“Like you and me,” said Jade. “How we used to be.”
“What do you mean? Crazy?”
“Living in our own world. Believing what we felt was separate from everything else. We couldn’t do anything except be together and nothing else was real.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that’s crazy. And you just said it was, even you.”
“No,” I said, “not when we both believe it. Crazy people are alone and no one understands what they mean. But that’s not our way. We both know and it makes complete sense. It’s not crazy when you both believe it, when you make it true by living it. And other people believe it, too, remember. Believe it about us. Everyone who knows us, sees us together. We have that effect.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t?”
“Don’t talk about it as if it were still happening. It’s not. It’s a long time ago.”
“A long time ago. But now I’m with you and it doesn’t seem that long. I think I could forget all the time in between.”
Jade shook her head and lowered her eyes; her fingers were spread out on her lap, the thumbnails touching, the fingers rising and lowering. “Don’t,” she said. “You don’t know who you’re talking to. You’re walking in air.”
“I know you,” I said, and the statement took on a weight far greater than I expected, as if the simple claim had within it an emotional magnetism that attracted everything that was unknown, unspoken, everything that was vague and hoped for and dreaded as well. I told her that I knew her and the atmosphere between us became as charged as if I’d finally gotten the courage to lean over and kiss her. Yet I had no choice but to come more and more forward, like someone pursuing a ghost: either the vision would recede into light and dust or it would take on weight and substance.
“You don’t know me,” Jade said, finally. “You just remember me.”
“No. You can’t call it remembering. You remember something that’s past, over, but if you want to call it remembering, then I remember you the way you remember how to walk if you’re bedridden. I mean it’s not just looking back, it’s returning.”
“To being crazy together?”
“It wouldn’t matter.”
“To you.”
“To me.”
Jade closed her eyes and shook her head, as if to dislodge an image. “I don’t know what we’re talking about,” she said. “We shouldn’t. It’s painful, isn’t it?”
“For me?”
“That’s what I’m thinking—for you. It must be.”
“No. You?”
She shook her head. “It’s different for me. I’m not a part of this, not in the same way. You’ve been trying to hold on to what we had and I let it go. It’s one of those things when you drop it, it doesn’t bounce back, it just falls away, and falls and falls.”
“But inside.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you drop it, us, it falls but it falls inside you, so no matter how far away it seems, it still is there, close. We’re sealed, tighter than space capsules. We can’t really forget anything.”
“Oh, I think about you,” she said, in a voice that was meant to be casual.
“I think about you all the time,” I said. “When I was in that fucking hospital, and at my parents’, and now in my own apartment.”
“Where do you live?”
“Fifty-three eighteen Kimbark. Two and a half rooms. Second floor.”
Jade nodded. “Kimbark,” she said. “I miss the old neighborhood. We’re lucky to be from there, believe me. Especially when you come east. They really give you hell for being a midwesterner out here, but it helps if you’re from Hyde Park. You can keep up with things.”
“Like what?”
“Talk.” She shrugged. “Stuff. Is the Medici Coffeehouse still open?”
“I think so.”
“Good. When I was in Chicago last time they were saying it might close.”
“When was that? When were you in Chicago?”
“In the winter. The worst time. Worse than Vermont.”
“This winter?”
Jade nodded.
“But I was there!” I almost stood up.
“I know. I was there with a friend. I thought about calling you. I really did. I almost called your parents to find you. I dropped the dime in the phone but I changed my mind. When I hung up, the dime didn’t come back. Scared me.”
“You should have. It’s so terrible that this is the first time we see each other. Your father’s funeral.”
“It fits,” she said. And then, “Sorry. That was stupid. Anyhow, I said I was with a friend. It wouldn’t have worked out very well.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. I mean it would be worth it. I’d see you under any circumstances.”
“We were on our way to California, Santa Barbara, her home town. So we stopped to see mine.”
“Susan.”
“What?”
“Her name is Susan. Keith told me about her. Your friend.”
Jade was silent, shrugged, her lips pressed tight, jaw tightened: she’d learned the silent warnings people give who don’t want to be asked certain questions. She had heard more than she could bear about Susan, about being with a woman and loving her. But the stab of jealousy I felt sunk into dead tissue: I’d bled the wounds a thousand times already and there was nothing more to feel and certainly nothing to say.
“Did you go to your house?” I asked.
Jade nodded. “Yes. It was hard but I owed it. It was a good thing, though. It didn’t look as bad in person as it does in dreams. In dreams it’s still on fire—just a little, like out of one window, or on the roof, but burning, always. It was good to see it as it really is. Have you?”
“For me it’s the opposite. It looks so much like it used to. It makes it harder, as if the whole thing comes close to never having happened. You know how it is when you play an event over and over in your mind and you see all the things that could have happened that would have made everything so different?”
We went toward the silence, sitting close to each other.
“I wanted to write to you when you were in the hospital,” Jade said, looking away from me. “To see how you were, you know, and tell you where I was going. But everything was so confusing, then. And I thought I might make trouble for you. There was no right thing to do, for me. It seemed wrong to write you after what happened and it felt wrong not to. I don’t approve, you know, I don’t approve of letting things drift. I hate that. But—” and then her voice broke, with a soft, furry click, and the color came rushing into her face. She lowered her head and hunched her shoulders.
I took her hand. No. I laid my hand on top of hers and then, one at a time, I curled my fingers around the heel of her hand until they touched the outer border of her palm. “Tell me,” I said.
“I feel so alone,” she whispered. She’d begun to cry.
“You’re not. I’m with you. I’m always with you.”
Suddenly we were no longer next to each other. Jade was standing, walking across the room, seating herself in the armchair and blotting her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I’m in my senior year at Stoughton,” she said, crossing her legs. She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Next five months I’m going…” she trailed off for a moment; her tears had left a web of moisture on her voice. “Next five months is all independent study. I’ve got two pregnant golden retrievers, one blind. They’re both going to drop their pups in a few more days and I’m going to study how the litters develop, how the ones with the blind mother do compared to the ones with the normal mother. Then do a paper and that’s it.”