Loud Awake and Lost, page 23
“You said you’d met someone, that night. So…” Rachel frowned. “Was there even anybody else in that cab?”
“No, not on Halloween. But on New Year’s Eve, yes. Anthony and I had left Areacode together.” Waffles, waffles, I’d giggled into Lissa’s voice mail on New Year’s Eve. The joke being that I’d found something surprising and better. I’d found Anthony.
“You were living out memories like they were happening in real time,” said Rachel. “It seems like a horrible thing to do to yourself. Because wasn’t it like losing him all over again?”
“I don’t know. It was always so amazing to be in it, to immerse myself in it. And that New Year’s Eve—it’s indelible, it stands out from everything. He followed me out onto the fire escape. He kissed me at midnight, right as the fireworks went off.”
Rachel was using the long fingers of one hand to crack the knuckles of the other. Her mood had clouded over. “Look, Embie, I’ve got to say this—I knew you were seeing somebody, before the accident. I knew there was a guy, someone important, someone time-consuming—and I should have told you. Especially after, I had to wonder if Anthony and you had been close. But you never mentioned him, so I couldn’t shake you up like that. I wanted to protect you, to keep you moving forward. Not stuck in some tortured nightmare.”
“So you did know Anthony?” I struggled to sit up higher.
“No! I never met him, ever. But sometimes you’d ask me to cover for you, like when your Mom called. I knew somebody was taking up all of your time. The thing was, after the accident, you had so much to deal with when you came home. And this guy, Anthony, he hadn’t been part of anything—of your old life, with me, or with Holden, or anybody. He was your secret door prize, and you weren’t sharing. So I made a deal with myself. I’d bring it up if you brought it up.” Rachel looked miserable. “And now you’ve brought it up. Going back to the bridge—it shook something loose, didn’t it?”
I nodded. “I remember it now.”
“Even our fight?”
“Even our fight.” It was coming back to me. A horrible drag-out right upstairs in Rachel’s room that had left both of us in tears and pitched in a grudge match.
“And I said stupid things, of course. I was mad that you’d retreated from me. So I said things like, ‘I hope your taste in guys isn’t as crappy as that jacket.’ Jokes that Claude remembers and holds me to, of course. I meant to be hurtful. I blamed the new guy for stealing you from Holden. I blamed your new art-house and club crowd. And then, three days after that fight, you almost died.” Rachel put her hands over her face. “And all I could think was I’d never been able to tell you I was sorry.”
“Rachel, stop. Really. It was such a long time ago. I’m sure I was awful, too. I wish I could remember precisely all the stupid petty things I said, so that I could apologize for them.”
But she wasn’t listening to me. She was shaking her head, lost in her recollection. “You can’t believe how bad I felt, standing by your hospital bed, you looking like that, your eyes all pulpy and bruised—you were so far away from us all. I was watching those drugs pumping into your veins, and I just kept praying please, please, please God let her be okay. Let her wake up so that she can forgive me.”
“You were there for me that night, and at Addington, and you’re here for me tonight,” I reminded her. “I called you knowing you’d show up.”
“Ember, I’m so sorry I never got a chance to meet him!” she blurted.
“Oh.” That startled me. I nodded. “Me too.”
“But now I want you to tell me everything,” Rachel continued, her eyes starry with emotion. “I’m not kidding. Tell me all about how it felt when you first saw Anthony. Start with that night. I want to hear every single detail, Ember.” She tucked the blanket so that it covered my feet, making sure I was comfortable, and in my gratitude, I could feel the burden of everything that had been unspoken between us start to dissolve, as Rachel sat rapt, waiting.
She was here for me now, and I wanted to tell her all of it. I could feel the whole entire story contained within me, pressing for release, ready to become real in my voice and in her listening.
“Technically, it was his brother, Hatch, who I met first,” I began. “He’d gotten a job to hand out flyers that Anthony had designed, for this New Year’s Eve party at a new club in Bushwick. I was walking down the street—I’d just bought my boots, and I was feeling really good. I felt like anything could happen.”
“And then,” said Rachel with a little smile, “something did.”
32
I Think I Know a Place
I stopped by El Cielo right after school. It wasn’t open for dinner yet, but Hatch was already there and working on setup, as I knew he would be, rolling silverware and refilling the containers of ketchup, hot sauce, and red-pepper flakes.
“You want coffee?”
“Sure.”
He had to brew it first. I sat at the front bar and watched him shake out a filter and scoop six cups of grounds into the industrial-strength coffeemaker, one of those machines sturdy enough to withstand a hundred novice waiters and waitresses. Hatch had had a growth spurt this year, and he looked so much like his big brother that it was hard to take my eyes away. Isabella would be coming in soon, and so would the prep cooks and waitstaff. We had about half an hour in private.
Once the coffee had brewed, Hatch poured my mug. One sugar and a splash of whole milk. He’d absorbed that detail about me, just as he’d learned anything else about me that could be discerned through the power of observation. Hatch was a sensitive kid that way; there was a special wattage in him that burned like a flashlight, trained on others.
We’d met back when I’d first come into the restaurant, early last January. I wasn’t supposed to be there, obviously. And Anthony had warned me not to act like Hatch and I knew each other too well.
“My aunt will already be suspicious of you,” Anthony had told me. “And my little brother has a crush on you. So consider yourself double-warned.”
“Oh, save it,” I’d answered. “Families love me.”
After the party at Areacode, I’d tracked Anthony down. I’d had his matchbook, with an address that I was sure would lead me in the right direction. It’s why he had given it to me, before he’d followed me out onto the fire escape. So even when he hadn’t called me, I’d known how to reach him. He’d admitted it, later. That although he’d taken my number, he’d left it up to me to make the first move.
I’d come in and sat in the back bar. I’d watched for Anthony’s signal, and then we’d sneaked downstairs to the cold-storage room where we could talk without interruption.
But I’d met Hatch that night, too. To love Anthony was to create space for his baby brother. We hung out first on New Year’s Eve, at the St. George dormitory, with the reverberation of Areacode’s DJ beat matches and mash-ups still thudding in my ears, we’d watched Bela Lugosi movies with Hatch until 4 a.m., when Anthony had walked me home.
Another time was a few weeks later, in freezing Cobble Hill Park, where the whole gang, led by Alice de Souza, had painted that amazing mural. Hatch and I’d watched from the bench, as Alice, Maisie, Anthony (though he was “Kai” that night; he was always Kai on guerrilla-art nights), his friend Antz, and a few others had created a summer forest of trees.
We’d clapped and hooted as he’d tagged the bottom—that K for Kai that was also a sideways A for Anthony.
“I’m getting addicted to coffee,” I admitted to Hatch now. “Funny thing was I never used to drink it before.” I’d slipped the flask from my backpack and set it on the bar. He saw it, and I knew it was too much to acknowledge it. He took it in silence, quickly, without looking at me, and he disappeared downstairs—to lock it in his employee locker, I bet. When he returned, some minutes later, his eyes were red. I knew better than to explain how I’d found it. It was his now, that was what mattered.
He slid onto the barstool next to me, a boy who was beginning to act in so many ways like a man. “Sometimes I stay in his dorm room,” he confessed, almost tonelessly, staring ahead. “I’ve got the key card. It’s still activated.”
“Even after a year?”
Hatch nodded. “They kept it empty. I’m sure that’ll change come spring.”
My heart quickened. Anthony’s room had been a study in intensity, a still-life whirlwind of mess and inspiration. If only I could go there. Just to sit on the edge of his bed, to pore through his papers, his books, his prints, the vellum and watercolor and charcoal sketches rolled up on shelves and stacked in orange crates.
“I want to see it, Hatch. Just for a night. If you’ll let me, please. I want to see his room again.”
Hatch seemed unsurprised at this request. He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and pulled from it a plastic card with a magnetized stripe on one side.
I slipped it into my jacket. “Thank you.”
“The journal’s in the top drawer of his desk. You know what it looks like.” Hatch shrugged. “It’s yours, anyway. I read it once—but it wasn’t for me. Everything that’s in that notebook is about you.”
I nodded. Yes, I wanted that journal. The journal that Anthony had cracked open and started writing the night we met. He’d never let me see, not once. But I knew that this evening I’d go to his room, and I’d spend the night reading everything in that notebook once, twice, three times over.
And when I became too sleepy to read, I’d curl up on the empty bed, and I’d tuck his notebook under my cheek, and I’d fall asleep with all of his outsized, kind, funny, strange, wild thoughts burning up my brain. In my dreamworld, I would feel him take me in his arms again and unwrap me, his body heavy on mine, his hands cupping my face, kissing me just as he had that last weekend, the weekend I’d stayed with him in the dorm before Valentine’s Day.
“It’s so noisy tonight.”
“Dorm life.” His breath in my ear had sent warmth from my neck down my spine. “How it always is. Thursday means the start of the weekend. I got used to it this semester. But it’s making you uncomfortable, so let’s just go to sleep.” He made a curve of his body that mine fit perfectly inside.
He was right. It was hard to feel intimate when it sounded like a house party in every other room.
And then, my idea. “Listen, I think I know a place we can go next weekend. Upstate.”
“I don’t care what we do. Long as I’m around you.” Pushing his nose into the hollow of my neck. Whispering. “Ever since I met you, I’ve been nonstop. Ideas for one painting, then for another—it’s totally crazy.”
“Ha. Does that make me your muse?”
In the darkness, I sensed his mind circling the thought in earnest, though he didn’t answer. “Talk to me more about this getaway.” His arm closing me in.
“My dad’s sister, my aunt Gail. She lives up in Mount Kisco. I know she’d like to meet you. If you can get the time off, I’ll drive us.”
“She’d be cool with that? With…us?”
“No doubt. She’ll love you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I love you.”
That night, everything had seemed so perfectly, effortlessly possible.
“Next weekend, then.”
“Only thing is it’s supposed to snow maybe.”
“What’s a little snow? Makes it more romantic, right?”
And I would feel his body again, heavy over mine. I would feel him slip away from me into sleep. And then I would close my eyes, willing myself into my unconsciousness, to disappear first before he disappeared again.
Epilogue
I see it as soon as I enter the gallery. It’s hanging at the opposite end of the room. Which means that when they moved it out of that apartment, they noticed the K sprayed bold and directly onto the dining room wallpaper. That must have shocked them. It makes me smile.
Familiar and yet foreign; at first I’m afraid to approach. It has been almost three years since Anthony painted it. I can fit into the shape of that girl, but I know that I am changed. He only knew me as a girl who turned to face in a new direction. But now I am the girl who actually left.
It’s crowded. Hatch is here, and Lucia’s uncle Carlos, who is the curator of the show, and Lucia herself, who ended up staying in the States, where she’s attending Hunter College. And Maisie—and others, so many others. It’s a bump and jostle. I’m only off work and home for a few of these end-of-summer days, and still I feel a bit jet-lagged. Also maybe a little self-conscious in my California casual, my jeans faded and my T-shirt simple and loose. No sleek fashion getup for me.
“Those jeans! You hold on to clothing the way other people keep pets,” Rachel joked when she came over last night with some of the old gang, including Sadie and Perrin and Holden—with Cass—for my tasting-menu Folly. It was an ambitious medley of everything I’d learned this past semester in culinary school, with a few dishes straight out of The Reef, the restaurant in Long Beach where I’ve been working all summer.
I knew I’d feel off-kilter, mixing in with this sleek arty world. But I never would have missed this night.
“Hey, you!” Alice raises her hand from across the room. Alice de Souza is why the gallery space is packed, although the show itself is stand-alone provocative—Lucia’s uncle has an eye for art that goes beyond just-another-rich-dude-collector. There’s a lot to look at on the walls. But Alice is the main draw. She’s become even more famous in these years since I first met her, when she was just a wild-card member of Kai’s street-artist pack, another bandit with a spray can and a chin-set view of her big place in the world.
Alice is legit; she’s graduated past It-girl into purposeful, complex work. I read all about her in a glossy magazine piece in a San Bernardino hair salon while I was getting a trim; her likes and dislikes and her goals and what she ate for lunch. She’d seemed as far away as Mars.
But Alice is worthy of her hype. She’s eye-catchingly cool, too, as she strides toward me, knowing that every eye is on her—some trying not to stare, others completely unapologetic. “I’m so glad you could make it.” And then she cuffs the side of my ear with a kiss. It is a kiss-kiss sort of night, and we’re all playing our parts.
“Me too.”
“Ready?”
“Yep.”
“Good, then come on. Come see it, Ember.” Her hand, an artist’s hand, is large and brown and fine-boned. My hand, a chef’s apprentice hand, is nicked and burned and well protected in hers.
We are immediately sidetracked, of course. By Lucia’s uncle Carlos, who greets me with the manic energy befitting the host of a highly successful party. This is officially a hot venue; it will be written up, photos are being snapped, paintings will be sold.
But not that painting. Never that painting that has given Anthony Travolo this moment of fame—the online posts, the tribute pages. Carlos himself promised in his email message, inviting me to the event, that the painting never would be sold. Its worth, he said, was personally incalculable “as a memory of that fine young man.”
I know that part of my presence here is sensationalism. I’m the crucial bit of the story that is whispered—she must feel so awful, so guilty, he would have been a big star, maybe. My role in the tragedy is still, in moments, almost too crushing to bear. Too much story. And it makes me glad that I don’t live here anymore, and likely never will again.
Alice is navigating me through rubberneckers and well-wishers and bloggers, gallerinas and critics, collectors and scenesters. She’s done this a hundred times before. But ever since I contacted her about Anthony’s painting—along with the taped photo he’d printed from our day in Coney Island, plus the sketches he’d left in his notebook—she has become proprietorial of his art, of me, of our meaning. I’m grateful.
Anthony’s art is raw, mostly potential. Even my untrained eye sees that. He’s trying to find me in those freezing January dunes. But my shyness of his prying camera phone, my desire to be beautiful for him, my heady joy in our brand-new romance—he found all of it.
I stare at the painting and I find that girl, and I see all the things that lit me up. The palette of thick dream-dappled colors, my cold bright cheeks, the peek through my fingers—shy, but I couldn’t resist seeing and being seen by him.
“It’s about love,” murmurs Alice at my shoulder.
“Yes,” I agree. I can taste again the salt in the wind. I can feel my fingers splayed against my face. The oily chop of the brush, my half-closed eyes.
He has captured our light exactly, that stark and glowing afternoon. I never wanted it to end. On oil and canvas, forever, Ember was here. Even if cell by cell and day by day, I am aging past that moment when Anthony laid bare everything he knew about me.
In this painting, he has found our eternity.
Lucia, who has approached noiselessly to stand at my side, breaks my trance. “Uncle Carlos is taking the piece to Italy next week,” she says. “It will be part of a group show in Florence, and then another in Rome.”
“Oh. That’s cool.” Anthony, who had not even owned a passport, who would have wanted almost more than anything to be at home in the world. How he would have loved that.
They leave me with the portrait, and I am alone with it until I feel him.
I turn, shading my vision. The sun is behind him so that he is all shadow, a crisp cutout of darkness backlit by the window. I hear his voice in my ear again, that night in the Tribeca apartment, when he brought me to the dining room and showed me his painting of me for the first time—“Look. Look at you. You’re my best work, the best that’s in me.”
I never saw him again after the night I went back to the bridge. I never wanted to. I’d found some peace in my grief, and in many ways I’ve traveled far from that hour. To build a new life, to become another Ember; I’d had to.
He raises his hand.
Tentatively, I raise mine. As I watch him, I let his image burn through me, and then I close my eyes and let the impression, as if on the slow beat of a hawk’s wing, take flight.
