by A. J. Banner
“I’ve never been more serious in my life.” He reaches up to touch my cheek. “You’re so beautiful. Do you know that?”
“When you say it, I feel beautiful.”
“You should always know it.” He runs his thumb along my bottom lip. “When I’m at work, I miss you all the time. I need to get off this treadmill. Life is short, Marissa.”
“But you’re helping people. You’re saving lives. Remember that woman who hit the telephone pole?” As we were driving home from the grocery store, she drifted to the shoulder right in front of us. Nathan pulled over and ran to her aid. She was sweating, shaking. I thought she was drunk, but he quickly determined she was diabetic, suffering from low blood sugar. He gave her half a cup of orange juice from the store, and we waited for the ambulance to arrive.
“I’m burned out,” he says. “I can’t do it anymore.”
“But how could you possibly retire now?”
“I figure I need to work two more years, and I’m there. My inheritance from my dad and my savings should carry me until my retirement kicks in—”
“Are you sure? What will you do instead? You’re an adrenaline junkie. You like the rush of going out to the scene of a crisis.”
He pulls me back down into his arms. “There are other ways to get my fix. I could teach, write a book. Work on the house. I need to replace the windows, repair a few roof shingles . . .”
“You are good with your hands,” I say, nestling into him.
“That’s the idea,” he says softly, kissing my forehead.
“It’s an exciting idea. I know you can pull it off. When you set your mind on something—”
“I make it happen,” he says.
My mind whirs with the possibilities. Could I go part-time at school, embark on a new adventure with Nathan? As I’m drifting off, the beep of a text on his cell phone jolts me back to awareness. He turns away from me to check his phone on the nightstand. The clock reads 12:11 a.m. “Who is it this late?” I whisper sleepily. “Is everything okay?”
“Fine,” he says, turning back toward me. “Just work, but I’m not going in.”
An alarm rings in my mind, but it’s a distant bell. I’m too tired to think. Just work, his voice echoes as I fall into sleep. In the early-morning hours, Lauren visits my dreams, surrounded by sand, the blood pooling at her feet, a vast and black reflective pond. I need to tell you about something, she says, her features sculpted by the rising moon. It’s about you and me, and what happened before. It’s about my family. Brynn and Jensen. It’s about us, Nathan and me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In the morning, the dream fades. Nathan is on a day shift. He comes and goes like a phantom, but at least he left me a note.
I loved last night. I love you like crazy.
“I love you crazier,” I say aloud.
I lose myself in the comfort of strong coffee, try to forget his text from last night. Just work, he said, not missing a beat. I choose to believe him. When he proposed to me in the shower, before we made the dinner announcement, I was immediately sure of my answer. I nodded beneath the soothing hot water, whispered yes into the steam, and he held me tight.
But I wasn’t so sure of myself, all those years ago, when I skipped my last class that February afternoon. I’d bought a new perfume, Coco, to prepare for my dinner with Jensen at the Great Northwest Soup Company. I’d been holding off for a week, and now I would finally give him my answer. I pictured holding out my hand so he could slip the engagement ring onto my finger, and I imagined the smile that would spread across his face. I was giddy, full of anticipation.
Back in the apartment, I peeled off my wet rain gear, left my knapsack by the door. I saw Lauren’s coat draped over the couch. A math textbook lay open on the coffee table. She’d left her dishes on the kitchen counter as usual. Carelessly scattered her belongings around the living room. Soon I would no longer have to deal with her annoying habits. I would move out, and Jensen and I would find a place together.
I’d just removed my wet socks when I noticed a man’s black trench coat thrown over a chair. I tiptoed down the hall to her bedroom door, which stood ajar. The strange whimpers and grunts grew louder. In the afternoon. How rude. Does she ever study? I sometimes woke in the night to the rhythmic squeaks of her bedsprings. I took to wearing earplugs. In the months leading up to that afternoon, she’d brought three different men—boys, really—back to the apartment after hours, and they skulked away guiltily in the morning. I saw them, their rumpled hair and wrinkly T-shirts, but I never knew who they were. She never bothered to explain.
Our friendship wavered on shaky ground. Playing together as children, patrolling the shopping mall as teenagers. None of it compared to having to live together in college. Her worst habits rose to the surface like pond scum. Maybe mine did, too. She snapped at me for leaving the cap off the toothpaste, for drinking the last of the coffee without announcing my intention. At least I didn’t sleep with strange men.
She wasn’t even trying to be quiet. She must not have heard me come in. Or maybe she and her lover didn’t care. I pushed the door open a little more. They didn’t even see me. I stared at her naked, sweaty back as she pumped up and down. I saw only part of him, my Jensen, his hair on the pillow, his eyes half-closed, not even looking at her. He was too far gone, his hands on her hips. His hands.
The noises he made, sounds I’d never heard. Deep, guttural. The lamplight illuminating Lauren’s curves. Her hair tangled, messy—a pillow on the floor. During the thousand years I stood there, Lauren and Jensen became one, a single writhing beast moaning and keening and ripping out my insides. I wanted them to see me, to notice me, to kill themselves from the guilt, but they didn’t look in my direction.
I doubled over, nausea rising in my throat, and I backed off in shock. The rain banged on the roof. I knew, as I ran to hide in my room, that I had become the jilted, betrayed girlfriend repeated through the annals of time. More than I hated Lauren and Jensen, I hated that I had become a cliché.
I quietly left the apartment, stepping out to the concrete walkway beneath the overhang. Then I pretended to come home, making a lot of noise with my keys, slamming the door, singing. I stood in the living room and waited, listening to the scrambling, their efforts to cover up. Then Jensen sauntered out of the hall, fully clothed but flushed. Lauren stepped out of her room in sweats, her hair a mess.
“Oh, hey, Marissa!” she said. “Jensen got here early.”
He grinned, straightening his shirt. “Thought we could go to dinner from here. I was just in the john.”
I stood there, wondering how they could look me in the eye. If I hadn’t seen them, I might have believed them. Even with all the scrambling and messiness. I would have preferred the lie.
“I saw you,” I said.
“What?” Lauren said. Her face reddened.
“I saw you two in your room. I came home. Your door was open. I saw you.”
She laughed. “What do you think you saw? You didn’t.”
I was shaking so much, I felt my bones were breaking. “I. Saw. You.”
“It wasn’t what it looked like—” she started.
“It was exactly what it looked like.”
“Damn it, Marissa,” Jensen said. “Shit.” The guilt on his face could’ve ended civilization as we knew it. But it didn’t matter. I despised him. I ran into my room and locked the door. He knocked, said he couldn’t help it. He didn’t know what had happened. At least he owned up to his behavior. Lauren never did.
Now, as I spread peanut butter on toast, I mull whether to tell Jensen about Brynn. Maybe I ought to leave well enough alone, keep my distance. But what was she really doing outside in the night? It seems the entire town slipped outside, restless, drawn by the full moon. And what was she doing at my house? Did she genuinely need to talk? Or did she make up the whole story?
While I’m trying to decide what to do, I spot Jensen jogging toward the beach stairs, in Spandex pants and
a windbreaker. As if he read my mind. I leave my toast on the counter, and I’m out in a minute, yanking my hat over tangled hair, running down to the beach in sweats and running shoes. I race to catch up with him, my lungs bursting. He slows to a fast walk. “Marissa, hey,” he says, tossing me a sad smile.
“Any news?” I say.
“The detective came back. They’re bringing a forensics team to rappel down the cliff. They want to retrieve her shoes and test them.”
“What evidence can you pull off a shoe?” The blood rushes in my ears.
“They can see where she walked. Based on plant material on the bottom of her shoe.”
“Where would she have walked?”
“We have a unique form of ground cover at the back of the property. They can tell if she walked straight back or took a detour.”
“That seems a stretch,” I say.
“It’s really not. Different areas of ground have distinctive characteristics. They use a microprobe technique to compare soil samples from the shoe and the garden.”
“Wow, they’re definitely treating this as a murder investigation then.”
“Word must be getting around. A reporter knocked on my door yesterday. She thought she could sweet-talk me to get her story.”
“I hope you sent her away,” I say.
“I told her to get off my property. I wasn’t polite. I don’t want the news all over this.”
“I don’t blame you.” I take a deep breath, then I tell him what happened in my cottage to the dress. About my talk with Brynn. The broken branches and the footprints at the edge of the cliff. About the scarf. I don’t mention Brynn’s girlfriend, Karina—or Nathan’s outing in the middle of the night. “Nothing else was stolen,” I say. “Just the dress.”
He’s so quiet that I can tell he’s stunned. “I apologize for Brynn if she broke in. She’s taking everything hard. I’ll see if she has your dress.”
“I don’t want her to get into trouble. I showed her a picture from . . . your birthday at the Mediterranean. From seventeen years ago. She guessed. About us, and about you and Lauren ending up together.”
He looks at me, his eyes bloodshot. “Did you tell her the rest of the story?”
“I thought that was your job. You’re her dad.” I look at him, at his blocky profile leaning into the wind, aging but still handsome. He can still give me a faint flip-flop in my stomach, a distant echo from long ago.
“I never told her. Neither did Lauren. We didn’t have the guts.”
“That’s refreshingly honest.” Coward. I feel needles under my skin again, after all this time.
“Lauren was hell to live with. She didn’t admit to anything. She argued about everything, drank too much at parties, flirted with strangers. But I loved her. Love her. I always will.”
“I know.” We turn around, head back along the beach.
“You intimidated her,” he says. He wipes his nose with the back of his gloved hand.
“I intimidated her?” I say.
“She told me about how you helped her study for tests, but you never seemed to have any trouble getting As. She had to work at it. Other things came more easily to her. She admired you. She had a lot of guilt. She wanted to make it up to you.”
“That’s good to know. At least she grew a conscience after all these years.”
“She didn’t know how to apologize. You were so upset. You didn’t talk to either of us for a long time.”
I follow him back toward the beach stairs. “She didn’t know how to apologize? Really? I don’t believe it. Do you know why I got back to the apartment early that day?”
“You never told me . . .” He stops, the wind in his hair, and I can feel the pull of the past. He waits for me to go on.
“I had decided to say yes to you. I figured I would throw caution to the wind. I was one hundred percent ready to marry you and live happily ever after.”
His face goes blank with shock. “You never told me that.”
“I was going to tell you, but I didn’t have the chance. It felt so special. I was walking on air. I was also scared. About the future . . . about everything. We were so young. But then I thought, people get married young all the time. You know what changed my mind? My sociology professor. In class, he was illustrating the concept of monogamy . . . He told us about how he’d met the love of his life in high school and they’d been together for forty years. He was about to retire and travel the world with her. He inspired me.”
Jensen’s face blanches. “Seriously? You’re not making this up?”
I turn my face into the wind, inhaling the cool sea air. “Why would I make up something like that?”
“Marissa—I had no idea. I loved you.”
“I know you did.”
“If you’d told me sooner . . .”
“What difference would it have made?” I take a deep breath. He and Lauren stopped seeing each other after I found them together. Jensen kept pursuing me, meeting me everywhere, telling me he wanted to try again. He professed his love for me on his knees outside the psychology building when I emerged from class. Finally, I relented. I would date him, no promises. We lasted another six weeks . . .
“You weren’t the same,” he says. “We went out, and you didn’t talk to me, sometimes all the way through dinner. I tried to be with you again.”
“You’re making it sound like it was all my fault what happened, and all my fault that I couldn’t forgive you!”
“I know . . . I’m not saying that. We would have worked it out. We could have . . .”
“Really?” I’m climbing the stairs. He follows. “Maybe Lauren wouldn’t have come to you and told you she was pregnant. From that little tryst that afternoon? Maybe if you’d stayed with me, she would have had an abortion, and Brynn would never have been born.”
He flinches. “Don’t say that.”
“Or who knows? Maybe Lauren would’ve become a single mom. Eventually you would’ve gone back to her.”
“We can’t speak in what-ifs. What happened . . . happened.”
“No, you made a choice, and then you made another choice. And then, well, the rest is history.” We’re at the top of the stairs. I stop to catch my breath, then I keep walking.
He falls into step beside me. “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”
“It was a long time ago. I might never have told you if it weren’t for what happened to Lauren . . .”
“I know,” he says, taking a deep breath. “I need to tell you something, too. She got depressed a couple of months ago. She didn’t want me to tell anyone. About what happened at the end of August . . .” He wipes his nose again with the back of his hand. I give him a crumpled tissue from my pocket, which he probably won’t use. He was never fond of blowing his nose.
“Hedra mentioned that Lauren was sneaking a cigarette at the barbecue last time she saw her. And crying.”
“Yeah, she was broken up. After we had Brynn, she wanted a boy. We tried forever, but she couldn’t get pregnant. Finally, a few months ago, she did, and the ultrasound showed it was a boy.”
“She didn’t tell me,” I breathe.
“She didn’t even tell Brynn. Her doctor suggested we wait. He said the risk of miscarriage increases with age, and Lauren was thirty-six. She wanted to keep it quiet. And then she lost the baby.”
“Oh, how terrible for both of you. I had no idea.” I search through my memory—of Lauren downing more alcohol than she should, flirting with Nathan. Was all this to numb her sorrow?
“She kept things to herself,” he says.
“What a devastating loss—it must have been so hard.”
“It was, but she wouldn’t go near that cliff. Not if she was sober. Not if she was her normal happy self. But she wasn’t.”
“Are you saying you believe she might have jumped? Even with all the indications—”
“I don’t know what to believe,” Jensen says, a pained expression in his eyes. “She wanted to be happy again.
I know she did. She was trying her hardest. But when the baby died, I think a part of Lauren died, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I return to my cottage, and the day tumbles around me like laundry on a fast spin cycle. Even though I’m taking a few days off, I respond to emails from parents, from teachers who want to send students to me for testing. I work on Individualized Education Programs, and I click through the wedding invitation templates, the mock-ups I created for Nathan and me. One has a border of leafy vines, another version with interlocked wedding rings, a third style with roses. But I’m only going through the motions. My mind strays back to Jensen, to the surprise in his eyes when I told him I had planned to marry him, his expression turning to grief when he told me about Lauren.
Her actions reveal themselves in a new, sadder light. I could have been more forgiving if I had known. I would not have put her off when she said she needed to talk. But I was still holding a grudge, imprisoned by the past.
To anchor myself in the present, I pull out the romantic birthday card from Nathan, the one he gave me last autumn, with a heart made of red yarn on the front.
I’m in love with you. That’s all.
I read through my texts from him. I can’t wait to see you . . . new pillows . . . when you get here, let’s take a shower . . . Anna’s at her mom’s . . . can’t stop thinking about last night . . . you were wild. And the gifts—a thin silver necklace with an orca pendant, commemorating our first whale watching trip to San Juan Island; a handmade journal with a linen cover. I see him propped on pillows in my bed, laughing. My long-ago loss became a gain. If Jensen and Lauren hadn’t found each other, perhaps I never would have met Nathan. But for all I know, Lauren would still be alive. Or not.
Jensen is right. I can’t play the What-If game. Perhaps everything would have turned out the same way no matter what. I must let go. I try to find solace in the details of my life, in folding laundry, putting it in drawers. I come across a lace bra like the one Lauren loaned me years ago when mine was stolen at the high school swimming pool. A girl from school grabbed my bra, threw it out in the hall. I stood in the cold, covering my chest. Lockers slammed, faucets squeaked in the showers—giggles, the slap of flip-flops on the tile floor. The smell of chlorine hung in the air.