“See?” Luke said, “Right there!” He pointed toward the intersection of Glen and Catherine streets as we approached on foot. “Lauren, that’s where I died.”
Upon reaching the intersection he trotted defiantly against the flashing Don’t Walk signal to the opposite corner and called back to me with just enough voice to carry over the distance and traffic noise: “Right here is where I pulled over after it happened! I was shaking!”
It was a golden summer evening in early June, and Luke and I had just had coffee a few blocks away. He had started to tell me a story and then stopped short and said he had to show me something, immediately. I went along with it.
When the traffic light went through its full set of changes, I joined him on the other corner and we stood side by side, surveying the intersection. “How do you know you… died?” I said in an almost conspiratorial undertone.
“Ok, so here it is, what I was trying to explain. I was hoping that being here would help. What happened was, like, it was late at night. Real late. And it was pretty cold but not winter. Late winter, early spring, I think. This was twenty-five years ago, so I don’t remember that part much. There wasn’t much snow, anyhow. But here’s the thing. I was coming home from a party. And I ran a red light coming up Glen Street here and then another car coming down Catherine T-boned me from the left.” Here Luke gestured the collision with the fingertips of his left hand meeting the palm of his right. “I only had a moment to realize I’d screwed up as the fast-approaching headlights filled the car. Collision was imminent. The other car barely had time to hit the brakes.”
“Ok. And then?”
Hearing somebody whistling from a passing car, I looked over. Big stupid grin going by. Aimed at me, of all things. Crazy kids.
“Well, and then I shot up into the sky in a sort of transparent cube like a glass elevator—car and all. And a second or two later I dropped down just as fast, and when I landed I’d passed the middle of the intersection, past the point of impact. I hit the brakes, probably just on reflex, but there was no need to. The other car was gone. Maybe was never there in the first place. And I was… back. Still, I was so shaken up that I pulled over, right here.” He pointed to a parking space on the street next to us. “I had to process what just happened. I sat here with my car running for a few minutes before continuing on home.”
“So, assuming this is real…”
“I died! Good God! I died!”
“Yes, well...”
“I’m telling you!”
“I’m trying to understand what you’re saying, Luke. ’Cause I mean, usually when someone dies there’s a body. A dead one, I mean. What makes you so sure about all this?”
“Because, he’s back.”
“Who?”
“Me. The one who died, I mean. And I think he wants in.”
“In?” The light had changed and the cars started moving up the hill through the intersection again. “In what?”
“Me.”
Luke and I locked eyes for a moment. I looked back toward the intersection, took a deep breath, smelling warm pavement.
“It’s certainly interesting,” I said, knowing Luke needed some kind of acknowledgement but feeling unsure where I stood on this whole thing. Suddenly I felt like I was peering down into a microscope at something somehow both very close and very far away. “Listen,” I said, “I’d love to talk more with you about this.” I grabbed of both his upper arms and looked at him for emphasis. “And we will, I promise. But I’m thinking it’s time we call it a night. I have papers to grade for tomorrow.”
“He said he died there. I’m wondering if it’s a metaphor.” This was me talking to Jen after school the next day. Activity in the teacher’s lounge had thinned out to just Jen and me and the occasional faculty member stopping by the fridge. Jen had found a package of microwave popcorn somewhere and held it up.
“Is it true you eat plastic when you use these?” she asked. “I’m sorta hungry.” She looked over in my direction. “Listen, Laurie, it sounds like a waste of time even thinking about it to me, but you know how I feel about you and Luke. He pulls you off course and takes up a lot of your time. Meanwhile, you’re still single.”
Jen had a way of cutting to the chase.
“Yes, you do eat plastic when you eat those,” I replied. “So don’t. And I understand about getting distracted.”
She replaced the popcorn packet on the high cupboard shelf she’d taken it from. Jen is tall. A shorter teacher had probably tried to hide it up there. “So look, Laurie, I don’t want to try to tell you how to live. I see Luke’s place in your life. Nobody quite gets why you two aren’t together yet, but that’s none of our business. Still, don’t you feel it’s time to shuffle the deck for a new deal? What do you have to lose?”
So that’s how I ended up going out that night to a local club, conspicuously alone, or so I felt. Conspicuously old for this town, too, it goes without saying. And on a school night, no less. Over the years I never had any trouble attracting men’s attention in bars, but seldom have I gotten the kind of company I wanted, so I generally avoid them now. Still, it was near the end of the school year, and maybe breathing the pheromones that my students were sweating out all day long had something to do with it. Jen was right: I needed a new deal, a fresh… something.
Surprisingly, a kind face belonging to someone perhaps a few years younger than me, but not ridiculously out of range, showed up at the table just after my tonic and lime had arrived. The band’s blaring speakers were close enough for me to bullseye with a martini olive if I’d had one, but the place was unexpectedly crowded and it was the best seat I could find. With a gesture he asked to sit at my table and I motioned my assent.
“Manuel,” he said above the din.
“Laurie.”
“What brings you here?” The band hit its final chord of the first set. A few moments later, more quietly, some recorded dance music took its place.
“I needed to get out,” I said. He looked at me appraisingly. Then I asked, “How about you?”
“Oh, the same. But I got an invitation,” he said. “I practically never get out. To these kinds of places, anyhow.”
“And now? What occupies you generally?”
“I read for a living,” he said.
“Funny. In a way I do, too.”
“Will you give me your hand for a moment?”
“That’s pretty forward!” I gave him a warning smile instead; inwardly I was backing up. I’d seen smooth operators before. His eyes were steady, though, and I saw a trace of sadness or possibly weariness cross his face before he spoke again.
“Very well. But when the music starts if I ask you to dance and you say yes, I’d probably take your hand to the dance floor, and you’d think nothing of it.”
“That’s different.”
“True,” he said.
“So you want me to pretend we’re dancing?”
“It doesn’t feel like pretending to me,” he said.
That’s when my right hand went across the table. He took it in both of his. Oh for fuck’s sake, I’m thinking. Still, there was a palpable buzz between us, noticeable, I’m sure, on both sides of that simple connection.
“Ok, so, you care for people a lot. Or is it that you care for a lot of people?” He laughed.
“What are you, some kind of psychic?”
“I told you I read for a living.” He flashed quite a smile. I shook a little in the light of it. “But no, not really.”
“So tell me about yourself, then,” I said.
“Oh, well. I guess you should know that I really don’t know what I’m doing here. I came on impulse. But the first thing I’m sensing is, you hold so many hands. I’m not sure how, but I’m sure you do. You probably want someone to hold yours sometimes.”
“Doesn’t everybody. I want my nickel back.” I rolled my eyes with theatrical exaggeration but felt that buzz again. I looked at our hands and then back to the new face across from mine. “And the second is?”
“The second is…” Here he looked at me as though from a different place in himself. “You know, so often we think stuff happens because we do it. And it’s kind of true. You showed up here. This wouldn’t be happening if you hadn’t. Still, you didn’t plan on this, did you? This is different. You’re just allowing. You’re not even sure what to make of it. When I asked to hold your hand, you were sure I was quite the player, weren’t you? You were feeling defensive, which I guess is natural. But didn’t you come here hoping something unusual would happen? I mean, look at us. We’re both kind of out of place, aren’t we?” I opened my mouth to say something. He waited. When nothing came out, he continued. “This really isn’t about what’s happened in the past. Start now, Laurie. Now.”
Our eyes met one level lower on the three-dimensional chessboard of the situation.
“I’m willing to give it a try,” I said.
And for about five seconds, I thought it was going to be just that easy. Then I saw Manuel motioning to someone. I turned and there was a very pretty woman with fabulous red hair standing near the door.
He rose. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. This is terribly awkward, but I have to go. Here’s my card. Call me if you like.”
I found this difficult to handle. For starters, I felt angry with this woman for yanking Manuel out of an intimate moment we’d been sharing, and angry with him for drawing me out and then leaving so abuptly. Seeing them go, they didn’t register as being on a date together, at least. Part of me wanted to relegate Manuel to the overflowing dustbin of opportunistic males I’d encountered and rebuffed over the years, but if so, why did I wish he were still sitting with me, holding my hand? And by the way, whoever she is, what’s that redhead got that I haven’t got? When I reached this last thought, I knew I was sinking fast. I scanned the tabletop for something to hold onto and found nothing but a few melting ice cubes in a glass on a damp cocktail napkin. This was definitely a 21-and-over setting, but I wasn’t dealing with it any better than one of my high school sophomores in a gym filled with balloons and crepe paper.
Just then two men and a woman started filing past my table, obviously looking for a place to sit. I made eye contact with the man who was the caboose of that short train, motioned that I was leaving, caught their quick smiles of thanks and made for the door.
Yes, I had some real thinking to do, but not before I got some really bad thinking out of the way first. Driving home, things ran through my mind like: The sheer gall! He gave me his card, as if expecting me to call him! What makes him think he’s so special? Egotist! And: It was such an intimate moment we were having! He withdrew too quickly! Jesus, how many times have I had THAT thought? Men!
Having delivered closing arguments to the impaneled jury of my imagination, just at the moment I was about to vote unanimously to convict, I realized that the entire contents of my mind had validated Manuel’s observations. I did have my guard up. I usually do. And while I could fantasize about meeting someone patient enough for me to drop my defenses, it was really up to me to let it happen. The patient ones (and there had been patient ones) I left hanging. The pushy ones, far more numerous or at least more noticeably present, I pushed away. Concluding my deliberations as I arrived home, I felt I had no choice but to find Manuel innocent on all counts. Relieved and strangely exhilarated by this verdict, I lay his card on my bedside table and started a bath.
Who knows? Every new deal starts with a single card.
Luke called me two days later. Just to clarify, if Jen’s remarks didn’t clue you in, Luke and I are not lovers and never have been. And no, I wouldn’t put him in the category of the ‘patient ones,’ but maybe that’s because he’s long past waiting for anything. Fact is, though, we’re there for each other. With my love life a perpetual disaster, after a certain age I started piecing my relationships together like a blind person might do a jigsaw puzzle: less by the picture and more by the fit.
“Hi, Lauren,” came a voice through the phone. “You got a minute? I had a weird day.”
“How unusual,” I replied. Standing barefoot in the kitchen in a faded sundress, I picked the next mushroom from the colander and set it on the wooden cutting board.
“You’re funny.”
“What’s up? Just a sec. I’m cooking. Lemme get my headset.”
“So,” he started. “I’ve been thinking about this. I went into Wooden Spoon.”
“It’s closed.”
“Yeah. So I was looking around—”
“Luke. Seriously, that store closed. Years ago.”
“—and I picked up this collection of poems by Wallace Stevens. Used, of course. Never could make head nor tail of most of his stuff. And I know it’s closed. It’s been closed for years! We just walked past there a couple days ago.”
“Oh good. You had me worried. I thought you might have spent the afternoon in 1994. And, yes, Wallace Stevens is hard.” I finished quartering the last of the mushrooms, put them into a bowl by the stove and started giving a couple carrots a quick scrub.
“Right, well, so what I’m getting at is that I bought the book after going in there on a whim. I’m talking years ago, Laurie. Years ago, just after I… just after the traffic thing I was telling you about.”
“Where you died?”
“Yeah, well. I’m getting to that. So…” Luke’s voice trailed off into a vanishing little whirlpool somewhere.
I waited for him to continue, focusing on my knife blade as carrots turned into matchsticks before joining the onions that were already bubbling gently in melted butter.
“The book,” I said finally, hoping to defibrillate the conversation. As a teacher of language arts I’ve developed a strong appreciation for wait time, but the time had expired.
“Oh, right. Well I still have the book. I just picked it up the other day. Again on a whim. And that’s when things started accelerating. And as I started reading it, I realized something: It’s from him. It always was from him. But now, it’s time. Or getting near.
“Luke, do you want to come over? I could feed you. Simple fare, just a little primavera I threw together. There’s more than enough and I think you might need something.”
“You think I’m nuts!”
“No, I don’t. And you can calm down. I was thinking about it and this isn’t the first time I’ve heard a story like yours. A teaching friend once told me about how she was driving to work during an ice storm and looked into the rearview mirror only to see a car spinning out of control behind her on the freeway, certain to hit her from behind. Bracing for a collision, she looked out the front and there was the spinning car again… same one, still in her lane, but in front of her. Like it went right through her, she said.”
“Really? Weird. Huh. Weird. Ok, well thank you for the offer of dinner. That would be great. I’ll bring the book. I’m hoping you’ll hold onto it for me. See you in a bit. Gimme twenty minutes. I rode my bike to the office today.”
Upon his arrival we took our plates to the covered wooden porch of my Old West Side house. For a moment we sat facing the street, just breathing in the quiet of a fine June evening. Cars eased by. An occasional bicycle sounding like a zipper being pulled. Bird calls. The neighbor watering some bedding plants. We could use a little rain.
“Luke,” I said, feeling his weight beside mine on the wicker love seat. “How come you never mentioned any of this before? About the accident?” I noticed that he had grabbed the Wallace Stevens collection with his free hand on his way out, and he still had on the rainbow-billed hat with PRIDE embroidered across the brow that he’d sometimes wear in solidarity with his grown son. He set the hat on the painted grey floor beside us. The book stayed in his lap.
He took a deep breath and let it go.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied after a long interval. “Partly because I felt it had faded into irrelevance. Partly because it was just one more crazy thing in a sort of crazy time in my life. But I guess the dying part was sort of unusual. Or, the not-dying.” He took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “Then again, maybe it’s more common than we think. Maybe what’s unusual is that I got a strong sense of how close we sometimes are to ‘the road not taken’ without even knowing. Plus, thing is, you didn’t know me then. I was reckless. In a way, I admire that now. I feel I’ve become sort of tame by comparison.”
“You wouldn’t by any chance have been just a little the worse for wine at the time?”
“Oh, that goes without saying, though naturally I thought I was the better for it. But then again, drunkenness was a kind of sobriety for me back then.”
“Right. Now there’s a drunken idea if ever I heard one. And the book?”
We both looked at the book in his lap for a moment.
“This was… a parting gift, maybe. Maybe something more. He loved poetry. I mean, I loved poetry back then. Well okay, I still do. It’s cool we can talk about this kind of stuff, Laurie. It’s one of the things I love about you. But it was different then. I had a sense that I wasn’t just reading poetry, I was… I dunno… living it.
“Yes, everything seems grand and mythic when you’re young,” I said.
“But, so look at this thing: hardcover, dust jacket intact. Granted I bought it used, but I was by no means rich back then. Even so, I took it to Kinkos to have the dust jacket laminated. That tells me that I planned to keep this book a long time. And yet, I didn’t start reading it until recently.” He took another bite, chewed. “This tastes great, by the way. Thank you.”
My porch faces east, and as a trace of cool air announced the arrival of evening I got a clear sense of Luke’s body radiating a bit of the day’s sunshine my way. Just the same, I might need a sweater soon. We continued eating in silence for a couple minutes.
“You’re an MSW,” I said, doing my best to channel my teaching colleague Jen. “Psychotherapist by profession. The fact that you’re thinking like this, making these kinds of attributions. And referring to yourself in the third person. This doesn’t concern you at all?” I was trying to put this as directly and reasonably as possible, but one way or another I needed to broach the obvious.
“Concern? No. In fact, it’s my professional life that helped me to finally see what happened there. Well, that and this damned book. Laurie, last week three grieving mothers started seeing me as clients. Three! One lost a son to suicide. 25 years old, he went out back to the garden shed during a visit home, sat down on the riding mower and shot himself in the forehead. The other two women lost sons to opiate overdoses in the past year. It’s an epidemic. When I saw that mother of that recent suicide again today, shaking hands with her felt like holding last year’s robin’s nest. These women are crumbling, Lauren, unraveling, ready to fall apart in a moment like a handful of dry grass and sticks and bubblegum wrappers. There’s very little holding them together. I do what I can. But their devastation is palpable.”
Luke cares about his clients. I waited a minute. Then I said, “So what’s that got to do with your… accident?”
“Motive.” He stared straight ahead.
“I don’t get it.”
Luke looked down at the book again. Eyes fixed upon it he said, “You know I was in therapy for a couple years after my divorce. Any responsible MSW needs therapy, probably on a more regular basis than I have, honestly. But it’s the only way not to mess other people up. I was a little late in realizing that. Anyhow, I never mentioned to Ralph about my death, or not-death or whatever. I wasn’t even thinking about this back then. But as I thought back recently, I did figure out one thing: a possible motive. At the time, dying would have been the simplest, most effective way to break my mother’s heart.”
The silence that followed pounded softly in my ears. I looked at Luke in profile. His face remained neutral. I’d never seen him look so solid before. Strange as it might seem given what he’d just said, I felt some stirrings of attraction for him in that moment, and forgive me if that sounds kind of criminal.
My friendship with Luke started long before he and Sarah got divorced a few years ago. He worked in the school district before he started his private practice. And yes, we considered romantic possibilities between us after his divorce. Let’s just say we handled it like grownups. We said: no. But we did start hanging out.
And now sitting beside him on the porch, I suddenly realized how thin my sundress felt on my skin.
Pulling myself together, the teacher in me took over. There were too many things in Luke’s story that just didn’t add up. We have a tacit rule that our friendship has to be a safe place to bring our stuff, however thorny or difficult. I try to keep an open mind, but the whole thing seemed beyond implausible.
“So, wait,” I asked. “You’re saying you wanted to hurt your mother by dying in a car accident? Why?”
“Oh, who knows? Maybe just because she gave birth to me and I needed someone to blame for the fact that I thought I was having a hard time back then. Of course it’s just a hypothesis. I know it probably sounds crazy. And it really was. I mean, young people are stupid sometimes.”
“Yeah, I know. And I’m glad to hear you say that, Luke. Life is precious.”
“Yes,” he said. “It would have been a stupid death. And worse, it would have messed up other people’s lives, too. But young people are also wise. Most young people seem to know instinctively that if you make too precious a thing out of life, it starts to lose value. That’s why they take crazy risks and do crazy things that make us cringe sometimes. It’s a kind of an exuberance. Without it, there’s no point in living.”
My tears came up so fast I that didn’t have time to shut them off.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m crying. It makes no sense.”
Luke looked at me with concern. “Lauren, it doesn’t have to. And neither do a lot of things in life, or even the thoughts we think about it all.” He paused. “But then you catch another angle on it and it does seem to make sense again. For a while.” We breathed. “So, about this book,” he resumed, I’m hoping to leave it here.” He handed it to me in exchange for my plate. “Take a look if you like… but pay attention. He’s nothing if not clever.”
The wicker audibly eased a little as Luke stood up, and then he turned to face me. Bending down with a plate in each hand, he kissed me on the top of my head near my hairline. That’s not a typical thing between us, but under the circumstances, with my eyes still wet and blinking, it seemed appropriate. “Lemme take care of the dishes,” he said.
I followed him indoors a few minutes later and we worked together, the sounds of plates and pots our only conversation. He knows where every spoon, bowl and spatula belongs, and he put the napkins where I pile laundry at the top of the basement stairs. Luke remembers things. He’s nice to have around. Then he prepared to go. In lieu of a helmet — and yes, I’d bought him a nice one that I assume he still has somewhere — he put his hat on before rolling off on his bicycle. Watching him go, another wave of tears welled up, soft this time, round and full, and I felt a soggy kind of gratitude for him.
So that’s how it is with Luke and me, though, now that I think of it, I’ve very seldom cried in front of him. I’m used to hearing about Luke’s latest dating fiasco, or sharing my own. We’ve supported one another through deaths in each of our families, and when they happened we found our places, off to the side but present, at the funerals. I feed his cat when he’s out of town, he waters my plants, and we both belong to that narrow subset of friends who come over when you’re too sick to get out for food or medicine. It’s true we aren’t lovers, but emotionally we’ve covered a lot of ground, more than most friendships do, more than many romantic involvements — in my life, anyhow. We’re open on that level. It’s one of the things that makes this work. It’s also nice sometimes to go see a show together or go out somewhere in the evening. Plus if I attract the wrong kind of attention, I like having him there. Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I assume his years of martial arts practice probably mean something. Still, my response to this conversation was somewhat bewildering to me. I had water in me I didn’t even know was there. I waited until the following week before I opened the book.
The end of the school year is usually a good time for teaching poetry. It’s spring, for one thing, a season when people in our latitudes start spending more time outdoors again. I love how people start to open windows, how warm breezes and friends seem to more easily flow through our screen doors, how we shed our heavy coats and winter gear, and, naked as we dare, embrace both the longer days and the shorter nights they wrap themselves around. Can you tell I’ve been reading poetry lately? Gotta stay on top of this to teach it.
In the classroom, though, the classic end-of-year poetry unit is a decoy, in a way. When students see the shorter literary form and all the open space surrounding poetry on a page, many of them seem to think it’s going to be easier than tunneling through solid walls of text like we did reading novels all winter. In a way, they’re right; in some ways it can be easier. But poetry asks something different of the reader. Poetry has a special way of stretching us from the inside out. First you start reading it, then you start seeing it. That’s one of the reasons it’s worth teaching.
When I finally opened the Wallace Stevens collection, just poking around at random I came across a longer poem about a man playing a blue guitar. My initial teaching assessment: this might work. The smartypantses in Advanced Lit could speculate, guess, and argue with each other about it. Perfect. I read on, captivated. Maybe I was finally starting to get it, too. I used Manuel’s card to mark the place. As I did so I realized that I’d almost certainly never call him. At the same time, for whatever reason I didn’t want to throw that card away. So making it into a bookmark seemed a perfect use for it, in a way. I felt a hint of magic as I placed it between those pages. And it’ll remind me to tell Luke about what happened that night sometime.
“Things as they are...” to quote a line from thst poem, had changed. A little bit, at least. Was this the new deal?
The next day I was reading that line in front of my class. Screw the plans. For one thing, I had a few quirky geniuses who might help me get to the bottom of this poem, and, as for my ‘B team’ among my ‘A’ students, I had a larger cadre of academic eager beavers whose persistent academic gnawing at a given topic could sometimes yield interesting results by dint of sheer grade-motivated determination.
At the end of class I checked my phone and noticed a text from Luke:
Meet me at the intersection after school if you like. I plan to be there.
At the intersection? It took me a few moments to realize what he was referring to: The Intersection.
I replied:
Maybe. I’ll let you know.
I still had a couple hours left to teach, the weather was getting hot, and a diversion downtown to a street corner made into a soulless concrete landscape by the never-ending expansion of university hospital infrastructure was not my idea of an enlightening field trip. Nonetheless, once I was in my car and driving, I found myself continuing past my neighborhood, and by some miracle I was able to park fairly close. Music blared from one of the student houses as I walked to where I found Luke standing on the corner.
“You came! I thought you were going to let me know.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. Forgot.” I could feel beads of perspiration popping on my forehead. “So what exactly are you hoping to find here? Are you planning to Hoover up your past self like in Ghostbusters? Where’s your equipment?”
“The only piece of equipment I had, I gave to you,” he said. He waited a beat for emphasis before continuing: “That book. Anyhow, I know it’s silly. It’s not like he’d still be waiting here after all these years. But maybe I did leave something behind. I’ve been thinking. I know this is going to sound crazy, but since you came I’d like you to just hear me out.”
At that moment a Ford Focus coming up Glen Street paused before making a right turn, assuming we were about to use the crosswalk. Luke smiled, nodded and waved them on.
“Ok,” I said. “Go ahead.”
“It may seem kind of backward. In a way, see, despite circumstantial evidence to the contrary, it’s more like I had actively decided to die, but when it didn’t happen, I sort of lived on by default. I know that seems opposite of how we usually think of things, since stupidly dying young seems like such a cop out while living life and establishing myself in a profession, getting married, having a kid — a kid with issues, as if there’s any other kind — then getting divorced and so on… Well, that seems like the harder path. But the thing is, I don’t feel it was the chosen path. The chosen path was death. That’s where the vivacious part of me said, “Oh, what the hell!” As for ‘life’…eh… that just sort of happened.”
“There I gotta disagree with you, Luke. This is the chosen path. The one that got you here. It has to be.”
He shot me a look of surprise. “Crap! You’re right!”
“But what about the glass elevator?” I said.
“I sure don’t remember pushing the ‘up’ button. It felt like the action of some outside agency or power. What I actually recall doing was, I ran a red light in my old Plymouth. On purpose. I saw the light had turned red. But onward I plunged, typical of my fuck-all attitude. True, I survived. But after that, the tawdry daily mandates of human existence seemed like something I had nothing to do with, even as I did it all. I’ve been going through the motions, Laurie. All these years. No wonder my marriage ended. No wonder nothing since then has worked out, either.”
Together we surveyed the intersection. Hot, bright and busy, it was a place different in every way from the one Luke had described to me on our first visit. Periodic blasts car exhaust hit us in the face.
“Luke, let’s find some shade and sit down. I want to think clearly and this heat isn’t helping.” We walked in silence together for a few minutes in the alternating shade of the trees lining the sidewalks.
“And yeah,” he continued, “maybe it didn’t all boil down to one cold night at one o’clock in the morning back whenever it was. I mean, who knows? Maybe I’ve died another half-dozen times since then, or maybe even before that happened, but just forgot about those other times because I didn’t notice getting moved around inside a giant clear Lego block by, like, some archangel’s little brother or something. Or, or maybe none of this happened and I’ve just imagined it all. It would certainly be easier that way, because if so, I wouldn’t have to do a damn thing about it. Jeez. So there you go: I’m starting to doubt my own story. But that’s part of the problem. Last week when I first shared about this with you, all doubt had vanished; I felt sure of something, at least. At last. And I felt different. That’s why I came back today even though all this sorta scares me. And it’s why I asked you to join me at the intersection again. I need clarity.”
We’d cooled off a bit and were now approaching a little area known as Kerrytown.
“So what evidence are you basing your case on?” I ventured. “And it doesn’t have to be physical evidence. I mean, what’s the evidence within your experience?”
“The most compelling evidence is that I seldom feel fully alive.”
“But who does, really? And think of all the people you’ve helped over the years. Do you need a grand tour of it all, like in It’s a Wonderful Life?
“‘Helped,’” he repeated, rolling his eyes.
“I know you hate that word. ‘Were present for,’ then.”
“That’s better, I guess, but even that’s starting to sound like a euphemism. It’s true I do show up when I’m needed. And yes, I feel somewhat more alive when I do. Afterwards, though, I sort of give up the ghost again. I don’t know how else to say this, but that’s a really sucky way to live. Helping people.” Luke raised his hands for the air quotes at the word ‘helping’ as we walked. “It’s like an addiction.”
“God, you’re hard on yourself sometimes.”
We’d reached a park, found some shade and sat down. He sighed. The soft grass begged me to slip my sandals off, and I did.
“Have you opened the book yet?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m teaching ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar.’”
Upon hearing this, Luke caught his breath and stiffened a bit in alarm, which I found odd. Then he breathed again. “Ok, here we go. ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’. You’re positively intrepid.”
“Oh, I think it’ll work. I’m just going to let them play with it. The way I’ve structured it, at a minimum they’ll learn to think together and come out of this process knowing a little more about poetry, and about one another. It’s perfect for teens in June when they’d rather look at one another than at a book. I’ve been doing this long enough to know. And I know my kids.”
“Smart lady. Brave and smart. Thanks again for taking care of that book for me, but I didn’t count on you engaging your class with it. I think you may have just throttled this whole thing up a notch. Me picking up that damn book was when all of this started. That may be why I gave it to you. I was hoping to pull the plug. Or maybe I mean put the brakes on. Anyhow, I really don’t know what I mean anymore. Or what to hope for.”
“Poetry is the subject of the poem,” I read aloud for my seniors. After a while, the bell rang. And again. And again. Students repeatedly filled my room and left. At the end of the day I reached into my desk drawer to find a short string of texts from Luke:
Just finished a shopping run and decided to visit the intersection again this afternoon.
Assuming I can find a parking space… ☺ I took my car today.
I just have a feeling there’s a piece of business left to transact there.
You don’t need to come this time.
I confess I felt somewhat relieved that he didn’t ask me to be there. I could only imagine that it would be more of the same. It was predicted to be still hotter than yesterday, and I didn’t relish the thought of standing on that corner again. Strangely, though, once I got on Seventh I kept going and took a right onto Huron, heading downtown. Again.
I had to use a parking structure a short distance away, and as I walked the streets toward the intersection through blinding heat, I saw Luke on the sidewalk on the other side of the street some distance ahead, mostly turned away from me and facing another man in front of a gray house. Given the distance and the glare off the cars I couldn’t make out who Luke was talking to, but then I unmistakably saw Luke’s rainbow hat leave his head and fall on the sidewalk behind him. After I took a couple steps more the other man appeared to be lying down on the sidewalk. It almost looked to me like maybe the two had bent over to pick up the hat at the same time, and the other man just collapsed. A third man in a green shirt rushed out of the house to where Luke stood and started shouting. Then a fourth , shirtless in jogging pants, came rushing across from a porch on the other side of the street. By then I had crossed the street and was almost upon them.
“What’s going on?” I asked. That’s when I noticed the blood on the sidewalk.
“Asshole here wouldn’t move his car,” said green shirt, bending down to the man sprawled on the concrete. “Brian…Brian!” He nudged the man.
“Jesus!” said the shirtless man, looking down. Then to me: “I’m Ken. Saw the whole thing. Is this your boyfriend? That dude totally had it coming.” Shirtless and Green Shirt exchanged quick menacing looks. Shirtless turned to Luke. “I have a surveillance camera on my porch that probably caught everything.”
The man on the sidewalk sneezed a bloody, snotty spray, groaned.
“Oh fuck,” said green shirt.
“This is stupid,” Luke said. “Somebody call.”
“Luke… what the hell?”
He gave me a quick look and shook his head. Green shirt helped the injured man off the pavement and into the shade. A few tense minutes later, Luke left in the back of a police car and the injured young man left in the back of an ambulance.
I stood there with Ken. “Good thing the hospital’s close,” he said. And then, “Oh! Wait here. Just a sec.” He ran back into the house across the street and came back seconds later with a slip of paper. “Here’s my number. I normally wouldn’t do this but I hate that fucker. Pardon my language. His name’s Brian Car…Carson, Carwin, or something. I think. Story I heard was that he couldn’t find a place to rent near campus so his dad literally bought him that house. Dad’s a bigshot or something – has a hotel chain down south somewhere is what I heard, so this fucker thinks he owns everything. Sorry again. That guy is just savage. Cops were over there twice in just the last week. For real. Anyhow, I saw the whole thing. Your guy did nothing wrong.”
“Thank you, Ken.” I picked up Luke’s hat and walked back to my car.
“So what happened?” I asked.
This was hours later, and Luke and I were back at my place with Luke sitting on “his side” of the old brown couch in the living room where we’d watched so many romantic comedies on video. Outside, I could feel the cloudless summer night stretching over the city like a deepening glass bowl. The heat of the day had broken, leaving a soft, pliable warmth in its place. I reached over, clicked the switch on the lamp on the end table, then pulled my legs beneath me on the couch.
“Well, to begin with, “ he said, “this is why I prefer bicycling downtown. Believe it or not, it was all about a stupid parking space. At first with the cops I was going to play it tight to the chest and wait for legal advice before saying anything at all. You never know with cops. Then for whatever reason I found myself throwing caution to the winds and just decided to tell them as clearly as I could what had happened. I wasn’t charged with anything, but they said I might be hearing from them. As I was leaving, one of them mumbled for my benefit as he went past that the guy I hit already had quite a record.” Luke shook his head.
“Anyhow,” he continued, “I’d just gotten out of my car when it happened. You saw him. Young dude, handsome in a way that impresses a certain type of young woman. But I could tell he’d been drinking. He said that he wanted to save the space for his girlfriend, who was on her way over. He was smiling, sort of. He wanted to be her parking space hero, I guess. I said no; I’d already parked. He didn’t like that. His fake smile vanished. He took a backhand swipe that knocked my hat off. I knew bending down to get the hat would be a bad idea, so I thought I better just walk away. If I’d had any sense I would have run like hell. But then he grabbed me by the shirt and started shaking me around. I glanced at the hat and made like I was going to reach down for it but instead shot a punch to his groin. I don’t think he was expecting me to fight back.
“Goodness! What about the blood? His face was a wreck.”
“He doubled over and took two quick knees to the face. Horrible. Sickening. Why didn’t I just vacate the damn parking space, Lauren? I could have just left. It wasn’t worth fighting over. But Lauren, I didn’t want to. Something just took over.”
“And what about you?”
“Oh, I’m fine. But I can see this situation could easily get even messier.”
“Let’s hope not. Here,” I said. I turned to the end table and picked up the slip of paper from the guy at the scene. “The young man from across the street gave me this. It’s his number. He said he probably has the incident on his surveillance video.” I handed the paper to Luke and he leaned toward me for a moment to take a look at it in better light. “He also told me the kid’s dad is rich,” I said.
“Great. Just great.” Luke leaned back and put the note in his shirt pocket. “Is this that It’s a Wonderful Life thing you were talking about? Shit. What have I gotten myself into? Why do I always regret showing up?”
“Um, Luke?”
“Yes?”
“I— I mean, isn’t it funny how different this room seems with the TV off?”
And all at once I was kissing him — we were kissing. When we finally caught our breath, he stood up as though to leave. Not that I had worked out a plan ahead of time, but I felt unprepared for this.
“Luke…” My feet were back on the floor, but I was reeling.
“Thank you, Lauren.”
“Luke, I love you.”
“And I love you. And if this is what I missed by not really showing up for my life all these years, well, you certainly know how make a compelling argument for being here.”
“Luke, don’t leave.”
“I’m not leaving. Hell, I feel like I just got here, finally. But I am going. I got some stuff to figure out.”
“Going where? To do what?”
“I don’t know. I just… Maybe I just want to take a look around. I’m guessing things are gonna look different now. But I’ll be back in a bit, if I’m invited. May I let myself in?
I rose in one fluid motion and kissed him again, my breasts pressed into him without apology for once after so many cautious, asexual greetings and partings over the years.
“Yes,” I said, hands firm and gentle on his face. “Yes, I think you’d better.”
Then he turned and, pushing through the screen door, stepped out into the thrumming blue night.