Alex Morel - Survive

I take a few more swigs, feeling the water flood through my body, and then, reluctantly, I hand it back so he can finish it off. Hunger kicks in as I watch him finish the water.

“We have Raisinets and three energy bars, right?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“So let’s eat the Raisinets and we split one bar a day.”

“But you’re so much bigger, it doesn’t seem fair,” I say.

“Honorable of you, but I’m fine.”

He’s reaching into his bag, and for a moment, I think he’s going to ask me which kind of bar we should choose to eat tonight, but he doesn’t. He just rips one open, breaks the bar in two pieces that are roughly the same, and hands one half to me.

“Cheers!”

“Eat slow,” I say. “That’s what my mom would tell me.”

“I miss my mom. I would fight and scream about cleaning up my room. Then she died and I missed how much she took care of everything.”

“How did she die?”

“Cancer. Breast cancer. Her dad was a two-pack-a-day man.”

“Sorry,” I say. “What about your dad?”

“My dad didn’t care about anything after my mom died. He threw himself into his books and work and left my brother and me to fend for ourselves. There were weeks at a time when Will, he’s my brother-he’s dead too-cooked dinner. We only knew how to make two things: grilled cheese and scrambled eggs.”

“That sounds horrible. I mean about Will too; I’m so sorry.”

“Cancer. I prayed for him every night and day and absolutely nothing happened. He wasted away in less than a year.”

I stare at him. It is dark, so I’m not sure he can see me, but I’m sure he senses me.

“It wasn’t so bad before he got sick. My dad and Will, they got along. Will loved to read what dad was reading. I hated reading. I’m dyslexic or I was, and was probably ADD, too.”

I touch his back and tell him I’m sorry.

“We haven’t spoken in two years. My dad and I. I was flying home to see him.”

“Why?”

“Was I flying home?”

“No, why haven’t you spoken to him?”

“Will died,” he said, and there was a pause and what I thought was a little sniffle, but maybe not. “And I didn’t want to go to college. My dad said I couldn’t stay home and live with him. If I wasn’t going to school and seeing a shrink with him, I’d have to make it on my own. So I went to the shrink with him for a year or so and the doctor sided with my father on everything. I mean he didn’t say it directly like that, but everything always got twisted up and about me. And just before I left for good, we had a session where Dr. Klein, that was his name, kept hounding me about doing homework and chores and whatever my dad wanted me to do and I exploded. I jumped at him, but my dad held me back. After that I just left.”

Paul shifts his arm and reaches out and touches my face, then my hair.

“Sorry,” he says, “I need to know where your face is; I was disoriented.”

“It’s okay. It felt nice,” I say.

He strokes my face and hair again.

“I flew out west with the money I had. I work as a ski instructor in the winter. In summer I surf in Cali. That was almost two years ago.”

“And you’ve never spoken?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing-not a text?”

“An email once every six months or so. We’re like that; the Harts are sort of brutal. My grandfather once made my father spend an entire summer pulling rocks out of the yard because he got a C on his report card. Each day, as the story goes, my dad squared off six by six feet of yard and on his hands and knees picked out every stone and rock under the turf. It took him sixty-six days to finish it off. When he was done, he brought my grandfather the bucket of stones and my grandfather tossed them into a river and then said, ‘Study harder next time,’ and walked away.”

“Wow.” I think about it. “My mother never punished me, really, for anything.”

“I suppose he had it tough,” Paul says, placing his whole hand on my cheek. “But he was worse on me. His dad, at least, gave a damn.”

We settle in and finish off the Raisinets. My stomach roars with the expectation of more food. Paul’s is even louder, and I feel a tinge of guilt over splitting the food evenly.

Total darkness descends quickly and the wind picks up, howling past us, but our cave provides a lot of protection. There’s a long stretch of silence, his warm breath on my neck. I’m afraid to speak, to say the wrong thing after his confession. My head throbs and muscles I didn’t even know I had are aching. My head feels weirdly off-kilter.

Paul grasps my left hand and for a split second, I know he can feel the scars from where I tried to hit the switch last year.

“I’d never ask,” he whispers.

“I know. I know you wouldn’t.”

“I don’t like knowing other people’s shit.”

“I can tell. You’re too mean.”

“Am I?”

“I think you threatened to leave me for dead back there.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“But I melted water for you and you did end up climbing a really big-ass mountain.”

“Yes,” I say, squeezing his hand.

He holds my other hand in his and he squeezes back. Not in a stay-warm kind of way, but more in the I-like-you kind of way. Maybe these aren’t the best conditions to try to discern those types of messages, what with the weather, the medication withdrawal, the hunger, the layers of random outerwear, and the darkness, but I feel a change in the air and something like affection rises in me.

“I was turning fifteen,” I say into the darkness. “I had lived in New York City my whole life, but we had just moved to New Jersey. My father had been dead for nearly four years and money was tight, or that’s how my mom would describe it. And that didn’t matter. None of it did. I’d never had many friends anyway. I’d been a loner since high school started.”

I stop talking for a minute. Paul doesn’t say anything, but he puts his left hand through my hair and I can hear his heartbeat. I take a deep breath. Then he stops.

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“No one’s ever touched them before. I mean nobody I didn’t pay to touch them.”

“You employed some male hookers to touch your scars?”

I laugh. The dumb jokes are starting to grow on me.

“Yeah, I liked to make them dress up like doctors.”

He laughs. “You’re funny, for a girl.”

“Most girls are,” I say.

“You’re probably right,” he whispers. “That’s the kind of thing my dad would say. I hate when I sound like him.”

I clear my throat and think about the words I want to use. I think about how my first impulse is always to lie or obfuscate the truth, but how with Paul I just want everything to be honest and straightforward.

“Let me start over. My father shot himself on Christmas Eve. He didn’t just die-that’s how I talk about it, like he died the way people normally die. My great-grandfather hit the switch too, and my grandmother spent the last decade of her life in a house for crazy women in Vermont. My dad never told me this, but my mom let me know after he died that his mother killed herself inside that home-she hung herself. Being crazy is a family hobby.” I laugh a little as I say this.

“Well,” he says, interlocking our fingers. “I guess we’ve gotten kicked around by the same shit, in a way.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I say.

He leans in and kisses my forehead. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Thanks,” I whisper. I feel a flood of emotion come up and settle in my throat and chest.

“It was the beginning of September and I was standing in the kitchen, making lunch. I started slicing some tomatoes. There was something about the way the knife went through the skin of the tomato that caught my eye. Then, in a moment of what felt like crystal clarity, I decided to slice my fingers and then my palm. The first cut felt like euphoria. Then the blood poured out of me, and it felt like liquid relief as every ounce of anxiety burst out of my veins. Blood was everywhere but I didn’t care, and then I made the cut you just traced with your fingers. It could have killed me, but my mother came in and stopped me.”