Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down (16 page)

Tyler came up beside him.

She used to scream from the bleachers at our matches, he said.

You played soccer? Matt said, and hoped Tyler wouldn't ask how he knew already what kind of match, how he knew Jacob's sport without having known him at all.

Just freshman year, Tyler said. She knew all the rules, the fouls, the yellow cards.

Matt wondered how it was that there was so much about Tyler he didn't know. How dating since summer, even confidentially beyond the gaze of peers and parents, hadn't let him in much further than if they had never known one another. He slid his hand down the sleeve of Tyler's jacket. Found his palm. Tyler let his hand be held for only a moment, then squeezed Matt's palm and pulled away.

WE DISBANDED. WE
left one another at the brick steps of the church. We'd thought to collect ourselves, to go somewhere for the afternoon without discussion of yearbook or fire or funeral and found instead only exhaustion. Only the desire to be alone. Zola mentioned her first shift back at the Local Beanery, that she had to report by three. Nick said he'd been gone all morning and just wanted to go home and rest. Christina let her father's car take her in with barely
a goodbye, saying only that she was tired and wanted to change out of her dress. Matt stood at the curb beside his car with Tyler.

Want to go somewhere?

Anywhere, Tyler said. I don't really want to go home.

Matt started the car, Tyler in the passenger seat. They traveled along downtown streets filled with steel buildings that blocked out the sun. Matt navigated west, back toward Midvale. He didn't take the highway, the quickest route. He meandered past Union Station, the train depot converted to a mall where his parents had taken him to a fudge shop and model train store when he was small. Past the castle-like towers of Washington University, a college he'd never visited. Past streets lined with trees. Silver maples. Black maples, their leaves exploded in yellow. Sugar maples, leaves like stars washed in red. Tyler cracked the window, a burst of cold air. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and Matt felt at once irritated.

We could go to the zoo, Matt said. It's close by. It's free.

Fine with me, Tyler said. He blew smoke toward the passing trees.

Matt steered the car toward the entrance of Forest Park, the largest city park in the country. A landscape of grass and hills and trees. They drove past the Grand Basin, the park's enormous fountain. Past the art museum on the hill, the statue of King Louis crowning its entrance. Everything deserted on a Wednesday afternoon. Matt parked the car along the street in front of the zoo and Tyler flicked his cigarette out the window.

Where to? Matt asked.

Anywhere. Really, I just need to be outside for a while.

They moved through the turnstiles and headed past a stretch of small mammal habitats Matt remembered wanting to visit first as a child whenever he came to the zoo with his parents. One reclusive red panda, its straw hut in the rear of its pen. A striped tail he always located in the trees though today, the sky overcast, the panda was nowhere to be found. A Malayan sun bear paced in the adjacent
pen, one corner of the enclosure to the other. Matt watched the bear track the same path, a worn groove in the dirt.

I haven't been here since elementary school, Tyler said.

Me either, Matt said. What he didn't say was how strange it was to be here again with Tyler. Someone he'd kept hidden from his parents across an entire summer, parents who'd guided him past these same exhibits as a child. Someone who'd left him in the hallway beside Caroline, an anger he knew he was still trying to leave behind. Tyler turned to the sea lion pool across from the small mammal enclosures. They could eat up to thirty pounds a day, Matt remembered a keeper once telling the crowd. He stepped to the pool's edge and placed his hands on the railing and three sea lions darted through the water, gray submarines beneath the surface of an overcast sky. Matt tried to think of something to say to Tyler. Anything. The air stilted between them out in the open.

Tyler moved away from the railing and they passed a wall of outdoor enclosures, small alligators and a bevy of tortoises that led toward the indoor reptile center. The building was warm inside, a reprieve from the crystalline chill of October sky. Matt approached a large window where a boa constrictor lay curled and stood with his face to the glass. The footsteps of children echoed around him. He felt their feet vibrate through the floor, stepping to the glass before moving away toward the amphibians and desert snakes. Matt felt himself planted. He watched the boa and imagined being swallowed whole. A body thicker than anything he could dream, what it would feel like to pass through the walls of a snake's body and feel its muscle push in and contract.

And then Tyler's hands were against his back, breath against his ear. There's a bathroom in this center, Tyler said. Empty stalls. A place to be alone.

Matt felt his lungs grow tight. He nudged Tyler away before he could think.

What the fuck, Tyler whispered loudly. A mother ushered her
child away from them. Matt made his way toward the bathroom, Tyler behind him, and didn't stop until they reached the last stall. He'd barely closed the stall door before he felt Tyler push him against the tiled wall, his tongue in Matt's mouth. Matt felt something split inside him, a light, something aching and weightless and bright. A light broken quick by a flare, a red-hot flash of adrenaline that made him shove Tyler away. He thrust him hard enough for his body to hit the stall door, the sound echoing through the bathroom.

Jesus, what's your fucking problem? Tyler said.

You're my fucking problem.

What, because I'm here? Because I want you?

Because where the fuck were you? Matt felt his palms ball. Where were you, and why now? Why here? What makes you want me now? When you couldn't bear to acknowledge me in public at school or even at the funeral this morning?

Tyler rubbed a hand across his shoulder. Matt didn't want to say it but couldn't stop himself.

You left me there.

Tyler didn't move. It's not that simple, he said.

Do you know what it felt like? For you to leave me there? Do you know what it was like to stand there and watch her—

Matt felt his throat close. He couldn't say what it was he watched Caroline Black do. Everything she'd been bleeding away across the carpet.

You think this is easy for me? Tyler said. No one knows. You think I want to be caught with my pants down in a bathroom stall while a gunman shoots up the halls?

No one knows what, Matt said.

What the fuck are you talking about.

You said no one knows. No one knows what?

Tyler's eyes flickered across the stall.

You can't even fucking say it, Matt said. Gay
.
No one knows you're gay.

Before he even finished speaking, Tyler's elbow was across his throat. Matt felt his head slam against the tile, Tyler's arm pinning him to the wall, his face drawn close. Tyler's eyes swimming. An electric heat. For a moment, Matt thought Tyler would spit in his face. Then he pulled back and Matt drew in breath and watched Tyler's shoes leave the stall. I can find my own way home, he heard him shout before the bathroom door opened and whispered to a close.

CHRISTINA STOOD AT
the edge of the diving board, water dripping down into the pool beneath her feet. Only a few swimmers populated the Midvale County Community Center pool, arms knifing through lanes and slick with water. Ryan hadn't called. Two days of nothing. Two days of listening to the constant hum of the television in the other room, a droning newsreel. Two days of waiting for her father to come home, her brother playing video games or else locked away in his room and her mother at work across the river and calling every day, a comfort but a ringing nonetheless that left her chest aching. That it wasn't Ryan. That he refused to call. That she'd come home from the funeral with her father and there were no messages yet again and she'd felt her lungs push against her breastbone and grabbed the keys to her car.

She'd alternated drills of freestyle sprints with laps of kickboard flutter kicks, the same practice as her swim team. She knew they wouldn't meet for weeks but her limbs were restless, in need of slicing the water. She pushed her way down the narrow lane, her goggles sealed across her eyes, and thought of the one time she'd been snorkeling, a trip to Florida in junior high to visit her mother's sister. Shallows off the coast of Destin. Her parents and brother billowing somewhere in the water nearby. She'd identified sand divers, trumpet fish, the iridescent blue of angelfish before removing her snorkel and pulsing all the way down to the flat sand of the ocean floor. She gazed up through her mask and watched light shimmer
at the surface. The water silent as a chamber, a stillness she sought in the community center's chlorinated waters. She'd swum laps for a half hour, the dark stripe of the lap lane visible beneath her. Her body in motion, her flip turn the only rippling of the water's surface. When she finished, she climbed from the water and noticed the deep end of the pool and its empty diving board.

Despite her place on Lewis and Clark's swim team, she hadn't jumped off a diving board in years. A lone lifeguard sat on the stand watching the few other swimmers turn and glide through the lanes. She'd climbed the metal ladder. The same as climbing the water slide at Midvale County's outdoor public pool when she was small. She walked out to the precipice and felt her toes grip the edge of the diving board. The water deep blue and dark beneath her. This community center a place where she'd practiced so many early mornings, so many afternoons beyond school. Elise. The habituated routine of her swim partner sliding through the water in the same lap lane, their bodies matched stroke for stroke, their hands pulsing in synch with one another. Christina stood at the edge. She shifted her weight to test the board and let herself jump.

She dove headfirst into the pool, her goggles still on, a rippling of bubbles she could see as her body sliced through the water. She kept swimming to the bottom as she had in the ocean off the coast of Destin. Silent blue. The surface of the water winking back way above her. She swam down until her hands reached the rough base of the pool's foundation and through her goggles she could see the faint, far-off movement of swimmers in shallow lanes. She let herself be still. Elise Nguyen. A lack of air. The deepest stretch of the pool. Christina felt her lungs fill with pressure. She thought of Ryan in his bedroom and the shattered picture frame and Principal Jeffries and a casket she'd seen only hours before, a woman she'd seen last week. Her lungs throbbed to resurface and she imagined a world beyond this. The ocean floor. The coast of a state she hadn't
seen since she was a child. Another elsewhere entirely, sea salt and blue, one she could almost feel from the bottom of a pool.

ZOLA PEDALED THE
mile to the Local Beanery, a stiff wind breaking through her sweater. A three-hour shift, her first back. A distraction but not enough. She relieved Marilyn, the middle-aged woman who worked early afternoon shifts, and stood behind the counter taking bites from an oversize muffin, the only lunch she thought to have in the bitter aftertaste of a funeral.

The shop was empty. Two women drank iced tea in one corner. Near the far windows, two college-aged students sat with laptops at separate tables, neither seeming to know the other. Zola looked through the window beyond them, the sky growing overcast with deep stratus clouds. She felt Matt's profile in her back pocket, a slip of paper she still hadn't read, one she'd kept hidden in her clothing through the funeral. She watched a bulk of low clouds move in thick filaments across the sky and felt nothing, no urge to capture them to film as she once had. She'd taken photographs since seventh grade, an amateur, a skill her mother had noticed that holiday season with the gift of her first camera. She'd photographed icicles, frozen pines. She'd tried to snap snowflakes as they fell to see if each one was different. As her mother trained her telescope upon the stars Zola pointed her camera to the sky, sure she could capture constellations. She felt nothing now. Her camera gathering dust beneath her bed. The world dulled to a lack of color. She finished her muffin as the front door opened, a bell dinging a customer's arrival.

Zola wiped her hands against her pants and looked up to see Beth Zimmerman walk in. Josh Zimmerman's sister, a senior. A girl who'd spoken at the vigil, whom Zola knew from Des Peres Elementary though not well, right between Beth and Josh in age though she remembered them as fixtures of the hallways, the lunchroom, the elementary school library. Beth had been in the coffee shop many times before, and her mother, too, their house not far
from the storefront. She was in jeans, an old T-shirt. Zola knew from the newspaper that she'd buried her brother that morning.

Large coffee, Beth said. Her face hollow, eyes empty.

To go?

Please.

Zola pulled a paper cup from a stacked set. She didn't ask what she'd been trained.
Dark roast or light? Room for cream?
She filled the cup. Beth stood waiting. She figured Beth knew who she was, a high school of 1,200 and even still they'd shared a set of hallways for nearly ten years between Des Peres and Lewis and Clark, though they'd never acknowledged it directly the many times Beth had been into the coffee shop. Zola wanted to reach across the counter and tear the pain from her chest with a clenched fist.

Beth kept her eyes on the ground. Zola placed a plastic lid on the cup, set it down. She pressed numbers into the cash register, aware of Beth's hands resting on the counter and quivering. Zola wanted to touch them. Let her hands leave the register and surround them. She stopped herself but not before she let her mouth fall open and say the words.

I'm so sorry, she whispered. I'm sorry for your loss.

Beth nodded. I had to get out of the house.