Chapter Nine #2
“They’re so tiny, let me check.” He knelt down, inspecting my legs in a way that made me blush. All the blood in my brain
rushed south the closer he got to me, running his fingers along my skin softly, picking up my right foot and moving my sandal
around to look underneath the straps.
“These little suckers are tiny!” He stood up and pulled something from his pocket, then knelt down again and did what felt
like minor surgery on a spot on my ankle.
“Got it. See? You have to be careful,” he said, standing up.
I looked at the weird little bug on the end of the tweezers.
“Gross.”
He laughed. “I keep a mason jar of rubbing alcohol by the door and put the ticks in it. My dog gets a lot by the end of the
day.” His dog bounded around us, then came up to sniff me more closely.
“What’s your dog’s name?”
“Baby”
“He’s cute.”
There was so much heat between him and I, but also, it might have been entirely in my head.
“One sec,” he said, and ran into his cottage.
Baby followed at his heel. When he came back out with a little green plastic bottle, Baby followed him. In his eagerness to
sniff me again, he toppled me over on my ass and tried to French kiss me. “Baby, no! I’m so sorry. He’s really into sneak
kissing right now.” He pulled Baby back.
“Not very Baby-like,” I said, steadying myself, “more like toddler-esque.”
“My son named him when he was first learning to speak and he only knew a few words, so he kept calling him baby and it stuck.”
He threw the dog a stick and he bounded away after it. Son?
“Is your kid here with you?”
“No, he’s with his mom. I have him every Friday to Sunday morning. She lives in her hometown, about an hour north of here.
I keep a little apartment there. I’m here until October just to get a little space from it all. It’s hard living in a town
where you know everyone. And I spent my teen years in Cherry Valley, my grandpa had a farm here. Right next to the Sinclair
farm. My ex and I are friends and it’s all good, but it’s just weird, the transition, you know.”
“I can imagine.” I couldn’t imagine. Or believe he was a father. I remembered how we said we’d get married, we’d have kids
after we made our first movie together. Late into the night we sketched out our whole lives together.
“You ever been married?”
“No.” I was oddly jealous of this great love that he’d had, even though it was over. He’d found it. And I’d been hanging on.
Baby ran back with the stick in his mouth, drooling and proud. I raised my hands up in case he was going to come in for another
tackle.
“I’m ready this time, Baby.”
He just nudged my legs gently.
“He didn’t scare you, did he?”
“No, it’s fine. I love exuberance.”
“I remember that about you.”
We stood smiling at each other for a beat too long. I didn’t want to get into the “I remembers.” He started shaking the bottle
of bug spray. “Hold your arms out akimbo.” He sprayed my legs and arms with what smelled like poison. I turned my head away
from its wafting mist. He sprayed at my sandals and then asked me to turn around. Because we were on the slope above the cabin,
I could see into his cottage—it was a mess. There was a TV with a basketball video game on pause. An overflowing recycling
bin. I felt the bug spray on the back of my knees. It was oddly intimate. I turned around while he was mid-spray.
“Thanks,” I said, and once a safe distance from him, I remembered that we were relative strangers now.
No reference for each other as adults. He was the only thing about my adolescence that I’d ever felt nostalgia for, the only reason I’d ever wanted time to stand still.
I spent most of my teenaged years desperate to be old enough to leave home, to start my life for real.
And then when it started—the frantic pace of film school, my master’s degree, working to pay off my student loans, night jobs with daytime internships, the work, it was like jumping from escalator to escalator.
I never stopped to be present, unless I was sitting in a movie theatre for two hours, transported.
What would it have been like to have stayed in each other’s lives?
In those two months that summer, I was completely changed by him, mostly for the better, until the final two days of camp.
He listened to me. He thought I was smart, he liked my ideas, my dreams for the future.
Before she’d left, my mother always said I wasn’t feminine enough, didn’t have enough friends, was always hiding out watching movies.
But Buckeye made me feel like the only person in the room, the way his eyes followed me around, often blushing if I caught him staring.
My friends at school were the AV club nerds with whom I had a solid network of people who were also socially in pain, but
was it friendship? With Marlon it was, but we often felt like a duo of underdogs, waiting out the prison term of high school.
And then, after my mom left, I was consumed with making sure Katie was OK. When my mother had been home, Katie was the princess,
the young, pretty, easygoing child who got good grades without trying, who all the teachers said was a delight to have in
class. My mother never hid the fact that she preferred Katie. And so while I felt some relief to not have my mother’s ever-present
critical eye around, Katie was bereft by her sudden absence.
Buckeye was not only my first love, but the first person who felt like he was on my team, that he knew me. Who would we be now, if he hadn’t broken that pact?
“It’s funny, the reason I buy this bug spray is that if I buy the citronella kind, it reminds me of you too much, and I don’t
know, I thought that if I used it too much as an adult, it would just smell like the summer in general and would lose its
frame of reference as like, the way Goldy and I smelled as kids. You know? I wanted to keep it as a time capsule smell,” he
said, rubbing some spray into his muscular biceps.
“Yeah, I get it. I totally get that,” I whispered, shocked that he remembered what I smelled like and wanted to preserve that
memory. All along he’d been as nostalgic as I had been?
“I can’t listen to that Modest Mouse record either, same reason.”
I looked at him, hoping he’d say more. Keep opening up. Explain what happened. But he just kept clicking the top of the bug
spray nozzle nervously, staring off above my head.
“Also, I listen to a lot of Raffi now.” He shrugged, turning away.
“Yeah, OK, well thanks for making me tick proof,” I said, and started walking toward the sign marked TO THE LAKE.
When I got to the path, I willed myself not to turn around.
I replayed our first kiss, which was still vivid in my mind: We had been tasked with making sure the campfire was fully out and it started to pour—we ran toward the closest shelter, the boathouse.
For days we’d been flirting, exchanging longer than normal glances, taking every opportunity to touch in conceivably accidental ways, exchanging longer than average good night hugs.
I knew as we ducked through the door, heaving from our sprint across the grassy field, what we might do.
When he finally pulled me close to him, one arm around my waist, the other running his hand through my hair, I’d never felt desire quite like that before.
Or since. I knew now, however, that that kind of attraction, that matching of energy was rare.
I’d kissed dozens of men like that. No kiss had ever felt the same.
I was still kind of angry now, on behalf of younger me.
I was also something else—exhilarated? I was practically floating to the lake.
When I reached the water’s edge, I found an old dock, the wood greying and uneven, with tall grasses and reeds on either side.
It swayed a bit like it wasn’t entirely secure. There was no beach, just rocks and muck. Ben had told me that the water on
East Lake was deep, though it looked more like a very wide river than a lake. I preferred to wade into water, with hesitant
steps, adjusting to the temperature slowly. I liked to daydream while staring out at the horizon, while others ran in screaming
and splashing. I did this even as a five-year-old. “You’re such a quiet child,” my mother would remark, whenever I stuck around
the edges of boisterous play. “You’re like a tiny forty-five-year-old. You’ll never be the one drowning.” I always thought she was telling me that I was smarter, more sophisticated than the goofy kids acting like kids. But now I’m
not so sure what she meant. I only realized in later years that she hadn’t taught me to swim or ride a bike. She’d taken me
to pools and lakes; my dad bought me a bike. But they never seemed to have the time to really show me how to do either activity.
I remember pushing my bike down the road, pretending I was just walking it because I was tired. Eventually I got to the little
cul-de-sac where I couldn’t see other kids and got on it, wobbling my way for a few feet before falling theatrically on my
side. My whole right leg was scraped. I put the bike away in the garage and told my dad I didn’t like biking, that Katie could
have it. Years later when he realized I couldn’t ride a bike, he was shocked. He said, “But you can do everything.”
Katie was persistent, insisting Dad show her how to ride every day, until one Sunday afternoon, I saw him standing outside, hands on his hips, watching Katie push off on the too-big pink bike with the rainbow streamers.
She fell but got up again; he held the handles for her as she felt what it was like to balance.
“Good,” he said, and then let go of the handles.
She fell again. But she wasn’t discouraged. Eventually he put training wheels on
and she buzzed around and around the driveway, ecstatic. I studied how she did it, and then mimicked it later. I pretended