I raise my eyebrows, make him work. “About?”
“I don’t know,” he says, taking over as I step away from the swing set. We’ve been trading back-and-forth for nearly half an hour, steady like a metronome. Hannah could swing for days, chubby baby legs kicking happily; she figured out clapping a few months ago, and every once in a while she smacks her hands together with some kind of secret baby glee. “This. Me.”
I shake my head. “I haven’t changed my mind about you.”
Sawyer snorts. “Ouch.”
“Sawyer—” I break off, huffing a little. “I’m trying, you know?”
“I know,” he says.
We push in silence, patient. The sun glares. My lungs ache like they’re full of dust, dry and barren. “What was the best place you visited?” I ask finally, not so much because I want to know—it’s almost safer not to, I think—but because I can’t imagine what else to ask him and the quiet shreds my nerves. There’s a map of the United States stenciled in bright paint on the blacktop. I wonder if small things like that will ever stop making me sad about everything I missed out on. “What was your favorite?”
Sawyer glances at me once, like he’s surprised, and then thinks a moment. “Nashville,” he decides eventually. “You would really like Nashville.”
I hum a little, noncommittal. “Would I.”
“Yeah, Reena,” he tells me. “I think you would.”
“Out,” Hannah says, quite clearly, and Sawyer grins.
“Out?” he repeats.
“Out!”
“Okay, then. Out it is.” He lifts her from the swing and sets her on the ground; she toddles happily toward the sandbox, quick and unsteady. “My mom says it’s been good for her,” he tells me. “Hannah, I mean, having all her grandparents around, and you, and—” He smiles, a little shyly. “She says she’s really smart.”
Well, that gets my attention. “Your mom said that?” I ask, disbelieving—Hannah’s smart all right, but if it has anything to do with the keen interest shown by her grandparents, then I’m the Cardinal of Rome. “Seriously?”
“Uh, yeah.” Sawyer looks suddenly uncomfortable, like he thinks he’s possibly misstepped—it’s not an expression I remember from back when we were together, him so sure of himself all the time. “Why, is that not … ?”
It boggles me a little, though not as much as you’d think. Lydia’s probably pulling out every stop she can think of to get Sawyer to stick around this time, and if that means convincing him that everybody gets along great around these parts, that we’re all some kind of modern, blended family—well, then, so be it. Still, for some reason I don’t have it in me to give her away, not explicitly: It feels like a lot of work for nothing, on top of which it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that there’s some small part of me hoping it will work and he’ll stay.
I shrug. “No, she’s definitely something,” I say, not bothering to qualify which she I might be referring to or what that something might possibly be. I nod at Hannah, who’s calling my name from the edge of the sandbox. “Here I come, babycakes!”
Sawyer looks at me like he’s not totally buying what I’m selling; he doesn’t push me on it, though, like maybe we’ve got some tacit agreement to play nice with each other on this hot, sunny afternoon. “So, hey,” he says instead, as we follow Hannah on a scenic tour of the playground, sun bleaching white on the back of her neck. She squats down to grab a handful of sand and almost loses her balance, and I reach out a steadying hand. “Are you still writing?”
I laugh before I can stop it, a low angry cackle like the Wicked Witch of the West. I try not to feel bitter. It doesn’t always work. “No,” I tell him. “No, not really.”
Sawyer frowns. “That’s too bad.”
“It’s fine,” I say, hoping he’ll drop it, but:
“Why’d you stop?”
“Because.” I shrug and dig some sunscreen out of my bag for the baby. It’s possible this isn’t even the real answer, but at the moment it’s the best I can do. “You can’t be a travel writer if you’ve never gone anywhere.”
Sawyer takes some time to absorb that. With the hat, it’s kind of hard to see his face. “Fair enough,” he says after a minute, and he doesn’t ask me any questions after that. Instead he looks at the swing set, at the baseball diamond, at Hannah. He squats down in the sand and digs in.
*
We get home and my father is fixing himself a snack in the kitchen, leftover chicken and rice from the other night, skinless and low-fat like Soledad always makes for him. The radio croons, the public jazz station out of Miami that he likes. “Hi,” I say, putting Hannah in her chair and pushing her sweat-dampened hair off her face. I collect a few stray Cheerios from this morning, toss them into the sink.
My father nods at me, impassive. His cholesterol and blood pressure medications are lined up along the counter. In the last year or so he’s put on weight.
“We were at the park,” I tell him.
“So I heard.” He nods again.
“With Sawyer,” I continue.
“So I heard.” Mother of God, he nods a third time.
Oh, come off it, I almost snap. Instead I take a deep breath, steadying. “All right,” I say, surrendering. With the possible exception of Soledad, we’re none of us emoters in my family. Still, my father can out-silence anybody, even me. “Can we just … address the fact that this is happening?”
“What’s that?”
That makes me mad. “You know what,” I say, an edge in my voice I can’t totally file down. “Him being here. Any of it.”
My father sighs. “Reena, I don’t really see that there’s anything to talk about. You know how I feel. You make your own choices. Do what you want.” This morning’s paper sits on the table, and he opens it to the international news. “There’s food,” he says, without looking up.
“Okay,” I say finally, and open the refrigerator. “Just … okay.”
Not so long ago, in my art class we read about the Renaissance and how for a long time afterward it was almost impossible for Italian artists to make anything. All that history there already, they figured. What was the point?
18
Before
“I think you’re sticky,” my father was telling my brother as I came out of the kitchen one windy Saturday night at the restaurant, Homecoming weekend of my third and, with any luck, final year of high school. There was a dance I could have gone to. I picked up an extra shift instead. It was after midnight and Antonia’s was empty, my work shoes squeaking on the hardwood floor.
“Well, what is it? It’s like, a—What’s the word? It starts with a P.” That was Cade, leaning against the bar in his discount-warehouse suit—he’d gotten promoted that fall, was managing days and some weekends. He and his fiancée, Stef, were saving up to buy a house.
“It’s a plasma,” Sawyer said. He was unloading glasses from the dishwasher behind the bar, and he smiled at me as I approached. “Here, ask Reena. Reena will know.”
“What will I know?” I set my plate full of pancakes on the bar and hopped up on a stool. My hair was falling out of its braid, I could feel it.
“Okay,” said Cade, around a mouthful of bar pretzels. “Reena. If I throw a bucket of blood on you”—he paused dramatically—“are you wet?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Are you wet,” my father repeated, like this was somehow a logical question. He was festive and silly tonight—he got like that sometimes, around the boys. It made him seem younger than he was.
I set my fork down. “First of all, that’s disgusting. Second of all”—I turned to Sawyer—“why is that something I would know?”
“’Cause you’re smart,” he replied reasonably. “And smart people know stuff.”
“Oh, well, in that case.” I rolled my eyes, dorkily pleased. I’d taken the SATs again that morning, as a matter of fact, trying to pull my math score up even more—the next in a logical sequence of steps, I
thought, toward getting the hell out of town. “Anyway, I think he’s right. I think you’re more sticky than you are wet.”
“Ha. Good girl,” my father said, vindicated. He kissed the top of my head. “I’m going to get out of here before Soledad calls the police. You want to come with me, or have Cade drive you after he closes?”
“Um.” I hesitated, looking in every conceivable direction except for the one I wanted to be looking in. I should have gone home, actually—I’d joined the school paper at Ms. Bowen’s behest and was writing an Around Town column about street festivals and new stores on Federal Highway. I had 250 words on a sculpture park near the beach due first thing Monday morning. “I can stick around for a while.”
Sawyer noticed my plate once my father had gone and Cade, flush with his new managerial responsibilities, went back to the office to run the night’s totals. “Aw, not fair,” he said, his face a sad, silly caricature. “Finch made you pancakes?”
I nodded happily, digging into the fluffy stack sitting on my plate. “Finch loves me.”
“And really, who can blame him?” Sawyer hooked a pair of wineglasses onto the rack above his head. Then he reached across the bar, took my fork out of my hand, and helped himself to a big bite.
“Oh, come on!” I cried, playing at irritated. “Get your own.”
“Yours are better,” he said, mouth full.
I huffed a little, delighted and trying not to look it. “You know, not all of us want your germs.”
“Reena,” he replied mildly, handing back the fork. “You already got my germs.”
I froze for just one second, and then I started to laugh. It was the closest we’d come to talking about it—the only indication he’d given me that he even remembered it had happened—and hearing him say it loosened some knot I hadn’t even realized was pressing on the muscles in my chest. I giggled like a maniac for a minute, absurdly relieved, crazy hyena giggles, like I hadn’t laughed in a year. “Shut up,” I managed, once I finally got my breath.
“There you go, Reena.” Sawyer grinned, revealing two perfectly straight rows of white teeth. “You’re so serious all the time, I swear. I crack you and it makes my damn night.”
“Yeah, well.” I took a breath, calmed down a bit. “I do what I can.”
“Mm-hmm.” Sawyer wandered over to the piano and made himself comfortable on the bench. Though my father put a down payment on Antonia’s all those years ago in part so he’d always have a place to play his music, it only took a couple of months for him to realize that the care and keeping of a restaurant required more time and effort than he had anticipated. Now he sat at the baby grand only once or twice a month, a special occasion. The rest of the time, he booked bands.
“Any requests, ma’am?” Sawyer asked, clever hands already splayed over the keys. He started with a few quick scales, flew through the opening of a Dave Matthews song that was one of Cade’s favorites, then launched into some West Coast–style jazz I knew my father must have taught him. Dave Brubeck, I recognized after a moment. Car-commercial music.
Is there anything you’re not good at? I wanted to ask him, but I just smiled, reached behind me, and pulled the rubber band out of my hair. “Play whatever you want. I’ll just listen.”
“I wish everybody was that easy. Come sit.”
I slid off the barstool and onto the piano bench. Somewhere in the back of my head I thought of the old pictures I’d seen of my parents sitting at the upright in my grandmother’s house, the dark gaze of my mother, Antonia herself, fixed on my father’s young face as he played.
“You should wear your hair down more,” Sawyer said, glancing at me, hands moving fast through a piece I didn’t know. Our thighs were touching. “It looks nice like that.”
I laughed, but Sawyer just shook his head. “I’m serious,” he said, still playing. His voice went low and quiet. “I noticed you, you know that? Even before last spring I did.”
Before last spring you were dating my dead best friend, I thought and didn’t say. Instead I hedged. “That so?”
“Yeah.” Sawyer shrugged. “You’re just … different.”
“Different,” I repeated. I thought of Lauren Werner, of the fact that at this very moment, everybody else in my grade was at Homecoming except for me. I got tired of being different, is the truth of it. It wore on me. “What, from Allie?”
That was the wrong thing to say. Sawyer kept his fingers on the keys, didn’t miss a chord, but his whole body tensed. I thought of the strings inside the piano. “Sorry,” I said, backpedaling. I hadn’t even meant to bring her up, not overtly—she was just on my mind so much, still, like the six months since the car crash hadn’t done anything to dull how much I missed her. You’d think losing her almost a full year before she actually died would have cushioned the blow, somehow; instead I just felt it more and more. “I shouldn’t have—I just meant—”
“It’s fine,” Sawyer said shortly, but for the first time all night I didn’t like the sound of his voice. I wondered how much he thought about her. I wondered if he thought about her at all.
“Okay, but …”
“I said it’s okay, Reena.”
We sat in awkward, testy silence for a moment until Cade emerged from the kitchen. “Taking requests?” he asked, then noticed our stony faces and looked, sort of accusingly, at Sawyer. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said too loudly, keeping my expression as neutral as humanly possible and feeling certain that I’d just pulled this apart, whatever it even was, faster than I’d known it could be destroyed. “Everything’s great.”
19
After
I’ve got a midterm to take in the Modern American Novel, a class I was sort of excited about when it turned up in the Broward College course catalog last semester, which just goes to show how delusional I really am. For some reason I was picturing lively, sophisticated conversations about the great writers of the last few generations; instead the lecture is delivered by a fleshy middle-aged professor who’s not so much boring as blatantly bored, who eyes us with vague pity through an owly pair of glasses and periodically administers multiple-choice quizzes I’m fairly certain he’s printing off the Internet. “You are my penance for a misspent life,” he announced on the first day of class, before assigning The Things They Carried and two books by John Updike and pretty much washing his hands of us entirely. I like to imagine that one of these days I’ll be able to walk into a class at Broward without thinking of Ms. Bowen and how disappointed she’d be, but to be honest it hasn’t happened yet.
This morning I park my car and head down the chilly hallway toward the classroom, past the bulletin board with flyers for intramural flag football games and two-for-one happy hour at a bar near campus. Par for the course, I don’t have a hell of a lot in common with my classmates, although I feel like at this point that’s absolutely more my fault than theirs. I’ve been to coffee a couple of times with some girls from my accounting class, but for the most part my time at BC has not been the social bonanza Shelby hoped it might be. Basically it feels a lot like high school, only without gym.
I sit down at one of the long tables and tick the appropriate boxes with my number 2 pencil, then hand in my test at the front of the room where good old Professor Orrin is reading the Atlantic on his phone. He nods at me distractedly before returning his attention to the screen. I hurry down the stairs into the parking lot, cross the shimmering black-top to where my car sits waiting. There’s more than fiction on my mind today.
Allie’s old house has been empty for ages: Her parents moved to Tampa not long after the accident, and the new owners foreclosed inside a year. It just sits there in the swooping curve of the cul-de-sac now, gap-toothed and vaguely haunted-looking, waiting for whatever’s coming next.
Allie’s buried at Forest Lawn, but I’ve never been much for cemeteries, and anyway, whoever’s beneath that headstone—beloved angel, darling girl—that’s not the Allie I knew. And maybe the girl I fough
t with all those nights ago in the unforgiving glare of the patio light wasn’t the Allie I knew, either, but sometimes I can still find her here in her old backyard. I come by to look every now and again, if it’s summer or I’m lonely or afraid.
This afternoon, though—half a week since our date at the playground, who knows how long since my father looked me in the eye—I’m not the only one hanging around the Ballards’ old development. Sawyer’s rusty Jeep is parked in the driveway, unmistakable. I shake my head, disbelieving, as if there’s some invisible string that kept us tethered the entire time he was away and that’s tightening now, a slip-knot hooked around my wrist.
“You’re trespassing, you know,” I call, wandering across the scruffy expanse of dry, brown grass, Allie’s dad’s beloved lawn gone wild and weedy. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that things change whether you’re around to notice them or not.
“I know,” he says. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” I sit down on the swing next to him just like we sat all those nights ago outside the party, rubber burning the backs of my thighs. “What are you doing here?”
Sawyer shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood. I don’t know. I feel like I never really …” He trails off, going quiet, one sneaker toeing the ground. “I think about her sometimes, you know?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, which is an understatement. “I do.”
“I thought about her a lot while I was gone.” He raises his head to look at me, like a challenge. “Thought about you, too.”
I ignore that last part, shaking my head a little as I gaze across the yard at the empty patio, the darkened windows filmed with grime. I grew up in this yard—Allie and I slept out here every summer, the two of us in a pup tent with a Coleman camping lantern and a radio, listening to the Top 40 countdown. In second grade I tumbled off these monkey bars and fractured both my wrists. “She’d be in college,” I tell him. “If she hadn’t … if she’d lived. We both would be, maybe.”
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