I am sitting shotgun in Gary’s sedan, the last of three girls to be dropped off at home after a lesson. It’s April and winter-dark. There are still a few days before time rolls back an hour. Garfield, suctioned to the rearview window, watches a drop of drizzle inch down the glass with his two unblinking eyes.
Blinkers click like a stopwatch and illuminate Park Avenue in flashes. My tennis racket is squeezed between my legs, brick of a book bag at my feet.
Gary stares straight ahead as the streetlight turns from green to gold to red and then green again. I wait for him to say something like “All right, Piper-ooni, until next time,” but he is quiet. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, so I grab a strap on my knapsack and reach for the door latch.
“Don’t go just yet,” he says. “Stay here with me for a minute.”
My stomach forms its familiar wave, preparing for the worst. I did something wrong during practice. I was being lazy. My serves were inconsistent. I almost hit Emma with my racket when we were doing drills. She flinched, I apologized. Gary didn’t say anything.
“Okay.” I lean back in my seat.
Gary lowers the volume on the radio and looks out the windshield, two hands on the wheel.
“I’m depressed,” he says and then is quiet again.
I am startled at first. These are words I have never heard a grown man speak, words I have spoken only to myself. There is something to the sound of it, the two-syllable arc that rises and falls, like a heaved sigh. The sound itself a perfect description for what I have and who I am, who Gary is, too. An explanation for us both.
I’m flooded with warmth for him, for his Garfield, for this soft, stippled velvety car seat. He wants my help; he sees I am someone who understands this kind of pain.
“Me, too,” I say. Sometimes I imagine my skull is an eggshell with hairline fractures. A premature and pulpy creature taps its beak from inside. This is what it feels like to be breaking from within, waiting for the transparent coil of bones, sickly alive and mewing, to slip out. The kind of thing you’d step on to put it out of its misery. I want to explain this feeling to Gary, and tell him about dangling my feet outside my bedroom window seven floors up, how I have already written a note. But I don’t dare disrupt this moment that belongs to him.
All afternoon, we shifted back and forth between the white lines stapled down to green clay. We aimed above the net, chased after small yellow balls, listened for the pop when one of them hit the sweet spot of our rackets. Now everything that matters is in this car with a man who has entrusted a girl with his secret.
“Why are you depressed, Gary?” I’m careful to emphasize the you, so he asks about me next.
“Because you’re going to leave me,” he says.
I don’t expect this. It hadn’t occurred to me that my own absence could trigger anyone else’s sickness. Usually it’s my presence that incurs the damage. I know how it feels to miss someone who’s right in front of you. But I never thought I’d be the one who was missed. I want to hold Gary now and rock him, like my mother rocked me when I mourned her as a child, bleeding out all her imaginary deaths through my tear ducts. I want to show Gary how grateful I am to be the one who is mourned, and to prove to him that I’m worthy of it.
“Just for now, Gary,” I say. “I’ll be back Saturday, and you can always call me—”
“No, no, you don’t understand, that’s not what I mean.”
He readjusts himself in his seat and slams a hand on the side of the wheel in frustration. This sudden violence startles me. Scary? Exhilarating. It’s as if Gary has started the car inside the car, stirring away the stall of misunderstanding, so that we are swerving recklessly toward a new point. Gary stares out the windshield. The yellow traffic light glints on his face, like a tennis ball apparition.
“It’s that everyone leaves me,” he says, gripping the wheel with two hands.
“You all grow up and you go away and you leave me all alone.” His voice is unusually flat, almost monotone. He sounds so removed, as if he’s alone, looking at his reflection in the mirror, watching his own lips move. You all, he said, and it stung a little. Could it have been any one of us in the passenger seat?
I look over to see if he’s crying. I wish he were crying. I listen for the gargled pooling of tears, but instead his voice grows softer.
“And after all we’ve been through,” he coos.
A taxi speeds past and through another yellow light. The doorman clutches the door handle and squints to see inside the car window. I am the shadowy outline of a girl inside a man’s car. A girl with her father, or somebody’s father.
“What about kids?” I ask.
“What about them?” He turns to look at me. Even in the darkness, I can see his thick caterpillar eyebrows inch closer together.
“Maybe you could have your own?” I say, the words slipping out before I can swallow them back.
“Maybe I should have,” he says flatly, and turns again to the windshield.
I’m afraid to say the next wrong thing. So I lean over to hug him—a gesture I haven’t made before. I’ve squeezed his shoulder from the backseat, but never from the passenger seat and never a full chest embrace. His windbreaker makes plastic scratching noises as he presses against me. Neck to neck, he smells like Big League Chew.
“I won’t leave you,” I say. “I promise.” His arms gather loosely around my back. They feel birdlike and bony through his rayon sleeves.
“I love you, Gary,” I say, because it’s different from We love you, Gary. It’s not a consolation or a group decision, but a private understanding. A snuggle between two Jews. A loose promise of what—solidarity? A commitment. A casing that will preserve what’s been spoken between us, for us.
“I love you, too,” he says.
And then I get out of his car like a girl who has just been kissed.