THE HIDING PLACE

“She always looked out for me, protected me. It’s what I remember most about our relationship.”

“What sort of things did she protect you from?” I asked, and he was silent for a while, as if the conjuring of those memories required a force of will, a certain mental preparation.

“I tend to think of my early childhood as being fairly happy, although I wonder if I was just too young to know any different. It wasn’t until I was about fourteen, though, when things really started to change for me.”

We’d come to a stop near the east end of the perimeter. There was a small gate built into the fence here. From the looks of its rusted hinges and neglected condition, I guessed it had been padlocked shut for the past twenty years, maybe longer. I’d forgotten it was here, and it occurred to me now that so much of Menaker was like that. It lay quiet and unobtrusive, like a water moccasin sunning itself on the trunk of a fallen tree along the riverbank. There are parts of this place that you can almost forget exist until you stumble upon them and they strike out at you from the high grass. I glanced over at Jason, who was looking out past the fence at the tree line beyond, his expression lost in recollection. I said nothing, only waited for him to continue.

“Fourteen is a … turbulent age. I think we were all rediscovering girls back then. I still remember how strange and terrifying and wonderful that was. It was like we’d known them as one thing our whole lives but were encountering them for the first time as something other than what we’d established them to be. Part of it was their physical development. Their bodies were changing—maturing and becoming different from ours in obvious ways that could no longer be ignored. Part of it was our own hormones kicking in, awakening from over a decade of dormancy and demanding to be dealt with.

“I had this friend, Michael. I guess you could say he was my best friend. He lived a block over from me, used to stop by every day after school—you know: hang out, ride bikes, toss the football around, that sort of thing. We’d both been living in the same neighborhood since we were born, had grown up together. Our families sometimes even spent vacations with each other, renting out a beach house for a week or driving up to Pennsylvania for a few days of skiing. We were pretty close, and I valued that friendship—relied on it, I suppose—in a way that I didn’t fully understand or have the ability to articulate.”

The wind moved through his hair—tussled it almost—making him look much younger. I could imagine him as an adolescent.

“Our best friends are those we make in childhood,” he said, his eyes clearing for a moment as he looked over at me. “Do you ever notice that? You can live to be a hundred and meet all kinds of interesting characters along the way … but our best friends are the ones we had as children.”

He turned his face away from me, absently brushed a lock of dark hair back from his brow. “Michael and I were in the same grade at school and shared several classes—used to even copy each other’s homework from time to time.” He smiled. “There was this girl in our English class—Alexandra Cantrell, I still remember her name—who joined us midyear when her parents relocated to Maryland from somewhere in the Midwest, maybe North Dakota.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “Man, she was beautiful. Long blond hair that she liked to wear pulled back into a French braid; tall and thin with a slightly athletic build; light blue eyes that reminded me of the way the sky looked just before dawn. She was smart, too—easily one of the brightest students in our class—and had this sort of innocent kindness about her that made you just want to be around her, even if you were only in the periphery of her circle of friends.”

“She must have been pretty popular,” I commented, and he nodded.

“All the guys went crazy when she got there. Most of them were too chickenshit to do anything about it, but the way they used to talk about her …” He grinned. “The general consensus was that she was untouchable, out of our league, although I don’t recall wondering whose league she might’ve been in.”

“Girls like that,” I said, “spend a lot of Saturday nights at home without a date.”

“I know that now, but I didn’t back then.” He shrugged. “It didn’t matter, though. I was less intimidated by her popularity than most of my peers. I hung out with her because she was a nice person and fun to be around. Michael, too. The three of us spent a lot of time together that year.”

“So there was you, and your best friend, and this beautiful girl,” I summarized. It wasn’t difficult to see where this story was heading.

“Right,” he said. “There were other kids, of course. Like I said, lots of people liked to be around her. But for the life of me, I can’t remember who they were. In my mind, what it came down to was the three of us.”

“Three is an unstable number,” I commented, and he nodded his agreement.

“There was a pond close to our house that would freeze over in the wintertime. We used to go there to skate and play hockey. I remember telling Alex about it one day after school, and her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘Take me there,’ she said, and so I did, neither of us bothering to stop home on the way. I don’t know where Michael was at the time, why he wasn’t with us that day, but he wasn’t. We took the school bus, Alex getting off at my stop instead of hers, and we walked two blocks down the street and cut left through the woods to the pond. It had snowed lightly the night before, and we walked mostly in silence, listening to the soft crunch of wet powder beneath the soles of our shoes.

“I remember how, when we came to the edge, she dropped her book bag on the ground and just charged out onto the ice without testing it first, trusting that it was thick enough to hold her weight because I said it was. And of course I ran out after her, planting my feet when I was three-quarters of the way across and sliding the remaining distance to the opposite side. I could hear the ice cracking and settling beneath us—we both could—but she never paused, never cast an uncertain look down. I gathered a snowball and lobbed it out toward the center of the pond where she was standing. It missed her by a good two feet, but she grabbed her chest and fell to the ice like a wounded soldier, lying with her face turned up at the sky, her arms and legs fanned out as if she were in the midst of making a snow angel. I went back out onto the pond, dropping down on one hip and using my momentum to slide into her. We bumped and our bodies did a half turn on the ice, coming to rest with our heads together, our torsos angled slightly away from each other. Laughing, I started to get up, but she reached over and put her hand on my arm. ‘Wait,’ she said, and so I lay there in the quiet of the afternoon, looking up at the blanket of gray above us. I could hear the steady beat of my heart in my ears, and I wondered if it was loud enough for her to hear as well. I began to say something, but she said, ‘Shhh,’ and so we lay there together in silence as the wind moved through the trees and the ice buckled and cracked beneath us.

“That was when I started to wonder just how strong that ice was. There’d been a warm spell the week before, and I counted in my mind the number of days since then that the temperature had hovered around freezing. Five—no, four days, I realized, and I wondered if that was enough. I could feel the chill of the frozen surface biting through my jeans, imagined the paralyzing temperature of the water just beneath, and considered the thin barrier that lay between. In my mind, I could suddenly see it giving way, the two of us plunging downward, the startled expression on our faces as our heads disappeared below the surface. I could see us reaching up to clutch at the edge of the hole, the ice there breaking away as we attempted to hoist ourselves out. I could feel the shocking chill turn to numbness, our bodies becoming slow and lethargic, the white plume of our breath dissipating over the minutes that followed until at last … there was nothing.

“‘We should go,’ I told her. ‘The ice is thinner than I thought. I don’t trust it.’

“She turned her body to look at me. ‘It’ll hold,’ she said, and put her right arm across my chest, resting her head on my shoulder.

“Suddenly, I was sure that it wouldn’t, that we were lying out there on borrowed time already, that it was prone to give way at any moment. I heard it shift again beneath us, and this time it sounded like the last warning. ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to go.’

“I remember her looking at me with a wounded expression as I nudged her off me so I could stand, like I was rejecting her instead of trying to keep both of us from harm. ‘What’s your problem?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I don’t think she was intending for her words to come out so accusatory, so sharp, but they sliced into me before either of us knew it was going to happen, and once they had there was no taking them back.

“‘Nothing,’ I replied, backing away from her. ‘Nothing’s wrong with me.’

“I turned my back on her then, not caring if she fell through the goddamn ice or not, and walked off and left her there. I could hear her calling out to me as I trudged up the hill through the light snow—‘Jason, I’m sorry. Whatever it is, I’m sorry’—but I pretended I didn’t hear her, pretended it was anger I felt instead of something else.

“After that, we didn’t see much of each other for a while. She called me on the phone once, tried to apologize, but it was clear she didn’t know what she was apologizing for, and there was nothing I could say to explain it to her. Michael, of course, asked me about it, told me I was acting like a jerk and ought to get over it. But I just couldn’t. I’d close my eyes and think about the two of us lying there, one of her arms wrapped casually around me, and the ice suddenly breaking away beneath us, our muted screams for help tapering away into silence. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked over and over in my head, and I couldn’t look at it. All I could do was back away.”

I stood there at the institution’s fence and watched Jason struggle. I wanted to reach out to him but reminded myself of the boundaries between doctor and patient, how they needed to be respected.

“Triangles are curious things,” he said. “You can’t change the relationship between any two points without affecting at least one of the other two relationships. Michael and I had known each other our whole lives, but we’d known Alex for only a few months. I took it for granted that what we shared between the two of us would remain unaffected. But that didn’t happen. Maybe it was because of the way I’d treated her, which was unfair. In our small court of public opinion, the verdict was that she was the victim, not me, and until I could come up with a reasonable explanation for my actions I was on the outs with both of them. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care, but of course that wasn’t true. I was losing him; that was obvious. What was less obvious was what to do about it.

“Finally, I decided to make amends. And so I rode my bike over to Alex’s house the next Saturday afternoon. I’d been there a few times before, and her mother recognized me when I knocked on the door. ‘Hi, Jason,’ she said. ‘Alexandra’s playing out back with Michael.’ I almost left then, feeling more like an outsider than ever, but then I decided no, I was coming to apologize, and so I walked around to the backyard expecting to find them. When I got there, the yard was empty, although Michael’s bike was leaning against the house. I looked around for a moment and, figuring they must have headed up the block, was about to leave when I noticed the opening to a narrow trail at the edge of the woods that bordered the far end of the yard. I trotted across the grass and entered the woods, following the path for about fifty yards until it started sloping downward toward the chuckling sound of a stream below. The earth was a little loose here, and I had to hold on to the trunks of trees as I descended. I was mostly looking down at my footing instead of focusing on the bank of the stream below me, so I was near the bottom before I saw them. I remember how the trees seemed to shift, to open up slightly so that I suddenly had a clearer view—and that was when I noticed them, standing on the opposite side of the stream with their arms locked around each other, kissing softly, almost gingerly, as if they were each afraid of hurting the other. I stood motionless on the hillside, watching from above, realizing that I was already too late, that the nature of their relationship had changed when I wasn’t looking, and that what they had now excluded me almost entirely. A barrage of emotions struck me then—anger, resentment, betrayal, isolation, jealousy—but I remember that what I felt most of all was a sense of shame. I was ashamed to be surreptitiously encroaching on this moment between them, ashamed to be thinking that I longed for it to be me wrapped in that embrace. I stood there, wrestling with my anguish, for a few more seconds before quietly turning to go. But the root my right foot was resting on gave way unexpectedly as I shifted my weight. There was a snap and I cried out in surprise, grasping at a tree limb that broke off in my hand. My left knee struck the ground and the earth there crumbled away, sending me sliding down the remainder of the embankment with an accompaniment of pebbles and debris.

“‘Jason,’ Michael said, letting go of her, but I was seeing him only in my peripheral vision. I couldn’t look at them directly, couldn’t bear the humiliation, and so I leaped to my feet and scampered back up the hill as fast as I could. By the time I got to the top, I realized there was something wrong with my ankle. It had begun to throb with every step. I didn’t run—couldn’t really—but I made my way as quickly as possible along the path, limping across Alex’s backyard when I got to it and, retrieving my bike from the front of her house, pedaling home as furiously as my wounded body would allow.

“I awoke the next morning to find my right ankle swollen to twice its normal size, and I couldn’t bear weight on it. It was Sunday and my mother, realizing that our doctor’s office was closed, took me to the ER for X-rays. I was fortunate that I hadn’t broken it, the doctor told us, but I’d suffered a bad sprain and was reliant on crutches for the next two weeks.

“When we got home from the hospital, I expected to see Michael sitting on our front steps waiting for me. But he didn’t stop by that day or the next. In fact, a week went by and I saw very little of either of them. At school we would catch each other’s eye for a moment in the hallway before pretending we hadn’t noticed. In class, we’d sit in our assigned seats, keeping our eyes focused on the teacher or on the pages of our respective books. In my mind, I was convinced they were either angry with me or embarrassed for me, and that either way I was the cause of all that had gone wrong between us.

“I don’t know how much time would have elapsed before we spoke to each other if it hadn’t been for an art project I decided to take home from school one day. It was a framed painting I’d made the week before. I’d gotten it back that day with a note from the teacher that read, ‘Great use of contrast. This shows real promise.’ At a time in my life when I wasn’t feeling very happy with myself, I grasped that small piece of praise like a life preserver and held on to it. I wrapped it up in a plastic bag to protect it from the rain and hobbled on my crutches to the waiting school bus. It was awkward to carry, too big to fit into my backpack and tricky to hold on to with my hands occupied with the crutches. I laid it along the outside of my right crutch and held it there with my forearm. It was slow going, and I almost missed the bus, but the driver saw me coming and held the painting for me while I lurched up the steps and into a seat. So I’d made it halfway, I thought, which was good. But the distance between the bus stop and my house was three blocks off the main road, perpendicular to the route the driver normally took. I disembarked ten minutes later, and I guess I must’ve looked pretty pathetic working my way down the street because I heard Michael call out to me, ‘Yo, Jason. Wait up,’ and a few seconds later I could hear his shoes slapping along the wet sidewalk as he came up behind me.

“‘Here, give me that, you moron,’ he said, and I handed him the plastic-bundled painting so I could use my crutches more effectively. He didn’t say anything else, just walked beside me in the rain, the two of us looking down at the asphalt, our shoulders hunched slightly against the weather. When we got to my house I opened the door and we stepped inside. I rested my crutches against the wall and unslung my backpack, dropping it beside me. My parents were both at work and the house was silent except for the sound of our jackets dripping onto the tile floor. We stood there facing each other, neither of us speaking. His eyes met mine only briefly, and then he sort of shrugged and moved toward the door. ‘I’ll see ya,’ he said, and I panicked, knowing that this was the moment for me to say something, to do what I could to make things right between us.

“‘I’m sorry,’ I blurted out, and he paused with his hand on the doorknob.

“‘Yeah, it’s okay,’ he replied. He took a breath, his left hand raking back the wet brown hair from his forehead. He smiled a little, his hazel eyes regarding me in a way that told me we were still friends, that we’d both been acting like idiots but now all was forgiven. I thought about the years we’d spent together growing up, about the secrets we held on to for each other, about the loyalty that had been built brick by brick like a fortress around us. I wanted to tell him that it was still there, that fortress, and that all we had to do was step inside once again.

“‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognize it,’ he said, ‘what was developing between us.’ I wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, that I had recognized it for both of us. ‘Sometimes two people just … connect, you know?’ he tried to explain, and I nodded. ‘I mean, it’s like it’s not there one day and the next day it is.’ He shifted his stance so that his body was turned more fully in my direction, and I took a half step forward.

“‘The thing is … I think I love her,’ he said, and I froze, my mouth going dry. ‘Yeah,’ he said, more confidently now. ‘I love her, dude. I just didn’t know you felt the same.’

“I looked away from him, focusing on the stairs leading up to our living room. I could feel myself tearing up, could feel my throat getting tight. ‘I don’t,’ I told him, but he scoffed a little.

“‘It’s obvious,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen the way you look at us.’

“I shook my head, remained silent, knowing my voice would betray me.

“‘Just because I’m spending time with her doesn’t mean I can’t also hang out with you,’ he reminded me. ‘We’ve been friends a long—’

“Without thinking, I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around him, burying my face against his shoulder. I could feel his chest rise and fall against me, could feel the warmth of his body beneath the damp bulk of his jacket. He did nothing for the span of a few seconds, just stood there and let me hold on to him. And then his voice—alarmed, and too loud within the confines of the foyer—was in my ear.

“‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Jason, get off me.’ He pushed me away with his hands, and I had to step back onto my sprained ankle to keep from falling. I kept my eyes on his this time, and I think I was crying but I’m not sure. He looked at me in disbelief. ‘What’s wrong with you,’ he said, and it wasn’t a question but an accusation. In my mind, I could hear Alex asking me the same thing, bewildered by the sudden panic that had taken hold of me as we lay there together on the ice, her arm wrapped around my chest. ‘I’ve seen the way you look at us,’ Michael had said, assuming that the hurt and yearning in my eyes was directed at her, not him. Suddenly, the realization dawned on him, and his face changed as if he’d unexpectedly come across something pungent and revolting.

“That’s when he struck me, his arm flashing out so quickly that I think it surprised even him. I took the blow in the left temple, my head rocking back and to the right as my vision became a kaleidoscope of images in front of me. The house was quiet except for the sound of our breathing, and standing there—blinded by my tears—I remember wondering whether he would hit me again. My arms hung loosely at my sides, refusing to defend me, and I stood there waiting for it—that second blow—and however many more would follow. Instead, I heard something worse: the sound of the door opening and closing as he left. And it was only then that I allowed myself to crumple to the floor, the sobs ripping through me like bullets, the self-loathing rising in a great wave, and a vague awareness that I had uncovered something in myself that I did not want to deal with. I wanted it to disappear for a while inside me, to come out different or not at all.

“The house stood still around me—silent and watchful—and I remember feeling alone in a way I had never experienced before. I did not think about the ramifications of what I’d done, did not consider the price I would pay in the weeks ahead. That would come later. For the time being, I only sat there with my discovery, not knowing what to do with it. The palm of one hand went to my face to wipe away the tears, and when I looked down I noticed a streak of blood crossing the lifeline. I stood up on my one good leg and, situating my crutches beneath my arms, lurched to the bathroom where I inspected myself in the mirror. There was a gash just beneath my left temple—here.” He pointed to the remnants of a faint scar I hadn’t noticed before.

“My mom took me back to the hospital to get stitches, and I saw the same doctor who’d treated me for my ankle a week and a half before. When he asked me how it had happened, I gave him some lie about tripping on my crutches, striking my head on the counter. He must not have believed me because he cleared everyone else out of the exam room, asked me if someone had done this to me, if anyone was hitting me at home. I could feel my face flush at the response—a liar’s face—as I told him, ‘No, it was my own fault. I wasn’t being careful. I did this to myself.’ He studied me for a moment, then pulled out his pen and jotted something down on the chart. I remember wanting to look at what he’d written, convinced that the final diagnosis would not be ‘fall’ or ‘laceration,’ but rather the same accusatory question that had been posed to me twice over the past month. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ it would say, and for the first time I had an answer.

“I winced when the pinch of the needle entered my body. The burn of the Novocain ebbed into a strange numbness. What’s wrong with you? I thought over and over again as the sutures pulled the edges of my wound together, their futile attempt to return me into something whole. And when I began to cry, Mother squeezed my hand and whispered her own false reassurance—that it would be over soon, that I just had to be brave a few minutes longer.”

Chapter 10 (#ulink_b349cea9-967a-598a-a5d2-2ea3bed35b2b)

I want to know what he did,” I told Wagner, cornering him near the nurses’ station.