Sliding Past Vertical Read online

  She crossed her arms over her chest and threw herself back against the seat. “I spent five hours cleaning last night and the place still looks like Bosnia. And my roommate’s smoking again, thanks to finding her tampons shredded and little Petie dead on her bedroom floor.”

  She let that soak in a while. He wasn’t so smug anymore. Even his cut-glass cheekbones seemed to have softened.

  “You don’t know,” he said finally, voice cracking. “These guys...you short them or something, they don’t exactly forgive and forget...”

  He swallowed a couple of times and started drumming on the wheel with his index fingers. He looked scared. It was about time. Maybe he’d finally tell her what was really going on. “Do they have something to do with the reason why your friend never called for his stuff?”

  He shook his head. “He did call. He got picked up and had to lay low for a few days. Since I already had the money, he wanted me to give his stuff to the guys who bailed him out, for payback. Turns out they’re the ones who broke my windshield. I told you, these aren’t happy-go-lucky guys.”

  Sarah had a sudden, awful feeling Jay was into this deeper than he knew. And by association, so was she. “So I’m guessing you put off calling them?”

  He turned away. “Something like that.”

  “And maybe...they came looking for it themselves? And somehow figured out on their own that you’d given it to your girlfriend to hold?”

  His eyes darkened. “Don’t push this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because...I might tell you something you don’t want to know.”

  She glared at him and then turned toward the window. A maple tree shuddered behind a curtain of water on the pane. “Fine. Then don’t tell me.”

  He let out his breath. His palm landed on her knee, sending a jolt up her leg. “Sarah...baby, I didn’t want you mixed up in this. All you wanted to do was help me...”

  He slid closer. Leather squeaked against leather. “I’m really sorry this happened...”

  The hand traveled up her thigh. He was nearly breathing in her ear. Did he actually think—?

  “Baby, I’m so sorry...”

  The words vibrated through her. She began to respond like a well-tuned Stratocaster. Boiling with fury, at him and at herself, she whipped around, scaring him off of her.

  “Too little, too late by a long shot!”

  “I can’t turn back time!” His voice was hoarse, his hands outstretched. “I’ll buy Dee Dee a new parakeet. I’ll pay for all the damage. Anything you want. I’ve still got most of the guy’s money.” He reached for his wallet.

  She couldn’t look at him. “I don’t want your freaking money.”

  “Then what can I do?”

  Get help, she thought, but the words stuck somewhere along the way. Her eyes dampened.

  He slumped against his seat, pushing a hand through his hair. “Man,” he said, after a long stretch of silence. “I really fucked this up, didn’t I?”

  Sarah wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “Just when I thought you and me, we had something special...”

  Something in her heart went “click.” She’d assumed he was talking about how he’d screwed up the deal.

  “I thought, you know, that you were the one...I wanted to ask you...” He smiled sadly as his gaze fell away. “Never mind.”

  She blinked at him through tears. “What?”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve blown it. End of story.”

  She should get out of the car. Go upstairs to Emerson and cry on his shoulder for the hundredth time. But she stayed. She had to know.

  He worked his hands together between his knees and worried the long fingernails he used instead of a pick. “I was going to ask you to help me get into rehab. Not that half-assed place I went to before,” he added quickly. “But something that’s really going to work. Maybe a therapist. Or hypnosis. Or that thing at the hospital. I know I can do it if you’re around to support me. And then maybe...maybe we can talk about the future?”

  He suddenly met her gaze, eyes never bluer, lashes never longer. Eyes not just touching her everywhere at once but also doing things to her she’d never had done before. And she was thinking about them. He squeaked against the seat, pulling at his jacket.

  “Baby...” His voice was a low purr. “Look, this is kind of uncomfortable, talking in the car. You want to go to my place for a cup of coffee?”

  “Oh...Jay, I don’t think...” She knew what would happen if she went to his apartment. He’d continue this magic trick and she’d have sex with him, and it would be great because he felt so guilty, so great she’d forget about times like this and all the other times before when she’d wanted to strangle him.

  “I just feel so...” The hand was back on her leg. The eyes glittered. “You know, close to you right now. Now that all of this is out in the open.”

  Except for the fact that she’d flushed his coke down the toilet and let him believe it had been stolen. “I can’t,” she said. “I’m too upset.”

  “Come on. I’ll help you take your mind off it.” The hand drew music along her thigh: G chords and grace notes and adagios. “Just one little cup of coffee?”

  The voice was soft and heavy. Her lids were sinking; her lips parted moistly. She wondered if she could be alone with him and not succumb. They did need to talk, after all. And it was getting awfully damp and stuffy in the car.

  “All right, I guess, but...” She thought of Emerson upstairs, waiting for her, worrying. She looked up and saw a shadow move across the window. She imagined him behind it, eyes haunted, mouth drawn down.

  “Mutt and Jeff, huh?” He peered up to her apartment. “Don’t worry, I’ll have you back before they miss you. Which one’s Emerson? The Brit or the one who sounds like his balls just dropped?”

  “How’d you know one of them was Emerson?”

  Frowning, he started the car. “Lucky guess.”

  They slid away, spraying up water.

  Sarah couldn’t help herself. “Like those guys knowing I had your coke was a lucky guess?”

  “I told you,” Jay said. “Don’t go there.”

  “Tough. We’re going there.”

  He missed a red light and blew out a relieved breath at having done it unscathed and uncaught. “Can’t you at least wait until we get home?”

  “I need to know now.”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “That’s for me to decide.”

  He swerved to avoid a pothole, nearly driving a cyclist into a parked car. “Shouldn’t even be on the fucking road in this weather,” he muttered.

  “Tell me or I’m going to the police,” Sarah said.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  The sneer canceled out any sexual thought she’d been having about him. “What are you going to tell them?” he asked. “That you were hiding a bag of coke? What do you think that makes you?”

  She’d forgotten that part. “I was doing you a favor,” she snapped. “You got me into this mess, something you did got me in trouble. You owe me an explanation.”

  “Okay, okay! Maybe...maybe I sort of...may have led them to believe you had it.”

  The world stopped revolving for a moment. Cars around them froze. Even the rain seemed to hang in mid-air. “You...what?”

  “I said you wouldn’t like it. I caved. One of them called, it was late, I was half toasted. He wanted to come over and get his stuff. I wasn’t ready to deal with that, so I said I didn’t have it.”

  “Because you were hiding it at your girlfriend’s house and—no, wait, let me guess—she wasn’t home.”

  “Well, uh, yeah, kind of. But I never mentioned any names.”

  He said this like she should have been proud. But the subtlety of the grammar wasn’t lost on her. “Names. Like more than one?”

  Her stomach dropped as a blade of silence cleaved them neatly apart. “More than one?”


  “They weren’t you,” he said finally.

  She sniffed back tears. The calm in his voice made it that much worse. Of all the other times he’d acted guiltily, why not this one? “None of them got to hold your coke for you?” she said. “Is that supposed to make me feel special?”

  “Baby...can’t we just...go talk about this like adults?”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you. Let me out.”

  “I can’t stop here. We’ll get creamed.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I’ll take you home.”

  “Don’t do me any more favors.”

  “We’re a mile from your house. You don’t have an umbrella.”

  “I’ll live. I just can’t look at you anymore.”

  “Baby—”

  “Let me out!”

  He pulled to the curb. She slammed the door. He peeled away, drenching her from the knees down in road grit and cold water.

  * * * * *

  In the next thirty minutes, Sarah was sprayed twice more. A cabbie shook his fist at her and yelled in fractured English. A car passed, full of college boys who promised to help dry her off. What had once been home she was satisfied to call refuge, a place where she didn’t have to answer to anyone, not even the two sets of eyes that met her at the front door.

  One pair was marble-dark and trusting; one looked as if it wanted to say, “I told you so,” but wouldn’t dare. It was impolite to gloat, especially to a woman in tears.

  She stomped upstairs and threw herself face down on the ruined bed. Two soggy sneakers plopped to the floor. In her head, she counted the seconds it would take for Emerson to knock. She’d never tell him that she’d almost gone back to Jay’s apartment. He’d be too disappointed in her.

  But Emerson didn’t come.

  Fine. She turned over and cursed as her heels and elbows caught ripped sections of canvas and shredded them further.

  I don’t need him. I don’t need Jay. I don’t need Jimmy. I don’t need this crappy apartment with the broken front lock and the broken shower knobs and the annoying roommate who names parakeets after her boyfriends.

  And I don’t need Boston.

  I could leave, she thought, and for a second, smiled. How appealing it sounded to escape to a new city, where she could reinvent herself again, cut her hair, buy a car, maybe even change her name.

  But the $34.15 in her checking account wouldn’t even rent her a moving van.

  She stared at the ceiling: the only thing in the room, it seemed, the dealers hadn’t defiled. She heard Emerson’s voice in her head—that you should sleep two nights on any major decision.

  But she wondered how you were supposed to sleep on it when you had nothing to sleep on.

  Eventually, her own body betrayed her. It could no longer resist the aromas of curry, sautéed onions, and steamed rice beckoning with long jeweled fingers from underneath her bedroom door.

  She mopped herself up and attacked the plate she assumed Rashid had made and left for her in the fridge. As she was putting her dish in the sink, she saw Emerson absorbed in a novel on the tiny screened-in back porch, glasses slipping down his nose.

  Not thinking she needed an invitation, she sank next to him on Dee Dee’s white wicker loveseat, its cushions printed with pink cabbage roses. Emerson marked his place and set the book aside. He blinked at her, waiting.

  Sarah shook her head, and he put an arm around her shoulders.

  She accepted his affection and could have used it hours ago, but she had been too proud to ask. At that moment, she was too tired and stunned, too small and used-up to be proud.

  His shirt smelled like curry and his damp, moldering room back in Syracuse. She curled up against him and listened to the rain and his heartbeat.

  If she listened hard enough, she could hear the ocean.

  Finally she said, “Are all men total schmucks or just the ones in my life?”

  Pause. “I think I’ve just been insulted.”

  “I didn’t mean you. You were an aberration. I must have gone temporarily sane.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw a piece of a smile. He petted her hair.

  She wouldn’t tell him about Jay’s other girlfriends. A father with a wandering fly had given Emerson zero tolerance for men who cheated on women. Dirk Blade might have been scum, but at least there wasn’t a Mrs. Blade home washing lipstick stains off his Euro briefs.

  “We left you lunch,” Emerson said.

  “It was good.” She noticed for the first time, and with some relief, that he seemed to be the only other warm body in the apartment. Only one set of eyes to answer to. “Where’s Rashid?”

  “He went to Cambridge to visit an uncle who teaches at MIT. He’ll be back in the morning.”

  This was good. She’d known Emerson forever. She didn’t have to entertain him, pretend everything was fine, or worry about what she looked like.

  “I’ll help you clean up inside,” he said. “If you want.”

  “Maybe in a while.” It was a good idea, but she felt comfortable against him and didn’t want to move.

  “And then I was thinking, maybe you’ll let me buy you a new bed.”

  “Em, I don’t want you to—”

  “Where else are you going to sleep? The futon’s ruined.”

  He had a point. “I’ll think about it later,” she said, eyelids growing heavy.

  * * * * *

  He could have teased her. Given her one of his baby-bird looks or read more into her falling asleep in his arms than the circumstances warranted. He only said that she was probably overtired and then went about his business.

  “Where does the coffee table go?”

  “Where you have it is fine.”

  “I think they cracked one of the legs.”

  “I think it was like that before.”

  Then there were long stretches of silence, until the next task came up that needed discussion.

  “You want to bother gluing this vase back together?”

  “I don’t know. It’s Dee Dee’s.”

  “Okay, I’ll leave it here on the counter and she can decide.”

  Sarah felt like she was sleepwalking: dreaming about someone else’s living room, someone else’s possessions. Someone who had died, perhaps, and the two of them had been charged with taking inventory for the estate sale.

  I’ll have so little to pack, she thought. Most of these things she could easily leave behind. She felt no attachment.

  “You have a particular order for the books?”

  They had done what they could in the living room and were starting on her bedroom. She’d just discovered another practical reason to store books in plastic milk crates. When the time came to move and start her new life, she could turn them over and carry them out.

  “Nah, just as long as they fit.”

  He plucked a hardcover copy of Dune from between her dresser and a milk crate. “Hey, is this—?”

  “The copy you gave me? Yes.”

  “On our second date,” he said, tenderly smoothing a dust bunny from the pages. “I can’t believe you kept it. I thought you would have chucked everything I’d given you out a window.”

  “But I hadn’t read it yet.”

  He laughed. “Did you keep anything else from back then?”

  She shrugged a shoulder. Only about a thousand memories of sharing secrets as two young, damaged lives opened up to each other like oysters.

  “Nothing in particular,” she said.

  “You must have really hated me.”

  “No, I—” A blush crept up her cheeks. What she’d felt for him at that time was too complicated to wrap up in one tidy sentence. Mostly she’d hated herself for hurting him. And she had to make it his fault because it was too much for her to carry alone.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I was pretty pathetic.”

  “Well, maybe a little. Did you...did you save anything I gave you?”

  He was quiet for a mom
ent, as if making a decision.

  Then he took out his wallet. He handed her a student ID card, the laminate yellowed and cracked. The picture was of someone she would have crossed the street to avoid. She didn’t remember him looking that scary back then, so skinny and frightened.

  “It’s on the back,” he said.

  She turned it over. “It’s just a bunch of old pieces of tape.”

  “Look hard. Can you see it?”

  She squinted. “No.”

  “One night, we’d gone to the movies and we were walking back to the dorm. You had something in your eye and we stopped under a streetlight so I could see what it was. It was just an eyelash, I brushed it away and then you kissed me. When I got back to my room, the eyelash was still on my finger.”

  She stared at the card and thought she saw a wiggle of something, like an old spore encased in amber. “That’s my eyelash?”

  He nodded.

  She handed it back to him. “You are so weird.”

  “Yeah, I was a sentimental kid.” He looked at the picture a moment before returning the ID to his wallet.

  She’d liked that sentimental kid. He was a pain in the ass sometimes—moody, sanctimonious. But she’d liked him. Maybe she’d even loved him.

  “Casablanca,” she said.

  “You remember the movie? And they call me sentimental.”

  He looked at her far too long, with big, haunted eyes.

  “Well...we should—” Sarah gestured to the rubble.

  “You’re right.” He put Dune back in the crate. “We should.”

  They cleaned a while longer, not saying much, and Sarah’s bedroom, except for the abused futon, was soon back to normal. Sarah felt restless. What next, she thought, when everything was done and they had no Rashid to distract them? Then she’d have to think about her future. Maybe even talk about it.

  Emerson fussed with a roughed-up table lamp, attempting to rethread the cord through the base.

  “I’m going to get the mail,” she said.

  He grunted, absorbed in his task.

  She padded downstairs. The haul was mostly for her roommate: a fashion magazine, a medical journal, a greeting card addressed to “Nurse Dee Dee” in a child’s handwriting. There was the fall schedule for Jane Fonda aerobics classes at the Y, a flyer from a local band (Dee Dee was dating the drummer), and a postcard from Jamaica from the girl who cut her hair.