Lucid Interval, 6
Months pass. Ryan still remembers everything about the accident.
He remembers the impact, and losing control of the vehicle. He remembers the noise of the crash, and how he didn’t think anything could be that loud. He remembers the intense heat of the fire washing over him, the smell of burning rubber and the weight of Marissa’s limp body in his arms just as vividly as if it happened yesterday. He can close his eyes and there he is: right back there on the asphalt, crumpled over her with her head pillowed on his thigh and a column of thick black smoke rising into the night behind him.
Moving on isn’t easy. No one ever told him that it would be.
Therapy helps. As reluctant as he is to admit it, it does help. It doesn’t solve his problems but it does help him cope. So do the Cohens. Just being around them, being part of their family, having their support, it’s good. Having someone aside from himself to be concerned about, and having someone to be concerned about him, it helps.
So does Taylor.
Life is full of surprises, and Ryan can’t think of a better example of that than his relationship with Taylor Townsend.
Taylor is brilliant. Taylor is quirky. Taylor has an emotional addiction, an obsessed French ex-husband, an overactive sex drive and a pre-disposition towards violent Asian cinema. There’s nothing in the whole world like Taylor Townsend, and the world is probably a safer place because of it.
Taylor has never needed saving, except for just the once, and Ryan just happened to be there.
Wrong time. Right place.
Taylor is not the type of person that Ryan ever thought he could be attracted to. They come from two different worlds. They have almost nothing in common, but then again neither do Sandy and Kirsten. Ryan told Sandy once that being with Taylor is like riding a roller coaster. That’s as close as he can come to describing what he feels when he’s with her. She’s exciting and terrifying at the same time. Sometimes she does things that make him a little queasy, but when she’s away from him he can’t wait until she comes back. She’s not just a roller coaster, her realizes one day. She’s the whole carnival.
At first Ryan wastes a lot of time being conflicted over their relationship. She’s so different from Marissa. He worries about whether or not it’s okay for him to love her. He wonders if he deserves to have her love him back.
Ryan learned the hard way that nothing in life is certain, but he knows this: Taylor makes him happy. He has a hard time accepting that.
Sandy told Ryan once that he’d never get over Marissa’s death, but he’d get used to it. Ryan wakes up every day wondering when that’s going to happen.
XXXXX
Days become months. Months become years.
Ryan still visits Marissa’s grave from time to time, whenever he’s in Newport.
She still rides shotgun when he’s alone in the car.
The accident still haunts him, but his memories of that night have begun to fade like old photographs, and the less important details have started to slip away. He’s forgotten the name of the hospital that they took him to after the accident, and the faces of the EMTs, the doctors and the nurses. He’s forgotten his police case number, and a lot of the other details surrounding the accident.
Ryan wakes up one morning and he’s a Sophomore at Berkeley.
Seth and Summer are in Rhode Island. Seth is enrolled at RISD and Summer is back at Brown after a year riding around on a bus with GEORGE, saving the planet.
Taylor is traveling in the Middle East. She sent him a postcard and a photograph. In the picture she’s wearing a ruffled shirt, headscarf and a smile. The postcard is written in Farsi.
Sandy is teaching law at Berkeley, and he’s good. Ryan thinks he’s found his true calling. He sat in on Sandy’s class once. It was almost enough to make him want to change his major. Almost.
Kirsten does consulting work for architecture firms in the bay area. She works out of the Cohens’ home in Berkeley so that she can spend more time with their infant daughter, Sophie Rose.
Ryan has midterms in three classes in four days, but he forgets all about them because as hard as he tries he can’t remember what Marissa looked like the night she died. He remembers how she felt in his arms. He remembers what she said, but he can’t remember how her hair was or what she was wearing. The information is just gone, faded away.
It shouldn’t matter, but it does. If he forgets anything about her then he’s letting her down. He’s failing her.
He can’t sleep. He nearly flunks his midterms and he’s a wreck by the time Sunday dinner at the Cohens rolls around. Sandy and Kirsten open the door, take one look at him and know with the full force of their parental instincts that something is bothering him and it has nothing to do with his course load or his professors or any aspect of college life. It takes them all evening to draw it out of him and they listen and nod like it’s the most important thing in the world.
“I can’t even remember what color her shirt was,” he tells them. Ryan can’t believe how stupid he sounds, but he feels better having said it.
Two days later Ryan gets a phone call from Julie Cooper.
“White,” she says. “Her top was white. It was sleeveless and it gathered at the waist and she was wearing a sweater over it.”
Julie is a sophomore too. She and Ryan talk almost every week, and it’s not unusual for Ryan to hear from her. After three years of conflict she and Ryan met on the no-man’s land of her daughter’s death. Later on, when Julie started a relationship with Ryan’s father, they found themselves fighting on the same side. As time goes by their common ground keeps expanding, but even if they didn’t they will always have their love for Marissa to fall back on.
Ryan remembers, “She had on that wishbone necklace, the gold one.”
Julie’s voice becomes thick. “Yes, she did. Jimmy got it for her. It was one of her favorites.” He can hear her crying.
Being reminded of Marissa makes Ryan sad too, but life goes on, and Marissa isn’t the only loved one that they have in common anymore.
“How’s my little brother?” he asks.
XXXXX
Ryan graduates from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in architecture. He’s the first person in his family to graduate from a four-year university, and he graduates with honors.
Afterward he does an internship at Hank Bruce in Tiburon. When he’s finished, they offer him a permanent position, but he turns it down so that he can pursue his masters. Three years later they still have an opening for him. So do several other firms. Ryan chooses a job in Richmond, just north of Berkeley, not because they offer him better pay or a bigger office, but because wants to stay close to his family.
Ryan is close with all of the Cohens, but he’s closest to Sophie. There was a time in Sandy and Kirsten and Seth’s lives when Ryan was a stranger to them, but there has never been a time in Sophie’s life when Ryan wasn’t her brother. While Ryan was attending college he would come home almost every weekend to baby sit. He was there for her first steps, her first tooth, her first words, and her first day of kindergarten. It was difficult at first to make her understand why he didn’t call Kirsten and Sandy “Mom” and “Dad”, why he had a different last name and why his “real” parents had left him with strangers when he was sixteen years old. It had been hard on Ryan, trying to explain to her things that he never really understood himself, things he hasn’t thought about in years. Sandy summed it up best when he said: “Family is a word for people who take care of each other,” and that seems to work for Sophie.
Ryan thinks that works for him too.
Barring another natural disaster Ryan doubts that the Cohens will ever relocate from their house in Berkeley. There’s too much family history there.
Seth moves back to the west coast after he finishes design school. He lives and works in a loft in San Francisco with his drafting table, his massive library of graphic novels (research, he calls them) and Summer, his muse. Atomic County can be found at every Borders and Barnes and Noble in the country, and Taylor swears up and down that she saw someone reading a bootleg translation of volume one on a subway in Tokyo.
Seth was even mobbed once at Comicon in San Diego.
Ryan helped him escape.
The crowd got a kick out of that.
Seth and Summer get married in the back yard of Sandy and Kirsten’s home. Their cake-toppers are tiny gum paste replicas of Captain Oats and Princess Sparkle. Ryan is Seth’s best man and Taylor is Summer’s maid of honor. Taylor just got back from a trip to Thailand and Ryan hasn’t seen her in six months.
This time they get a hotel room.
Sometimes Ryan and Taylor are exclusive. Sometimes they’re not. They drift apart and come back together like drops of water on a windshield. Their relationship runs hot and cold and every temperature in between, but when Ryan tests the waters they seem to grow more and more tropical with every passing year.
Ryan has made peace with Taylor’s past and the parts of their relationship that weren’t so pleasant. He keeps a well-thumbed copy of A Season for Peaches on his bookshelf. It's part of who she is, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Also, it’s good for ideas.
Ryan has known Taylor longer than he ever knew Marissa. He’s been intimate with her in ways that he couldn’t even consider being with any other girl, and not just physically. She knows him better than he knows himself.
Marissa was the girl he wanted, but Taylor is the woman he needs.
Ten years after she died Marissa is more of an idea than a person. She’s a rosy image in the back of his mind. He remembers how beautiful she was, how confused and scared, and how young she was when she died. Mostly he remembers the good times, and her flaws all melt away.
Marissa is an open wound at first, and slowly, very slowly, she becomes a scar.
He keeps her pictures. Just because even though she’s not around anymore it feels wrong to pretend that she wasn’t an important part of his life once. He keeps a snapshot of her in his wallet so that he can take her with him wherever he goes. She’s a part of his past, a part of who he is.
He keeps another picture hanging in the hallway of his apartment in Richmond. It’s a photograph of him, Seth, Summer and Marissa on the day that they graduated from Harbor. In the picture they’re standing arm in arm, dressed in purples and blues and draped in lei, grinning at the camera under the bright June sky. The people in that picture are frozen in time, young forever.
But in the real world life goes on, and so does he.
To be continued...
Part 7
I know, it seems like then end, but it's not.
Thank you for reading. Feedback is welcome.
He remembers the impact, and losing control of the vehicle. He remembers the noise of the crash, and how he didn’t think anything could be that loud. He remembers the intense heat of the fire washing over him, the smell of burning rubber and the weight of Marissa’s limp body in his arms just as vividly as if it happened yesterday. He can close his eyes and there he is: right back there on the asphalt, crumpled over her with her head pillowed on his thigh and a column of thick black smoke rising into the night behind him.
Moving on isn’t easy. No one ever told him that it would be.
Therapy helps. As reluctant as he is to admit it, it does help. It doesn’t solve his problems but it does help him cope. So do the Cohens. Just being around them, being part of their family, having their support, it’s good. Having someone aside from himself to be concerned about, and having someone to be concerned about him, it helps.
So does Taylor.
Life is full of surprises, and Ryan can’t think of a better example of that than his relationship with Taylor Townsend.
Taylor is brilliant. Taylor is quirky. Taylor has an emotional addiction, an obsessed French ex-husband, an overactive sex drive and a pre-disposition towards violent Asian cinema. There’s nothing in the whole world like Taylor Townsend, and the world is probably a safer place because of it.
Taylor has never needed saving, except for just the once, and Ryan just happened to be there.
Wrong time. Right place.
Taylor is not the type of person that Ryan ever thought he could be attracted to. They come from two different worlds. They have almost nothing in common, but then again neither do Sandy and Kirsten. Ryan told Sandy once that being with Taylor is like riding a roller coaster. That’s as close as he can come to describing what he feels when he’s with her. She’s exciting and terrifying at the same time. Sometimes she does things that make him a little queasy, but when she’s away from him he can’t wait until she comes back. She’s not just a roller coaster, her realizes one day. She’s the whole carnival.
At first Ryan wastes a lot of time being conflicted over their relationship. She’s so different from Marissa. He worries about whether or not it’s okay for him to love her. He wonders if he deserves to have her love him back.
Ryan learned the hard way that nothing in life is certain, but he knows this: Taylor makes him happy. He has a hard time accepting that.
Sandy told Ryan once that he’d never get over Marissa’s death, but he’d get used to it. Ryan wakes up every day wondering when that’s going to happen.
XXXXX
Days become months. Months become years.
Ryan still visits Marissa’s grave from time to time, whenever he’s in Newport.
She still rides shotgun when he’s alone in the car.
The accident still haunts him, but his memories of that night have begun to fade like old photographs, and the less important details have started to slip away. He’s forgotten the name of the hospital that they took him to after the accident, and the faces of the EMTs, the doctors and the nurses. He’s forgotten his police case number, and a lot of the other details surrounding the accident.
Ryan wakes up one morning and he’s a Sophomore at Berkeley.
Seth and Summer are in Rhode Island. Seth is enrolled at RISD and Summer is back at Brown after a year riding around on a bus with GEORGE, saving the planet.
Taylor is traveling in the Middle East. She sent him a postcard and a photograph. In the picture she’s wearing a ruffled shirt, headscarf and a smile. The postcard is written in Farsi.
Sandy is teaching law at Berkeley, and he’s good. Ryan thinks he’s found his true calling. He sat in on Sandy’s class once. It was almost enough to make him want to change his major. Almost.
Kirsten does consulting work for architecture firms in the bay area. She works out of the Cohens’ home in Berkeley so that she can spend more time with their infant daughter, Sophie Rose.
Ryan has midterms in three classes in four days, but he forgets all about them because as hard as he tries he can’t remember what Marissa looked like the night she died. He remembers how she felt in his arms. He remembers what she said, but he can’t remember how her hair was or what she was wearing. The information is just gone, faded away.
It shouldn’t matter, but it does. If he forgets anything about her then he’s letting her down. He’s failing her.
He can’t sleep. He nearly flunks his midterms and he’s a wreck by the time Sunday dinner at the Cohens rolls around. Sandy and Kirsten open the door, take one look at him and know with the full force of their parental instincts that something is bothering him and it has nothing to do with his course load or his professors or any aspect of college life. It takes them all evening to draw it out of him and they listen and nod like it’s the most important thing in the world.
“I can’t even remember what color her shirt was,” he tells them. Ryan can’t believe how stupid he sounds, but he feels better having said it.
Two days later Ryan gets a phone call from Julie Cooper.
“White,” she says. “Her top was white. It was sleeveless and it gathered at the waist and she was wearing a sweater over it.”
Julie is a sophomore too. She and Ryan talk almost every week, and it’s not unusual for Ryan to hear from her. After three years of conflict she and Ryan met on the no-man’s land of her daughter’s death. Later on, when Julie started a relationship with Ryan’s father, they found themselves fighting on the same side. As time goes by their common ground keeps expanding, but even if they didn’t they will always have their love for Marissa to fall back on.
Ryan remembers, “She had on that wishbone necklace, the gold one.”
Julie’s voice becomes thick. “Yes, she did. Jimmy got it for her. It was one of her favorites.” He can hear her crying.
Being reminded of Marissa makes Ryan sad too, but life goes on, and Marissa isn’t the only loved one that they have in common anymore.
“How’s my little brother?” he asks.
XXXXX
Ryan graduates from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in architecture. He’s the first person in his family to graduate from a four-year university, and he graduates with honors.
Afterward he does an internship at Hank Bruce in Tiburon. When he’s finished, they offer him a permanent position, but he turns it down so that he can pursue his masters. Three years later they still have an opening for him. So do several other firms. Ryan chooses a job in Richmond, just north of Berkeley, not because they offer him better pay or a bigger office, but because wants to stay close to his family.
Ryan is close with all of the Cohens, but he’s closest to Sophie. There was a time in Sandy and Kirsten and Seth’s lives when Ryan was a stranger to them, but there has never been a time in Sophie’s life when Ryan wasn’t her brother. While Ryan was attending college he would come home almost every weekend to baby sit. He was there for her first steps, her first tooth, her first words, and her first day of kindergarten. It was difficult at first to make her understand why he didn’t call Kirsten and Sandy “Mom” and “Dad”, why he had a different last name and why his “real” parents had left him with strangers when he was sixteen years old. It had been hard on Ryan, trying to explain to her things that he never really understood himself, things he hasn’t thought about in years. Sandy summed it up best when he said: “Family is a word for people who take care of each other,” and that seems to work for Sophie.
Ryan thinks that works for him too.
Barring another natural disaster Ryan doubts that the Cohens will ever relocate from their house in Berkeley. There’s too much family history there.
Seth moves back to the west coast after he finishes design school. He lives and works in a loft in San Francisco with his drafting table, his massive library of graphic novels (research, he calls them) and Summer, his muse. Atomic County can be found at every Borders and Barnes and Noble in the country, and Taylor swears up and down that she saw someone reading a bootleg translation of volume one on a subway in Tokyo.
Seth was even mobbed once at Comicon in San Diego.
Ryan helped him escape.
The crowd got a kick out of that.
Seth and Summer get married in the back yard of Sandy and Kirsten’s home. Their cake-toppers are tiny gum paste replicas of Captain Oats and Princess Sparkle. Ryan is Seth’s best man and Taylor is Summer’s maid of honor. Taylor just got back from a trip to Thailand and Ryan hasn’t seen her in six months.
This time they get a hotel room.
Sometimes Ryan and Taylor are exclusive. Sometimes they’re not. They drift apart and come back together like drops of water on a windshield. Their relationship runs hot and cold and every temperature in between, but when Ryan tests the waters they seem to grow more and more tropical with every passing year.
Ryan has made peace with Taylor’s past and the parts of their relationship that weren’t so pleasant. He keeps a well-thumbed copy of A Season for Peaches on his bookshelf. It's part of who she is, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Also, it’s good for ideas.
Ryan has known Taylor longer than he ever knew Marissa. He’s been intimate with her in ways that he couldn’t even consider being with any other girl, and not just physically. She knows him better than he knows himself.
Marissa was the girl he wanted, but Taylor is the woman he needs.
Ten years after she died Marissa is more of an idea than a person. She’s a rosy image in the back of his mind. He remembers how beautiful she was, how confused and scared, and how young she was when she died. Mostly he remembers the good times, and her flaws all melt away.
Marissa is an open wound at first, and slowly, very slowly, she becomes a scar.
He keeps her pictures. Just because even though she’s not around anymore it feels wrong to pretend that she wasn’t an important part of his life once. He keeps a snapshot of her in his wallet so that he can take her with him wherever he goes. She’s a part of his past, a part of who he is.
He keeps another picture hanging in the hallway of his apartment in Richmond. It’s a photograph of him, Seth, Summer and Marissa on the day that they graduated from Harbor. In the picture they’re standing arm in arm, dressed in purples and blues and draped in lei, grinning at the camera under the bright June sky. The people in that picture are frozen in time, young forever.
But in the real world life goes on, and so does he.
To be continued...
Part 7
I know, it seems like then end, but it's not.
Thank you for reading. Feedback is welcome.