Trapped in Forever

45 ~ He Smelled too Much like Icing Sugar

His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his black hoodie, forming uneven protruding mounds beneath the fabric of his sweatshirt over his stomach, and he wore a pair of bright colored denim jeans with emerald hued grass stains over the knees, as if he slid on the blades of freshly watered grass to our house and then brushed himself off before ringing our doorbell. He was nodding, a gleam of light running across one of the strands of blond hair that hung over his forehead, the end overlapping against his eyebrow, and his hair looked disheveled, like he had been running his concealed hands through it when we weren’t looking, and he was smiling faintly at my mother, who stood by the railing, her shoulder pressed against it, and her arms were crossed over her chest, the first two buttons of her blouse were undone, and in one her hands she held a multiple paint chip sample, and she nodded too, murmuring something. Something about renovating, about the lake house, and how she was thinking of purple for the master bathroom or something, and he nodded, again, in that way you do when you don’t know what to say, and said that purple was a nice color.

And then he glanced up, his hazel eyes lifting away from my mother and her words about the color purple and renovations and houses like the lake, and traveled up the staircase, catching the sight of bare feet planted on the carpeted stairs, and then his eyes were on me, so suddenly that I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, if I was supposed to smile or to say something, but all I could see was him, in front of her name planted into the ground with that red rose at his feet and his faces in his hands. How small he looked there, surrounded by gray and gleaming headstones, withering flowers, and engraved names and the dates when someone came and went.

He smiled at me from where he stood, almost pushed into the corner where we hung our coats, gleaming and glittering with rain or warm with heat, and tossed and pushed aside our shoes, just sliding them off with our toes and kicking our foot in the air, hearing the thud as it hit the wall and bounced off to land upside down on the floor until Mom came and corrected our lack of organization, and his smile was slow. It was the kind of gradual smile that bloomed slowly and carefully on someone’s face, and felt like it radiated warmth from their parted, curling lips that you could feel, even from half a staircase away. He slipped one of his balled hands out of his hoodie pocket, flattening the fabric against his abdomen, and he waved, slightly, just lifting his fingers up, but it was enough. Enough to make me step down from that step on the staircase, and graze my fingers down the glazed wooden railing as I felt the carpeting flatten beneath my toes, and enough for my mother to turn around, a lock of hair catching in her lip-gloss, and her fingers slowly slipping from the folded inside of her elbows.

“Hey,” he said to me, and he slipped his hand back into the pocket of his hoodie, wrinkling it with his loosely curled fist once again, and he leaned back on the balls of his feet, pretending not to notice my mother’s gaze trailing away from me standing on the staircase, feeling the glaze of the railing underneath the pads of my fingers, and catching the kaleidoscope of blurred faces in the corners of my eyes, and toward him, eyeing him briefly before she turned back to me, and smiled, tensely. It was the kind of smile was the opposite of his—the kind you give someone instead of words, the kind of smile you saved only for a few certain people as they descended toward me, spurring a feeling of warmth in their chests—her smile was the kind that meant something was unfinished. The kind of smile you gave someone when you couldn’t say what you wanted to just then, but eventually, in rooms with just the two of you and muted televisions.

I lifted my fingers up from the curved surface of the wooden railing, wiggling them at him, and I ran my toes against the last step of the staircase, feeling the beige carpeting soft and cool beneath my toes, and tried my hardest not to glance in my mother’s direction, only flicking my gaze over to her hand curled around the end of the railing, a manicure with a chipped thumbnail gleaming. “Hi,” I said back to him, pensively, almost like I was afraid to say his name in front of her, like suddenly, she would remember details I never told her and realize that this wasn’t just any college guy showing up at our door, doing something that no one had done since Roxanne that night when her parents announced their divorcement, but this was her ex-boyfriend. The guy who just yesterday was crouched down in front of her grave with a red rose in his fingertips, my name being muttered in his string of apologies. “Uh, what are you doing here?” I tried to say this casually, like I just wanted to know, not like I could feel my mother’s gaze burning little beady holes into my skin, scorching it with heat.