The Fallback Plan (13 page)

“Okay,” he said. Nate didn’t turn to look at me at the next red light. I felt confused. Instead of thinking about what we were about to do, we were just doing it. If Jack knew what I was doing, he would say that Nate was a pervert, and I was naïve.

Did Jack know the color of my eyes?

“Park under those trees,” I said.

After she leaves the faun’s warm parlor, the Littlest Panda goes back to the lamppost. She doesn’t quite understand how an ordinary lamppost could be a portal to another world, but the faun has confirmed her suspicion that it is, and before she knows it she is once again surrounded by mink furs and Valentino gowns. The interior of the armoire smells like her mother’s perfume, which makes her feel sad, and a little sorry for being away for so long, for she knows she must have caused her siblings to worry. She was just having such a lovely time.

“Hello?” the panda calls out, as she emerges from the wardrobe. “It’s me, everybody! I’m home!” They’ll be so relieved to see her!

She takes off running down the long hall.

Run, panda, run!

She knows her brothers and sister won’t be mad at her when they hear that they’ve been chosen to be soldiers for Hanukkah!

The little panda finds all three of them in the rec room, playing Guitar Hero. They don’t even look up when she enters the room.

“Guess what!” she says, in the breathless voice of a track and field star.

“What,” her brother says, her brother who was supposed to be looking for her but forgot.

“I know I was gone for a super long time but now I’m back! And guess what?” No one guesses. She goes on: “I met a faun and he smokes a pipe, but it isn’t gross, and anyway, he lives in this land where it’s always winter and I was kind of transported into the land by hiding in that old wardrobe upstairs! Transported? Is that the word—transported? Propelled? I landed near a lamppost and now he needs our help to save Hanukkah from the Evil White Witch! Let’s go! If we don’t help she’ll give him sweets and persecute him!”

They all stare at her. She can’t understand why no one is on their feet, racing her back to the wardrobe.

Then the cuckoo clock strikes noon, and she realizes with a queasy feeling, a feeling like she’s on a boat in choppy waters, that she has only been gone for three minutes.

• • •

“What would you do,” I said, “if after you took me to my
house you went back to your own house, put the car in park, opened the car door, and realized your legs were missing? Go.”

“That’s a good one,” Nate said. “I don’t know what I would do.”

“Would you call someone?”

“Would I still be able to drive the car?”

“Yes,” I said. “Wait. No. No, you wouldn’t.”

“Then I’d park in the garage and keep it running until I asphyxiated on carbon monoxide and died.”

I wasn’t too sure how to follow that one—it seemed like something only a very depressed person would say. Nate didn’t look depressed. But apparently neither did I, because I was entrusted with the care of a four-year-old.

“Think about it, though. If you didn’t have any legs you could ride in one of those electric shopping carts at Walmart,” I said, which made Nate laugh in the soft, easy way of someone who isn’t really listening but can still recognize a punch line.

The sun had set and the stars were out, or at least they would have been, if we lived in a place with less light pollution. Nate had the moon roof open and we had reclined our seats so we could look up without actually leaving the car and risk being seen together. The clock on the dash said 9:06. It seemed like every time I thought to check the clock, an entire hour had passed. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a crushed apple juice box on the floor behind
Nate’s seat, and a cardboard book in the shape of a lamb entitled
Fuzzy Wuzzy Little Lamb
.

“Give me one,” I said. “A hypothetical.”

“It’s hard to think of them. You’re better at this.”

“Are you still so stoned?”

“Yes,” Nate said. He closed his eyes and put his finger to his lips to indicate that this was a secret. I pretended to lock my own lips and throw away the key, but realized too late that I had no audience. His eyes were still closed.

“I wish we had some cigarettes. Let’s go buy some cigarettes.”

“Why don’t you steal some from Amy?” I said.

At this Nate opened his eyes.

“Amy doesn’t smoke,” he said.

“What?”

“Amy doesn’t smoke, I said.”

I’m going to go outside for a minute
.

To s-m-o-k-e
.

“You’re right,” I lied. “I don’t know why I said that.” I didn’t want to talk about Amy. If we started to talk about Amy or May, I knew that Nate would realize the time and that he had been gone for too long. At around seven, he had called Amy to tell her he’d be home late.

I’m going to the mall
.

To buy shoes, I whispered
.

I’m going to the mall to buy shoes! Nate said, and I flinched a little. I need new shoes! He paused. No, I lost my navy ones
.
I think I left them at Mike’s that day we played tennis. Okay. Love you, too. Bye
.

“Cigarettes just sound good for some reason,” Nate said. “Might as well go all out and do everything I’m not supposed to do at the same time.”

“In that case, let’s drive to the 7–11. We can pick up a couple 40s and some teen prostitutes while we’re there,” I said.

“How old are you again?”

If this were a reality dating show, I would have pushed a buzzer and ended the date right then, before we even got to the free drinks and the hot tub. I had just started to relax, but now my paranoid self-consciousness had returned. With Jack it had been: do I look the right way, which underwear had I put on that morning, will I say the right things if he makes me watch him play video games? With Nate it was: how can I be both sarcastic and endearing, does he want me to pretend to be his age or does he want to pretend to be mine, where will we go after this and what will we do there?

“I’m seventeen.”

“Come on,” he said.

“I’ll be twenty-three in six months.”

“So … December.”

“Basically. I mean, technically, January fifth, but that’s like December.”

“You’re twenty-two now, though.”

“Technically,” I said. My mouth was so dry my tongue felt like a cheap washcloth. A washcloth from Walmart.
Electric shopping cart
. At some point Nate had turned the engine off because we didn’t need the air conditioning anymore, but now I felt claustrophobic. I asked him to turn on the battery so I could roll down my window and stick my arm out. The air was still damp from the storm, but cooler now than in the day, and I saw fireflies flashing Morse code above the nearby soccer fields like heliographs.

“God,” Nate said, “what was I even doing when I was twenty-two,” which was the second thing I did not want to hear.

When I was your age we didn’t
have
e-mail! We didn’t
have
global warming! I had to type my college papers on a typewriter and measure the margins with a wooden ruler!

“I went to engineering school before I decided to get a degree in accounting,” Nate said, “and when I was twenty I was living in a dorm suite with two other guys: Craig and Dave. Craig was a pothead and Dave was like an idiot savant, though now he’d probably be considered autistic. Anyway, Dave had a perfect SAT score, had graduated high school when he was sixteen, and could do these insane calculations off the top of his head like Rain Man. And although Dave had the social graces of a, I don’t know, a meth addict at a cotillion? He loved Tetris and when he found out I could play, he challenged me to a nightly Nintendo duel.”

“I didn’t know they had Nintendo in the 1950s,” I said, a little attempt at revenge.

Nate turned his head to look at me. Our arms were next to each other on the console, barely touching. “This was 1990, you Generation Y, Internet culture zombie.” He seemed proud of himself for that one.

“Hey,” I said. “I read books.”

“
Teen Vogue
is not a book.”

And at that I put both my hands in my lap. I felt confused. I knew he was kidding, we were both kidding, but part of me was like,
Does he really think I read
Teen Vogue
?
I mean, he was right, I did read
Teen Vogue
, but I didn’t want my entire being defined by it. I also read the
Tribune
every day, and I’d read at least three Ayn Rand books, not to mention the entire Chronicles of Narnia series and
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. Nate didn’t appear to pick up on my negative body language, and continued with his story.

“Every day after class, I’d smoke with Craig and play Tetris with Dave. He liked having someone to play against who could match his level. And that’s how I spent my twentieth year. The end.”

“Right,” I said. “But I’m not twenty.”

I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t say anything else, just waited for the clouds to pass so I could see the moon.
Nate is Jack
, I realized.
Nate is Jack grown up. Jack will grow up to be Nate. When Jack is thirty-eight he will be smoking pot with his daughter’s babysitter in the middle school parking lot
.

Apparently, no one ever grew up to be noble and brave and wise. Apparently, this was just a lie perpetuated by children’s book authors. Thanks, Frances Hodgson Burnett! High five, Louisa May Alcott! Now, at twenty-two, I finally knew the truth:

In another twenty years I would still be depressed and apathetic. I would still be waiting for that turning point, the one that comes in books and plays, where the hero has to step up and risk it all. Apparently, in life, there is no such thing. In another twenty years I would just be a heavier, more nearsighted, more clumsy version of the girl I was now, except that I wouldn’t even be allowed to read
Teen Vogue
, because I would be seen as either mentally ill or as a pedophilic lesbian.

I had been waiting for something monumental to happen to me in my life and now saw that nothing was ever going to happen. This was it.

“Is something wrong?”

“Nopity nope,” I said. There was the moon, finally. It was full and luminous, like a hula hoop covered in silver lamé.

“Esther, what did I say?”

“Nothing.”

“Was it the Tetris part or the pot part?”

“What?” I said.

“That upset you,” he said.

“You didn’t upset me. I just realized something and upset myself.”

“Should I take you home now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “In a minute.”

He started the car, but didn’t adjust his seat from its reclined position.

“Final hypothetical,” I said. “There are no more planes or cars or school buses or anything.”

“I’d plant a garden,” he said without hesitation, and for another minute we didn’t move. We stayed in our seats and stared at the sky, and when he put his hand over mine all was forgiven, it was as if he had just asked a question to which I had said yes.

In the moment I had conceded that nothing would ever happen to me, something had happened, much like getting into a minor car accident the day after I finally passed my behind-the-wheel exam. It wasn’t sex or even lust, really. We had mostly just held hands, and kissed in the slow hesitant way of virgins or sleepwalkers. I couldn’t define what had passed between Nate and me, but it felt precious like a porcelain manger set, like it was ours and no one else’s.

We memorized each other’s cell phone numbers. That’s what Romeo and Juliet would have done, or were we Hamlet and Ophelia? I tried to think of where the nearest river was, and felt safer when I couldn’t remember.

Twenty years ago, Nate and I would have had to call each other from pay phones to arrange clandestine rendezvous in nearby suburbs where we were friendless. We would have rented motel rooms by the hour, paid for in cash so we wouldn’t leave a trace. And if the front desk clerk asked for Nate’s name, Nate would say, “Rogers.
Mr
. Rogers,” and then he and I would fall upon the lobby floor and laugh and laugh in the deranged way of people in love.

The previous night was only the beginning of what I knew would be an affair. I rolled the word around in my mouth like a maraschino cherry. I decided to start watching the Lifetime channel, for tips on playing the other woman.

“Hello?” Nate said, the first time he called, which was only minutes after dropping me off at my house that first night.

“Hello?”

“Do you know who this is?”

“Yeah …” I said, trying to sound irritated in a sexy way.

There was an awkward pause, and then Nate said, “I’ll be in touch,” and hung up.

I took this to mean that it was only a matter of time until we ran away to Buenos Aires together. I took a shower and shaved my legs until they were as smooth and hairless as broom handles.

Alone in bed that night, in that woozy place that immediately precedes sleep, I imagined our plane landing on the runway, the Argentinean sky cerulean and cloudless. When they lowered the exit ramp, I walked down it in a beautiful pink suit with a flower pinned to my lapel, singing “What’s New, Buenos Aires?” from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical
Evita
.

My dreams that night progressed from the tarmac through the more devastating events in the life of Eva Perón. I dreamed that the military came for me, as I was dying of uterine cancer, and my husband Juan (who was
also Nate somehow; it wasn’t clear) wasn’t there. I panicked. Who would tell them to go away? I was dying of uterine cancer! They were going to break down the door! They were yelling my name, “Esther! Esther!”

I woke and realized it was my mom, knocking on the back door. It was morning and she had gone out to water the flowers and had accidentally locked herself out of the house.

• • •

Later that morning when I went to Amy’s I found her wearing a pair of white stirrup pants and a baggy t-shirt with Bedazzler rhinestones all over it, and I didn’t see her wear anything else for the rest of the week. Was she purposely dressed like a drug hallucination? Did she suspect I’d held her husband’s hand in a drug den on wheels? Her eyes were bright and wild, and she moved through the rooms of the house with a strange new purpose, as if time were running out. I watched her have her cigarettes out behind the house, and even then she couldn’t stand still.