Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (22 page)

I shook Will’s hand and wished him a happy birthday.

He called me later that night.

“I really loved your gift,” he whispered so that his mother wouldn’t hear. She had set a phone curfew for him of nine o’clock while he was recuperating, and it was already ten-thirty.

“I’m glad.”

“You know those records were my dad’s.”

“Yes, Will.” Of course I knew that; I knew everything about that boy. “But my thinking was…It was so long ago…My thinking was that maybe you ought to take them off the wall and play them once in a while?”

Will didn’t say anything for a minute. “Winnie br—”

At that moment, Mrs. Landsman came on the line. “William Blake Landsman, you are supposed to be asleep.”

“Ma!”

“Hi, Mrs. Landsman,” I said to my English teacher.

“Hello, dear. Tell my son that he needs to get off the phone, would you?”

What could I do? Certainly I had an interest in whatever Will was planning to tell me about Winnie, but the woman would be grading my final in less than two weeks. “You should rest, Will.”

“Thank you,” said Will’s mother. “Now tell Naomi goodbye and hang up the phone, William.”

“Good night, Chief,” he said.

The next day was chaotic with the arrival of the books. When I opened the first cardboard box, I felt sadness that Will wasn’t there. It had been his baby after all, and it didn’t seem right that I should be the first one to see the book, certainly not without Will. No one had loved this yearbook more than he, and all his work had made this beautiful thing that people would have forever. The book was all white. In the lower right-hand corner it said
The Phoenix
in a very simple black Arial type font, and on the spine was a small silver bird coming out of a silver flame. The inside papers were gray, and on the upper left-hand corner of the interior front cover the school’s name and date were printed. It was simple and elegant; we had begun the design months, even years earlier, before we had even been co-editors.

Of course, I had to call Will. “I only have a minute. It’s about to get crazy here.”

“I know,” he said wistfully. “I was thinking about walking down—”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Well, I decided against it. Even if I did make it there, my darling mother would probably murder me. How does it look?”

“It’s gorgeous,” I told him. “I’m so proud of you. I’ll come to you as soon as we’re done getting the books out.”

“I’m glad you’re there.” Will coughed, but even his coughs were sounding so much better. “I was just thinking…isn’t it lucky that we decided to become co-editors? If one takes a blow to the head, the other can fill in. If the other’s lung spontaneously collapses, the one can fill in. It’s a perfect system when you think about it.”

I laughed. “Hey, Will, I could give the book to Winnie. She’ll probably get to you before me. You know how it is on D-Day.”

“No, I’d rather you brought it, Chief,” he said.

“Or your mom, if you’d prefer. I can send Patten or Plotkin to drop it off in her classroom.”

“No,” he insisted, “it should be you.”

I didn’t get over to Will’s house until seven-thirty, and by then I was spent. “He’s waiting for you,” his mother said. She made me promise to leave by nine, so that Will could get his rest. “You look like you could use some, too,” she said.

I went into Will’s room.

The walls were still lined entirely by his dad’s record collection. The record player was sitting on the bureau.

“Okay,” Will said, “let’s have it.”

I handed him the book; he started flipping through each and every page. He was lying on his stomach on his bed, and I lay down next to him the same way so that I could look at it, too. We would complain about a typo here or the way a picture had printed there, but it wasn’t the type of thing anyone except us would even notice. The last thing we looked at was the cover.

“I think we were right to go with the all-white, don’t you?”

I nodded. “I love it. Everyone at school did, too.”

“You haven’t forgotten our joke, have you?” Will smiled at me.

I hadn’t. The title in the corner was printed so that it almost looked like a textual orphan. “The orphan,” I said.

“Exactly.” His voice changed a little. “You won’t have forgotten the
White Album
either?”

Our reference in coming up with the whole design had been the Beatles’
White Album
, which had been Will’s dad’s favorite record. I scanned Will’s walls to locate it—he arranged his albums alphabetically by title—but there was a gap in his collection where it ought to have been.

“Where’d it go?” I asked.

He said he’d taken it down, that he wanted it to be the first record he’d played on his new (old) record player. “I was waiting for you to get here.”

The album was two records long, and he set it on the turntable on side three (or side one of the second record). He put down the needle.

We listened for a while and kept flipping through the book, occasionally making a comment to each other about something or other.

“I really wish my dad could have seen this,” Will said. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his pants.

The second to last track on the third side was called “I Will.” When it came on, I pointed out to him how it had been the final song of the first mix he’d made me after my accident. “Had you been trying to remind me about the cover?” I asked.

“Sort of,” he said shyly with that funny crooked smile of his, “but I’d been mainly trying to remind you about me.
I, Will
, you know?”

“If you had ever signed my yearbook instead of just leaving that big old blank box, that probably would have done the trick, too,” I said.

“S’pose.”

“Why didn’t you anyway?”

“Too much to say,” Will said with a decisive nod of his head. “Too much to say with none of the right words to say it. I’d rather just pick the perfect song to do the work for me.”

It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless. I wanted to hear it again nearly as soon as it was over, but by that time it was nine o’clock. I shook Will’s hand—was it my imagination or did he hold it longer than was strictly necessary?—then I drove myself home.

By Thursday, most of the yearbooks had been distributed. For the first time in over a week, I had time to go eat with Alice and Yvette, who were back together again.

“We love the book, cookie,” Alice said.

“It’s mainly due to Will,” I said.

“Well, tell him we love the book when you see him,” she said.

I said that I would.

“Did you hear that Winnie Momoi broke up with him?” Yvette asked.

“While he’s been sick? Did you know about this, cookie?” Alice looked at me.

I shook my head and concentrated on chewing my sandwich.

“Yeah,” said Yvette, “she’s in my math class, and she was crying all day on Monday.”

“Why was she the one crying if she broke up with him?” Alice asked.

“Guilt, maybe? You cry every time you break up with me, Ali.”

“Touché,” said Alice, and then she changed the subject. “I hate the word
touché
, don’t you? I can’t imagine what possessed me to say it. It sounds like tushy, or something you say while eating cheese.”

“Actually, it’s a fencing term,” Yvette said. “You’d know if you ever came to my matches.”

“I come to your matches!” Alice said. “I’ve been to at least three.”

“Two!”

Their fights often started like this and went on for days. I ignored them and thought about Will instead. I had seen and called him over ten times since Monday, and he had never mentioned anything about Winnie to me. I wondered what had happened between them, but I didn’t really feel like it was my place to ask. If he wanted to talk to me about it, I figured that he would. These days, I was careful around Will, and he was careful around me.

Even if we never got together in a romantic way, I loved him. I guess I always had. To tell you the truth, the knowledge was something of a burden.

I remembered those porcupines I’d been watching with Dad the night I thought Will might be dying. Not the part about the urinating. The part where they looked each other in the eye. Will and I weren’t there yet. (Personally, I hoped never to get to the peeing stage.)

I stopped by Will’s house after school to tell him I wouldn’t see him for the next three days—I was taking off Friday to go to Martha’s Vineyard for Dad’s and Rosa Rivera’s wedding. I knew that Will had gotten used to my coming around every day, but I chose my words deliberately. I didn’t want him to think that I had any expectation that he would care that I was leaving. I also didn’t want to pull another disappearing act on him.

“Your dad’s wedding,” he said. “It sure came up fast, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, why didn’t you invite me, Chief?” He said this in a cheerful way where I couldn’t tell if it was a serious request.

“Well…you’ve been sick, so I doubt your mother would have let you go.”

“True, true.”

“And also”—I didn’t know I was going to say this until I did—“there’s Winnie.”

Will cleared his throat. “Yes, Winnie.” His voice was amused. He looked me in the eye, and I looked back. “She broke up with me. I thought you might have heard by now.”

“I hadn’t heard it from the source, so I didn’t put too much stock in the story.”

“She said I wasn’t a very good boyfriend.”

“I doubt that. You always seemed attentive to me.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that. I’m a genius with birthdays, and I always do what I say I will. You know that. The thing was, she suspected I was in love with someone else.”

I took a deep breath and raised my right eyebrow. “Scandalous,” I managed to say.

Will’s mother got home then—since Will had been sick, she was always buzzing around him.

“Ma, can I go to the Vineyard for Naomi’s dad’s wedding?” Will called out.

“Absolutely not.”

“I didn’t invite him,” I called to her.

“I knew
you
wouldn’t,” Mrs. Landsman said. “But that son of mine.”

On the ferry ride to the Vineyard, Dad and I sat in the middle of a long pewlike bench with roughly a million sweating people on it. Rosa was on the deck with Freddie and George. Dad has always gotten seasick on decks, so I was keeping him company in the cabin. It had occurred to me that this was the last time it would be me and him for a very long while. Maybe Rosa, Freddie, and George were thinking the same thing when they’d decided to stay outside.

The day was bright and wet, and my clothes were sticking to me. I was seriously considering abandoning Dad for the deck (last time alone be damned), which at least had the benefit of a breeze, when he asked me if I was looking forward to the wedding. I told him I was. I said how much I liked Rosa Rivera and all the sorts of things I knew it would make him happy to hear.

“You seem a little flushed, though,” he said.

I said I was just hot.

It was noisy and crowded in the cabin, in other words not a great place to talk about serious things, but Dad persisted. “How’s James?” Dad asked.

Truthfully, I hadn’t thought of James at all. I hadn’t had time—not with Dad’s wedding and Will’s sickness and
Will
and my photography and tennis and yearbook.

It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him.

Apparently, I could.

That I could forget him so easily, more than the loss of James himself, made me melancholy, I guess. I wondered if Mom had felt that way about Dad when she met Nigel again. I wondered if my biological mother had felt that way about my biological father, and even about me when she’d had to give me up.

“I don’t see him much,” I said to Dad finally.

“It happens, baby.” Dad nodded and patted me on the hand, and then he read my mind. “You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned—the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and the Pythagorean theorem. You especially forget everything you didn’t really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you’ll forget those, too. You forget your junior year class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend’s home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations—even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties. Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.”

I must have started to cry because Dad held out his sleeve for me to wipe my eyes on, which I did. It wasn’t anything in particular that Dad had said, but it was like he’d read my mind and put words to all the things that had been brewing inside me for so long. We were so much alike really.

I wanted to tell him how I was in love with Will, but it was Dad’s weekend (and me not a particularly confessional sort of person under any circumstances) and maybe he already knew it anyway. Besides, it seemed silly after we’d just been talking about James. I didn’t want to be the kind of girl who always needed to be in love with someone.

So all I said was “I’m really happy for you, Dad.”

Rosa Rivera had no use for the color white—not in decorating and certainly not in weddings. “I am not young or a virgin,” she had declared, “and I have already worn a white dress once. This time, I will wear red.” The only white she wore on her wedding day was a white ribbon that she tied around her waist like an afterthought and the roses that she wore in her hair.

“But, Mama, aren’t white roses bad luck?” George had asked her.

Rosa Rivera said she didn’t know and she didn’t care to know.