Chapter 68
— Chapter 68 —
Aubrey had a horrible middle-of-the-night realization a few weeks ago and came downstairs in tears.
“Once we leave, we’ll never see Lenny Juice again,” she said. “He’s too old already and we’ll be gone too long.”
Bee had promised to take care of Lenny for us. But Aubrey said she couldn’t stand the idea that he would die thinking she didn’t love him anymore. So we spend a lot of time trying to construct a portable rat cage. Nothing too heavy, nothing too chewable. Some kind of pouch that clips to a backpack. We make him a harness and a tiny polar fleece sleeping bag too, but in the end, we don’t need it. Aubrey wakes up to find Lenny cold and still on the pillow next to her.
“He had a good life,” I tell her, holding her as she cries. “You gave him a much better life than he was going to have. That’s the best we can do for each other, and you did that for Lenny.”
She’s scared if we bury him in the yard, a cat, or raccoon, or coyote will dig him up. “He’s not prey. He’s my friend,” she says.
So we craft a nest of newspaper and cotton balls and wrap Lenny in a shroud of torn bedsheets. Jam and Shray collect dead branches from the yard, and Aubrey and I tie them together to make a raft. The swamp isn’t fully frozen. There’s a hole in the ice we can get to by balancing on a dead log.
“You were the best rat I ever met,” Aubrey says, and we all agree that it’s true.
“He was only ever happy,” Shray says. And that makes me cry, because there are so few things in the world that are purely, simply good, and Lenny was one of them.
“I never thought I could love a rat,” I say, “but I loved him so much.”
Jam goes inside, opens the windows in the sunroom, and plays a song that sounds like a lullaby. And we say goodbye to Lenny Juice before we light his raft on fire to send him into the afterlife.
Then we sit on the back patio wrapped in blankets, sucking on Dum-Dums. Aubrey brought home a massive bag of them from Gristedes, because we are determined to finally quit smoking. She insists we eat them on the patio, since congregating outside was what she loved best about her bad habit.
“Which kind did you get?” Aubrey asks Shray. They’re huddled together under my parents’ old corduroy comforter, like a two-headed garden gnome, and I can’t look at them without imagining the tearful moment when they’ll say goodbye.
“Root beer,” he says.
“I got a question mark,” Aubrey tells him.
“What does it taste like?”
“Here.” She holds out her lollipop so they can switch.
“It’s good,” Shray says. “But I don’t know what it’s supposed to be either.”
Jam holds his lollipop out to me, joking. I bat his hand away. He grabs my wrist with his other hand, looks me in the eyes, and I picture our goodbye. I don’t know how I’m going to leave him.
“Hey, Jam,” Shray says. “I like that song you were playing. What’s it called?”
We snap out of it. Jam drops my wrist.
“I don’t know… Requiem for Lenny Juice?”
Shray thinks about it. “I like it when songs have really long titles. Like, Song for a Sunrise in the Town on the Hill on the Eve of the Morning Before the Nocturne… ”
“Is that a real song?” Aubrey asks.
“No. I made it up,” Shray says. “I can’t think of any of the real ones. But when Dada is listening to the radio, all the titles go on forever.”
Jam laughs. “How about A Requiem for Lenny Juice on the Occasion of His Viking Funeral in the Cradle of the American Circus ?”
“I like it,” Shray says.
“Cradle?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Aubrey says. “Somers is the ‘Cradle of the American Circus.’?”
“I thought it was home .”
“Nope.” Aubrey points her lollipop at me. “It says cradle on the sign.”
“It used to be home .” I look to Jam. He shrugs. “Oh, you don’t remember,” I say. “I’m pretty sure it used to be home .”
“In 1808, a year that’s great…,” Shray says.
Jam laughs. “There was a man named Hachaliah…”
Aubrey chimes in and the three of them say, “… who had an elephant beside him…”
“What the hell is that?” I ask.
Aubrey looks at Jam. “You had Mrs. Beekhof for kindergarten too?”
“Yeah, how does the rest of that poem go?” Jam asks.
Shray and Aubrey continue. “An old girl named Bet, whose future was set, to work in the field…”
Jam joins them again, “… until Hachaliah learned of the riches she’d yield. So instead of plowing fields of corn, thanks to Old Bet, the circus was born!” Aubrey and Shray open their arms over their heads like the sun rising.
“It’s so dumb!” Jam says. “Does corn even get plowed?” He snickers and I shove him.
Aubrey shrugs. “I guess you have to plow the field to plant corn?”
“It’s pretty dumb,” Shray says.
“And Bailey didn’t even start the circus!” I shout. “The ancient Romans had circuses.”
“What is your beef with Bailey?” Jam asks, amused.
“Did you ever think about it?” I say.
He shakes his head.
“Do you think that elephant wanted to be some dude’s spectacle?”
“Shit.” Jam shakes his head again, our entire childhood shifting in his mind. “They always made it sound like she was happy.” He bites the rest of his lollipop off the stick. “She couldn’t have been happy. Fuck Hachaliah Bailey.”
Aubrey laughs. “Yeah.” She looks at me and grins. “Fuck him. And the horse he rode in on.”
Aubrey and Shray decide to spend the night at Shray’s house. “It’s too sad to sleep in my bed,” she says. “Since Lenny…”
Once we hear the doors of Shray’s car slam, Jam grabs my wrist again.
“Oh, hi,” he says, grinning. His eyes are clear. They have been lately, most of the time.
“Oh, hi,” I say.
He pulls me close, whispering in my ear. “It’s too sad to sleep in my bed too.” He’s clean-shaven and his breath smells like cherry lollipop.
“Yeah? Do you need to stay here? With me?”
He nods. Then he kisses me, deep and full and frantic. It feels like being caught under a wave, engulfed by the pulse of the tide, that ecstatic moment of weightless freedom. We keep doing this, recklessly barreling toward heartbreak without ever talking about what we are or what we want. We don’t ask questions or make demands. I feel the judgment in my mind, a programmed voice, trying to tell me that if this can’t last forever, it shouldn’t happen at all. Except, I am keenly aware that anything good is fragile and fleeting. I used to use the threat of loss as my reason to sidestep joy, but the bad things happen anyway, and I want to feel everything good with Jam before the need to surface overtakes us.
We have sex on his piano bench, watching ourselves in the reflection of the sunroom windows, my legs wrapped around his back. Our bodies are beautiful together; the way we become something greater than ourselves leaves me longing for this moment, even while it’s happening. I want to memorize us, in case I don’t come back here, or it gets too hard for him to stay. Any time we’re together might be the last.
“You could come with me,” I tell him when we are sweaty and breathless, our damp skin sticking. I say it like I mean it, even though I can’t picture Jam out in the woods. “You could hike your own hike with us.”
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe I could.”