Page 74 of What You Left Me
“Martin?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not what I’m sorry for anymore. I’m sorry I never really got to know you.”
“Petra?”
“Yeah.”
“I like when you call me Martin.”
Flushed, Petra turns away. Endless rows of empty white chairs surround her. The rest of her class has disappeared, but she isn’t alone. She can still feel Martin’s pulse against her own, syncopated beats married through their hands. Still the yellow remains. Softer now. It’s not so hot. It’s weather that isn’t even weather anymore—a perfect, pleasant evenness that envelops everything.
“You’re funny,” Petra says.
Martin makes a fist with his free hand and pulls a victory arm pump into his chest. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear you say that.”
Petra rolls her eyes. “Too far.” Because he’s gone, she remembers again. It’s so easy to forget because it matters so little. Not at all actually. It doesn’t have to matter here. This can be anywhere. They can do anything. But they don’t want to. All they need is this very moment on their football field. The beginning of it all.
Petra’s been choosing to look away from Martin, an old nervous habit and a mistake she is quick to correct. When she turns to see him, nervousness is etched into his forehead: tiny taut wrinkles from where he holds tension.
“Sorry if my hand is sweaty,” he says.
“It’s perfect.” Her heart rate skyrockets. It’s her hand that’s sweaty. It’s she who is nervous. When he smiles, his scar, a little whiter than the rest, pulls wider. “How’d you get that?” she asks.
Martin knows what she means. “Wrestling in my backyard with Spitty.”
“Figures.”
“We were losers.”
“I know.”
“Then what are you sorry for? Sounds like you know all there is to know about me.”
Petra exhales. Her features pull downward, trying to see in Martin’s face how all of this ends. “What now?”
“Anything. Everything. Nothing. It’s all possible.”
“I mean when I wake up. You won’t be there. And it’s taken you so long to come here in the first place.”
“I know,” he says. “I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“You being mad at me.”
Petra has to laugh. “You were afraid I’d be mad at you…for dying?”
“I didn’t keep my end of the promise.”
“Do you really think you had control over what was going to happen to you? I mean, a car hit you,” she says softly. “There wasn’t a way for you to change the outcome of that, no matter what you were doing in people’s dreams.”
“Dammit you’re smart,” he says. He pauses to think. His mood changes. “Can you tell my family I’m sorry? And the family of that other driver?”
Petra puts her other hand atop his leg. “Your mom set up a memorial in his name.”
“Wow.” He takes it in. “I didn’t know that. When I visit them, it’s not like it is with you. We don’t talk about real stuff. It’s just happiness. Memories. Lots of hugging.” He fakes a shudder. “You can’t believe the amount of hugging.”
“You’re a pretty huggable guy.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice.”
Petra leans her head onto his shoulder. She can hear Martin breathing, full and real, his thoughts turning, his tongue untwisting, so used to saying the wrong thing and so eager to find the right thing. “This right here,” he starts, “is what could have been in your world, and what is in mine. It’s the place where we exist, together, exactly as we want to be.”
Yes,she thinks to herself.It is.
Sunlight stretches their shadows onto the grass in front of them. There are no more chairs around. Smack-dab in the middle of the field with black outlines looming like giants, Petra and Martin continue talking. And laughing. And nudging each other. The fastest of friends in the brightest of lights, glowing for an imaginary amount of hours on a clock that does not move. Their shadow selves, like a mirror of yet another world, dance together.
This, Petra thinks, is the place where lost things are found. Where time doesn’t matter. Where all of us live as our truest selves, in infinite forms, in moldable shapes. Where we shed our skin and become reborn, over and over, night after night, preparing ourselves for the hours that wait on the other side.
