What We Leave Behind (9 page)

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“How pretty you look tonight.”

“And what else?”

“How you don’t need this.” And he brought his fingers to my mouth and wiped off the lipstick that I had spent hours applying.

“Why,” he asked, “what are you thinking?”

I wanted to say
how soft your fingers felt against my lips and how this is sure to be the first song on the soundtrack of my life
, but I settled on, “Nothing.”

“I think it feels nice,” he said in a whisper so that my potentially eavesdropping mother and the Bigfoot by her side couldn’t hear. “I think you do too.”

His breath whipped past my neck like the whiff of a hundred kisses. It smelled like toothpaste, the yummy, minty kind. Is that what Adam Levy meant? Next time I’m at Vons smelling toothpastes, I’ll be brought back to this moment?

I leaned my head back so that I’d get a better view of him, this abnormally calm person who made it so easy be in his arms. Elton John crooned about taking his lover’s hand in his. Jonas found my face and peered deeply into my eyes, while his hands heeded the words of the song and his fingers laced through mine. Something passed in those sweetest eyes I’d ever seen, a moment that I would never forget. All that I’d been pretending not to feel was staring me back in the face, his hands telling me what his words could not. My arms had no choice but to pull him closer, my head resting against his shoulder.

Words were hard for Jonas, at least, with me. He was always holding back something. When he gave, I’d soak him in, and when he closed off, I’d confuse myself into thinking it meant he didn’t care. Tonight, he cared and when he tightened his hold around me, it didn’t even bother me that Beth and Amy stopped watching the television and made no attempt to conceal their gawking at us. I think if it weren’t for the fact that my mother saw this as a potentially heart-wrenching day, she might have intervened, but she didn’t. Instead, she got up and danced, as did our neighbors Mel and Susan, and soon you might have thought this was an actual party; but for me, Jonas was the only guest.

“Did you say something?” he asked.

“No,” but I’m sure what he heard was my heart pounding through my chest.

“Stop thinking so much,” he said, interrupting the wail of my silent thoughts. “Relax and enjoy the moment.”

I closed my eyes and tried.  Being sixteen entitles you to few things, one, a driver’s license in most states, and two, raging meddlesome hormones. The latter hit me with spellbinding force.  All I wanted was for everyone around us to disappear so that when I opened my eyes again, it would just be me and Jonas and instead of his finger brushing my lips, it would be his mouth.

They were all still there. And the song dutifully came to an end as I prayed another slow number would follow, but like my previous prayer, that too went unanswered. With the song over, he stepped back, his arms and hands no longer around me, although remnants of his touch were left in secret, soulful places within. A look passed between us. He smiled. I smiled back.

“You have a great smile,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, alarmed at how sappy I’d become.

The others kept dancing around us, thinking nothing odd of the attraction we had for one another. Since we were trying to figure it out ourselves and having nothing to do with all that displaced energy, we walked into the kitchen where my cake sat on a table. I looked at it with great fear, as if the numbers would scare him away, the reminders of the years between us.

“Are you cold?” he asked, noticing the trail of goose bumps down my arms. “A little,” I said, confused, when only moments ago I was filled with heat. Jonas took off his sweatshirt with the Harvard logo and draped it around my shoulders. It was still warm; every hair on my arm seemed to stand at attention.

He wore a thin green T-shirt underneath. His arms were long and lean.

“Your shirt matches your eyes,” I remarked, and his expression changed. As he reached for something, my mother called out from the other room, “Okay, gang, let’s get the candles going…” I don’t know what he was about to say, if he was about to say anything at all, but I was annoyed with the intrusion, and I think he was too.

Turning my attention to my mother, who didn’t mess around when it came to candle lighting and had every year accounted for on my cake, I grinned. For all my lack of appreciation, the cake was beautiful. It had layers and layers of thick chocolate icing with pretty flowers surrounding a large candy tree. There was even a miniature figurine on one of the branches that Amy Levy took out and placed on the grass of icing below. She had everyone laughing, telling the incident of that afternoon, until we got to the part when Jonas saved me.

“Yes, I saved her.”

“Yes, you did,” I said, agreeing on something.

“He was like Superman,” said Amy Levy, “swooping her out from under the tree.”

“You hear that, Lois Lane?” he nudged me.

All the candles were lit; I closed my eyes to make my wish.

I was very careful about this particular wish. It had the promise of being different than years past.

“Come on!” they hollered, but I wouldn’t let the pressure distract me from my goal. When the pictures I was searching for were there in my head, I pulled Jonas’s sweater around me tighter, and released the wish into the air. All the candles blew out, except for one.

I blew again and watched as it disappeared, but the damage had already been done. I was deflated of breath, the sinking swell in me from lack of air, lack of hope. I already knew that my wish would never come true.

Sleep did not come easy. I was tired, my mind spent, my body needing to refuel. Jonas’s existence was everywhere, his arms around me, his eyes before me. That my wish would not come true was only a small part of the worry that polluted my thoughts. He was looking at me, wanting me. I fumbled in the darkness for Sammy, my trusted bear, hugging him close to my body; but where he once consoled, there was a void that left me restless and unable to sleep. I tossed and turned in search of relief, my birthday long since gone by the steady accumulation of impatient hours. That’s when I saw the ball of fabric that lay strewn across my floor.

Jonas had left without asking for it back, and I had casually thrown it on the floor of my room when I undressed for bed. I had forgotten it was there, caught up in the appraisal of my body in the mirror, sure I’d find some changes there, some small indication that I was now more of a woman, anything to contribute to the clamoring of sensations that cascaded down my legs.

I got up from the bed, my formidable opponent, and reached for it in the darkness. Holding it in my hands, looking it over, I couldn’t resist raising it to my nose for a hint of Jonas, to smell him there on my bed. I pulled the tank top I was wearing over my head, tossed it on to the floor, and fit the sweatshirt over my shoulders. The fabric against my chest and arms did more than just warm me. Laying back on my bed, bikini underpants hugging my narrow hips, Jonas’s sweatshirt was the only blanket I needed. Closing my eyes, it was easy to imagine that it was him there with me, Jonas on me, Jonas against me. It was simply a shirt, but it aroused me, teased me, fooled me into thinking he was there. I was creeping myself out a little and, at the same time, I was getting excited. This had to be the most intimate moment I had ever experienced alone.

I was feeling something.

I was feeling breathless.

I was feeling myself wanting to be touched by him, wanting more than the thin piece of cotton against my now hardened nipples. I yearned for something to extinguish the fire that was spreading between my legs. My body arched, my hips moved to a rhythm that defied me.

My hand found the dampness.
There
, I told myself,
just a touch
, feeling the slippery wetness of Jonas on my fingers. I was both ashamed and excited by my thoughts, but I didn’t stop. It was my sixteenth birthday, and I fooled around with Jonas all night long.

I only agreed to go to lunch with Jonas because he pressed me, practically bullying me into accompanying him.

“I didn’t get you a gift…” he reasoned, “so let me take you out.” I toyed with the idea of telling him that I had gotten from him a gift that I had gotten from no other boy.

When he found me in the hospital that afternoon working alongside my mother and the other nurses in emergency, he teased, “You don’t look happy to be having lunch with me today.”

“I’m in the ER, Jonas. Nobody’s happy here.”

“You two heading out?” my mother chimed in, astounding me with her lack of flitting.

I looked at him, thinking how cute he was, and then back at my mother. I was convinced they both could tell where my fingers had been.

“Is that alright?” I asked, in need of some necessary parental guidance.

“Go ahead,” she said, without looking up from a chart. I untied the uniform from around my waist and followed Jonas to the parking lot.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Don’t you worry,” he said, “I have it all taken care of.”

We got off the highway in Long Beach and headed toward the ocean. I was confused when we stopped in front of a marina.

“Can you swim?” he asked as he led me down a dock toward a large boat. “If not, you can wear one of these.”  He threw a bright orange life vest my way. I held it in my hand, still not exactly sure what was happening. When he got on the boat, shaking hands with someone who called himself captain, I was stunned.

“Come on,” he said, helping me onto the vessel with a protective hand around my waist. My stomach was starting to grumble, and I wasn’t sure if it was nerves or if it could have been actual hunger.

“Where are we going,” I asked, “Gilligan’s Island?”

“Fantasy Island,” he answered with a laugh, because he didn’t know I was there the night before.

I had a fleeting thought of my mother back at the hospital while I was whiling out the day on a luxury sea liner not much smaller than the Love Boat. Did she know what she had agreed to? Lunch was one thing. This wasn’t a hospital buffet.

“I already cleared it with your mother, Jessie,” he said, knowing instinctively where I’d gone in my head.

“You cleared it with my mother?”

“She knew I was taking you on the boat for the day. It was our secret.”

“She agreed, just like that?”

“Yes, but there was one little hitch, one little catch.”

“What’s that?”

“I told her Amy was coming with us.”

“Is she?”

“No, is that okay with you?”

He could have hung me from the ceiling and had me spit nickels out of my mouth, and it would have been okay.

“Come on, I’ll show you around,” he said, signaling for me to follow him.

In a matter of minutes, I could feel the engines humming below and the boat’s placid movement beyond the harbor. I didn’t know where we were headed. I had no idea what the day had in store for me, but I knew that I was with Jonas and wherever it was he was taking me, I’d be happy.

We walked to the bow of the boat, leaning against the rails, the wind twirling around us. It was highly improbable for me to sit for long periods of time with another person without spouting off something clever, but I deviated from tradition and relished in our shared quiet. Maybe it was the ocean, how its smooth humming danced around my ears, or maybe it was the thrill of the
morning after
, but I needed little more than the comfortable silence.

When a small island came into view, I asked, “Catalina?”

“Have you been?”

“No, only pictures,” I said.

“Most people don’t realize that the natives have been living on Catalina Island for thousands of years. They found silver on the west end in eighteen sixty-three.”

Who could think about history right now? I was thinking about love; how much I loved being alone with Jonas, how much I loved that he’d planned something for me, how much I loved the anticipation that lay before us. All this love, by the way, was sure to kill me.

We docked on the island and the colorful postcards came to life. Catalina was a quaint and charming piece of land, with no visible similarities to its stepparent, California. A musical rhythm filled the air; merchants selling crafts and goods sprinkled the streets.  Children were running and playing on the pavement, their laughter in tempo with the music.  When you got higher into the hills, the trees were thick and lush.

Jonas led me to a scooter parked on the side of the road. “Hop on,” he called out.

I swung my leg over, pulling myself up onto the shiny red metal.

“Hold on tight,” he said, gunning the machine, leading us up a small hill that met a private road. The cobblestone street ended in front of a pair of wrought-iron gates, and a sprawling home was visible in the distance. That’s where Jonas stopped.

I said, “Is that someone’s house?” Sure, I’d taken star maps through Beverly Hills and peeked through security gates and over walls, but this was different. It might have been the way it was perched on the hill with the sea just behind it, or its considerable trees, or the ivy that crawled high along the French Victorian windows. It was impossible to pinpoint what made it perfect.

“You know, when I was a little kid…”

“Cause now you’re such a big kid,” he teased.

“When I was a little kid,” I began again, this time more persuasive than before, the proximity of our bodies thrilling me. “There was a house around the corner from Beth’s that looked almost like this. Every time I’d pass it on the way to her house, I’d pretend it was mine, sometimes following the walkway up to the door for a few steps. I wanted to know what it felt like to own it, to have it be mine.”

Jonas didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking under his helmet. “Guess you never played make-believe,” I said.

“You can have anything you want in life,” he said, “if you want it badly enough.”

“That’s not always true,” I said.

The mechanical whirring of the gates began, ceasing the passage of developing thoughts. The doors swung open and Jonas stepped on the gas. I hugged him closer, wanting to remember the exact detail of his body against mine.