Keepers (10 page)

Until this

(
You’re everything that I didn’t know I always wanted
...)

moment.

Until this moment

(
You did the wrong routine
...)

of this day.

Until this moment of

(
Dammit
,
I’ve
helped
people
,
you know
?
I’ve cared for them when no one else
wanted to
...)

this day when I’d watched an old man die on the highway for want of hat and crawled in blood-soaked clothes under the porch to comfort a dying dog as Magritte-Man and his troop of players surrounded me and a mist crowded with
bas-relief
ghost-animals formed an impenetrable dome over my house and shrunk the boundaries of what I laughingly thought of as my world until I

(...
might say they’re not from around here
...)

had to come out here and watch my own private production of
Godspell On Crack
just so these bastards could rattle my cage and jar everything loose and I didn’t
want
to remember these things about Beth and her Aunt Mabel and their Its and what happened to all of them and to me during that terrible sick-making three-hour period the year I turned twenty-one and I only had a few moments to shove it all back inside and slam the door before it took over and swallowed me whole but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do because I was hurt and frightened and my house was under siege and so much of it was
already out
and right there in my face and suddenly I thought

(
There ought to be a place
)

of something I’d read about Nietzsche who’d said there are times when things get so horrible that you have only two choices laugh or go crazy so I opted for the former and barked out a single laugh that sounded berserk even to me and then I did the only other thing I could think of to keep the memories from engulfing me like the jaws of some mythic beast—

—I opened fire.

Simply Because They Get You

“
It’s the leaving that’s the important part
....”

By the time I turned seventeen I was an honorary member of Beth’s and Mabel’s family. Beth was now twenty-four and had grown into her shop-worn beauty and grace with all the poise I’d come to expect from her. In the years since the hospital we had shared every secret, every dream, every sadness, pettiness, fear, hope, want, triumph, and failure of both childhood and adolescence; I knew her better than anyone, and she, in turn knew more about me than any person ever had or ever would. There had been so much between us, so many shared moments and experiences: our first trip (the first of many) to King’s Island where she took me on my very first roller coaster ride, then didn’t laugh her head off or make fun of me when I threw up as soon as we climbed out of the car; a terrible afternoon a few weeks after I’d gotten my driver’s license when I drove her over to Columbus to get an abortion because her boyfriend at the time (all her boyfriends were so physically interchangeable to me they became faceless over the years) had dumped her and skipped town after she told him she was pregnant; the day she picked me up at four in the afternoon on my fifteenth birthday and drove all the way to Cincinnati so I could see my first circus; an Emerson, Lake & Palmer concert where we were nearly trampled to death after the crowd—who’d been standing in near-blizzard conditions for over three hours—rushed the doors when they were finally opened; all the times I helped her to take one of the dogs to the vet, times when I stood beside her after the animal had been given the Last Injection and she needed to say good-bye—then, later, her infectious near-giddiness when the dead pet was replaced by a new one; and, most of all, a certain picnic in Moundbuilders Park on my seventeenth birthday when Beth asked me if I had a girlfriend. When I said no, she leaned in and gave me the sweetest, longest, most tender kiss against which all others would forever be compared and come up lacking, then shyly handed me a birthday card inscribed:
Just wait until you’re legal
!

I read the inscription twice before clearing my throat and saying, “Um, I, uh...is this a joke?”

She put her thumb and index finger under my chin, lifting my head so she could look straight into my eyes. Whenever she did this, it meant Something Serious was about to happen or be said. “Can I ask you something?”

“You mean besides that?”

“Don’t try to be funny, you’re not all that good at it.”

“Okay.”

She kept her thumb and finger under my chin, making small, maddening circles against my skin with the tips of each. “Do you love me?”

I blanked out for a second—what was happening here?—then shook myself back to the Right-Now and said, “Yes, of course I do. We’ve known each other for—what is it now?—
eight
years?”

“Almost nine now.”

I reached up and held her wrist. “You are the best friend I have ever had, Beth. Hell—you’re the
only
real friend I’ve ever had.”

She cupped my face in both her hands and kissed me again. “And you’re
my
best friend. You’ve never judged me, or lied to me, you’ve never been cruel or thoughtless to me, you’ve appreciated everything I’ve ever done for you and you’ve done so many
sweet
things for me, even when I was acting like a real bitch on wheels—”

“Your words, not mine. Go on, I’ll speak up when I disagree.”

She smiled, moving closer to me. “You know that in high school I was kind of...oh, what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Popular?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Well, I suppose
that’s
a
word for it.”

“Friendly?”

She bit her lower lip and shook her head.

“Available? ‘Open Twenty-Four Hours’?” I began to laugh. “‘One Mattress, No Waiting’?”

“You’re dangerously close to losing one of your nuts.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“You
do
know what I’m trying to tell you, right?”

“That you were kind of easy in high school?”

“Don’t sugar-coat it, kiddo—Oh, shit! I didn’t mean—”

“Too late.” I held out my hand. “You owe me a buck.”

“But we were having a moment—”

“—that will continue once you pony up the dough.” Ever since the day she’d taken me home from the hospital, Beth and I’d had an agreement: any time she slipped up and called me “kid” or “kiddo” or any variation thereof, it would cost her a dollar. She had promised never to call me anything like that again, and my charging her for her digressions seemed a solid way to remind her of the importance of keeping her word.

She dug into her pocket and produced a crumpled dollar bill, which she slapped into my hand with a lot more force than was called for, in my opinion.

Shoving the buck into
my
pocket so the lint would have some company, I smiled at her and said: “You were telling me something about your being easy in high school?”

“Easy? I was a slut. If I’d stayed in college, I’d probably be a real piece—”

“—like you already weren’t?”

“—
of work
, smartass. I’d be a real
piece of work
. I spent way too much time in way too many beds trying to convince myself I was worth something. If a guy even hinted that he liked me, I’d pretty much let him do whatever he wanted.”

“I kind of suspected that when I saw you with that bozo at the gas station the first time you took me home for dinner.”

“I’m not like that anymore. Since the abortion last year, I’ve been very careful about who I...you know...I mean, I haven’t been with a guy in that way
since
....”

She wasn’t on the verge of tears—Beth almost never cried—but there was a thinness to her voice, a vulnerability that both surprised and scared me.

I touched her face. “You don’t have to explain any of this to me. I understand how things were. It never mattered to me. It still doesn’t.”

She turned her face into my hand, kissing the palm. “That’s just so goddamn typical of you.”

“What? Did I do something untoward? Did I say the wrong thing? Did I let fly with a whopper of a fart and just not notice—what?”

“You
accept
me for who and what I am. You always have. Whenever one of those dick-for-brains boyfriends of mine would treat me like shit, or embarrass me, or stand me up for a date, you always said or did the right thing to make it better. I could never really
hurt
when I was with you. Sometimes, just knowing that all I’d have to do—it didn’t matter who I was with or where we were or whatever kind of trouble I getting into—all I had to do was pick up the phone and call you and you’d make everything better.”

“Okay.
And
...?”

She stared at me for a moment, then shook her head slightly. “And you have no idea how great a thing that is, do you? You have no idea how wonderful you really are. All you can see are your weaknesses and failures. You don’t see how strong you are already, how strong you’ve always been. Christ, when I first met you in the hospital I thought you were, like,
my age
. Sure, you were
built
about the size of a nine-year-old, but when you looked at a person—when you looked at
me
—you were so much older than you should have been. Even now, looking into your eyes, you seem so much older than I am. Haven’t you ever noticed how people can’t keep eye-contact with you during a conversation?”

“Always figured it was because I had something stuck in my teeth—”

“
Shut
.
Up
. You listen now. People can’t keep eye-contact with you because you see through all the scrims and bullshit. Whether you mean to or not, you just don’t look
at
a person, you look right into the middle of who they really are and people can’t handle that.”

“That explains my jam-packed social calendar.”

“See? Just then, that remark—‘My jam-packed social calendar.’ How many seventeen-year-old guys do you know who say things like that? And wasn’t there an ‘untoward’ in there earlier? Don’t answer, it wasn’t really a question.”

“What’s going on here, Beth? I’m confused.”

“No, you’re not. You’re one of the most
un
-confused people I’ve ever known. I think everything is very clear to you.”

I held up the birthday card. “This isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. You just don’t want to admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“That you love me.”

I sighed in exasperation. “
I already said I did
! That’s what started this...this...this goddamn dialogue exchange from a Harold Pinter play. You’re my best friend and I love you.”

“But you don’t
only
love me as a friend, do you?”

(
Mayday
,
mayday
,
sonar has malfunctioned
,
there’s an unexpected obstacle outside the cabin window and
—)

—and there it was.

She’d blind-sided me and she knew it. Had it been that obvious all these years and I was just too stupid to know I’d been wearing
all
my feelings on my sleeve?

Staring into her soft-brown, gold-flecked eyes I was as utterly and deliciously helpless as any teenager in love has ever been. “You’re
twenty-four
, Beth.”

“You make it sound ancient.”

“How would it look to your friends? Christ, I’m just a
baby
as far as they’re concerned.”

“Leave them out of it for now, okay? Fuck ‘em. Right now, right here, I want to know
all
your feelings for me.”

What surprised me the most was how quickly I answered, and the ease with which the words came out of my mouth: “I’ve been in love with you since that day you brought two of your friends into my room at the hospital and kissed me in front of them. I was in love with you long before you held my hand for the first time, or told me a secret, or took me to your house, or slipped your arm through mine while we wandered around King’s Island. The first time I saw you in your hip-huggers and a halter-top I thought I’d implode from how beautiful you were. Do you have any idea how much I wanted to kill that guy at the gas station because
he
got to hold you and kiss you and all I could do was sit there and watch him do it? You haven’t dated one guy that I didn’t immediately want to run over with a power mower just to hear him scream. Whenever you hug me, I won’t wash the shirt for a
week
because the smell of your musk oil lingers in the material. All my life girls have either made fun of me or treated me like I was their brother. My first kiss I got only because I was at a party playing ‘Spin the Bottle’—it pointed at Linda McDonald, who was the new girl at school and didn’t know I was the class joke. The only girl who’s ever kissed me like she
meant
it is you. I’m never really happy unless you’re around, or I know that I’ll be seeing you soon. When I’m an old man sitting in a nursing home with oatmeal dribbling down my chin, I’m gonna bore the piss out of the nurses because I’ll keep telling them over and over about this girl named Beth who was the great love of my life, but because she was also my best friend so I did the noble thing and let her slip away.

“Whoever you wind up with, whichever guy out there has the brains to know he’s just met the greatest woman in the world the first time he meets you...the two of you can be together for sixty, seventy years, you can have dozens of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and build the most unbelievably fantastic life together, but when you’re holding his hand at the end and looking into his eyes and seeing him remember the richness and fulfillment and joy he’s known because his life has been spent by your side, at that moment,
that very moment,
he won’t come
close
to loving you half as much as I do right here, right now. So, yeah, Beth, I love you, and I’m
in
love with you, and nothing you’ve said or done in the past has changed that, and nothing you can say or do now is
going
to change it. There? Happy now?”