Red Leaves

It was nearly midnight.

She took off her brand-new black boots and remembered Spencer O’Malley.

A handsome young detective looking at me like I was the best cup of hot chocolate he’d ever had. A nice man with cold hands whose pupils dilated at the sight of me. But what can I do with dilated pupils now? I thought my mission was to right my life. What year was that my New Year’s resolution? Like, every year. I’ve been trying to do that since I was eleven. Every year that was the first of ten items stuck to my bulletin board with a blue tack. Ah well. That’s my mission again for 1994, but this time I really mean it.

Kristina took off her jeans and put on clean black underwear. She took off her sweatshirt and bra and put on the pink tank top she slept in. When she was younger, she had been proud of her sleek toned lines, of her fair color. She looked like her mother. As a teenager, her hair had always been short, and her mother hadn’t allowed her to go to school in anything but dresses. She had once been a proper young lady, but at Dartmouth she played basketball, where speed and stamina counted most. At Dartmouth she didn’t own a single dress.

Kristina went out in the hall to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face.

When she returned, Albert was sitting on her bed in the dark. Locking the door behind her, Kristina came to sit next to him on the bed, relieved to see him. He wiped her still wet cheek with his fingers. In return, Kristina brushed the hair away from his face. His ponytail was unbound, and his hair hung loose past his shoulders.

‘I can’t stay long,’ he said. ‘I could barely get out as it was. Told her I had to get my condoms. She said she had some. I said I wanted the colored ones. Red, white, and blue. With the rocket’s red glare…’

‘You’re so patriotic’ She smiled, moving closer to him. He wiped her other cheek and forehead. She stared him straight in the face, her eyes inches away from his eyes, gently running her fingers through his hair. ‘I understand,’ she said softly. Their arms were touching.

‘I wanted to talk to you about something,’ he said.

‘Anything,’ Kristina said tenderly. ‘What is it?’ She was so happy he had come. Earlier she had thought it had to stop. She knew it had to stop. But when she was with him, alone, she didn’t want to stop anything.

‘Let’s go somewhere,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘Now. For Thanksgiving.’

She sat quietly by his side in the dark; silently she sat and looked out the window.

‘Go where?’ Kristina finally said.

‘To Canada!’ he breathed out. ‘We’ll rent a car and cross the river, to the other side, make a right, and just keep on driving. We’ll find some nice little cottage, somewhere nice. In Quebec. On the way back, we can stop in Montreal. What do you say?’

Albert looked back at her stare. ‘What? We got no money again?’ he said with a peculiar lilt to his voice.

‘No, we -’ She stopped. ‘We got a little. Howard gave me some for my birthday.’

‘How much is a little?’

She thought very quickly. ‘Ten thousand dollars.’

Albert watched her intently. She tried to keep her face impassive. ‘That’s enough to get to Canada,’ he finally said. ‘Or is that money all for you?’

Rubbing his arm, Kristina said, ‘Don’t be like that. It’s for us.’

‘It’s not for us,’ he said. ‘It’s for you.’

‘For us,’ she insisted.

‘For you,’ he repeated, with the same peculiar lilt to his voice. Then with his right hand he cupped the side of her face. ‘Rocky,’ he said gently. ‘Want to?’

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘We can’t. I’m playing on Saturday.’

Albert sneered. ‘UPenn. I can beat them myself with my eyes closed and shooting into their net. Your third team can beat their first, with or without you.’

‘Albert, I can’t skip the game!’

Shrugging, he said, ‘Not like you haven’t done it before. It’s no big deal. The coach yells at you for two minutes and then you dazzle her at practice for a week and everything’s okay.’

‘Yeah, well, she told me last time I missed a game that she’d make me sit out, like, a month, if I did it again.’

‘Kristina,’ said Albert, smiling. ‘The coach knows she’d be cutting off her nose to spite her face. The only thing she’d do without you is lose, and lose big.’ Albert drew Kristina closer to him, squeezing her. ‘You’re too good.’

She squeezed him back.

Albert prodded on. ‘Come on, Rock. What do you say?’

She put her arm tighter around him and shook her head. ‘What, disappear for a few days? And then? We got to come back, you know. We have to come back and live here. There’s no escape.’

‘Who wants to escape? I just want us to go -’

She interrupted, ‘If we could drive to Alaska, you’d say go there. If we had more money, you’d say, let’s never come back to this place, let’s travel the world, and be free of this life, of Dartmouth, of Howard -’

‘We are free of Howard,’ Albert said sharply.

She continued, ‘- of Connecticut, of Luke and Laura, of Jim and Conni. You’d even forsake Aristotle, if it would mean…’

‘Mean what?’

‘Mean no one would know us. You’d forsake everything. Wouldn’t you?’

Albert placed his hand on her chest to feel her heart. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

Kristina tried to pull away from him. ‘Not everything. Not everything.’ She choked up. ‘Though God knows,’ I want to -’

‘Do you?’ he asked intensely. ‘Do you want to?’

‘To be free? More than anything,’ she said, equally intensely. Her brown eyes flashed at Albert. But he misunderstood her meaning.

‘Then let’s go!’ he whispered. ‘Edinburgh, Kristina! Remember Edinburgh?’

Remembering Edinburgh made her hands weak. Her fingers tensed and relaxed, and her heart squeezed tight with memories of Edinburgh. ‘Sure, I remember. But what then? I’d still have to come back and face Jim. And what about Conni? Remember how it was when we came back? It would be just like that, only worse.’

‘I’ll make something up.’ He smiled tenderly. ‘I’m good at that.’

‘No,’ she said. They were speaking in hushed tones, and her no was an octave higher.

Albert said, ‘It’s no big deal. I’ll do anything to get away for a few days.’

‘What’s the big hurry? We’ve just been to Fahrenbrae.’