Deanna Roy - Forever Innocent

I closed my own to cut off the visuals feeding my distraction, letting my head fall against the wall. Calling him had been a good thing. I felt in control again, less afraid of what had happened in the bathroom. Maybe now that the moment had passed I would be all right. I could send Gavin home, and we’d see each other in class on Monday, and fall into something easier than we’d endured so far. If I kept it light, then my secrets could stay tucked away. No more drama. No disaster or rejection or guilt.

His breath on my neck made me snap my eyes open.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No! I’m fine. This is fine. It’s good. Thank you.” God, I was gushing.

He picked up my hand and bent each finger, one at a time. My heart sped up crazy fast. He first starting doing this when we were young and just experimenting with kissing and touching. He saw it in some movie and realized when he did it that it had an effect on me that worked even better than on the woman on the screen.

Later, when we were lovers, he’d do it when we were out in public, just to tease me, knowing it made me think of all the things it led to. Feeling it now, each finger getting its own moment of attention, everything flooded back. The innocence we knew as children and friends. The playful way we copied the grown-ups around us, acting like other couples, sometimes as a joke, and other times in perfect seriousness.

And of course, later, when we knew the baby was coming, and that we would marry, and life might be accelerated, but was still the path we planned to go down eventually.

I struggled to find a way to avoid that dangerous direction. “You did this at Finn’s sonogram,” I said. “You know, the big one when we found out if he was a boy or a girl.” And if he was normal, I thought.

The sonogram had been fine, showing a healthy boy right on target for the dates they’d established before. We had no idea then that Finn would be born early and with a heart condition.

“That was a good day,” Gavin said. He brought my hand to his lips and kissed each finger.

Heat flooded through me again, and I knew I was falling. “He was so beautiful.”

“He was.”

“Sometimes he doesn’t seem real.”

Gavin gripped my hand and held it to his cheek. “I feel that way a lot.”

He did?

“You think about him? You had his picture.” My chest still warmed over, seeing it, even though I hadn’t been ready when Gavin pulled it out in the stairwell.

“Pretty much every day.” He let go of my hand and stretched out on the floor, hands beneath his head.

I was both relieved and disappointed that he moved away. “But you — you can manage it. You don’t get upset?”

He frowned. “Not much upsets me anymore.”

“How does that work?” I felt like I was getting worse, not better, although until Gavin had come back, I had been in a manageable place.

“I burned it out of me with beer and work and everyday life.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t watch TV for the baby commercials. And some stores are insufferable. There’s this sign on campus —”

“I know the one.”

“Tripped me up.”

Gavin stared up at the ceiling. “Could you be pregnant? We can help.” He looked over at me and his abs crunched together in a way I only knew from Hollister ads. “I know what it’s for, but I want to paint the whole kiosk black.”

“We never considered anything but keeping the baby, did we?”

“Nope. Hell, half the town was excited for us.”

It was true. So many of our classmates married right out of high school anyway. Jumping the gun hadn’t caused much of anyone so much as a blink.

“Remember how Old Man Wilkins brought over that ancient stool?” Gavin asked.

“It was so sweet. It had belonged to his little boy. I still have it.”

Gavin sat up. “Really?”

“Sure. It’s on the other end of the sofa.”

Gavin stood fluidly, each muscle taut, and I tried not to think about him as anything but, well, like Austin, or lumberjack boy, or my coworkers — guys I’d come across and felt no temptation with whatsoever.

Who was I kidding?

He picked up the little green stool. “Do you have anything else from our old place?” he asked.

I pushed myself up, not nearly as gracefully as he had. “Just small things. The bedside table. The little hula-girl lamp.”

“Hula girl!”

I had to smile. “Yes, the gift from the art teacher. She was always a little strange.”

“You just say that because she loved my bad paintings of waterfalls better than your bad paintings of waterfalls. Can I see her?”

“Sure.” I led him down the hallway to the bedroom, not realizing what a terrible idea it might be until I flipped on the light and saw the unmade bed, sheets strewn in every direction.

Gavin passed me and beelined for the lamp. “Turn off the overhead!”

I waited until he had his hand under the girl’s skirt, then killed the main light. Gavin switched on hula girl and as she warmed up, her hips swayed gently back and forth.

He looked over at me, his face bathed in the greenish light. “I missed her!”

I could barely swallow then. Seeing him there, leaning over the lamp, we could be in any time, any place.

Gavin must have noticed I had changed. He walked back to me and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, another familiar gesture that completed the sense that we had arrived in some other moment in our history. “This is good, really good. Don’t you think?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice. This was going to happen. It had already begun. 

Something had shifted in Corabelle. But it had been pushing and pulling all night, so I didn’t trust it. She’d been in my arms by the door, and again on the sofa, and I’d screwed it up every single time. I turned away and sat on her bed, looking for something else from our past to comment on, something easy.

Hula girl swayed on her stand, keeping the light moving like a wave. Corabelle’s room was simple, sparsely decorated, and all the pictures on the wall were of her family.

Then I saw it.

The frame held four images, two tall and two wide. The first picture was the sonogram, Finn’s shape clear in white on black. The next was the first shot, one I had taken, right after he was born, red faced and covered in a white paste. The last two were after they hooked him to the ventilator, the blue tape covering his mouth.

So much for keeping it easy.

She saw me looking and sat on the bed next to me. I wondered why she hung them up if she didn’t want anyone to know, and then I realized it was because no one came here. No one was in her room but her. She kept herself separate. Jenny said she only saw Corabelle at work.

How alone we’d both been. I’d busied myself with work, and playing pool with Mario, and paying girls to keep me company. But we stayed away from attachments, from closeness. We were the same.

“I just had the one from the funeral,” I said. “I didn’t take anything with me when I left.”

“I know. I thought you’d be back soon because you hadn’t packed so much as a toothbrush.” Her arm brushed against mine, but she didn’t move away.

“I really thought I’d come back. It’s just the farther I went, the harder it got to turn around.”

The moment had arrived to tell her what I’d done, and why I’d stayed away. Just get it over with and see if she hated me or not, if she could forgive me. Maybe she would just say, get a reversal. Or maybe she’d take it so personally that the rift would tear us apart a second time.

But she laid her head on my shoulder and I couldn’t breathe. Her fingers closed around my arm, and my blood rushed so hard, it was everything I could do not to pull her down on that bed, to love her mercilessly and without hesitation. Maybe we needed something stronger before we went down those dark paths. Maybe we could build again.

“Remember in the sunroom?” I couldn’t say anything else, not trusting my voice to hold together.

“Which time? We were busy in there.”

“The first time.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“Your parents thought it would be okay to leave us to go to that fire station fund-raiser,” I said.

“We were only fifteen.”

“Going on twenty.”

Corabelle squeezed my arm. “They had no idea.”

“What movie had done it this time?”

“How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.”

“Yes, Kate Hudson. Hot.”

Corabelle smacked my thigh.

“You did the same thing that night,” I said, laughing.

“What was the scene that got us?”

“In the bathroom, when they finally decide they actually like each other. He takes off her shirt.” I remembered that so clearly. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to do it with Corabelle. When the movie ended, we went into the sunroom, our together space since her parents were weird about me going in her bedroom now. We turned out the lights and talked for a while, then I stood up and dragged her with me.

“Raise your arms,” I told her.

Corabelle had giggled. “What for?”

“Just do it.”

The seriousness of my tone sobered her up. “Like in the movie?”

“Like that.”

She looked up at me, dark haired where the actress was blond, but just as intense, just as sure, and lifted her arms in the air. I held on to the bottom of her shirt, barely able to breathe, and lifted it over her head.

We were young, and we fumbled, but Corabelle was already on the shot, so we had nothing to worry about except the how and the where. And once we began, there was no stopping us.