Beyond the Storm (9780758276995) Page 20

  “Idiot.”

  “Yup.”

  “So why did you continue to go out with him?”

  “Are you really asking that question?”

  Adam acknowledged the stupidity of asking. “Right, got it. Good-looking, great hair, quarterback of the football team . . . am I missing something?”

  “Really good kisser,” she added, and then looked like she regretted saying that.

  “Vanessa, you don’t have to worry about offending me. You’re allowed to remember the good times you and Danny shared together. It’s not the past if you deny something ever existed. Everything happened, experiences don’t just disappear because you don’t want to remember them.”

  “I’m not denying it . . . him, it’s just . . . here now, with you, I just don’t want Danny Stoker intruding on this . . . uh, unexpected night of ours. It’s like the prom we really never had—or were promised. No guarantees, huh? Guess I’ve learned that. But still, Adam, the prom should have been a time when you could dance at will, laugh like you hadn’t a care in the world. When the night ended it’s like you’d endured a rite of passage. You got through graduation . . . anything was possible.”

  “I still think anything is possible.”

  “Even without a job, or prospects for a future?”

  “Hey, I’m only thirty-eight. I’ve still got time to figure it out.”

  “Adam, you’re just being flippant.”

  “Lighten the mood,” he said. “Not everything we talk about tonight has to be soaked with meaning. Sometimes you just have to make a joke at your own expense.”

  “You want to know something?”

  “Sure, let me hear it.”

  “I don’t have a job either.”

  “But . . . Mrs. Stillwell-Abramson . . . who will dress her and keep her schedule . . . and . . .”

  “Her husband is no longer ambassador. New president, new appointments. They moved back to that stuffy Fifth Avenue apartment six months ago.”

  “And you?”

  “I moved back in with Reva, but this time in a crappy but cool flat in Putney—not quite Central London but good enough.” She laughed. “Like I’m regressing. Maybe that’s why I decided to come back for the reunion. Maybe I couldn’t believe twenty years had somehow passed and I was still living with a roommate, drinking, smoking again, wasting away the days because I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

  “So, we’re kind of in the same boat.”

  “And sinking fast,” she said, looking away as she said the words, wishing she could take them back. Why was the sea . . . or the lake or ocean or whatever body of water was nearby, why did it keep washing into her thoughts, tangling them with its discarded entrails? She’d never quite taken to the water, and she hated to swim. Were these allusions mere illusions? Turning back to him, she said, “Tomorrow may be coming, but that doesn’t mean we know what comes next. Heck, don’t know what I’m doing a minute from now, much less tomorrow or six months or a decade from now.”

  “Then let’s take the night a minute at a time. No sense rushing time when it doesn’t seem to be moving anyway.”

  “Doesn’t stop me from worrying about tomorrow when it happens,” she said. “You want to know something, Adam? What this night means? Why we’re telling these stories? Because I don’t think we’re ever truly done with the past. It shapes us, perhaps defines us, and right now it’s consuming us. So let’s embrace it the way it wants. Come on, I’ve spilled my guts enough. For now. I think it’s your turn again.”

  Adam steeled himself, wondering just where this was leading.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Anything,” she said. “Surprise me.”

  “You want me to open up my letters and share with you what I wrote?”

  His words chilled her, this feeling almost like a sharp stab at her abdomen. Was it cold from the night air, or fear at what lay beyond these borders? And if fear, of what? Of the unknown? Why had he used such a metaphor, when earlier the idea of the letters had brought about her fainting spell? But as she studied his expression, there didn’t seem to be any hidden meaning behind his bemused look. So Vanessa wrapped her arms around herself, forged ahead, and did as he asked. She delved into his past, his psyche.

  “Tell me about your high school.”

  They, of course, had gone to the same one. Yet she could tell he knew exactly what she meant. “Why go there?”

  “Adam?”

  “Yes, Vanessa.”

  “Spill.”

  “Remind me again why we’re doing this?”

  “Because we’ve talked about everything else—life and love, sex and babies, spouses and lovers, things we’ve lost or things we’ve never had. Things that might have been, or might have happened in some other time. So here’s where we are, the only logical place for us to return to—high school, the prom. This is supposed to be a high school reunion, Adam, right? And we were both planning to attend it and I think we were each looking for the other. Instead the fates, as you believe, have thrown us together for our very own reunion. I shared my story, tell me yours.”

  “High school sucked.” He paused. “End of story.”

  “I’d like to hear what happened during your pause. Your eyes . . . they darkened.”

  “Do you know what it meant to get that job at KFC, to land clients who trusted you, who had faith in you and unflagging confidence that you’d make them rich? Absolutely fucking great. I had left all of my old life behind, and I found a place where I fit in.”

  “You fit in before . . . just, you know, in your world. With your own friends, pursuing your own interests. You just weren’t comfortable in your own skin yet, it wasn’t like you wanted to be someone else. Don’t you get it? That’s the lesson, Adam, that envying other people’s lives just makes you miserable. So don’t think that nobody cared . . . that you didn’t matter. Thinking that you don’t fit in anywhere, that’s an awful outlook on life.”

  “It was an even worse way to live. Vanessa . . . can we not do this?”

  She crossed over from her side of the porch, sat beside him, her hand caressing his arm. The cool night allowed the temperature to flare up. “Tell me.”

  “You sure know how to get a guy’s attention, then—and now,” he said. “Okay, well, for starters I hung out with the math geeks. We played stupid games. Get this: One kid would toss out random numbers and the others had to add, subtract, multiply, divide, at will, and if you got it wrong everyone forced you to recite the Pythagorean theorem. For fun. Sounds cool, just like a date at Sno-Cone, huh? I didn’t even like math, I sucked at algebra. But there I was. You were out socializing with Danny, drinking your malteds and probably sneaking booze under the bleachers while he was trying to unbutton your blouse, and I was drinking flat grape soda at Hank Goldman’s house. No wonder we were nicknamed the Zit Club.”

  Vanessa let out a laugh, then quickly apologized. “Sorry, I forgot about that.”

  “Where’s the wine?”

  “Now you sound like me.”

  “That’s why we get along,” he said. “I think it’s still in the kitchen, I’ll be right back.”

  Adam left her to her own thoughts. In the craziness of the day, all the events that had occurred between the two of them—first thrust together by the chance accident and then by some untenable passion—she hadn’t actually thought about the true nature of their relationship. Where had it even begun? On the grassy hill beside the school’s water tower when he asked her to the prom . . . or, more accurately, where she asked him? Or even before that, when neither of them knew who they were or what the universe held for them? They did have a surprising amount in common, including that overwhelming desire to get out from under where you grew up, redefine yourself as you saw fit. No one to judge you, your decisions. Not once today had they lost patience with each other, lost their temper. Well, more so Vanessa than Adam, but never at the other’s expense. But there was more than that pu
lling her toward him. No doubt she found him attractive, that wasn’t up for debate. She wondered what would come with tomorrow, under the new light of a fresh morning.

  Answers to such questions would have to wait, the night still held more secrets.

  Clearly those secrets were close to revealing themselves.

  Adam returned with the wine, two new glasses.

  “Don’t break this one, we’re out of jelly glasses.”

  “At least the glass was empty when I dropped it.”

  “The rare occasion when the glass being empty was a positive,” he said, raising his glass with yet another toast.

  “Now what?”

  “We would have had to endure even more toasts at the reunion. So just run with it.”

  “Okay, toastmaster. Toast away.”

  He thought before speaking. “Actually, let’s cheer to us.”

  “Us?”

  “Yes. For what we’ve been through, and what we’ve become.”

  “Stronger?”

  “Wiser.”

  “Drunker,” she said, and laughed with the sound of someone grown suddenly content. In this life, this crazy world, you took what you got, you made memories out of moments, and you locked them in your mind so no one could steal them from you. She sipped, looked up at Adam to guess what he was thinking and found him staring out into the blackness. What hung back out of their reach was sealed up and unforeseen, like those letters upstairs, but that didn’t mean it failed to exist. Memories she chose not to remember, they had a way of sneaking out.

  “So . . . math club?”

  “It wasn’t an official club . . .” He stopped, smiled at how ridiculous he sounded, trying to defend a decision he’d made more than twenty years ago. “Look, let’s not dwell on Danton Hill High. Those kids were my friends when I needed them, and then I moved on because I couldn’t see myself drinking grape soda the rest of my school days. So I drifted away, but not anywhere where I found solid land. Just islands, many of them my own. I wasn’t athletic, my singing was bad enough for the shower to turn off automatically, and I didn’t smoke or do drugs, so . . . you know, no hanging out behind the school with those kids.”

  “Sounds lonely.”

  “I survived.”

  A comfortable silence enveloped them even as the cool air swirled around them. Vanessa sensed there was something more he wanted to say, he was just taking his time getting there. Rather than rush the moment, she would offer him the same consideration he had shown her, so she could wait till the right time. So she remained sitting, drinking, waiting, thinking.

  He spoke at last. “Sophomore year, I still looked like I could pass for a sixth grader. You know, get in for less at the movies? Which everyone thought was a cool thing—well, the math guys, anyway. They would calculate how much money I’d saved with such a scam. But that’s not the story . . . it’s . . . yeah, sophomore year . . . I was so naïve, dumb even.”

  He took another sip, checked out the bottle’s contents. Enough for one last round.

  “It was February,” he said. “Actually, the fourteenth.”

  “Valentine’s Day,” Vanessa said, realizing just where this stroll down memory lane was taking them. Because in a flash she remembered that day too, the square red envelope, the red and white card littered with golden sparkles that fell all over her dress when she opened it. She knew before she read the cramped signature line that the card had been from Adam; the way he’d looked at her queerly all day long, as though waiting for a chance to talk to her when friends didn’t surround her, classmates . . . Danny, he’d been waiting to give her this.

  And lost his courage.

  “Do you know that I gave you a Valentine’s card?”

  “Actually, you didn’t give it to me. You left it for me, sliding it right through the upper slots of my school locker. I found it after football practice—I always stayed after school to watch Danny. He said he tossed better when I was cheering him on.”

  “I put it there at the end of the day. I almost didn’t.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “You are?”

  “Remember in grade school every Valentine’s Day our teachers would have us cut and paste cards? Glue everywhere and inevitably one of the kids would cut himself with those cheap scissors and go bleeding his way down to the school nurse, but in the end we all got those little makeshift cards made and passed them around to classmates and family and even some teachers. It was a pretty corny tradition. But still, as forced upon us as they were, there was inherent sweetness to getting loads of valentines.” She paused, pouring a bit more wine into her glass. “That sophomore year, the only Valentine’s Day card I received was the one from you.”

  “But Danny . . .”

  She waved off his comment before he could say anything more. “But Danny nothing. I remember that night clearly because he went out with his buddies. Someone had a fake ID and so they drank a case of cheap beer and probably puked their guts out later. Not that they didn’t deserve it. Happy Valentine’s Day, Vanessa!”

  “What did you do?”

  “I sat at home and ate a pint of rocky road and held your card.”

  “It was corny.”

  “Yup. It was sweet too. I remember what you wrote inside it.”

  “You couldn’t possibly . . . ?”

  “You start, I’ll finish.”

  “‘From the land to the sea . . .” Adam began.

  “‘You are all I see,’” Vanessa completed. “I knew it was from you.”

  “How could you know? How did I sign it?”

  “You signed it . . .” She paused. She sought an answer in her emerging memories. Could she picture the card, the awkward, juvenile lettering? A surprised expression crossed her face and she looked up. “There was no name, no signature. Just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “Initials.”

  Adam nodded. “What initials?”

  “A.B.”

  “See, could have been anybody.”

  She tossed him a look of genial annoyance. “Not likely. I knew then, and I know now, it was the initials of one Adam Blackburn.”

  He went along with the idea, for now. “Okay, fine. So I was hiding behind an alias. You figured it out. A.B. was Adam Blackburn. Guilty as charged. I was a dork.”

  “Yes, you were,” she said.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Danny saw it.”

  “What?”

  She’d gone there, might as well continue. “The Valentine’s card. He came over to my house a couple days later and your card was still on my dresser, right beside my earring tree and jewelry box.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Oh, he tore it to shreds, tossed it into the air like it was confetti.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She looked away, almost shamed. “You can’t go back. You can’t change who you were. Not you, not me, definitely not Danny.”

  “He was, is, and probably always will be a jerk.”

  Setting her glass down, Vanessa stood up, her feet taking her a distance from Adam, her arms encircling the columns of the porch for support, for something to lean on. She, like Adam before her, stared out in the darkness, and even though her eyes couldn’t be certain what she had found beyond those blackened borders, she knew what images her mind saw. She saw Danton Hill, eleven years ago, the last time she’d ever set foot on its soil. The week before her interview with Mrs. Stillwell-Abramson, just a few days before she would coincidentally run into Adam at the Standard and screw him in the men’s room because she just wanted to forget. She had returned home that time—thankfully with Reva at her side—for a funeral.

  “Adam,” Vanessa said, “Danny Stoker’s dead.”

  “Oh, uh, wow. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “That’s why I came back to the States, that time when we met up in New York.”

  “You’d gone home?”

  “All the way to Danton Hill.”

  “S
o, a little part of you, maybe you still loved Danny? Loved the memories of your fun times in high school, not how it ended or what happened after that . . .”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. Pain stabbed at her heart. “I didn’t love Danny Stoker, and I doubt I ever did. You know why I went back?”

  Adam was still seated on the porch. She could feel his eyes bearing down on her, but she couldn’t look back at him, she couldn’t reveal the awful emotions boiling inside her heart. “No. But I think you want to tell me.”

  “I just wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to see him lying in that casket.”

  Her focus was elsewhere, so the sudden warmth of his arms surprised her. She welcomed his touch, invited him closer. He held her, and she held him, and she allowed a tear to fall from her eyes and slide down unchecked upon her cheek. She did nothing to wipe it away, it would have meant breaking free from his embrace and that was the last thing she wanted. Right now, this time and this moment, amidst clouds and blackness, equal parts mystery and darkness, she needed to feel something other than pain.

  Just then Adam broke the embrace, but still never let go of her hand.

  “Vanessa Massey,” he said, taking a step back. “May I have this dance?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I want to dance with you.”

  “Adam, there’s no music.”

  “Hey, our cars got to dance, the music of crashing metal.”

  “That’s not even funny.”

  “So stop questioning reality, it’s not real, not now,” he said. “Only the two of us exist in this moment, and we can make any noise we want and no one will hear us. Music surrounds us if we want it, it’s in our hearts and our minds. We can feel the beat between our hearts, the heat between our bodies, the rhythm of our emotions whenever we want. Feel it now, Vanessa, feel the music with me.”

  She thought he was crazy but maybe crazy was good, maybe right now crazy was perfect. She accepted his lead, taking hold of his strong hand. He led her around the width of the porch, one step, then two, then three and then four in classic ballroom fashion, and she was the lucky girl in the swirling gown and he was the handsome boy who smelled of fresh cedar, and with the waltz playing somewhere way back in their past but somehow seeping through an encroaching glint of moonlit darkness and into this dreamy moment, she suddenly laughed and shouted and waited with giddy anticipation before he twirled her around, not once and not twice but a third time, until she dizzyingly collapsed into his arms.