He breathes out, eased perhaps a little, and reaches for me. I crawl into his arms, let my face fall into the crook of his shoulder.
“I love you,” he says. I can feel the vibration of it in his chest. The words echo around like they’re bouncing off water and stone.
“I love you too,” I say, and I expect to feel the syllables bouncing inside me as well, like they used to, starry and joyful in my throat. But all can I hear are the hymns from the crickets. And all I can feel is Jake’s heartbeat beneath his skin—steady, slight, and slow.
Chapter 11
I don’t sleep that night, or Sunday.
I guess that’s an exaggeration. I nod off a couple times while I’m standing behind the counter on Sunday. I nap during my lunch break, a short hour curled up in Jenny’s office with her back pillow tucked under my head. I doze on the couch after work while Mom makes mac and cheese and talks to my aunt Nancy on the phone.
But at night, I do not sleep. I stare at my phone, or at the old clock with the big green numbers on my bedside table. My eyes adjust to the dark. I can see every detail of the dream catcher twisting in the window, the slats on the closet door, the spines of my childhood books peeking out of the bookcase. I can see the lines of the postcards on my corkboard. None of the postcards show Kentucky. When I go to the bathroom, the light is blinding, and I squint while I wash my hands.
Will you think about it? he asks over and over again in the half-sleep state that leaves me tossing and turning. My yes weighs me down so I can’t move my legs, my arms. I am stuck.
On Sunday night, I drag my heavy limbs out of bed and try going down to the porch. I even take a sleeping bag this time, like my mom suggested when she found me earlier this summer. But it’s not a good night for porch camping. The stars aren’t out. Clouds wash across the sky fast and dark, leaving sporadic glimpses of the moon.
It starts raining. One of those summer storms that leaves the air impossibly humid in the morning. I duck my head inside the sleeping back and hear rather than feel the raindrops hitting the waterproof coating. I stay in there until it gets too stuffy. When I come out, the rain hits my face in thick panels, and I’m soaked before I get inside.
All of which is to say that when I get in the shower before work on Monday morning, I am exhausted. My hair is still cold from the rain, and a mossy scent comes off it as I lather the shampoo. My skin feels too sensitive and my stomach tight, which makes sense because I haven’t eaten since Saturday night. I turn up the water until it’s so hot it makes my whole body turn red, and for the first moment since he said it, I forget will you think about it? I stand there for as long as I can before I jump out of the water stream, hissing and muttering expletives, and the sentence slides back inside me, easy as breath.
Will you think about it?
Will you think about it?
I’ve been thinking about it.
Work is a slow blur. When Georgia ducks in to say hey, dripping chlorine from her long ponytail, I lie and say Jenny’s making me do extra admin stuff so I can’t make it to lunch. Her office door is closed, so I think I’m getting away with it, but she comes out after Georgia leaves and raises an eyebrow. I don’t say anything, and neither does she.
Except at noon, she beckons me into her office, says, “You look exhausted,” and pulls the back pillow from her chair, offering it up to me. For the second day in a row, I spend my lunch hour sleeping on her floor. This time, her sitcoms are my lullaby.
I wake up to my phone alarm, feeling even sicker than before. My eyes are cottony and dry, and my stomach is a cavern. I start to get up and groan. Jenny turns to look at me skeptically.
“Did you have lunch?” she asks. Her laptop is playing commercials. She doesn’t turn the volume down.
“I was asleep,” I say, which I realize, a good three seconds later, is a stupid answer.
Jenny rolls her eyes. “Did you have dinner last night?”
I don’t say anything. The right answer is yes but the real answer is no.
“But your parents feed you, right?”
“Yeah, of course,” I respond, defensive.
“That’s what I thought, but you never know.” She scoots her swivel chair over to a filing cabinet in the corner. She pulls on a drawer—the screeching sound taps on the headache I’ve had for the last thirty-six hours—and removes a jar of peanut butter, a plastic knife, and a bag of tortillas. She puts a tortilla on a napkin, spreads peanut butter on it, folds it in half, and turns to me.
“Eat,” she says, scooting the napkin toward me. “You’ll feel better.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Bullshit.”
I look at the napkin, and the pain in my stomach sharpens itself into hunger. I’ve been this hungry before. The weekend my mom looked at me in the dressing room during school shopping last year and asked the saleslady to get the next size up. The Thursday and Friday after one of my then-friends raised her eyebrows at the cookie I was eating with lunch. But I haven’t thought about food like that nearly as much this summer.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but you should eat something. Last chance. I love peanut butter. I’ll take it if you don’t.”
Mom and Dad used to make me these on nights when neither of them wanted to cook. Dad called them PBQs—peanut butter quesadillas. He warmed them up in the microwave.
I take the tortilla, and Jenny turns back to her laptop, tipping her feet up on her desk. I eat it in exactly twenty small, precise bites. It tastes better than lunch with the counselors, better than family pizza night. I almost start crying.
Jenny glances at me. “Want another?”
I nod.
She scoots over to the filing cabinet again and takes out two tortillas, spreads peanut butter thickly between them. The peanut butter coats the inside of my mouth, rich and sticky.
“Listen,” she says, turning to me and hiking one ankle up over the other knee, so she resembles a pretzel in denim. “I’m not your friend. I don’t need to be. Nor do I want to be. I was sixteen once, and I don’t need to relive that experience ever again.” She looks at me almost pityingly.
“But you do have friends, right? I know you have at least the one, that counselor girl, because she’s always in here distracting the customers every goddamn free moment. So, you know…” Jenny waves her hands in an exasperated sum-up motion. “Talk to her. You don’t have to be miserable.”
My mouth is filled with peanut butter and I don’t know what to say, so I just nod. She sits and looks at me and waits for me to swallow my bite, like she’s expecting something.
“I will,” I say, the words awkward around my sticky tongue.
“Good.” She turns back to her laptop and continues watching. I sit there with the unfinished PBQ. It appears we’re done talking, but I can’t be sure. She looks at me. “Lunch is over. Get back out there.”
I eat the last few bites of peanut butter leaning against the back wall in the shop. I unwrap an almond chocolate bar and eat one square, hide the rest in a drawer. My belly feels tight and full around the food.
I stand there and stare out the thin sliver of window in the wall across the room while a preteen girl and her mom browse quietly. My headache ebbs into a soft pain behind my eyes. I sell the girl a notebook covered in cartoon manatees.
Outside it starts pouring, one continuous flow, like water from a pitcher.
It’s been a dry summer. All the water in the air, nothing on the ground. Good to get some rain, my mother will say.
I’ve had two visions running through my head for the last two days. They are twins, connected.
The first is of me and Jake waking up at the same time in his dad’s barn in Kentucky. The air is warm but not too humid, the sky a pale blue that I know will brighten into cobalt. Outside, a dog barks and a chicken clucks, and inside, a cat prowls around the edges of our mat
tress on the floor. We’re naked and Jake snuggles closer to me, murmuring his dreams wordlessly into my ear. I’m thinking about the day, how we’re going to get up in half an hour and go in the house for breakfast, fresh eggs and bacon that we’ll cook ourselves while his dad and LeeAnn are out feeding the animals, and then go into town, where he works at the general store and I work at the pharmacy. Nothing has ever been so perfect.
The second looks the same at the beginning. We’re lying together naked on a mattress in the barn. But in this one, Jake’s arm across my chest feels like dead weight I can’t shake off. I’m fully awake, staring out the window. He’s still asleep, content. He talks in his sleep. He murmurs his dreams wordlessly into my ear and the sickness in my stomach is there, getting worse and worse. I hear his dad and LeeAnn having their first fight of the day as they go out to feed the chickens. The air is already stifling, and it’s not even seven in the morning. Breakfast is dry toast with LeeAnn while she makes snippy conversation about when we’re going to leave. We don’t go into town because we don’t have jobs. Jake helps out his dad, and I stay inside, shades drawn, trying to get reception on my phone.
The visions start in the morning in that loft, and as they go further into the day, they get more and more vague, until it’s evening and I can’t picture what’s happening. What do you do, evenings in Kentucky? Watch TV? Watch Jake play video games? Smoke on the back porch? The same things I do now.
What’s left by the evening in my imagination is just a feeling. It’s in my chest. In the first vision, it’s a good feeling. Amazing, really. Like walking outside in the spring after a week of rain and inhaling everything fresh and cool and new. It’s how I felt when Jake looked at me in the grocery store that first time.
In the second vision, it’s a tightness. The wind knocked out of me. A summer day so hot that when I go for a run, even a mile, I end it gasping. Accidentally taking a breath underwater. My cousin smothering me with a pillow when we played at a family reunion as children. Tight, and burning, and scary.
I’m tired of the visions. I thought I was thinking about it like he asked, but these looping reels aren’t productive, and I am spent. My whole body hurts. I remember my mom telling me that when her grandfather lived with them when she was little, he used to complain about aching in his joints every time it was about to rain. Maybe I’ve inherited his pain. Or maybe it’s just not sleeping or eating for two days. That could be it too.
I watch a lot of people come into the store, walk around, and leave. I don’t ask if I can help them with anything, and Jenny doesn’t come out to tell me I should, not like she would anyway. I sell a stuffed penguin to a woman pushing a stroller. A starfish necklace to one of a group of twelve-year-old girls, their mothers in the lobby gossiping and passing around a tin of breath mints.
The JAC kids run in and out of the activity room and the aquarium, the counselors shepherding them and texting behind their backs. I look down when they go by. I don’t want Georgia to talk to me.
She does come in, though, at the very end of the day, as I’m gathering my things to leave.
“Oh my God what fucking bullshit of a Monday,” she starts, out of breath. “First, Zack shit in the pool, which, sure, he’s six, you would think he’d have better control of his basic faculties but whatever, we all clear the fuck out. But we don’t have anything else planned, so we do drawing time, only we ran out of the coloring pages, and the ones you sell here are preposterously overpriced—no offense—so we just hand them printer paper from the office and all these crayons, and this is what we do for an hour and a half. They were bouncing off the walls by the end of it. And so were we! And then—”
She stops, finally, and studies me. I feel too conscious of my body. For once, I didn’t even think about how I looked when I walked out the door today, but I can imagine now: sallow skin, frizzy hair, the bags under my eyes big and purple. Not great.
“Are you okay?”
I look at the ground. I feel like an egg about to break. I’m afraid I’ll fall down crying right here behind the counter if I meet her eyes, that if I say anything, everything will come out. And then, she’ll draw back in judgment when I tell her. About the plan, the secret, the going away.
But when I open my mouth to push out some half-convincing “fine,” my lips won’t form the word. I am too tired in too many ways to lie to her now, when it would be so obvious, and I’m ashamed that it takes so little—just one difficult conversation and two crappy days—to break me down. But I’ve been keeping this from her for a long time. So I breathe in deep and try again.
“Not so good” comes out in a childish tone.
Georgia mutters, “Aw shit,” and ducks her head to see the line of minivans piling up outside. She says, “Okay, hang tight. Everything’s gonna be fine, okay? I just have to go out and talk to this one parent, and then I’ll be right back.”
Mentally, emotionally, I give myself up to her. I took care of her that night at the bowling alley. Now, I can tell her the truth, and she’ll take care of me. I gather up my things as she talks to the little kid and his mom, and when they drive away, I come outside to meet her.
Chapter 12
It happens at Buona Tavola, which is just three strip malls down the street from the aquarium. It turns out that some nights when I hang out with Jake, she’s been coming here after work, eating dinner alone and lingering over tiramisu, to spend less time at home. “This place is a godsend,” she says as we sit. “Before it opened, I used to go to the sandwich shop, and they would get mad at me for sitting around so long. You can only take so many minutes to eat a sandwich, you know? But this place isn’t so successful yet, and they actually enjoy having me here. I sit in one of the window booths so it doesn’t seem so empty.”
I am grateful to have her talk at me, even if I have nothing to say in response. She orders for me—eggplant parmesan. Then she looks me straight in the eye—I look down—and says, “Do you wanna eat first, or…?”
I nod. While the waiter goes back into the kitchen, she talks to me, tells me about her day and its tiny disasters. There is no one else in the restaurant. The light slants in, still hot and full, and strikes the edge of our table. The air conditioning is turned up so high I’m shivering. I pull a sweater out of my bag, drape it over my knees, hug my arms tightly against my chest.
When dinner comes, we eat for a while in silence. I’m so glad Jenny gave me lunch. I’m still starving, but if I had eaten all this on an empty stomach, I would have vomited immediately. As is, it feels good. My head clears more, figuratively and literally, with every bite. After I put down my fork and take in a big long breath—half the food still on the table—Georgia puts down her fork too and says, “Okay, what’s up?”
I tell her. I am not sure where to begin, and there are a few false starts. I stumble. She listens. She does me the great service of not looking right into my eyes, but down at the edge of the table, or out at the parking lot, which is good, because I can’t look her in the eyes either, not even a little.
In pieces, I tell her everything. Mostly stuff we’ve talked about before, on the back deck with her SAT book or in my bed at night, in whispers, so my parents won’t wake up. How Jake and I met, how we dated through the school year, how awful my friends were about him. How close we grew so quickly. How we wanted to be together more than anything.
Then I tell her what she doesn’t know. Our deciding to leave together back in April. That all those postcards on my walls aren’t really just places I want to go, they’re places I want to move to, with him. September 1. I even tell her about the dreams I’ve had, flashes of our future life together that come in like lightning and make no sense.
Last, of course, I tell her about Saturday, the field and the cabin and the dinner and then the conversation about the barn in Kentucky. The way we lay there for so long after talking and drove home without speaking, no music or anything. How I didn’
t start crying until I had locked the front door and all Mom said was “Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?” and I said “No no no,” even though he had, because I knew what she meant, and he hadn’t done that. And how she sat with me in bed until I cried enough that I could doze, if not really sleep. How her brow furrowed, and she held me, and I let her, and the words she used to tell Dad to leave when he tried to come in to help. How, on top of everything, the guilt about my plan to leave them crept into my mind like a cat, and how I shooed it away, no room to give it the attention it deserved.
I say it all the way through as if I’m talking about the plot of a book. I am too overwhelmed to put all of this in slow motion, to examine it, dissect it. And what I feel in my whole body is something that has no words, that is too big for words, and if there are words, I don’t know the right ones.
I’m no good at that, anyway. Naming things, understanding them. Georgia is.
I finish talking, ending with work and Jenny’s lunch today, and I look down at the cold food, and I hope she doesn’t get up and leave. She could. I think she might. Because we both know I should have told her a long time ago.
I’m waiting for the scrape of her chair against the floor and the ring of the bell over the door. But I don’t hear it. Instead, there’s just a long, quiet sigh. Her hand enters my field of vision. Reaching across the table, palm up.
“Caroline.”
I look up at her. She doesn’t seem angry. Not too angry, anyway. There’s a lot in her expression, disappointment, sadness, but mostly pity. I put my hand in hers. It’s small and soft and familiar.
“Are you mad at me?” I ask. I sound so stupid.
She sighs again. “I’m not mad at you, but I kind of can’t believe you were going to do this.”
I jerk upright. She’s talking about it in the past tense, as if these were past plans. But I’m just bringing her up to speed.
The Goodbye Summer Page 17