Where We Left Off Read online

  “It’s like I’m in a boat,” she’d said, as though the carpet was water and I had to keep her from spilling over into it. It reminded me of a game Hattie and I used to play as kids that we’d called “lava.” Everything but the ground was safe and we’d hop from table to chair to ottoman to avoid falling into the molten and fiery floor below. Mom would get annoyed when she’d come home to find us on the kitchen counters or wedged in the doorway with our feet and hands propped against the frame.

  “Why do you call it a boat?” I’d asked Mallory. My mouth was close to her temple and I’d pressed it softly there.

  “Because I feel safe here. Like you’re my calm place in rough waters.”

  “You don’t feel safe when I’m not around?”

  She lifted her chin to look me in the eyes. “No, not unsafe, really. Just uncertain,” she’d said. “But I’m certain of you, and that makes me feel safe.”

  Later that night Mallory led me down the hall. We were headed toward her dad’s den, and though I’d always wanted to know what he did in that room, I knew enough to wait until I was invited along.

  “Want to see something?”

  I nodded.

  “Hey, Tommy.” She’d dropped a few light knocks on the door as she spoke. “Care for a couple visitors?”

  Then she propped open the door to let me through. It was dark and musty. I could make out a wall with a large bookcase at the back of the room, and I studied it. There were hundreds of books, all haphazardly thrown onto their shelves. Some were upright. Others lay sideways. Some looked like they’d been tossed against the case and stayed where they fell. There was a small loveseat off to the side and it was covered in a deep red brocade fabric, the floral, swirling pattern interrupted with tears and snags.

  “Go sit over there and I’ll see if he’s got everything he needs.”

  I did as instructed and slumped onto the seat with a huff. The springs in the cushions were old and I could feel every individual coil. There was a lamp to my right that looked like it was made from stained glass and I wanted to flick it on, but I decided to wait on Mallory. She’d turn it on if it was necessary. It seemed like she had a routine in here.

  “Oh, Tommy,” she said, bending to the ground to retrieve a paint tube. “You should’ve told me to buy more goldenrod. I was just by the store today.” The way you do when you squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, she rolled the paint between her fingers and a dollop fell out and onto Tommy’s pallet. “There, that’s all that you’ve got to work with tonight.”

  The floor was speckled in every color of paint one could imagine, and there were stacks of canvases lining the walls the way music stores organized their albums and records to flip through. There must’ve been at least a hundred judging by the ten piles I counted along the wall.

  Mallory came over and sat next to me. I wasn’t a guy with a particularly long attention span—I’d been known to sleep through movies and lectures and church sermons—but I swore I could’ve watched Mallory’s dad paint all night. The limited movement I was accustomed to seeing from him disappeared altogether. His hand swept across the canvas as though he was a conductor, the paints his orchestra. I almost wanted to close my eyes to take in the concert in front of me.

  “Before the stroke, he was right handed,” Mallory whispered after an hour or more of silence. “Now he does everything with the left. The doctor says he should be able to speak, too, but he doesn’t try. I suppose he doesn’t need to speak audibly, though. His work says everything he needs to say.”

  This piece wasn’t what I would necessarily call abstract—it wasn’t like Picasso where you’d have to stand on your head and squint with one eye to make out any kind of meaning, but it wasn’t realistic, either. There were swirls of yellow that crossed over the entire canvas like wheat or yarn or ribbon. It could have been anything, but the one unmistakable element was the eye that peeked out from under it. It was identical in tone to Mallory’s, bright and sparkling.

  “What does this piece say?”

  I dropped my palm onto her bare knee and left it there. Mallory’s eyes fell shut, briefly.

  “That he misses her.”

  Then she got up and padded across the room and came up behind her father, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I miss her, too.” She pressed a kiss to the crown of his head and he leaned back at the gesture. She pulled him closer to her and his brush fumbled from his grip and spread thick yellow paint across her arm. She didn’t care, she just hugged him tighter. “I miss her every single day. She sure loved the hell out of us, didn’t she?”

  They stayed like this for a while, and though it was an exchange between the two of them, I felt like I was a part of it. There was a love so present it saturated the space around us. He’d painted more than an image, more than a memory. He’d painted a pure emotion, and in that moment, I couldn’t understand how this work of art wasn’t on display in the most prestigious of museums with the largest price tag possible. It was one of a kind in feeling and love.

  We left him after that and I pulled Mallory into the bathroom off the hallway as we walked away from the den. I took her arm—the one covered in freshly drying paint—in my grip and looked her in her eyes, hard. She held my gaze as I reached around for the faucet and wet a washcloth with warm water and wiped it across her forearm, taking the paint with it.

  I set the towel on the counter and stared at her reflection in the mirror for long enough that the connection of our eyes did weird things to my stomach. I didn’t know her story, but I knew there was loss—loss of so many kinds. “I’m sorry about your mom, Mallory.”

  She spun around. I saw the tears well, the quiver of her bottom lip. Then she cried. It wasn’t a sob that wracked her body or one of those ugly cries. It was controlled, as though she’d cried this same cry every day. Like brushing her teeth or doing homework, this was just part of her routine.

  I held her. My chin pressed into her hair and her cheek rested on my collarbone. She didn’t shake or shudder. The tears slowly and silently slipped down her face and landed on my shirt, soaking into the fibers there. She squeezed me back with her arms coiled around my waist.

  I didn’t know Mallory’s history. I knew I could never take the pain she’d experienced away, but I knew I would be part of her future, and any pain she’d ever face, I would be there for. Be there to comfort her and love her through it. And I needed her to know that.

  My voice didn’t feel like my own, and when I said it, I could hardly hear it, but I knew she could. I hoped she could. “I love you, Mallory.”

  She didn’t act surprised. She didn’t pull back in shock or in excitement at my words. She just nodded against my shoulder and said, “I know. I love you, too, Heath.”

  Mallory

  Winter didn’t hold on as long this year as it had in the past. It was often well into March before the trees turned from brittle looking skeletons with their menacing and bare branches clawing toward the sky into living, budding plants that reminded me of the yearly promise of new life and fresh starts. It was only February and already the town had begun to thaw.

  “Good morning, Sunshine,” Nana said one Saturday morning when I came down for breakfast. She’d outdone herself with the smorgasbord of baked goods that lined the old pine table positioned in the center of the kitchen. Cinnamon rolls, country-style potatoes, sausage, thick strips of bacon with ribbon-like curls of fat still clinging to their edges. My stomach growled as though letting its appreciation be known. I plucked a piece of bacon from the top of the pile and snapped it between my teeth.

  My hair was split into two braids which hung down my back and I wore pink flannel pajamas that had cotton-tailed bunny rabbits patterned all over them. Nana caught sight of me and cocked her head. Her expression was mixed. There was a little nostalgia there, like she was seeing me as the young girl she’d always known me to be, but there was something more in those twinkling, yet unsure, eyes. There was a hint of goodbye.

&n
bsp; I chose to ignore it and stuffed my face with a poppy seed muffin.

  “Oh, Mal,” Nana said. “Why have you grown up so quickly?”

  Not quickly enough, is what I wanted to reply. Sixteen was a weird age. You weren’t given the benefit of being young enough to make mistakes and merely learn from them anymore, but you weren’t old enough to fully own your decisions, either. You were the legal responsibility of a parent or guardian, but the emotional responsibility of no one but yourself. You weren’t coddled. You weren’t given the benefit of the doubt. You just were.

  It was weird that they called those who were ten or eleven in age tweens. We were the tweens. We were the ones caught in between childhood and adulthood. Those prepubescent kids were just stuck between being a little kid and an even bigger little kid.

  I wasn’t a kid anymore. I knew what I wanted out of life, and who I wanted to share it with. We’d been together just over four months. That wasn’t a lot in the timeline of life, but my timeline wasn’t all that long yet. The space Heath took up felt huge.

  For years, I’d wondered what it would be like to fall in love. What steps I would take to get there, how it would happen and who it would be with.

  And then one day I was there. Thrust into the thick of it. I thought I was falling in love with him, like it was some process that happened gradually and methodically. But if I thought on those feelings I had when we first met, they were the same ones I had now. My feelings didn’t change. They just magnified. Exploded.

  I’d burst into love with Heath.

  I finished chewing my muffin and took a swig of orange juice as I looked at my grandma, feeling like I had the answer to her question, even though it was probably meant to be a rhetorical one anyway.

  “You think I’ve grown too quickly? Time is relative, Nana. Sometimes it seems to drag on and then others it feels like it’s not moving at all. Like everything is frozen.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice.” She laughed. She filled up my glass with a pour of fresh squeezed juice. “To freeze time. A fountain of youth, if you will.”

  “I don’t know about that.” I smiled and thought of growing old with the boy who’d stolen my heart, of our years together and memories made over a lifetime of love. “I think I just might like to live my life day by day.”

  She gave me a pat on my back.

  “I think that’s the only way to do it.”

  Mallory

  “Daylight savings is next week. I don’t know about you, but I’m done with this dark at five thirty nonsense.”

  Nana had been flipping through the TV guide, circling the shows she wanted to watch for the upcoming week with a red Bic pen that was close to running out of ink so it skipped and stuttered on the paper. I never understood why she did this since she had her favorites set to record already, but people were nothing if not creatures of habit. And Nana’s habits were pretty harmless.

  “Hoping for some extra hours in the day to paint the town, Nana?” I’d teased and she just offered me a mischievous smile in return.

  I’d finished all my homework for the night, thanks to Heath, who offered to go to the library during lunch to help me find what I needed for my English paper on Flannery O’Connor. I’d checked out one of her novels, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and held it up in front of my face just so my eyes peeked out over the top. “It is not!” I’d exclaimed, waggling my eyebrows and pointing to the title. “I found you pretty easily.”

  “In all fairness, I found you.”

  “Maybe we found each other.”

  “Nope.” Heath was adamant. He’d been wearing dark jeans and a Rockley High hoodie with a bulldog in white ink drawn across the front, and as usual, he had his hair tucked under a gray wool beanie. “I’m taking the credit on this one. Remember, I walked two miles in the snow both ways to ask you out.”

  “Fine. The credit is all yours.” I’d winked at him and he launched at me with a hoomf! The book dropped and clattered to the ground right as his lips smothered mine. We got the expected shushes and eye rolls from several nearby students and the librarian shot a deadly look of warning from behind her pretentiously tall desk, but that only encouraged us. Heath pulled me behind a bookcase and yanked me closer to his body. He was warm and solid. We kissed like that all lunch recess, sneaking away among shelves, pressed up in dark corners and hallways, his mouth on mine, our hands on each other.

  Heath was never shy in showing his affection, and I was never hesitant in receiving it.

  If someone had asked me that day how much Heath loved me, I would have said with his whole heart. I’d earned every portion, and he’d taken every bit of mine. It was an even and beautiful exchange, to care about someone intensely and equally.

  I gave him all of my heart, knowing that I’d never want it back, hoping he’d never have the need to return it to me.

  It was his.

  I was his.

  Heath

  You didn’t remember all moments in life the same. Some held extra weight, others extra clarity, and the very few, significant ones became a part of you, embedded in you like the sharp sting of a splinter. Not just a recollection or a fond memory.

  These were the memories that defined you. They intersected and disrupted the trajectory of your life, an unforgiving fork in the road that propelled you another direction, one so very far from the path you were comfortably traveling down.

  My direction-changing memory occurred on March 23, 2004.

  People called moments like these life altering, and I guessed that was true. But it was never just your life to be altered. There were always others involved. The deepest memories always included multiple casualties.

  I often wondered what her memory would be. If we sat down, how would she tell it? What parts would she punctuate with expression? What moments would she gloss over? If I asked her to tell her story, would it parallel mine?

  I was beginning to think I’d never know.

  This was how I remembered things.

  The clocks had changed that day. I always hated having to update every damn watch in our house. It seemed impractical to shift life either one hour behind or ahead every six months. Arizona had something going with their refusal to adhere to daylight savings. Whatever. It wasn’t as though my complaining was going to change the fact that I’d lose an hour that day.

  I’d lose so much more than that.

  Mom and Dad were at the hospital, Hattie at volleyball practice. Back in California, I’d been on the baseball team, but I didn’t go out for any sports this spring. In years past, my hands would ache for that familiar grip of the bat. The fresh and crisp smell of the field was a homecoming to me. Hours a day would be filled with the repetitive catch and release of the ball from my glove into my dad’s in our pasture by the big red barn.

  Somehow I’d missed tryouts. It wasn’t really a somehow. I knew exactly why I’d missed them. I was with Mallory, helping her struggle through her latest pre-calculus assignment. Numbers weren’t kind to her brain. They’d jumbled together and when a few letters were thrown into the mix, it was migraine worthy. Her mouth would scrunch in frustration, the thick line of discouragement creased between her eyes. Shoulders hanging in surrender. She was failing. Sure, we were only juniors, but one failed class led to another and another and she didn’t have the luxury of many more semesters to catch up.

  I knew what happened to small town girls without their diplomas. At least I’d heard stories, ones I could never match with my Mallory. She had so much potential, and potential was not measured exclusively by academic success.

  For whatever reason, the day it happened I was out at the ball field. Mallory and her grandmother had plans that afternoon, and when the final bell chimed at the close of the school day, I began walking through the parking lot, right by my dad’s car. They carried me all the way to the diamond at the south end of the campus. There were metal bleachers erected behind the dugout, the yellow paint on them chipped and peeling like the polish on Mallory’s fi
ngernails. I’d always loved how haphazardly put together she was. She was a jumble of intention, but never quite successful in matching the mold of her more popular and better-dressed peers. I loved her for that, for her originality in every aspect of her life.

  I’d watched the boys play for an hour and a half. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a stab of jealousy. Of course I did. That pop of the ball into the glove could be felt in my own hands as I sat on the cold bleachers, a spectator rather than a participant. I knew what plays the catcher would signal before he called them. That had been my territory—in the squat behind home plate—and I was damn good at it. I’d winced at every passed ball that slammed into the backstop, knowing I could’ve blocked it with my knees, my chest, my body. I wore my pitcher’s mistakes and made him look good, helped him get the win. That was my job.

  I fixed things. I knew how to shadow and pull my glove into the strike position when something came my way a little off center, out of the zone. I’d fool the umpire, the batter, the crowd into believing it was the perfect pitch. I’d changed the outcome by altering the way I received it.

  I didn’t know how to fix what ended up happening that evening. I couldn’t fake out anyone, least of all myself. I’d received the news as anyone would’ve expected me to, and in truth, it didn’t matter how I’d received it.

  It wouldn’t change the outcome.

  The first thing to tip me off was Mom’s voice on the other end of my cell. She was working and never called home, not even to check in. My parents were excellent at what they did and wore a professionalism that came with years of practicing bedside manners with their patients. Mom would come home from work and talk without any effect to her tone of a three-month-old flat lining or a teenager recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. It wasn’t cruel at all, just matter of fact. Because things happened in life, and that was the truth in it. The world needed people like my parents who could mask their emotions to hunker down to get the job done when the rest of humanity wanted to curl into a helpless fetal position and cry.