Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(55)

After a while, he raised his head. He’d been crying.

“What happened anyway?” I tried to say this gently, but an array of other emotions was diluting my intent.

“I was driving to my dad’s in Westwood to get the gear. And I happened to notice this cemetery, so I decided to stop. Marilyn Monroe’s buried there. I’d been there before, but this time when I went I noticed how pink the marble on her grave is because people kiss it and touch it so much, you know…And that made me depressed as hell. My brother’s buried like a mile from there in this other cemetery. No one ever kisses and touches his grave, because no one gives a crap about him, do you know? He was just some kid who died. And it’s gonna sound so screwed up, but I drove over to his grave next. I couldn’t even find it at first. I’d forgotten where it was. It’s way in the back. And I started kissing it, and touching it to try to change the color of the stone…I knew it was crazy even while I was doing it, but I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. He was never even as old as I am now, how messed up is that? It makes me crazy sometimes.

“This thing I have…this depression…I can see it coming on. It’s like when you’re surfing. You want to stay on the crest of the wave as long as possible, but the nature of waves is that they always come back down.”

I put my arm around him. James felt so small to me. “I love you,” I said.

James laughed, which was horrible. “I can’t help but wonder if you’d still say that if you could remember everything. If you were in your right mind.”

I could have told him then, but it didn’t seem the place. “Don’t you love me?” I asked.

“I do.”

“Let’s get out of here, okay?”

When we got to the car, James looked really tired, so I suggested that if he gave me directions, I could drive.

“I thought you didn’t remember how,” he said.

“I remembered,” I answered. He didn’t question me beyond that.

James’s dad’s house was the California equivalent of James’s mom’s house. Roomy, empty. His dad was away somewhere. “On business,” James said.

“Have you been here by yourself the whole time?”

James shrugged.

I made eggs, but James didn’t really eat anything. He didn’t say much the whole evening. I could tell he was thinking about something, and I didn’t want to disturb him. Still, I felt like each second he didn’t speak became an inch between us.

Around ten, he said he was going to bed. I followed him into his room.

I kissed him.

“I need to get some sleep,” he said. “I haven’t slept in days and days.”

“Why not together?” I asked. I knew it was probably pathetic, but I was trying to pull him back to the surface. I loved him even more now that he seemed so vulnerable. Maybe I loved him more because he needed me.

James shook his head. “Naomi,” he said sweetly. “Naomi…I wish I could.”

He took my hand. His grip wasn’t very strong at all. He led me into one of the guest rooms.

“Good night,” he said, and then he closed the door.

I hadn’t turned on my phone since boarding the plane.

There were twenty-eight messages. I was just about to check them when the phone rang. It was Dad. I knew the jig was up.

“Hello,” I said.

Here’s how it played out:

He’d been trying to phone me all day.

He got worried when I didn’t pick up.

He called Will.

He wasn’t there, but he got Mrs. Landsman.

Mrs. Landsman didn’t know anything about a conference in San Diego. Furthermore, she told him I’d quit yearbook months ago.

He called James’s mom.

She said that James was in California.

“I just want to know one thing, is that where you are?”

“Yes,” I said, and then I started to cry. It was the tension of the day more than the trouble I was in. It was the sound of my dad’s voice. It was lying, not just to Dad but to everyone. It was wondering how I’d let everything get so screwed up. With James and Mom and Will and Dad and school and yearbook and tennis and even poor Ace. It was all the things I hadn’t said, but couldn’t and wanted to. They constricted my throat to where the only thing to do was cry or choke. It was that half-eaten carton of strawberries and the coin toss that I’d lost and being abandoned in a typewriter case and then again by my own crazy, beautiful, treacherous, wall-painting mother. It was my sunglasses, which I’d left on the beach that day. The sun had gone down and I hadn’t needed them anymore. It’s when you don’t need something that you tend to lose it.

It was James. Of course it was James. He had said I’d looked at him “funny,” but I had eyes: he was looking at me that way, too.

Dad booked me on a flight that left at noon the next day, the first one he could find.

In the morning, James looked better. “Maybe I just needed a good night’s sleep?”

I told him my dad had found out and that I had to go home.

“I know,” he said. “Raina called me. Your dad probably hates me now.”

“You’re not the one who lied,” I said.

On the way to the airport, James took a detour. He drove to USC, where we took the tour.