Before You Go (12 page)

Jude laughed. Only Becka could see the world that way. He admired how alive she was to things, the minor miracles of the everyday world.

She picked up a strawberry, brought it to her nose, and breathed in. It reminded Jude of one of the first days he saw her, that little nibble she took of the pretzel. “You eat like a rabbit, you know that?”

Becka poked out her two front teeth, twitched her nose. “I always smell my food,” she said. “A habit, I guess.
A rabbit habit.
Do you think it’s weird?”

“No, I like bunny rabbits,” Jude said.

“Lie next to me,” she told him. “Let your hands drop down to your sides.”

Jude scooted down beside her, content under the tie-dye sky, all blues and purples and shifting clouds.

“I always think of the earth as a round ball, just spinning in space,” Becka said. “Close your eyes. Can you feel it?”

Jude tried to imagine the great curve of the earth, like he was lounging across some giant exercise ball. It wasn’t working so great, but he did like the feel of Becka’s body next to his. They were in the middle of a grassy meadow, sparse with itinerant commuters, dog walkers, and Frisbee players, but they all dropped away, and Jude felt entirely at peace with this singular girl.

“It’s a miracle we don’t fly away,” Becka said, her voice a whisper. “The earth spinning around and around—you’d think we’d just fall off.”

“Gravity,” Jude said.

“Science,” Becka scoffed dismissively. “Don’t think so much. Can’t you feel it in your fingertips, the curve of the earth?”

Jude listened to the distant voices of a family carrying across the field, felt the lingering warmth of the near-evening air. He knew what Becka wanted him to say, so he said it. “Yes, I feel it—sort of.”

He remembered something and told her a story. “When Lily, my sister, was little, she used to have all these stuffed animals, you know. We had this big ceiling fan in the living room. I was about five years older than her, so I used to climb up on this little step stool, and put all her stuffed animals on the blades of the fan.”

“You were teasing her?” Becka asked.

“No, she loved it,” Jude said. “Once it was all set up, I’d climb down and let her flick on the wall switch.” He allowed himself a smile and soft laugh at the memory. “The blades would turn slowly at first, but one by one the animals would fly off. We’d make bets on which one would hang on the longest. Lily laughed so hard. She’d ask me to do it over and over again.”

Becka sank into the grass, basking in the story’s warm glow. “Nice,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah, it was,” Jude said. “I haven’t thought of that in a long time. Funny I’m telling you this.”

A quiet came over them, but not a silence that needed to be broken. It was not awkward or uncomfortable.

Finally, Becka spoke. “When things get too complicated,” she confessed, “when I begin to take myself too seriously, I try to remember this feathery feeling. Like I could just float off the earth and fly away.”

“Specks on a spinning globe,” he said, thinking of it as
whirled
, not world, a revolving mystery, drifting like dust in a tie-dye sky, or animals hurled from the blades of a ceiling fan.

“We’re tiny parts of this immense universe,” Becka murmured. “Like flowers in a great garden.”

Jude remembered that feeling when he was a little boy, turning round and round in his backyard, dizzy and falling to the ground. Drunk with wonder. He hadn’t felt that way in a long, long time. Usually he felt more likely to sink to the earth’s dark core than to levitate into the sky.

“Does it make you feel insignificant?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Becka said, her voice soft, mellow. “I feel like I’m blessed, part of some unknowable mystery.” They lay in silence together. “Are your eyes still closed?”

“Yes.”

He sensed her movement, rising on an elbow. He felt her lips on his mouth, and they kissed.

“Thank you for forgiving me,” she said.

Jude couldn’t locate the name for this feeling, the string of a child’s helium balloon slipping through his fingers, this sense of floating skyward, knew only a boy’s confusion and thrill and desire, the heart’s thrup and thrum. Kiss me again and again until all the stars crowd the sky like scattered salt on black rock. He pressed into her again, his heart on her lips.

Is that what it is
, he wondered, thinking of love?
Could this be it?

EIGHTEEN

The softball game was set for six thirty, to end at dusk. Corey came via bus, and the short walk over to the softball fields west of the water tower, looking lean and sinewy in long shorts and a loose sleeveless shirt.

Jude sniffed. “Is that aftershave you’re wearing, Corey Man, or did you soak in a bath of rose petals?”

Corey shook his head as if forlorn, made no reply. “You sure they’ll let me play?” he asked.

“It’s just a game,” Jude answered. “Really, who’s gonna stop you?”

Slowly the players gathered, some coming directly from work, others pulling up in cars, lugging coolers. It was a warm, still night. Jude introduced Corey to his coworkers, guys like Ivan, DaJon, and Billy. Corey and Roberto greeted each other like long-lost Ping-Pong partners.

Roberto turned to Jude, grabbed him by the shoulders, and solemnly intoned, “As my hero Ron Burgundy said in
Anchorman,
‘For just one night, let’s not be co-workers. Let’s be co-people.’”

Corey’s gaze turned to two girls as they approached the field. “Is this her?”

Yes, it was. Becka Bliss arrived with Daphne. They had become friendly of late. Becka wore gym shorts and a three-quarter-sleeve baseball jersey, with a Mets hat screwed backward onto her head. She looked like an athlete, ready to play, and cute as a puppy. Daphne’s hair was pulled back, showing the fine, porcelain features of her face. Her shirt was undersize, revealing a toned, tanned belly. It was one of those moments that occurs when a seemingly ordinary girl—someone not on the male radar, which scans the seas like a nuclear sub,
ping, ping, ping
—shows up one day and blows everybody’s mind. A revelation that most often happens in September, after a nine-week summer, and ends with an astonished question or two: “Did you see Daphne? How’d that happen?”

The game was hardly an athletic contest. Just various people joking around, making ridiculous plays, standing in the outfield with beers in hand, more worried about spilling than catching, everybody laughing and having fun. Corey played exceptionally well, though, hitting long balls into the beyond, racing around the bases like a jaguar. Daphne seemed interested in him, and Corey enjoyed her attention.

“You like her?” Jude later asked Corey.

“Becka? Yeah, she’s great. I love a girl who can turn a double play,” Corey said.

“I mean Daphne.”

Corey pondered the question. “She available?”

“Looks like you’ve got a shot. You think you can get a ride home?” Jude asked. “If Becka and I…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“Worst-case scenario, Roberto’s got wheels,” Corey answered. “I’ll be fine, Jude. You two can go make out under the boardwalk, or whatever it is you wild and crazy kids do these days. Who knows? Maybe I can find a better-looking driver.” He got up and wandered over to where Daphne sat, eased down beside her like Miss Muffet’s spider, and the way she turned to him with an authentic smile told Jude he didn’t have to worry much about Corey’s ride home.

After the game, folks dispersed in different directions. Corey and a large group, including Daphne, headed over to the boardwalk at Field Four. Jude and Becka veered away from the crowd, at the stage in their new relationship when they sought only each other, and walked barefoot to the Atlantic’s rim. Becka had brought a big blanket and wrapped it cozily around their shoulders, huddling close. As they moved away from the lights of the boardwalk, Becka gazed up at the night sky. “So many stars,” she said, “and a quarter moon. It’s beautiful, Jude.”

They stopped at the crest of the dry sand, before it sloped down to the surf, and laid out the blanket. Becka said, “They say each star is a soul looking down on us.”

Jude gazed up, wondering. “So if you die?”

“You become a star,” Becka told him. “My mother says that people don’t
have
souls; we
are
souls.”

“So you believe in God?” he asked.

She looked at him in full seriousness. “I believe in magic.”

A new mood settled over Jude, a restless, wordless quiet, and he thought of Lily, his lost sister. He considered the stars above.

I wish I may, I wish I might …

“What is it?” Becka asked. “Sometimes you get this look on your face, and it’s as if you’re far away.”

Jude had only told Corey his secret. His family knew the truth, of course. But now, for reasons he could not fathom, he felt the locked-away words begin to form somewhere in his belly, rising up to his mouth, some inner demon to exorcise. He wanted Becka to know.

Listen:

Jude lay with his back on the blanketed beach and said, “Can I tell you something?”

He felt his body beside hers, his bare arm against her soft skin. They were alone together—together, and yet still alone—the sand beneath them, cooling in the night air. It felt good to be with her in this way. He sighed, ready to begin. “You know about my sister, Lily … Little Lil, we called her.”

Becka squeezed his hand and her good heart cracked, the way ice on a winter pond spiderwebs when you step on it, when you can almost feel yourself plunge into the frozen water. Yes, Jude’s sister, Lily. A depth of sadness she never knew. Nothing ever in her world had touched that kind of sorrow. The loss of a sister. It felt foreign, exotic—a feeling she had never felt. Yet it excited her, this physical nearness to something so sad and important as the death of a child. So she waited for the words to shower down like blue rain, his voice like a doomed poem dropping from the sky.

“It was my fault,” Jude said. And he said it without emotion, flat as the horizon, four ordinary words like soldiers in a line.
It was my fault.
He glanced sideways at her to see if she understood, then looked up and away, as if confessing to the summer sky above. “She died because of me.”

“Jude.”

“No, it’s true—let me talk, okay? I want to tell you. In my family, you see, there was always this idea that if we didn’t say the words, if we didn’t say it out loud, maybe it wasn’t real. Just, you know, nobody move, nobody talk, and nobody gets hurt. We were, like, all sitting in a blackout—no lights, no candles, total darkness, and we pretended it was somehow okay. Lil was dead. And we just went on living in that darkness, bumping into each other, apologizing constantly, falling down, getting hurt, saying ‘sorry’ and ‘excuse me’ and ‘don’t worry, it’s fine.’ Saying ‘please, forgive me,’ and ‘accidents happen.’”

His voice sounded urgent and bitter now, not like him at all. Jude was opening a cellar door for her, inviting her down the creaky stairs into some dark place of his soul. It frightened Becka. She released his hand, her entire body tense and listening.

Jude continued, “That’s all we kept saying: ‘It was an accident, no one’s fault—these things happen for a reason.’ God, I hated that one.
Happen for a reason.
What total bullshit.”

“I don’t understand,” Becka said. “You said—you told me yourself—she drowned.”

“That part’s true,” Jude said. “I was there. I was supposed to be watching her—but my mom was gone for so long, and it was so hot that day, must have been ninety-five degrees. Lily loved the water—we had a pool in our backyard. She spent hours splashing around in her orange floaties.”

Becka listened now to his breathing, the way the words came out in spurts and declarations. He was still next to her, here at the beach, and at the same time impossibly distant, a chasm she could not cross. Above, the stars were pinpricks of pale yellow lights on a velvet cloth, and she longed to be that light shining down for him.

“That was my job: ‘Watch Little Lil till I get back,’ my mom said. And she went off in the car. I didn’t know where. I still to this day don’t know for sure where exactly she went; I can only guess what was so important. All I know was she left me alone with Lily, and it was my job to take care of my sister.”

“How old were you?”

“Nine,” Jude said. “Lily had just turned four.”

“Nine years old? She left you alone, watching your sister by yourself?”

“I did it plenty of times,” Jude said defensively, his voice jagged now, ragged and uneven. Worn out already.

Becka half turned, propped on her left elbow. She brushed the hair from his face, saw the sharp sickle of moon reflected in his eyes.

He shook his head, shivered a signal:
Don’t.

Becka looked at his eyes—they were fixed on some distant elsewhere of the imagination, as if watching something that existed only in memory.

“I was in a recliner by one end of the pool,” he said. “It was hot, and I was bored and tired. I had this handheld video game, and I was determined to reach the next level. Lily was paddling around in this rubber duck inner tube, you know, those rings that go around your waist?”

“Yes, I know,” Becka said, her voice a hush, a shush. She wanted to kiss him now, cover his mouth to keep the words from pouring forth. And at the same time, she knew what he needed from her, and so she listened.

“It was so weird, because I didn’t even notice at first. I never heard a sound. I never saw her slip through.…” His voice snagged on the memory, caught like an animal in a snare.

She heard him swallow, breathe deep, determined to continue. “And I can picture it so clearly.” He lifted up his hand like a sleepwalker moving down a darkened hallway, and let it drop to his side. Empty.

She reached for his hand and squeezed. “You don’t have to—.”

“I want to,” he answered.

And though Becka wished he wouldn’t go on, wouldn’t speak more of it, she asked him, “Please, it’s all right, you can tell me,” because she knew he must, just as it was her necessity to bear witness to this confession. He was the mouth, the soft lips to her ears, whispering the horrible truths.