Throughout the summer the only thing I could think about was the road to Lazarus’s. I’d dream about it: the stop signs, the white line, the turnoff, the front porch, the door. My brother phoned and left a few messages, but I didn’t bother calling back.
“Are you alive?” Ned’s familiar voice asked one day when I played my phone-message tape.
Actually, yes, I wanted to tell him. Amazingly, incredibly enough, I seemed to be. But he wouldn’t understand. How could I explain that on rainy nights Lazarus and I sat out on his porch in the dark, drawn there by whatever was inside us, some external weather trapped and mirrored inside our blood and bones. I felt addicted, to the danger, the rush of being alive, taking chances. We had sex outside, in the dark, with the rain coming down. We went down to the pond, turned away from each other, took off our clothes. We didn’t have to see each other to know what we wanted. It was a story that no one else knew.
Now when I went to the survivor group I felt nothing, no kinship. I wanted to run away from their sorrowful tales of lives gone wrong. I came late, left early, avoided the girl with the mismatched socks when I saw her on the street. We were nearing hurricane season, a time when lightning-strike survivors feel more stress than usual. Anything can happen at any time. In group, we were told safety tips. Stay away from windows; have a hurricane cellar. And there I was on the porch on nights when the wind nearly carried us away. I wasn’t thinking of safety at all.
“Where’ve you been?” Renny asked me at the snack table after one survivor meeting. There were oatmeal cookies and cream cheese brownies and some gray thing I supposed was red velvet cake, allegedly a specialty around here.
Lately, I’d been more selfish than ever. I had a secret dark world and it suited me. In my greed, I had forgotten about Renny. I was that sort of friend, I suppose, the bad sort, and I was embarrassed by my own self-involvement. Renny looked nervous and underfed. Not that he was my responsibility.
“Here and there,” I said.
“You’re fucking him?” Renny said. Just like that. As though he could read my mind. Did it show? Surely, I had no expression on my face. I never did.
“Good Lord, you are suspicious.” I took a cookie, though I hated oatmeal. “And nasty.”
Renny wasn’t so easily fooled. “You mean smart.”
“I actually did mean that.”
We both laughed.
“You, on the other hand,” he said. “Very stupid.”
“And your romantic life is something to boast about?”
Iris McGinnis. The girl who didn’t know he was alive.
“Good one,” Renny said. “You got me.”
The basis for my friendship with Renny was our shared chapter on pain. It was an inclusive chapter, the guiding principle of all that was to follow: Careful what you feel. Better yet, feel nothing at all. With his gloves, Renny could not feel enough and had difficulty picking up a straw or a stone. Barehanded, there was too much sensation, dizzying, all-encompassing. Because I’d seen him less once I began to go out to the orchard, I didn’t understand how bad his pain had become until that night at group. He looked more anxious than usual; the summer semester was ending and Renny had very little faith in himself.
I was at the library the next day when Renny called on me. I had to show up for work occasionally, but I took my time, slowly, lazily replacing books on their proper shelves, in the dream state I entered whenever I thought about Lazarus. I was the Ice Queen who wanted to be burned alive. I wanted to take the path full of stones that led through the forest of ashes. At the end of that path I would find what every fairy-tale creature yearned for. Not pearls, not kingdoms, not gold. I was looking for something better than that. Real treasure. Real truth.
“You’ve got to help me,” Renny pleaded.
“Is this about Iris again?” Iris McGinnis, nymph of sorrow, so far away she might as well have been living on the moon. Renny loved to talk about her. I usually just tuned him out and let him drone on, but my patience was wearing thin.
“Not Iris. Not this time.”
He was failing his architecture course; his end-of-the-summer term project was due and he couldn’t work on it himself because of the pain in his hands. He was taking Demerol, along with Tegretol for the tremors. I could feel guilt rise up inside me like a living being. I wanted to tell him no. After work I planned to get in my car and drive to the secret country where oranges were white. I wanted to walk into the cold pond where Lazarus and I went swimming on clear nights, after all the workers had left, after the trucks had been loaded up and driven away, after it was dark. The mud between my toes under a black and starless sky. I’d been thinking about it all day as I shelved books. I wanted to be dragged under, forget there was anything else in the universe.