Sliding Past Vertical (26 page)

Chapter 45

A teenage waitress in an
undersized T-shirt slunk out from behind the counter with unleaded in her left
hand, high-test in her right, and a tattoo encircling her navel. Sarah cringed.
She’d wanted to meet Emerson somewhere they’d never been before, but this
little dive near the campus had not been her best idea. It was bad enough that
whatever sleep she’d managed to get the previous night had been riddled with
diving dreams, bad enough that her heart and body ached for what she’d done to Rashid
and then done to him again with her clothes on, without all these nubile young
things making her feel even more like a used teabag.
 

She regretted having agreed
to social contact with a member of the opposite sex not even twelve hours after
sending another one packing. And all she could do was wait for him, alone, in a
diner booth.

“More coffee, ma’am?”

While crow’s feet sprouted
and her breasts sagged and eighteen-year-old trendoid pipsqueaks called her
“ma’am.”

“Switch me to decaf,” she said.

The girl poured. “You wanna
order now?”

“No, I’m going to wait for
my—” Sarah stopped. She didn’t know what to call Emerson. She’d been
about to say “boyfriend,” but that was nothing more than wishful thinking. It
would probably be a long time before he’d let her that close again, if ever.
But “friend” seemed dishonest, too, a betrayal of a relationship that was
hardly so casual. She needed something in between. Emerson always came up with
the perfect word. Sarah alone couldn’t think of it fast enough to hold the
girl’s attention. She flitted off with a bored, frozen smile and two fists full
of coffee. As if she knew there was no word, would be no word, no matter how
long Sarah took to explain their situation.

No
tip for her.

* * * * *

I
didn’t mean to hurt him,
Sarah imagined she would tell Emerson, as she nursed her third cup of coffee.

Emerson would tell her not to
be so hard on herself. That people made mistakes. And maybe both parties were hurting,
but she’d done the right thing in the long run.

She worried what could be
keeping him and called the house. No one answered.

Then, as she was returning
from the pay phone, two foreign students she recognized as casual acquaintances
of Rashid’s took the table across from hers. Too late to hide, the best she could
hope for was that they wouldn’t tell Rashid she’d been here, waiting for
whatever she was waiting for. What they would say!
Another man! So soon! And how she looked! Earrings and eye shadow!
Nothing but trouble, American girls, you are much better off without them!

That’s
it. I’m leaving
.
It wasn’t right to be here; it wasn’t respectful.
Why should Rashid be miserable while I’m considering pancakes and
Emerson?

She signaled the two-fisted
waitress.

“More decaf?”

“No, thanks. Could you please
tell my—” There it was, that damned missing word again.

“Friend?” the girl offered,
batting her eyes.

Bitch
. “If you could please tell
him I had to leave...he’s tall with long blond hair and little round glasses,
and everything on his face turns down...”

“So pretty much the opposite
of that guy?” the girl said, pointing toward the register with the pot of
decaf.

Sarah followed the direction
of the spout and saw the boy from the lab. Jaga-something. He was in his lab smock,
his stunned gaze jumping around the restaurant, landing on her.

* * * * *

He said nothing but Sarah knew
she should follow. She was too afraid to ask where they were going but struggled
in improper footwear to keep up with his galloping, sneakered strides.

For a long time she would
blame her shoes.

Her back and calves would
ache and it would be weeks before she remembered why, and when she did, she’d
take all of her shoes that she couldn’t do a flat-out sprint in and give them
to the Salvation Army.

She’d even take up jogging.

Emerson would be patient with
her. He’d explain that there was probably nothing either of them could have
done.

The ledge that Emerson
assumed to be marble was made of tin, painted to look like marble. And it could
only support the weight of a steadfast adult male, however small, for not quite
as long as it would take for him to change his mind.

Chapter 46

The college-professor uncle drove
in from Cambridge with a rented trailer to pack up Rashid’s room. Grudgingly,
he accepted Emerson’s help. He said little during the two hours for which he’d
chosen to stay. Either he was in shock or blamed Emerson for the accident.
Either way, Emerson was accustomed to working alongside people in grief and knew
to keep his emotional distance unless called upon.

He wasn’t called upon.

It’s
my destiny,
he thought,
to put closure on the
material detritus of people’s lives.

But those people were old and
sick and might have welcomed death as an end to their suffering. The loss of
this one, young life made no sense to him and never would. Rashid hadn’t wanted
to die. Emerson had seen it on his face, the look of bewilderment, of gross
miscalculation.

Emerson had shot out a hand,
not fast enough to catch him.

Among the material detritus
of this one, young life were two things of Sarah’s—a towel that Rashid
seemed to have adopted and a single earring that had survived the fall in the
pocket of his tweed blazer.

“What is this?” The uncle plucked
a dangling bit of gold filigree from the spread of his nephew’s possessions,
spilled out from a manila envelope the police had given them. Emerson
recognized it as the orphan of a pair he had given Sarah for her birthday a few
years ago. “Surely this does not belong to him.”

“I know who it belongs to.”
Emerson put out his hand. “I’ll give it back.”

The uncle bared pointed teeth
and his eyes, close together and sunk into his head, were hard as marbles. He
jabbed the earring into Emerson’s palm. “Do what you want with it. Throw it into
that ugly lake of yours, I’m not sending it to his mother.”

Emerson kept the earring and
the towel for Sarah in a plastic bag in the trunk of his car. Someday, when he thought
she could handle it, he would give them back.

They belonged to her, after
all.

* * * * *

Little things stopped Sarah
cold: a shaker of cumin he’d left behind, a bag of rice, an empty Kingfisher
bottle she’d forgotten to throw away. These would ruin her. One Saturday morning,
the vacuum sucked up a piece of paper. She stopped to extract it from the dusty
maw and read the handwriting that broke her every time she saw it.

Milk,
sugar, bread, cereal...

His grocery list must have
fallen from his pocket and drifted under the sofa. It contained the ordinary
stuff of ordinary life, a life that no longer was because of her. She sank to
the floor, clutching the scrap in damp palms, and cried.

This was all she had left of
him—these stray things, a few tidily printed words, and the guilt, which stalked
her like a jilted lover. It was in the bathroom, the kitchen, in her bed. It
waited for her in closets and behind the shower curtain when she got home at night.
In the morning, it followed her to work. It wore his face and a brown blazer
and black socks with gold toes.

When she ran out of tears she
put the list in her jewelry box. Guilt lived in there, too, in everything she’d
worn that he’d admired. In the earrings Emerson had given her as a birthday
gift, which she’d lied about losing in Rashid’s car, one of which she
discovered was truly missing. It had been snagged by a sweater, jogged loose
during a run for the bus, or tugged out by the earphone of her tape recorder,
no doubt.

She put the single one in her
left ear and cried some more.

She couldn’t face this day.
She was supposed to go shopping with a couple of women from work and buy an
outfit or two to celebrate her new job in the art department of the public
relations firm. Then she was supposed to meet Emerson for dinner: a melancholy
marking of time, a meal in his honor.

The women understood when she
called to cancel. They told her peppermint tea was the perfect thing for a mild
case of food poisoning.

To Emerson, she told the
truth.

* * * * *

He called back that night, just
after she had been woken by a neatly attired ghost with arms outstretched and
gold toes curled around the ledge of her window.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She swore she could smell Rashid’s
aftershave. “Just the diving dreams again.”

“Him or you?” He paused. “Or
me?”

“Him,” she said.

“The same one?”

“Yeah, but different.”
 

Sarah imagined Emerson in his
room. She saw the unused typewriter, his placid eyes and mouth drawn downward
as he leaned back in his chair, waiting for her to go on.

“It wasn’t supposed to be
like this,” she said, through fresh tears. “He was supposed to have gotten
married today.”

“I know, honey.”

“It’s my fault.”

“You didn’t make him fall,
Sarah.”

“Yeah, but he wouldn’t have
been up there if I hadn’t—” She couldn’t continue.

“There were things that had
nothing to do with you,” Emerson said softly.

She knew what things; Emerson
had told her so many times. Pressure from his family. Falling in love. It could
have been anyone.

It just happened to have been
her.

“You want me to come over?”
Emerson said.

She took a slow breath. “No,
I think I’ll be all right.”

There was a pause. Maybe he’d
been having diving dreams too, reliving the memory of what Sarah could only
imagine. Watching Rashid fall, again and again.

He’d been powerless to save
him, just as he’d been powerless to save Thomas.

 
“Unless,” she said, “you want to come
over.”

 
He asked if she wouldn’t mind. Just for a
little while.

* * * * *

He stayed over that night. When
the memories weighed too heavily and the sofa grew too lonely, he crawled into
Sarah’s bed. She offered sympathetic embraces and that was all, but he hadn’t
expected more. Having someone to hold on to was enough.

“Were you writing?”

“A little. It’s easier here.
He’s not standing over my typewriter, looking disappointed in me.”

After a long silence, she
said, “You couldn’t have saved him.”

“You don’t know that.” Then,
softer, in as non-judgmental a tone as he could muster, he added, “You weren’t
there.”

She didn’t take offense or
try to kiss their grief away. She simply held him tighter. “But I know you. If
it were humanly possible, you would have done it.”

* * * * *

Emerson left his typewriter
at Sarah’s apartment. It was easier than lugging it back and forth, since he did
most of his writing there anyway. He wrote while she was at work, as his
schedule permitted, and during the two evenings a week she attended the
computer classes her company had paid for her to take.

She’d encouraged him to join
her, but he was saving his money for nursing school and chose, for the
foreseeable future, to remain faithful to his old Super Sterling.

With it he spat out enough
Dirk to satisfy his editors and his increasingly active sexual desires, made
worse because Sarah wanted to wait a little longer before sleeping with him.

She wanted to take it slower
this time. They made dates for dinner and shared chaste goodnight kisses. He found
nice mushy notes and a chocolate donut next to his typewriter when he came to
her apartment to work.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she
wrote, fueling him for what Dirk needed to do.

But lately he’d been pulled
to write other things too. He dusted off the lousy start to the lousy short
story about his dead brother, thinking he could finally tell it right. Because
of Rashid, he saw a new context for it, one stupidly ironic death linked to
another.

Accidents caused by the side
effects of human passions.

But there was a catch. This
latest irony was too new, too raw. He couldn’t tell that part of the story yet.
He’d have to wait. Fortunately, he knew how to wait.