Sliding Past Vertical (8 page)

“How’d you know one of them
was Emerson?”

Frowning, he started the car.
“Lucky guess.”

They slid away, spraying up
water.

Sarah couldn’t help herself.
“Like those guys knowing I had your coke was a lucky guess?”

“I told you,” Jay said. “Don’t
go there.”

“Tough. We’re going there.”

He missed a red light and
blew out a relieved breath at having done it unscathed and uncaught. “Can’t you
at least wait until we get home?”

“I need to know now.”

“You won’t like it.”

“That’s for me to decide.”

He swerved to avoid a
pothole, nearly driving a cyclist into a parked car. “Shouldn’t even be on the
fucking road in this weather,” he muttered.

“Tell me or I’m going to the
police,” Sarah said.

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking.”

The sneer canceled out any
sexual thought she’d been having about him. “What are you going to tell them?”
he asked. “That you were hiding a bag of coke? What do you think that makes
you?”

She’d forgotten that part. “I
was doing you a favor,” she snapped. “You got me into this mess, something
you
did got
me
in trouble. You owe me an explanation.”

“Okay, okay! Maybe...maybe I
sort of...may have led them to believe you had it.”

The world stopped revolving
for a moment. Cars around them froze. Even the rain seemed to hang in mid-air.
“You...what?”

“I said you wouldn’t like it.
I caved. One of them called, it was late, I was half toasted. He wanted to come
over and get his stuff. I wasn’t ready to deal with that, so I said I didn’t
have it.”

“Because you were hiding it
at your girlfriend’s house and—no, wait, let me guess—she wasn’t
home.”

“Well, uh, yeah, kind of. But
I never mentioned any names.”

He said this like she should have
been proud. But the subtlety of the grammar wasn’t lost on her. “Names. Like
more than one?”

Her stomach dropped as a
blade of silence cleaved them neatly apart. “More than one?”

“They weren’t you,” he said
finally.

She sniffed back tears. The
calm in his voice made it that much worse. Of all the other times he’d acted guiltily,
why not this one? “None of them got to hold your coke for you?” she said. “Is
that supposed to make me feel special?”

“Baby...can’t we just...go
talk about this like adults?”

“I’m not going anywhere with
you. Let me out.”

“I can’t stop here. We’ll get
creamed.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’ll take you home.”

“Don’t do me any more
favors.”

“We’re a mile from your
house. You don’t have an umbrella.”

“I’ll live. I just can’t look
at you anymore.”

“Baby—”

“Let me
out
!”

He pulled to the curb. She slammed
the door. He peeled away, drenching her from the knees down in road grit and
cold water.

* * * * *

In the next thirty minutes,
Sarah was sprayed twice more. A cabbie shook his fist at her and yelled in
fractured English. A car passed, full of college boys who promised to help dry
her off. What had once been home she was satisfied to call refuge, a place
where she didn’t have to answer to anyone, not even the two sets of eyes that met
her at the front door.

One pair was marble-dark and
trusting; one looked as if it wanted to say, “I told you so,” but wouldn’t
dare. It was impolite to gloat, especially to a woman in tears.

She stomped upstairs and
threw herself face down on the ruined bed. Two soggy sneakers plopped to the
floor. In her head, she counted the seconds it would take for Emerson to knock.
She’d never tell him that she’d almost gone back to Jay’s apartment. He’d be
too disappointed in her.

But Emerson didn’t come.

Fine.
She turned over and cursed
as her heels and elbows caught ripped sections of canvas and shredded them
further.

I
don’t need him. I don’t need Jay. I don’t need Jimmy. I don’t need this crappy
apartment with the broken front lock and the broken shower knobs and the
annoying roommate who names parakeets after her boyfriends.

And
I don’t need Boston.

I
could leave,
she thought, and for a second, smiled. How appealing it sounded to escape to a
new city, where she could reinvent herself again, cut her hair, buy a car, maybe
even change her name.

But the $34.15 in her
checking account wouldn’t even rent her a moving van.

She stared at the ceiling: the
only thing in the room, it seemed, the dealers hadn’t defiled. She heard
Emerson’s voice in her head—that you should sleep two nights on any major
decision.

But she wondered how you were
supposed to sleep on it when you had nothing to sleep on.

Eventually, her own body betrayed
her. It could no longer resist the aromas of curry, sautéed onions, and steamed
rice beckoning with long jeweled fingers from underneath her bedroom door.

She mopped herself up and attacked
the plate she assumed Rashid had made and left for her in the fridge. As she
was putting her dish in the sink, she saw Emerson absorbed in a novel on the
tiny screened-in back porch, glasses slipping down his nose.

Not thinking she needed an
invitation, she sank next to him on Dee Dee’s white wicker loveseat, its
cushions printed with pink cabbage roses. Emerson marked his place and set the
book aside. He blinked at her, waiting.

Sarah shook her head, and he
put an arm around her shoulders.

She accepted his affection
and could have used it hours ago, but she had been too proud to ask. At that
moment, she was too tired and stunned, too small and used-up to be proud.

His shirt smelled like curry
and his damp, moldering room back in Syracuse. She curled up against him and
listened to the rain and his heartbeat.

If she listened hard enough,
she could hear the ocean.

Finally she said, “Are all
men total schmucks or just the ones in my life?”

Pause. “I think I’ve just
been insulted.”

“I didn’t mean you. You were
an aberration. I must have gone temporarily sane.”

Out of the corner of her eye
she saw a piece of a smile. He petted her hair.

She wouldn’t tell him about
Jay’s other girlfriends. A father with a wandering fly had given Emerson zero
tolerance for men who cheated on women. Dirk Blade might have been scum, but at
least there wasn’t a Mrs. Blade home washing lipstick stains off his Euro
briefs.

“We left you lunch,” Emerson said.

“It was good.” She noticed
for the first time, and with some relief, that he seemed to be the only other
warm body in the apartment. Only one set of eyes to answer to. “Where’s Rashid?”

“He went to Cambridge to
visit an uncle who teaches at MIT. He’ll be back in the morning.”

This was good. She’d known
Emerson forever. She didn’t have to entertain him, pretend everything was fine,
or worry about what she looked like.

“I’ll help you clean up
inside,” he said. “If you want.”

“Maybe in a while.” It was a
good idea, but she felt comfortable against him and didn’t want to move.

“And then I was thinking,
maybe you’ll let me buy you a new bed.”

“Em, I don’t want you
to—”

“Where else are you going to
sleep? The futon’s ruined.”

He had a point. “I’ll think
about it later,” she said, eyelids growing heavy.

* * * * *

He could have teased her.
Given her one of his baby-bird looks or read more into her falling asleep in
his arms than the circumstances warranted. He only said that she was probably
overtired and then went about his business.

“Where does the coffee table
go?”

“Where you have it is fine.”

“I think they cracked one of
the legs.”

“I think it was like that
before.”

Then there were long
stretches of silence, until the next task came up that needed discussion.

“You want to bother gluing
this vase back together?”

“I don’t know. It’s Dee
Dee’s.”

“Okay, I’ll leave it here on
the counter and she can decide.”

Sarah felt like she was
sleepwalking: dreaming about someone else’s living room, someone else’s
possessions. Someone who had died, perhaps, and the two of them had been
charged with taking inventory for the estate sale.

 
I’ll
have so little to pack
, she thought. Most of these things she could easily
leave behind. She felt no attachment.

“You have a particular order
for the books?”

They had done what they could
in the living room and were starting on her bedroom. She’d just discovered
another practical reason to store books in plastic milk crates. When the time came
to move and start her new life, she could turn them over and carry them out.

“Nah, just as long as they
fit.”

He plucked a hardcover copy
of
Dune
from between her dresser and
a milk crate.
 
“Hey, is
this—?”

“The copy you gave me? Yes.”

“On our second date,” he said,
tenderly smoothing a dust bunny from the pages. “I can’t believe you kept it. I
thought you would have chucked everything I’d given you out a window.”

“But I hadn’t read it yet.”

He laughed. “Did you keep
anything else from back then?”

She shrugged a shoulder. Only
about a thousand memories of sharing secrets as two young, damaged lives opened
up to each other like oysters.

“Nothing in particular,” she said.

“You must have really hated
me.”

“No, I—” A blush crept
up her cheeks. What she’d felt for him at that time was too complicated to wrap
up in one tidy sentence. Mostly she’d hated herself for hurting him. And she had
to make it his fault because it was too much for her to carry alone.

“I don’t blame you,” he said.
“I was pretty pathetic.”

“Well, maybe a little. Did
you...did you save anything I gave you?”

He was quiet for a moment, as
if making a decision.

Then he took out his wallet. He
handed her a student ID card, the laminate yellowed and cracked. The picture was
of someone she would have crossed the street to avoid. She didn’t remember him
looking that scary back then, so skinny and frightened.

“It’s on the back,” he said.

She turned it over. “It’s
just a bunch of old pieces of tape.”

“Look hard. Can you see it?”

She squinted. “No.”

“One night, we’d gone to the
movies and we were walking back to the dorm. You had something in your eye and
we stopped under a streetlight so I could see what it was. It was just an
eyelash, I brushed it away and then you kissed me. When I got back to my room,
the eyelash was still on my finger.”

She stared at the card and
thought she saw a wiggle of something, like an old spore encased in amber.
“That’s my eyelash?”

He nodded.

She handed it back to him.
“You are
so
weird.”

“Yeah, I was a sentimental
kid.” He looked at the picture a moment before returning the ID to his wallet.

She’d liked that sentimental
kid. He was a pain in the ass sometimes—moody, sanctimonious. But she’d
liked him. Maybe she’d even loved him.

“
Casablanca
,” she said.

“You remember the movie? And
they call me sentimental.”

He looked at her far too
long, with big, haunted eyes.

“Well...we should—”
Sarah gestured to the rubble.

“You’re right.” He put
Dune
back in the crate. “We should.”

They cleaned a while longer,
not saying much, and Sarah’s bedroom, except for the abused futon, was soon
back to normal. Sarah felt restless. What next, she thought, when everything was
done and they had no Rashid to distract them? Then she’d have to think about
her future. Maybe even talk about it.

Emerson fussed with a
roughed-up table lamp, attempting to rethread the cord through the base.

“I’m going to get the mail,”
she said.

He grunted, absorbed in his
task.

She padded downstairs. The
haul was mostly for her roommate: a fashion magazine, a medical journal, a
greeting card addressed to “Nurse Dee Dee” in a child’s handwriting. There was
the fall schedule for Jane Fonda aerobics classes at the Y, a flyer from a
local band (Dee Dee was dating the drummer), and a postcard from Jamaica from
the girl who cut her hair.