The Other Side of Disappearing

by Kate Clayborn

Instincts without experience, one of my professors once said to me, were a liability.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a face like hers—it’s like looking through a window at a storm. There’s rain, lightning, wind; there’re trees bending and shaking with the force of it. Part of you is glad to be separate from it. But part of you wants to press against the glass and get as close as you can.

It’s difficult not to notice the shift that takes place inside me when Adam is at the wheel of the process: It’s an arm out across my chest. A safer feeling I’ve had in relation to this thing since it started. I shouldn’t trust it, but it’s also difficult to ignore it. He’s like that. Gigantic in his effect on me.

Crying is for the shower, which is basically the unlocked pool gate of locations for having emotions. You can maintain a lot of plausible deniability about the moisture on your face in there.

Briefly, I wonder if anyone’s ever stood up in the middle of a restaurant to ask if there’s a therapist in the room.

When she raises her eyes to mine and slowly smiles back, it suddenly becomes the best date of my life, even though it is not a date at all. Her smile is the same as her condolences. Rare. Honest. Meant.

“I know it makes me a shitty journalist. It probably makes me a shitty person, too. But this is the truth, Jess. I don’t want to know you for the story. I want to know you for myself.”

And I feel a flutter in my middle when I think of what it would be like to have Adam Hawkins know me for no one else but himself.

“You don’t blend in. Not to me, you don’t.” He’s said it so forcefully, but it lands like a caress. Soft and so disarming. It makes the steady posture I have to keep on this unsteady surface almost impossible to maintain. I should be lying down when I hear Adam Hawkins say something like this. The images that accompany this thought—they’re too intimate to contemplate.

Either my kiss is magic or Adam has had a miraculous recovery from his earlier unsteadiness, because as his tongue slides against mine, the lines of his body transform in some ineffable way—he’s planting himself, growing roots that go straight through the surface of the mat and deep down into the ground. It’s the most obvious display of strength I’ve ever felt from him, and having it against me is intoxicating, a shot of something totally pure to my bloodstream.

“That was so athletic,” I say, then kiss him again, through his quiet chuckle. “I came out of retirement for you.”

Everything Tegan said to me only moments ago comes back to me now, fresh and clear and important. I can’t do barely-thought-out with this woman who’s been hurt enough for a whole lifetime. I can’t do naïve and hair-triggered on an old basement couch. I realize, with a startling sort of clarity, that I’d cut out my own heart before I treated hers carelessly.

I notice that the way he’s touching me is more complicated than a simple up-and-down or back-and-forth over my skin. Instead, he runs his thumb up in a line, then traces a circle. Moves a little to the right, does it again. Over and over, inner arm to outer edge. A pattern. After a few seconds, I realize: He’s tracing along the lines of my tattoos. As though he’s memorized them.

Smoothly, swiftly, he moves me again, rolling me so I’m on my back. The view is perfect: half Adam, half wide-open sky. Make me say your name a hundred times tonight, I’m thinking. I’ll introduce you to the stars.

I think of the last few days we’ve spent with Adam and Adam’s family, people who somehow manage to have big feelings with each other and also boundaries about it, calibrations they make for the youngest among them. I think of Mace hugging Katie after camp and telling her he sometimes gets stomachaches when he’s nervous, too; I think of Adam telling Sam he’d miss her when he said goodbye this morning. No one in the Hawkins house wields a feeling like a weapon, or like a leash.

It feels huge and heavy, this moment, and while I’m glad we’re having it, I also feel so unequal to it. I’m frayed and overwhelmed by my own experience today, worried that I’m barely strong enough to hold Tegan up during this.

It’s me, after all, who doesn’t really know how to live a feeling out loud.

I think Jess is telling me about as much as she can manage this morning. A half-truth to give me hope for the whole.

I think of Adam’s arms around me, strong and steady; I think of his low voice in my ear. The way I feel about you . . . It gives me a strange sort of courage to remember it. As though everything I’m overwhelmed about is stored somewhere safe for now. I can take it all out and look at it later.

I think I know that what I saw with you and Adam—that’s how love is supposed to look. That’s how you’re supposed to look. When you were with Adam, you couldn’t disappear. He wouldn’t let you.”