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“Like…your landline?”
I nod. “Or the other.”
“I’ll take the landline number, to this cabin. Thank you.”
“Hey, you saved me.” I force a small smile as she gets her cell phone out.
“No. I would have, but you wouldn’t let me get too close, remember?”
It’s such an apt representation of our history that I don’t know what to say.
“Thank you,” I manage.
She nods. “I’m glad I was out there. Even though I’m sure it wasn’t a complete accident.”
I grab a scrap of paper and a pencil from a nearby drawer and jot my number down, plus my cell, because I’m fucked up.
Then I close the space between us. I know I shouldn’t, but I want to hug her one more time. When I get close, though, I can’t do it. I don’t want to be that guy, trampling her boundaries and clinging to dead shit. I reach out and touch her shoulder, which is weird enough.
She gives me a long look and then blinks. Her mouth moves like the echo of a smile.
“Bye, Elise.”
“Goodbye, Luca.”
Finally, she goes.17EliseThere’s this memory I have. It’s just this sequence of a minute or two—minutes that would probably have been forgotten, like so many are, except that over the years, this memory reel became one I re-play often. Because it’s near-prescient.
Luca and I are sitting in the field in the middle of the high school track. I remember that the track was wild, the grass always too high; the “field” part of our school’s athletics program had—for reasons I can’t recall—set up shop a little closer to the river.
The sky is blue, and he’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt. The sunlight is such that I can see him in crisp technicolor: his glossy dark hair and the pink of his lips, all the colors of that black eye he had. His face is so expressive, always with these little smirks and twists of his lips. An audacious mouth, almost too much for his face, which was already so striking, with stark cheekbones and dark brows and those gemstone blue eyes.
So I can see that—I can see his face—and also his lean body underneath what must have been a thin T-shirt. I can see the veins in his hands and his long eyelashes. The way he squinted. I can see him swallow. A little later, I would figure out where he most liked for me to bite that throat. How biting his lip would trigger a lovely seismic event in his lovely Luca body. But that day, I remember that I didn’t know him well. And so I asked him if he was a nice guy.
That’s not what I actually said. I said something like, “Are you a good guy, or a bad guy? I can’t tell.”
He thought it was funny. But he quickly turned thoughtful. For a moment, he seemed almost sad and then just earnest. And he told me he wasn’t a nice guy. I can’t remember the percentages he gave me, but I’m pretty sure he kept recalibrating for a while. Eventually, he settled on sixty percent bad, forty percent good. Or something like that.
And I remember that I didn’t believe he was a bad guy. He seemed so much like a good guy, like the hero. He was always taking care of me…always there. But he was also reluctant. I guess you could say he was a reluctant hero. Until the moment that he couldn’t be a hero anymore, and he turned.
For years and years, I thought about the turning. What was it like? Who was involved? Why did he forsake me when he always claimed I meant so much to him? And if I didn’t really, how was he so compelling? Was he simply a great actor?
How did I hand my heart to a villain? How did I mistake such a villain for the hero? What was wrong with my judgment?
And so, I learned as much as one can learn about the way judgments are made. What is good and bad, and what is right and wrong, and how are villains punished? I looked outside myself for answers I could never find within.
While I was on my journey, Luca was endeavoring one of his own. While I became a lawyer, he became…the opposite. So much the opposite that everyone who saw him at my after-party on the night I was elected was aghast that he would dare to come.
I think of my quandary as I drive to downtown Saranac Lake. How, for years, I’ve classed him as “bad.” I’ve locked him into that colorless two-dimensional role—until today, when he broke free, reminding me that humans are too complex to fit into the confines of a right-wrong binary, that he especially is just…so much more. My judgment of him—as a bad guy—is no more suitable than his judgment of himself so long ago as “mostly bad.”
