Sunlight-Colored Roses

On the night of his return I just stood in the doorway and listened to him talking to my foster-mother. She was beside herself when he left, and beside herself when he returned. I never said very much to him before or after, but he spent the days of summer wandering through the city, on sun-parched sidewalks, picking his way through high weeds and bowing through broken chain link fences, just exploring. We went around the way we did when we were children. I didn’t want to talk to him. Having him with me was more important than it should be. I cared about him too much. I could see he was in so much pain, and all the life experience he’d gained hadn’t taken it away.

I knew Ophelia was what he thought about, had always thought about. I sat in doorways in the shadows with him. I felt how he blamed himself. I wanted to reach out to him, hold his hand. I didn’t dare. I suffered in silence.

We exchanged very few words those first days, even weeks. He didn’t discourage me from being with him, and I know it must have seemed real, how much I wanted to be with him.

He was the first to speak. “Part of my mind will always be somewhere else. It isn’t fair to you.”

I answered immediately. “If I can have with you what I have right now, then that’s all I need.”

“That isn’t fair to you.”

My heart sickened at his words. I could never make him understand how much I loved him, and I couldn’t really justify it to him or anyone else. I had fallen in love with him the moment I had moved in. For a time it seemed hopeless. He was so distant. Then he disappeared for a year. And now he was this shattered person. But I still loved him so much. I just wanted to be with him, sharing his silent moments.

It came time for my exams, and I left for a week to do some extensive study. I stayed in a college dormitory when I did so. It was my first time to see a college campus. It was far isolated from the rest of the town, and it was nearly summer. The ground was parched, the sun bright. The interior of the building seemed so cold and dark, blinds drawn against the bright heat.

My new college roommate and sponsor was really friendly, but somehow we were really different. Maybe because I wasn’t friendly. She became close friends with the girl who traveled with me, and it made me feel guilty that I was the one who happened to be her roommate. I got sick repeatedly. We attended a social the first night, and I got so sick I had to return to the room. I thought eating something would help. I found a quart of milk in her micro fridge and drank it all. I hoped she would understand. My stomach was cramping so bad, I thought putting something in it would make me feel better. I passed out on her bed and slept under the bright overheard light.

When she came in I apologized. She seemed like she didn’t get it at all. I could tell she didn’t care about the milk, it was something else. I felt delirious. I felt like I needed to go home. I didn’t know how I was going to make it for the exam.

The next morning after she left for class I cracked open the blinds and let in the morning light. I had a little food and studied, feeling relief at being alone and like I could concentrate on and even enjoy studying for the exams. After I studied for about two hours, I read my own book for pleasure and wrote about the college campus in my journal. I had always felt this was the college I would attend, but now being here, it wasn’t what I thought. The people were so different from me.

That afternoon my foster-mother visited me unexpectedly before my exam. Coming toward me first though was Johnny. He found me and came to my room, or the room I was staying in. He looked crazed, his blue eyes were bloodshot and wild.

I found myself unexpectedly buried in his arms. A moment before, I had thought he was hundreds of miles away, and I had been focusing myself dutifully on studying for my future that couldn’t involve him.

I knew he wasn’t okay.

“Why did you leave me?”

It was tense with his mother there. What were we allowed to say, or feel?

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, muffled. “I have to take my exam.”

They were going to take me out to dinner after my exam. After they left the room, I cried. I cried so hard and so deeply. My roommate, or whatever, came back, and I was still crying. I was so happy and so beyond it all that they had cared enough to come to me. They were going to take me out to a restaurant after my exam, my family, and Johnny.

She didn’t understand my feelings, and I didn’t try to explain. It didn’t matter what she thought of me, or that she chose to hang out with the other girl from my school who had come, and she didn’t like me. I had felt so lonely, and now I felt so loved. I thought about Johnny and my foster-mother occupying themselves while I was taking my test.

I poured my whole heart into my essays. I loved literature so deeply, and it wasn’t hard to completely lose myself in the questions and in my analysis of the works.

When I was done, I turned in the standard-issued lined notebook that was now filled with my words. My hand felt sore and cramped. Johnny and my foster-mother were waiting in the hallway in front of glassed-in bulletin boards with announcements that meant nothing to me. My heart rose when I saw them.

Johnny reached for me and wrapped his arm tightly around me. His mom was powerless to stop him. I knew that. She let him do whatever he wanted. After feeling so cold and so spare, I was overwhelmed with joy.

We ate in a dark Italian restaurant with very few people in it, that had an old sign outside, and old booths. We shared a pizza and Pepsis, since they didn’t have Coke. It was the most delicious food I’d tasted. My stomach had been so upset since I left a week ago. I was starving, and Pam sent for another basket of rolls.

I talked excitedly about the books I’d read and the questions I’d answered. I thought I had done really well on the test. Pam didn’t seem worried. Johnny didn’t join in the conversation. He just held tightly to my hand the whole time.

But when we returned home, to our old neighborhood that was an abandoned wilderness, how would I feel? I had spent a week rediscovering my love for literature. I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to following him around. The pain of it was so immense. The severing I’d felt when we parted had worn off, and I’d grown a real self, even if it was pretty weak.

We left for home, and Johnny rode in the back seat, while I sat in the front with Pam and read. She played her music on the radio, which we both ignored. I had heard the songs so many times they sounded old and tired, like the tracks on the radio must be worn out, but Pam didn’t seem to hear it that way.

I stayed aware of Johnny in the back seat, and he of me. Pam stopped at a gas station and locked us in. When she went inside I turned around to him, and he grabbed me and kissed me. My heart was pounding. I had known the whole time we were driving that he was going to do this the moment we were alone. I was so afraid, but what if I had said no or resisted? There was no question of it in his mind. I didn’t resist. I held onto him for as long as I could.

His eyes looked tortured when I pulled back, I could tell he had missed me a lot. He might have missed me even more than I missed him.

Pam was approaching the car. I sat upright in the front seat and opened my book like nothing had happened.

“Will you be my girlfriend?” Johnny asked at the last second.

“Yes,” I said.

I stared at the page of my book, but the words ran together. For once reality was so much more interesting and dynamic. For once something was happening to me. I wasn’t just hanging on, emoting, anymore. Johnny was my boyfriend now. And his mom, driving us home, had no idea.

I was going to be leaving after the summer for college. Johnny had no plans to go to school. He was just trying to make it at all. Pam had found him a job as a grocery boy in our small chain store that didn’t exist anywhere else except in small towns. He was going to save up some money, see how much, see if he could get a car or get it together in any way. I knew mostly Pam was just hoping he would be able to keep the job. She wanted him to become an adult, even though he should already have been one.

I waited for him outside after work. The parking lot was desolate and weedy, with broken shopping carts. We walked to the gas station two miles up the road to buy burritos that stayed warm under a harsh orange light, and cokes from the refrigerated cases. Then we would walk further, up toward the woods, and hang out.

Even though I was nearly eighteen, and Johnny was over twenty now, we just held hands and talked. We were just friends, really. I was disappointed, but at the same time, it didn’t feel right for there to be anything else between us while we lived in the same house and basically had the same mom. I was afraid he would meet some older girl that he would feel passion for, that would actually become his girlfriend.

I knew I loved him, but I sensed that much of him was still withheld, possibly mute, dulled with grief, or on hold. His depression about Ophelia’s death was still immense.

We would stay there until it was dark, and Johnny’s other friends would hang out sometimes, too. We went to the cemetery. Johnny didn’t join in their conversations much, but that was when he held me. He would hold me against him tightly while everyone else would talk like nothing serious was on their minds. I was so happy that he held me. I didn’t care if I didn’t know how to join in the conversations. I wasn’t expected to. I was just Johnny’s girlfriend, and I was really too young to have much in common with them.

On these nights as the temperatures rose Johnny would kiss me, and we would start making out in the shadows. It felt surreal. My mind and body often felt detached. I didn’t know what would happen. It felt so beyond my control. However, Johnny seemed to know how far he would take things. He stopped before I wanted him to.

After these nights, I loved him more than I ever had before, and when I was back in my bed I couldn’t stop thinking about how it had felt in his arms, and how things might have gone further. I would get so hot, thinking about him. Knowing that he was in the same house as me, I fantasized about him even more.

The more times we were like that, the more intense it got, till we broke what felt like an unspoken rule, and started being together in the house too, when his mom wasn’t home. In his room, seemingly hanging out. But when we were alone we were in his bed. He would get beneath the covers with me, taking off some of our clothes. Eventually, he took off all my clothes.

I was scared, I felt like things could get out of control. I wasn’t sure if Pam knew what was going on.

I loved being with him, I really got to trusting him not to take things too far. Summer was coming closer to its end. It was mid-August now. I hadn’t thought much about going away.

I ended up being able to take correspondence courses. I really couldn’t fathom being at that campus and Pam had seen it, how shabby it was, and decided it wasn’t a safe place.

However, she did get a clue something was going on between me and Johnny, and she had him move out of the house. I couldn’t process that she’d driven out her precious son on my account, when I was a foster child, but she seemed to think there was something to make of me. She really believed in me. I had done so well on my entrance exams that I was able to take correspondence courses with a college that was far away, but really good, and she was excited about my getting a degree.

Johnny moved into a small apartment, the very cheapest, which was all we could afford. He didn’t mind moving out. It seemed like it gave him a new sense of freedom, which terrified me. I thought I was losing him.

However, his first night in the apartment, I stayed over with him, and we had sex for the first time. I was scared, and it felt like I had transcended to a different time and place, like I would never be me again. It felt so right and natural, and he seemed so happy with me. He seemed happy for the first time in his life.

I went over to his place regularly. It was amazing too have the privacy and for the first time it felt like we had a real relationship. We always used protection and I didn’t have any scares about getting pregnant. I continued working on my English degree. I thought I would become a teacher, though what I really wanted was to be a college English professor. I moved in with him my last year, when I had enough money saved of my own from working summer jobs.

Johnny still had a lot of shadows hanging over him. He was very depressive sometimes. He smoke and drank, a lot. He held down the apartment, but he always despaired of having enough money to ever do anything. He was just getting by.

It scared me that there was something more than me that he needed to be happy, but I knew this wasn’t going to cut it for much longer. I asked him to see a counselor. He refused. I saw one myself, on a visit to the campus where I took correspondence. I talked about our relationship, and the counselor thought it was all really messed up. I could tell she thought I should leave Johnny.

What is it with psychologists anyway? They counsel you like you’re not in love or something, like love isn’t the most important thing, and like every decision you make shouldn’t be out of consideration for love. I didn’t take her advice or see her again or tell Johnny about her. I knew it would hurt him a lot to know I’d gone, especially that I’d told another person about the intimate details of our relationship.

I knew I was going to have to do it alone. So much time had passed since his older sister’s suicide. Pam had coped with it. She was an incredible woman, an under appreciated woman. Despite all of her love and worry for Johnny, he had never give her more than a second’s notice. His contact with her now was perfunctory, if even that. He was growing increasingly isolated.

I felt scared. I didn’t know how to bring out the problem. I was afraid his addictions would get out of control, he would reach rock bottom, and we would have to move up from there. Each night I just held him. He clutched onto me like I was his shelter, the only thing of substance in his life.

Our love life lost its luster, and he didn’t seem capable of romance anymore. I took it quietly, appreciating the love he showed me and the way he did need me. But something was in the house with us, in our bedroom, all the time.

“I love you so much,” he said to me, all the time. He would hold me so tight I wondered if he was losing it. “I don’t know how I could go on without you. I don’t understand why you love me.”

I had loved him for most of my childhood. He was my first and only love, my hero. It was impossible to imagine anyone else, and the thought sickened me. But he thought of it a lot, and he grew really jealous and possessive.

I started worrying what would become of the degree I was about to get. I needed to get a teaching job, but Johnny didn’t want me out in the world. He was terrified of losing me. I was terrified of losing him. I feared displeasing him and having the door closed to me forever. He was so intense. I knew just as he loved me intensely, so too would he cut me off, like he did Pam, and isolate himself totally. He wasn’t able to have that balance or pull back and keep things in perspective.

I began to think at some point, maybe soon, I would have to choose between survival as a functional human being, and him. It would be easy, I would choose him, even though some of the things that psychologist had said long ago still stayed with me, and haunted me. I could see in her eyes that she had met other girls like me and she thought she knew where I was going with this. Her older, wiser view of my relationship, which seemed to me like the epitome of love, unnerved me.

In the darkness, I held him close. It wouldn’t last, couldn’t last. But I couldn’t pull away, couldn’t leave him when he needed me so much.

But I was what was standing between Johnny and Ophelia’s ghost. That one week I had been gone, he had changed, woken up somehow. He had been exposed to the pain and emptiness. Now, with so much to accumulate and make the old memories that much heavier, it seemed cruel to think of exposing him to her that way.

But I did.

We weren’t married, and I couldn’t really teach high school in a nearby small town, when everyone knew who I was and that I was living unmarried in a relationship with my foster brother.

We couldn’t survive on his salary, even though he was a manager at the grocery store. And with a degree, and feeling excitement about new opportunities, I didn’t want to stay in that small, shady apartment with him anymore. I wanted him to come with me into the light.

I took my own place in the neighboring town. Basically it was like we were breaking up. I didn’t know how I could bear to sleep in my own bed alone, eat meals alone or keep house by myself.

My apartment was bright and clean. There were many windows, and I decorated it myself. I had money to do whatever I wanted.

Johnny visited me soon like a stranger. He smelled like alcohol, he was unwashed and looked so different than anyone I saw. It was a shock for me, even though that had been the old life that I had been used to.

“I understand why you did what you did,” he said, and the shadows beneath his eyes were so deep and so dark. It looked like he hadn’t slept in days, and I felt a deep fear that he had started doing drugs.

“I want you to join me after you face what you need to face,” I said.

“I’ll marry you tonight, if that’s what you want. It’s all I ever wanted.”

“No, it isn’t all I want. This will still be between us if we get married, until you deal with it. I always dreamed of being your bride, I still can be, but not that way. I want it to feel clear and clean.” But my heart was pounding to know that he still wanted me.

He spent the night with me, and the passion between us was immense. We had been apart for weeks, and I had truly thought I would never see him again any way but at arm’s length. It felt like a miracle to be in his arms again.

But that night I let him go. He left, and I cried bitterly. I knew at his core he was weak and that he might not be willing to make the effort to face his demons and get help.

A week later I got a call from Pam. My heart dropped down to my feet at her voice. She said Johnny was in the hospital. I thought at first that he had tried to kill himself, but he had drunk too much, was intoxicated, malnourished, and in serious danger from alcohol poisoning.

At that point he was in the doctors’ hands.

I remembered what the psychologist had said again about needing to grow up. I stayed apart from him. I didn’t see him through his recovery. I kept up with him through Pam. I felt severe anxiety almost all the time. There was no escaping my feelings. I could scarcely eat, and when she didn’t call me I panicked, but I didn’t bother her. I kept it all inside till I too was almost nonfunctional.

He left town to go to a rehab facility. I didn’t hear from him for several months. Even though I loved him deeply, I accepted it was over. I had to move on.

I lost myself really deeply in my work, in addition to teaching I read the classics voraciously, and I started writing. Short stories, mostly drama, just ways to expel my intense, almost violent emotions. I spent hours in the nearby university library, gathering research material for class, and finding things for and about myself, that healed my soul. Literature about the emotions healed me in a way psychology never could.

He became an entity for me. My contact with Pam slowed and finally stopped, and Johnny became my deep, unsatisfied love that inspired me to go deep with my emotions, and deep with my focus. I inspired my students to think, and their answers to my essay prompts impressed and satisfied me. I applied to the university as a lecturer and was accepted. I fulfilled my dream job, and now I had hopes of getting more education, possibly doing research one day.

One day a year later Pam called me and told me Johnny was sober. He had gotten a medal for two years’ sobriety. He was clean. I drove down to him immediately.

He was working in an insurance office. It was a smart, window-fronted building in a strip mall surrounded by manicured lawns and a maintained parking lot. It was so different from the town where we grew up.

When I walked into the office, my heart plummeted when I was greeted by a young female receptionist. I couldn’t speak or even breathe for a moment. Finally I found my voice and asked for him.

He was just coming out though, about to go to lunch with a co-worker. I recognized him immediately. He looked just the same. He was clean-cut, well-dressed, but I knew every physical feature so well. I was overwhelmed. I just wanted to run away. The shadows beneath his eyes were still there, but the eyes were bright, so vividly blue.

His gaze met mine and he stopped. He nodded briefly to his co-worker, and came to me and took me outside.

We stood in front one of the other buildings that was vacant, so that there was privacy. When I looked at him again, his blue eyes were red and burning.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I’m here to see you. Pam said you were doing better.” I could barely speak. The words came out tersely as I struggled to breathe.

I couldn’t stop staring at him. I let go of all my fears and didn’t wonder about things, I only felt passion and wonder.

He took my face in his hands and held it hard. “You’re so goddamn beautiful,” he said. “What have you done to yourself? You’re too beautiful for me.”

I put my hands over his and closed my eyes, trying to breathe. “How are things?”

“Okay.”

Okay was better than they’d ever been before. He was being sustained by something other than leaning on me. Had I done my part? Had I given him enough of a chance to heal?

“I’ve never forgotten you,” I said. “It’s the same for me. As it’s always been.” My voice was muffled against him.

He breathed deeply. I could feel the strength in his exhale. “I know,” he said softly. He pulled back and looked at me. I could see the distance in his eyes. The cold feeling in my stomach turned to pure frozen terror. There was someone else.

“Let’s go to lunch,” he said.

I didn’t see how I could eat. I didn’t want to eat. I wanted to grieve. It was hard to hold myself upright and walk beside him.

Before we made it past the shaded area he turned my face to his again and kissed me, firmly. My tears flooded my eyes and trailed down my cheeks. I looked at him as he pulled away. “I can’t,” I whispered. “I just can’t.”

“It’s not that way,” he sighed. “It’s not what you’re thinking. There isn’t anyone. But we can’t rush into things. I have to take things slow. Especially with you. You bring a lot back for me.”

“I know.” I squeezed my eyes closed. I wasn’t sure how I’d stop crying.

“I’m glad you came. I’ve wanted to see you. But I couldn’t interfere in your life again.”

I remembered our last night together in my new apartment. It almost hasn’t been love then, just passion. Everything between us had become so distorted. It had been wrong, even though I loved him so much.

“Let’s start seeing each other again, okay?” He kissed me again, just my cheek. I couldn’t believe it. It almost didn’t feel like him. But I knew he was holding back because of his program and his need to stay balanced. I understood it took a lot of effort to keep his job and stay in check.

“Okay,” I whispered past the lump in my throat.

We walked down to the pond a few blocks away and sat on a bench, holding each other. We watched the ducks, didn’t eat anything. On his way back to his office Johnny got a hot dog for himself from a vendor.

I asked to see a counselor with him and he agreed. We began our relationship tentatively. There was little romance in it. It was all very careful, very balanced and planned. It was important that we both not get caught up in bad cycles.

After six months, Johnny proposed marriage to me. To my co-workers and his, it looked very conventional. But we both knew the other side of conventional. For some people conventional wasn’t boring. Finding a way, any way, and humbly taking it because it was the only way to be together, was salvation, and more than I had hoped to have.

I lived every day of my life as his wife, loving him from the depths of my soul. We spent our holidays quietly with Pam, but we didn’t spend a lot of time in that small town, and we revisited those memories with caution. We moved on with our lives in a neat, quiet suburb. He was a loving and considerate husband. Our exterior shells and the world around us made our lives sustainable, while we needed each other with the same desperate feelings as when we were lost teens. A part of us would never heal from the troubled childhood we’d suffered.

I was grateful every day for our quiet, conventional life, and everything that allowed me to be with Johnny. I could never have been happy without him, no matter what psychology might have had to say about it. He came home to my loving arms. His need was a little too great. My embrace was a little too tight. We tried to restrain ourselves, to stay moderate and not go off the deep end. We stayed sober for the rest of our lives. We stayed happy, and I slept next to my love every night of my life.