My Monticello(22)

I met Knox last fall during my first semester at the University of Virginia. He was—I later learned—a fifth-year and a fancy honor student, but I didn’t know that when we met. I only knew he was the only white boy to come to the first of our Students for Equity meet-ups. I’d volunteered for outreach and so he’d come to my table to get his HELLO MY NAME IS. I’m Knox, he’d told me, stooping close so I could hear him, asking my name too, then carefully repeating it. With him in Engineering and me in Education, that might have been the end of it, except I’ve always struggled with numbers, with probabilities. When I reached out at student services for support, there he was again, his light eyes looking bereft somehow behind glass and wire. I was drawn to the stark angles of his face, the focus he set. I’d been told a couple times in high school, “You’re pretty for a Black girl,” but in Knox’s expression, I saw no such qualifier. In the tutoring sessions that followed, we’d sit on separate blankets on the Lawn, beyond the shadow of the rotunda. Sometimes Knox would look at me as if I were as familiar as water. One day he brought a photograph to show me: his family, out in Washington State, posed in front of a mountain lake, the water a faceted blue-green, like a gemstone. In the photo, his father looked austere in a flak jacket and flannel. His mother stood near Knox, handsome and blond, her eyes the same noncolor as his. His younger brothers crowded together, bare chests streaked in mud, their thin arms linked. I haven’t been home in a while, he’d told me as I studied that picture. He picked a red leaf from the river of grass separating our blankets. Then Knox said my name, like a question. One that I understood. One I’d already been asking myself.

Later, after we’d gotten together in earnest, after the air had grown cold enough to draw frost from our words, Knox and I took a giddy selfie on the Lawn, our bodies angled close. I felt short, of course, nestled there in the pit of his arm. Knox smelled like castile soap and wood smoke, since it was finally cold enough that he’d begun to use the fireplace in his dorm. I remember I could feel him peering down at the crown of my head with such adoration, my hair pulled taut to a puff at my neck, a bind that he would undo that same night with trembling, reverent fingers. Posing there, I knew there was nothing so peculiar between us, between any one person and the next. But when we looked at the result, we had to pretend it wasn’t a jab, the way the flash could hardly contain us—it blew out Knox’s fine features and burned mine to pitch.

What I mean to say is that I love Knox—I’m in love with him, even if something happened early on in the unraveling. It happened during spring recess, before the planes fell, when Knox flew back to his home state and left me in mine. I went to stay at my room at MaViolet’s, planning to escort her by bus to one of her doctor’s appointments. Her pulmonary specialist was at the university hospital, and they’d kept switching up the date for her visit, everything already falling apart, though we had no idea at the time how far it would fall. When we arrived, they explained a change in policy: After that visit, unless we could afford to pay in full, we should make other arrangements. On our way out, a nurse stuffed a plastic bag with emergency inhalers and handed it me.

That evening, back on First Street, I must’ve been feeling low. I spotted Devin out the family room window. It had been such a long time and it felt good to see him. I slipped outside, the screen hinge whining softly behind me. I knew Devin had been through some things since I’d last seen him, but as we walked together—out past the ball courts with netless hoops and the wild greens of the community garden—we only talked about the old days when we were just kids on that same stretch of road. The way we talked that day, the pain of the past felt like a kind of pleasure for the simple fact that we’d shared it between us. Devin lit a cigarette and that smell reminded me of Momma. We kept on, all the way to his uncle’s place, all the way to his room, remembering every little thing.

What can I say except The body remembers. Momma used to always warn me to be careful, as if my girl body was a ticking time bomb. And I was careful—I had been. But just then and into the early stages of the unraveling, with all the closed offices and unstocked shelves, I’d failed to be careful, even with Knox. Spring recess ended and I went back to Knox, because we’d promised each other I am yours and you are mine. I went back to campus, to the life I’d been striving for, because I wanted to, even if those slow, unspooling moments with Devin had moved me, like reading a passage in a forgotten book, and finding—in those known words—a revelation. I went back, telling myself that what happened with Devin had been a misstep, or a sidestep, something to be buried. Then came those monumental storms, all that wind and water, and it was only afterward that I realized.

Devin knows about Knox, but Knox doesn’t know about Devin, except for our pre–high school romance, which is ancient history. No one in the world knows that I’m pregnant—except for maybe MaViolet, who might see me more vividly than I can see my own fool self.

While Devin cleared the broken glass, Knox walked back to me. He was shaken, I could tell, by Devin’s anger and by what had happened that day on First Street and all the days that led us to it. I had MaViolet right beside me, but Knox’s family lived across the country—he couldn’t even call to see if they were okay. I knew that when Knox had flown home for spring recess, his father had refused to look at him. His mother baked bread and set the table, but only spoke to him sparingly, about small things. Even his younger brothers sat on their hands, as if they’d been instructed to leave him untouched. In high school, Knox had begun to fall out with his father after the older man had had some sort of epiphany, or crisis, abandoning his networker job in Seattle and relocating the family far north to live off a wild rocky plot of land. Knox told me it was because he’d challenged his father’s new vision of what the world was and should be. It was because Knox had insisted on leaving for an elite East Coast college. It was because, just before winter break, Knox had told his parents that he was seeing someone. He’d sent them my picture, from his phone, the one with overblown darks and lights.