What We Saw at Night (9 page)

“I
f you had a long life for sure, what would you do?”

“Nobody has a long life for sure,” I told Rob. “Especially people who jump off buildings.”

We’d had the what-if-you-weren’t-doomed-to-die conversation before, many times. But not recently, not since we’d started Parkour.

We were sitting in the Jeep, on the top story of the parking garage in Duluth: the one that widened in big concentric loops until it filled an entire city block at the bottom. It was the same one that the cop’s son had been caught scaling. In fact, the cop had inadvertently given us the idea. The sky was a deep blue, the kind of blue it turns just before kids like us can begin unwrapping our scarves and hats and sunglasses. And the best part? The part I want to kill myself for admitting?

Juliet wasn’t with us.

Three days had passed since
the incident
. The whole ride home that night, she’d been on this weird campaign that was
probably based on diluting her own fear: She’d tried to talk to me about
the incident
as though it hadn’t happened quite in the way I thought it had. She’d dropped dismissive hints. (“Maybe you were thinking of that other night, before, and you thought you saw something …”) I’d dismissed her dismissal: I knew she was shaken. Juliet was cool. And not in the slang sense. She never got agitated. She was cool like a pool hustler.

The key to Parkour isn’t just strength, and it definitely isn’t daring. It’s absolute focus. From her ski jump days, Juliet was able to focus far better than Rob or I could. She’d applied that gift to Parkour, the gift for drilling straight down to the moment in front of her. Still, she was more challenged than we were, because even with contact lenses, her vision wasn’t 20-20 in either eye. Her poor vision was partly responsible for the bad fall that ended her fledgling ski career. Although she covered it up, she was losing a little more vision every couple of years. Dr. Andrew said that eventually laser surgery would correct the kind of loss she had, which was a complicated form of astigmatism. But no one would even try it until Juliet was eighteen.

“If I could live a long time and be sure of it, I’d travel,” Rob said. “I’d … you know. Take a sabbatical. The way professors do.”

Or Juliet
, I answered silently. She’d gone on another “sabbatical” these past few days. Just up and disappeared. And I did hate myself for being relieved that I could spend time alone with Rob. The problem was that she could be so persuasive that there were moments I did doubt myself.
The incident
had been an adrenaline-drenched blur. Juliet’s excuse for her break from us was that she needed to “rest a little.” This would be like a promiscuous athlete who made
$20 million a year announcing that he would spend the next few seasons as a Buddhist monk.

But like I said: it gave Rob and me time to talk. And I was not hallucinating this much: we did talk differently when Juliet wasn’t around.

We’d gone for sushi. We’d even tried out gruesome sounding combos, like Marching Dragon Tail. (It was awful.) Then we ran for the car—a sun below the horizon can still be dangerous—and Rob grabbed my hand without thinking to pull me along.

Feelings change fast when you’re a teenager. Mom told me that it still amazed her that she would start a school year thinking about one boy constantly, relating every song and every bite of food and every glance in the mirror to complete absorption in him … and then, a few months later, be able to look at him with cold detachment, noticing his blackheads and his girl butt. But my feelings for Rob hadn’t changed, ever, except to grow stronger. I fantasized about explaining to him why we should get married when we were eighteen, because it corrected for our presumed lifespan.

How could he not know? Or care? Being with Rob meant more to me than having a real grown-up life—whatever that even meant—in part because I didn’t think of my condition as really suited to having a big life, unless I could telecommute for everything. But I could have a home and a love. I could be happy. Eventually he would cave in and admit he was attracted to me.

Two nights earlier, I had cut my hair in face-framing tendrils. Tonight, I’d even tried alluring cologne. (An oldie called Shalimar; my mother said that her mother had used it; but magazines said that it turned guys on because it smelled like vanilla—in other words, like something they could eat like a
cookie.) Predictably, Rob didn’t try to eat me like a cookie. As always, he treated me like a kid sister. Worse: a kid brother.

In the silence he said suddenly, “There are lots of places, like Paris, that are better at night. I’d keep a little room in some big city like LA, with just a Nerf basketball hoop and computers and my music and books. I wouldn’t even have a stove because I’d get takeout from a different place every night.”

“Refrigerator?”

“I’m not a barbarian.”

“What else?”

“A Murphy bed.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a bed you pull down out of the wall. If you have one, you only need one big room. You know, with a table and a couch. A very big TV. Stands for the guitars. A Strat like Jimi Hendrix.”

“You don’t play guitar. A what like Jimmy who?”

“Never mind. I’m dreaming here.”

Rob was the only guy I knew who shared the exact same musical tastes as his father. (True, I didn’t know many guys. But every guy in Iron Harbor our age listens to rap.) Both Dorn males insisted that “all great music was created between the years 1966 and 1974.”

“Anyway, just one room to live in and one room to clean,” he added.

“Is this a guy thing? Like, it’s okay to do everything in one room?”

Rob sniffed. “Juliet told me she would live on a motorcycle and carry everything she would ever need in two saddlebags.”

My shoulders sagged. Even when Juliet wasn’t here, she
was here. I couldn’t think of a response. She had one-upped me in absentia.

“It’s not appealing to me, to tell the truth,” Rob continued. “If I didn’t have to take care of it all by myself, I’d actually have a real bed and more than one room.”

“Why would you have to take care of it by yourself? Why wouldn’t you have a roommate?”
Like me?

“You have to be on your own sometime. I’m just not really necessarily the kind who wants to. I’m not a solitary guy.”

I smiled in the gathering dark. That was a lie. But I was smiling because I had to strain to hear him. That was really the crucial difference: he spoke so much more quietly when Juliet wasn’t around. She made the air around her hum just by being in it. Every time we did Parkour, we clamped our gloved hands together and shouted, “Live once!” And that was okay. It ritualized Parkour, which
should
be a ritual. But tonight … sitting alone with him was a fantasy glimpse into the lives of two regular people, who had regular habits and did regular things.

“If I had a life for sure, a long life, I would be a judge,” I said.

“A judge? Now that would be difficult.”

“Not for me. I would be firm but fair.”

“I meant, practically, it would be difficult,” he said.

I laughed. “Night court. Someone has to be there. I think, being used to what you see at night, I would be more tolerant than a Daytimer. We aren’t very easily shocked.”

“Tolerance. So you wouldn’t be a hanging judge?” Rob said.

“Ha! So what would you do?”

“In my room? My studio would be downstairs. There
would be an inside staircase, maybe a fireman’s pole. And since I don’t play guitar, I’d record. I’d mix. The old rock stars, you know, like The Beatles or the Rolling Stones? They would start their day at five or six at night. They would be in the studio until dawn. Like that old song, ‘Beth’ by Kiss.
‘Me and the boys will be playing … all night.’
So that’s what I’d be.”

“Why don’t we ever say: what we
will
be?” I asked without thinking.

“I guess we’re trained out of it.”

“I’m sick of being trained out of it. I’m opposed to thinking my early death is a foregone conclusion.”

Rob smiled. “Allie, you don’t face the facts. Never did.”

“Never will,” I said. “Facts are overrated. All geniuses ignore facts.”

He kissed me then.

We both pulled back, instantly. For a frozen moment, his eyes met mine as though we’d spit on each other or something.

Then, he leaned over and undid my seatbelt and his. He kissed me again, pulling me under him. The times I had been kissed before amounted to once, in eighth grade, by our then-neighbor, Eric. I had worried about how it would be when it happened for real, doing silly little kid stuff like kissing the mirror and my pillow. And of course, I’d only ever imagined it being with Rob. But now that it was happening … everything fit like finely chiseled wood, smooth and soft and funny, tasting like the wasabi we’d had with dinner. Then he stopped.

I said, “What? What?”

“Is this going to be our time?” he said.

“It is if you say it is.”

He blinked. “Here?”

“Not, well, not in the Jeep. I’m not a contortionist. But I want it to be with you, if that’s what you mean.”

“You don’t feel like you’re cheating on Juliet?” he asked.

My eyes narrowed. “What are you—?”

“I didn’t mean that … I, listen. If you were bi-curious, I think I would have brought that up a few years ago, Allie. But I feel like I’m cheating on the three of us. As you know, like a unit. The
tres compadres
.”

“Stop,” I said. My heart thumped so hard I thought it would burst out of my ribcage. “Let’s just go back to talking about the future we aren’t going to get instead of talking about the girl any guy would have the hots for, or feelings for, or give anything to get over.…”

“Any guy but me.”

“You don’t?”

“I used to, but now I don’t. Please let me finish. If we do this, now, we can’t be the
tres compadres
anymore. We can’t be the three friends together. We’ll be two and one. Is that okay with you?”

Was that okay with me? Why did he have to bring up long-term consequences of instant gratification?

Rob added, “Maybe us being here, right now, this way, it’s a sign. Although I don’t believe in signs.”

“Since when?”

“I never did,” he said.

“I mean, since when do you not want Juliet?”

“Since I kissed you just then.”

“But you did before.”

“Allie, there you go. This is a fact. You can’t be jealous of before.”

“Oh,” I said.

I drew in a deep breath, and then settled back into the cold Jeep cushions. The moment had not just been broken; it had been broken and then stepped on. Gradually my pulse slowed.

“Let’s see how you feel after we make short work of this building. We came here to trace, right?” I had to say something. Both of us were strung wire tight and needed to do … anything. I honestly didn’t know if it was our moment to do
everything
.

Rob grinned, as if nothing had happened at all. “You’re on,” he said.

W
hat we planned wasn’t so dangerous, unless you missed your footing or your grip. But we weren’t going to miss.

I pulled on my gloves.

Rob went first, roped to me, while I filmed him with his camera. Something had changed tonight. It was as though we’d done Parkour all our lives, instead of for three months. From the roof of the parking garage, down floor-by-floor, he perfectly “derived” (as Parkour speakers say) his relationship to the space—walking that little beam, then hanging from it, as though it were as wide as a boardwalk on the beach. He finished with a standing jump and a flip off onto the grass.

I applauded and stowed the camera in my flat front pack.

As I prepared to take my turn, while Rob raced back through the parking garage, something came over me. I decided what the hell, to be a girly girl for once. I yanked off my skullcap and my headlamp and let my newly-shortened hair fall free. For the first run, I’d be roped to Rob anyhow
and he’d be filming, so I would be able to see by the light from his camera.

The all of a sudden Rob was beside me, roping our waists together. Before I began, he kissed me again. It was a long kiss, hard and involved, as if we were both preparing for a battle I’d win. As if we both believed the future would be wide open: some sappy happily-ever-after fairy tale. It was a beautiful lie, and I grasped it tight. We both did. I began my first passage down the wall and turned fast to leap and grab the edge of the next level. Focusing, my breath even, I made my way one more level down.

Vaguely, somewhere above, I heard a car start. I tried to ignore it. Focus was all. But the car kept revving, like some kid horsing around. Had Rob and I missed someone? Rob couldn’t have been messing with me. Besides, I knew the sound of his Jeep. Anyway, the rope was still taut; he was on the other end.

Then I heard the squeal of tires.

Rob yelled, “Christ, no!”

There was a clatter and his headlamp went out. Camera light: gone. Rope: slack. Darkness. Nothing.

Steady. Steady, Allie
.

The car corkscrewed down the shadowy interior of the parking garage, plunging toward the street. I couldn’t stop the car; I was tethered to Rob. Not unless … I unhooked the rope. Who knows what had happened to him up there? My fingers trembled. I stopped breathing. Parkour is all about using momentum in your favor, turning jumps into rolls where you can’t get hurt—