The Forgetting Place (4 page)

May 12, 2010

W
hen he thought of that evening, what his mind kept returning to was the blood. There had been
so much
of it—an
impossible
amount—more than the human body should contain. It had seeped from the hole between the ribs, pooled beneath the body, congealing into something that was no longer liquid but rather a cooling gelatinous mass on the hardwood. The sole of his shoe brushed it as Jason sank to the floor beside the body for the second time, causing the coagulated puddle to jiggle like a dark lake of Jell-O.

He'd been upstairs in the bedroom when it started, watching a repeat episode from the third season of
Mad Men
. If the doorbell had rung or if she'd knocked, he hadn't heard it. What he
did
hear eventually was the sound of arguing from the floor below. At the outset, Amir's voice had been calm, reasonable, placating. But as the discussion continued his tone took on a sharper edge, becoming defensive, even angry. Jason recognized the female voice as well, and he'd gotten up, deciding he should go downstairs to intervene.

Then a scuffle—noisy at first, but then quiet and focused. He'd never noticed that before, how a physical altercation becomes progressively quieter as the struggle intensifies. Words turned to muted grunts. Halfway down the stairs, Jason could hear the unmistakable sound of a body striking the wall, the clatter of a picture frame falling to the floor.

That got him running, moving quickly through the living room and into the short hallway leading to the front door.

He saw them go down together, arms clasped around each other in what could've been misconstrued, under different circumstances, as a lovers' embrace. Amir landed on top of her, the air from their lungs making an
umph
sound as it was simultaneously forced from their bodies. She arched her back, dug for something attached to her belt, and a second later she was driving a clenched fist into the left side of his rib cage. A single strike and Amir lay still—odd, Jason thought, because she hadn't hit him that hard—and he had time to wonder if maybe Amir had struck his head on the way down, had knocked himself out when they'd contacted the floor. Then she was pushing herself out from under him, was getting to her feet, and there was blood on her hands—too much of it
already
—bright red and dripping from one fingertip onto the blue jeans of the inert body at her feet.

His eyes fell to Amir, to the area where she'd struck him, only now he could see the blood pumping from a wound on the left side of his torso, the knife lying next to him on the floor. Jason dropped to his knees, stuck his fingers into the hole in the shirt left by the knife, and tore the fabric apart to get to the wound. “
Help me hold pressure!
” he pleaded, placing a hand over the site, the blood spilling through the small spaces between his fingers. It was everywhere now: on his hands, arms, and clothing. Days
later, he'd notice faint crusted remnants clinging to the underside of his fingernails.

She knelt down beside him, taking hold of his forearms as she shook her head slowly from one side to the other.

“He's gone, Jason.”

“
No. He's
not
gone. Help me move him to the couch. We've got to
—”

“He's dead,” she said, letting the words fill the hallway, the town house, the crater of irrevocable absence above which the two of them now perched.

Not dead, not dead,
he thought, for the person lying here had been alive and well ten minutes before, had sat at the bistro table and eaten dinner two hours ago in the kitchen behind them.
How can he be dead when the blood is still warm?
he wanted to argue, but he realized that was no longer true. The blood—inert and useless now—had already started to cool.

“
What have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!
” he cried out, his words filling the hallway, racing through every room of the town house and back again. But, of course, he knew what she had done. She had come here to protect him—just as he'd known she would. Just as she always had.

She stood, fished a cell phone from her pocket, dialed a number.

“Are you calling an ambulance?” he asked, as if this were a situation that might still be salvaged—might still be undone.

“No,” she said. “I'm calling my field office. We'll need a cleaner.”

L
et's go back to your relationship with your sister. What was she like?” I asked as we passed Morgan Hall—the main administration building—on what had become our routine walking route across campus. The brick exterior of the building was chipped and scratched beneath the windows, as if something roaming the grounds at night had done its best to claw its way inside.

Jason offered me that half smile of his—ironic and sad, but not completely devoid of hope.

“She always looked out for me, protected me. It's what I remember most about our relationship.”

“What sort of things did she protect you from?” I asked, and he was silent for a while, as if the conjuring of those memories required a force of will, a certain mental preparation.

“I tend to think of my early childhood as being fairly happy, although I wonder if I was just too young to know any different. It wasn't until I was about fourteen, though, when things really started to change for me.”

We'd come to a stop near the east end of the perimeter. There was a small gate built into the fence here. From the looks of its
rusted hinges and neglected condition, I guessed it had been padlocked shut for the past twenty years, maybe longer. I'd forgotten it was here, and it occurred to me now that so much of Menaker was like that. It lay quiet and unobtrusive, like a water moccasin sunning itself on the trunk of a fallen tree along the riverbank. There are parts of this place that you can almost forget exist until you stumble upon them and they strike out at you from the high grass. I glanced over at Jason, who was looking out past the fence at the tree line beyond, his expression lost in recollection. I said nothing, only waited for him to continue.

“Fourteen is a . . . turbulent age. I think we were all rediscovering girls back then. I still remember how strange and terrifying and wonderful that was. It was like we'd known them as one thing our whole lives but were encountering them for the first time as something other than what we'd established them to be. Part of it was their physical development. Their bodies were changing—maturing and becoming different from ours in obvious ways that could no longer be ignored. Part of it was our own hormones kicking in, awakening from over a decade of dormancy and demanding to be dealt with.

“I had this friend, Michael. I guess you could say he was my best friend. He lived a block over from me, used to stop by every day after school—you know: hang out, ride bikes, toss the football around, that sort of thing. We'd both been living in the same neighborhood since we were born, had grown up together. Our families sometimes even spent vacations with each other, renting out a beach house for a week or driving up to Pennsylvania for a few days of skiing. We were pretty close, and I valued that friendship—relied on it, I suppose—in a way that I didn't fully understand or have the ability to articulate.”

The wind moved through his hair—tussled it almost—making him look much younger. I could imagine him as an adolescent.

“Our best friends are those we make in childhood,” he said, his eyes clearing for a moment as he looked over at me. “Do you ever notice that? You can live to be a hundred and meet all kinds of interesting characters along the way . . . but our
best
friends are the ones we had as children.”

He turned his face away from me, absently brushed a lock of dark hair back from his brow. “Michael and I were in the same grade at school and shared several classes—used to even copy each other's homework from time to time.” He smiled. “There was this girl in our English class—Alexandra Cantrell, I still remember her name—who joined us midyear when her parents relocated to Maryland from somewhere in the Midwest, maybe North Dakota.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “
Man,
she was beautiful. Long blond hair that she liked to wear pulled back into a French braid; tall and thin with a slightly athletic build; light blue eyes that reminded me of the way the sky looked just before dawn. She was smart, too—easily one of the brightest students in our class—and had this sort of innocent kindness about her that made you just want to be around her, even if you were only in the periphery of her circle of friends.”

“She must have been pretty popular,” I commented, and he nodded.

“All the guys went crazy when she got there. Most of them were too chickenshit to do anything about it, but the way they used to talk about her . . .” He grinned. “The general consensus was that she was untouchable, out of our league, although I don't recall wondering whose league she might've been in.”

“Girls like that,” I said, “spend a lot of Saturday nights at home without a date.”

“I know that now, but I didn't back then.” He shrugged. “It didn't matter, though. I was less intimidated by her popularity than most of my peers. I hung out with her because she was a nice person and fun to be around. Michael, too. The three of us spent a lot of time together that year.”

“So there was you, and your best friend, and this beautiful girl,” I summarized. It wasn't difficult to see where this story was heading.

“Right,” he said. “There were other kids, of course. Like I said, lots of people liked to be around her. But for the life of me, I can't remember who they were. In my mind, what it came down to was the three of us.”

“Three is an unstable number,” I commented, and he nodded his agreement.

“There was a pond close to our house that would freeze over in the wintertime. We used to go there to skate and play hockey. I remember telling Alex about it one day after school, and her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘Take me there,' she said, and so I did, neither of us bothering to stop home on the way. I don't know where Michael was at the time, why he wasn't with us that day, but he wasn't. We took the school bus, Alex getting off at my stop instead of hers, and we walked two blocks down the street and cut left through the woods to the pond. It had snowed lightly the night before, and we walked mostly in silence, listening to the soft crunch of wet powder beneath the soles of our shoes.

“I remember how, when we came to the edge, she dropped her book bag on the ground and just charged out onto the ice without testing it first, trusting that it was thick enough to hold her weight
because I said it was. And of course I ran out after her, planting my feet when I was three-quarters of the way across and sliding the remaining distance to the opposite side. I could hear the ice cracking and settling beneath us—we both could—but she never paused, never cast an uncertain look down. I gathered a snowball and lobbed it out toward the center of the pond where she was standing. It missed her by a good two feet, but she grabbed her chest and fell to the ice like a wounded soldier, lying with her face turned up at the sky, her arms and legs fanned out as if she were in the midst of making a snow angel. I went back out onto the pond, dropping down on one hip and using my momentum to slide into her. We bumped and our bodies did a half turn on the ice, coming to rest with our heads together, our torsos angled slightly away from each other. Laughing, I started to get up, but she reached over and put her hand on my arm. ‘Wait,' she said, and so I lay there in the quiet of the afternoon, looking up at the blanket of gray above us. I could hear the steady beat of my heart in my ears, and I wondered if it was loud enough for her to hear as well. I began to say something, but she said, ‘Shhh,' and so we lay there together in silence as the wind moved through the trees and the ice buckled and cracked beneath us.

“That was when I started to wonder just how strong that ice was. There'd been a warm spell the week before, and I counted in my mind the number of days since then that the temperature had hovered around freezing.
Five—no, four days,
I realized, and I wondered if that was enough. I could feel the chill of the frozen surface biting through my jeans, imagined the paralyzing temperature of the water just beneath, and considered the thin barrier that lay between. In my mind, I could suddenly see it giving way, the two of us plunging downward, the startled expression
on our faces as our heads disappeared below the surface. I could see us reaching up to clutch at the edge of the hole, the ice there breaking away as we attempted to hoist ourselves out. I could feel the shocking chill turn to numbness, our bodies becoming slow and lethargic, the white plume of our breath dissipating over the minutes that followed until at last . . . there was nothing.

“‘We should go,' I told her. ‘The ice is thinner than I thought. I don't trust it.'

“She turned her body to look at me. ‘It'll hold,' she said, and put her right arm across my chest, resting her head on my shoulder.

“Suddenly, I was sure that it wouldn't, that we were lying out there on borrowed time already, that it was prone to give way at any moment. I heard it shift again beneath us, and this time it sounded like the last warning. ‘Get up,' I said. ‘We've got to go.'

“I remember her looking at me with a wounded expression as I nudged her off me so I could stand, like I was rejecting
her
instead of trying to keep both of us from harm. ‘What's your
problem
?' she said. ‘What's
wrong
with you?' I don't think she was intending for her words to come out so accusatory, so sharp, but they sliced into me before either of us knew it was going to happen, and once they had there was no taking them back.

“‘Nothing,' I replied, backing away from her. ‘Nothing's wrong with me.'

“I turned my back on her then, not caring if she fell through the goddamn ice or not, and walked off and left her there. I could hear her calling out to me as I trudged up the hill through the light snow—‘
Jason, I'm sorry. Whatever it is, I'm sorry
'—but I pretended I didn't hear her, pretended it was anger I felt instead of something else.

“After that, we didn't see much of each other for a while. She
called me on the phone once, tried to apologize, but it was clear she didn't know what she was apologizing for, and there was nothing I could say to explain it to her. Michael, of course, asked me about it, told me I was acting like a jerk and ought to get over it. But I just couldn't. I'd close my eyes and think about the two of us lying there, one of her arms wrapped casually around me, and the ice suddenly breaking away beneath us, our muted screams for help tapering away into silence. ‘What's
wrong
with you?' she asked over and over in my head, and I couldn't look at it. All I could do was back away.”

I stood there at the institution's fence and watched Jason struggle. I wanted to reach out to him but reminded myself of the boundaries between doctor and patient, how they needed to be respected.

“Triangles are curious things,” he said. “You can't change the relationship between any two points without affecting at least one of the other two relationships. Michael and I had known each other our whole lives, but we'd known Alex for only a few months. I took it for granted that what we shared between the two of us would remain unaffected. But that didn't happen. Maybe it was because of the way I'd treated her, which was unfair. In our small court of public opinion, the verdict was that
she
was the victim, not me, and until I could come up with a reasonable explanation for my actions I was on the outs with both of them. I told myself that it didn't matter, that I didn't care, but of course that wasn't true. I was losing him; that was obvious. What was less obvious was what to do about it.

“Finally, I decided to make amends. And so I rode my bike over to Alex's house the next Saturday afternoon. I'd been there a few times before, and her mother recognized me when I knocked
on the door. ‘Hi, Jason,' she said. ‘Alexandra's playing out back with Michael.' I almost left then, feeling more like an outsider than ever, but then I decided no, I was coming to apologize, and so I walked around to the backyard expecting to find them. When I got there, the yard was empty, although Michael's bike was leaning against the house. I looked around for a moment and, figuring they must have headed up the block, was about to leave when I noticed the opening to a narrow trail at the edge of the woods that bordered the far end of the yard. I trotted across the grass and entered the woods, following the path for about fifty yards until it started sloping downward toward the chuckling sound of a stream below. The earth was a little loose here, and I had to hold on to the trunks of trees as I descended. I was mostly looking down at my footing instead of focusing on the bank of the stream below me, so I was near the bottom before I saw them. I remember how the trees seemed to shift, to open up slightly so that I suddenly had a clearer view—and that was when I noticed them, standing on the opposite side of the stream with their arms locked around each other, kissing softly, almost gingerly, as if they were each afraid of hurting the other. I stood motionless on the hillside, watching from above, realizing that I was already too late, that the nature of their relationship had changed when I wasn't looking, and that what they had now excluded me almost entirely. A barrage of emotions struck me then—anger, resentment, betrayal, isolation, jealousy—but I remember that what I felt most of all was a sense of shame. I was ashamed to be surreptitiously encroaching on this moment between them, ashamed to be thinking that I longed for it to be me wrapped in that embrace. I stood there, wrestling with my anguish, for a few more seconds before quietly turning to go. But the root my right
foot was resting on gave way unexpectedly as I shifted my weight. There was a snap and I cried out in surprise, grasping at a tree limb that broke off in my hand. My left knee struck the ground and the earth there crumbled away, sending me sliding down the remainder of the embankment with an accompaniment of pebbles and debris.

“‘Jason,' Michael said, letting go of her, but I was seeing him only in my peripheral vision. I couldn't look at them directly, couldn't bear the humiliation, and so I leaped to my feet and scampered back up the hill as fast as I could. By the time I got to the top, I realized there was something wrong with my ankle. It had begun to throb with every step. I didn't run—couldn't really—but I made my way as quickly as possible along the path, limping across Alex's backyard when I got to it and, retrieving my bike from the front of her house, pedaling home as furiously as my wounded body would allow.