What We Leave Behind Read online

  “You didn’t love it? I loved it.”

  “It was good,” I said.

  We were referring to Forever, Judy Blume’s latest book. Beth and I were obsessed with Judy Blume. We had plodded through Blubber, Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing, Deenie, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in record-breaking speed, with Margaret being the pinnacle, the literary work we judged all other books against, until Forever. With Margaret, we witnessed our chests blossom from flat boards to mosquito bites, culminating in the extremely delicate and life-changing ritual of menstruation. We celebrated with Margaret and hoped for the same surge of hormones in our own bodies by the book’s end, but much to our frustration, that didn’t happen, no, not until we got to reading Forever. There began the hormone surge.

  Forever was not the same identifiable literature that had answered most of the questions and concerns I had about the awkward, teenage years. This particular book stumped me.

  “Didn’t you just love Michael and Katherine together?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And what’d you think of her with Theo?”

  I hadn’t thought much about it. I was still harping on other things. She hadn’t noticed my silence when she said, “Ralph. Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever heard?”

  She was referring to Michael’s penis. That was the name he had given it. I laughed, not wanting to hurt her feelings.

  “I can’t wait to be in love,” she said, “just like Michael and Katherine.”

  “And look where it got them,” I sadly stated, disillusioned that their great love was compromised by a boy named Theo.

  I didn’t tell Beth this, but I read Forever four or five times that week, or at least parts of it. I earmarked page eighty-five until the pages were folded and worn. You could set the book down and it would flop over, opening itself to the page of discovery, and what I now think of as the awakening of my own libido. The particular passage caused these sensations in my legs and down there that I didn’t quite understand. I would go to the bathroom after reading it and wipe myself, feeling the dampness upon the soft paper. What was happening to me? Was I peeing in my pants? It didn’t smell like pee.

  At first I liked what I read, the feelings between Michael and Katherine, the tenderness, but then it got confusing. He rolled over on top of me and we moved together again and again and it felt so good I didn’t ever want to stop—until I came.

  Came where? I didn’t understand. If she was there with him, how could she just be entering the scene? Had Ms. Blume made a mistake? My knowledge of sexuality was clearly limited at the time. I grasped the car in the garage concept, but no one had ever explained to me what happened when the battery in the car overheated, or that the car could overheat when it wasn’t even in a garage.

  I didn’t ever want to stop—until I came.

  I repeated it in my mind over a thousand times until it became a mantra, and not because it perplexed me, but it brought the tenderness to an end. Something was amiss, I knew that, and I didn’t have the courage to ask Beth when a glance in her direction told me she very much understood the things I didn’t.

  “Do you think you’ll name your boyfriend’s penis?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What would you name it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I told you, I never really thought about it.”

  Beth’s emotional radar was on high alert. “You don’t have to be so dismissive,” she said. “I’d name it Richard, in case you were wondering.”

  Yeah, that was exactly what I was wondering.

  “’Cause then I can call him Dick for short.” Now that actually got a laugh out of me.

  We lived in a quiet neighborhood in the valley. It wasn’t glamour, it wasn’t squalor, just the life my mother and I shared—the in-between. My mother was a good woman, and though we didn’t have a lot of money, and my father left us with even less, she never passed along the brunt of her worries, never extended her gripes and grievances my way.

  My mother liked to flitter. What I mean is, she would flit around the room like Tinkerbelle. I think a nervous energy took over her body after my father’s death, a need to be at all places at all times. She’d sidle up to you before you even knew she was in the room and like a trained flitterer, satisfy all your whims with one little swoop of her wand before she’d flutter off to the next recipient. This was my mother’s way of dealing with her pain; keeping busy, fixing, helping and caring, drew people to her and served her well in her job as a nurse at the local hospital. In fact, the years after my father’s death were my mother’s most productive work wise. She was promoted to head nurse in emergency. My mother, when she would stop her flitting, was quick as a whip. She was smart and industrious.

  Mom wanted to get married again, and she desperately wanted to have more children. She was always saying, “Jessie, you can’t use filthy words like that. You have to be a role model one day. Who knows? You might be a big sister.” Procreation was living proof that she was young enough and lovable enough to be a woman, and not what the ladies around town called a widow.

  “Widow sounds so wretched,” she would say to me when I sat in her bathroom with her and watched her apply makeup.

  The men would come in droves. I told you, my mother was an attractive woman, and because of her combined Mary Poppins and fairy godmother skills, men were always parading around the house. When they’d pull up in the driveway, I’d run to the kitchen for a white paper plate and a marker, the supplies needed for my little game. She would be putting on perfume, flittering around, snapping on a last earring, and I’d be peeking through the curtains. “Don’t do it,” she would say, and I’d reply, “I’m not,” and she would say again, “Jessica, don’t do it,” and I’d say, “But Mom, I can’t help myself,” and she’d relent, finally asking, “Okay, what is it?” and I would scribble on the paper plate and just before the doorbell rang, I’d hold it up.

  This careful assessment of her date on a scale from one to ten usually determined the amount of perfume she would throw on herself as well as the outcome of the evening. My mother had grown to trust and rely upon my filtering process. The displeasure on her face when a man scored below five was unbearable. “A two,” she asked me one night, “just a two?” I nodded, sorry for her, thinking she might not want to answer the door, but she always did. She went on every single one of those dates, even the twos and threes.

  I enjoyed visiting my mother at work after school. Now that Mom was high on the ranks there, I’d ride my bicycle over and wander around the floors and halls. Every Friday, I’d put on my best jeans and blouse, pull my hair back into a ponytail, and scope the floors in search of him, the nice doctor to introduce to my mother. The criteria were simple: he had to be tall, he had to have straight, white teeth, his hair had to be blonde, eyes of brown, and well-kept hands. That meant no dirt, no grime, no hangnails. I despised dirty fingers.

  A few came pretty close to fitting the bill, but there was always something that ended up bothering me about them. Either they had hair in places where hair normally didn’t grow, or their personalities were void of just that: personality. If they didn’t laugh at my jokes, they were nixed from the list, and pediatricians weren’t allowed in the running, since we all knew that they are the last ones to conceivably want to be around more children.

  I was fifteen that year when summer began and progressing rather nicely from the prepubescent pain in the butt my mother liked to call me. The hospital had become my sanctuary, and the insulated world of doctors, nurses, and patients had beckoned me. The building was like a hotel—people checking in, people checking out. I knew the inner workings, the hierarchy, and the inroads like the back of my hand; still, I remained happily anonymous, which didn’t explain how I ended up on the fifth floor. I knew right away that I must have hit the wrong number button when the elevator doors opened. It was a floor I had never visited before—in fact, one that I tried to avoid. But there he
was, the handsome doctor, and, at first glance, the only one to boast of all the attributes on my checklist. The fifth floor housed the really sick patients, not contagious sick, but terminally sick. I watched him talking to some other doctors, smiling at the appropriate times, laughing at what sounded like a joke told by one of the nurses behind the desk. He garnered double points for owning a sense of humor on an otherwise humorless floor.

  When he went through the doorway to visit with his next patient, I followed close behind; and when I was absolutely sure he could not see me, I pressed my nose to the windowpane. They were huddled around the bed. Tubes, lights, monitors abounded. A woman was crying in the corner. She didn’t see me, but my heart sank from her tears. Nearby was a boy. He looked older than me and he was holding the man’s hand, the man who lay weakly on the bed amidst the mass of lights and monitors. It didn’t take a genius to know that the man was not doing well. I stepped back, ashamed that I was intruding on their private moment. I figured I could linger outside their door and maybe catch the doctor on the way out, but what I really should have done was taken the pain this family brought forth in me as an omen of some kind.

  “Jessica Parker, what are you up to?”

  The voice from behind startled me from my reverie. I turned to see my mother swiftly approaching. “You’re at it again, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Instead of answering, I eyed the door that was now opening, expecting to witness Prince Charming make his way to his ladylove. My mother followed my eyes, both of us fixed on the figure that was passing through the opened door, but it wasn’t him. This person was huddled over, clenching his stomach. My mother sprang into action, flitting across the hallway. I stepped back, not exactly sure of what to do. At first I thought the man inside the room might have died. There was a bustling, some raised voices. I watched while the boy before me, leaning now against my mother for support, proceeded to vomit all over the floor. And that’s how I met Jonas. A chunk of his vomit fell neatly across my brand new, favorite shoes.

  Jonas Levy, the one who taught me that the very things we wish for are the same things we should turn away from and run.

  CHAPTER 2

  My mom whisked him away to the nearest bathroom while the woman I assumed to be his mother stood in the doorway. She didn’t seem to be registering any of what had just happened; her eyes were stuck in a deadened glaze. Propping the door open with her narrow shoulders, the woman was unsure about stepping out into the hospital corridor. She was so petite and pretty with wavy, dark hair; I thought the doorway might swallow her up, and before it did, I said, “My mom’s a nurse, she’ll take care of him.” But my words didn’t seem to make a dent. This was a woman who had already lost a lot of faith in her family’s well-being.

  I stood there in a similar swell of uncertainty, not sure if I should offer my help. The vomit was spilling off my shoe and onto the floor. I longed for something that would have lessened the discomfort I felt beside this woman, but I knew it served me right for searching for love on the terminal floor. Why would I think there would be hope in a place where none dwelled? The potential prince who had started all of this in the first place was nowhere to be found—a cad, I’d decided—having slipped out just as things got dicey. Thank God Mom never ended up with the likes of him.

  Since nobody seemed to care that I was standing there dripping in humiliation, I decided to get a paper towel from the bathroom to wipe the boy’s lunch off my shoe. On my way, I saw Jonas coming out of the men’s room, my mother floating nearby with a cup of water.

  “This is my daughter, Jessica,” she said to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry about your…” and he looked down, as if saying the word would embarrass him even further.

  Now, I was pretty tall for my youthful age, already five feet seven inches, though this boy was really tall. He had to be well over six feet, so when he approached me, it wasn’t his face in my line of vision, but his messed-up shirt. Nevertheless, his clean, manicured fingers were acceptable. I slowly started moving my gaze up his body.

  He said it again. “I’m sorry.” I know he tried to remember my name, but like most boys, he drew a blank.

  “Jessica,” I heard my mother say again.

  I looked at her, wanting her to leave, to quit lingering and being so nice to this boy.

  In the meantime, he was apologizing to me again.

  “It’s okay,” I heard myself say, straining my neck upward to look at his face. I was beginning to get agitated by my mother’s looming presence and this strange boy apologizing over and over again. I really just wanted to flee from the two of them, which I probably should have, but for reasons I’ll never know, I didn’t. I stayed and then noticed the two most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen in my life.

  I think he was still apologizing, fumbling over his words, mortified, cheeks flustered, but I didn’t hear a word. I couldn’t take my eyes away from his. They were just stuck. It was like being in the planetarium when the universe moves around you and bits of movement and light flood your mind, but your eyes are fixed, staring at a single star. Forget that his were a shade of green I’d never known before or that they were shaped like almonds, a description I’d read in books, but had never observed myself. Delicate and kind, that’s what they were, and deep and soulful. He was a boy who could win every staring contest because you had to avert your eyes from his. If you didn’t, you’d be sucked in by their intensity. I did my best, I really did, having had forty-five quality minutes every Friday with Dr. Norton to perfect my technique, but I didn’t stand a chance against this guy. I tore myself from his pull and searched the floor for something that wasn’t there. When I raised my head, I was careful not to look him straight in the eye. “These were new shoes, you know.”

  “Jessica,” I heard my mother say. I thought she had disappeared, but she hadn’t. There she was, scooting down by my side with a paper towel, cleaning the mess off my shoes until they looked brand new again.

  He said, “I told you I’m sorry. How many times do I have to apologize?”

  “You can say it like you mean it,” I answered, unimpressed with his lack of remorse.

  “Jessica!” my mother snapped again. “Leave the boy alone. He said he was sorry.”

  “It’s alright, Mrs…”

  “Parker,” my mother answered, annoying me again with her kindness.

  “I can handle your daughter, Mrs. Parker. I have a little sister myself. She’s about your age. Eleven? Twelve?”

  I turned to him, catching the sarcasm of his tone, even if my mother hadn’t.

  “I’m fifteen, for your information, almost sixteen. And at least I can hold my lunch instead of losing it on public floors.”

  “Jessica Parker!” my mother yelled, furious. I think at this point she grabbed me by the hair and dragged me down the hospital corridor while Jonas stared at us as though we were some ridiculous circus act. I caught a glimpse of his bleak expression when we turned the corner. It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I had been a complete idiot.

  I took my punishment like the mature adult that I was. “No hospital visits for two weeks,” my mother told me.

  “It’s more your loss than mine,” I said. I mean, really, I wasn’t the one looking to find a husband. And when the two weeks were up, nothing gained, nothing learned, I returned to the hospital and resumed my position on the terminal floor, pacing outside the familiar door like a lion in search of its prey. When nobody was looking, I peeked through the window, curious about this boy and the man inside the room. The dad was still there, hooked up to the tubes. The queasy son was nowhere to be found.

  I watched his dad, alone in the narrow bed, wondering what he might be thinking. Was he thinking about anything? Was he praying, or had he given up hope, merely succumbing to his illness? A sound from behind coaxed me from my stance. My eyes followed the noise to the boy, clutching his stomach, and making these grossly distorted sounds. I was amazed that a person could be su
ch a complete moron.

  I said to him, “It’s quite astonishing how you ever grew to be so tall when your brain is evidently stunted.”

  “And which part of my brain might that be, Miss Know-it-all?”

  “What, you think I don’t know about the pituitary gland?”

  “Kudos to Jessica Parker. She knows about the endocrine system. What else do they teach you in the seventh grade?”

  “You mean almost eleventh, and they actually just taught us about the beauty and drama of the living world in biology, and I’m wondering where your vile bodily secretions fit into the scheme of things.”

  “For such a pretty girl,” he said, “you have a lot of ugly things to say.”

  I ignored the compliment, sort of. This is what we girls do. We file them away for future reference, and when we’re alone, we take them out and repeat them over and over in our minds.

  “I guess I’ve witnessed a lot of ugly things in my life, namely the most recent nasty thing that was left on my shoe.”

  “You’re fifteen,” he said, “what ugly things have you had to endure?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “You didn’t just say that, did you? I used that line back in the fifth grade.”

  “I’ve seen fifth graders with way more self-control than you.”

  “Friends of yours?” he laughed. I wasn’t used to cute boys keeping up with my quick wit. I studied his face; the green eyes were positioned perfectly across a smooth, olive complexion. A thick brush of unruly brown hair contradicted his chiseled appearance.

  He said, “I’m twenty-two.”

  “What makes you think I care?”

  “Next you’re going to ask me when is my birthday.”

  I laughed to hide my astonishment.

  “It’s December seventh.”

  I said, “Looks like bombs weren’t the only stupid things they dropped on Pearl Harbor Day.”

  “What exactly does that mean?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.