Where You End (8 page)

“How about the pictures in your camera? The ones I saw at your place the other day?” he says.

I give him a disapproving look.

“What? They
're good. They've got that thing the Green's always talking about.”

“What's that?”

“You know. The hope and the fear. You know what I'm talking about. How there's only one feeling in the world and that's what everything's about?”

“That's two.”

“What?”

“Hope and fear. That's two feelings right there.”

Adam looks at me, smiles, and pulls my shoulders in close to his. There's the coffee smell again. And his detergent. The smell of his clothes, his house, our time together.

“Hand over the camera, Mardy Bum.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Arctic Monkeys.”

“Right. Too cool for me. As in Mardi Gras?”

“As in bummer. Let's have it. I'll show you what I mean.”

The camera is in my bag. I took it just in case. I leave it in there.

“Come on, remember? You're my brave friend. You're the one who gets the best pictures. I always stop to think. You're the one who always goes for it.”

“Goes for what?”

“Now you're fishing … ”

“Fine. Whatever.”

“Gimme Bogart and I'll show you.”

“I don't have it,” I lie.

He looks at my bag, then looks away. Then he puts his hand on top of my head, right in the middle where it's always cold. I keep my head as straight as possible until he takes it off. Neither one of us acknowledges this strange blessing. We walk the last few minutes without talking, just feeling the air between us shift.

“Okay … ” Adam says as we reach the arts building, a gray, pre-fabricated cube. “Wanna see something?” His eyes are the size of two, dark planets.

“Sure,” I say.

“You can't tell anybody though. You have to promise.”

I raise my right hand, my left one on my heart. Adam takes his camera out.

“Look,” he says, pointing to the screen.

I frown. He knows my rule.

“Come on. Come on, come on, come on. It's not Bogart. It's my camera. You have my permission to look.”

I lean over and hold my hand over the screen to block out the light. There she is. The sculpture. Lying on the ground. And my witness in her white shirt.

“Oh my God,” I say, before I can take it back.

“I know, right? With the light on her face and all the feet around her. I wanted to get the guards—”

“How did you get this?” I ask.

“Fast. I was scared shitless. Ms. D was down there. That
's her boots right there.”

I did not expect this. Adam seems to be waiting for something, but it could be me making it up.

“It's perfect,” I say quietly.

He smiles, blushes a little, takes the camera back.

“Are you showing that today?” I ask.

“No way. Not after I heard the museum dude blamed somebody in our class. I'm not crazy, like you.”

I stop at the entrance and a cold, airless dread fills my chest. Adam holds the glass door open. I don't want to go in.

“After you,” he says.

I shake my head again, and his face falls. He doesn't get it.

“Miriam?” he says.

We walk inside, and I lean against the wall in the hallway.

“What is it?” Adam asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “I didn
't eat very much this morning.”

“You want me to get you something?” he asks.

“No, it's okay. Go ahead. I have something in my bag.”

Adam reluctantly leaves, and I wait for him to be out of sight before walking back out through the glass doors. I take a long breath and find a place to sit, turning my face toward the sun. Second period just started. The campus is empty. Elliot is in American History, and Maggie is in Spanish. Because I'm pathetic and memorized their schedules, I know they don't have any classes together today. That means they'll have to meet by the oak tree, or the front doors where Elliot and I first spoke. I try to push those details out of my mind, to focus on the warmth on my nose and my cheeks and how it's burning my eyelids a little.

I still haven't gotten my period. It
's now officially two weeks and three days. I should probably take the test already. A girl can't spend her life waking up in the middle of the night and riding her bike until she's tired enough to fall back asleep, especially taking pictures of stranger's houses. It's going to get too cold for that soon. I'm going to have to come up with a better compulsion.

“Hey!”

I open my eyes again and look for where the noise came from. I can't see anybody.

“I'm right here, by the gates” she says, and I recognize the voice now.

Paloma is standing behind the gates of my school, waving for me to join her. I'm completely paralyzed. I can't decide if I should just ignore her, but then again she could scream “Picasso,” over and over, until everyone walks out and stares. No school guard can keep a girl like that out. I walk over, checking behind me for any onlookers.

“Hi,” I say. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” she says.

“I'm at school,” I whisper.

“Yeah, I know. Aren't you supposed to be in class?”

Right. “It's my break,” I lie.

“Oh. Well. Do you want to take a walk? Do they let you do that here?”

“Yeah. I mean, it's probably better if I stay though. I have stuff to do.”

“Okay. I just came by to see what it looks like. You have the picture, right?”

I give my creepy stalker friend the once over. She's wearing the same thing, for the third time now. The jeans, the shirt, the gold fish necklace.

“Aren't you cold like that?” I say.

She shrugs. “You sure you don't want to go for a walk?”

“I have work.”

But I feel sick lying to the one person who seems to know the truth. I resolve not to ever lie to this girl again. She could very well be my knife.

“I'm supposed to be in class,” I say.

“What are you doing out here then?” she asks.

“Just thinking.”

“About what?” she asks.

“Stuff I can't figure out,” I say.

She nods and we both stand quietly for a minute, each on our side of the fence.

“Maybe I can help you” she says.

“I don't know,” I say. “I'm starting to think it's just never going to be the same.”

She laughs a little, not a mean laugh; more like a wise, tender laugh.

“Nothing is ever the same,” she says.

I check for Bogart in my bag and consider showing her the picture I took last night, but instead I take out my green sweater, the one I was wearing at the museum. I hand it to her.

“I can't take that,” she says.

“Go ahead,” I say, “it's cold.”

“Thanks.” She pulls out the sleeves before slipping it on. It's tighter on Paloma than me, but I can tell she
's grateful.

“How long have you been out here?” I ask.

“A while,” she answers.

“I do have your picture,” I say, “but can I show it to you later?”

Her eyes open wide. “After school,” she says.

In my head, I run through all the people who could notice her, and then I remember Adam's picture of the statue. He would recognize her. He has that kind of memory, and she's his kind of girl, the kind he'd want a portrait of.

“Can we meet somewhere else?” I ask.

She narrows her eyes. I half expect her to grab my arm and write something on it, but instead she just names a
time and place. I agree, and she walks away with my sweater on, looking both ways before crossing the street.

I turn around and find my spot in the sun, where I sit and realize there's nothing in my back pocket. That's where my phone was, so it must've fallen out in Ms. K's office.

I walk past the place where Elliot and I first spoke, and only when I'm on the other side do I notice I didn't hold my breath this time, like I have for the past month, to ward off the sentimental monsters. School. Here is the place where I spend my days. Here are the grown-up children, tucked in their boxes. Here are the teachers, checking the time. Here is Maggie. There is Elliot. Everywhere minds connect and disconnect, charting maps of thoughts all over the air. I cut through them deliberately.

Ms. K's door is open, but she isn't in there. I only have about ten minutes before the class period ends, and I need to find my phone. It isn
't on her couch or under the pillows. I check back toward the door every two seconds. Maybe it's on her desk. Nope. There's a drawer with a lock and one without. I'm too nervous to open it. Back to the couch, lift the pillows, think of the last place I saw the thing.

When Ms. K says “Hey,” I scream. A little scream. A yelp. She smiles.

“Oh my God, I'm sorry. You scared me, I was looking for—”

“Your phone?” she says.

“Yes?” I ask, hoping she'll give me a hint.

“Didn't Adam give it to you?

“Adam?”

She looks confused and moves away from the entrance, toward me. “I just took it to Photo, and he said you were in the bathroom.”

I think like a liar: fast and stupid. “Oh yes, sorry, he did say something, and then we had to go and then I forgot to ask him again.”

“Are you all right?” she says, her eyebrows all bunched.

“Yes,” I say. “I'm sorry. I have to go.”

“Okay. Are you sure?”

“Yes.” And, before she can ask anything else, “I already took my first picture.”

“Oh,” she says, surprised. “That's great, Miriam, that's great.”

I thank her again and head toward arts building, where I'm almost certain Adam is waiting with my phone and a few questions about where I've been.

I make a plan. If he asks why I skipped, I'll say I needed to be alone. If he insists, I will tell a half-truth, that I went to take pictures. He'll be annoyed I didn't invite him, but he'll understand that. He might even be proud. This is Adam.

The kids are starting to leave the buildings for lunch, and the noise goes in waves, lows and highs, screeches and whispers. I close my eyes and listen to it. I could pick out Elliot's voice if I wanted to. I open my eyes back up and feel a stabbing pain in my belly. I can't walk straight and I'm suddenly terrified, in front of all these people, in front of him, wherever he is. I fold and hunch my way over to the nearest steps, but the pain only gets sharper. Maybe it's a cramp, I think as I hear the voices and try not to make eye contact, praying that people have better things to do than notice me. Maybe it's finally a cramp. Maybe this is what it feels like when you skip a cycle and it comes back with a vengeance. They say your body can skip when you're sad.
They
can be right sometimes.

I try to breathe through the pain, but I can't. My body seems to be rejecting the air, spitting it back out into the light. I hop, still folded but filled with hope, to the nearest building and into the bathroom, where I manage to check and see nothing. White. Clean. The pain begs me to sit in a corner of the stall, so I do, and, as I hug my knees to my chest, I let out the air in a sad, short burst. It was gas. I rock back and forth until it's better, humbled by the needs of my body. I snicker. One minute, you're magnificent. The next, you're folded over by a fart.

I'm late. I run down the steps to the photo lab and slam the door open. A few guys look over and nod hello. They're busy examining their pictures. I've known them and their work for two years now, but they feel so far away. I'm surprised they even recognize me.

“Do you guys know where Adam is?” I ask.

“Try Mr. Green's office,” Toby says, barely looking up from the screen.

Mr. Green's office is empty. This is where we meet for critique; a few photos are still pinned on the wall. I scroll over them (people, places, things, more people, no Picasso) and find I'd actually like to stop and look, but Paloma is pulling me away. Later. I don't have time.

Maybe I can find Adam's bag. He must be taking a break, grabbing a snack—he spends a lot of lunches in here. I search for his stuff under the stools, on the tables, in the hallway outside. I come back to the office and notice my phone on a side table. No message, no note; it hasn't even been turned on.

The thought does occur. The idea does strike. Maybe Paloma texted me when he had the phone. Maybe he read it. Maybe he knows. Maybe he turned it off so I wouldn't know he knows. But how. But no. But why.

I dial her number and she picks up immediately.

“Not Maggie?” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

A pause, then, “Everything okay?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Do you need anything?” she asks.

“What?”

“You called me,” she says. “Do you need anything?”

“No.”

A pause.

“I'm coming,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

twelve

This is where Paloma wants to meet. Rock Creek Park—two thousand acres in the middle of the city. We need to meet before it gets dark. It's a long walk from the bus stop to the Nature Center. The trees here are mostly elms, hackberries, lindens. I know this because Elliot was a tree guy. He got it from his father, David.

David is an obsessive cyclist, one of those men who's too old to have so little body fat, the kind who only eats red meat on holidays and then bikes sixty miles in the frostbitten dawn to work it off. I spent months trying to forget his member struggling to pop out of those spandex shorts.

Elliot would go along some weekends, his pasty long legs sticking out of an old gym uniform and pedaling furiously to keep up with his dad.
I can't move today. We went to Rock Creek in the morning.
He whined about sore muscles, blisters, thigh burns, but never in front of his father. The reward of a few hours alone with him, or a congratulatory pat on the shoulder, was always worth the pain. It was on these outings that Elliot learned about trees and birds, David being somewhat of an amateur naturalist. A robin has an orange belly; a cardinal has a red mohawk. The peach blooms before the cherry, and so on.

But Elliot never took me to Rock Creek. The last time we were in the woods together was this summer in Delaware. His parents have a house on Fenwick Island, and stayed there for almost a week. It was the end of June. Back then, I had no idea what an ovenbird was, but now I can't help but hear it call
teacher, teacher, teacher
from the forest floor.

“Why are you running away from me? Where are we going?”

Elliot's voice during our epic fight is still clear in my mind, not really as sound proper, but more as pictures of sound. A sharp whisper might be a rattlesnake. A sigh is a lion gone limp.

“You don't have to come with me,” I remember saying, inhaling the pine all around us.

“Okay, can we just stop for a second? I can't think when I'm chasing after you.”

“Don't chase. You can stop if you want, but I wanna walk. I want to get out of here.”

“You don't know these woods. You're gonna get lost.”

I could hear the ocean on the other end. I knew it couldn't be so hard to find the ocean. The salt air was already pulling at my skin.

“We've been here before, remember?” I say.

We had. Every day, at least once, we did it somewhere in the Delaware woods and then held hands and shut up until we got to the ocean, where he swam and I stayed afloat, hoping no sharks would smell our sins and swallow up my dream.

“Miriam, he's not a bad guy,” Elliot said.

“No. Of course not. He's old and disappointed. My problem is you.”

Elliot sighed. “What did I do?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I said. “You just sat there, as if you had no opinion, as if nothing he said mattered at all.”

“Does it?”

“Does it? Are you kidding me? Are you the same person who can't survive without music, who thinks a song is some sort of cosmic knife cutting through to the core of your existence? Are you the guy who plays three instruments and cries when we light the Shabbat candles?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you do have faith and you don't think it's stupid. It means you believe that music matters, that photographs matter, that hope matters, that stories matter.”

“So does my dad … ”

“Maybe. Maybe once upon a time. But that's not what he was saying tonight.”

Elliot rolls his eyes, which makes me want to push him over and kick him in the ribs.

“Were you there, Elliot?”

“Yes … ”

“Let me remind you. We were talking about our plans, and he said he didn't think it was a real plan, that music and art don't save people's lives. I said I know music and art aren't antibiotics or surgery, but that sometimes that kind of thing can save a life.”

“So … ”

“So he told me it was time we stopped investing in things we can't count on, that it doesn't do any good. No, what did he say? I know:
It doesn't help anybody
.”

“I know what he said,” Elliot interjected.

“Do you? Because you were dead to the table … ”

“What was I supposed to say?”

“I don't know, Elliot. Anything. That you think music matters, that it's why you spend your days immersed in it, that you don't think we should all just grow up and wake up to a world where the only things that count are the ones we can test in a lab, the ones that never ever fail us, the ones we have hard evidence for.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Don't you see that's what he was saying?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“He was telling us we should all be scared. That we should give up before we even start, that because God doesn't always give us what we want, we should turn away from everything that requires any faith.”

We were both scared now, the ocean roaring ahead of us.

“Why are you even bringing God into this?” Elliot yelled.

“Because you can't count on
him
, can you?”

“I don't understand what you're saying,” he said, which doubled me over.

“Yes you do,” I said, tears in my eyes. “You under
stand. You understand better than anybody else. I know you understand. You're just pretending you don't understand, because you're too much of a wimp to say you understand in front of your father.”

“You need to chill out,” he said.

“And you need to grow up,” I said.

“You always act like everything is so complicated … ”

Here, I could feel some kind of ugly truth coming on, and since nobody can turn away from ugly truths, I listened.

“Being with you is like … ”

“What is it like?” I hissed.

“It's like you bring me down into this deep ocean, where I've never been before, and it's really beautiful, and it's exciting, but sometimes it's just too much … ”

“I'm just too much?” I asked.

“It's just so intense. It's, like, sometimes you have to come up for air, you know, but it's, like, impossible to come back up to the surface with you.”

“
So you're tired? Is that what you are saying? That you're tired of me?”

“Can we just go back and sit down?” he pleaded.

“Do you agree with him?” I asked, desperate.

“Oh my God, please,” he said.

“Do you think you'll wake up one day and no longer need your music? Or God? Or love? Do you think we're just wasting our time?”

“I have no idea, Miriam.”

“Yes, for example. Miriam.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you know who Miriam is?”

“
No.” He looked down and made circles in the sand with his feet, probably to stop himself from shoving me out of his way.

“She'
s the one who saved Moses, watched him float in a little basket down the river when the Pharaoh wanted to kill him.”

“So what?”
Elliot said, losing patience. “My father is the Pharaoh?”

“No.”

“Oh, no, I'm the Pharaoh! I'm the Pharaoh!”

“You didn't answer my question,” I said.

His eyes were green, green, green—like Oz green. “It was a stupid question.”

“Oh, now you're calling me stupid.”

“I didn't call you stupid,” he said.

“No. You just think I'm too much.”

“Miriam.”

“Elliot?”

“It's one thing. He said ONE thing. You've been here for five days. You've gone on hikes with him. You've had dinners with him, and one time he says this thing and you totally write him off.”

“Should I be grateful?”

“I'm not saying that.”

“What are you saying?” I ask.

“I'm saying he's my father and maybe he's wrong, but I love him, and I still respect him.”

He was trembling when he said that. I knew I could make it to the ocean, but it could not be with Elliot. Elliot could go back to his Mommy and Daddy.

“Good.” I nodded. “And I'm saying my grandfather took the last boat to America before the Nazis raided his house, and that's why I'm here to fuck you in your summer home. I'm saying my mother gave up everything and lived in a rathole for years, just so she could take photographs for the rest of her life. I'm saying that guy at the concert was your knife, and he probably saved your life, and now you'
re turning your back on him and everything he does. I'm saying we're in love, but it's nothing anybody can count on, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop when I get tired. Faith isn't something we can just get rid of. We need it. Everything runs on it.”

You could say we would've never broken up if it hadn't been for David's rant on the useless arts. Or if Elliot hadn't been so damn passive, so quiet. But what kept me shivering until I got home was the fear—not of David, whose comments I'd heard before; not of Elliot, who'd proven his loyalty enough other times—but of love itself, stretched from my Opa, through my mother, to my favorite second grade teacher, to the boy who kissed my breasts in the kitchen of his summer home after his parents had gone to sleep.

All I kept thinking about was his ocean metaphor. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was too intense, too tiring. Maybe it was easy to fall in love with me, but not so easy to be with me. Maybe that's who I was.

But what was I supposed to change then? How could I give in and not give up? How could I come out whole? What would have to die for me to stay close to Elliot, to anyone? Was it possible to be in love and be yoursel
f
? Love is loss is love is loss is love.

That day, I made it to the ocean and swam for an hour. When I got back to the house, they were all gone, maybe to look for me, maybe to get ice cream. I left a note for Elliot and took a cab to the train station, where I bought a ticket for the first train back home. That's where I took the last picture of the summer. From that train, of a street in the Wilmington ghetto.

I'm in your woods, Elliot. Can you hear me? Picasso's daughter wants to meet me in your woods.