the things they left behind

it was the first night they had ever really hung out together, just the two of them. they had talked alone before, but always with the din of other peoples coversations in the background, always somewhere else to go when the first flush of silence fell upon them. though april didnt have any feelings for dave, and though she earnestly didnt think he had any feelings for her, the thought of being alone with him was as nervewracking has if it had been a first date. she was learning, the more people she met, that there were very few who she would chose being with over being alone. she had never noticed it before, but lately conversation was trying. lately, it left her feeling even more empty than before, or more confused about aspects of herself that she knew perfectly well before saying hello.
so far, dave had been easy to talk to. slight and nearly hairless, dave worked on the school newspaper with her and had worked on the most interesting articles that the college had ever seen, in her opinion. in one, he wrote about people's need to collect things, focusing specifically on garden gnomes and magnets. he had interviewed people, mostly people over 60 living around the university, people who remembered when it was nothing more than a couple of brick buildings. what april liked about dave's articles were that they rarely concluded in a chilling last sentence; he never tried to make a point. she deemed this brave and said so upon their first meeting; he never told her that he thought of it as his most glaring shortcoming- that he never really knew what he was talking about. he would come up with an idea, and then research it or begin writing about it, and would soon realize that what he thought he was writing about was actually something completely different, usually many completely different things, and trying to untangle them was simply too daunting. so he would come up with another idea and hope that people who read the articles took them as interesting glimpes into the lives of strangers. he liked that phrase. april wrote about music.
they met at a thai restaurant that friday night, the first night they were alone. dave asked april questions, and though usually it was the questions that ended up tying her in knots, she could answer his. he asked about her childhood and her family.
"it was a good one," she told him. "me, mom, three brothers. my father died when i was very young, and my mother got remarried when i graduated high school, so, you know, for the most part it was just the five of us." she took a sip of the red wine that dave had ordered, telling them he didnt need to swirl it around or sniff it. it embarassed him he said, and besides it was a pretty unnecessary convention. she took her time before speaking again, because she wanted to make sure that he wasnt going to apologize about her father. it would be an awkward sentence to cut off, and things were going so well. "i dont really remember my dad at all. so its not like thats a particularly painful thing or anything like that. so it was good, really good. my childhood i mean." she blinked two times and he smiled. "what about yours?"
"oh, you know, child of divorce. hated my dad for years. he ran away and married his best friends ex-wife. it was a mess and i was stuck in the middle of it, being the only child my mother had to complain to. to cry to, etc. you know the drill. its really the same story no matter how many times you hear it. right?" he laughed a little bit and she settled into her seat, happy that they had gotten this all out of the way, surprised at how painless it had been. so, things happen.we're adults now and can talk about it. so.
after they split the bill they decided to go get coffee before heading to a friends party. dave stood up and placed his napkin on the table and waited as april got her things together. she slid her credit card into her wallet and began going through her purse.
"oh, sorry. one sec, just want to make sure i've got everything." she pulled out her cell phone and put it on the table. she pulled out various lip sticks and put them in the bowl her dress was making in her lap. she rumaged through until she found her keys, and then a tiny notebook, and then a pen, and then another thing of lipstick. she looked up at him and gave a small laugh. "its just a..." she put her fists full of things up in the air as she said it "a thing i do." dave stood, puzzled but not irritated, and watched as she put everything back and then gave the insides of her wallet one quick glance.
later, though dave had paid for her large cup of jasmine tea with two tea bags, and thus she had not even opened her purse while at the coffee shop, she began to do it again. out came the phone and the lipsticks and the little purse and the pen. this time she didnt laugh, or even acknowledge that she was doing it. and again, dave stood with his hands in his pockets and waited.
they followed each other to the party and dave got them two cups of foamy beer. they stood out on a balcony that overlooked the whole city. dave used one his finest techniques for getting people to speak.
"tell me something," he would say, and the person would say, "what do you want to know?" and he would say, "what do you want to tell me," and then usually they really wanted to tell him something so before long he knew things that he never would have known to even ask about.
"tell me something," he said to her, and propped his elbows on the wooden railing.
"my house burned down when i was little. thats how my dad died."
dave didnt take his elbows off the railing but he turned his head and said, "april, im so sorry. were you in the house?"
"yeah. we all were. it was some fuse or something, some stupid problem with the electricity. it was in the middle of the night, i heard the alarm and my mother came running into my room, i remember the nightgown, and she was screaming, everyone was running. it was huge by then, by the time the alarm went off. its so strange, in my memory of it. i remember her nightgown, and the sound of the alarm, and i remember being outside and our very elderly neighbor coming in her red robe, barefoot, to bring us cookies as we were waiting outside. you know, after it had mostly been put out. it was so kind of her, that small thing. but i dont remember the flames or the smell. isnt that odd? how can that be?"
"maybe you blocked it out. people do that a lot."
"you probably want to know how he died. we were outside, and i guess the firemen hadnt gotten there yet, and by that point there wasnt much left. of the house, i mean. but he was determined, to do something other than wait. he was mad that they took so long. and he had this collection of seashells, of stupid fucking seashells, that he had gotten from around the world, and he arranged them all on this plate i remember. and he went back into that house. the house that was barely half standing, to get a plate of seashells. he couldnt bear it, to stand there and watch them go like that. my mom screamed. my brothers told me all about it, when i was old enough to need to know. she was sobbing and screaming and he ran back in, you know, to get the shells."
"thats an incredibly sad story. that is a devastating story."
april gave a tiny, forced laugh. "we had so little, for so long. so everywhere we went, she would make sure we had everything that was really truly important to us. she would say, got everything? and we would sit down and check- teddy bear, lucky socks, lucky this, lucky that. its a... neurosis, now. i mean, its crippling really. but i dont want to have to feel that, you know? that panicked, i've lost it feeling. ive lost it and its gone forever and it might as well be ashes because ill never ever get it back.even if it is a fucking lipstick. that was his last thought- ive lost it forever."
"maybe his last thought was, im going to make it, im going to rescue them and then ill be whole again."
"i dont know which is sadder," she said, "thinking youve lost it forever, or needing it to feel whole in the first place."
and he nodded, wondering if maybe the truth of things was actually as tangled as he had found it to be.