Quarters

To write about a summer that never was: aren’t there infinite? Isn’t there a summer when I was a little kid, and instead of wondering what it meant when my mom stood in my bedroom doorway and told me—on Father’s Day, mind you—that my dad was “hiding vodka” again, I was a happy kid with friends, my only worry a scrape or a bump that my young body would heal with haste? There has to be a summer where I wasn’t 15 and my first kiss wasn’t from the deadbeat, 22-year-old college dropout who worked with me at the local fast-casual Italian spot on the highway, and another one where I didn’t live off peanuts and banana chips during those sweaty, lonely couple of months in Philly between sophomore and junior year of college.

The thing is, yes, there are infinite possibilities. Some people seem to have luck: whatever entity decides the stories that unfold for us, if there is one at all, seems to favor some over others. You might think this has something to do with whether you’re a good person or not; it doesn’t.

During the summer that never was, I was good, because I loved for the first time. I answered delirious phone calls at 4:00 in the morning; I went to the hospital to be at his bedside when I should have been at work; I answered his mother’s texts when she wasn’t sure where he was or if he was still sober. If I once dropped my keys on my stoop after a sleepless night of talking him out of an overdose and sat down and cried, keys still in the dead potted plant the upstairs neighbors kept near the door, and had the intrusive thought but if he did kill himself, you wouldn’t have to do this anymore, well, there’s no way I sealed the fate of that summer. Right?

********

“Right.”

“No, not quite right.” That summer, I laughed and slowed the car in the gravel near the river, and I didn’t look at him as I shifted the gear into park. “Listen, in this little scenario, I would rather sacrifice my own happiness for yours, but—"

“Oh? You’d only do that in a make-believe situation?” He was teasing me, and I knew it by the way his eyes had a hooded, almost bored look of amusement.

“Jesus, Michi, no. I…here, watch this.” I twisted around and leaned toward the backseat of his mom’s car, lent to us for a mini road trip that day. Grabbing the foil off the tray of brownies he baked for us to bring along, I took out a dense, almost wet-looking square, and turning back around, I tucked one leg under me and rested an arm on the steering wheel. I held the brownie near my mouth, closed my eyes, and groaned. “God, I am about to be so selfish, just enjoying this brownie while you sit there and watch, and—oh, wait.” I tossed the brownie playfully on the dashboard, and before Michi could react, I leaned into the passenger seat and kissed him. His teeth scraped against mine and his hands fluttered awkwardly to my shoulders, but after a few seconds, we settled into it. It was nothing overtly sexual—in fact, we even started laughing after a few seconds—but in the back of mind, some small voice said what it always did when we touched: this. This is it. This is what everything is for.

When I pulled away, he blinked, dazed. “Wait, I’m not sure I get it.”

“I was just trying to show you that I’d always put my own pleasure second if it meant making you happy. Probably a dumb example, but I got to kiss you, and here—” I picked up the sweet chocolatey square and popped it into his mouth—“the pleasure, my dear, is all yours.”

He still didn’t look convinced—to be fair, kissing him was clearly fun for me, too, so my logic didn’t really hold up when compared to the conversation we’d been having, but I never missed an opportunity to kiss him. Not now that I had the chance, after so many months of longing, and not when we’d just had a conversation that awakened that fear again: that my time with him was running out.

********

Here is what he had asked me, why we’d been talking about sacrificing happiness for the other person: as we drove through the cornfields in rural Pennsylvania, leaving the city far behind to narrow our world down to only each other, Michi cleared his throat and said he had a question for me. His tone was serious, but I wasn’t worried—I worried more when he wanted to tell me something, like two weeks ago when he told me he was busy with Shabbat at his parents’ house, but actually, he was buying an eight ball—so that night, both cocaine and heroin—in Kensington and getting high in his campus apartment. His roommates had come home and found the bloody needle in the sink, and they carried Michi, who had nodded off in a slump against the refrigerator door, into his room, where he woke hours later to the sound of his roommates discussing whether to kick him out. He’d told me all this a few days after it happened, when I picked up the phone after missing a few of his calls while at work. “I have to tell you something,” he had said, and my heart sank when I heard the guilt in his voice. But he’s still alive, I thought. He’s talking to you. Even if he tried to overdose again, you already know it didn’t work.

So, yes, asking me something was far preferable to him telling me something. I’d had my window down, but I rolled it up to hear Michi better as he spoke. “If you knew that I wanted something that was bad for me—let’s say, I really want some chocolate ice cream, even though I’ve already eaten a lot of sweets that day—would you do something that harms you just to help me get it?”

‘“Harms me? How? Like, steal it for you?”

“No, like, let’s say you need some quarters to do your laundry. You need to wash your work uniform for the next day, or your boss will be mad at you. But then I call you up, and I say I’m really craving chocolate ice cream, but I’m short on cash and I just need a couple quarters to get a cheap cone somewhere.”

“You don’t even have a few quarters, but you’re worrying about chocolate ice cream?” I laughed, but something felt off. Michi loved studying the Torah and then asking me about the thought problems he’d encountered in his last reading, but this felt different. He was choosing his words carefully, and he was the smartest person I’d ever met, but this question felt a little too absurd just to be about ice cream, and I didn’t want to think about what he was really asking me.

So I didn’t. I glanced over at him, but he didn’t seem amused at my attempt to lighten the conversation. “Okay, never mind. So, you really want to ice cream. And I happen to care about you quite a bit, so I like when you get things you want. Therefore, I would want to give you my quarters, even if it’s not beneficial at all to me—even if it makes my life slightly worse—because your happiness matters to me.”

He thought for a moment. “What if you knew beforehand that I’m going to regret getting the ice cream? But I still ask you for it, telling you how much it would mean to me if you helped me out?”

“I mean…” His question sent another minor wave of panic through me. I remembered a conversation we had months ago, walking back to my apartment one freezing January night after he used his fake ID to meet me at a bar and got a little too drunk off Long Islands. Are you really okay dating someone who you know is actively suicidal? I shake my head and return to the present. I refused to entertain the thought that he was asking me for permission to hurt himself, that he was even admitting there’s a chance he’d regret it. So, again, I focused on the stupid ice cream. “I guess I would give you what you wanted. I’m pretty bad at saying no in general. And like I said, I happen to like you quite a bit.”

“So you don’t care if I suffer? What if I get the worst stomachache of my life?”

“Then I’ll hold your hair back while you throw up, princess. You can demand I make sacrifices for your well-being any old day.” Hoping to sound playful, I ruffled his hair. It was short, cut slightly unevenly against his forehead, and I spared another glance at him. He was distracted, staring out the window. I wasn’t even sure he heard me.

“Right.” He still wasn’t looking at me. Just then, we reached the banks of the Lehigh River, so I found a spot to pull over.

“No, not quite right.” I laughed, but I started to ask him what his real intentions were—because I had a feeling my answer would change if he stopped using his silly ice cream metaphor and told me what was really on his mind, that it would be the thing I fear so much I can barely think of it as a real possibility. Abruptly, though, his manner changed; he teased me, and I teased him with my bad brownie analogy, and then we kissed, and I swear in that moment that I had already forgotten the ice cream conversation. The only thing I thought, as we laughed and our lips parted, and we broke away, smiling almost shyly at one another:

This is it.

My only, my greatest love, out of all my infinite summers.

********

We spent time by the river with our arms around each other’s shoulders, remembering the lake we’d sat by that first month we’d known each other, two lonely students on a month-long trip abroad. Michi reminded me what he’d said that day: “If I ever come back here,” he’d mumbled back then, possibly without realizing he was saying it out loud, “I’ll either be really, really happy, or really, really sad.”

We laughed, sitting by the Lehigh, because there we were almost a year later, feeling “really, really happy,” and I reminded him what I had said in response last year by the lake. “I never feel like I’m on the same page as anyone else. Not a single person. But with you, I’m not just on the same page. I’m on the same word…honestly, the same damn letter.” After I said that, there by the Lehigh, he was—was he blushing?—he rested his head against my shoulder. My only, my greatest love.

We laughed some more, talking until the sun went down. I drove us through the fields near my childhood home so we could see the stars from one of my favorite spots, and when we got stuck in traffic driving back into Philly, I told Michi I’ve never spent so much time with one person and not felt drained by it. He asked me to spend the night with him once we got back into the city, but I declined; I had work the next morning, and even with my sister checking in a few times, my dog was probably going crazy without me by now.

I drove to the subway station closest to Michi’s house, and when I got out, he switched to the driver’s seat, even though he didn’t have a license. He’d explained to me that with his history of opioid abuse, he had to prove he’d been clean for some time before he could even get a learner’s permit, but his brother had been teaching him the basics when his parents weren’t around. “I’ll be fine for a few blocks,” he said, and since this was hardly the most reckless behavior he’d exhibited since I’d known him, I wasn’t concerned. Before he pulled away, I had the strongest urge to tell him the corny-yet-heartfelt thing my sister and I always said whenever we left one another: "I love you, don’t die." But I didn’t say it; I still recoiled from the vulnerability that came with saying I loved him, even though I felt it, all the time, in a way I hadn’t imagined I’d ever be able to feel.

Instead, I smiled at him, and I shortened the phrase to a simple “don’t die.” I started walking away, but he called out to me hold on a moment, he wanted to give me something for the ride home. After digging in the center console for a moment, Michi looked up at me with a grin and reached out the window, asking me to hold out my hand. When he opened his fist, a few old, grimy quarters fell into my hand. One more time, I almost told him: "I love you, don’t die."

Still, I didn’t. I stuck the quarters in my pocket, thinking I wouldn’t spend them on the subway that night. It felt like throwing away a gift, and someday I wondered if maybe I could buy him that ice cream cone, and we could laugh about the conversation we’d had earlier, because we would still be together. He would stop chasing that idea of chocolate ice cream, and we’d be as happy as we were kissing in the front seat of his mom’s car.

We both made it home safely that night: me, without spending his quarters, and him, without a driver’s license.

That night was the last I ever saw him.

********

The summer that never was. The summer we were supposed to go to the beach together, to start sending each other whatever we were writing at the time, to sneak into Laurel Hill Cemetery again with another six pack and watch the lights of the Comcast Tower blink while we sat on that one hill, the one in the cemetery overlooking the Schuylkill river, feeling like the last people on earth and not minding it one bit. The summer we would eat more wet brownies, or I’d finally use quarters to buy him chocolate ice cream, but a whole pint, and even though the cashier would glare at us, we’d laugh and split the whole thing.

Now, it’s late August. Summer is ending. I’m moving out of the country in less than a week. People act like I should feel excited, as if I’ve felt anything at all since that day I got the text after wondering why I hadn’t heard from him in almost 36 hours: Michi passed away yesterday.

Four days prior, we had spent the entire day together. I thought about chocolate ice cream, about giving out my last quarters, about suffering for his peace and happiness.

My big move is one of desperation. Everything in this city reminds me of him, because he was constantly on my mind. I couldn’t bear it anymore, so I grabbed the first job I could that would take me across an ocean, away from here.

********

Summer is finally ending, and I’m on my way to Michi’s parents’ house. His mom said she had something for me, and I had no idea what it was, but when she hands me his phone and tells me that he left me a voice note, something inside of me breaks. I don’t remember climbing the stairs to his attic bedroom, but I take the phone up there, inches from where his mom found him, and lie down on the bed, shoes and all.

I listen to his voice, made immortal just hours before he finally got what he wanted. He planned to die that night, he said, but first he wanted to share a few thoughts with me.

You were my best friend. I hope I was yours.

I’ve been thinking about how you’ve never told me you loved me while you were sober.

I know you’ll find the strength to move on from this, and even find some enjoyment in life.

I don’t think I could ever feel anything for anybody else but you.

The voice note lasted an hour and a half, and when I stood up to leave, barely even sure where I was anymore or if I was still crying after all that time, his cat was in his bedroom doorway, staring at me. I swept my hands over the bedspread one more time, imagining it was kind of like touching him, and my hand brushed something cold and hard where I’d been lying.

I guess I never took those quarters out of my pocket that night. Three of them lay where I’d been sitting, and I left them there as I followed Michi’s cat down the stairs, both of us lost, looking for him.