What We Leave Behind (11 page)

No, not good
, he added. Then, very slowly, he wrote,
my girlfriend
.

I recovered quickly from the blow.

I wrote,
we're only friends, right?
Did he notice my fingers were shaking when I added the smiley face?

Friends
, he wrote.

The crayon became like a hot coal in my hand, so I flung it abruptly into the basket. Jonas took this time to casually finish off the rest of his sandwich. At this point, I didn’t care if he got mustard up his nose and in his ears, I wasn’t going to wipe it off. Remaining calm and balanced was a difficult task when the stinging of his admission was burning me up inside. Hadn’t I seen that little inconspicuous red flag and failed to trust it? Weren’t the signs evident? She was out there, someone beautiful and bright, and the envy, which would eventually turn into something larger and greater, incensed me.

“I know you’re mad,” he said, taking the last bite of his meal.

 “Why would I be mad?” I asked, struggling to pick up a crayon and do something with my hands besides strangle him.

“I should’ve been up-front with you.  It was never an issue because you and I were just friends.”

“We still are.”

“I know,” he said, leaning forward, setting his hands on the table. It was better that he wasn’t reaching for a crayon. What he was about to say needed to be said, not written on the paper. Now I knew how Demi Moore felt when she insisted Rob Lowe keep the lights on when he was dumping her, how they’d been in the dark for too long. “I like talking to you, and I liked dancing with you.”

The mere mention of that dance brought an intimacy to the table that I was sure the whole restaurant could feel. I looked up from my doodle of a dog, pretending that the reference had nothing to do with Jonas.

He continued, unflappable. “I’m happy when I’m with you, this whole experience, the crayoned words. I’ve enjoyed it, and,” he paused, hoping to lock my eyes into his, “there's something very sexy about writing you.”

“You can’t do this, Jonas. You can’t just say things like that and pull me close and then in the same breath tell me you have a girlfriend and we’re just friends.”

“
You’re
the one who said we were just friends.”

“What did you expect me to say?” I questioned him. “How am I supposed to react when you tell me something like that?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you just tell me how you feel? Forget twenty-two, forget sixteen, forget hypotheticals.  Tell me what you feel.”

“Does it matter?” I asked, throwing down an imaginary white flag. He knew what it meant. What did it matter what I felt when there were things more forceful than feelings between us?

“You’re impossible,” he said, rising to go to the bathroom, giving me five minutes to compose myself and grow up quickly.

When he returned, I asked, “What’s she like?”

He took a sip of Coke. “She’s nice.”

“Nice? That’s all you have to say?”

He thought about it for a minute, and then he began. Interestingly, once he got started, he didn’t seem to want to stop.

“Her name’s Emily. Emily Cohen. She’s my age, and we’ve been close friends since the second grade. Her dad is an international banker, and he and her mom have traveled all over the world for most of Emily’s life. She and her sister, Barbara, were pretty much raised by their housekeeper, Francie, and us.

“It’s been Emily and me ever since I can remember. She’s been like a fixture in our house growing up. I guess I’ve always taken care of Emily, from the very beginning.” He could see how unimpressed I was with this story, pausing to see if he should go on.

“She’s very pretty,” he said, “different than you, cute, not as tall, serious and levelheaded…”

“I’m levelheaded.”

“She’s not as adventurous as you.”

Big-breasted?
I wanted to ask.

“Why hasn’t she been to the hospital? Where’s she been all summer?”

“She met her parents in Italy. We were supposed to go together.”

“But instead you traveled all the way to the Valley to meet a fifteen-year-old.”

“Yeah, I guess I did. Except now she’s sixteen.”

“What a difference a day makes. Is she smart?’ I asked, thinking that was the one thing I might have over her.

“Let’s just say that she finished first in our med school class, but we were neck and neck for a while.”

“Oh,” I said, deflated, “I didn’t realize she was there with you.”

“Yeah, we’re both doing our pathology rotation.”

I mumbled, “The friend who lured you from your dream,” but he didn’t hear me because he was busy explaining how he was going to work for her family’s pathology lab—one of the most prestigious in Boston.
BrinkerHarte
, I heard him call it.

“That sounds really great,” I said, hating Emily Cohen for keeping that last candle on my cake lit. “It must be nice to have everything so mapped out for you; no need to worry about any unforeseen obstacles.”

He eyed me with what I now understood to be the
suspicious brow
. “I’ve always been very methodical, and I can deal with unforeseen obstacles.”

“Qualities you’ll put to good use when you’re laboring over your research.”

“Emily’s uncle is one of the leading pathologists in the country,” he lamented.

“You don’t look like the type that gets swayed by other people’s choices.”

“I’m not being swayed. I want to do this. I’ll be good at it, and I stand to make a lot of money.”

“Do they even know you had a plan of your own?”

“It’s important for the two of us to do this.”

“Why?”

“It just is,” he said, “I’m really all she’s got.”

“So you'll set aside your dreams to sit in a stuffy path lab to please your girlfriend and her family?”

He gave me a sheepish smile. “It's adorable that you care.”

“I don’t care at all,” I snapped, moving away from the table and the close proximity of his charm. “I'm actually disappointed in you. You’ll never be happy. Finding that place inside where you can sit comfortably in your skin is worth more than all that other stuff.”

“You're going way deep on me,” he said, studying my face, caught up by the depth of my emotions.

Then he wrote,
I like when you get all hotheaded
. On its own, this sentence would have had a profound effect on me, but when compounded with his spoken words, “That’s something that nags at me and leaves me open to regret, not the regret of being a pathologist,” I realized just how many levels were at work in our conversation.

“Besides,” he continued, “your definition of happiness might be different from somebody else’s.” This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted to forget ideology and have him write more insatiable things to me on the table, but he didn’t. My words had reached a place in him that was tightly guarded. We were different people from different worlds. I couldn’t expect him to understand the fragility of life and how something you love can be snatched away from you. I thought that his father’s prevailing illness would have sensitized him to this, but maybe it was having the opposite effect. Maybe it was too much to bear, knowing that he was in the process of losing someone he loved.

“My father’s dead, Jonas.”

He moved around in his chair, both nervous and surprised, and then leaned forward with his head very close to mine.

“I’m sorry, Jess, I didn’t know that. You never said anything.”

“I know, I didn’t want to, but you need to hear this now. When he died, it was an ordinary day like today. We woke up, we got dressed, we went about our business, with the exception of the special plans we had for dinner that evening, and everything was normal or appeared normal. We didn’t know that this was the day our lives would be changed forever. We didn’t know we would never see him again. And I know what you’re thinking right now, and I
agree
with you—we can’t live in fear of the unknown. But things
do
happen, and lives get turned upside down, and knowing that, don’t you think life is just too precious to waste on something that doesn’t make you happy?”

My disclosure rattled him. The otherwise smooth and confident Jonas appeared conflicted, torn, and dejected.

“I want to talk to you about your dad,” he said. “It’s important to you, but first I want to say something.” Leaning back in his chair, he began again. “Everything you’re saying makes sense. I can’t dispute you’re a bright girl—albeit a little outspoken at times—and you’re aware of things on a deeper level than most; but I’m surprised with all your talk about happiness, you haven’t taken a good look in the mirror. I hear it in your tone, in your comical sarcasm, the way you hide behind an insulated shell, pretending not to be interested when I know you’re feeling things, things you don’t even want to see yourself. What are you so afraid of?”

“I'm not afraid of anything,” I said, meeting his powerful gaze. “Certainly not you or whatever it is you’re implying.”

“You should be afraid,” he responded with a laugh while I glared back at him. Then he stuck his tongue out at me.

“You’re really an ass,” I spat out, exhaling, not caring that I cursed.

“Then why can’t you look away?” he asked.

My face told him I didn’t know how, that I was no longer immune to his cynicism. I could already hear the faint sound of the bell dinging in his favor.

“Tell me about your father,” he said, freeing me from the urge to explode.

“There’s not a whole lot to tell. He died twelve years ago yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

“On your birthday?”

“You’re quick.”

“What happened?”

I looked up at him. He genuinely seemed to care. If we were going to be friends, real friends, I would have talked this through with him, but it was a place and a part of me I couldn’t share. Just like the place and the part he couldn’t share with me.

I wrote,
Can we change the subject, please
?

He had to know how serious I was, or he would have never obliged. We took the things we wrote on paper very seriously.

“Next time,” he said, and then he got up from the table, so I did the same. When I took a step, I felt my foot buckle, losing my balance. His arm reached out for me, resting across the small of my back, intercepting my fall.

“I'm okay,” I said, releasing myself from his grip and finding my footing, but I wasn’t okay at all. And he knew it too.  That’s why his arm found me again, leading me out of the restaurant and toward the scooter.

I was sorry to see the magic restaurant disappear behind us. I would have liked to have saved the tablecloth, but I didn’t want Jonas to know how much it meant to me.

The ride down the hill was a quick one. There was a warm breeze circulating around us, and I used the opportunity to hold him closer. When we boarded the boat, we sat on the deck and watched as Catalina became nothing more than a speck of sand in the distance. He turned to observe me every so often, proud to see that I’d been impressed with our little sojourn. I had worn the wide-eyed expression of disbelief across my face, but now it was faded, having seen things and learned things that could never be taken back.

“I think I finally got inside your head today,” he said. “I think I know where you go when you’re lost in your thoughts.”

“Where’s that?” I challenged him.

“Somewhere sad. And probably lonely.”

I thought about this for a second, knowing that had our paths crossed at another time in our lives, we could have gone places together. The rest of the trip to shore was in silence, except for the purring of the engines and the sounds of the waves caressing the sides of the boat. I studied the view in front of me, knowing that when I reached land and took a step back on the ground, it was going to feel different.

Aware of his stare and how the pressure of serious thought made him look wistful, I asked, “What’s wrong?" while twirling my hair in my fingers, something I did when I knew something big was about to happen.

“I was just thinking,” he said, in a voice I’d never heard before.

“Me too,” I said.

Thinking how nice it would be to stay on Catalina forever.

“He’s not here,” Adam Levy’s gravelly voice told me when I entered his room. “He’s home sick with the flu.”

“I came to see you,” I lied.

“Maybe you should bring him some soup.”

“Isn’t that what girlfriends are for?” I asked.

Adam eyed me. He reached for a pen and paper and began writing. “Don’t be a brat. Here’s the address. He’ll be happy to see you.” Grabbing the piece of paper from his hand, I shoved it in my pocket and walked out of the room. My better judgment kept telling me to go home, but I’d never been one to listen to the echoes that sabotaged my rational thought.  Instead, I picked up the phone, dialed the nurse’s station three floors below, and called in sick for my shift.

I borrowed my mother’s car at the hospital, planning to return it before she noticed its absence. Yes, I’d passed my driver’s test, to everyone’s surprise, including my own. Much to the chagrin of the other drivers on the Pacific Coast Highway, my foot was frozen on thirty-five mph the entire way to Malibu, afraid to venture any faster for fear of losing control over the massive machinery.

That wasn’t the only thing that was massive. The house in front of me was even bigger than the hotel on Catalina. A security guard opened the gate, and I followed the road up to Jonas’s front door. When I got out of the car, Mrs. Levy was leaving.

She said, “Jessica, how nice of you to come,” in a tone that implied a whole assortment of conflicted thoughts about seeing me there. I wanted to blurt out,
He's just my friend
, but she would never believe it, knowing full well that a mother knew things when it came to her kids.

“He might be sleeping still,” she said. “Amy should be back from ballet in about an hour. Maybe you can make sure he eats something.”

“Sure, Mrs. Levy,” I said, glad for her trust in me. “I’ll get him whatever he needs.”

“Gloria will show you to his room,” she said, stepping into her tiny car. “I’m heading to Adam.”