Love Stuff

Patrick could barely read his own writing through the droplets skittering across his eyelashes, but he was certainly going to try like hell. If he gave up now, what was the whole point of all of his hard work? The time he had dedicated to this whole thing already? No, no-- he wasn’t having it. He wasn’t having any of it, in fact, and as far as he was concerned, Hannah would be found tonight. Yes, he thought. That’s right. I’ll find you tonight. I just need a sign.

There had always been an element of eerie when it came to their relationship-- Patrick and Hannah knew it since the very beginning, and rather than shying away from it like most kids their ages (eleven and ten respectively), they rather embraced it; learned to familiarize themselves with the third party in the relationship early on. And just like that, he was sent back there as the rain fell, back to the moment he didn’t yet realize would be the very moment that he would in adulthood call, “how I knew there was a God” just so that he could search for a shard of hope. Where are you, Hannah?

-------------

“Did you FEEL that?” Her teeth shone bright as she extended the ‘e’ sound to him. They had been paired together during Mrs. Kennison’s 5th grade math olympics, and though they had never passed one another in the hallways or while waiting to pay for a cookie in line before the release bell rang, neither questioned how comfortable it was to be in the other’s presence. Both had reached for the Connect Four game at the same time, and it was as if Hannah’s entire forearm had been numb for ten years and was just then coming back to life; a safe kind of crackly that was both scary and reassuring to her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he had said, knowing exactly what she was talking about-- and just wanting to make sure it was real before he got too excited. He had to make sure. He had always been that way.

He’d heard about things like this happening before, to people just like him, Patrick, and her, Hannah. Normal, everyday kids who liked eating cookies after school and going to the community pool on the weekends when someone was actually willing to take them. In fact, normal kids are exactly who these things happen to, he thought. There was maybe a good chance, maybe a one-in-one-hundred chance, that they had chips implanted in them when they were babies on another planet and were delivered here together with strict instructions given by a Higher Power to a Connecting Force, and that Connecting Force was like a human but maybe not really a human at all though still meant to help them find good Earth parents-- but then they got separated, him Patrick and her Hannah, somehow they got separated because the Connecting Force wasn’t paying enough attention or got the coordinates wrong, and it was their mutual destiny to find each other on this day at this time so they could help prevent future Connecting Force mistakes AND help other babies with chips from other planets find each other on this Earth.

But he had to make sure, because SOMETHING definitely HAPPENED, and that meant there was some sort of Connecting Force at play-- and if there were no implanted chips or Higher Powers, then what? They both somehow harnessed electricity in their fingertips on a random Tuesday while pretending math? He would know the truth soon.

Patrick noticed then that Hannah’s teeth were very white, and that her eyelashes curled inward just a bit at the ends. He felt something close to what he had seconds earlier, but this tingle was in his stomach. He had eaten an old chicken finger the night before and wondered if he was paying the price. “Don’t come crying to me if you’re clutching your stomach in the middle of the night,” his mother shouted to him up the stairs. “Why can’t you control yourself?”

As they sat down to play, Hannah opened the box and started separating the red chips from the black chips inside the lid. Patrick always played with the red chips; his grandmother always used to play with the black before she couldn’t play anymore. He reached for one of them that was propped up on another, leaning against the edge of the box. He could feel the Michigan breeze across his face, how cold it had been the one Christmas they had gone there.

“My favorite game, EVER. I used to play it all the time with my Dad.” He could tell by the way she said ‘play’ that he shouldn’t ask any questions, but also could tell that wouldn’t be a problem for her.

“I mean, we used to play it sometimes during the summer at our beach house, when he was there. And I would win, I would win all of the time. Sometimes we would play for three hours, and then afterwards we would walk across the street and get a hot dog. He likes extra mustard like me. It was fun.”

He sat quiet, again not knowing just what to say, but knowing that saying nothing was better than saying the wrong thing.

“Anyway,” she went on, “after last year I went to stay with my aunt, and I haven’t been to the house since. But I guess this game sort of reminds me of what home feels like, since that place felt like it the most.” Patrick thought about telling her a memory of his grandma, and in doing so reached for another black chip-- Hannah’s fingertip met him there; the buzzing in the air was supernatural. He thought it looked like waves of heat just above your field of vision if you were riding a Jeep through a desert on an archaeological mission.

“How about that?” she whispered softly to him under the moon of her hand, placed around her top lip. She did this because she knew that he was a little nervous and wanted to make it a little quieter for him, and because she had heard all about these kinds of things, too, things that happened to girls like her and boys like him, sometimes while playing games on a classroom carpet or sometimes in the park or maybe even at the grocery store if you both liked apples enough. The girl looks and then the boy looks, and because they both look they know, and then one of them decides to ask the other one if they’d like to go get coffee, or ice cream, depending on the time of year.

Hannah remembered then what her Auntie Greta said to her after her Uncle Trent kicked her cousin Jarrod of their house: “Now Banana-baby, when you become a mommy, and you’re starting to talk about love, and that love is a boy looking at another boy, or a girl looking at another girl, if you can see love there, you let it grow.” Auntie Greta died the year before in a car accident; a drunk mother on her way home from an office party on Thanksgiving. Hannah missed her a lot because she could believe most of what she said, and that included a lot about love stuff.

All of her sparkled thoughts were in one big bubble, but he wasn’t looking at her, and that was usually part of the contract. Patrick was staring into his lap, looking at his hand, so she decided to ask him one more time.

“Patrick?”

He looked up at her, and made her want to let what she saw grow.

“Yes. Yes I did.” He nodded his head once, softly, and then they began to play.

---------------------------

A stream of water made its way across the bridge of his nose and down to the corner of his mouth, catching some of the dried salt left on his cheek from his earlier cry before entering the woods. Hannah had been missing now for six hours, his parents had no idea where he was, and the battery in his flashlight was about to die. Maybe he was about to die. Maybe you’re already dead, too.

He pulled his hood over his head to create a little bit of dry space to write one more thought down, one more last something before the rain washed his little black book and all of its words and wishes away into the darkness. Patrick had only known Hannah for six months, and already this book was filled with all of the reasons that she was the best person he’d ever met, some of the fun guessing games they did with one another at lunch (a grand development at the beginning of the sixth grade school year), and all of the things they wanted to do when they grew up. Each of them had a personal list, but they also created one for all of the together adventures in their future one day after school when waiting for the bus. What originally was a joke gift from his much older brother had now become his roadmap, his proof of both Connecting Forces and a Higher Power and also how some beautiful things really do happen in this life and how you just have to believe in them.

I love Hannah Winters, and she loves me. I tried to find her, but couldn’t. If you know her, please tell her I’m sorry.

He knew that the only way he would lose this notebook were it to be wrestled from his grasp, but he secretly loved the dramatic effect of one last bold entry. What if his words became famous? Patrick knew that if this were to be true, he would want his last words to involve Hannah, and love, and he would want her to know that he tried. He tried to help bring her home.

It was then he heard the sound of the freeway-- it was closer than he originally realized; the engines squealing and echoing into the emptiness of the sky. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and began to jog, his flashlight turning on and off with each bound.

Home? Hannah? You’re in a place that makes you feel home?

When he reached the edge of the forest, he knew immediately where he was. His grandmother used to drive him to the gas station at the corner of this highway when they were coming home from her bowling games. He would always pick Twinkies as his snack choice, and his grandmother would always ask him if he wanted two of them. He was no mathematician, but he figured if he kept jogging, he could get to the U-Can-Drive in the next five minutes.

The rest was a blur: the not knowing if he was right, the knowing that he was, whether or not could he trust the cop he spoke to to go to the place ACROSS the street from the hot dog shop up the street from the movie theater and not some other place nearby, was she too cold by now because the October chill had begun to set in, did someone hurt her, someone better not have hurt her. Patrick’s feet kept moving one by one, and eventually he saw the green neon sign of the gas station ahead. He picked up speed to cross the street that had no traffic on it, a moment of serendipity he never noticed in order to remember. The metal door was freezing.

“Can I use your phone?” he blurted to the man with the mustache behind the counter, and relished in the sound of the dial tone as the man picked up the receiver.

"Looks like you're about to be $20,000 richer," he said, a grin on his face, not just because he had seen the report on the seven o'clock several hours earlier, but also because he was a man who also knew what it was like to just know about that kind of connecting force.