What We Leave Behind (15 page)

“It’s nice. You don’t see it, but you look at me sometimes, when you’re in one of your good moods.”

“My Jekyll mood?”

“Yeah, that one. Your face changes. I can’t really describe it, but you get this hopeful expression, like I have all the answers…”

“Don’t you?” I teased.

“…like I’m everything…and it feels like I’m going to drown when you look at me like that. Not in a bad way. It’s your eyes, they pull me in…”

He paused, the quiet before an influx of words.

“Sometimes,” I began, “sometimes you
are
everything.”

I stared at my fingers, needing to concentrate on something as benign as my fingernails. He didn’t say anything and neither did I. We were both taking it all in. When he lifted himself up out of the truck and stared beyond the hills, I knew I’d never look out at this bluff without thinking of Jonas Levy.

I raised my knees to my chest and hugged them while he spoke. “It hasn’t always been easy doing the right thing by you, Jess. Besides being wrong, I know it would be great, all of it, not just the physical part.”

“I’d never turn you in,” I said, and he turned to grin at me. “Maybe it would be great, maybe it wouldn't. We’ll never know.”

“You really think we wouldn’t be good?” he asked, searching my eyes for the truth.

“You can’t ask me that,” I whispered in his ear, knowing there was so much of life we’d never experience together. “Maybe we loved each other in another lifetime. I don’t know.”

“Maybe it was this life,” he said, staring me in the face.

I’m sorry to spoil this moment with a reference to mainstream drama, but I knew just then how Molly Ringwald felt when she walked out the door on her sixteenth birthday and Michael Schoeffling was standing by his Porsche, waiting. We weren’t sitting on a Porsche, but did it matter? When Molly walked out, I doubt she noticed anything other than how bright the world had become.

I was not about to avert my eyes from his. He might have said one hundred other profound sentences after that, but that first one was all I heard. He loved me. That was all I ever really needed to know.

“Our timing really stinks, doesn’t it?” I asked, feeling strangely happy and sad all at the same time. “You’re going to keep in touch with me, aren’t you?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. He grabbed my legs and slid my body down to the edge of the truck, pulling me close. His legs were touching mine, and his hands clasped around my fingers. “Are you drunk?” I asked, because Jonas never touched me like this before.

“I don’t know, Jess. Truth? Maybe I just need to be closer to you.” He crushed the second beer in his fist and threw it to the ground. Then he took my hands again and whispered dangerous, desperate words.

“Kiss me.”

The symphony of innuendo that had defined us for weeks was playing loudly. There was no indecision here. His lips were on mine, his hands wrapping around me, his body pressing down against me. My legs spread further apart, and he moved in closer, my hands finding their way around his waist, tugging at his shirt, reaching for the smooth skin underneath.

There was no question of how Jonas felt about kissing me. His lips couldn’t open wide enough. His tongue couldn’t resist exploring my mouth. I tasted him, breathed him in, my fingers running up and down his back. It was like a drug—a force pulling us closer and closer together. And when he kissed my face and my ear, and his lips brushed against my neck, I didn’t stop him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered in my hair, abruptly stepping back, his arms pulling away. “I shouldn’t have. It’s wrong.”

“It’s not wrong,” I said, out of breath, willing his eyes to meet mine.

He dropped his head down. “Jesus, what am I doing?”

“You’re doing me a favor,” I said. “No longer sweet sixteen and never been kissed.”

I could tell he was torn. I held his fingers, lacing my own with his.

“Don’t you want to be my first?” I asked, urging his hands closer, raising my head so our eyes would meet.

“Jess…” but that was all that came out. He grabbed my face in both his hands, and the confusion had all but vanished by the time his lips were on mine again. This time he didn’t pull away. This time he stayed there, kissing me so hard, my lips were getting numb. I had to take a breath.

“Please don’t stop, Jess,” he practically cried out, but I had to massage my bottom lip.

I said, “It hurts.”

“I never want to hurt you. Look at me,” he said, cupping my face. “What do you see?”

What did I see? Beautiful eyes. Lips I wanted to keep on kissing, a boy I lost my heart to
.

“What do you see?” he repeated, lifting my face up to meet his. “Look at me. Look in my eyes.”

Everything I was feeling inside was staring back at me. I didn’t care if it hurt. I couldn’t stop myself. Reaching for him, I found his lips again, then wrapped my legs around him, securing him there, close to me. It had built up to this moment. There was no use fighting it any longer. Just the two of us, no rules. I could get hurt, yes, I could, but for one night Jonas Levy was mine.

We sat there like that, holding each other, Jonas running his fingers through my hair, and I was deliciously spent. In my adolescent longing, I figured that this was our defining moment and that everything would be different when I woke in the morning. Jonas wouldn’t be able to resist having more of me. Was it wrong for me to think that this was the beginning of something and not merely a detour in the road?

“I love being with you,” I whispered faintly into the hollow of his neck, “but it scares me.”

If it were anyone else, I might have been anxious about the quiet that followed, but I’d gotten to know Jonas. He was examining the words that traipsed through his mind, careful to select the right ones. He tightened his grip around me. I understood his silence better than my own.

“I told you that would happen,” he finally said. “And I was wrong for saying you should be afraid.”

“Any time you let someone in, it’s scary. But I’m also happy.”

“This can’t change things, Jess.”

Jonas didn’t know what he was saying. This—this moment we were in—was more than we could have ever anticipated. What we were feeling inside was bigger than both of us, and more important too.

“Everything’s changed, Jonas,” I said, “you just can’t see it yet.”

“Don’t do this,” he said, turning away.

“You can’t tell me tonight didn’t change everything. You can’t tell me you don’t feel what I’m feeling. I know I didn’t imagine what I saw in your eyes, what I felt in your lips. Doesn’t than mean something?” I asked.

“Yes, it does,” he said. “And it’s wrong.”

“Do you love her?” I asked, then reconsidered. “Forget it, don’t answer that.” I should have just said,
If you really loved her, you wouldn’t be here with me
, but something stopped me, rationale, perhaps or maybe the possibility that I didn’t want to know the answer.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ll never understand my reasons for staying loyal to Emily. She needs me. I’m her family. And you, you’re just sixteen.”

I got up from the perch I was seated on and walked toward the view, closely grazing the edge of the cliff. I could feel his eyes across my back.

“I used to have this recurring dream about a boy riding into my life, always on a horse, white horse, of course. And he’d lift me up onto this horse where we were safe from the world below, riding off along this stretch of beach. The faster he’d ride, the more exhilarating the journey. I’m not sure if it was happiness I felt, it was something unfamiliar—even for me. I couldn’t tell you what he looked like, but I could tell you how large he was, how his physicality wrapped around me and I was, for a short time, unafraid.”

He was standing motionless by my side. Turning to him, I said, “I never experienced that feeling in real life, Jonas, until you. You changed all that. I know you have another life, another plan, but when you think about all that had to fit into place for us to find each other, it has to make you stop and think.”

“One day you’re going to forget me, Jess,” he began. “You’ll be grown up, living successfully and happily off your addictions to music and movies. You’ll be surrounded by men who want to befriend you, take care of you, love you. And all this will be the past.”

My ears heard him, but my heart was wearing headphones.

“You know,” he said, “you almost had me believing in fairy tales again.”

“Fairy tales have happy endings,” I reminded him.

“There will be a happy ending for you. Give yourself a chance. There’s still so much of life ahead of you.”

“You sound like you’re saying good-bye.”

“I’m not saying good-bye. I’m just saying I can’t give you everything.”

We drove back to my house in silence. There was really nothing more we could say to one another. Tomorrow would be different; Jonas and I would be different. He held my hand the entire time, and when I got out of the car, he was there waiting for me, leading me to the front door.

“Wait here,” I said. “I have something I want to give you.” When I returned, I handed him a picture. It was slightly worn from the years it spent in my mother’s wallet, but I had no qualms about taking it; I’d stolen things before of far greater value than a picture. “Here, take this,” I said, shoving it at him. In it, I had pigtails, but they were my only childish characteristic. I was seated in a chair with a book strategically placed on my lap. My face was serious, my body curled against the back cushion. He stared at it for a while before saying anything.

“Your eyes, my God, they look so sad.”

“It’s a couple of years after kindergarten. I think I was eight.”

“What were you reading?”

“
Ruffian
.”

“Didn’t he die?”

I nodded. “I thought you’d like it, the picture.”

“I love it. You’re adorable.”

He tucked it into his pocket, pulling me against him, holding me as tightly as he knew how. Tuesday night. The night that everything changed.

Then he kissed me, long, and wanting for more.

“We’ll never say good-bye,” he said, and I took a step back, forcing him to say those words while looking into my face. Jonas and I were taking a giant leap forward. Tomorrow we would analyze it to death—the right, the wrong, the how to fit it all together. Right then, I wanted to be present in every cell of my body. I didn’t turn away. My eyes were locked on his.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” he said, and I mumbled something,
okay
, and he squeezed my fingers before letting them go.

I watched him walk back to his car, and then I turned toward my house and let myself in. I didn’t head directly into my room, though. Instead, I stood by the window, masked by the hideous drapes my mother bought at a flea market, and watched him get into the truck. He didn’t drive off as I had expected. I watched him take the picture out and hold it in both hands. He was looking at me and I was looking at him. I knew he would be staring into the eyes in the photograph, my eyes eight years ago. I knew he would see what I had already known. I knew he would understand how everything had led to this, that we were two people on the verge of falling in love, our lives now one.

And though I couldn’t predict the future, I could feel its warm promise rising up inside of me. Jonas would no longer be able to resist being with me, and only me. His loyalties to Emily would no longer imprison him to old obligations. My love for him would set him free. I watched him stuck in a moment—a slice out of time, not part of the present, not part of the past. Time in that instant was a stolen fragment that belonged to us. Watching Jonas stare at a photo of me assured me that he was seeing pure love in my eight-year-old’s eyes, and that our love, my love, was powerful enough to challenge fate. What did past virtue and morals matter when we shared a moment of pure love that could displace time?

When I arrived at the hospital Thursday morning and found Adam Levy’s bed empty, without any remnants of his ever having been there, I realized that I wasn’t prepared for the inevitable—that people and things pass too quickly through our lives.

“What happened to Mr. Levy?” I asked Maria, the attending nurse.

“He’s gone, Jessie. Late Tuesday night.”

Tuesday night. I looked at the watch my mother had given me just a few days ago, or was it weeks ago, the face already scratched. The date staring back at me, encased in a clear, not quite plastic dome. I might have known, believing in superstitions and all. He died on the thirteenth. Tuesday, the thirteenth of August, the day that would eventually mark a series of extraordinary events.

“Where’s all his stuff, his family?” I asked, hearing the panic in my own voice.

“They took everything this morning, cleared the place out.”

Her words filled my lungs with a crushing heaviness. I ran out to the courtyard, the one where Jonas once held me in his arms. We had been kissing, being intimate, and Adam had just slipped away. Guilt consumed me for the obvious reasons, but mainly for spending the afternoon in bed on Wednesday relishing in the warm, cozy reminder of Jonas’s arms around me. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t called. I didn’t need to hear his voice to know what I felt inside my heart and what I believed he felt inside his.

I half expected Jonas to find me there, to put his arm around me, comfort me, but I knew he was with his family in Malibu. We had talked about what the end would be like, what the family’s plans were. They were different than our plans, being Catholic and all. I had never been to a Jewish funeral. I was thankful I wouldn’t have to look at Adam in that awful casket.

I wanted to cry. I did. I just didn’t know if I could prevent the trickle from turning into a downpour. The ache was there in my throat and to unload right there, by myself, over someone else’s father felt strange. And as if I willed him to be there, I heard his voice beckon me from a very dangerous place. “Jess.”

I turned to find Jonas Levy, the beautiful boy I’d fallen in love with in two months’ time. He had been crying. I could tell by the splotches of red on his face. His hands were fisted deeply in his pockets. I wanted to run to him and take some of his pain away, but something about his expression made me stop. Instead, he walked over to me, his head held down, unable to look me in the eye.