“‘We should go,’ I told her. ‘The ice is thinner than I thought. I don’t trust it.’
“She turned her body to look at me. ‘It’ll hold,’ she said, and put her right arm across my chest, resting her head on my shoulder.
“Suddenly, I was sure that it wouldn’t, that we were lying out there on borrowed time already, that it was prone to give way at any moment. I heard it shift again beneath us, and this time it sounded like the last warning. ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to go.’
“I remember her looking at me with a wounded expression as I nudged her off me so I could stand, like I was rejecting her instead of trying to keep both of us from harm. ‘What’s your problem?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I don’t think she was intending for her words to come out so accusatory, so sharp, but they sliced into me before either of us knew it was going to happen, and once they had there was no taking them back.
“‘Nothing,’ I replied, backing away from her. ‘Nothing’s wrong with me.’
“I turned my back on her then, not caring if she fell through the goddamn ice or not, and walked off and left her there. I could hear her calling out to me as I trudged up the hill through the light snow—‘Jason, I’m sorry. Whatever it is, I’m sorry’—but I pretended I didn’t hear her, pretended it was anger I felt instead of something else.
“After that, we didn’t see much of each other for a while. She called me on the phone once, tried to apologize, but it was clear she didn’t know what she was apologizing for, and there was nothing I could say to explain it to her. Michael, of course, asked me about it, told me I was acting like a jerk and ought to get over it. But I just couldn’t. I’d close my eyes and think about the two of us lying there, one of her arms wrapped casually around me, and the ice suddenly breaking away beneath us, our muted screams for help tapering away into silence. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked over and over in my head, and I couldn’t look at it. All I could do was back away.”
I stood there at the institution’s fence and watched Jason struggle. I wanted to reach out to him but reminded myself of the boundaries between doctor and patient, how they needed to be respected.
“Triangles are curious things,” he said. “You can’t change the relationship between any two points without affecting at least one of the other two relationships. Michael and I had known each other our whole lives, but we’d known Alex for only a few months. I took it for granted that what we shared between the two of us would remain unaffected. But that didn’t happen. Maybe it was because of the way I’d treated her, which was unfair. In our small court of public opinion, the verdict was that she was the victim, not me, and until I could come up with a reasonable explanation for my actions I was on the outs with both of them. I told myself that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care, but of course that wasn’t true. I was losing him; that was obvious. What was less obvious was what to do about it.
“Finally, I decided to make amends. And so I rode my bike over to Alex’s house the next Saturday afternoon. I’d been there a few times before, and her mother recognized me when I knocked on the door. ‘Hi, Jason,’ she said. ‘Alexandra’s playing out back with Michael.’ I almost left then, feeling more like an outsider than ever, but then I decided no, I was coming to apologize, and so I walked around to the backyard expecting to find them. When I got there, the yard was empty, although Michael’s bike was leaning against the house. I looked around for a moment and, figuring they must have headed up the block, was about to leave when I noticed the opening to a narrow trail at the edge of the woods that bordered the far end of the yard. I trotted across the grass and entered the woods, following the path for about fifty yards until it started sloping downward toward the chuckling sound of a stream below. The earth was a little loose here, and I had to hold on to the trunks of trees as I descended. I was mostly looking down at my footing instead of focusing on the bank of the stream below me, so I was near the bottom before I saw them. I remember how the trees seemed to shift, to open up slightly so that I suddenly had a clearer view—and that was when I noticed them, standing on the opposite side of the stream with their arms locked around each other, kissing softly, almost gingerly, as if they were each afraid of hurting the other. I stood motionless on the hillside, watching from above, realizing that I was already too late, that the nature of their relationship had changed when I wasn’t looking, and that what they had now excluded me almost entirely. A barrage of emotions struck me then—anger, resentment, betrayal, isolation, jealousy—but I remember that what I felt most of all was a sense of shame. I was ashamed to be surreptitiously encroaching on this moment between them, ashamed to be thinking that I longed for it to be me wrapped in that embrace. I stood there, wrestling with my anguish, for a few more seconds before quietly turning to go. But the root my right foot was resting on gave way unexpectedly as I shifted my weight. There was a snap and I cried out in surprise, grasping at a tree limb that broke off in my hand. My left knee struck the ground and the earth there crumbled away, sending me sliding down the remainder of the embankment with an accompaniment of pebbles and debris.
“‘Jason,’ Michael said, letting go of her, but I was seeing him only in my peripheral vision. I couldn’t look at them directly, couldn’t bear the humiliation, and so I leaped to my feet and scampered back up the hill as fast as I could. By the time I got to the top, I realized there was something wrong with my ankle. It had begun to throb with every step. I didn’t run—couldn’t really—but I made my way as quickly as possible along the path, limping across Alex’s backyard when I got to it and, retrieving my bike from the front of her house, pedaling home as furiously as my wounded body would allow.
“I awoke the next morning to find my right ankle swollen to twice its normal size, and I couldn’t bear weight on it. It was Sunday and my mother, realizing that our doctor’s office was closed, took me to the ER for X-rays. I was fortunate that I hadn’t broken it, the doctor told us, but I’d suffered a bad sprain and was reliant on crutches for the next two weeks.
“When we got home from the hospital, I expected to see Michael sitting on our front steps waiting for me. But he didn’t stop by that day or the next. In fact, a week went by and I saw very little of either of them. At school we would catch each other’s eye for a moment in the hallway before pretending we hadn’t noticed. In class, we’d sit in our assigned seats, keeping our eyes focused on the teacher or on the pages of our respective books. In my mind, I was convinced they were either angry with me or embarrassed for me, and that either way I was the cause of all that had gone wrong between us.
“I don’t know how much time would have elapsed before we spoke to each other if it hadn’t been for an art project I decided to take home from school one day. It was a framed painting I’d made the week before. I’d gotten it back that day with a note from the teacher that read, ‘Great use of contrast. This shows real promise.’ At a time in my life when I wasn’t feeling very happy with myself, I grasped that small piece of praise like a life preserver and held on to it. I wrapped it up in a plastic bag to protect it from the rain and hobbled on my crutches to the waiting school bus. It was awkward to carry, too big to fit into my backpack and tricky to hold on to with my hands occupied with the crutches. I laid it along the outside of my right crutch and held it there with my forearm. It was slow going, and I almost missed the bus, but the driver saw me coming and held the painting for me while I lurched up the steps and into a seat. So I’d made it halfway, I thought, which was good. But the distance between the bus stop and my house was three blocks off the main road, perpendicular to the route the driver normally took. I disembarked ten minutes later, and I guess I must’ve looked pretty pathetic working my way down the street because I heard Michael call out to me, ‘Yo, Jason. Wait up,’ and a few seconds later I could hear his shoes slapping along the wet sidewalk as he came up behind me.
“‘Here, give me that, you moron,’ he said, and I handed him the plastic-bundled painting so I could use my crutches more effectively. He didn’t say anything else, just walked beside me in the rain, the two of us looking down