CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
"The moon was so beautiful the sea held up a mirror." (Ani DiFranco)
I kiss her.
A moment passes (yet it seems like a perpetual amount of time) since that initial kiss, and the nerve endings in my fingers and my toes have started buzzing with goosebumps. Raisa moves backward so I'm dragged with her; and she settles quietly on the grass with a toothy smile that looks up at me with curiosity, and hopefully impatience. I pull back, for a second, to look at her and try to work out what it is she wants, and why she wants it; what she thinks about when I catch her dreamy-eyed and starry.
"We can't make out on my dad's grave, that's not." Raisa giggles breathlessly. "That's not really okay."
"No," I smile, infectious, "Ethics, and all that."
My wrist is taken and pulled upwards, and away until I've been dragged to the underneath of the giant tree, where no graves have been planted and in their place are daisies and other weeds of that genre, miniscule in the moonlight. "This okay?" I ask her, and I feel a wildflower or something brush my leg.
"Yes." She says, and for the first time, I see her eyes say the same thing as her mouth.
Another few moments occur in a sequence I won't detail but the result of it is this: I gingerly touch the soft skin underneath the hem of Raisa's stupid band shirt and instead of the smooth expanse I was expecting I get tiny lines of raised flesh. It's the same as what I've got on my wrists.
My hand is grabbed and pulled back to Raisa's cheek but I feel myself going numb and possibly pale as well; I try to tell myself they're just cat or dog scratches or something but on someone's hips? "Raisa," I mumble, moving backward and repeating myself louder.
A sort of undeniable realisation dawns on her face. "Nathan..."
I place my palm on her shoulder. I don't know what to say, my mouth is too dry to speak even if I did know.
Then my vision is blacked out—Raisa's hand over my eyes, childish and utterly Raisa, and then I'm re-gifted the sight of the cemetery, except this time it's empty. "Raisa?" I call out. "Raisa!"
Nothing. Leaves rustle to the left of me but nothing is there.
"Joel!" I try again, and attempt to figure out where the cigarette smell is coming from but I can't figure it out. I call his name a few more times. I can only hear an ambulance driving by down the street. I regret not getting Joel's mobile number. I don't even know if he has a mobile. I know nothing about these people.
"Nathan?"
"Joel!" I echo back at the voice, searching frantically for the owner. "Where are you?"
A tall, skinny silhouetted figure emerges from the walkway down the middle of two sections. "What's wrong?" It asks.
"Raisa ran off, I don't. I don't know what she's doing—where?" I breathe wildly, the sort of breathing where 'breathe' is not a word that can be used to describe it.
"What did you do?" is what Joel asks.
"I—did you see where she went?" I wish he wouldn't avoid me.
"What did you do, Nathan?"
"I didn't do anything! Have you seen her?"
Joel sighs, and places both his hands on my shoulders. They're heavy and they hold me in place. "I think I saw her. Wait, shh; you have to tell me what you did, so I can find out where she's going."
"She..." Am I allowed to tell him? Am I supposed to know? Does anyone know?
"What?"
"I just." I'm seconds away from forgetting how to breathe. I have to remind myself.
"Nathan, sit down." Joel pushes down on my shoulder and I do as he says, my fingers twitching and tapping a meandering rhythm on my thigh. "I don't know what to do, um. Deep breaths?"
"Deep breaths." I confirm.
I try to think of a star, an unequivocally bright one, and then it explodes, but instead of the explosion I focus on one tiny particle being carried by the solar winds. "Deep breaths," I say again, and it's working.
"Can you tell me what happened?"
I show Joel my wrist. I figure he won't tell her, and if he does, it'll just be us three who know. "She has these." I explain. "I found them, and she ran away from me."
Joel bites his lip and furrows his eyebrows. "Maybe she went along the street. I didn't hear anyone take the car and my keys are still in my pocket."
"What's along the street?"
"A pool, I think."
I think of Raisa sitting by the pool in an aura of regret and insecurity. "We have to find her."
-
Walking for a little while does me some good and my brain shifts back into a steadier gear.
"Raisa!" Joel shouts, disrupting some birds in the trees.
"Joel," I whisper. "Don't shout. She'll only run further. We have to be quiet."
Joel makes an 'o' noise. "Can I tell you something, Nathan?" he says, a lot softer.
"Yeah."
"There's definitely something about Raisa, I mean, because I feel it. She's sort of magnetic, yeah?" I nod. "Raisa and you aren't simple magnets, it's like, you're a negative and she's a positive and you're stuck together. Does that make any sense?"
"A little." I allow.
"Only a little?"
I smile at him, as if that's all I need to do.
There is a pool further down the street, and that strikes me as a bit odd to have a public pool near a cemetery, but I suppose it had to go somewhere. We walk in silence, until a small noise not unlike a giggle makes us turn around and stare through the pool's gates. I'm already imagining white hair and a button nose, but I hear, "oh, no," before I see anything. Joel's hand comes flying over my eyes.
"Joel, what is it?"
"Shh," he hisses, "Oh, my God."
"Oh my God what?"
"Shut up, okay?"
"Who is it? Is Raisa there?"
"No. Alice."
I essentially rip Joel's hand off my face by his wrist. There's a girl sitting on the edge of the pool with her ankles in the water, and another body swims at her feet, murmuring at her to what I assume is to join him. The girl is brunette and has a piercing glinting in her nose, and has tattoos all the way up one arm and along her collarbone. I can't make out what they say, but the largest one seems to be of a hibiscus flower—she's taking off her shirt now?
"No." Joel turns my back. "No."
"Who is he?" I ask.
"I don't know who he is."
"Are you sure it's Alice?"
"Surer than anything."
I hear a splash, and I see the top of Joel's shoe hit the bottom of the pool fence with so much force the fence rattles and Joel swears under his breath. The splashing stops. A not-so-faraway shout replaces it.
"Joel." I say, with some finality.
"Yeah, I know." He says, sounding resigned, and runs.
I can't move. Dr. Joseph would put this down to my anxiety around the fight-or-flight instinct, and I'm not sure why that's my first thought, but I hear another shout behind me.
"Who was that?" Okay, Nathan, this is where you have to go now. This situation is highly suspicious and 'looking for my bohemian friend, sorry to have disrupted your illegal dip' is not a variable excuse. I hum nonsense to myself in some last bid to calm my nerves enough to actually work. It doesn't garter any results. I'm going to be arrested. My parents are going to kill me more than they already are.
"What the fuck are you doing still here?" Joel whisper/screams at me from somewhere.
"I can't move." I whisper back.
He re-appears, having hid behind something, grabs my upper wrist, and forces my body to move, which seems to be exactly what it needed. I wait until we're a considerable distance back up the road, and also hidden behind a mausoleum.
"I cannot believe Alice would do that." Joel breathes heavily.
"What? Go swimming?"
"No, go swimming almost-naked with a strange guy in the early hours of the morning in a pool down the road from a cemetery."
"I agree," I say. "That is a strange sentence."
That gets me a tiny chuckle. "I'm really angry, Nathan." Joel says, in a nonchalant voice, but I can see his white-knuckled fists by his sides. "She told me she wanted to be alone and there she is..."
"We had a kid in six south with anger issues," I talk quickly. "That wasn't why he was there, he was there because of his schizoeffective disorder. But he used to get really freaked out, usually around mealtimes because it was too loud, or something. It was never really loud, it was just a buzz of nurses chatting to patients, and you know, we're a mental health ward, we don't really speak much. Anyway, one day he was swearing and threatening nurses and kicked over the fish tank we had in one corner. That was something about mindfulness, watching the fish. I liked the fish. He kicked it over, and it was caught and everything but then Dr. Joseph ran out of his office and stuck a record on the record player. Do you know what it was?"
Joel's breathing sounds a little easier. "What?" he says, but it's more a wheeze.
"Dark Side of the Moon." I say, and Joel laughs so hard and suddenly that he snorts.
"Seriously! Dr. Joseph put it on side two and got track nine and Finn, that was the kid, just sat down and stared wide-eyed into the distance."
"I like this Dr. Joseph man." Joel says. "I'm disappointed we hadn't met at the hospital."
"He only works weekdays." I see Joel's fists, which are still wound impossibly tight, and I hear his breathing, which sounds a bit easier but still isn't natural. The more on concentrate on his breathing, the less I concentrate on mine, and then I've lost it, my lungs working overtime to still the flow of panic coming out of my heart. Ever heard of someone's brain short-circuiting?
I don't know what to do. There are no fish tanks around but I don't know what Joel will substitute for that. The thing I know least about is why I start singing. Only softly. Hardly at all.
"And if the dam breaks open many years too soon. And if there is no room upon the hill, and if your head explodes with dark abodings too, I'll see you on the dark side of the moon."
It works. The anger wells over like a thousand dams of words-never-said and then Joel's crying. The kind of crying Manly Men in Movies do, when it's mostly sniffles and one lone tear down the cheek for emphasis. But that only lasts a second before Joel cries like I do, real, and with nothing held back.
"Should we, um." I say, "Should we find Raisa?"
"Give me a minute," Joel says, except what comes out of his mouth is more like "gimmiamiyut."
"Okay," and I watch him fall apart.
There's something poetic about that, but I hold back from saying so, seeing as though Joel wouldn't hesitate to pretend my head is a fish tank and tell me exactly what he thinks about the situation in one fluid movement. There's something about his blunt honesty, too, the kind of selfless admittance that I long for.
"You going to be alright?" I ask.
"The number of kids in your mental home freaked me out. I didn't tell you—you know, unless you freaked out." Joel mutters, in broken syllables. "But I think I understand, now."
"Do you?"
"It's just so fucking easy to break your own heart."
I let this settle in the air for a moment, before adding: "Yeah. It fucking is."