That’s what I tried to do, anyway. I called his phone and only got a voice mail on the first ring, the kind of VM that is just a robot reciting a number: you’ve reached blah, blah, blah. Blah. I didn’t even get to hear the sound of his voice—that old voice mail he’d left me in the hospital was getting a little stale. I didn’t have an email address for him, and when I searched for him online again, this time, like, hunting, with places I knew he lived, with names I thought might be his parents’, all I found was his mother. I’m pretty sure it was his mother, and she seemed to be a powerful lawyer. But nothing else. Connor was a ghost.
Or that’s what I hoped, because it meant that he could return somehow, scratching at my window maybe, slipping out from my closet door, Wuthering Heights–style.
He could rise up behind me in any mirror, I thought, but still I avoided looking at myself in the mirror then. I only looked at myself in segments: here is my leg, here is my face, my arm—like a chicken cut up for frying maybe—because all of me, I couldn’t. Sometimes, though, I would look in the near distance of the mirror to see if he was standing there maybe, leash wound around his hand, Verlaine smiling beside him.
Of course Connor was the one who found me. It was how it worked with us. He would always be lost and I would be found.
But it took a while.
It happened when I least expected it, just like when he showed up in the hospital unannounced. How random was that, how lucky, that in that big old horrible place this perfect person showed up? This time, I was already back at school. It felt like it had been forever, but really I had just missed six weeks. October 7, just in time for homecoming that weekend, which I found incredibly annoying. Also annoying? Dee-Dee and her Rizzo attire, her constant back against the locker, notebook at her chest, her boyfriend, who of course was playing Kenickie, panting at her side. It was all so 1955; I was surprised she didn’t have a chiffon scarf around her neck, like the green one Nana gave me from her drawer when I was a kid. I loved the feel of it on my face, and the smell of her lingering perfume, but it did not, I repeat it did not, belong on a junior in high school. Also? Lydia was practically stitched to Dee’s side. Also annoying.
I guess I was in costume too, though. That first day back at school I felt I could be anything I chose, but there were basically two options: (1) I could be dressed up now, lipstick, nice clothes. I could cover myself up that way, I guess. Or (2) I could match up my insides and outsides better, wear my father’s old sweats, his T-shirts. Old ripped jeans and some Vans of my own. Never be seen.
I went with option two.
What’s to report about returning? Mostly weirdness. I don’t know why I thought people wouldn’t know. Or that they wouldn’t know the specifics. But they did. They were either overly nice, smiling at me in the hallways the way I always smile when I see kids in wheelchairs or on those metal crutches with the arm grips. Teachers welcomed me back as if I’d been lost in space, and in homeroom I received a summons by the school nurse to let me know that she—her office—was my safe place should I need it. That was nice, I suppose. I didn’t think I’d ever take her up on it though.
And Michael Lerner.
“Hey,” he said, like, sliding up beside me while I was at my locker.
“Hey!” We had been such good friends once. Now? Nothing really.
“Did you get my gift?”
I had totally forgotten about the necklace. “Yeah,” I said. “So sweet. Thank you.” It was nice to have his attention, I will admit.
“How you doing? Like, what was it like?”
“What was what like?” I pretended to be looking for something important inside. But there was nothing in there. Nothing even hanging on the door.
“The hospital. Surgery. Now.”
I shook my head. He was saying: Like, what is it like, what are you like now? Now. Now. “It was fucking fantastic,” I said. He wasn’t really interested in me. He was interested in what had happened to me.
He looked stricken. “God,” he said. “I was just asking.”
“And I was just telling you.” I slammed my locker closed. You know the person who wants to be close to the sick person, the person whose mom died, the person who has seizures in the hallways? The one who will have all the inside info on this person’s . . . stuff? That person was Michael L. And oh yeah, the sick person in this equation, that was me.
“You’re welcome for the necklace!” Michael said as I shuffled away from him and down the hall.
Down the hall: flyers for the homecoming weekend hockey game. A color printout of everyone in their plaid skirts and polo shirts, their shin guards and cleats, two hockey sticks crossed in front of the first row. Correction: a color printout of everyone but me.
Anyway; Connor. I had just gotten in from my third day of school, a time that was always of note because of the mad relief I felt. Nora and I were trying to make a plan to actually see each other.
“Luv, luv,” she said, “you’re like a little lag in there, never going out, after being all pent up with the gerries. Totally jammy for me to come. When works?”
We agreed on the weekend. She would take the train up.
“We’ll meet you under the clock at the station!” I said to Nora. “Text me when you get off the train.”
“Under the clock,” she said. “Chirp chirp!”
Was that even British? No idea, but didn’t have much time to think about it, because as soon as I’d hung up, my mother came up the stairs. It was sweet that she worked afternoons from home now, but it did always take me by surprise to see her.
“Mail call!” she said. Mail call, when it happened, usually involved a postcard from Nana or a letter from Tim for Zoe. He wrote her letters! That guy was so in love with Zoe; it was kind of sad but also kind of beautiful. I think Zoe actually loved him back. I’m sure of it.
My mother lifted her eyebrows and tilted her head as she sliced the air with an envelope.
Plain white, handwritten address.
Connor. It had to be.
How can I explain? The fluttery weird crazy in my chest. What was that?
I snatched it from her. I ran into my room. I closed the door. I brought Frog out from her aquarium and set her on the floor. I put Birdy on, “Fire and Rain.” I sat down, back against my bed, and closed my eyes to calm myself. I opened the letter and it was true. Finally it was news from Connor. He’d been found.