Where You End (14 page)

“Okay, well then, it sounds like he forgave you, like everything was okay. Did you get in trouble? Was your mom pissed?
”

My comment seems to amuse her slightly.

“He didn't forgive me. He just went on. Because I'm big, and he's only a little boy. I always thought I would protect him,”

“That's good.”

“Yes, it's good, but I hurt him instead.”

“You
're his sister. Sisters do that sometimes,” I say.

She looks at me and shakes her head.

“I'm sure everybody loses it. Doesn't your mom yell at him?”

“My mother never yelled at anybody,” she says.

Her face twists into disgust, like she's smelling something awful.

“She never even raised her voice.”

Neither did mine, or I can't remember if she did. She pushed my legs off the back of the passenger seat once, and then handed me crayons before I could cry.

“I'm going to do it again,” she says. “Once you do it once, you just do it again.”

The tears are still coming, but the wiping has turned to scrubbing, her face a stubborn pot. I reach over and grab her wrist.

“Stop,” I say. “Your mom is there.”

“My mom is not there,” she says.

“But she is,” I say. “She'll get better, won't she?”

She doesn't say anything.

“Look, I wouldn't push the sculpture again,” I say.
“I learned from my mistake.”

Eva jerks her hand away and reaches for the empty space around her waist. She grabs the end of her sweater and stretches it down toward her thighs.

“You don't know, Miriam. You don't know the feeling right after you do something like that. I know he got up. I know I love him. But I broke it. I broke something. I destroyed something. It was something, and then it wasn't anymore. I destroyed it. I did that. It was safe and then it wasn't. It was love and then it wasn't. How could that be love? How could he believe me when I say that to him now?”

She looks away for a minute, catching her breath, considering her own dilemma. This seems like too much for a sister to take on.

“It was a mistake,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Maybe,” she says. “But you can't go back. You can't come back after some mistakes.”

I'd like to say that isn't true, but I am not convinced. After all, I pushed the statue and I still haven't told anyone. I lied to my parents. If I ever come back, I don
't know who it is they're getting.

“You're probably right,” I say.

“So then what am I supposed to do?” she says, a little aggressive.

I think about my parents. I think about Elliot. I see Adam in front of me, his shoulders, his neck, his grin. I want to destroy them all, but most of all, I want them to survive. As I picture that, I remember the statue, and how good it felt to push her, when she was still strong, before she fell over. How right it seemed to lean against her, to stun her out of her peace. I can see her looking at me like that, without eyes or a real face, looking like me looking at her, looking like me covered in bronze. I get it, I should say to Eva. I get why you hit your brother. But the words are stuck in the place where we manufacture them, rolling off the assembly line, making mischief in the room of my thoughts. Eva looks like she forgot the question.

“You know when people say they can't stand something?” I say.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think they mean, exactly?” I ask.

“I don't know. That they can't take it, I guess. That they don't know how to take it.”

“Right. I agree.”

“What are you trying to say?” she asks.

“That it's not about hating something.”

“Is this about the sculpture?” she says.

I am not sure what it's about.

“When something is precious,” I try, “people are always telling you to be careful with it, so you try to be. And that works for a vase or an antique, but not with a person.”

She is not looking at me, but she's listening. I can tell.

“Because you can never really get close when you're too scared to hurt someone. So, you should. Or maybe you shouldn't. But we do.”

“Do what?” she says, releasing one hand and switching to the other.

“Hurt each other,” I say.

She turns her head. I see the puzzle on her face. I want to make her understand.

“So he knows you're not perfect, so that you can survive it, so that it can all be real. Sometimes you can't stand love, so you have to hurt it.”

That doesn't make sense, but it feels exactly true. The words mean something I can
't understand yet. The words are doing their job without me, and I will just have to catch up later.

“So that you can actually love someone and they can love you,” I say, “even if you weren't careful, even if you weren't kind, even if you were exposed as the mean, selfish, ugly-ass thing that you are.”

She stares.

“Did you read that in a book?” she asks.

“Maybe,” I say, because everything comes from somewhere, right, and it may as well be a book.

She releases both hands from her sweater and rubs her knees with her palms. There's a faint smile growing on her lips. It has a patronizing slant.

“Is that what you think you are?” she asks softly, but with a strange confidence.

“What?”

“A mean, selfish, ugly-ass thing?”

“I don't know,” I say, trying not to blush.

“Thank you for the pictures,” she says.

I shrug.

“You may be right about all this stuff,” she says, “but you never really lost anything.”

A rush of heat fills my face, a flood of shame.

“Maybe not,” I say, “but it feels like I did.”

We sit there and watch the visitors roll by. A lion roars, somewhere farther away than it sounds. A boy runs to grab his father's leg. They laugh. People let their children throw bread to the turtles in the pond. The keepers pretend not to see it. The silence between us is heavy, but I feel lighter. Everything is in relief. Eva suddenly stands and walks to a bench in front of the souvenir store. Two men beside us are weaving fake spiderwebs around a tree, debating what branches to dangle them from. Eva doesn't see the men. She's staring straight ahead. Her face is blotchy from all the crying.

“I'm such a fucking whiner,” she says. “I'm sorry.”

“That's okay. I'm just not sure what to do. Do you need something?”

“Maybe some water would help,” she says.

“Okay. I can get that.”

I stand and look around for a vending machine. “Give me a minute. I'll be right back.”

“Miriam?”

“Yes?”

“Every day I'm out here, it gets harder and harder to go back.”

I give her a quick look of solidarity, take out my wallet, and drop my tote on the bench as a security deposit, to show her I'm not leaving her.

Eva nods quietly and I head back up the hill. I'm going to find what this girl needs. I'm going to go back there. I'm going to take care of one thing at a time. I find a machine that asks for two fifty for a bottle of water. I slip the money into the slot and punch the blue logo.

The bathrooms are right next door, so I run in there. I wash my hands and steal a look at my face. Is it rounder? Is it tired? Then I remember the water, Eva, the bench. Focus.

When I get back, my bag is sitting right where I left it, but she's not there. I look around at the fake waterfall and the kids huddled around to feed the turtles they're not supposed to feed. No new sweater, no shiny hair. I head for the big cats, but she's not there either. All I find is a tiger, pacing back and forth on the edge of the water. Wanting out.

At the bottom of the hill, there's an exit and a big clock that's stuck at 11:45. I look for my phone. It
's actually four-thirty. The walk back up the hill to my bike is unbearable: the hill is especially steep, and my breath is short from looking for Eva. The cheetahs are still napping. When I get to my bike, I call Eva and it goes straight to voicemail. That's Pablo saying the numbers. So you hit your brother, Eva. What makes you think he's better off without you?
I'm going to do it again,
she said. I take out the phone and text her.

i have your water.

Erase that.

where are you?

On the way home, the wind threatens to throw me off the bike a few times, especially on the way up from Connecticut Ave, past the zombies and jack-o'-lanterns and poisonous plastic spiders. I stop at the top of the hill to re-arrange my school stuff and switch sides. Bogart is gone. She took my camera.

twenty-nine

At home, someone is upstairs in my room. Probably Mom sorting laundry, but my night pictures are still up there somewhere, so I should check. When I open the door, Adam is sitting cross-legged reading my library book. That Adam. That library book. He's in the middle of it, his hands over someone's blue face. Adam found my Picasso book. I want to scream, but my body won't let me, it's had so much. I squeeze the door handle so I can stay in between. His toes peek out from under his knees, and he'
s wearing one of those nameless, shapeless shirts guys can wear their whole lives. The kind that comes in a pack of ten.

“So, apparently … ” he says as he turns the pages, “Picasso liked sad women.”

His voice is comforting, but my body is frozen in fear. He doesn't look up, and I can see the place where the barber shaves his neck under the curls, that dip in the neck, that tiny, empty pond. I could spit in it. His shoulder bones poke out under the T-shirt, sharper than when we were twelve-year-old boy and girl.

“
Young Girl Struck By Sadness
, 1939.
Young Tormented Girl
, 1939. Lots of young girls. I guess he liked them. Basically, the guy got a wife or a mistress every time he wanted to paint somebody new. This Olga portrait is outstanding, with her arm draped over the chair like that … the face like an egg, the eyes. She's so serious.”

“I got your pictures,”
I say. “Or my pictures. Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” he says. “I figured, when you came by the other day … ”

Adam's voice is uneven. He's afraid I might interrupt. He wants me to listen. I take my hand off the knob and look around at my ocean.

“There's just so much color in these,” he says. “Colors you'd have to make up in the real world. And shapes. It's so fucking weird, but it works. I can see why you like it. You got this from the library, right? I didn't know you liked Picasso. You've been talking about him lately, but I didn't know you liked him. I get it.”

It doesn't seem like Adam cares if I talk or not. He smiles and shakes his head, and turns quickly through the pages where the faces stare back, deformed, a nightmare of faces. I wonder how long he's known.

“This one looks like you,”
he says, pointing to a drawing, maybe pencil or pen, of Fran
ç
oise, one of Picasso's favorite mistresses. She's beautiful.

“How long have you known?” I whisper.

“From the beginning,” he says.

He swallows and pushes his hair off his face.

“She's got your lips.”

Adam looks up and straight into my eyes and does not move, the book still open in his lap. That's when I know this is not a game. We've played well. We've made our moves. We've delivered all of our lines. We've been good friends and good partners. We've had our little lovely life. Now is where he's asking me something, and what we have to do next is, we have to dissolve. This is how this one ends. I walk over to Adam, take the book from his hand and place it flat and open on the carpet—face down. When I look back up, his eyes are still on mine. He is braver than I imagined, braver than I made him out to be.

He pulls at my sweater, with unexpected force, until our faces are close enough to breathe on, but not close enough to recognize. My fingers look for the dip at the nape of his neck, and we kiss and think of nothing and everything, of teeth and photographs, of snow and warm chests, of muscles and spines. His hands reach under my shirt, and the fingers spread at the bottom of my back to pull me even closer. My legs start to ache from kneeling like this, but I'm afraid to change position, afraid of what we might look like when we pull apart.

Adam does not seem afraid at all. His mouth is on my face and my neck and my ears, his curls trailing after him, tickling everything he kisses. Our bodies become more frantic, less careful and less loving, closer, more hungry. I have not been kissed in a thousand years. I stop him.

“Hey,” he says, looking at me.

“Hey.”

“Are you okay?” he says.

“Yeah, but we shouldn't.”

“You don't want to?”

“I can't right now,” I say.

“I love you, Miriam,” he says. “I really do.”

“I know, Adam.”

“Good.”

He moves close, and I'm afraid he's going to kiss me again, but instead he rests his chin on my shoulder.

“I don't want to leave,” he says.

“You have to,” I answer.

He looks a little concerned. I'm too warm to feel the chill of what we'
ve done, and when he stands up, I close my eyes so I won't have to look. He's not my old friend anymore. Already, he's not. He gives me a kiss on the cheek, and his lazy eye stays lazy a little longer than usual. I don't tease him.

“I'm going, but I'm not going,” he says.

“Okay.”

“Are you … ?”

“I'm good, Adam.”

“Good,” he says, and he walks out without his bag or his jacket, without even closing the book. My hands smell like him. My hair smells like him. My neck smells like him. My wrists smell like him.

Under the covers, I escape into sleep and me and Malcolm X are together on a sailboat and he is telling me everything, everything I need to know. He's giving me all the answers, but I can't seem to remember any of it (it all just slips away) and I'm looking for my camera, because I want to take a picture of him (because I'm in a boat with Malcolm X), but I can't find it anywhere and it's night and he's not there anymore and now we're in a courtyard where there's one chair and all these leaves are everywhere, rotting. On one side of the courtyard, Elliot is cooking an omelette, and I can see him through his window, but when I look back at the chair, Adam is sitting on it, and he tells me to sit on his lap, which I do, but I'm still looking at Elliot. I can't wait to tell Elliot I just saw Malcolm X, but he won'
t lift his head away from the pan and I can never see his face. I can't make eye contact. I can't get his attention. I don't remember what he looks like.

I wake up choking on my breath. The street lights are on outside. My door is shut. The house is quiet. My eyes adjust to find my cell phone: 1:10 a.m. One new text, from Adam.

Good night, Meem. Wanna ride the bus tomorrow?

There's a handwritten note near my phone:

We tried to wake you up but it was impossible.
Leftovers in the fridge.

See you tomorrow.

I walk into the bathroom to pee and check if my parents' light is still on. The only noise is the rinse cycle in the dishwasher downstairs. They must have stayed up later than usual. I brush my teeth and rinse my mouth out to get rid of the nightmare taste.

Back in bed, I go through my third grade roster, alphabetically. I sing “You Are My Sunshine” in my head five times. I count the number of years Henri Cartier-Bresson lived. When I get to ninety-six, I take time to remember my mom's birthday present. I was fourteen. She gave me a copy of
The Decisive Moment,
Cartier-Bresson's book. Her dedication is scribbled under the title, on the first page:

Cartier-Bresson was not interested in the darkroom. Don't spend all your time in there. The viewfinder is where you make your pictures. The world is where you get them. Get out there.

Love, Mom.

I stole that line from my mother so many times.
The viewfinder is where you make your pictures.
I've spit it at Adam whenever he wanted to crop a picture, make it brighter, or highlight the most important detail.

Even evil David was impressed with my plagiarized thought over wine, cheese, and blue grapes. Yes, we sixteen-year-olds drank wine at Elliot's house. We were sophisticated there, an odd kind of progressive, at least about wine.
Well said, Miriam. What a smart girl you found, Elliot. And not afraid to have an opinion.
Elliot had winked at me. Bear with it, his eyes seemed to say. Eventually, we will sleep together and laugh about this. But I
am
smart, I had wanted to tell everybody in the room. This isn't a joke. I'm not being cute.

I get up and look for
The Decisive Moment
in the boxes in my closet. I've marked my favorite parts with little exploding snowflakes.

“Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact,”
Cartier-Bresson wrote,
“and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact.”

So that's what I am. I'm a photographer struggling to recognize a series of facts. And staying awake isn'
t going to help. I need sleep to think straight, and I need to think straight to get sleep. My jeans are crumpled on the floor. I crack the window open and stick my hands out to read the temperature.

Elliot's socks are still under my bed, and Adam's camera beckons from the floor. He forgot it here this afternoon. The screen is printed with the lines of his thumbs, like sweaty tree circles telling time. I put the strap around my neck, like a tourist. The body of the camera falls right in the middle of my chest, the lens looking out to lead me through the dark house. Now Adam's name is in the book too. We are all tangled.

The wind is brutal, and it almost knocks me off the bike once or twice. It's not constant, more like gusts, and I can't predict when the next one will come. I turn onto the main arteries, hoping that the bigger buildings will shield me better. I ride past many of our regular haunts: the coffee place, the movie theater, the water tower at Fort Reno.

Everything in the store windows looks trapped. The oranges, the hula hoops, the power drill and leather boots; the televisions, the laundry hampers, the antique chair; the milk steamers and the cold medicine and the composition notebooks, they are all sleeping behind the shatterproof glass. All the objects look so discouraged, as if they dread the impending fluorescent light that will get them handled, kidnapped, and consumed.

There is a great little stream of nervous energy in my insomnia. Despite the wind, the slopes feel possible tonight. My body is drawn to this place; I couldn't get lost if I tried. A rush of something cool quenches my sleepless, beat-up body. On Elliot's street, the lamps turn everything orange. I drop my bike on the sidewalk several feet back from the front door. The neighborhood wind chimes clank furiously.

Adam's camera is in “open” view.

Most of the lights are off, except for the desk lamp in his room. I refuse to think of Elliot, in his bed under his sheets, but in refusing, I picture it perfectly. To wake him or not to wake him. I set up the tripod on the slippery grass. Adam's camera fits perfectly, of course. I just need to breathe and click, and then we're done. It'
s all ready, but I wait.

What would you do if you were sitting in front of your sleeping ex's house, feeling like you had very little love left, but still so much longing? How would you lock up all that nostalgia? For me, it's a picture. It always is, and always
will be. You don't shut it out. You lock it up and take it with you. I know that now.

Someone walks into his room. I gasp and look closer, squinting my eyes in the dark. It's his mother, in her pajamas. I'm embarrassed to see her like this. Even in Delaware this summer, she was always dressed by breakfast. I grab the tripod, leave the camera on, and take a few steps back.

She walks toward Elliot's bed, stops, looks, steps back toward the desk, and extends her arm to flick the light off. I don't see her leaving the room or closing the door, and I can't hear her saying good night or I love you. Do mothers still do that? I don't have a picture yet.

As I get ready to leave, her own bathroom light comes on, across the house. Mrs. Fox pulls her hair up, splashes her face, and brushes her teeth. This is the picture I take, as she gets ready to go to bed. The wind comes back suddenly, and a loud thump makes me run to the bike. I get on and lean into the wind, to make a U-turn. A giant rodent is crawling across Elliot's lawn. He'
s huge. He looks lost. He is shaking, like he's scared, and dragging his tail along the dying grass. I ride back past the house without looking in.

Pedaling back home, I resolve to meet Elliot outside of school, like I did almost two years ago. I have three hours before the alarm clock goes off again, so in anticipation of the force with which my head will hit the pillow, I try Eva again.

I went to the guy's house. I think the wind knocked a possum out of his tree. Is it a sign?

After I read it over the third time, the message strikes me as a metaphor I can't understand, and that thought gives me peace. That's the last feeling I have before I fall asleep: a sliver of pure peace.