Last Girl Ghosted(24)

I climbed on the bottom rung, bounced a little to see if it would hold. When it did, I scrambled up.

Oh, it was magical. Sun streaming in from the roof slats, smelling of wood and leaves and rot, a worn old mattress in the corner, a stack of books swollen with moisture, a table with shells and feathers. All of it grimy, neglected, obviously having been abandoned for years.

“What’s up there?” Jay called from down below.

Nothing. Everything. What was it that I found so wonderful? It was a secret space, a place apart from the world where all time stood still. I could hear the birds singing, the wind pushing the leaves around. And for a moment I understood why my father loved this place; I was washed over with a sense of peace.

The floor felt solid enough. I vowed to clean it, care for it, and make it mine. I wanted to stay up there forever. But finally Jay called me down.

“What’s it like?”

“It’s perfect,” I told him.

He glanced up at it, the sun and the wind playing on his white blond hair.

“Good,” he told me. When he looked at me, his eyes were serious. “When things get bad, that’s where you go, okay?”

I didn’t have to ask him what he meant. Last night had been peaceful enough. We’d cooked our dinner on the fire my dad made out back—hot dogs and beans in a skillet. He’d even taken out his guitar, sang a love song he’d written to my mom. But Jay still had a fading purple bruise, a faint shadow on the edge of his jaw, from a few nights ago when a similarly peaceful moment turned ugly.

“And don’t come back until I come to get you.”

I nodded my agreement, stayed silent. He dropped an arm around me for a moment, and we both looked up at the tree house. Then he shoved me away lightly, rustling my hair.

There was movement in the leaves. At first I thought a person was there, stone still and watching us through the trees in the dappled light, someone tall and bulky. I grabbed Jay’s arm. But he just smiled, put a finger to his lips. Then I saw it was a deer, a doe. She stared at us with dark, glassy eyes, then bounded away into the forest.



twelve


Now


What are we looking for when we look for love?

What did I hope to find with my posting on Torch?

Why did I choose you?

I’m thinking about this as I whip through traffic in my usual reckless, kamikaze style—bobbing and weaving, playing chicken, skating past opening car doors, and finding narrow alleys through stopped traffic.

On a bike, the city is a blur of car horns and changing lights, throngs of people and doorways, alleyways, parks, windows. I am in the middle of it all, and totally alone all at once. I get stern lectures from Miranda and Jax, both requesting that I forgo my Citi Bike habit after Jax’s older brother Pete was hit by a car, laid up for nearly ten weeks and still in physical therapy. I’ve had a couple of wipeouts over the years, some pins in my elbow to show for one, a scar on my leg from the other. Both times I was wearing a helmet, but not today.

I earn an angry shout from a guy for passing too close as he waited to cross. I lift my hand in apology, still thinking about dating and love and how messed up it all is these days.

But meeting someone online isn’t so different from picking someone up in a bar, is it? Or a chance encounter in a park, or show, or anyplace where people gather. It’s just a bigger playing field, right? After the initial connection, however inorganic, isn’t it all the same? There’s a meeting. If there’s chemistry, a connection, then there’s another meeting, a slow peeling back of layers, a gradual revealing of different parts of the self.

My father would have thought this modern way was just more evidence that the end of the world was coming. That people are getting further and further away from each other, losing their humanity, their ability to connect—in spite of imagining themselves more connected than ever through their devices.

The envelope of cash I have stuffed inside my pants is pressing uncomfortably into my abdomen as I ride. I can’t remember the last time I had so much green. Or any at all. Money, too, has been reduced to an electronic affair mostly. The swipe of a card, numbers on a screen, bills spit from a machine, if you need cash at all.

I’m old enough to remember before we were swallowed by the digital age, before our lives were controlled by screens and devices. I remember ticking clocks and paper money, ringing phones attached to the wall, doors that locked with a key, doorbells without recording cameras. You remember that, too, Adam. We share a nostalgia for the analog.

After returning the bike to one of the racks, I walk the rest of the way to the storage unit, a great behemoth of a place that spans an entire city block, a whole universe devoted to storing people’s junk that they don’t care enough about to use, but which they’re not ready to purge. Hoarders. For a second I flash on the house where I grew up, but I push it away hard. I can’t afford a trip down memory lane.

Come home, Robin said this morning. Just come home.

I hate to keep breaking her heart. But I don’t want to go back there right now.

As I walk, people scurry past, a couple of them wearing masks like the man in the coffee shop. Just like that SARS, or the bird flu, there’s apparently a strangely named disease from a faraway place that won’t impact us much at all, I’m sure. But people are always ready to give in to panic; me, I tend to underreact. My father would accuse me of being “worldly,” which to him meant that I dwelled in the material. That I suffered under the delusion of permanence, that I erroneously believed that the things I could see and touch had any meaning at all. He’d see those people wearing masks as a sign, the white horse of the apocalypse—pestilence.