All We Know of Love Read online

  Sometimes, if he was diligent, Arnie could arrange to be leaving school at the same time that Mr. Cowell was heading for his car. And they could talk on their way to the parking lot.

  But it was at night, in Arnie’s dreams, in the dreams that occurred just before he fell asleep, the ones he still had control over but were magical enough to carry him away, that he could go anywhere he wanted to go. Be with anyone he wanted to be with.

  And make them love him, him alone.

  I have such an appetite for you.

  If only, and forever, in his dreams.

  Dreaming, but no sooner do I realize this than I forget what it was I was dreaming about.

  I open my eyes, and it is dark.

  Where am I?

  On a bus?

  I’m on a bus?

  Why?

  A sense of panic that I haven’t felt before seizes me in the dark. Not in all these hours. What time is it now? How alone I feel in the dark. Every thump of the bus tires taking me farther away from everything I know to be real, my house, my room, my dad, school, Sarah.

  It moves without my permission — and me along with it.

  It is the night, I tell myself. Things will look better in the day. Don’t listen to your night voice. The night voice is always afraid. It starts to come back to me as I rub my eyes, my forehead, the top of my head. The roadblock was cleared, and the bus had gotten under way. The next few hours are harder to recover in my mind. My legs are aching; my neck hurts.

  I look next to me. Paul Brown is sleeping. All over the bus, people are sleeping. I remember: we stopped in North Carolina two hours ago. We waited there how long?

  Then how long before we got to South Carolina? Manning, South Carolina? A few more people got off the bus.

  What time is it now?

  The dream I was having is beginning to seep into my brain, but it disappears again as soon as I try to remember it. I need to check the time, but I don’t wear a watch.

  I press the power button on my phone; it takes a while to start up. If I’ve gotten a call (did I get a call?), a message, it will beep, even with the ringer silenced. I hold the phone deep in my lap to muffle any sound. It takes forever. Somebody a few rows back sneezes, and then all is quiet again. My cell phone slowly lights up.

  1:43.

  It is 1:43 in the morning. Sunday morning.

  No messages.

  I power down and try to wait it out till daylight.

  Dreaming.

  That I am on a bus, a long silver bus.

  Every seat is empty. No one else here. There isn’t even a driver, and yet we are moving. I am on my way to school. This is a familiar ride, the rows of tall green vinyl seats. I stand up to see where everyone has gone.

  No, this doesn’t feel right. I shouldn’t be on this bus; everyone got off at school and I forgot to. Nobody told me to. I am missing math class again, and I didn’t do my homework. I’ve got to get off, I am thinking. I’ve got to stop this bus, but there is no one to tell this to. There is no driver, but we are driving. The bus is shaking and plodding along, rocking like a cradle.

  I stand up and start to move forward, down the aisle. I have to do something to stop this bus. I have to get to class, but when I look down, I see I am in bare feet. And on further inspection, I see I am in my pajamas.

  I am far more panicked about this than I should be, but knowing it doesn’t help at all.

  I am moving through the night, past it; and night is just about to give way to morning. I wake up to find that my head is resting on Paul Brown’s shoulder. Oh, Jeez. When I lift my head, my neck is stiff. I bet my face is swollen. My teeth feel sticky. God, I feel like crap.

  “Sorry,” I try, but Paul is asleep. His head leaning against the window. His mouth slightly open. His hands still clutched around his bag.

  I need to go to the bathroom. I get up. My legs feel weak, but they work.

  As I walk down the aisle, I see that most everyone is still sleeping. Some people sleep like they are just sitting in a chair and happen to have their eyes closed. Some people look slouched, like they are in bed. They just happen to be sitting up. I feel like I am viewing something I shouldn’t be. Some private moments, secret thoughts. There is something oddly personal about this long-distance bus travel. Outside, morning takes over.

  Once the sun starts to come up, it seems there is no stopping it. The bus is flooded with the low, streaming light. It shoots its way in across the windows, and I have to cut through the beams as I walk all the way to the back of the bus and into the tiny bathroom. The bulb flickers on when I shut the door behind me. There is a tiny mirror above a tiny metal sink. In the sink there is a small pool of dirty water that quivers with the vibrations of the bus tires thumping over the seams in the highway.

  Where are we?

  Georgia? Are we in Georgia yet?

  It sounds like tapping, rhythmic tapping. A pencil. A heartbeat slowing, about to stop.

  I look at myself in the mirror.

  God, I do look terrible.

  Worse than I feel.

  My hair is bunched up, pulled from the top of my ponytail, and the side of my head is imprinted with two deep sleep lines. I splash some cold water on my face. I rub my teeth with my finger, and I take a piece of gum out of my bag and pop it in my mouth.

  And now I start to realize that the bus is almost there. The ride is almost over, and the journey just about to begin.

  I look right into the reflection of my face.

  What the hell am I doing?

  I knew Adam had a girlfriend when we first met. I felt bad when he dumped her for me. I really did. I never met her. She went to a different school; I never had to see her, but I felt bad.

  At the same time, it scared me that he had just dumped her, for apparently no other reason. Even if it was for me.

  “But why?” I asked Adam one night. “If you say you loved her?” I always dressed quickly, and preferably in the dark.

  Adam didn’t seem to have the same shyness about his body. He lay across his bed, the sheets rumpled and the comforter lying on the floor. It occurred to me that a lot of beauty has to do with believing it yourself. That half of what we see is just the way it is presented.

  Almost like a magic trick, a sleight of hand.

  Far from playing any tricks on anyone, I was the magician’s apprentice. I helped the magician perform his magic. I didn’t really understand it. If I had any power of my own, I didn’t know how to use it.

  Not like Adam. He had broken her heart. He told her not to call him anymore, yet sometimes she still did, crying on the phone. Sometimes he let me listen to her messages.

  “I did love her. I still do,” Adam said, stretching his arm out toward me.

  I was buttoning up my sweater, straightening myself out. I had to leave soon. It was late. I had told my dad I was studying at Sarah’s. I stepped farther away, out of reach. I had to go. I had a history test in the morning, and I hadn’t even read over my notes.

  “I just wanted you more,” he told me.

  I loved to hear that. I just wanted you more. As if having something someone else wanted made it so much more desirable.

  But even then, I knew that didn’t make sense. If you can love someone one minute and someone else more the next, then chances are there will be another, and another. And nothing will mean much at all. So I looked for deeper meaning. I was desperate to be wrong.

  “Well, there must have been something about her,” I pressed. “Something you didn’t like. Some reason.”

  Maybe if I could figure it out, I could avoid it for myself. If I asked enough questions, I could learn from history, and conquer it once and for all.

  “Let’s not talk about this anymore, Natty. C’mon. You know what you mean to me. You know how you feed my heart . . .” Adam paused. He said slowly, “And nourish . . . my body.”

  I didn’t move. Only my brain clicked forward. I was sure Adam had written that to me before, those exact words — Feed
my heart and nourish my body — in an e-mail. Sitting at my computer one night about a month ago, when it came up on my screen, I thought I would instantly and joyfully perish, evaporate suddenly from complete happiness and fulfillment.

  What more could I ever want from life than to hear such words?

  And although I didn’t perish, if I had, it would have been just fine. I would have died happily, right then and there.

  But now, he said it again, slowly as if just considering the words, as if at this moment they had occurred to him. Clearly, he had forgotten that he had written that exact phrase to me just a few weeks ago. Did he think I would believe he was just making it up now? Here? In this room? In the dark, after we had just shared our bodies?

  Is that what he wanted me to believe? Did he believe that?

  And it made me wonder how many times he had used it before, and not just with me.

  They are just words, I told myself. We all use words over and over. It doesn’t diminish their meaning.

  But I knew better, didn’t I?

  Somebody is knocking softly on the bathroom door even though I am sure the VACANT sign slides to OCCUPIED when you lock the door.

  “Just a minute,” I shout.

  This bus trip is nearing its end.

  I really didn’t think this through at all. What am I going to say to my mother?

  What if I don’t even recognize her?

  What if she doesn’t know me?

  I now realize fully, that the only part of this plan I thought through was how I would tell Adam about it when it was over. I would call him on the phone weeping, describing the trip, the desperation, the explanation.

  I would say:

  Weren’t you so worried about me?

  Did you miss me?

  Do you understand now?

  Do you know me yet?

  Please, know me.

  In these fantasies, I didn’t really consider the part about going through with it, did I? I envisioned the story, but not the actuality. I could hear myself telling the chronicle but not living it.

  Does my stupidity know no bounds? I take one last look and chew my gum to maximum teeth-cleaning effect before I spit it out into the slot marked TRASH ONLY. I see my own eyes looking back at me: brown; a little puffy, but clear. I try to pretend I am seeing not myself but some girl, some pathetic girl with messy hair and fabric imprints on the side of her face. And two newly forming red pimples on her chin, not yet ready for popping.

  Adam wouldn’t want me now, anyway.

  Being wanted — when did that become the only thing that matters to me?

  My mother sat staring at herself in her dresser mirror.

  “Mommy?” I walked in. The carpet felt furry and soft under my feet. The rest of our house had wooden floors. This difference added to the feeling of sanctuary in my parents’ bedroom.

  She didn’t turn around, but I could see in the mirror that she saw me. Was I three or four years old? It was like I had two mommies, one facing me in the glass and one sitting with her back to me.

  But there was only one me.

  There was no other little girl in the mirror. She was irrelevant. She didn’t exist. There was the me I felt. The me that simply was. Another reflection of my mother. Or she of me.

  “Mommy?” I said it again.

  This time she turned slowly. “My baby,” she said. She held out her arms. She stretched out her hands, her long slender fingers I could count her fingers, press our fingertips together. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

  “I made a picture,” I said. It was in my hand, dangling like a surprise, as I climbed up carefully and sat in her lap. I could feel myself in her arms. Her arms were around me; her smell was powdery. Her skin was smooth. I had worked hard on this picture. Choosing the right colors, shapes. Pressing down with my crayons. I hadn’t broken one. No mistakes. I had colored it just right.

  I felt her shift her legs a bit under me, but I didn’t weigh anything extra. I didn’t feel gravity pulling me, sliding me. I felt her arms lift me up, closer, readjusting me. We were one form now, one being, one shape reflected in the mirror. This was as it should be.

  This felt right.

  “I made this for you.” I held it up, too close to her face.

  “It’s wonderful, Natty,” she said. But I knew she wasn’t looking at it. She didn’t take it in her hands, hold it out at a distance, and turn it. She didn’t look at it closely, see the colors I had chosen, the way I had filled in the whole page.

  She didn’t care.

  And so the picture I made stopped existing. It didn’t matter anymore, stripped of its importance.

  I watched my picture flutter to the ground, and I looked up to see my mother’s reaction. Her face and my face, side by side. I could see her eyes, boring into her own and then filling with tears.

  Now all I wanted was to get away. I squirmed and struggled in her arms. It was over. I wanted to get away.

  “You hate it when I cry, don’t you, baby?” she said, watching herself in the mirror, as if she were talking not to me but to her own reflection.

  She squeezed me even tighter. I could feel each of her fingers pressing into my back. I could feel her grip weaken, and when she lifted her hands to readjust them, I was able to slip out from under her, and run away.

  Florida.

  I have to change buses in Jacksonville. I know this, sort of, although I am having that strange, disoriented not-enough-sleep feeling. I need to clear my head.

  I am here.

  I am in Florida, and when I step outside, I can tell. It’s warmer, sunny. I can take my sweatshirt off and tie it around my waist. The air is still and quiet. It’s early. Not even seven thirty in the morning. Sunday morning, and I am nearly a thousand miles from home.

  No one knows I am here.

  “Are you getting another bus, Natalie?”

  I turn around. It’s Paul Brown, with his briefcase in his hand, stepping away from the gathering passengers. We are all waiting for the driver to take our bags out from the bus storage.

  “Yeah, I am. How about you?”

  Paul stands just about my height. In the bright sunlight, I see now, he is probably older than my dad.

  “I’m staying here in Jacksonville,” he tells me. “Are you OK by yourself? Do you know where you’re going?”

  The driver hauls open the doors to the cavernous underbelly of the bus. The hydraulics hiss as they lift the compartment door. There are suitcases of all kinds, all sizes, for all kinds of runaways. The driver begins heaving them onto the pavement at an amazing speed.

  “Sure,” I say. I spot my duffel bag on the sidewalk and reach for it.

  “I got it,” Paul says. He lifts my bag up and down in the air. “Not much in here. You’re not staying long?”

  “Long enough, I hope.”

  Paul swings my bag toward me but doesn’t let go when I catch it. “Hey, do you need money? Anything? I mean, I’m not being weird. I know it’s weird but . . .”

  “It’s not weird. It’s nice. But I’m fine.”

  “Right.” He nods and lets go of my duffel bag. “Fine.”

  I smile.

  An announcement comes over the loudspeakers on the outdoor platform. Due to the delay, the bus to St. Augustine will be leaving in just five minutes.

  “That’s me,” I say.

  “Be safe, Natalie. I hope you find what you’re looking for,” Paul tells me, and then, just because we have been sitting together for the last twelve hours or so, we hug.

  He hands me his card:

  A. PAUL BROWN, MANAGER

  Extended Stay Suites

  Jacksonville, Florida

  “Glorified desk clerk,” Paul says. “But I get to travel a lot. So you can call me if you need to. For anything. Promise?”

  I see he has written his phone number on the back, which we both know I will never use. But we also both know it means so much. It means connection. And that’s just about all there is in this life, I think
. Even the very temporary, even the transient, even the people who you are never going to see again but who exist because we need them to, because we are human.

  “Promise,” I say. I do.

  St. Augustine, Florida

  9:30 a.m.

  Current temperature: 61 degrees

  There was something inside the package that came from my mother.

  It could have been an ugly sweater, out of style and too small. Way too small for me to wear, even if it wasn’t so hideous and ugly. It could have been a book, a baby book. One that I read five years ago or was the kind of book I would never, ever want to read. It could have been a corny CD, something that the Goth boy, the one with the nose and eyebrow piercing, leather pants, and purple hair who worked at Sam Goody told her all teenagers love.

  But it wasn’t any of those things.

  “Whatcha running from?”

  I stop. Out of breath. Sweating.

  And lost.

  I turn to the voice. It belongs to a little boy sitting on top of an old beat-up car. First I notice his southern accent and then the deep, almost blue, dark tone of his skin.

  “I’m not running from anything,” I say.

  “In this neighborhood you are,” he says. “Or you should be.”

  I think this boy couldn’t possibly be older than eight, if that. When I look around, I notice I am in a neighborhood, no longer near the St. Augustine bus terminal or a single palm tree. And I am the only white person I see.

  “What are you doing here?” he says. He sees the same thing apparently, and from his vantage point up there on that car, he’s most likely accurate.

  “I thought I could walk from the bus station,” I say, looking up, as if this were an answer.

  “But you were running.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “You were.”

  “Well, I’m looking for an address,” I say to the kid, although a couple of others have now gathered around him, sliding up next to the car, leaning on it.