On the edge of our town, on a frozen night, Tommy Baker’s body was found at the foot of a tree. He was submerged to his chest in powder, the soft blanket of the season’s first snow. I was seventeen years old at the time and had invested all of my babysitting money in my first perm and in a floor-length crimson gown with delicate seed beading underneath the bust. I thought it made me look grown-up and glamorous, just the way I wanted to appear when Tommy and I showed up at prom together.
After I purchased it, he asked me to show him.
“No!” I had protested as he pushed me back onto my bed, digging into my sides with his fingers. “It’s bad luck, or something.”
“That’s only for weddings, you dummy.”
Tommy swept his hair out of his eyes and I thought about how lucky I was, luckier than any other girl at my school. I used to think that he looked like Shawn from Boy Meets World, whose pictures I cut out from every issue of Seventeen Magazine that I could get my hands on.
Looking back on photos (I had no prom photos - the months following Tommy’s death are a quiet, blank time in my memory – like someone had taken a vacuum to my thoughts and feelings), I see how young and gangly we were at the time. I imagine myself in that dress, my hair frizzing around my face in a halo, my smile dulled by orthodontics, and I am almost relieved that Tommy and I never had the chance to go through that adolescent rite, that we don’t have pictures of us posed with his hands at my waist, our half-smiles frozen.
I wake up on Saturday mornings with that aching fatigue from the week still lingering in my bones. Or maybe I am not tired – maybe it’s the cold. As my body ages, I watch with dismay as the elements seem to rise up against me. First the rain, and now the cold. Soon, I will experience discomfort in every kind of weather. And then, like my mother, my grandmother – all those who have aged before me – I will begin to push pain to the back of my mind. It will cease to feel relevant. It shall become less like an order of business and more like a given – old news, if you will.
Rogan, my old Labrador, lollops up to me and drops his head onto the edge of my bed, as though he too is too tired for this day. We are the best of friends, Rogan and I. Richard often says that we gang up on him, that if both of us slipped through the ice on the lake one of these days, Rogan would save me without hesitation and leave him to drown, his lungs filling with ice water. I hate these kinds of morbid hypotheticals, the kind of terrible situations that people – especially people in love – create in order to test the bounds of loyalty, to see where they will snap.
Tommy and I used to play those games, lounging in the backseat of his car in the parking lot after school.
“What if I lost my arm?”
“I’d still love you,” he said, kissing my elbow. “What about me, what if I grew huge warts all over my face?”
“I’d still love you,” I responded giddily. “I’d apply ointment to them and take you to all the dermatologists in the world. What if… what if I went completely bald?”
“You’d be hot,” he said with a low whistle. I swatted his arm away. Then, he said with the nonchalance of someone asking the time. “What if I died?”
“I’d die too.”
“Really?”
“Yes, most definitely. So you better not die. Ever.” I pointed a finger at his face mock-sternly and he licked it.
It’s easy to look back at these conversations and apply much more gravity to them than what was really there. I did so for years afterwards. I thought of him, of the way he kissed, of the way he would glance at me sideways, of his occasional bursts of irritation over schoolwork or his mother (“She’s always hovering!”), and I tried to plot the steps that led him to that desolate clump of trees. I had notebooks filled with my frenzied thoughts on his death; I could write for days on end. I thought that at some point, all of my circuitous thoughts (Did he do it on purpose? If so, why? And hadn’t we all loved him enough?) would break through some barrier and clarification would dawn upon me.
After the funeral, I rarely spoke to his parents. It was too difficult. But once, years after his death, I came home from college and saw Mrs. Baker in line at the library.
“I can’t figure it out,” I found myself saying to her, shaking my head.
“Then don’t,” she said. Not unkindly, just in a matter of fact way, her tone a flat key on the piano. “Give yourself a break, Jessie.”
