Deanna Roy - Forever Innocent

His little lungs managed just fine at first, and even though they had placed him in an isolette with his eyes covered and monitors on his tiny body, no one seemed overly alarmed.

Gavin sat on the edge of the bed, holding my hand. “He’s beautiful. He’s perfect.”

They wheeled him down to NICU and I remembered sinking back on the pillow, exhausted, but there was no reason to worry. The last happy memory, possibly my very last happy memory, was Gavin leaning down and pressing his lips into my hair and whispering, “You are so amazing.”

Up on the roof, I couldn’t help it, but I turned so I could see him clearly. He was hunched over his popsicle stick, a shadow against the bright lights of the city. Emotion welled up, and for a moment I thought, he can just look up, and I can smile at him, and it can be like it always was.

But then he frowned, struggling to line up the cover of a notebook on his popsicle stick, his eyebrows drawing together. His expression reminded me of how he acted during the funeral, agitated and bitter, getting up before the minister said, “Amen.” He stormed down the aisle, shrugging the too-large jacket off his shoulders and dropping it to the floor.

Nothing good could stay pure, not even a memory.

I forced myself to look back at my instructions. This was why I didn’t want to have class with him. It would take so much mental energy to manage with him so near.

The girls by the light leaned their heads together.

“Amy is totally losing it over that guy,” one said to the other.

“Out of her league,” the other said.

“Sort of sad how she keeps staring at him.”

“I’d stare at him.”

I didn’t want to pay any attention to their gossip, but still, it was a distraction from my thoughts. I looked over at the TA. She was trying not to be obvious, but every six seconds she glanced over her shoulder at the ledge. I followed her gaze. Good Lord. She was obsessing over Gavin.

I turned back to my page. Draw a line. Do your assignment. Get your degree. Get the hell out.

I unzipped my bag and fished around for a ruler.

The two girls headed for the wall chart, and damn it, I sneaked another peek at Gavin. He was strung out. I could tell by the way his chin jutted forward. He kept setting and resetting the cardboard on the tiny stick, trying to keep it straight. His frustration was growing, and he was going to explode any minute.

Too bad. I aligned the ruler with my stick and drew a thin solid line. Next, I measured out the five sections and ticked off the centimeters. I would not look. I would finish this. Go home. Forget.

I stood up and headed to the wall chart to calibrate the cross-staff. I held out the stick and determined the degrees that corresponded to the lines I’d drawn. Now to map out the Big Dipper and I could go.

I turned around, and God, I couldn’t help it, but my gaze went back to him. Gavin was still sitting there, elbow on his knee, chin in his hand. He looked at his popsicle stick again and suddenly it was winging its way out into the night sky.

Amy apparently saw it as well, as she walked over to him and handed him another stick. “Need help?” she asked.

He shook his head, but the TA persisted, standing close. Too close.

I yanked the ruler from my bag. I was going to do something stupid. I closed the gap and held out the ruler. “You never did have the right school supplies.”

Gavin swallowed, his Adam’s apple starting high, then bobbing down. “You always were there with your organized binders and perfectly sharpened pencils.” His eyes didn’t seem so blue in the dark, and his lips were quirked in that little lopsided smile I teased him about when we were small, but not so much later, when kissing it became my primary obsession.

Amy set the new stick on the ledge and backed away. I should leave this alone, let her have him. Anyone had to be better for him than me.

He accepted the ruler and laid it on the stick. I picked up his little flashlight and held it for him. The new line halved the piece of wood neatly, and he quickly marked off the five segments. When he was done, he returned the ruler. “Thanks.”

I held the plastic, still warm from his hands. I didn’t know what to do or say, so as he moved toward the wall chart, I followed, like a groupie dying for any acknowledgment from the rock star she obsessed over.

He held out the stick and closed one eye. His arm really wasn’t too high, but still, I reached out and lowered it to the optimum level for calibration, my hand burning where it connected with his skin. He sucked in a breath and I knew he felt it too. How could he not, with all our history?

“Did you make your map yet?” he asked.

“No.”

Without the least hesitation, he took my hand and led me to my backpack, scooping it up, then around the rooftop to the far corner. No lights were hooked up there, so it was quiet and dark. “Lie here with me,” he said and set his backpack on the ground. He squeezed my fingers as he let go, and I wished we had walked some great distance, just to feel his hand on mine a little longer.

I laid my pack next to his and we stretched out on the bumpy surface, staring up at the stars.

“So how long have we both lived in the same city and not known it?” he asked.

“I got here a year ago.”

“A year.”

I couldn’t believe he was here the whole time. “It’s a big city, I guess.”

“Doesn’t seem big now. Do you work?”

“Yeah. At a coffee shop on Broadway. You?”

He shifted next to me. “At a garage. Changing oil. Easy stuff.”

“Not what we planned, is it?”

“Hardly.”

A breeze kicked up and our papers fluttered. I pressed down to keep them from flying away. “I guess we should do the lab.”

He pointed to the sky. “There’s the Big Dipper.”

“We should measure it,” I said, but neither of us made any move to fill out our worksheet.

This was so easy, lying next to him, just being.

“Did we ever do any stargazing when we were kids?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Should’ve.”

“Yeah.”

“Not like we were in some metropolis.”

“Nope. I remember the stars.” I shifted on the rough roof, the bits of asphalt biting into my shoulders. Still, I swear it was the happiest I’d been in a long time. Stupid. Ridiculous. But true. I tried to think of Austin passing the note across to me at the coffee shop, but he was nothing, just no contest compared to all the emotions that surfaced with Gavin.

I felt doomed. I couldn’t be with him. Too much had happened, and everything since. God. If he knew why I hit my professor, why I quit school. If he put it all together, he’d hate me. Right now, he still thought I was perfect and good.

Even though he left.

If he had all the facts, he’d leave again.

Go away, I told those thoughts. Live in the moment. Feel something for once.

I closed my eyes, reveling in the warmth of Gavin next to me and the comfort of sharing space with someone who knew me.

“Corabelle?”

My name sounded familiar when he said it, as though no one had used it since him. “Yeah?”

“Seems like the world wants us to at least be friends again.”

I didn’t know which words to get stuck on. Friends. Or at least. “Seems like it.”

“You think we’re the only ones who still think about Finn?”

Just hearing his name out here, in the open, with the heavens opened wide, made my throat close up. “I don’t know.”

He turned his face to me but I kept my eyes up on the stars. The Big Dipper rested neatly in the sky, surrounded by lesser bits of light, and I understood how it all fit together. Some moments of our lives were vivid and strong, hanging among all the other memories, not to be forgotten. Our baby was that constellation for us, and no matter where we looked, no matter what other stars dotted our sky, he would always be there, the biggest and the brightest of them all. 

Damn, this worked.

I made sure I kept my head straight, no worries about tomorrow. Just the night sky, the Big Dipper, and Corabelle next to me.

Something had shifted in her. I could see it, feel it. And as soon as I realized she wasn’t going to go away, that she’d reconciled with us being around each other again, I’d adjusted too.

She lifted her arm to point at the constellation. “I’m still reeling from the lecture on those stars.”

“Really? Why?” I’d been so distracted during class that I just transcribed the words, barely letting them penetrate. Corabelle had been so close, and I’d been so anxious to get to the TA and switch labs.

“He said two of them were Horse and Rider, orbiting together.” She dropped her arm. “They look like one star but really are two, endlessly circling each other.”

I figured Corabelle was using metaphors, like she always had. We’d been as close as one person until I’d walked. Or possibly she was just talking about stars.

“If you’d been listening today,” she went on, “you’d know that after all these centuries, a couple other astronomers decided that there were actually three. They discovered one more small star in their gravitational pull.” Corabelle still looked at the sky as she said all this, but the emotion was thick in her voice.

“That was 2009,” she said, barely holding it together, and my urge to pull her close was crazy strong. “They discovered this exactly four years ago.”

I felt the punch in my gut. That was when we last saw each other. When Finn was born. When he lived and died in his little plastic bed. I could hear the beeps of the monitor again, a steady stream of his heartbeat and random alarms. The only thing worse than those sounds was when they stopped.

“That’s a powerful coincidence, finding that third star right then,” I finally said.

Corabelle turned on her side, watching me. “When he said it in class, I could barely breathe. And you sat there, all defiant in your chair, just as stiff and angry as you got at the end.”

I’d been angry. I knew that. The doctors had no more told us Finn would die than everyone was looking to me to make the decisions. To be strong for the whole lot of them, as if this wasn’t as hard for me. Just thinking about that day made the rage boil over and before I could think about what I was saying, I blurted out, “You made me sign the papers to turn off the machines.”

Corabelle sat up. “What are you talking about?”

I should shut this down, but I’d started it. I had to finish it. “The damn forms. The ones allowing them to shut down his ventilator.” Bitterness coursed through me. I hadn’t thought about this in years, but she was making me. She was dredging it all up.

Corabelle tried to touch me, but I jerked away.

“Is that why you left?” she asked. “Because you had to sign?”

I couldn’t breathe, much less answer. Everything was rushing at me, like it had in those final days.

Corabelle dropped her hands in her lap. “We did what the doctors told us to do.”

I couldn’t take this anymore. I sat up and snatched at my bag. “I signed the paper. I decided when it ended. I was the one who told them when to let him die.” I kicked at the fluttering page of the lab assignment and stepped on the stick as I strode away. This wasn’t going to work. Too much history. Too much misery. Too much everything.

I shoved through the door and hauled ass down the stairs. Only when I was on my motorcycle, the roar of the motor drowning out all sound, did I start to feel any better. Distance. I needed miles to separate me and Corabelle again. Nobody could go through all this and come out okay. No one could be tough enough. I sure as hell wasn’t.

The lights of the city began to fade as I tore through Torrey Pines State Park and to the ocean. Just the quiet there, and the lack of strip malls and concrete, calmed my fury. I hated blowing up at Corabelle for something that wasn’t her fault. If she’d signed the papers, nothing would have been any different. The nurse would still have come in, and Corabelle would still have sat in that chair to hold the baby her first and last time. They would still have removed the ventilator. And the whir of the machines and the beeps of the monitors would still have gone silent.

Finn would still have died.

I turned off where the highway made contact with the beach and killed the bike. The water crashed against the shore, its endless wake a lulling sound, like the white-noise monitor some friend had given us for the baby. When Corabelle was still pregnant and couldn’t sleep, I played it for her at night. We laughed that since we couldn’t go to the college by the sea, we’d bring the sea to us.