Dark Water - Laura McNeal [51]
“A friend of mine found it,” I said. “Isn’t that weird?”
All around us the just-born leaves of the sycamores brushed against each other in a wind that was blowing from the north. It was hot like the Santa Anas, and it would burn clouds away like a welder’s torch and bake the new leaves into card stock.
Amiel looked up at the sycamores, where the limbs were mottled white and gray and the huge green leaves, nine inches across, touched gently together. I looked at his hands, one swollen and wrapped, one narrow and finely made, and I held out a loquat. He took one and bit into it, and I took another one, and we ate them without a word in the shadows.
This is the most beautiful place, I thought but didn’t say. I feel the strangest happiness. The words weren’t specific enough somehow. I didn’t have words for what I felt.
Maybe that’s why, now that Amiel’s gone, I trace and label the parts of the sycamore in my college botany classes: pistillate flowers, rounded sepals, acute petals.
“You dropped the envelope, I guess,” I said.
Amiel nodded.
“What do you call it again—hacer mal …” I couldn’t remember how to say “juggle.” I tossed one loquat to the other hand.
“Hacer malabares,” he whispered. He couldn’t juggle with his hand in a bandage, and we couldn’t talk, so what I felt—the strange happiness, the nearness of him—just got larger and had nowhere to go, as when the sycamore tree swells and strains against heavy bark.
The rigid texture of sycamore bark entirely lacks the expansive power common to the bark of other trees, so it is incapable of stretching to accommodate the growth of the wood underneath, and the tree sloughs it off in great irregular masses, leaving the surface mottled, greenish white and gray.
Amiel handed the envelope back to me. “Sí,” he said, lifting his hurt hand slightly. He tried to curve it into the letter C.
“She won’t take it, you know,” I said. “My aunt.”
He nodded very slowly and intensely at me. “Sí,” he said again.
I’m not good at arguing with people. I took the envelope and put it in my backpack. All the greenness around us fluttered in the wind, and I was afraid he would go away, but he didn’t leave me, and he didn’t speak. I suppose I couldn’t stand it any longer, the silence and the nearness of his hand to my own skin, which like sycamore bark entirely lacked expansive power. I turned my face with the intention of speaking, and he turned his face to mine with the intention of hearing. I had nothing adequate to say, he had nothing to hear, and so we left our faces in that position of mute expectation. His cheeks were flat and long and smooth, hollowed by something that was now gone, like the interlocking loquat seeds. On one cheek, he had a little scar like those craters on photos of the moon. His eyes were both still and not still. His lips were dry, and I felt them near to mine the way you can feel a fever before you touch a sick person’s skin. I couldn’t say if he moved forward slightly or if I moved my face, but we did move, and our lips touched. He smelled like dust and loquats. I would have stayed forever in that moment, but he broke away. His face was darker and more melancholy than before—angry, even.
“Sorry,” I said, my first impulse being to apologize.
He looked around us. I knew what he was looking for: witnesses to our kiss. The chest-cracking swells went on inside me. The trees were just the same in their posture, blind to us, invisibly growing inside that stiff bark. The brown seeds we’d spit out lay all around us, dirty now. I thought of saying, It isn’t wrong. Why is it wrong?
It wasn’t wrong in theory. It wasn’t forbidden. But I understood that it was very strange and different, someone like him and someone like me. The people who have nothing aren’t allowed to touch the people with cars and houses. They can work here. That’s all.
I could hear the leaves patting each other in the wind, and I tried to hear the water in the creek, but it made no sound as it drained and pooled and crept and slid. Amiel didn’t run away from me, but he stood forbiddingly