, like I haven't said anything at all.

“I think Gabe and I need to leave town for a little bit,” I say into the silence. “Maybe go see my parents in New York.”

His hands stop scrubbing for a moment, then resume their motion. “Why?” he asks, and if I didn't know him so well, I wouldn't be able to detect the slight edge to his tone.

“I just need a break from all this. I need to get my life in perspective, so I can figure out what to do next. And I need to do it somewhere that doesn't remind me of Aidan everywhere I turn.”

He puts the cutting board on the drying rack and turns to face me, wiping his hands on his shorts. “You running away, Maddie?”

“I don't think so,” I say. “Just trying to see clearly.”

“Don't leave because of me,” he says in the same even voice.

“I'm not,” I say back, which isn't a total lie.

He regards me for a moment, studying my face like he's trying to decide whether to believe me. And then he says, “Okay then. Let me know when you're leaving and I'll take you guys to the airport,” and turns back to the sink. He runs water into the asparagus pan.

I don't know what I expected him to do or say—to argue with me, maybe, ask me not to go—but that's not his style. If he'd given me a hard time, I would have gotten angry, told him to mind his own business. So why do I feel disappointed?

There's no good answer to that question, or at least no answer I'm willing to accept. I watch J. C. do the dishes, giving them his complete attention—perhaps no dishes will have ever been so clean; they could give my overscrubbed kitchen floor a run for its money—I wrap my arms tight around myself so I won't touch him, and I plan my much-needed escape.