The Winters in Bloom (6 page)

Zach didn’t know—or wouldn’t let himself know—that Amy was sleeping with other people. When she told him she was busy, he accepted it. Maybe because she still asked him to come over at least two nights a week. Often, she would ask for his help with something like a leaky faucet in the apartment or the battery of her car, and then she would make him dinner and let him spend the night. Kyra could hear them laughing and moaning. Her face would turn bright red; she usually fell asleep with her pillow smashed over her ears. When she woke up in the morning, she got dressed and left the apartment as quickly as possible, so she wouldn’t run into him in the hall. She didn’t want to see his skin warm and pink from sleeping in her sister’s bed, his hair tousled from her sister’s touch. But she wasn’t aware that she liked him
that
way. She hadn’t let herself consider the possibility, because she was so convinced that Zach was the only thing standing between Amy and utter chaos.

“I know you’re going to be mad at me,” Amy said. She sat down at Kyra’s table and took a big gulp of Kyra’s soda. The band was on a break. She seemed too hyper, as she always did at her gigs, but she claimed it was simply the excitement of performance. “You think he’s good for me, and I know you’re right. But I’m not ready for this. I’m going to have to tell him I just think of him as a friend.”

Kyra was stunned into speechlessness, but Amy quickly changed the topic to Kyra’s finals, which Amy claimed she was sure Kyra had aced. “You’re the star of the math department, Miss 4.0. You can say what you want about me”—she smiled a half smile—“though I wish you wouldn’t . . . but you are an unqualified success.” She grabbed Kyra’s hand. Her fingers were so warm, even though she was wearing a low-cut tank top and a skirt that barely covered her thighs. Her blond hair was longer now, with a blunt cut that made the ends look very sharp. Sharp enough, Kyra thought, to give someone a paper cut, except of course it would have to be called a “hair cut,” which made no sense.

Kyra never considered herself the star of the math department, yet it was true that she’d already taken an upper-level proof class and done well. She and Amy had started math together, in the same section of the same course, their first semester at UMKC. Kyra had gotten a perfect grade, while Amy had ended up with a C in that class and Bs or Cs in all her others, though she’d worked much harder than Kyra. That was the beginning of the end, as Amy stopped trying only a month or two later. She started saying things like “I’m not very smart” and “I’m not the type to be in college.” After all her plans, she let UMKC go with as little thought as she gave to selling back her books at the end of the semester. Unfortunately, she was following their mother here, too, though their mother had hung on for three years, while Amy decided to leave after only one.

“I’m not going to say anything bad about you,” Kyra said slowly, “but I think you’re making a huge mistake. He’s really smart and sensitive and—oh, cripes.” It was dark in the bar, but Kyra recognized Zach coming toward them with the big smile he reserved only for Amy. When he smiled like that, Kyra thought the whole world seemed better.

“Hey, babe,” he said, and sat down next to Amy. He leaned over to give her a kiss, but she turned her face so he was forced to kiss her cheek. It was the first time she’d done this, so he had to be confused. Amy must have sensed that and thought the best thing would be to tell him right then. Or maybe she just wanted to get it over with. Whatever her reason, Kyra felt terrible that he had to hear this in a crowded bar, with Amy about to go on stage.

He didn’t say a word; he just stood up and headed toward the exit. Amy was crying, but Peanut came over to tell her it was time to play again, and he hugged her and told her it was for the best. “We’re musicians. We can’t get entangled with day giggers, even cool ones like Zach.”

Maybe he was joking about the stupid day giggers remark, but it infuriated Kyra. She left to find Zach. He was walking down Nichols Road toward the parking garage. She caught up with him right as he was putting the key in the door of his old yellow Jeep.

“She doesn’t deserve you,” she whispered, and then she impulsively reached out and folded him in her arms. When she felt his shoulders moving, she realized he was crying.

“I love her,” he stammered. “I can’t stand to see her do this.”

Kyra thought by “this” he meant Amy breaking up with him. But no. He said something about Amy being in trouble, and Kyra figured out that he was worried about her sister. That was why he was crying. Kyra admired him so much at that moment. He was such a good person. She offered to go to his apartment with him because she knew he really needed someone to talk to.

He lived in a basement apartment not far from Kyra and Amy’s place. Kyra had never been there, but Amy had told her it felt like a cave and she was right. It was almost as dark as the bar, with only tiny windows near the ceiling and wood paneling on every wall. Zach said it had been furnished with stuff the owners of the house above him didn’t want. A beige Formica dinette set with two metal chairs. A brown-and-gray striped couch that was sagging in the middle. A yellowing white ottoman. A three-legged desk with a stack of schoolbooks serving as the fourth leg. A mattress on the floor in the corner, with the sheets twisted up and the blanket kicked to the bottom.

“I’m planning to move somewhere better at the end of the summer,” he said. “I just need to work and save up a deposit.”

“It’s fine,” Kyra said. She sat down on the far end of the couch to avoid the quicksand of the middle sag. “Our apartment isn’t perfect, either. Don’t worry.”

Kyra and Amy’s apartment was furnished with used stuff, too, from a thrift store, but the difference was their place looked pretty. They’d bought wicker baskets and wicker laundry hampers to store their books and clothes and shoes, and they’d painted their junk furniture white, to make the place look airy. They’d made their own curtains from cloud-blue sheets. They’d covered all the walls with the musician posters Amy loved, and the clocks Kyra was always picking up at garage sales. She had seventeen clocks at this point: the biggest, an old white one rimmed in black, three feet across, that used to hang in the front hallway of some elementary school; the smallest, no bigger than a quarter with cardboard hands, painted green and curved like fingernail cuttings. Her favorite present for her nineteenth birthday was a clock that Zach had found for her: a plastic raccoon with the time in his belly. On the hour, the raccoon’s eyes moved and his tail swayed back and forth: twelve sways for twelve o’clock, etc. He said it was corny but Kyra thought it was perfect and she’d hung it over by her cuckoos and her clock with the lion’s mane.

Zach mumbled something about how much more comfortable he’d always felt in Kyra and Amy’s apartment, which Kyra thought was an obvious reference to how comfortable he’d felt being with Amy. When he got out an unopened bottle of whiskey from the metal cabinet over his sink, she didn’t disapprove. Of course he needed a little something to drown his sorrows. His heart was broken.

After he sat down on the other end of the couch, he poured the whiskey into two Welch’s jelly glasses. “Last night, I told her she has to stop,” he said. “I told her if she didn’t agree to quit, I was going to have to do it. She begged me not to, but I said, ‘It’s for your own good.’ I really thought she understood that I was only trying to help.”

“Do what?” Kyra said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

He took a gulp of his drink. “It’s the one thing she made me promise I wouldn’t do.” He looked up. “I have to do it though. I can’t think of anything else to try.”

Kyra heard loud footsteps coming from the ceiling and what sounded like marbles being dropped. She wondered how Zach could study here. He was a very good student. His professors had told him that if he kept up his grades, with his experience as a medic in the army, he was a shoo-in for medical school.

“Amy is using,” Zach finally said. “Not just weed, which I don’t care about. Coke, speed, whatever she can get her hands on to be up for the gig.”

Kyra was stunned, but she knew she shouldn’t have been. No wonder Amy was so intense at the clubs. She swallowed hard and peered at Zach. “But what did you tell Amy you were going to do about it?”

“This,” he said, lowering his face. “Talking to you.”

“She didn’t want you to tell me?” Kyra took a big drink from her own whiskey. “
That’s
what she begged you not to do?”

He nodded. “She respects you more than anybody in the world. If anyone could talk her into getting clean, it’s you.”

“She does?” Kyra was repeating this new fact over and over in her mind:
Amy respects me more than anybody in the world.
How could this be true? Because she got good grades? Big deal. UMKC wasn’t exactly what you’d call a hard college. (Kyra had thought it was hard, until she started doing well. Then she figured it couldn’t be.)

“Oh yeah,” he said, leaning back, letting the old couch absorb him. “She thinks you’re a genius. She said when you two were kids, you were the smartest girl in the whole town.”

“That’s just false,” Kyra said. “Amy was the smartest girl. I was merely average.”

“Only because you didn’t care,” Zach said, glancing at Kyra. “Amy told me about your mom leaving. She said it really hit you hard.” He paused. “Must have been rough for both of you.”

“Not really,” Kyra said, because she believed this. But Zach pointed out this was another reason Amy respected her: she never complained; she was tough.

There was no point in arguing this with him. Instead Kyra listened as he talked about how wonderful Amy was and how he couldn’t stand to see her hurt herself. He said he’d always hoped they’d end up married. He wanted to have kids with Amy. He wanted to spend his life with her.

They were both drinking pretty heavily—Zach was on his third tumbler, Kyra on her second—when Kyra realized she still didn’t know what to do about Amy’s drug problem. Of course she would confront her sister, but when that didn’t work, then what?

Zach had been silent for a few minutes when he said, apropos of nothing other than the fact that he was getting drunk, “You’re cute, you know that?”

“No.” Kyra could feel her face growing warm, but she forced a laugh. “I’m okay-looking, but I don’t think I’m even slightly
cute
.”

“You are,” he said. “And you’re even cuter because you don’t know it.”

He was leaning toward her and she could hear her heart pounding in her ears. He came so close; he put his arm around her. When he whispered, “I wish I’d met you before I met Amy,” his breath tickled her neck. But when she stupidly tried to kiss him, he said, “I can’t.” Then he leaned back and collapsed in on himself.

He looked so sad that Kyra tried to put her embarrassment aside. She told him he would get Amy back, though she didn’t believe it. She said he would get someone better, which he refused to believe. She listened to his random memories about her sister for what felt like hours while he drank and drank his whiskey, though she herself had stopped drinking after she’d tried to kiss him. She didn’t want to lose what little inhibition she had left or she might cry and ask him why no one ever seemed to like her.

When it became clear that Zach was far too drunk to drive her home, she helped him over to the mattress. He fell into a stupor immediately, and he didn’t wake up when she pulled off his shoes and socks. He had great feet; she’d noticed them every time he’d been barefoot at their apartment. His toes were long and elegant and the tops of his nails were as smooth and rounded as ten little guitar picks. The calluses on the bottoms just made his feet more endearing to her. He’d been in the army. He wasn’t some kid; he was a man who’d been willing to sacrifice himself to keep the country safe. (Well, that and to earn money for college.)

After she covered him with his fraying gray blanket, she knelt on the bed, looking at his face. She gently brushed a stray hair from his mouth. She traced his light brown eyebrows with her fingertips; she held his cheeks in her hands. She even touched her lips to his, but so lightly she wasn’t sure if she’d made contact.

In her entire life, she’d never wanted anything as badly as she wanted him to wake up and pull her to him. But when it didn’t happen, she stood up and started the long walk home. It was a beautiful night. The moon was hanging low in the sky and Kyra was looking at it as the tears started. She was giving herself a stern talking-to though, telling herself to
cut it out
and
be reasonable
. It only made sense that she and Zach should not do anything together until he was over Amy. And the truth was, even if he’d wanted to sleep with her as much as she wanted to sleep with him (or even half as much), it really wouldn’t have been a good idea. She was still a virgin, and he had years of experience. What if she’d disappointed him?

It wasn’t planned, at least not consciously, but it turned out to be only a few weeks later when Kyra finally lost her virginity with fellow math major and quasi-friend Ford Trundale. Ford was also a virgin, and nothing about their sexual experience was memorable other than that he burned her shoulders and chest with candle wax when he went to move the four “romantic” candles over to her side of the bed so he could see her body in the dark. She didn’t cry out because Zach was in her apartment that night, too, down the hall in bed with Amy, who had decided that sex was allowed as part of their new, just-friends status. Amy had been up front that she wasn’t going to be exclusive, and Kyra thought Zach was setting himself up for a massive heartache. At least Amy had agreed to quit whatever drugs she was using. When Kyra had confronted her about it, she’d promised that in the future she would stick to coffee and Vivarin to get her up for gigs. Kyra could tell she meant it; the only question was whether she could actually do it.