Dangerously - Katie Burke

He was tall, lanky, with sandy blond, longish-short hair, and big blue eyes that didn’t look innocent. He was the only big-blue-eyed person I knew whose eyes didn’t look angelic; set in his face, they just looked troubled. He was 18. I was 14 and so taken with his beauty and his wounds, I lived to untrouble his eyes.

He lived dangerously. When we met at the park, his dad was walking him to a behavior management class, to make sure he actually went in, like parents do with their preschool-aged children. Liz and I were perched on the grass, waiting for my older cousin Amy, who was visiting Phoenix from upstate New York, to pick us up.

“Karl!” Liz said. He looked at her with recognition, at me with the desire of an 18-year-old boy who spots a blonde he hasn’t yet met, and backwards at his dad, who looked at him like he’d be a dead man if he didn’t keep his head down and continue walking. He shrugged and looked away as they walked toward the park’s administrative buildings, which it had never occurred to Liz and me to check out, while we’d been cruising the grounds for cute guys.

“That’s my neighbor, Karl,” Liz explained, once Karl and his dad were out of earshot. “His family is weird. I think his dad hits him, and I don’t think his mom does anything about it. He ran away once, in the middle of the night. He came to my house and asked to spend the night. My parents weren’t even awake. He stayed in our living room, and he was gone in the morning, and we’ve never mentioned it again.”

With those words, I fell in love. Always looking for a soul to save in the name of love, I had found my first. Karl and I spent years talking on the phone for hours at a time. Sometimes months would go by and I wouldn’t hear from him, even though I called. My heart broke all the time for two years, until I turned 16 and fell in love with Jeremy, another tortured soul, who lived within driving distance of my school and returned my calls. And then there was Austin, the love of my 17th year, who was my pal but who did not love me back … which, in those days and the many that have since followed, was a sure way to win my heart.

But I never forgot my first so-called-love. I stayed in one-way touch with Karl, who managed to call me back when I reached college years. Still living with his parents, and with no college aspirations of his own, he was still my wounded bird to save. And by that time, he had abandoned his pride borne of shame, and he gratefully took on the role. I still loved him after all those four high school years, and he finally believed it.

We finally kissed, when I was 20 and he was still living with his parents and smoking pot all the time at 24. I sat in the park with him one night, while he smoked his pot and I felt protective, never losing sight of Liz’ story about the middle-of-the-night living room sleepover. In my naïve, sheltered mind, it had all led to this – smoking pot at 24, with no future in mind, sitting with a cute blonde stacked with ambition and a heart full of fool’s love.

I drove us from the park to his parents’ house. He had me turn off the headlights of my tan Toyota Forerunner once we were two houses away. He went inside first, opening his bedroom window, which faced the street, and pulling me inside as I approached, tiptoeing, as if I did bad things like this.

He went to boob town, and that was his final destination, since I was Catholic then and had parents who cared where I was. I slinked out of Karl’s window, wearing his black sweater with a logo that only skateboarders wore, feeling happy to have a piece of his clothing to remember him by, since he lived a half-hour away from my parents’ house, and I only saw my parents twice per year, being in college out of state.

He bugged me for weeks to return his sweater that summer, while I was still in town, so I made what was, in my mind then, a long drive to his parents’ house. His dad answered the door, and I harbored hateful thoughts for what he’d done to his son all those years, what he was probably still doing … not that Karl would ever tell me about it, and not that he wouldn’t fight back at his age.

“This belongs to Karl. I just wanted to give it back to him,” said I, the mystery woman whom his father didn’t recognize from the park, where I’d last seen him, six years before.

Karl called me later that night, drunk. “You are a fucking fool.” I did not appreciate those words, but I did like the ones that followed. “You wouldn’t come back here and bring me my sweatshirt, and then you brought it when I wasn’t home.”

“I didn’t know you wouldn’t be home.” I really didn’t, but nor did I try to time it so he would be. I didn’t want to prolong our “rescuer/wounded one” dynamic. I would graduate college in two years and be on my way to graduate school for Counseling, a field that would help me reach people like Karl, without falling hopelessly in love with them and having a drunken sweatshirt conversation. And he would still live with his parents, smoking pot all the time, if our six-year history was any prediction.

“You fucking fool. I love you.” I’d waited six years to hear it, and in my fantasies, it wasn’t preceded by two declarations of, “You fucking fool.” But there it was, just the same, and I couldn’t wait until the next morning, when I could tell Liz. But for that night, I would listen to three hours of Karl’s ranting declaration of love, combined with pleading that I return to his parents’ house that night. “I don’t care about the sweatshirt. I kept asking you for it because I wanted to see you again.”

The next summer, I stopped by his parents’ house to find out about him. His mom answered the door. I’d never seen her before. She was the second person I’d seen in the world who had his big, blue, non-innocent eyes. She looked at me with hope: I was young, full of energy, and inquiring about her son. She looked beaten, and I guessed that she probably was.

“Karl’s in prison.” Her news knocked the wind out of me, but it wasn’t a surprise. “He’d love to hear from you.” Boundaries be gone, I gave her my phone number and the address to my college beach house in Connecticut, before I could think the better of it. Two weeks later, I was back at the beach, when my housemate Mia yelled, “Katie! The phone’s for you,” and then covered the receiver and whispered, “It’s someone from prison.”

Mortified, I didn’t take the call. Karl had infiltrated my normal world, no longer leaving our strange connection restricted to his bedroom in his parents’ house. Calling me from the slammer was unacceptable. Not that he would understand. Not that this wasn’t normal behavior in his world.

I did return his letter though, the one where he wrote that he’d gotten in a car accident while driving drunk and had been arrested for aggravated assault, as if I didn’t know any lawyers and couldn’t find out that aggravated assault charges require an actual … assault. He’d done more than he would tell me, and while that had always been true, I knew now was the time when our paths were too divergent to meet again. As if they’d ever been otherwise.

He lived dangerously. I’d give anything to have that black sweater now.