Unchaperoned

(I wrote this in a hotel room in Albuquerque in the middle of the night.)

What began as an excuse, a sympathetic ruse we constructed to convince our parents to let us, both eighteen, drive unaccompanied from Durango, Colorado to Los Angeles, California, soon became the trip’s true reason, the only force that held the gas pedal down and kept us moving forward.  I was there for “emotional support,” a role that overshadowed my previous position the night before, during our first night alone together. The memory of the shameless, ecstatic night, flashing back as we walked down the hospital’s glowing corridors, stung with guilt that held us to a more sober, grave, adult manner than we had been able to manage then.

At the time we had been dating thirteen months, somewhat casually and sporadically, with far more affection than devotion. That fall his best friend was in an accident in California, a motorcycle collision, and they told us back home he would be fine after a few months in rehab. Nathan sent a few emails, in the optimistic tone of denial all guys adopt during hard times. They discussed sports, the nurses at the hospital, and next year’s professors, all with a too-cheery overtone of confidence that Ben would pull through just fine.

That summer things took a bizarre turn for the worse, courtesy of an undetected injury to the brain that had waited, latent, until the weather cooled. On August twelfth, Ben’s mom called Nathan with the news. On August fourteenth, we announced to our parents that we were taking a road trip up to see Ben. What went unsaid was that it would be for the last time. I barely understood why I was going.  Though both of us vaguely recognized the space in Nathan’s life that was about to empty, that I would be called on to fill, it was the allure of an unchaperoned trip that drew me. It was from this hazy knowledge that we formulated our story, a reason poignant enough to override parental concerns. I knew Ben as well as a girlfriend can know her boyfriend’s best friend – from parties, occasional double dates, stories Nathan would tell about growing up. He was there when Nathan learned to swim at five, when he saw his first dirty movie at eleven, when they got caught smuggling alcohol from Ben’s uncle’s trailer at sixteen. I went not because I felt an obligation to visit Ben but because I felt an obligation to Nathan and to my own young sexuality. Our imminent departures for separate universities whispered another unspoken knowledge - we may never get another chance.

On August sixteenth we were walking back down the hospital’s hallway, having left Ben (Ben having left Ben already), feeling painfully our immature callousness in the exploitation of the situation. The night before, when this shame started to unfurl its barbed arms, Nathan whispered, “Ben would have wanted it.” I went along, imagining the two of them high-fiving the next morning. And so the shame retreated back into the shells of our minds, waiting for its next opening, as we took advantage of its absence and of our hotel room, of its distance from every worried parent and brain-dead friend, of its thick comforter and thicker darkness.

But the guilt returned, and we, having no excuses left, were forced to bear its weight along with the awareness that for both of us, the memories of our first night together and Ben and Nathan’s last day together would be forever entangled. The anonymous, thickly covered hotel bed melted into Ben’s clipboard-adorned, thin hospital bed. Ambient lighting from the streetlight outside our window became the blinding glare of fluorescent lights off white tiling. Our sighs and laughs and gasps gave way to Ben’s fragile breaths moving rhythmically through tubes. Where we stopped moving and rocking together, Nathan was in the arms of Ben’s mother, shaking, leaning. Then, I was “Love,” but the woman who would always be “Mrs. Elaine” to Nathan held him now, with none of the girlish confusion I had behaved with then and felt again, a weak stranger with no place in the scene.

I had never seen Nathan cry before, never seen him lean on anyone with such need and desperation. I realized then that my given role on the trip was both my most important one and one I could never fulfill. He turned from Elaine, straightening up from her shoulder, and I reached for his hand with a pathetic futility. He took it, though – the ineffective seeming otherwise with no other option in sight.