Say What You Will

by Cammie McGovern

  Then he discovered saying things like this didn’t help him hold on to his anger. Saying things like this made him cry for an embarrassing twenty minutes straight.

  Days bled into one another without him doing much of anything. He didn’t go into work or try to get his job back. He didn’t say much when his mother asked what he was thinking about for next year. “Should we get some college applications? See what they look like?” she said once.

  “I know what they look like, Mom. They look like forms online that you have to fill out.”

  Christmas came and went and he remembered nothing that happened except a fleeting feeling of victory that he’d gotten through the day, made ten times worse by Jana, his father’s new wife, explaining to her sister and parents, “Matthew’s just had a falling out with a very good friend, so he’s feeling sad today.”

  Nothing was a conversation stopper quite like that.

  He got through it, and January rolled in with its white-gray skies and endless rain. On TV, he and his mom watched the news, which had footage of mudslides around Southern California, carrying houses down rocky embankments. It startled him, watching that. Houses could move these days and he couldn’t.

  Or at least he hadn’t, in almost a month.

  It made him feel terrible. Like if he wasn’t careful, this really could become the rest of his life. He’d be one of those strange sons who lives with his mother until they both become so old, they look like a couple shopping once a week and bickering in the grocery story about their purchases.

  That could happen, he knew. She’d gone out to dinner once with Mr. Heffernan. When she came home, she said they’d had a lovely time but were probably better off thinking of each other as friends. “Good friends,” she said, which made Matthew think about Amy. He and Amy had never really been anything more than that, and look at how that much had destroyed him. Good friends? he wanted to say. You’d better be careful.

  His mother wanted him to move on with his life, but not so desperately that she’d force him. If he was still here five years from now, she would probably pass him the remote control and ask him what kind of soup he’d like for dinner. She didn’t want that for him, but if it happened, so be it. She wouldn’t push him out of this house or this life.

  He’d have to do it for himself.

  Finally in late January, he rode his bike to the La Tierra movie theater. It was four o’clock when he got there. Mr. Ilson stood outside wearing one of his stupid suits, holding his janitorial ring of keys. “Hi!” Matthew said, too loud.

  It had been a few days since he talked to anyone beside his mother. They often talked too loud, because the TV was always on.

  “Well, look who it is.” Mr. Ilson held a hand up to block the sun in his eyes. “Nice to see you again.” He didn’t step forward to shake Matthew’s hand (because Mr. Ilson never shook hands) but Matthew could tell he was happy to see him. “So we’ve missed you a little bit. I forgot how bad the nacho machine could get. Everyone else is pretty much a surface cleaner.”

  “Not me.” Matthew nodded.

  “Not you, Matthew. That’s right.” He unlocked the door and held it open. “You want to come in?”

  Matthew assumed his job had been filled. He didn’t even have a job, really; he had a few shifts that anyone else could have done as well as he did. He’d come back to say hi to whoever was working. To see if anything had changed, to “visit” like he remembered other ex-employees doing over the summer when they were home from college. You knew they’d once worked there by the way they reached around and helped themselves to popcorn.

  “You looking for some shifts again?” Mr. Ilson said. “I can go back to my office and see what I’ve got.”

  Matthew wasn’t sure if he was saying this out of pity or not. Surely he knew if he had open shifts. Probably he would go back and say he was sorry; he had nothing open. He was just pretending to be nice. “Sure, thanks,” Matthew said. Standing alone in the lobby was strange. One of the last times he was here, he’d stayed late and played truth or dare with Hannah in the beanbag chairs behind the screen. It wasn’t a bad memory; it just felt like it happened a long time ago to a different person.

  “Oh my God! Matthew!” It was Hannah, in the doorway, wearing a bike helmet. She looked good—friendly and sweaty and happy to see him.

  “Hi, Hannah.”

  “Are you back or just visiting?”

  “Just visiting, I think. But we’ll see—he’s checking the schedule.”

  She walked toward the employee changing room. “That means he wants you back!” She flashed a thumbs-up and disappeared. He remembered the rules and looked at his watch. They weren’t allowed to clock in before they had their smock on and their hair up. If they took too long changing, they got docked for being late. “Rules are rules,” Mr. Ilson always said. “I didn’t make them up.”

  It would be nice to come back here. To have someone else make up rules that everyone was following, not just him. No jeans. No open sandals. White shirts only under smocks. No smoking. No eating. Some rules were “soft rules,” which meant no one paid attention to them, like the no-eating rule. Everyone ate. And the “no hanging around after work hours” could have been rewritten slightly to say, “no hanging around after work hours unless these people are your friends and you feel like it.”

  Hannah came back out, dressed in her unflattering smock, hair pulled back. “Let me punch in,” she said. When she returned, she surprised him. She didn’t go behind the counter to start her shift inventory on drink cups and candy. She came over and hugged him. The longest hug he’d had in a while.

  “I’m sorry about everything you’ve gone through. We’ve all been thinking about you and hoping you’d come back.” Finally it occurred to him: Chloe must have told everyone. That’s why they’re all being so nice.

  He smiled into Hannah’s hair. It was nice of her to say, though it couldn’t possibly be true. Unless they missed making fun of him behind his back.

  “Carlton wrote a song about you,” Hannah said. “His band really likes it and they’re going to play it at their next gig. It’s called Mr. Careful. The chorus goes, ‘Mr. Careful takes care/ Wherever he goes/ He doesn’t leave traces/ So nobody knows/ What’s in his head or in his heart/ He lives in this world and lives apart. But if you look close/There it is, you can see/His heart. His heart.”

  She had a pretty voice, much nicer than he expected. She must have practiced a little, waiting to sing it to him.

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s nice. I like it.”

  “He wants everyone to know he’s not gay or anything. It’s not a love song.”

  “Right, no.”

  “It’s a story song. He made up some parts.”

  “That’s fine. Do you want me to help you start inventory?”

  “I guess. Sure.”

  After they’d made six stacks of twenty cups, Mr. Ilson appeared. “Good news!” he said. “I can put you on two shifts a week to start. Not tonight, though. Renalda’s coming in tonight. She’s new. No comments, Hannah. We’re still not too sure about Renalda.” He held up a flat stop-sign hand. “Don’t push me on this, Hannah. I’ve got Matthew on Friday night with you, and Wednesday afternoon with Carlton. That’s the best I can do.”

  For the first time in months, Matthew felt like he could understand what wasn’t being said directly. Hannah had pushed for this.

  Maybe Carlton, too.

  If he comes back, you have to give him another chance, they must have said.

  And why would they have done that unless they liked him a little? He didn’t want to start crying, so he forced himself not to think of something Amy had said in the hospital: People like you, Matthew. They do. You have to start seeing that, sooner or later. It’s a waste if you don’t.

  He wouldn’t waste this. Any of it.

  He didn’t want to anymore. He wanted to help Hannah count her cups and her candy, and ask if she was closing tonight. If she was, he’d offer to give he
r a ride home. Midnight was too late for anyone to take a bus home in the dark, he was almost sure. He wasn’t being Mr. Crazy-Careful to offer to come back and give her a ride. He was being thoughtful. He was being a friend. And if she wanted to kiss him after he dropped her off, so be it.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  FOR ALMOST TWO MONTHS, Amy spent most of her days sleeping in her room. When her mother finally came in, sat down on her bed and said, “We’re taking you to a doctor to treat this depression,” Amy didn’t protest.

  At the doctor’s office she didn’t say much. Talking required energy, and she didn’t have much. When he asked how often she thought about her baby, she managed to type, “ALL THE TIME,” which was true. At least she dreamed about her all the time, and since she slept so much it seemed like the same thing. Every night she imagined nursing Taylor; every morning she woke up, her breasts soft and empty and aching.

  She’d never felt so unmoored by anything in her life.

  Finally Amy told the doctor the truth: “I WISH I’D KEPT MY BABY. I KNOW IT’S TOO LATE NOW, BUT I STILL WISH I’D DONE IT.”

  In the end, the doctor wrote her a prescription that didn’t do much except help her sleep without dreams haunted by babies. She couldn’t bear to think about Matthew, because she vaguely understood that she’d done something terrible to him. She’d talked about moving on, and starting school again as if everything they’d gone through together—having this baby, giving her up—would be nothing to recover from. She’d been wrong about that. She’d also been wrong to diminish everything he’d done on her behalf—coming to the hospital, sitting at her bedside.

  Christmas came and went. Her grandmother visited, and her aunt from Boise, Idaho. Someone cooked a duck. Other people made bread pudding that Amy tried to eat but couldn’t.

  In the first week of January, a package arrived from UC Berkeley, welcoming Amy as a transfer student. The semester started at the end of January, meaning Amy had been home for almost two months and on medication for one. She didn’t know if she could survive starting a new school, but she was fairly sure she wouldn’t survive her only other option: staying home all semester.

  None of it was easy. Packing up and driving six hours north. Registering for classes at a huge university. Navigating a campus that was five times the size of Stanford. It helped that this time she was in a real dorm, the handicapped-accessible one with two wheelchair users on her floor. Compared to them, her motorized scooter maneuvered like a dream and went twice as fast. She felt like a show-off every time she passed one of them coming or going to class, but they didn’t seem to mind. They always waved, and she beeped her horn to say hi.

  She was surprised to discover that her favorite class by far was playwriting, which met once a week for three hours. There were fifteen students enrolled and an ensemble of student actors there to perform the scenes the writers brought in. From the very first class, Amy couldn’t get over the miracle of hearing her words read aloud by real people. The wonder of inflection! Of a real person delivering one of her jokes with comic timing!

  She loved watching actors play with her lines—deliver them one way, then change their minds, and try another. It was almost like the thrill she felt in fourth grade when she got a DynaVox, her first talking computer, and then again with the Pathway, her first computer that sounded (more or less) human. But this was even better—her words being spoken by real people.

  Unfortunately none of her early playwriting efforts were very successful. Her comic monologue had some good lines, but overall fell flat; her two-character confrontation—old people fighting over a bench—was overwritten and screechy. The teacher didn’t soft-pedal his critiques for Amy. (“A comedy should never look like it’s trying too hard. . . . The conflict was compelling but I’m not sure these characters were. . . . ”) Amy hated that she wasn’t good at this right away. With every failure she flew back to her room and started a new play.

  By March, she was writing all the time, at the expense of all her other classes. Some nights, she stayed up until one or two o’clock in the morning writing. She could say this much: for the first time since she’d had her, Amy went a whole night, and then two, without dreaming of Taylor. Instead she dreamed about writing bad plays that everyone she’d ever known showed up to watch. She also dreamed about failing every other class she was taking.

  That dream almost became a reality as she got more obsessed with her theater class. She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t get over the fascination and frustration of writing scenes that were almost good, but not quite. She spent one weekend reading the entire textbook (Scenes for Student Playwrights) and another weekend buying and reading more plays online. She’d never heard of Mamet until she fell in love with him over the course of a long Sunday spent happily holed up in her dorm room.

  By the following week, she’d produced her own Mamet homage, abounding with expletives and unfinished sentences. “THE SWEARING IS ESSENTIAL,” she told her classmates the next week because she felt that it was.

  “Amy’s finding her own voice,” the teacher said afterward. “This is part of that process.”

  Amy interpreted his remarks to mean, another failure but closer. Then he added this: “I’d be curious what would happen if Amy wrote her final one-act on a subject closer to home. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be true, just something inspired by her own experience. For some people that produces weaker, self-conscious writing. For others, it produces by far their best. Everyone should try it at least once and see.”

  A boy in the back who wrote exclusively science-fiction vignettes that read like video games without special effects groaned in protest, but Amy went home that night and started something new.

  She wrote a ten-minute play about an agoraphobic boy who hadn’t left his house in over six months, and his old friend, a girl, who tries to talk him into going out to dinner with her. When she read it over the next morning, something happened that she never expected. She found herself crying.

  A week later, hearing it read aloud in class, she almost cried again. After the scene ended, no one spoke for a few minutes.

  Finally the teacher said, “Lovely work, Amy. Just lovely.”

  The short-play festival it was selected for was meant to showcase the work of theater majors, which Amy wasn’t yet. “I’LL DECLARE TODAY,” she said to the teacher when he told her she’d been selected.

  “Only if you’re sure this is what you want to do.”

  “YES,” she typed quickly. “I’M SURE.”

  She didn’t know many drama majors, but she liked the ones she’d met. They filled a room in ways that took her out of her own head. Around them, with all their many eccentricities, she didn’t feel disabled so much as eccentric in a different way. You talk with your hands flying around your body and I talk with this computer.

  The three weeks of rehearsal were intense and overwhelming and some nights she hardly slept at all. Working so intensely with such a small group of people made her think of Matthew and the group he found working at the movie theater. A week before opening, she wrote him a note:

  To: mstheword@gmail.com

  From: aimhigh@comcast.net

  Re: what I’m doing . . .

  I’m a playwright now! It’s only a twenty-minute one-act, but I made it into the Shorts Festival, which means it’s getting a full production with a director and actors and a set design, too! Objectively speaking, it’s not the best play of the evening, but it’s not the worst one, either! And I’m the only freshman writer included, which might mean something? I know you can’t come up and see it, but part of me wishes you could. Part of me wishes we’d ended things differently so I could say, “Matthew, I’d love you to see this so I could see you.”

  She sent it before she could think about it too much. Who could be sure if he’d even
open it and read it? She’d sent him messages before and hadn’t heard back.

  Probably he wouldn’t.

  Which was fine, she told herself. Even if it wasn’t fine. Even if none of it would seem real unless he came and saw it. Because she’d written it for him. To say what she’d been trying to tell him all along.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  IT WASN’T REALLY AN invitation, Matthew thought. It didn’t include dates or times or anything like that. It was typical Amy—full of feeling without too much in the way of practical logistics. Still, he was curious. He looked up UC Berkeley Shorts Festival online and discovered it was running the same weekend that Hannah would be away at her cousin’s wedding. “They said I could bring you,” she’d told him. “But I’m not sure I should. Considering everything. Then years from now people in my family will keep asking me about you. I’m just not sure that’s a good idea.”

  Matthew wasn’t sure what Hannah meant by this; he only knew that in the few months they’d been semidating, he’d mostly been a disappointment to her. He didn’t call when she expected him to; he bowed out of most of the group activities. The one time he went with everyone to see one of Carlton’s shows, he had a mini panic attack on the mosh-pit dance floor. She found him outside, sitting on a curb still trying to calm down.

  He took it as a sign that Amy’s play was running the same weekend Hannah wasn’t taking him to a wedding. Maybe you’re meant to go, his old voice told him. These days it was interesting: sometimes his voice told him to do things he wanted to do. You probably owe her at least that much.