by Sarah Dessen
“Your grandmother’s hurt,” she said in a low voice, still not turning around. “She fell and broke several ribs, and she’ll have to have surgery on her hip in the morning. She was alone for a long time before anyone found her.” She choked on this last part, her voice wavering.
“Is she gonna be okay?” Down the hall I could hear my father’s voice, asking questions about departures and arrivals, coach or first class, chances of standby. “Mom?”
I watched her shoulders fall and rise, one deep breath, before she turned around, her face composed and even. “I don’t know, honey. We’ll just have to see.”
“Mom—” I started, wanting to somehow fix this, whatever I’d opened between us by not wanting to share Macon with her. By not wanting to share me with her.
“Julie,” my father’s voice came booming from down the hall, always too loud for small spaces, “there’s a flight in an hour, but you have a long layover in Baltimore. It’s the best we can do, I think.”
“That’s fine,” she said evenly. “Go ahead and book it. I’ll throw a bag together.”
“Mom,” I said, “I just—”
“Honey, there’s no time,” she said quickly as she passed me, reaching to pat my shoulder, distracted. “I’ve got to go pack.”
So I sat on my bed, in my room, with my math homework in my lap and the door open. I heard the closet door opening and shutting, my mother packing, my father’s low, soothing voice. But it was the silences that were the worst, when I craned my neck, hoping for just one word or sound. Anything would have been better than imagining what was happening when everything was muffled, and I knew she had to be crying.
She came in and hugged me, ruffling my hair like she always had when I was little; she said not to worry, she’d call later, everything was okay. She’d forgotten about what I’d said, about what had happened at dinner. Just like that, with one phone call, she was a daughter again.
Chapter Eleven
With my mother gone, it was like I’d been handed a Get Out of Jail Free card. My father’s morning show was still riding an Arbitron rating high, which meant he was busy almost every afternoon or evening with promotional events. In the past few months, he’d already lost an on-air bet with the traffic guy that resulted in him having to perform an embarrassing (and thank God, not complete) striptease at a local dance club, attended about a hundred contest-winner cocktail parties, and wrestled a man named the Dominator at the Hilton for charity. That one had left him bruised, battered, and with nose splints for a full week, which he’d loved. He’d discussed his drainage problems, complete with a million booger jokes, every morning while I cringed on the way to school.
The phone rang constantly, usually a nervous-sounding man named Lottie who organized my father’s every waking moment, lining up another trip to the mall, meeting, or Wacky Stunt. My father, who my mother insisted was too old and too educated for any of this nonsense, hardly even saw me, much less kept careful track of what I was doing. At most, we passed each other late at night, as I walked past his bedroom to brush my teeth. We came to an unspoken understanding: I’d behave, show up when I was supposed to, and he wouldn’t ask questions. It was only four days, after all.
Of course, I was always with Macon. Now he could pick me up for school and take me to work or home in the afternoons; Scarlett, who used to drive me, was as busy as my father. She was working extra shifts at Milton’s so she could buy baby clothes and nursery items; plus, she was spending a lot of time with Cameron, who made her laugh and rubbed her feet. Finally, our guidance counselor, Mrs. Bagbie, had convinced her to join a fledgling Teen Mothers Support Group that met at school two afternoons a week. She hadn’t wanted to go, but she said the other girls—some pregnant, some already with kids—made her feel a little less strange. And Scarlett, as I knew, could make friends anywhere.
Macon and I had fun. Monday we didn’t go to school at all, spending the entire time just driving around, eating at Mc-Donald’s, and hanging out by the river. When the school called that night my father wasn’t home, and I easily explained that I’d been sick and my mother was out of town. Macon had already mastered her signature, signing with a flourish every note I needed.
She called every night and asked me the basic questions about school and work, whether my father was remembering to feed me. She said she missed me, that Grandma Halley was going to be all right. She said she was sorry we’d argued, and she knew it was hard for me to break it off with Macon, but someday I would understand it was the right thing. At the other end of the line, phone in hand, I agreed and watched him back out of the driveway, lights moving across me, then heard him beep as he drove away. I told myself I shouldn’t feel guilty, that she’d played dirty, changing the rules to suit her. Sometimes it worked; sometimes not.
The night before my father and I were leaving to go to Buffalo for Thanksgiving, Macon brought me home from work. The house was dark when we pulled up.
“Where’s your dad?” he said as he cut off the engine.
“I don’t know.” I grabbed my backpack out of the back of the car and opened my door. “Doing radio stuff, probably.”
As I leaned over to kiss him good-bye, he pulled back a bit, his eyes still on my dark house. Across the street Scarlett’s front porch light was already on, and I could see Marion in front of the TV in the living room, her shoes off, feet up on the coffee table. In the kitchen Scarlett was standing at the stove, stirring something.
“Well,” I said to Macon, sliding my hand around his neck. “I guess I’ll see you when I get back.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me to come in?”
“In?” I drew back. He’d never asked before. “Do you want to?”
“Sure.” He reached down and opened his door, and just like that we were walking up the driveway, past my mother’s mums, to the front steps. The paper was on the porch and a few leaves were blowing around, making scraping noises. It was getting ready to rain.
I fished around in my backpack for my keys, then unlocked the door and pushed it open just as there was a loud rumbling overhead. Even without looking up I could feel the plane coming closer, the thin line of windowpanes on either side of the door already vibrating.
“Man,” Macon said. “That’s loud.”
“It’s bad around this time,” I told him. “There are lots of early evening flights.” The house was completely dark inside, and I felt across the wall for the light switch. Right as the light came on overhead there was a popping noise, a flash, and we were in the dark again.
“Hold on,” I said, dropping my backpack as he stepped in behind me, a few leaves blowing in across his feet. “I’ll find another light.”
And then I felt his arms wrap around me from behind, his hand, cool, on my stomach, and in the dark of my parents’ alcove he kissed me. He didn’t seem to have any problem negotiating the dark of the empty house, walking me backwards to the living room and the couch, pushing me down across my mother’s needlepoint pillows. I kissed him back, letting his hand slide up my shirt, feeling the warmth of his legs pressing against mine. Another plane was rumbling in the distance.
“Macon,” I said, coming up for air after a few minutes, “my father could be home any second.”
He kept kissing me, his hand still exploring. Obviously this wasn’t as much of a threat to him as it was to me.
“Macon.” I pushed him back a little. “I’m serious.”
“Okay, okay.” He sat up, bumping back against another stack of pillows. My mother was into pillows. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“You don’t know my father,” I said, like he was some big ogre, chasing boys across the yard with a shotgun. I was running enough risk just having him there; my father finding us alone in the dark would be another story altogether.
I got up and went into the kitchen, flicking on lights as I went. All the familiar things looked different with him trailing along behind me. I wondered what he was thinking.
“D
o you want something to drink?” I said, opening the fridge.
“Nah,” he said, pulling out a chair from the kitchen table and sitting down.
I was bending into the fridge, searching out a Coke, when I suddenly heard my father’s voice, as if he’d stepped up right behind me. I swear I almost stopped breathing.
“Well, we’re over here at the new Simpson Dry Cleaners, at the Lakeview Mall, and I’m Brian and I gotta tell you, I’ve seen a lot of dry cleaners before but this place is different. Herb and Mary Simpson, well, they know a little bit about this business, and... ”
I felt my face get hot, blood rushing up in sheer panic, even after I realized it was just the radio and turned around to see Macon smiling behind me, his hand still on the knob.
“Not funny,” I said, pulling over a chair to sit down next to him. He turned the volume down and I could only hear my father murmuring, something about same-day service and starch.
He said he wanted to see my room, and I knew why, but I took him up there anyway, climbing up the steps in the dark with him holding my hand. He walked around my bed, leaning into my mirror to examine the blue ribbons I’d gotten in gymnastics years ago, the pictures of Scarlett and me from the photo booth at the mall, mugging and smiling for the camera. He lay across my bed like he owned it. And as he leaned to kiss me, I had my eyes open, looking straight over his head to the top of my bookcase, at the Madame Alexander doll Grandma Halley had given me for my tenth birthday. It was Scarlett O’Hara, in a green-and-white dress and hat, and just seeing it for that second before I closed my eyes gave me that same pang of guilt, my mother’s face flashing across, telling me how wrong this was.
Outside, the planes kept going over, shaking my windows. Macon kept sliding his hand under my waistband, pushing farther than he had before, and I kept pushing him back. We’d turned on my clock radio, low, to keep track of my father’s whereabouts, but after a while it cut off and it was just us and silence, Macon’s lips against my ear coaxing. His voice was low and rumbly and right in my ear, his fingers stroking the back of my neck. It all felt so good, and I would feel myself forgetting, slipping and losing myself in it, until all of a sudden—
“No,” I said, grabbing his hand as he tried to unsnap my jeans, “this is not a good idea.”
“Why not?” His voice was muffled.
“You know why not,” I said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Macon.”
“What’s the big deal?” he asked me, rolling over onto his back, his head on my pillow. His shirt was unbuttoned; one hand was still on my stomach, fingers stretched across my skin.
“The big deal is that this is my house and my bed, and my father is due home at any time. I could get so busted.”
He rolled over and turned up the radio again, my father’s voice filling the room. “So come on down here to Simpson’s Dry Cleaners, we’ve got some prizes and great deals, and cake -there’s cake, too?—how can you say no to cake? I’m Brian, I’m here till nine.” He just lay there, watching me, proving me wrong.
“It’s just not a good idea,” I said, reaching over and turning on the light. All around me my room jumped into place, the familiar parameters of my life: my bed, my carpet, my stuffed animals lined up across the third shelf of my bookshelf. There was a little green pig in the middle that Noah Vaughn had bought me for Valentine’s day two years before. Noah had never slid his hand further than my neck, had never found ingenious ways to get places I was trying zealously to guard. Noah Vaughn had been happy just to hold my hand.
“Halley,” Macon said, his voice low. “I’m into being patient and waiting and all, but it’s been almost three months now.”
“That’s not that long,” I said, picking at the worn spot in my comforter.
“It is to me.” He rolled a little closer, putting his head in my lap. I had a sudden flash, out of nowhere, that he had done this before. “Just think about it, okay? We’ll be careful, I promise.”
“I think about it,” I said, running my fingers through his hair. He closed his eyes. And I did think about it, all the time. But each time I was tempted, each time I wanted to give up my defense and pull back my troops, I thought of Scarlett. Of course I thought of Scarlett. She’d thought she was being careful, too.
He left not long after that. He didn’t want to stay and watch TV or just hang out and talk. Something was changing, something I could sense even though I’d never been here before, like the way baby turtles know to go to the water at birth, instinctively. They just know. And I already knew I’d lose Macon, probably soon, if I didn’t sleep with him. He kissed me good-bye and left, and I stood in my open door and watched him go, beeping like he always did as he rounded the corner.
As I lost sight of him, I thought of that sketched black outline, the colors inside just beginning to get filled in. The girl I’d been, the girl I was. I told myself the changes had come fast and furious these last few months, and one more wasn’t that big of a deal. But each time I did I thought of Scarlett, always Scarlett, and that new color, that particular shade, which I wasn’t ready to take on just yet.
When I went over to Scarlett’s to say good-bye, there was food out on the kitchen table and counters, and she was squatted on the floor with a bucket and sponge, scrubbing the inside of the fridge.
“Can you smell it?” she said before I’d even opened my mouth. She hadn’t even turned around. Pregnancy was making every one of her senses stronger, more intense, and I swear sometimes she seemed almost clairvoyant.
“Smell what?”
“You can’t smell it?” Now she turned around, pointing her sponge at me. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes. “That. That rotting, stink kind of smell.”
I breathed in, but all I was getting was Clorox from the bucket. “No.”
“God.” She stood up, grabbing onto the fridge door for support. It was harder for her to get to her feet now, her stomach throwing her off balance. “Cameron couldn’t smell it either—he said I was being crazy. But I swear, it’s so strong it’s making me gag. I’ve had to hold my breath the whole time I’ve been doing this.”
I looked over at the pregnancy Bible, which was lying on the table, open to the chapter on Month Five, which was fast approaching. I flipped through the pages as she bent down over the vegetable crisper, nose wrinkled, scrubbing like mad.
“Page seventy-four, bottom paragraph,” I said out loud, following the words with my finger. “And I quote: ‘Your sense of smell may become stronger during your pregnancy, causing an aversion to some foods.”
“I cannot believe you don’t smell that,” she muttered, ignoring me.
“What are you going to do, scrub the whole house?” I said as she yanked out the butter dish, examined it, and dunked it in the bucket.
“If I have to.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No,” she said, “I’m pregnant and I’m allowed my eccentricities; the doctor said so. So shut up.”
I pulled out a chair and sat down, resting my arm on the table. Every time I was in Scarlett’s kitchen I thought back to the years we’d spent there, at the table, with the radio on. On long summer days we’d make chocolate-chip cookies and dance around the linoleum floor with our shoes off, the music turned up loud.
I sat down at the table, flipping through Month Five. “Look at this,” I said. “For December we have continued constipation, leg cramps, and ankle swelling to look forward to.”
“Great.” She sat back on her heels, dropping the sponge in the bucket. “What else?”
“Ummm ... varicose veins, maybe, and an easier or more difficult orgasm.”
She turned around, pushing her hair out of her face. “Halley. Please.”
“I’m just reading the book.”
“Well, you of all people should know orgasms are not my big concern right now. I’m more interested in finding whatever is rotting in this kitchen.”
I still couldn’t smell anything, but I knew better
than to argue. Scarlett was handling things now, and I was proud of her; she was eating better, walking around the block for a half hour every day because she’d heard it was good for the baby, and reading everything she could get her hands on about child rearing. Everything, that is, except the adoption articles and pamphlets that Marion kept leaving on the lazy Susan or on her bed, always with a card from someone interested in Discussing the Options. Scarlett was playing along because she had to, but she was keeping the baby. Like everything else, she’d made her choice and she’d stick to it, everyone else be damned.
“Scarlett?” I said.
“Yeah?” her voice was muffled; she had her head stuck under the meat and cheese drawer, inspecting.
“What made you decide to sleep with him?”
She drew herself out, slowly, and turned to face me. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Just wondered.”
“Did you sleep with Macon?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“But he wants you to.”
“No, not exactly.” I spun the lazy Susan. “He brought it up, that’s all.”
She walked over and sat down beside me, pulling her hair back with her hands. She smelled like Clorox. “What did you say?”
“I told him I’d think about it.”
She sat back, absorbing this. “Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. But he does, and it’s not that big a deal to him, you know? He doesn’t understand why it is to me.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said simply. “He knows why.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “I mean, I really like him. And I think for guys like him—like that—it isn’t that big of a deal. It’s just what, you know, you do.”
“Halley.” She shook her head. “This isn’t about him. It’s about you. You shouldn’t do anything you’re not ready for.”
“I’m ready,” I said.