by Roan Parrish
I still thought about him all the time. Of course I did. But I was neck-deep in “Goblin Market” with no idea what I was writing, and I didn’t have the mental energy to hide how hurt I still was while I tried to have a friendly conversation, so I let it go to voice mail. He didn’t leave a message and I pushed down my disappointment and got back to writing.
The next morning, having stayed up all night to finish the paper, printing it in dark blue ink because my printer had run out of black and I didn’t have time to run to the library and print it there, I sprinted to my class and slammed the paper onto the desk with the rest of them, collapsing in my seat and immediately falling asleep on my Anthology of Major British Poets along with about half the class.
At the end of class I dragged myself back to the dorms and fell asleep in point five seconds, relief at not having anything else due (and the fact that Charles and his alarm weren’t in the room) letting me sleep for twelve hours straight.
After a shower I felt almost human again, and I met Milton and Gretchen for dinner in the dining hall, where we were mostly silent until we’d eaten. Once we’d satisfied our basic human need for food, though, the giddiness of being off for a week set in and we talked excitedly, lingering over multiple soft serves and more Coke than anyone should really consume, relishing the leisure to drink it.
When I got back to my room, where I’d left my phone charging, I saw that Will had called again, and again left no message.
The next day while I was at work, I finally had time to think about the calls I’d missed from Will, and I started to worry. If he’d just wanted to ask me a question or say congrats about midterms or something, he would have texted. Besides, he’d totally respected my need for some space. What if something was really wrong? Or what if—just maybe—he’d changed his mind and was ready to take a chance on us? I almost slapped myself at that thought.
But, just like that, any distance that I’d introduced between Will and me was obliterated—a paper folded in half, its opposite edges becoming proximate as instantly and naturally as if they’d always been that way.
The fact was that we had unfinished business. I hadn’t been able to let myself think about it during midterms because I was trying too hard just to stay sane, but after I’d slept with Russell, things had… changed. It wasn’t about Russell, really, though he was a super nice guy. It was that I thought maybe I finally understood Will a little better. Could finally see past the hurt.
And, given how much he’d hurt me, it was ridiculous how much I still loved him. But none of the hurt touched that core of love.
My feelings for Will were a tender and naked heart beating tentatively in an iron cage, each expansion a risk, each deflation both relief and disappointment.
Will called for the third time that evening just as I was about to get on the subway to meet Milton at a late movie after work, and this time I scrambled to answer the call. Even after I ran back outside so I could hear him, I just traded no signal for traffic noise and the shouts of a basketball game on the court next to the subway steps.
In the din, Will’s voice, apologizing for calling me when I’d told him I didn’t want us to talk, sounded small and very, very far away. My heart was pounding in my ears, I was so ridiculously happy to hear from him. I walked around the corner so I could hear him better, phone clamped tight to my ear like I could pull him closer to me through it.
“No, no, it’s okay. It’s fine. What’s up?”
“It’s um… I just….”
Something was very wrong. Will didn’t stammer. Will didn’t trail off. Will didn’t sound this uncertain of himself.
“Will, what’s wrong?”
“I—you know what, never mind. I’m sorry—I shouldn’t’ve….”
I lost the rest of his sentence to the earsplitting drone of some douchebag revving his motorcycle.
“Sorry, sorry, wait. Let me just—okay.” I cut over to a quiet street and perched on a bench outside the door of a nice restaurant. “Okay, sorry, it’s quiet now. So, tell me what’s going on.”
He sighed. “I’m in Holiday,” he said. “I got here last night. Claire’s in the hospital, and I came out to stay with Nathan and Sarah.”
“Oh god. Is she okay?”
“She will be. She went off on one of her jags, disappeared. Nathan and Sarah couldn’t find her. I called everyone I could think of, but no one had seen her. They found her yesterday on the merry-go-round in that park at the corner of Willow and Grove. You know?”
“Yeah. Shit. What happened?”
“She’d driven up onto the grass and crashed the car into the swing set. Then she’d fallen asleep on the merry-go-round without a coat. Or maybe passed out. They couldn’t tell. I guess she’d been awake for like five days straight, and no one had been able to find her for the last two. She hadn’t eaten. She was so dehydrated they had to give her IV fluids. That’s why she’s still in the hospital, I think. I don’t know. They weren’t totally clear about it.”
Will’s voice had gone thin and strained, and I thought I heard him swear under his breath.
“Are you with Nathan and Sarah now?”
“Yeah. They’re pretty freaked this time. I guess… she was awake for a couple days before she took off and she got rid of a bunch of her things. She took all the pictures off the walls and destroyed them. Gave away a bunch of clothes. Nathan and Sarah had to lock their doors to keep her from giving away all their stuff. She donated everything that was in the living room and the garage. Their bikes and rollerblades and stuff. Nathan’s baseball stuff and Sarah’s soccer gear.”
I made a sound just so he knew I was listening.
“I guess Claire was saying some pretty weird things to them while she was trying to get their stuff. Like, stuff that just made no sense. I don’t know what exactly. They don’t like to tattle on her. But… she really scared them this time. I don’t know. They know she’s not herself when she has these episodes. Or, that’s what we’ve always told them.”
“Do you not believe that?”
“Well. It’s all part of her, you know? I think it’s kind of bullshit the way people treat mental health stuff like it’s separate from the person who has it. As if there’s some ideal ‘normal’ person trapped inside that needs to be chiseled out of the marble block, revealed when the ‘abnormal’ stuff is stripped away. I know it’s valid, to a degree—like, people compare it to intoxication and the way people act in ways they wouldn’t ordinarily act when sober. But I’m not sure. For me… I love Claire. I accept that it’s part of her. I accept that—” His voice was choked. “That I fucking hate her a lot of the time. But they’re kids. They shouldn’t have to hate her yet.”
I could hear that he was doing something while he talked to me, and I imagined him unloading the dishwasher or cleaning up a spill in his sister’s house, all alone in the dark while her scared kids were asleep upstairs.
“Do you know how long she’ll be in the hospital?”
Will made a sound in the negative, and I could hear his long, shuddery breath. When he spoke again, I could barely hear him, even cupping my hand around the phone and pressing my other ear against my shoulder to block out the noise of the city around me.
“And even when she gets out, there might be problems. I don’t know. Anyway, sorry. Oh shit, I forgot—how were midterms?”
“They were fine. Listen, Will, how are you?”
If we were in person, Will might blow this question off with an eye roll or go into the kitchen to do something else. Hell, even over the phone, he might ignore me; he might even tell me to fuck off. But he wouldn’t lie.
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he was going to ignore me after all.
“Leo. I—fuck, Leo, what if it’s always like this? Those poor kids. They’re growing up just as fucked as we did.”
Will didn’t call me by my name that often when we weren’t in bed. It was usually “kid” or “kiddo” or, occasionally, if I’d done something i
diotic, “fuckhead.”
It sounded different now. Everything about the way he was talking sounded so un-Will. He sounded scared, vulnerable. Like maybe he needed my help.
“I just, um… I don’t suppose you’re coming back to Holiday for spring break, huh?”
“Will—”
“Ugh, Jesus, never mind. Don’t listen to me. Fuck, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s this fucking house. All messed up and creepy with no stuff in it. There are like weird stains and shadows and shit and it’s making me go all Penny Dreadful, like there are monsters lurking in my periphery or something. Anyway, it’ll be fine. Everything’s… yeah, it’s totally fine.”
It was almost painful to listen to him try to reassure himself. Everything in me screamed that I needed to take Will in my arms and reassure him. Or just be there.
“Listen,” I began, but before I could say more, there was a voice in the background.
“That’s Sarah. She’s been having nightmares. Look, I gotta go.”
“Okay. Well….” But I couldn’t think of a single thing I could say to make any of it the slightest bit better. “Call me whenever,” I finished lamely.
Will’s whispered “Okay” was lost in the scream of a truck reversing on the next block.
The second Milton saw me, he knew something was wrong, and I ended up blurting out the whole story and then apologizing profusely when I realized I’d made us miss the movie.
“He’s just always so together,” I told Milton. “Or, like, I don’t know, he says how things will be and the world either falls into line or he rejects it. But he can’t really do that with this stuff. Oh shit, maybe I shouldn’t have told you about Claire. Fuck. It’s… whatever, scary to see him freaked out. I just hate that I’m not there. Maybe I could help. I mean, Milton, he called me. He called me.”
“But you’re not together…,” Milton said uncertainly.
“No, but….”
But Will’s distress was so immediate, his vulnerability so genuine. And the fact that he’d called me when he was upset, that even though we weren’t sleeping together—fucking, as Will would no doubt put it—I was the one he’d reached out to when things had gone wrong. That had to mean something, right?
“Well, it is spring break, so I guess you could swing it. Or does he not want you to?” Milton’s lip curled as he no doubt remembered all the times Will had turned down my invitations to come with us when we went out.
“Actually… I think he wanted to ask me. Kinda. I dunno, it’d be like the least Will thing of all time to ask for me to be there with him, but I swear he just about did.” Milton hit me with this look that said I was being pathetic and also potentially delusional so I swatted at him.
“It doesn’t matter anyway, there’s no way I can afford a plane ticket and even a train ticket’s hella expensive. I looked it up when I got off the phone with him. Besides, it takes forever to get to Detroit and then I’d still have to get up north….”
“You really want to go?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, sighing, sliding into full-on sulk mode. “I hate money. And time. And distance.”
Milton laughed. “Well, you’re a physics major. I guess you’ll have to do something about that. Uh, the time part, anyway. Or the distance part? Whatever. I have no clue what physicists do.”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“Listen, I’ll give you the money for a plane ticket if you want to go. It’s not a big deal.”
“No way,” I said automatically. “I mean, thanks but—”
“Okay, real talk: I have a credit card. I have a shit-ton of frequent-flier miles. My parents have money. It’s seriously not an issue. So there’s no need to be all weird about it like you always are.”
“What? I’m not always weird about it!”
“You so are. You’re all pearl-clutchy oh-no-I-couldn’t-possibly whenever anyone even pays for a damn coffee. It’s kind of charming in, like, a wholesome small-town boy kind of way, but you take it to extremes sometimes.”
“Huh.” I’d never known I did this at all. “Do I?”
“Dude, you took us out to dinner for your birthday. You do know it’s supposed to be the other way around.”
“Um.”
“Point is, if this is the part in the movie when you fly across the country and rescue the hero or embrace on the tarmac while your mutual scarves blow in the wind or whatever, then do it. I got you. Mention me on your wedding day. No prob.”
I started to dismiss him again, but Milton clapped a hand over my mouth.
“Leo. Pause. Disregard cultural narratives about propriety and capital. Consider. Do you want to go to Michigan? Nod for yes, shake for no.”
I rolled my eyes. He left his hand over my mouth. I considered.
I knew Milton was joking about me acting like I was in a rom-com, running to confess my love before the plane could take off or whatever. But it hit a little too close to Will’s comments about me being a romantic for comfort. My only relationship experience was from books, movies, and TV, so of course I had absorbed that stuff. And maybe when I’d first gotten here my hopes for me and Will had kind of skewed in that direction.
But I was pretty sure that recently I’d—what? Grown out of it? Or, just seen that there were a lot of ways for relationships to go. A lot of ways that romance could look different.
So, did I want to go to Michigan because I had a fantasy of swooping in like the hero to the rescue? I… didn’t think so? It didn’t feel like it was about playing a role or imagining that I knew what Will needed because I was applying some formula. It felt like I knew what Will needed because I knew Will.
I knew how strong he was, how capable of dealing with anything that was thrown his way. I knew how much he cared about his sister and how much he worried about her. I knew he loved Nathan and Sarah and was scared for them. And so I knew that when Will called me after he’d promised to give me space, sounding lost and sad and scared, and asked me—even if he said it like a joke—if I was coming to Michigan… that he needed me.
Not someone. Not a blank, generic rescuer. But… me. Just me.
I didn’t know where that left us, exactly. I didn’t know what it would be like to see him again. But if he needed me, I had to be there for him.
I nodded at Milton.
“Okay,” he said. “Will you let me get you a ticket?”
I hesitated, and he rolled his eyes at me. I squeezed my eyes shut and nodded again.
“Glory hallelujah,” Milton said, exasperated.
I pushed his hand away from my mouth.
“Thank you,” I said, and I hugged him hard as the movie marquis flashed above us.
13
Chapter 13
March
When I’d called Will from the airport to tell him I was coming, his reaction had made every moment I’d spent angsting about accepting Milton’s frequent miles worth it.
“You’re really coming?” he’d said, and though he’d tried to play it off like it wasn’t necessary, he’d sounded… lighter. When I’d hung up to board the plane, he’d simply said, “thanks.” But that one word had been freighted with such relief that I’d grinned all the way to my seat.
I’d clung to it on the flight, too, focusing on how I was going to help Will rather than letting myself sink into the murk of what precisely our relationship was, or where exactly we stood. I told myself that this didn’t necessarily mean something; it just was. I congratulated myself because the sentiment seemed to fit with Tonya’s yoga teachings about being present and appreciating a thing for itself, and then immediately side-eyed myself because congratulating yourself for being present wasn’t very… present. Thank god it was a short flight.
The cab dropped me off in a part of Holiday I’d never been to before, which was saying something, given its size. Will’s sister’s place was a small prefab with a big yard and a mailbox in the shape of a dalmatian.
I could hear the yelling even before I
got out of the taxi. One of the voices was definitely Will’s and I assumed the other was Claire’s. Well, at least she was out of the hospital, anyway.
“Good luck, kid,” the driver said to me. “My parents are a nightmare too.”
I didn’t want to walk into the middle of whatever battle they were having, but it was freezing out, so I knocked tentatively. There was no way they could hear me over the yelling, so I tried the door and, finding it unlocked, went inside. The house was spotless, and there was very little in it. Furniture and basic necessities but no décor, no art, no clutter. Nothing that suggested three people lived here.
I followed the noise and found Will in the kitchen, facing off with one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, and now that I’d been in New York for a while, I’d seen a lot. She looked like Will—the clean line of jaw and nose, the high cheekbones and clear brow. But where his beauty could be remote and otherworldly, hers was warm and inviting. She was curvy where he was spare. Her eyes were a darker, brighter blue, and her mouth naturally turned up at the corners. She had dimples and her two front teeth overlapped charmingly, making her seem approachable. Her blonde hair was a shade darker than Will’s—a warm honey color that made me want to run my fingers through its smooth thickness.
If Will was the untouchable statue, Claire was vibrant and alive. The girl you were desperate to talk to, desperate to have smile at you. Even like this, her face twisted in anger and her eyes blazing, I immediately wanted her to like me.
When she saw me, she jerked backward, hand to her chest.
“Jesus Christ, you almost gave me a fucking heart attack,” she said. Even her voice was attractive, smooth and low.
“Sorry! Sorry, I knocked, but….”
When Will turned to me, I was shocked. He looked utterly exhausted. But when I smiled at him and he smiled back, there was some kind of, like, light in his face. And I’d put it there.
“Hey,” he said. “Claire, Leo. Leo, Claire.”