Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (21 page)

ACE APPROACHED ME AGAIN ABOUT JOINING THE TENNIS
team. His mixed doubles partner, Melissa Berenboim, had torn her ACL. She was out for the last three games of the season, and he needed a replacement quickly. “We never thought we should play together while we were going out, but I figured it’s fine now,” he said.

“What about our fight and everything else?”

“I thought you might say that, but first and foremost, I have to be a good captain to my team, and what is good for the team is me finding a replacement for Missy. Naomi, there are way, way, way more important things than whatever stupid stuff happened between you and me.”

“Like?” I was curious what Ace would say.

“Like tennis. And strong knees.”

“I’m warning you, I’m totally out of practice.”

“I’ll whip you right back into shape, Porter.”

The truth was, I’d wanted to go back to the team for a while. I wasn’t the greatest player in the world, but I loved playing. Ace had known that about me.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

Actually, Ace was a great doubles partner: not selfish, not trying to go for every shot, instinctively knowing when I could reach the ball and when I couldn’t. We were a good team. We won more than we lost, which was saying something considering how little practice time we’d had.

We enjoyed each other on the court, too. Like if the score was forty–love, Ace might make a joke and say something like, “Forty—and maybe it’s love, but probably not if she dumps you on homecoming night.”

“Ha,” I said.

One day I wore those tennis sweatbands on the court. I held up my wrists and said to him, “Notice anything special about me?”

Ace whistled and said, “The guy who got those for you must have been some romantic.”

It was all sort of corny, but we amused each other. It was easy to remember why I had liked him in the first place.

We were in the athletic department van on the way back from a match when Ace said to me, “I heard about James.”

“Yeah,” I said, hoping he would leave it at that.

“Maybe you could go up to visit him?”

I told him that I already had, but that we were basically taking some time off from each other.

Ace nodded. He said, “I can tell that you really love him. I know what you look like when you’re in love.
I know you.
”

Then Ace apologized. “When we broke up, I might have said some things that weren’t very nice about you. I’m sorry for that.”

Of course, I had forgiven him ages ago. I told him I was sorry, too. “Things hadn’t been going well for a while, had they? Even before my accident, I mean?”

Ace smiled that dopey grin of his and just shook his head.

The third week of May, I was helping Alice paint the sets for her new play, a production of
Hamlet
, when James sauntered into the theater.

I hadn’t known he’d be back that day.

James was still handsome as ever. Less emaciated and that was good. He asked me if I wanted to go get coffee somewhere. I told him I had to finish painting first, which I did.

At the coffee shop, he told me about Sweet Lake, and I told him about my pictures.

He told me he had quit smoking, and I told him I was letting my hair grow out.

He told me how he’d made friends with a girl called Elizabeth while he was away, and I told him how I had sent Chloe an Emily Dickinson poem last week.

“Which one?” he asked.

“‘I’m Nobody.’ It’s sort of a nickname she has for me. We read it in Mrs. Landsman’s class, so I photocopied it and sent it to her. When I was a kid, I always loved getting stuff in the mail, didn’t you?”

James nodded.

Soon after, we ran out of things to talk about.

Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our “madness” (how else to put it?) to unite us, there wasn’t anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It’s like when you take a trip with someone you don’t know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realize all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travelers, if that makes any sense.

Whatever it was, I knew he felt it, too.

He drove me back to my house.

“You still have paint on your palm,” he observed. “Like mine, the first time we met.”

“Except that was your blood, Jims,” I pointed out. “This’ll just wash out, you know?”

“True, true. But it healed pretty quick actually.” He kissed me on my cheek.

I went to prom by myself, but I ended up hanging out with Yvette and Alice.

The first person I ran into was Ace. His new girlfriend was a tennis player from another school. Ace introduced me in the following way: “This is Naomi Porter, my ex-girlfriend and current mixed-doubles partner.”

“Probably more information than you needed,” I said to Ace’s girlfriend, rolling my eyes.

Will was there with Winnie. He was wearing a powder blue tuxedo, and she looked teeny tiny in a matching powder blue vintage tulle dress with a full skirt. (Personally, I’m too tall for most vintage clothes.) It was a lot of blue, but they looked adorable. Will and I never got a chance to talk. At one point, he winked at me from across the room; I winked back.

He was a good boyfriend to her. He brought her punch, made sure she had a seat when she wanted one, and watched her purse when she went to the ladies’ room.

He was a good boyfriend to her as, in some universe elsewhere, he might have been to me.

ROSA RIVERA, MY DAD, AND I WERE WATCHING A
nature program. Dad still watched them, though he watched fewer now, and when he did, it was with Rosa Rivera or me.

In any case, this particular one was about porcupines. So the guy porcupine will sing a song if he wants to mate, and if the lady porcupine’s not in the mood or would prefer a different porcupine, she pretends not to hear him before running away. And sometimes he’s completely the right porcupine, but she’ll run away anyway because she’s not ready. But if he’s the porcupine for her and the timing’s right, they stand up and face each other, eye-to-eye and belly-to-belly. They really take the time to
see
each other.

“This is so sweet,” Rosa commented. “He is showing her the respect. Why don’t you do that to me?” She turned Dad to face her, porcupine-style.

“After the staring has continued an appropriate time,” the TV narrator went on, “the male porcupine covers the female from tip to toe with his own urine.”

“Please do not ever do that to me, darling,” Rosa told Dad.

“His own urine?” Dad asked. “Isn’t that redundant? Who else’s urine might he be using?”

The TV narrator advised “never getting too near porcupines mating,” which seemed like sound, if obvious, advice to me.

I didn’t hear what happened after the urination because my cell phone rang, so I went into the dining room to answer it. It was Will’s girlfriend, Winnie.

“I was wondering if you’d heard from Will,” she said stiffly.

I hadn’t spoken to him since lunchtime, which wasn’t particularly uncommon since I wasn’t on yearbook anymore and we didn’t have any classes together. He’d sometimes call me at night, but just as often not. “No,” I said. “Why?”

“No one’s heard from him since the ambulance came. We thought he might call you.”

“Winnie, what are you talking about? What ambulance?”

“You haven’t heard, then?” she asked.

Obviously
. Why do people always ask that? I said, “No, Winnie. Please tell me.”

It had started after school at
The Phoenix
. First he had had a coughing fit and then he said he was having trouble breathing. He tried to continue working, though everyone could tell he wasn’t himself. Then he passed out. He woke up right before the ambulance got there. Winnie said that he told everyone to keep working, and that nobody should come with him in the ambulance, and that he’d call with instructions later that night. “Isn’t that so like Will?” Winnie asked. “Only he never called in with instructions, which is completely not like him, and now everyone’s freaking out. I should have gone with him. I can’t get Mrs. Landsman on the phone.” Her voice was small. “Do you think he’s dying, Naomi?”

“I’m sorry, Winnie, I have to get off the phone now. I’ll call you if I hear anything.” My hands were shaking.

Dad muted the porcupine program and called out from the living room. “Is everything okay?”

I took a deep breath. I dialed Will’s home number, but no one picked up.

“Is everything okay?” Dad had come into the dining room.

“It’s Will,” I told Dad. “They…” I cleared my throat. “They took him away in an ambulance. He’s sick. We have to go to the hospital.”

Dad looked at his watch. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious. Besides, it’s nearly ten o’clock, Naomi. They won’t let you visit him until tomorrow anyway.”

“I have to know what’s wrong.” I started heading toward the door.

“Wait!” Dad said. “I’ll call the hospital first.”

While Dad found the number to the hospital and called it, I thought of how Will knew everything about me, and how if he were gone, part of me would be missing forever. I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who
wants
to know all your stories.

Dad hung up the kitchen phone and said, “They have a William Landsman, but of course they wouldn’t tell me anything about his condition. We can’t ring his room because it’s too late. But if he has a room, he’s definitely not dead, Nomi.”

“What if he’s dying, Dad? I’m going down there.”

Dad sighed. “It’s ten o’clock. Visiting hours are over. Besides, it’s storming out.” There was a particularly brutal late spring downpour going on outside with wind, lightning, and all the special effects.

“Maybe his mom will be in the waiting room? And she could tell us what happened,” I argued.

Dad looked me in the eye. “Okay,” he said finally, grabbing his keys off the dining room table. “Rosa, we’re going out for a bit.”

In our rush we had forgotten umbrellas, and Dad and I got completely soaked on the walk from the parking lot to the hospital.

When we got there, the waiting room of the pediatrics unit was completely empty. I whispered to Dad that he should ask the nurse behind the desk if she could tell us about Will’s condition. I figured they’d be more likely to respect an adult than a teenage girl. But when the nurse asked if Dad was Will’s guardian, Dad shook his head no, like a goddamn idiot.

I burst into tears. My dad could be so annoying.

The nurse looked at me curiously. “I recognize y’all. Head trauma in August, am I right?”

I nodded.

“I pretty much have a photographic memory for faces,” she reported. “How you been, hon?”

“Mainly good. Except my friend Will might be dying and no one will tell me anything,” I said.

“Oh, honey, he ain’t dying. He just has”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“pneumonia is all. A bad case. His lung collapsed, but he’s sleeping now. And
I
didn’t just say that.”

I leaned across the desk and kissed her once on each of her cherubic peach cheeks, even though getting physical with total strangers was not my thing at all.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, thank you.”

“My pleasure,” she said. “And
I
didn’t just say
that
, either.”

“Could I leave a note to let him know I was here?”

“Sure thing, honey.” She handed me a piece of hospital stationery.

I didn’t know what to write. My heart had been bursting with so many things, and yet, when it came time to put any of them on paper, I couldn’t. Finally I wrote the following lines:

I handed the note to the nurse. I saw her read it before folding it in half and writing Will’s name across the other side. “Visiting hours start at eleven,” she said.

I remembered how Will had gotten there at 10:50 when it was me in the hospital, and I vowed to do the same.

In the car on the way home, Dad kept stealing sidelong glances at me. “Is something going on between you and Will?”

“No.” I shook my head. I wondered if I had said too much in my note. What the hell had I meant by
if you’ll have me
? Of course he’d have me. It was a hospital. You got visited by whoever showed up. What was Will, who analyzed everything, going to make of my stupid note? “No,” I said firmly.

“You sure?”

“I’m sorry, Dad. I have to make a call,” I said by way of changing the subject, but also because I actually did. I dialed Winnie’s number. “Winnie? This is Naomi Porter. He’s going to be fine,” I said.

I knew Dad wouldn’t give me permission to skip two periods of school, so I didn’t ask. Instead, I forged a note claiming a doctor’s appointment (and wasn’t that partially true, really? I
was
going to a hospital after all…).

In the elevator I thought about the note I had left for Will the night before and how it contained the three most ill-conceived sentences in the history of the world. Why had I written “Dearest Coach”? The “dearest” seemed ridiculously sentimental in the morning. We were talking about Will here. And “Yours, Chief”? Would he think I was saying that I was his and he was mine? Which, incidentally, I had been, but I didn’t want him to know that yet.

I tried to put it out of my mind. And maybe he hadn’t gotten it anyway? It hadn’t exactly been sent registered mail or something.

When I got to his room, he was sitting up in bed with his laptop on his food tray. He was wearing hospital pajamas with his smoking jacket over them, and he looked like himself, but very pale. He smiled at me, and I suddenly felt shy around him.

“Hey there” was all I could manage to say. I didn’t make eye contact either. I had my eyes focused on the foot of the bed. Then I decided that this was idiotic, so I looked at him as unsentimentally as possible. “Well, what happened to you?”

I moved over to his bedside and Will told me. He’d been feeling bad for a while, but he’d ignored it, thinking it was stress or just the flu or what have you. And yesterday, all of a sudden, he passed out. “They have no idea how I managed to take it so long,” he said almost proudly. “My lung had collapsed, it was so packed with bacteria.”

“Lovely,” I said.

“Isn’t it though? It was much more complicated than your average pneumonia.”

“You could never be simple,” I said.

We went on like that for a while, not saying all that much. If Will had gotten my note, he didn’t mention it or didn’t think it was anything to remark on. I didn’t bring it up either.

Yet, inside me, things were different. It was like that physics DVD I’d watched about string theory way back when. Do you remember? The one with the scientists groping around in the dark. I had thought the way I felt about Will was just a room, but it had turned out to be a mansion. He had turned out to be the mansion. Now that I knew that, it was difficult to go back to the way things had been.

At the end of my visit, Will told me he needed to talk about something serious. I thought to myself,
Here it comes. My stupid note.

All he said was “I need you to do me a really important favor.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Do you want me to get your assignments or something?”

He shook his head. “No, Winnie’s doing that. I want you to run yearbook for me while I’m away. You know as much as me, and I’ll probably be out of school for at least the next two weeks. Plus, the book’s done. Only distribution and the end-of-year inserts and things like that. Stuff you could do sleepwalking, Chief.”

“Sure thing, Coach,” I said. “Just put me in the game.”

So that’s how I went from Ex-Co-editor to Interim Editor-in-Chief of
The Phoenix
.

There were a few people on the staff who were not exactly happy to see me back. They rightfully thought of me as a traitor and a deserter. But most of the staff understood that I was filling in for Will because he had asked me to do it. They didn’t necessarily throw a parade, but out of respect for him they respected me.

Will sent me almost hourly e-mails. As his mother had banned him from the phone for the first several days of his recuperation, I went to see him every night with updates and to ask advice, even though it wasn’t the sort of work that required much input. It was mainly just accounting and distribution, as Will had said. But he was crazy over that sort of thing.

His seventeenth birthday was June 5.

I did the best I could to wrap the record player, but I hadn’t done that great a job and the arm was poking out. I lugged it out to the car, then drove over to the apartment he shared with his mom. Winnie was there, as were Mrs. Landsman and a few people from the staff.

It was a pretty tame birthday party. I was glad of it. He had only been out of the hospital about a week, and I still worried about him. Winnie gave him a straw hat with a black-and-white band that was without question something Will would wear; Mrs. Landsman gave him a pair of binoculars. He left my gift for last, but he kept making jokes about it, like “I wonder what that is…Could it be a toaster? A tennis racket?”

When he finally ripped the paper off, he said, “Of course you know I’m perfectly shocked.”

“I would have found a box, but I didn’t think you could handle too much excitement, Landsman.”

Winnie put her arm around Will’s shoulders. “Now we have something to play all those records on, baby.”

I tried to smile at Winnie, but it stuck in the middle somewhere. “I should go,” I said.

“No,” Will said, “don’t go yet. This is great, Chief.” He hadn’t called me that in such a long, long time. “When’d you get this?”

“Months ago. Before everything. When Dad first started dating Rosa Rivera, I mentioned to her about your record collection, and she showed up with this crazy old record player. Rosa Rivera’s always trying to give stuff away.”

“So, it’s a re-gift?” Winnie asked.

“No, I had to get it fixed. I was planning to give it to you at the start of the school year—you know, as a way to celebrate us being editors of
The Phoenix
—but the guy at the store had to order a part, and it took longer than I’d hoped. By the time it was finished, I’d forgotten I’d dropped it off in the first place. I only got it back because I happened to be in that same store last November to pick up something else and the store owner recognized me. But then, I didn’t even know who it was for.”

“You couldn’t guess it was me? Who else has vinyl?”

“At the time, I’d forgotten about your record collection. When I remembered, you and I were not exactly speaking.”

“That’s an amazing story,” Mrs. Landsman said. “So much misdirection, rather like a Shakespearean comedy.”

Will put on the hat that Winnie had bought him. “Looks good, baby,” she said. I didn’t like the way she called him baby. Not to mention, if she’d been so concerned about him, why hadn’t she noticed that he’d been sick all that time? Maybe I wasn’t being fair. I often had such thoughts when I was around Winnie and Will.

“I should go,” I said.

“Won’t you stay for some cake, Naomi?” Mrs. Landsman asked.

I shook my head. “There’re a couple things I have to do for yearbook tonight. Tomorrow’s the day the book’s supposed to arrive at school.” D-Day, we called it.

“I should be there for that, Ma,” Will said.

“You’re staying right here,” Mrs. Landsman said.

“But, Mrs. Landsman…” Will protested, like a student asking for a better grade.