“I really screwed up,” I choked out.
She didn’t deny it, which oddly made me feel better. I was tired of people saying they understood. I was tired of not feeling the consequences. I should have to pay for not being there, and every day without him felt like a punishment.
“Maybe, but I don’t think it matters anymore.”
Her words made me cry, hot tears that made me feel like an idiot. “He’s gone.”
“He’s not gone because of you.” There was absolutely no malice in her voice, and then she was reaching out and rubbing my back the way my mother did when I was sick. She pulled me in the direction of the hallway until we were in the girls’ bathroom, which was painted pink and red, like Cupid had vomited on the walls.
“Yeah, he’s gone because his mother died. His mother died, and I wasn’t there for him. I was off breaking my promises, and he was alone. He was there for me, and he counted on me, and I wasn’t there for him. Why wasn’t I there for him?” I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to keep my insides in even as they felt like they would explode out of me.
After a little while, I could breathe again. She ran a paper towel under the faucet and pressed it to my swollen eyelids. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Why are you being so nice to me?” I could smell the brown paper of the tissue over my face.
“Because you’ve suffered enough.”
I laughed and hoped that it was true.
She pulled the paper towel away from my eyes. “Plus, I’m pretty happy these days.” A smile crept slowly but surely across her face. “I thought I needed Michael to be happy. I thought I needed him to love me. But I don’t. I’m doing okay alone.”
I nodded, understanding her point. But wants and needs were different things.
She tossed the paper towel in the trash before pushing open the door. “Hey, do you want to stay and have coffee with us?”
Out in the shop, Marisol was leaning her elbows on the counter and laughing with Leo.
“I can’t. I already have somewhere to be, but thanks.”
She watched me for a second, her made-up eyes shifting from my hair to my eyes to my chin, probably assessing my level of post-crying puffiness. “Okay. Well, we’ll see you in Chem on Monday.”
“Yeah.”
I watched her join Marisol before I left with my own coffee.
* * *
Ever since that night I drove down to Salem, I’d been making the drive almost every weekend. A few weeks in a rehab facility was enough to help Harris through the withdrawal symptoms, but it still sometimes felt like visiting a ghost. That morning, I sipped at my coffee on the hour-long drive, my heater on full blast.
Harris’s bedroom door was open when I got there. I stood in the doorway and waited for him to notice me while he played a video game. His eyes flitted quickly to me, but he didn’t pause the game. He was wrapped in a fleece blanket, his skin pale and his face a little sallow.
He’d lost some of his bulk over the last month, but he’d made it through the worst of everything: the muscle aches, the insomnia, the nausea. These days, he was just quiet.
“How are you?” I asked, sitting down on the bed beside him and watching while his character on the screen hid behind a school bus to take out someone on the opposite team.
“Tired.” I knew he meant it. The skin under his eyes had begun to sag when he came back from rehab. Everything was out of his system, but he still seemed to be exhausted all the time.
He made exaggerated movements with his arms, as if that would help him win the game. “What do you do when you can’t sleep?” he asked.
I tried to think of an honest answer. Sometimes the answer was hot tea, sometimes it was staring at the ceiling with the lights out, trying to force myself to get drowsy. And then it was Michael, sitting by the pool at two in the morning.
Sometimes I still went up to the roof by myself and swam or watched cars drive by. Sometimes I read for class until the sun came up and then caught an hour of sleep before I had to rush to catch the bus.
But mostly I lay in bed and thought about what Michael was doing in Vancouver, wondering if he was awake, too.
“Sorry. Can’t help you there.” I looked over at the TV, watching the shooting and the dizzying landscape for a moment. “What’s the point of this game, anyway?”
He glanced at me. “To kill more people than the other team.”
I just nodded. “Classy.”
He nudged me with his elbow, and I watched him shoot at computer characters until my eyes started to drift closed. When something exceptionally loud exploded on the screen, I jerked my eyes back open, but eventually, I let myself sink down onto Harris’s bed and fall asleep to the sound of his gun firing.
When I woke up later, the TV was silent and Harris was lying beside me on the bed, his arms tucked around himself, like he was trying not to touch me accidentally. For just a second, it felt like it used to, when we would spend hours together after school, talking and playing games and swimming, until we were exhausted and took a nap before I had to be home for dinner.
But nothing was the same. Harris was worn out, and so was I, and a nap wasn’t going to fix this. While I watched him, his eyes opened slowly, finding me across from him, and he smiled.
It had been so long since I’d seen that smile that it sent a shock wave down to my stomach, and I smiled back, reaching out and pressing the back of my hand against his.
“Is it over yet?” he asked.
I thought of all the things that were over: my relationship with Michael, our time with the swim team, my time here in Salem, my parents’ marriage, whatever I had with my dad.
“Maybe,” I said because I thought he was talking about him, the drugs and the pain he’d been going through, physically and emotionally, since he’d lost his spot on the team.
He nodded, like I’d given him the right answer, and took a deep breath before closing his eyes again. I let him sleep, but I stared out the window while the sun moved up higher and higher in the sky, until it reached in to warm my skin.
* * *
When I got back to Portland, I drove straight to Lily’s apartment to drop off her car.
I trotted up the stairs to her apartment, using her key to let myself in. I didn’t know if she was home, but when I walked inside, the apartment was quiet, so I didn’t think so. She shared the apartment with a girl named Sherry, who was always in class or at the library or studying off campus somewhere, so I almost never saw her. I couldn’t even remember what she looked like.
I tossed Lily’s car keys onto the bar and went into the kitchen to get a quick glass of water before I left. I gulped some down and then heard a noise from Lily’s bedroom. Maybe she was home after all. I chugged the rest of the water and left the glass in the sink.
“Lily?” I called out from the kitchen, and while there was no clear answer, I heard shuffling and a voice, Lily’s. I figured she was probably on the phone, so I pushed open her bedroom door, and it took me a second to process the scene before me. Two people, one of them Lily, both of them mostly naked and struggling into their clothing. I clapped my hand over my eyes and rushed back to the living room.
“Oh God,” I groaned. “That is so much more than I ever needed to see.” I scrubbed at my eyes like I could erase the image from my brain.
Lily came out into the living room with her shirt all disheveled and the button on her pants undone. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d be back so early. I’m sorry.”
And then the guy rushed out behind her, and the first thing that I noticed was that his shirt wasn’t buttoned correctly.
The second thing I noticed was that he looked a lot like Tom.
He smiled bashfully at me. “Hey, Kate.”
I was suddenly no longer embarrassed. I didn’t care that I had just seen my sister half-naked because my sister had been half-naked with her ex, and that made something akin to hope bloom in my chest.
Lily must have seen the pure joy in my eyes, because her whole face lit up. “I was going to tell you, I promise, but we just weren’t really sure what we were doing yet, you know, and with everything—”
“How long have you been seeing each other?” If Tom and Lily were trying to figure out what was going on between them before telling anyone, I could understand that.
Lily shrugged, and she and Tom exchanged a glance. “About a month,” she said, and I saw some of the light in her eyes dim at the answer. It was like this now. Talking about what had happened a month ago always felt like it was off-limits, even if no one mentioned Michael.
But there wasn’t room for despair here. “I’m really happy for you.”
Lily smiled, and it traveled all the way up to her eyes.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” Tom said, leaving us alone in the living room, even though Lily’s apartment was so tiny that there wasn’t very much privacy anywhere you went.
Lily guided me over to the couch and pulled me down beside her. “Hey, are you okay with this?”
“Um, yes. Why wouldn’t I be?” I’d known we made a mistake the second we got in the car that day, and all I’d wanted was for Lily to know what it felt like to have someone care enough not to give up on her.
“I just meant because…,” she trailed off, but she didn’t need to elaborate. Was I okay with my sister being this happy even though I’d had my heart shattered?
“Of course I’m okay. I mean it. I’m so happy for you.”
She smiled, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.
I was happy. Of course I was. But a part of me was devoured by jealousy. I knew what it was like to find someone who would help you find your way when you were lost, talk you through a panic attack, hold your hand when everyone else was turning away. I wanted that again. But I didn’t want it with anyone else. I just wanted it with Michael.
* * *
I unlocked the door to my apartment, but when I threw it open, I was met with silence. “Mom?” I called out, the door still open in my hand, when the door across the hall opened.
It was a strange feeling, hearing it open again, like watching a lamp get thrown across the room by a ghost. I hadn’t heard that door open in so long that it was almost frightening. Like a hopeless idiot, I turned around, half expecting to find him there, leaning against his door like he was that morning before school, looking at me under his messy bangs like he was afraid to show himself.
But it wasn’t Michael coming out of his old apartment. It was my mom and some guy that I didn’t recognize.
“Dinner will be ready at seven,” she was saying. “I’ll make lasagna.” She smiled over her shoulder at him as she crossed the hallway, not even realizing I was standing there until the man’s eyes moved to settle on me.
“Oh!” she said when she turned around and saw me. “I’m so glad you’re home. This is Patrick. Patrick, this is my youngest daughter, Kate. Patrick and his wife, Laura, just moved in across the hall.”
Patrick, tall and thin with square-rimmed glasses, nodded at me from the other side of the hallway. “Hi, Kate. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Patrick works at the nursing home with me. I invited him and Laura for dinner tonight. We’ll see you a little later,” she said to Patrick, and shut the door between them.
And then her smile dimmed a little. “Is it okay that I invited them?”
I laughed. “Of course it’s okay.” I didn’t want to ask why it wouldn’t be, but I thought I knew. Making friends with the people across the hall, letting go of the former tenants, letting the world keep turning after everything had come to a halt.
She sighed, her shoulders relaxing a little. “Okay. I know it’s been hard, honey.”
I waved her off, and she gave me a sad little smile before going into the kitchen to get dinner ready.
I watched her from the table, as she moved around, humming to herself. I’d noticed the change in her that I never thought would come. She’d been a little cheerier in the past few weeks, looking more weightless than I’d ever seen her. And even now, there was a hint of a smile on her face.
Some days it felt like the water was closing over my head, but I wasn’t grasping for the surface anymore. Maybe no one could keep their head above the water, and we were all just being pulled under, learning how to breathe while life pressed in around us. And if they could do it, I thought I could, too.
It was time to move on.
Twenty-One
No one was surprised when Lily and Tom announced they were getting married. Things had gone from unsure to serious so fast that they were planning another wedding by February.
The guest list was reduced to a quarter of the original size, and what before was something large and extravagant became something intimate. We were lucky that Tom’s parents were such respected, long-standing members of their church, or Lily and Tom would have been trying to fit the small wedding reception into the meeting room at their apartment complex. As it was, the congregation was happy to prepare the church for another weekend wedding. They seemed optimistic despite the previous failed attempt.
Lily decided to wear her dress, the same dress from months before, but she’d done a few alterations. I had a feeling she was being superstitious about the whole thing, but I was willing to go along with anything that would get her wearing a wedding ring by the end of the day.
When we were back at the church, anxiety had set up a fort in my stomach. It wasn’t exactly like it was before. There weren’t fresh flowers everywhere or caterers setting up in the hall. Only family and close friends had been invited, and the church was quiet, the sanctuary barely buzzing with the noise of their conversations.
I moved through the building, making sure everything was going smoothly. Most of the guests were seated, with a few stragglers signing the guest book on the front table. At the end of the hall, I stopped by Tom’s dressing room and peeked in.
He was inside, perched on a long wooden table, reading from something that, from where I stood, looked like a Bible, while his best man stared at himself in the mirror, flexing almost imperceptibly.
When Tom saw me, he smiled. “Everything good?” he asked, and I was surprised not to hear any fear or hesitation in his voice. Even after all that had happened, he was completely confident in Lily. He was confident in them.
“Everything’s great. Are you all set?”
“Yep.” To punctuate the point, he ran a hand across his slicked-back hair and tugged on the ends of his bow tie.
Inside Lily’s dressing room, Mom was helping Lily pin her hair back. In the mirror, Lily smiled at me.
“Doing okay?” I asked, coming up beside her.
She laughed. “You mean, should you go ahead and pull the car around?”
“Har-har.” I knew Lily wasn’t going anywhere, but it was a relief to hear her joking about it. We weren’t pretending that everything was perfect. “Just want to make sure your feet are nice and toasty.”
My mother laughed but didn’t say anything. She’d been all too happy to hear that Lily had refused to let Dad come to the wedding, but she still seemed distracted as she gathered their prep stuff and packed it away in a large tote bag.
Lily snatched up her bouquet and moved her shoulders in a little happy dance that made me laugh, but then I remembered that I’d stuck Tom’s wedding ring, in its little box, in the glove compartment of my mom’s car late last night before Lily and I had our ballroom dancing finals marathon, so that there was no way I could forget it this morning.
“Damn. I left Tom’s ring in the car. I’ll be right back.” I ducked out and rushed down the hallway toward the exit, the same exit Lily and I had escaped through that day so long before. The fact that the whole world was different now was both a relief and a point of terror. It was a world I didn’t recognize anymore, but I thought maybe I could live with that.
It was freezing outside, and I had little protection from it
, as my dress was knee-length, strapless, and I was wearing open-toed shoes. I bounced around on my tiptoes trying to get the door unlocked and then leaned down to rummage through the glove box.
With the ring box in hand, I turned back to the church, ready to make a run for it, but stopped when I saw the figure against the side of the building, my body completely forgetting the chill in the air.
For a second, I thought maybe my mind was conjuring some strange déjà vu image from all those months ago because there he was, standing in the same spot he’d been in then, watching me. But everything was different. His hair was longer, curling around his ears, and there was no cigarette in his hand. He was in a slightly wrinkled button-down and black slacks, and seeing him there was somehow the greatest and most confusing thing that had happened to me, it felt like, ever.
He wasn’t smoking. He wasn’t doing anything. He was watching me with his hands tucked in his pockets as if he’d been waiting for me, as if he knew I would come out of that door at any moment. Maybe he was out here because he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go in and see me at all. Maybe he’d been ready to bolt.
I walked toward him slowly, but with his eyes on me, I suddenly couldn’t remember how fast I normally walked. Was I walking at a normal pace?
“What are you doing here?” My hands were shaking so much that I dropped the ring box, and Michael hurried to pick it up for me. He held it out to me, but I couldn’t focus enough to take it from him. I needed to steady my hands.
He held on to the box and met my eye. “Lily invited me.”
Of course she did. Lily, the greatest sister that ever lived. I didn’t even know what to say. This was all I’d wanted since the second he left, just to have him standing here in front of me so I could tell him how sorry I was for everything, but now here he was, and I had no idea what to say. He was looking at me, too, saying nothing.
Then the church bell rang so loud that I jumped. The bell ringing meant that it was noon and time to start the wedding. I snatched the ring out of Michael’s hand. “I have to go inside. You should get a seat.” I rushed inside, oddly happy for an excuse to get away. I wasn’t prepared for this. I wasn’t ready to say all the things I’d wanted to say, all the things that ran through my mind again and again in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep. I had never expected to run into him here, today.
How to Breathe Underwater Page 25