Before I Fall

Before I Fall Page 52

She balls up her fists and squeezes out, “Thanks.” Then she turns and heads up to the house. For a second the light falling on her face makes her skin look wet, but I’m not sure whether she’s crying or whether it’s the snow.

Kent leans over and opens the door for me and I slide in. We back away from Lindsay’s house and turn onto the main road in silence. He drives slowly, carefully, twin funnels of snow lit up by the headlights, both hands resting lightly on the steering wheel. There’s so much I want to say to him, but I can’t bring myself to speak. I’m tired and my head hurts, and I just want to enjoy the fact that there’s only a few inches separating our arms, the fact that his car smells like cinnamon, the fact that he has the heat on high for me. It makes me feel drowsy and heavy in my limbs, even as my insides are alive and fluttering and 100 percent aware of him, so close.

As we get near my house he slows down so we’re barely crawling, and I’m hoping it’s because he doesn’t want the drive to end either. This is the moment for time to stop, right here—for space to yawn open and fall away like it does at the lip of a black hole, so that time can do its endless loops and keep us forever going forward into the snow. But no matter how slowly Kent goes, the car moves forward.

Soon my street sign appears crookedly on the left, and then we’re passing the darkened houses of my neighbors, and then we’re at my house.

“Thanks for driving me home,” I say, turning to him as he turns to me and says, “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

We both laugh nervously. Kent pushes his bangs away from his eyes, and they immediately flop back into place, making my stomach dip.

“No problem,” he says. “It was my pleasure.”

It was my pleasure. Only Kent could say it and make it not sound like something cheesy from an old movie, and my heart aches frantically for a second as I think of all the time I wasted, seconds and hours spun out of my fingertips forever like snow into the dark.

We sit for a minute. I’m desperate to say something, anything, so I don’t have to get out of the car, but the words don’t come and the seconds run by.

Finally I blurt out, “Everything tonight was awful except for this.”

“Except for what?”

I tick my index finger once between us. You and me. Everything was awful except for this.

A light comes on in his eyes. “Sam.” He says my name once, just breathes it, and I never knew that a single syllable could transform my whole body into a dancing, glowing thing. He reaches out suddenly and puts a warm hand on either side of my face, tracing my eyebrows, his thumb resting lightly for one single miraculous second on my bottom lip—I’m tasting cinnamon on his skin—and then he drops his hand and pulls away, looking embarrassed.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“No…it’s okay.” My body is humming. He must be able to hear it. At the same time it feels like my head is going to lift off from my shoulders.

“It’s just…God, it’s so awful.”

“What’s so awful?” My body abruptly stops humming and my stomach goes leaden. He’s going to tell me he doesn’t like me. He’s going to tell me he sees through me again.

“I mean, with everything that happened tonight…it’s not the right time…and you’re with Rob.”

“I’m not with Rob,” I say quickly. “Not anymore.”

“You’re not?” He’s staring at me so intensely I can see the stripes of gold alternating with the green in his eyes like spokes of a wheel.

I shake my head.

“That’s a good thing.” He’s still staring at me like that, like he’s the first and last person who will ever stare at me. “Because…” His voice trails off, and his eyes travel slowly down to my lips, and there’s so much heat roaring through my body I swear I’m going to pass out.

“Because?” I prompt him, surprised I can still speak.

“Because I’m sorry, but I can’t help it, and I really need to kiss you right now.”

He puts one hand behind my neck and pulls me toward him. And then we’re kissing. His lips are soft and leave mine tingling. I close my eyes, and in the darkness behind them I see beautiful blooming things, flowers spinning like snowflakes, and hummingbirds beating the same rhythm as my heart. I’m gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it’s a good feeling—like soaring, like being totally free. His other hand pushes my hair from my face, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment—however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days—while he’s saying my name into my mouth and I’m breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I’ve ever been kissed in my life.

He pulls away too soon, still cupping my face. “Wow,” he says, out of breath. “Sorry. But wow.”

“Yeah.” The word catches in my throat.

We stay there like that, staring at each other, and for once I’m not feeling anxious or worried about what he’s thinking. I’m just happy, held in his eyes, buoyed up in a warm, bright place.

“I really like you, Sam,” he says quietly. “I always have.”

“I like you too.” Don’t worry about tomorrow. Don’t even think about it. I shut my eyes briefly, pushing away everything but this moment, his warm hands, those delicious green eyes, the lips.

“Come on.” He leans forward and kisses my forehead once, gently. “You’re tired. You need to sleep.”

He gets out of the car and scoots around to the passenger side to open the door for me. The snow has begun to stick, a blanket over everything, blurring the edges of the world. Our footsteps are muffled as we make our way up the front path and onto the porch. My parents have left the porch light on, the only light in a dark house on a dark street—maybe the only light in the world. In its glow the snow looks like falling stars.

“You have snow in your eyelashes.” Kent traces a finger over my eyelids and over the bridge of my nose, making me shiver. “And in your hair.” A hand fluttering, the feel of fingertips, a cupped palm on my neck. Heaven.

“Kent.” I wrap my fingers around the collar of his shirt. No matter how close he’s standing, it isn’t close enough. “Are you ever afraid to go to sleep? Afraid of what comes next?”

He smiles a sad little smile and I swear it’s like he knows. “Sometimes I’m afraid of what I’m leaving behind,” he says.

Then we’re kissing again, our bodies and mouths moving together so seamlessly it’s like we’re not even kissing, just thinking about kissing, thinking about breathing, everything right and natural and unconscious and relaxed, a feeling not of trying but of complete abandonment, letting go, and right then and there the unthinkable and impossible happens: time does stand still after all. Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch.

SEVEN

The last time I have the dream it goes like this: I am falling, tumbling through the air, but this time the darkness is alive around me, full of beating things, and I realize that I’m not surrounded by dark but have only had my eyes closed all this time. I open them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterflies take off around me, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below us, all green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath me, and the air around me is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and I’m laughing, laughing, laughing as I spin through the air because, of course, I haven’t been falling all this time.

I’ve been flying.

And when I wake up it’s wonderful, like I’ve been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty. I know now.

It was never about saving my life.

Not, at least, in the way that I thought.

AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY

I remember I once saw this old movie with Lindsay; in it the main character was talking about how sad it is that the last time you have sex you don’t know it’s the last time. Since I’ve never even had a first time, I’m not exactly an expert, but I’m guessing it’s like that for most things in life—the last kiss, the last laugh, the last cup of coffee, the last sunset, the last time you jump through a sprinkler or eat an ice-cream cone, or stick your tongue out to catch a snowflake. You just don’t know.

But I think that’s a good thing, really, because if you did know it would be almost impossible to let go. When you do know, it’s like being asked to step off the edge of a cliff: all you want to do is get down on your hands and knees and kiss the solid ground, smell it, hold on to it.

I guess that’s what saying good-bye is always like—like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you’re in the air, there’s nothing you can do but let go.

Here is the last thing I ever say to my parents: See you later. I say, I love you, too, but that’s earlier. The last thing I say is, See you later.

Or actually, to be completely accurate, the last thing I say to my father is, See you later. To my mother I say, Positive, because she’s standing in the kitchen doorway holding the newspaper, her hair messy, her bathrobe hanging wrong, and she says, Are you sure you don’t want breakfast? Like she always does.

I look back when I’m at the front door. Behind her my father is at the stove, humming to himself and burning eggs for my mother’s breakfast. He’s wearing the striped pajama pants Izzy and I got him for his last birthday, and his hair is sticking out at crazy angles like he’s just put a finger in an electrical socket. My mom puts a hand on his back while she squeezes past him, then settles at the kitchen table, shaking out the newspaper. He scoops the eggs onto a plate and sets it in front of her, saying, “Voilà, madame. Extra crispy,” and she shakes her head and says something I can’t hear, but she’s smiling, and he leans down and kisses her once on the forehead.

It’s a nice thing to see. I’m glad I was looking.

Izzy follows me to the door with my gloves, grinning at me and showing off the gap between her two front teeth. A feeling of vertigo overwhelms me when I look at her, a nauseous feeling lashing in my stomach, but I take a deep breath and think of counting steps, think of running leaps, and my dream of flying.

One, two, three, jump.

“You forgot your gloves.” Lisping, smiling, wisps of golden hair.

“What would I do without you?” I crouch down and squeeze her in a hug, as I do seeing our whole life together: her tiny infant toes and scalp that smelled like baby powder; the first time she tottered over to me; the first time she rode a bike and fell and scraped her knee, and when I saw all that blood on her, I almost died from fright, and I carried her all the way home. And I see beyond it, strangely, glimpses of her in the other direction: Izzy grown tall and gorgeous with one hand resting on a steering wheel, laughing; Izzy wearing a long green dress and picking her way in heels toward a waiting limousine on her way to prom; Izzy loaded down with books as the snow swirls around her, ducking into a dorm, her hair a golden flame against the white.