While I'm Falling (5 page)

At ten o’clock exactly, Gretchen closed her chemistry book. “That’s it for me tonight,” she said. “You want to take a break? Help me figure out what to wear?”

She was just standing up when the elevator doors opened, and Third Floor Clyde emerged. She smiled and sat back down.

I didn’t know Third Floor Clyde. I only knew his name because everyone did. He was a dorm celebrity, famous for being attractive in a shaggy-haired, dark-eyed way that made him seem like he should be out starring in pirate movies, not living among us in a dorm in Kansas. Back in August, on move-in day, the lobby was so hot and crowded that a lot of guys, and even one of the dads, took their shirts off as they carried rolled carpets and gaming chairs in from cars and trucks; but when Third Floor Clyde, waiting for an elevator with a large potted fig tree at his feet, took his shirt off, some smirking mother had elbowed her daughter and whispered, “Check out Adonis over there.” Only a week later, his real name was common knowledge, along with his floor number. Two weeks later, when I was brushing my teeth, I overheard one showerer tell another that Third Floor Clyde was not only beautiful, but an art major, and also a brave environmental activist. “He chained himself to a tree,” she shouted over the curtain, her voice full of reverence. “So he’s, like, beautiful, and he’s also, like, deep.”

His voice was certainly deep. “Hi,” he said now, the elevator doors closing behind him. His T-shirt read “5K Run Against Cancer,” and it fit snugly over his lean, lithe frame. He glanced at Gretchen, but he smiled at me. Sometime in September, much to my confusion, Third Floor Clyde had started looking at me with a friendly familiarity, his eyes lingering on mine for so long that I started to worry we did know each other, maybe from back home. But I surely would have remembered a face like his, even if he’d been two years younger.

“Hi,” I said, my voice as dazed and pleasant as I felt. I was just saying hello. Tim said hello to other girls, certainly. And some people just happened to be very attractive. That didn’t mean you couldn’t say hello to them. He continued to smile, so I did, too. Nothing wrong with that. Here was a person trying to be friendly. I should be friendly back. His forearms, somehow still tan, were flecked with white paint, as were his jeans and T-shirt. Both Gretchen and I watched him walk to the door of the men’s wing. When the door closed behind him, she turned to me.

“What was that?”

I was still smiling. “What was what?”

She didn’t say anything. She was annoyed.

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I don’t even know that guy.”

“Everyone knows who that guy is.” She looked back at the door to the men’s wing. “And he was giving you
a look
.”

“I don’t think so.” I laughed and shook my head. But it was flattering to think so, especially because I’d been sitting next to Gretchen, who was blond and, at the moment, wearing a scooped-neck shirt with a pair of smiling lips on the front. But he had looked at me. Not that it mattered. I had a boyfriend. I was in love with my boyfriend.

I looked back down at my book.
A molecule is achiral if, and only if, it has an axis of improper rotation; that is, an n-fold rotation followed by a reflection in the plane perpendicular to this axis that maps the molecule onto itself.
Whatever jolt I’d gotten from Clyde’s smile was already draining away.

Gretchen poked my arm. “So what are you going to do? Are you going to try to talk to him?”

I was confused for only a second. “Clyde?” I looked back at the door to the men’s wing. “No,” I said. “I have a boyfriend.”

She gave me a pitying glance. “You’re not married. Yet.”

“But I’m happy.” I smiled and poked her back. It was the truth and, for me, an adequate response. But I imagined she wouldn’t see it that way. When I was in high school, I only had a steady boyfriend for a total of two months. I always felt a little sorry for, and even a little superior to, the girls who started holding some guy’s hand in eighth grade, and were still holding the same one when we graduated. It all seemed a little claustrophobic, meeting the love of your life at fourteen. And maybe this wasn’t fair, but I sort of assumed that these girls who ate lunch with their boyfriends every day, who huddled against a boyfriend’s arm in the courtyard while everyone else milled about, were the girls who probably weren’t going to college. Their horizons already seemed limited. If that was what they wanted, fine. But I was a different kind of girl.

I even thought that way my freshman year of college, when I was just dating around. But then I met Tim, and all of a sudden I understood why some of those girls in high school had not been able to just let go of their boyfriends’ hands. Tim was simply my favorite person to talk to, my favorite person to be around, my favorite person to look at. If I had known Tim in high school, I would have been a girlfriend myself. It was my first inkling of how foolish it was to judge harshly and to discount fate, and to truly believe I was one kind of girl, and not another, just because of some decision I thought I’d made.

It was almost midnight when I got back to my room. The hall was empty, all of my freshman charges ostensibly in bed. Someone had written “YOU ARE NEVER HERE. YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE THIS JOB” on my message board. I wiped it off with the sleeve of my sweater and, holding the walkie-talkie between my knees, pushed my key into the lock.

The first time my mother came to visit, she was amused. “Does it make you want to mooooooove out?” she asked. She stood on my side of the room, her hands buried deep in the pockets of her raincoat, as if afraid to touch anything cow. My roommate had left for a rehearsal.

“Just try to get along,” my mother counseled. “Sometimes you just have to try to get along with someone.” She looked around the room and smiled. “Think of it as a learning experience. You know? Milk it for all it’s worth.”

This year, I had my own room, and there was no cow print to contend with. But I hadn’t really had the time or energy to decorate. I had a laminated poster of the periodic table of elements taped on my wall, so I could stare at it while I blew my hair dry. I’d pinned a calendar to the bulletin board, next to a picture of Tim standing on his head in front of his apartment. But that was pretty much it for wall art. I still had the white bedspread, and I put a white sheet over the other mattress. This looked okay in the early fall, when I still kept my windows open, the sun shining bright on the linoleum floor. But on gray days, and always at night, my room looked bare and stark.

As soon as I put my books down, I checked my phone, pleased to see Tim had called twice.

He answered yawning. “Good evening,” he said. “Or good morning. What time is it?”

“It’s late. Sorry. I forgot my phone. Did I wake you up?”

“No.” He was eating something crunchy. “We’re watching
El Corazón Verdad
. You’re missing out. Lorenzo is about to find out who his real father is.”

I sighed, envious. The graduate engineering program was famously difficult, but you wouldn’t know that from all the free time Tim seemed to have. He lived in an apartment off campus, and he regularly got himself to the grocery store and the Laundromat. He went running every morning. When the weather was good, he played kickball with his friends. He and his roommate watched documentaries on the Civil War and bad reality shows. They watched the Spanish soap operas so often that they were actually picking up Spanish. And yet Tim had recently been invited to a dinner at the Alumni Center for maintaining a 4.0. He never would have told me this, but they mentioned it at the dinner, and he’d brought me as a guest.

“They’re doing a marathon tonight,” he said. I could hear dramatic Latin music in the background. “You should come over.”

“
No puedo,
” I said.

“Whoa. Whoa.” I clearly had his attention. “Seriously. No television. I’ll turn it off. But will you come over? I’ll come pick you up right now. Just get your toothbrush. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“I’m on duty.” The regret in my voice was sincere. I liked watching the Spanish soap operas, sitting with him on his big couch, my head on his shoulder. In the morning, his roommate sometimes went out and got doughnuts.

“This job,” he said. “This babysitting job of yours.”

I fell on my bed, the phone pinched by my shoulder. “You could come over here.”

I knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t like staying at the dorm. There was the security check-in to deal with, and the real possibility of a late-night fire drill. And if he had to pee in the middle of the night, he had a long walk to the nearest men’s bathroom, complete with a flight of stairs.

“Tomorrow night?”

I checked the calendar pinned to the bulletin board next to his picture. Thursday, like Wednesday, was blocked out with an unhappy face.

“On duty again.”

“You know I leave on Friday?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t leave.”

“But you could still come to Chicago with me.” His voice was quieter. He’d turned the television off, or maybe just moved away from it. “You wouldn’t have to come to the dinner. You could just drive up there with me. I’d show you around. When I’m at the dinner, you could go see a movie or something. Or study. I mean, you’re invited to the dinner, but if you don’t want to—”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to go. I said I would feel strange.” I sat up and pushed my hair behind my shoulders. “I mean, it’s a big deal. They probably just want it to be family.”

“It’s not that big a deal.”

“Being married for fifty years?”

“Lots of people do it. My grandparents are just out to get presents. And attention. They always want attention, those two.”

“Mmm-hmm.” I smiled. Tim had a picture of his grandparents in his room. They were both in wheelchairs, holding hands. “So what are you getting them?”

“I was going to pick something up on the way. What do you get for a fiftieth anniversary? I mean, it’s gold, right? But what do you get if you’re young and poor? I don’t know. Matching sweatshirts? I have no idea.”

I reached up to the top shelf of my closet and took out the plastic bucket that held my toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap. “That’s why you want me to go. You want me to pick out a present.”

“I want you to go because I want everyone to meet you.”

I was silent, looking out my dark window. I was so high up. If there really ever were a fire, I might not be able to get out.

“So…? How about it?”

I had never been to Chicago. And he would probably let me drive, at least some of the way. But I couldn’t go. I had to study. And this weekend, I would have Jimmy Liff’s car. I could drive as much as I wanted, anywhere I wanted to go.

Tim took my refusal with little grace.

“You’re house-sitting for that security guy? The one who used to wear those stupid contacts that made his eyes look like a cat’s?”

I frowned. I’d forgotten about the contacts. “Yeah. But that’s not the point. He’s not going to be there.”

“Huh. You know that Chinese tattoo on his arm? You know what it says?”

“I didn’t know you read Chinese, Tim.”

“I looked it up. It says, ‘I don’t know Chinese, either.’”

I stood up, sat back down. “You’ll come over tomorrow night? You’re my only hope. I’ll be trapped in the tower here. Come save me.”

He laughed a little. “Good night, lovely Veronica. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

I sat there for almost a minute, holding the silent phone against my ear. I could have fallen asleep just sitting there, without even taking off my shoes. I would have to get up early in the morning. Jimmy Liff was picking me up at eight. He’d said it was the only free time he had before he left, and he wanted to show me how to get to the town house, and how to water the more delicate plants.

I changed into my pajamas and slippers, got my little basket of toiletries, and shuffled to the bathroom at the end of the hall. But even when I returned to my room, my face scrubbed, my teeth clean, I didn’t get into bed right away. I dragged the heavy wooden chair by my desk over to the closet, climbing up to reach the top shelf. I had everything up there—yearbooks, photo albums, ice skates, a book report I’d gotten to read over the radio in junior high—all the things that a college student with still-married parents would probably leave in a bedroom back home.

I found the cardboard box I was looking for and lowered myself into the chair.

My mother made amazing photo albums. My sister and I each had our own, our names cross-stitched on the front. Inside, she’d labeled each picture with the date, the event, and the names of everyone pictured. In the early years, before digital cameras, she used scissors to crop distracting backgrounds. She colored in our flash-startled eyes with brown marker. Once she got a digital camera, she could put all her energy into the layouts. She used wallpaper scraps for colorful borders. She included party invitations and notes from teachers, and a pressed flower from my prom corsage.

I moved the albums out of the box, one at a time, until I came to my parents’ wedding album. The last time I was at my mother’s apartment, she’d asked me if I wanted to keep it. She said she didn’t want it around.

I flipped through the pages slowly. The corners were yellowed, and some of the pictures were stuck to their shiny vinyl pockets. As a child, I had looked through this album so often, and so slowly, that every image was already burned in my mind: the little campus chapel where the ceremony took place, the priest standing in front of a magnolia in bloom; my father, young and skinny in his tuxedo, barely recognizable, his hair long enough to cover his ears. And my mother, her dark hair falling to her waist, in a white dress with a Cinderella hoop, a too-big bow on the chest. She was twenty-two. She looked happy in the picture, her smile wide, her eyes bright, the breeze lifting her hair and veil. There is a picture of her with my now-dead grandmother, and in it, they both look so vibrant, my grandmother wearing a bright blue hat, my mother’s head resting on her shoulder. There is a picture of my mother and father cutting the cake together. He is looking at her and saying something, and she is looking at the camera, clearly trying not to laugh.

It was hard to look at that picture, especially, and not feel bad for both of them, considering how it all turned out. I didn’t understand why my mother had done whatever she’d done with the Sleeping Roofer, why she’d let our whole world fall into this strange and un-organized landscape. She’d been unhappy, she said. I squinted down at her youthful face in the camera’s flash, searching for some clue, some way she could have known from the very start, even a hint at the world of difference between what she expected on that happy day, and all she had not foreseen.