The Love Sucks Club(12)

I instantly pointed it up at the sky and twisted it around, watching the patterns converging and changing, enjoying the way the colors slid around. Delighted with my interest, Fran was in a joyous mood. She laughed uproariously at my smallest jokes, and flitted around me in a rush of enthusiasm. The cake she had made for me, strangely lopsided and oddly colored, was perfect. I remember her presenting it to me with glee, telling me that it was the best she could do. She said it was Charlie Brown’s birthday cake. In a way, I think I was still reeling from the loss of my mother. Bitch that she was, she was still my mother. I thought about her every day. I would wake up in the morning and wonder when the phone would ring. My mother spent hours calling me lazy and stupid, but she spent just as much time lamenting where she had gone wrong with Susannah who had been married and divorced twice already by the age of twenty-five. The only one who had done no wrong was Jamie, and that had to have been because she escaped to college at seventeen and then to the Peace Corps. I think my mother saw her all of twice in ten years and that for only a couple of days. I remember sitting in a restaurant in Germany with Jamie a couple of years before my mother died. I asked her why she never came home. Her response was, “Why have you never left?”

So, though I was in the throes of new and exciting love, I wasn’t exactly in a great place. Fran was undeterred in her mission to give me the world’s best birthday. After dinner, she cut the cake and sat naked on my lap, feeding it to me. We went to bed and made the kind of love poets write about for years afterward. After, as she was falling asleep on my shoulder, I reached over and picked the kaleidoscope off the bedside table. Squinting against it, I aimed it for the light coming in from the hallway and tried to see the patterns. Within seconds, a buzzing started in my ears and moved into my head. It felt as if something was crushing the sides of my head in on itself. It didn’t hurt, but I felt a swelling in my brain, and the buzzing turned to a roar. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t make a sound. I was sure I was having a stroke, but I couldn’t even move to get Fran’s attention. As the roaring in my head increased, a tunnel formed across my vision and it felt as though my brain was being thrown down a long, dark hallway. At the end of the hallway was an image and I moved toward it, determined to see what it was. It was Fran. I called out to her in my head, but she didn’t know I was there. She was sitting on the grass in a field I didn’t recognize. She was pulling the grass up by its roots and staring at it in her hands. Blood was trickling down her face and I could tell that it had soaked through her clothes and pooled on the ground all around her. Mesmerized, I watched the blood sink down into the earth all around her. A moment later, she looked up at me and mouthed, “Help.” In that moment, I was back in my own bed, my arm wrapped around Fran so tightly, she was almost choking. She had poked at me until I came fully awake.

Shaking myself, I realize that Sam has been poking me for several seconds, in the same way Fran had poked me so many years ago.

“Ow,” I rub my arm and poke her back, hard.

“Ow, what the fuck?”

“You were hurting me.”

Sam punches me on the bicep. “You were out of it. I was about to throw you in the pool, but I was afraid you would drown.”

“I know you would save me,” I grin.

“Yeah, I might throw you a noodle.”

“You’re a true friend.” I smack her on the head.

“I thought you were having another seiz – uh – episode.”

“I was thinking about the first time I had one. It was on my actual birthday.”

“So a long, long, long time ago,” she jibes.

“Yes. Thank you so much for pointing that out. Your humor is unbearable. I’m laughing on the inside.”

“Way deep down on the inside?”

“Exactly.”

She pauses. “So, what happened?”

“I was in bed with Fran. She was sleeping. I had a vision of her bleeding from her head.”

Sam shakes her head. “How much of the book is true?”

“Basically, all of it.”

We stare into the water again, lost in our own thoughts. Trying to smile, I poke Sam on the arm again. “You know, I once went to a psychic. When I walked in, she stood up and pointed at me, screaming. She ran into a back room and refused to come back out. At first, I thought it was some kind of dramatic act, meant to drum up business, but later, I wondered. I mean, it’s not as if she got any of my money that day.”

Slinging an arm around me, Sam smiles. “I felt like screaming in terror the first time I saw you, too.”