First Comes Love (11 page)

“I was talking about how this diner has the strangest décor I’ve ever seen,” I say, noting again how the rainforest paintings clash with the s parlor style.

He waves his hand in the air with impatience. “I know, we agreed on that. What did you say after that?”

He sets his fork down as if he’s afraid he’ll choke again. His face is tensing up and his eyes ask,
Did you say you love me? Or did I imagine it?

I need to put him out of his misery.

“Oh. I said I love you. Is that what you’re referring to?” I ask, and give him my best poker face.

His mouth falls open and he only stares at me, like he wants to say something but the words are stuck. I don’t force it. When Gray doesn’t know what to say, he closes up. Unlike me, he’d rather be quiet and reserved any day than a babbling motormouth. It’s one of his best qualities.

I take a bite of my eggs and a long drink of orange juice. When I realize the conversation is one-sided when it comes to expressing our feelings, I go back to discussing my travel plans. But I can tell Gray isn’t listening. His eyes are wandering. There’s a question lingering behind them.

You love me?

***

“I scared you yesterday, didn’t I?” she asks.

Dylan’s lying in my arms on a hammock in our backyard. My feet hit the ground and I kick the hammock back and forth, like a swing. She came over again tonight in her pajamas and furry slippers (which she named, of course). Sometimes she talks to her slippers like they’re her pets, and sometimes her slippers have full conversations with each other. It’s borderline insane, but I let it go.

Now I leave the back door open for her. I’m starting to like our sleepovers, even though it’s hard to get a second of sleep with her in my bed.

I hold Dylan tight against my side and tell her she scares me every day, but in a good way.

“It’s what I said at Tom-Tom’s,” she prompts. I gulp, one of those nervous gulps where your whole throat constricts like there’s a knot inside it. I know what she’s getting at. Those three words.

“That I love you?” she adds, like I need clarification. “Is it so scary to hear it?” she asks. I look at her eyes, reflecting slivers of moonlight. I still can’t believe how easily she says it. Where does she get her confidence? Do they sell a prescription of this stuff that I’m unaware of? Can I get a bottle? Doesn’t she understand this changes everything?

“It’s scary to say it,” I tell her.

She sits up straighter and looks at me. “I don’t get it. It shouldn’t be scary at all. Shouldn’t it be, I don’t know, uplifting news?”

“It’s a big deal. How many people have you said it to?”

Dylan thinks this over. A few seconds go by. Then almost a minute. Have there been that many?

“I’m sure when I was little I said it more often. I told a couple guys in middle school. Maybe ten guys in high school. I tell my girlfriends all the time. I told a guy at a gas station the other day I loved him because he helped check Pickle’s oil.”

I stare at her with a frown. My bubble of self-absorbed assurance that Dylan loves me, only me, bursts in the air.

“You tell that many people you love them?”

She blinks at me. “Sure. Why not?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think you should just throw the word around unless you really mean it.”

“But I do mean it,” she says. I’m flabbergasted. And annoyed. I ask her how she can love me and a gas station attendant she’s known for five minutes. I tell her she uses the word too lightly.

She looks away and ponders this.

“I guess there are different levels of love,” she says. “There’s friend love and family love and platonic love and romantic love. And the levels of romantic love are endless. There’s all-consuming love and desperate love and tortured love and that love/hate kind of love—”

I cover her mouth with my hand and tell her I get it.

“I think you’re only meant to love a few people,” I say.

“Why?” she asks.

I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just the way it is. “Because that’s the way it works.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she argues. “Why limit it? Love is the one thing you can give away for free.”

“It isn’t free. People need to earn it.”

“That’s so sad to me,” she says, “to think I can only use it on a select handful of people. Why can’t we love everyone?”

“Because people are pricks,” I say. I brush a piece of hair away from her face and tuck it behind her ear. I try to kiss her but she leans away and stares at me.

“You know what it is? We’re taught to limit love. When you’re a kid, you can say it to strangers. And then all of a sudden, one day you’re reprimanded for it. The older we get, the closer we guard ourselves and the more selfish we are with giving it. And the more miserable we all become.”

She slumps back down in my arms. I watch her thoughts charge her eyes with energy.

“I wouldn’t say that,” I argue.

“But you’re right—we’re taught to love only a few people. We think it’s this sacred resource, like we’ll run out of it at some point. But the more you love, the more it’s returned to you. Hands down. You can’t argue with that.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe you stop giving it so freely because one day it’s taken away and it hurts so much, you need to protect yourself.”

She knows what I’m referring to. “Until you realize love’s the only thing worth living for in the first place,” she says.

She leans back in to me and I wrap my arms around her. Of course I love Dylan. I’m crazy in love with her. But I don’t know where she came from and why I deserve her and where this is going to go. I still feel like she’s going to wake up one day and look at me. Really look at me. See that I’m not brave, I’m not the male lead in a romantic comedy, see that
she can do better.
Because I think she can. And where would that leave me? Crushed.

***

I decide to test out her theory that the more you love,
the more it comes back to you. I tell her I love her at Nella’s Irish Bar during a heated two-player game of Ms. Pac-Man. I figure if she can pick a strange place and time to tell me, I’m entitled the same liberty. I steal her line. I tell her I love her and Ms. Pac-Man and her better. I finally release the words trapped on the tip of my tongue. It isn’t forced and it isn’t awkward or embarrassing or even life changing. It just feels right.

Dylan doesn’t take her eyes from the screen when I say it. She is about to clear the board and won’t be distracted. She just smiles and tells me she loves Ms. Pac-Man too.

A few days later I check my cell phone
and there’s a message from Coach Clark. Coach Clark, as in the head baseball coach at the University of New Mexico, who started recruiting me to play almost two years ago. He leaves this friendly message saying he’d like to talk to me and he wants me to call him back. He leaves his home phone number. He makes it sound like we not only have a past with each other, we have a future.

I call him on my way to work and he sounds genuinely happy to talk to me. Happy. To talk to me. The kid that flaked out of his full-ride scholarship. The kid that let down his coach and his team because he wanted to stay home and be with his family. The schmuck.

We start with small talk. He asks me what I’ve been up to. Not much. It takes about a minute to fill him in on a year of my life, because not much happens when you’re living in a shadow. I didn’t start living again until this summer. When someone forced life back into my veins.

He asks me how I’m doing. He dances around the subject behind the question. And for the first time I can truly say things are better. I’m doing better. He’s happy to hear that.

He tells me about last season. They ended up fifteen for eight in the conference. The guys are pretty young, but there’s a lot of potential and a close team dynamic. They’re great guys, he says.

I wonder why he’s telling me all this. Is he trying to make me feel guilty? Did he roll out of bed this morning and feel a sudden urge to ruin my day? How thoughtful.

And then he hits me with it.

“Gray, when’s the last time you played ball?” he asks.

I don’t lie. What’s the use?

“I haven’t touched a baseball since last fall,” I say.

There’s a long pause. Awkward silence?

“Do you think you might be ready to pick one up again? We need a pitcher.”

I’m too shocked to answer him. I can feel my pulse start to race.

“Gray,” he says, “if you want to play, the offer still stands. We’d love to have you on the team.” He tells me one of their starting pitchers injured his shoulder last week and needs surgery. He’s out for the season, maybe permanently. There’s an open spot and he wants me to fill it.

I remind him I’m out of my game. He tells me I can make a comeback, that one season won’t set me back too far. He can put me on weight training this fall, some conditioning in the winter. He tells me I’ll be ready for the spring if I’m dedicated to working hard every day.

I can still register for classes, he says, and a couple guys on the team share a house and have an extra room this fall if I’m looking for roommates. I’m stunned. It’s too easy. Too perfect. Since when does my life work like this?

My fingers turn to noodles. I almost drop the phone.

“Uh,” I say. Am I dreaming this conversation? “Coach, what brought all this on?” I ask. “Why are you giving me another chance?”

He clears his throat and tells me it’s strange. He got this letter the other day, on the same day he found out he’d lost his pitcher.

“Letter?” I ask.

He said it wasn’t signed by anyone, but it mentioned I might be ready to play if the team still wanted me. It said he should give me a call if he’s still interested.

“I assume your mom or dad sent it,” he says.

I know exactly who wrote it, and I shake my head. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” I say.

“Listen, Gray,” he says. “I want you to know that I’m not upset you gave up the scholarship last year. The whole team understands. But I’ve had my eye on you for two years. You’re the player I want on my roster.”

I don’t know what to say. My throat feels tight. His voice drops a little.

“When I was your age, my mom passed away. So, I can relate to what happened to you. You made the right decision to stay with your family. I stayed with mine for a while too; I put my life on hold to be with them. But at some point you need to get back in the game, you know?”

I hear him sigh, this heavy sigh like he brought up something he wanted to avoid.

“Yeah,” I say.

He says he doesn’t need an answer right now. He tells me to think about it. Talk to my parents. Let him know next week. If I want this, and if I’m willing to work for it, I’m on the team. I turn my phone off and stare out the window at a world that’s suddenly changed. In five minutes, my life just shifted off-course like it was struck with a meteor, and everything around me is showered in light. Life can change that fast.

***

Friday night Dylan and I drive to a coffee shop
in downtown Phoenix called McKinley’s to watch an open mike night. Dylan heard it’s mostly acoustic. She loves live music and Phoenix has a decent scene. I’ve taken her to Bash on Ash, Boston’s, and the Green Amigo, three bars that let in minors as long as you wear those paper bracelets so the whole world knows you’re a baby.

We sit across from each other at a corner table and watch a girl perform “Show Me,” by the Cure. She isn’t too bad.

Dylan informs me tonight she wants to ask questions. That’s it. Questions.

“Like what?” I ask her.

All categories, she says. Just random questions that make you think. She offers to go first. She asks me which albums I would bring if I were stranded on an island and could only bring five CDs.

Next it’s my turn. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s say this island also has an eighty-four-inch TV and DVD player.” Dylan rolls her eyes. “Hey,” I say. “This is my question. If you could only bring five movies to watch, what would they be?”

And the questions keep rolling and musicians walk on and off the stage and do mike checks and thank us for being there, but we don’t really notice. Lately, it’s like we’re in our own world and it’s the safest place I’ve ever known.

“If you could go out to dinner with any famous person—any living famous person, who would it be?”

“If you wrote a song about your life, what would you title it?”

“If you could date any celebrity, who would it be?”

“If you could shop at any store for free, which one would you choose?”

Dylan proposes another challenge. She pulls her small journal out of her bag. She flips to a blank page and looks at me.

“If you met someone and had to make out their character and you could ask them only ten questions, what would you ask them?” We take turns writing our questions down. We pass the journal back and forth. We cross some out; we star others. We compile our Top Ten list:

1. At the end of the day, what do you want to come home to?
   
2. Where do you see the world in twenty years?
   
3. If you could bring one character in a book to life, who would it be?
   
4. If you could unlearn one thing, what would it be?
   
5. What’s your personal philosophy of life?
   
6. What do you look for in a friend?
   
7. If you could travel anywhere, right now, where would you go and what would you do there?
   
8. If you could design your ideal life, what would it look like?
   
9. What does family mean to you?
   
10. If you could be remembered for one thing, what would it be?
    

Dylan and I each add a personal favorite to the list. Dylan’s is
Dogs or cats?
(She claims this answer conveys a critical look into a person’s psyche.) Mine is
Are you a strict vegetarian?
(I can’t hang out with someone who gets offended if I eat steak and bacon on a regular basis.)

The music ends and Dylan and I head to the Tracks. We sit under the bridge and Dylan blows bubbles with her Big League Chew. She lays her head in my lap.

“If you could have one superpower, what would it be?” she asks.