The Lights In the Sky

Chapter 23

I'm going to assume that you've never spent that much time in one room before. I mean, I'm sure you're in here a lot for your job, but not constantly. Not twenty-four hours a day or anything. That's what I was doing in the living room, other than bathroom breaks. When you're in a space for that long, you really start to notice things. Loose strings of fabric in the carpet. Cracks in the top of the floor border. There's this spider in our living room, a fuzzy one that's all black, who puts up her web in a different spot every few nights. She'll make one in a corner and then, when she's ready to move on, she pulls it apart and goes to another. I think that's probably a sad lifestyle to have. It's good to see the world, I guess, but it's also nice to have a place to go back to. I probably won't have that anymore.

I was never bored the whole time. I absorbed everything I saw on those documentaries like it was scripture. And when there was a commercial or something on that I wasn't interested in, all these thoughts would shoot through my head. Things about my family or Frank or Deborah, about how much I cared for them all. Or fear. I was afraid a lot. Of not knowing what would happen next. About what I'd do when they made me leave the couch.

Mostly, though, I thought about how none of it really mattered. I was no different than that ape in the zoo. Susan taught me that about a week after I admitted that it was all in my head.

The only break in all the nothingness that I can remember before that is Deborah coming to visit me. She wasn't supposed to, because her parents were still mad about the night she snuck over. My parents probably would have been mad, too, if they didn't have bigger things to worry about. When she walked in the room, I was watching this incredibly sad thing about how a lion reacts to a death in the pride. I was almost crying before Deborah walked through the doorway to the kitchen. It was sunset, the kind of dark orange that you only get at the end of the fall. The sunsets become the same color as the leaves and it casts this heavy glow that you can almost feel. That glow was coming in through the kitchen and surrounding Deborah in the doorway. It seemed to shine right through her hair. She stood there for a moment and I won't say that she looked like an angel, because that's ridiculously cliché. But she kind of did.

She walked slowly over to me and sat down on the couch. She looked at the TV but I just stared at her. Mom poked her head in from the kitchen for a quick second before disappearing again. Then I realized, That's why Deborah is here. Mom talked to her.

I didn't speak, I only watched Deborah as she watched the screen. Maybe she was afraid to look over at me. When she finally did, it was a slow turn and for a long time I didn't want her to look me in the eyes because part of me didn't want her to be real. I wanted her to be something beautiful that existed in my head. But as soon as we locked gazes, I knew she was real and she was there and she was in love with me. People have told me that the best moment in life is when you fall in love with someone. That's not true, though, is it? The best moment is when you realize that the person loves you, too.

She put her head on my shoulder. I couldn't remember the last time I washed my hair; I was only taking quick showers here and there. When her head touched me, though, I started to really wish I had washed it that day. Maybe I had, I don't know.

She wrapped her fingers around mine. I closed my eyes and didn't move for a long time.

"What are we gonna do when all this is over?" she asked.

My heart swelled. Nobody else suggested that it would ever end.

Without opening my eyes, I told her that I would do whatever she wanted. So she told me a story of the two of us getting on a plane after graduation. And that the plane would take us to Norway, to this city where you can see the Northern Lights all the time. She saw pictures of it, she said. People silhouetted along the crystal slabs of ice, a paintbrush streak of blues and greens and purples and reds hovering above them. And the stars behind that. We would stay in this hotel that was made entirely of ice and sleep under reindeer skins. We would spend our day bundled up under the low sun and we would go see the ocean and maybe, if we were brave enough, we would jump in together and freeze together and warm each other up. And then we would wrap ourselves up again and kiss each other until the lights came back. And the lights in the sky would remind us that we're so small. And then we would look at one another and remember that we're so big. We're so important. We're everything.

I started crying. I pulled her closer. And I whispered something in her ear. Not that I loved her. Not anything you'd expect. But it made her cry, too. So that's what we did. We cried together. She curled up on the couch and put her head in my lap and we watched TV until I fell asleep for the first time in days.

When I woke up, she was gone.