Where I End and You Begin (21 page)

But I don’t.

Minutes tick by, though it is impossible to tell how many of them pass.

You should have stopped it,
I think to myself.
You should have kept him from making a mistake.

I could have said no, but I didn’t want to say no. I wanted to scream
yes,
but I didn’t do that either. My voice is trapped inside my chest, so rusty and disused that if I ever used it for anything important the weight of my words would break it apart, shatter it into pieces. The things I hold inside, the secrets that I lock away are too much for a voice so out of use to bear.

And I wanted it. I wanted him to touch me, wanted to be the one he would break for. I’ve dreamed of being the one that someone would throw it all away for. And now that it has happened, I dream of taking it all back.

Dreaming, then, is my mistake.

More minutes roll by, and at last Daniel shifts, turning over and freeing me from being pinned under his weight. I take a moment to catch my breath, then glance over at him.

Too dark. I can’t even see him. But his breath tells me he is deeply asleep, and I am alone and wide awake in the dark. The cold of the room swirls around me, but I know I can’t stay here.

I have ruined it again. I’m so hungry for love that I take whatever form it comes in. I had a friend in Daniel, one I could talk to, one who could talk to me, and I destroyed it. I took advantage of his sadness and weakness, a man of God in the throes of doubt, and let him throw away the things he believed in just so I could have a pale shadow of love.

I will never escape. My hunger overtakes me, rapacious and consuming. Instinct will always win out. A starving man will always resort to becoming a monster, devouring the flesh of other men, rather than die.

I slip out of the bed, taking my bra, my panties, my sweatshirt. The pajama pants I leave behind, and I feel my way through the dark into the living room. Putting on my underwear and my sweatshirt, I get down on my hands and knees, circling through the kitchen to the utility closet. It’s open, and I wince at the loud, metallic sound of the dryer door unlatching. Reaching inside, I take my jeans and my socks and finish getting dressed.

My shoes and coat are by the door. My shoes are still wet, but my coat will be warm enough once I’m moving. I feel for the lock, twist it, and let myself out.

The night is not quite as bitterly cold as I thought it would be—the snow must be doing its insulating job now—and I carefully lower myself down the snow-covered stairs to the ground floor.

Great drifts of snow are piled around me, but not too high, Three feet at most in the deepest places, and still coming down but gently. I can make it.

Somewhere else in the city, someone still has electricity, because the shine of lights reflect off the clouds, giving the snowy, alien landscape a dim glow.

I walk out to the road and turn toward home, wishing I could fall down and go to sleep. My jeans are already soaked through, and I’ll probably stop being able to feel them before I even get halfway home. I should give up now. But the will to live is too strong in me, despite everything. Sometimes, I wish it weren’t.

Snow falls.

I breathe in.

I breathe out.

I trudge on.

T
here are two things that transcend human power and elevate us into the realm of the Gods. The first is to kill, and the second is to beget. Both are divine acts, taking the power of life and death into our hands, creation and destruction.

Sex and death are two sides of the same coin. They dissolve illusions, until nothing is real—not our bodies, not our hearts, not our love or our hate or our fear, not the earth, or God or time or the universe.

To create and to destroy. The moment between life and death is a border, the only border that matters. In that moment, all boundaries dissolve, until we are boundless and infinite. Until there is no
you
or
me.
Until there is no
us
or
them, here
or
there,
until there is no more meaning in words, for all lines have been erased and there is either everything, or nothing at all.

I
make it home just before dawn and frozen to the bone. The door to Marchand opens when I punch the code into the keypad, and there is a light on in the kitchen, but the heat is still out. At least there is electricity.

I climb the stairs, numb and ready to collapse, but when I come stumbling into my room, I realize Tanya isn’t there. I had hoped to see her, even if she was just sleeping. The city is dead in the early morning, and even deader when there is three feet of snow on the ground. I haven’t seen another living thing in hours, though footprints have passed me by, left by phantoms.

I’m so cold and tired, but I know I need to warm up first. I dump my coat, my bag, my shoes, my purse, grab the things I need for a shower, and stumble down the hall, only to realize when I reach the end that I have gone the wrong way. In my old house, the one I grew up in, the bathroom was off to my left from my room. Here, it is off to my right. I turn around and trudge all the way back down the length of the house, my bones so cold they feel as though they are splintering inside my skin.

I drag myself through the bathroom, though I take a moment to look at myself in the mirror. I look the same. I put a finger against the mirror, but I can’t think of anything to write, so I go to the stalls and start the water and take a shower instead.

The water heater is still working. I stand beneath the spray and let it wash away Daniel’s scent. I wanted to keep it, but I shouldn’t. I have no right. I selfishly wanted Daniel, and now he’s probably cast out of heaven thanks to me. I mean, I don’t know how that sort of thing works, but I’ve heard of Catholic guilt. He’ll feel better that he won’t have to face me when he wakes up. I will tell no one what I’ve done.

The water falls over my shoulders, down my chest, dripping over my stomach and between my legs. I reach down and clean myself there. It’s a weird sensation. I’m on birth control, but I always make the guy wear a condom. But if a priest isn’t clean, who is? Besides, I remind myself again, it’s against his religion.

Now that I have the chance to laugh, I do, though it’s ironic, bitter. I tempted him, like Eve tempted Adam in the garden, or so they say.

I run the soap over my skin, letting it wash the sweat of our coupling down the drain, and my stomach turns. I’ve fucked up. Fucked up badly. I know we are not possible as a couple, but I let it happen anyway. Let my hopes get up that he might love me, even though he isn’t supposed to love anyone—not that way at least. I just don’t know how to love, or how to be loved. It always gets twisted up somehow.

I stand in the hot water for a long time before finally turning it off and hoping no one else will wake up before it has a chance to heat up again. My skin is scorching hot, and when I towel myself down I feel my hands on my body, and remember where Daniel touched me.

I bite my lip as I pull on my pajamas. I don’t look at the steam-fogged mirror as I leave. I know I will see nothing there.

As soon as I open the bathroom door, the door of Lana’s room opens too.
Shit
, I think, my mind caught up in inanities.
I woke Lana up. Lana wants to get a shower and there won’t be any hot water. Fuck.

But it isn’t Lana. It’s Tanya.

I stand there and stare at her, stupidly.

“Where have you been?” she says. “Get your ass in here.” And she reaches out and grabs my arm and pulls me into Lana’s room.

Lana is a junior and has no roommate. One of the benefits of having no roommate is that she unbunked her beds and pushed them together into some sort of superbed. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I hear Alice hiss, “What are you guys waiting for? Get in here!”

Tanya pulls me to the bed and the next thing I know I’m under the blankets with her and Alice and Lana, blankets piled high and warmth all around. They have positioned themselves crosswise along the beds, so the only hiccup is the gap between the two twin mattresses beneath my ass. I squirm further under the covers and decide the problem is not that much of a problem.

“What are you guys doing in here?” I whisper.

“Duh,” Lana says. “Conserving warmth. It’s so fucking cold in here we decided to double up. Triple up. Would have quadrupled up but you weren’t around.”

“I tried calling you,” Tanya adds, somewhat reproachful.

“I was at Daniel’s apartment. We got caught in the weather.”

They are quiet for a moment.

“Daniel the priest?” Lana asks.

I want to cry. “It’s not like that,” I say. “We’re just friends. I swear.” I’m good at lying to myself, so I’m pretty good at lying to other people. The lie slips out of me so easily, just one more little lie to smooth the way, to iron out life’s wrinkles. Better than saying,
I don’t want to talk about it.
Better than saying,
It’s none of your business.

So, how are you doing?

I’m fine.

Easy.

“I’d hit that,” Alice says.

“You’d make Jibril jealous,” Tanya says.

“No way,” Alice replies. “Jibril and I are just friends.”

“Then why did I see you two making out behind the house?”

“Pfft,” Alice says. “Jibril said he’d never been Frenched, so I helped him out.”

“But you guys are ‘just friends’?” Tanya says.

“For someone who likes to be naked at every available opportunity, you sure are trapped in the strictures of the patriarchy,” Alice tells her.

“I am not! I demand satisfaction!”

“Would you two shut up?” Lana says. “I’m kicking you all out if you keep me from sleeping.”

“Have any of you slept since you got in bed?” I ask.

“Nope,” Alice says. “Why would anyone sleep at a sleepover?”

“Isn’t it almost six in the morning?”

“Time is an illusion. Besides, classes are already canceled. We get to sleep in tomorrow.”

A reprieve. Another day to stay here. A day to wrap around me and live in forever. I’d do anything to stay here until the end of time, to stay where I might become anything, before I start failing for the rest of my life.

I should tell them, I think. I should talk to my girlfriends. I’ve always given them advice, like that time when Tanya couldn’t decide between two guys and kept accidentally sleeping with them on alternating weekends and she asked me what she should do. I told her to suggest a threesome. It worked. What would I tell myself, if I had heard my story?

Become a nun.

The thought is so amusing that I giggle, and for a moment my heart scabs over, heals just a little bit.

“What’s so funny?” Tanya asks. Her head is down on her pillow. I don’t know whose pillow I’m lying on and I find I don’t care. I play musical beds, and this one is the safest place to land.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just thinking to myself.”

“You think too much,” Tanya tells me.

“What?”

“You think too much.”

“I’d replace think with drink, and then it would be accurate.”

“You drink too much because you think too much. You’re always frowning. You’ll get wrinkles if you think too much.”

“How... progressive?”

“Shush, you two,” Lana says. “Sleepy time.”

We clam up and burrow down, and though I think I will stay awake until the sun comes up, I’m asleep in seconds.

I don’t dream, and I wake up only when Lana begins poking me with her toes.

“Wakey wakey!” she says. “Rise and shine! It’s two in the afternoon!”

I force my eyes open. For a happy moment, I remember nothing. I’ve had a good night’s sleep, and everything is fine.

Then I remember, and my heart clenches in my chest. For a second I debate asking Lana if she wouldn’t mind me staying in her room forever. I’d keep it clean, and I’d leave only to go take a shower or a dump. If I never return to my room, I think to myself, I will never have to move forward. I won’t have to talk to Daniel. I won’t have to go to classes. I can stop time.

But of course I can’t, so I thank her for the use of her bed and drag my ass back down the hall to my room.

When I enter, the phone is ringing, and I seize up. My legs twitch. I want to run.

It’s only a phone, I think. It’s just the phone. It might not be Daniel at all.

I pick up the phone just as it stops ringing.

It was Daniel. And the other five missed calls were Daniel, too.

Feeling sick, I put the phone down and change into warmer clothes. The heat is still off, and when I peek outside, the slice of campus I can see has been transformed, buried under a blanket of snow. The snow has stopped coming down, but the sky hangs heavy and gray, and it’s a day to stay indoors if there ever was one.

I leave my phone on my desk and wander downstairs.

The living room is full of people lying around and swaddled in blankets. The TV is on and someone has put about twenty lit candles in the fireplace. Whoever did that is probably going to get fined, but of course we’d have to know who did it to tell the RA. I’ll just stay ignorant. I hear it’s the key to bliss.

Tanya’s sitting on one of the couches and she pats the cushion next to her. “Come sit next to me,” she says. “You look awful.”

I scowl at her. “That’s a terrible pick up line,” I tell her.

“I just tell it like it is,” she says. “And you look awful. You were totally passed out when I left the room. Were you drunk?”

I shake my head. “No.”

She studies me. “And you said you were at Daniel’s. You got caught in the weather.”

I nod. “Yeah, we were in Nompton exploring one of the old houses there, and the snow started coming down. Took us too long to get back to town, so I stayed at his apartment until the snow let up.”

Her eyes are narrow. “Uh-huh,” she says. “And he... what? Just happened to drive you home at five in the morning.”

Why is she prying about this. “Yup,” I tell her. “He had to get up early to go somewhere and drove me here.”

“Uh-huh,” she says again.

Stop, I want to say. Don’t ask me any more questions. I don’t want you to worry about me. Stop worrying about me. I’m fine.

“You guys didn’t have a fight or something?” she says. “Because everything’s closed today. Why else would he drive you home at five in the morning?”

I can’t tell her I walked home. I just can’t. That would make her worry more. “It’s fine,” I say. A little white lie. The gift of an easy mind. “We didn’t fight.” A little truth. Another gift. Don’t worry about me.

“Okay,” she says. “Do you have any food?”

Relieved, I shrug. “A jar of peanut butter.”

Tanya sighs. “You really need to take better care of yourself.”

“Why?” I ask. “If I die, don’t you get an automatic pass on the semester?”

She gasps and gives me a smack on the arm. “That is horrible! Why would you say something like that?” Then: “Is that true?”

I laugh, and it clears the ache in my chest I’ve become so good at ignoring, if only for a second. “I don’t know. I heard it was true.”

She shakes her head. “Not worth it,” she says.

For some reason, her words make me want to cry. I won’t. Of course I won’t. But I feel a little sting in my nose all the same.

Tanya looks alarmed. “Are you okay?”

I swallow. “I’m fine,” I tell her, and for a brief moment, I am.

The day is spent watching television and shooting the shit, and except for a brief trek through the snow to the closest convenience store for burritos and greasy snack pies, we all stay indoors. By the time it’s ten at night, I think I should probably go upstairs and check my email, and delete any voicemails Daniel might have left. Without listening to them, of course.

I’m a coward.

I enter my room just as the phone rings, again. Time repeats itself, becomes cyclical. I pick up the phone to see who’s calling, and to my surprise it’s my mother. I haven’t talked to her in almost a month. My thumb hovers over the answer button. Then I touch it, and we are connected.

“Hello?” I say.

“Hello,” my mother says.

I hate hearing her voice on the phone. When I was a teenager, before I got into high school and could start taking the bus, she used to drive me to and from my school. She always took those times when I was a captive audience to yell at me, tell me everything I’d been doing that was wrong, which was everything that I’d ever done. Keep my grades up, don’t kiss boys, pray with me. And so on. I hated being stuck in the car with her. I hated her lecture tone. I spent so many mornings before school trying to fix my mascara before anyone saw I’d been crying.

Being on the phone with her is the same. I could just hang up, but she’d call back. And some day I’ll see her again, and she’ll be so angry. She’ll yell, and slap me, and it’s just easier to smile and nod. Smile and nod. Smile and nod.

“How are you doing?” she asks me.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “Why?”

She makes an impatient noise, and I wince. “Because your school got hit with the biggest blizzard in Indiana history in the middle of October? Maybe I’d worry about you because of that?”

Of course. She always worries about the wrong things. If I’m driving safely, or if I’m drinking my orange juice. She’s always been obsessed with me drinking my orange juice. I always lie and say I have. “It’s fine,” I say.

She sighs, exasperated with me. “Well sorry for asking,” she says. “I won’t care what happens to you ever again.”

And there’s the guilt. It used to work on me, until I decided I was done feeling bad for being myself.

A memory comes to me. I am thirteen and a storm comes through. One of those big storms, the kind you only get in the plains, when the wind howls and lightning flashes once a second, and the rain beats down so hard it hurts if you’re caught outside in it. During the storm, one of our trees loses a huge branch, broken in the wind, and it lands on the roof of the house.

We can’t leave it up there and it is just my mother and I now, so when the sun rises my mother calls me outside, and we have to drag the tree branch off the roof somehow. But I’m only thirteen, and my mother isn’t very strong, so we have to saw the branch apart while it’s still on the roof and take it down in pieces. It’s so awkward, hanging half off the edge of the roof, but stuck on the low-grade incline, too heavy for someone on a ladder to take. I hold the ladder while my mother awkwardly saws it into pieces.