If I Lose Her (3 page)

 The next
morning I couldn’t stop thinking about her while I jogged around the park near
my house. It was probably too soon to call and ask her out again, but it seemed
like things had gone well and I had a pair of tickets to the pool in Glenwood
Springs so I decided to pick up the phone and push my luck.

 “Hello?” she
said clearly just waking up.

 “Hey, it’s
Alex.”

 “Alex?” It
took her a second. “Hey.”

 “I just
thought I’d call and say good morning.”

 “Well.”

 “Well what?”

 “Well, are
you going to say it?”

 I laughed.
“Good morning.”

 She sounded
still half-a-sleep and all soft and beautiful. I was imagining her with her
hair tossed around her face trying to squint across the room to see a clock on
a distant dresser or maybe on her wall.

 “Good
morning. What time is it?”

 “9:30.”

 “9:30?
Shouldn’t you still be asleep?”

 “Meh, I jog
in the mornings. I just wanted to see if you had plans for the day.”

 “Uh, I guess
not. What did you have in mind?”

 “I thought
maybe we could go swimming. I have a couple of tickets to the pool in Glenwood Springs.”

 She was
quiet.

 “We could
stop at BeauJo’s for lunch,” I said trying to tease a yes out of her.

 She laughed.

 “Oh, all
right. If you’re going to pull the BeauJo’s card.”

 “How’s 11:30
sound?”

 “Sounds
good.”

 I hung up
the phone.

 Glenwood Springs.
I didn’t think she’d say yes, but now that she did I was nervous about how I
looked.

 I got into
the shower and stood for about fifteen minutes in front of the mirror, tucking
in my stomach and flexing my muscles this way and that. I didn’t look too bad.
A little lean but not bad.

 I picked her
up at 11:30 and we began the three-hour trip, making a stop in Idaho Springs
for some BeauJo’s deep-dish pizza. I ordered the New York special and she had
the mother-load mountain pie, which impressed me.

 “So why
Journalism?” She asked me as we got back into the car and continued on our way.

 “My dad was
a journalist, so I guess I figure it’s what he would have taught me to do if he
was still around. How about you? Do you always do the fine-art stuff?”

 “Not always.
I started off photographing the usual stuff like ducks and flowers, but I love
how the camera lets me create different worlds and show those worlds to other
people.”

 “So you’re
crazy,” I said with a smirk.

 She laughed.

 “Maybe a
little. Is that okay?”

 I shrugged.
“You know. Whatever.”

 She just
smiled at me.

 We talked
some more about where we were both hoping our photography would take us and sat
for a while just watching the mountain rocks and forest pass by our window.
Then we arrived.

 We paid the
entrance fee, got our wristband and went in to the dressing room to get
changed.

 I was
finished before she was.

 I laid my
towel on the back of a beach chair and stepped down into the water. It was warm
and smelled rich with minerals from the hot spring that fed the pool. Then I
turned and saw Jo run past me and jump in. I shielded my face from the splash
then ducked under the water to swim to her.

 When I came
up I saw her watching me with her eyes bobbing up just out of the water.

 “You have
beautiful eyes,” I told her.

 She smiled,
closed them and ducked underneath the water again.

 I waited a
few seconds.

 I felt a
poke in my ribs as she sprang out of the water, onto my back and pulled me
under. We wrestled for a while under the water, and chased each other back and
forth across the pool. When we were both tired she put her arms around my neck
and hung on my back. My arms wrapped around hers.

 “What is
this from?” She asked, touching the pencil-eraser sized scar on my forearm.

 “That’s from
my mom’s friend burning a tick out of my arm.”

 “Ew, a
what?”

 “One summer
when my mother’s bastard of a jailbird business partner came out to Minnesota
with us, we were out fishing when it started raining harder than I had ever
seen before or since. I had heard from somewhere that fish bite more when it
rains, and I truly have loved the rain since I was little so I stayed out on a
dock fishing while everyone who lived at the trailer park sat in the bar
watching me through the front window. It rained so hard my ass-cheeks went
pruny, and I didn’t catch a thing.”

 She laughed
and shook her head.

 “That night,
after I peeled off the layers of soggy clothes and climbed into the shower, I
saw something on my arm. It looked like a little seed or something. So, I tried
to brush it off, but it was stuck. When I looked at it more closely I saw that
it had legs and no head. Its head was stuck in my arm. I went and showed my mom
who showed her business partner staying in the hotel room next to us, and he
informed me that it was a tick, probably carrying Lyme disease and that we had
to burn it out. We tried but killed the thing before it could pull its head
out. He then informed me that the only way to make sure he got all of the head
out was to cut the wound open, with a razor blade, and explore around with a
pair of tweezers. I begged him to shoot me instead, but he wouldn’t have it nor
would my mother, so they laid me down on a bed and dug into the bleeding hole
in my arm like they were playing the operation game. ‘There’s no more head,’ he
told me, ‘but to make sure it doesn’t get infected we need to cauterize the
wound, and I’m thinking to my self
Cauter WHAT?!?
”

 “ ‘I’ll
light a match head and push it on the wound with my finger. It will go out
immediately and I’ll burn myself, but it’s the only way,’ he told me. I must
have been too young or too terrified to stop and suggest some simple alcohol.
Then there was a puff of smoke, a smell of burning skin and it was over.” 

 She looked
at the scar, touched it carefully, then started laughing.

 “What? It
really hurt,” I said.

 “Oh I’m sure
it did. I’m also sure you won’t forget the alcohol next time will you?”

 “I just
won’t go fishing outside of some old rickety bar when it’s pouring rain,” and
we laughed together.

 “Do you have
any interesting scars?” I asked her.

 She let go
of my neck and stood in the pool in front of me, lifting her arm.

 “I fell out
of a tree and landed on a rock, here,” she said showing me a one-inch white
line on her ribs.

 “I got this
one flipping over the bars on my bike,” I said showing her the scar on my
elbow.

 “Well, a
shovel fell off the wall in the garage when Susan and I were playing princess
castle and got me here,” she said turning, lifting her long wet hair and showing
me the scar between her shoulder blades.

 “That looks
like it hurt,” I said touching it. Then I leaned down and kissed it gently.

 She turned
and kissed me back.

 I wanted to
spend the rest of the week in the pool watching her beautiful body swimming
around in the warm, spring water, but it was a three-hour drive home, and it
was getting close to dinner, so we decided to head back. Before we left, I had
one of the life guards use my little Holga to take a picture of Jo and I
laughing in the swimming pool together.

 School was
much more bearable now with Jo’s hand to hold in it, and I was enjoying all of
the nuances of new love, like sharing lunch and finding notes hidden in
peculiar places like my locker and books. I even enjoyed talking to Jo about
homework.

 “What do you
think about this?” Jo asked me one afternoon between classes as she handed me a
folded photograph of a woman wrapped in white silk, floating underwater.

 “I like it.
It has a kind of otherworldly quality to it,” I said looking at the photo. “For
some reason I almost feel sad for her. Like she’s lonely or waiting for
someone. Who’s the photographer?”

 “Howard
Schatz. I’ve been kind of fixated on him the past few weeks since I found a
book of his work at Camera Obscura.”

 “That
gallery you visited downtown?”

 “Yeah, you
really should go with me sometime. You’d LOVE it. They have this little closet
of a bookstore that is somehow packed with pretty much every photo book ever
printed.”

 “Nice. Hey,
I talked to my mom and she said you should come by sometime for dinner. Are you
up for that?”

 “Yeah. My
parents are pretty ready to meet you too.”

 I laughed
and shook my head.

 “What?” Jo
asked.

 “So, it’s
meet the parents time huh?”

 “Is that
okay?”

 “Yeah, I
guess I’m ready if you are. You wanna meet my mom first since I kind of already
talked to her about it?”

 “Sure. I
need to go though. Can we talk more about it after class?”

 “Yeah.”

 Then she
kissed my cheek and was gone.

 Jo’s parents
had found out about me through her sister Susan, a senior at the school who I
had met only a few weeks after Jo and I started dating. This wasn’t a problem
since they trusted her to decide who her friends were.

 Jo and Susan
got along even though they were about as different at two people could be. Jo
was artistic and reserved with dark hair and a wardrobe bought at the Corner
Closet, a retro second-hand store in Aurora. Susan on the other hand was
bright. She was blonde, loved sports and reached for her Dolce & Gabanna
sunglasses on sunny afternoons. What the two of them had in common was their
strength and kindness. Once in a while I would swear that I had a crush on
Susan, but then I would meet up with Jo for a movie or lunch, she would kiss
the back of my neck or play with that little length of hair behind my ear and
it would dissolve away.

 Saturday
came, and we had plans to meet my mother for dinner.

 We spent the
afternoon doing a bunch of touristy stuff around Golden like visiting the
bronze buffalo, and walking along Clear Creak while some fishermen cast flies
for trout.

 Jo’s idea of
picture taking was slow and thoughtful so she didn’t often have her camera with
her; mine was glued to my face. I took some shots of us in the brewery, one of
us feeding a three-legged dog on main street and a couple of shots of a group
of kayakers practicing white-water maneuvers across the street from Golden City
Park.

 My car at
the time was an old VW rabbit with a half-functioning tape deck that had no
carpeting at all on the driver’s side floor, just naked, grey metal. This
didn’t bother Jo. She just filled the glove box with a small library of
cassettes that she had crafted over months that covered just about any mood
that I could think of, and that afternoon, as I pushed our little rabbit up the
serpentine curves we listened to Aerosmith’s ‘Ain’t That a Bitch’.

 Around three
we stopped at the Buffalo Bill Cody museum, and I snapped some shots of Jo and
I at the stony grave of Wild Bill, including one of me picking her up and
spinning her around while her summer skirt twisted around us. I was wearing my
favorite pair of silver rimmed aviator-style sunglasses with the big, round
lenses.

 After the
museum we still had about an hour to kill so I took her to my favorite spot
where you can look out twenty miles across Denver, all the way to the airport.
We parked along the road and I took out a blanket from the back of the car so
we could lay it out and just sit and talk for a while.

 “Have you
ever met your real father?” she asked as I picked up a handful of rocks and
rolled them around in my hand.

 “Nah, mom
said that she’d heard he had moved to the east coast somewhere, but she never
felt the need to go find him. She said that she would understand if I ever
wanted to contact him myself, but I guess I’m just nervous about how she’d cope
with having him in her life again.”

 “What do you
mean?”

 “They met
when she was in her early twenties at some concert or something. They fell in
love and were together for over a year, but one night they had a fight and she
told him that she was pregnant. I guess it freaked him out or something,
because he left. A couple of weeks later she found out she really was pregnant,
with me. Well, he came back saying that he wanted to do the right thing, but
after seeing how he had reacted the first time, she told him she wasn’t
actually pregnant and that she had lied. Then he left again; this time he
didn’t come back.”

 The stone
was hard and cold beneath our blanket but we didn’t care. I looked out over
Golden to the city skyline in the distance. The birds were out singing their
thanks for a warm summer afternoon, and I could smell the pine in the air. Jo
laid her legs across my lap and let one shoe fall sideways off of her foot and
she pinched its edge between her naked toes. Then I took out my wallet and
showed her the small square photograph that I had found in the camera bag some
years earlier.

 Jo looked at
the photo closely.

 “You look
like him.”

 “My mother
says the same thing, but I don’t see it,” I said running my hand along the back
of her foot. “She tells me bits and pieces about him sometimes like how he
could meet you at the grocery store and remember your name six months later, or
how he always thanked everyone he met by name, like waiters and bankers. I
guess they were out one afternoon, walking back to his house from the park,
when some people were carrying a couch down the street, and he just dropped
what he was doing and helped them. Little stuff like that. Stuff I’m pretty
sure she told me so that I wouldn’t hate him.”

 “Do you?
Hate him I mean?”

 “Nah. Not
really. I feel like it takes too much energy to really hate somebody. I don’t
suppose it’s really his fault anyways. Maybe, if my mom had told him the truth
he would’ve stayed.”

 “Do you
think you’ll ever try to find him?”

 I just
though about her questions for a while like I had some many countless times
before. “I don’t know. I mean what if he’s a jerk or something?”

 She turned
the photo over to look at its back then looked at its front again. 

 “I’ve only
ever seen one other photo of him that’s hanging on our living room wall. I’m
curious sometimes, but I don’t really want to bring another guy into her life
that could just turn out to be a problem. She seems happy right now.”

 “She’s
really had a rough time hasn’t she?”

 “Yeah. She’s
raised me the best she knew how, but the guys have always been ass holes. When
I was two she married a captain in the coast guard. That lasted about two years.
He had a habit of throwing her around, which she put up with for a while since
he was the most stability she had known in a long time, but when she came home
one afternoon expecting to find him in the back yard playing with me or maybe
out at the pool, she found me in the back yard playing by myself and him in bed
with another woman. So, she packed a bag for me and we left. They got worse
after that.”

 I picked up
a pinecone and fingered the little spines beneath its wooden leaves.

 “When I was
twelve, mom needed some help moving out of a little apartment and into the
house we’re in now, so she asked around at the local church. They recommended
Peter Simons. They started talking, and he told her about all this money he had
made in various businesses at various times and how he was fighting to get his
kids back from his wife who was abusing them. It broke her heart and she
started helping him. Over a few weeks they spent more and more time together.
She would lend him her van to move out of his house, and I would get
conscripted to help him repaint an apartment that he was renting out or clean
out some storage shed full of crap. He made her laugh, and she thought he was
dangerous, in an exciting way.  She would go to court with him all dressed
up like they were going to a dinner party, and at night she would fall asleep
digging through old papers and older laws trying to help him find a hook that
would help him keep his kids. More than once they went to Las Vegas gambling,
eating and talking about all of the things he had done in the military or in
business or in life. He was her real life James Bond, and he gave her a cause;
these poor, innocent little kids who needed protecting from their own mother
who was abusing them and the courts, who for some strange reason just couldn’t
see the truth. Well, at the time she owned a small jewelry shop in Littleton
that was doing pretty well, until one afternoon when she went to the store and
found it empty. She immediately called him for help but there was no answer. Over
the previous months she had also lent him her credit card because, according to
him, all of his assets were tied up in the divorce. Then one night he left town
with his kids and her clothes and jewelry, only stopping long enough to max out
her credit card and empty her bank account. She was left with a
thirteen-year-old to feed and no money, no credit and nothing to sell in a
store that she still had a lease on. She went to the police, but since his name
had been on the lease with hers, they considered it a civil matter and wouldn’t
pursue any criminal charges. She had been totally screwed, and the police just
watched. It took her selling some of my great-grandmother’s jewelry, and some
emergency food aid from the government to get us back on our feet. After that
she just wasn’t the same.

 “When her
first husband beat the crap out of her and slept around I know it hurt her, but
I think she thought she could handle it–for me, so there would be someone
there to help take care of me, like a father. It was different with Peter. I’m
pretty sure she loved him. I think that’s what hurt her the most.”

 I tossed the
pinecone over the edge and watched it fall, maybe 200 feet, before bouncing off
some rocks.

 “God Alex,
I’m sorry. I can see why you’d hesitate before trying to find your dad,” Jo
said sitting up next to me and curling her legs beneath her. She had kicked off
her other slender red shoe and sat leaning on one arm. She was absolutely
beautiful in a white spring dress with red flowers she had bought just to meet
my mother. I loved that dress.

 “Don’t get
me wrong though,” I said. “When it’s just us, things are pretty good. Sometimes
I’ll come home late, after being out with friends or whatever, and I’ll see the
light on in her room. I’ll knock on the door and if there is no answer I know
she is out on her balcony smoking a cigarette. ‘Mom’, I’ll holler in through
the cracked door. ‘Yeah honey,’ she’ll say sliding open the glass door to the
balcony. ‘Come on in. I’m just out here watching the stars,’ she’ll tell me or
maybe, ‘I’m just out here thinking.’ Then she’ll put down her cigarette and
walk into the bedroom to give me a hug. If it’s cold out, she’ll be wearing a
full-length silver fox coat she bought off a customer in her store, and I’ll
wrap my arms around her, bury my face in the soft hairs of the fur and remind
her that she’s my favorite mom. Then she’ll laugh. ‘Well, that’s a good thing
because you’re my favorite son.’ Then I might go out on the balcony with her
and tell her what my day has been like or she’ll talk about some interesting
piece of jewelry that came into the store and pretty quick the conversation
will wonder onto whatever it is she’s reading.

 “My mother
never bothered to spend the money on a bed frame, but she loves her books. Her
mattress just lays on her bedroom floor with stacks of books piling up next to
it, sometimes two and three feet high against black and gold fabric that she’s
pinned to her walls as decoration. She might be pulling apart Shakespeare or
Whitman, reading the newspaper or writing in a journal; usually several at a
time. But the one thing that is always open by her bed is the Bible. I’ll sit
down and she’ll share with me some interesting nugget she’s found digging
through the Hebrew Scriptures. We’ll debate back and forth and more times than
not, before either of us know what’s happened, the sun will be rising on
another day.”

 While we
were talking raindrops started tickling our cheeks and arms. Jo looked at her
watch. “It’s four-fifteen. Should we get going?”

 “We had
better,” I told her. We folded up the blanket, got back into the car and wound
our way back down the mountain.

 I hadn’t
talked to anyone about my mother like that before that day, which meant I
hadn’t really thought about it. Not about her or my dad or what kind of awful
things she must have been fighting through. I mean, how often does a kid stop
and actually think about all the stuff their parents go through. You don’t
usually stop and look at them like they are real people until you get older,
when the weight of some of the decisions they made on your behalf finally
starts to crystallize, and the bit that sucks is that then it’s often too late.

 I squeezed
Jo’s hand, and we drove through the rain to my house.