Love Lettering

by Kate Clayborn

  All of the air is sucked out of the apartment, out of both of us. Sibby looks absolutely shocked that she’s said it, that she’s brought up the worst possible thing.

  The family secret that brought me here.

  The secret, I guess, that led to me encroaching on her New York City dream.

  I don’t know if I look shocked. I don’t even know if I feel shocked. After all, I’ve been here before, and recently, too. This is where pushing, where fighting can lead. I’ve known it all along.

  It can hurt.

  It can hurt so, so bad.

  “That’s beneath you,” I say, my voice cracking.

  The tears filling her eyes spill over, tracking in gray-black tears down her cheeks. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  I know she is, and it’s more than the tears that tells me so. It’s in the set of her shoulders; it’s in the way she’s rubbing her thumb up and down along her index finger, a nervous habit. It’s in the way she looks at me, full of regret.

  The part of me who sat across a table from Lachelle and took her very good advice, the part of me that made certain I confronted Reid before I slept with him, the part of me that, not even a half hour ago, told Lark about my boundaries related to my work—that part of me is saying, Stay. Stay and work it out.

  But that part of me is pretty new. That part of me doesn’t have enough practice for this.

  So I do the thing that feels most necessary for escaping this awful, awful hurt.

  I leave.

  It’s too soon.

  Too soon to show up unannounced.

  Too soon to cry in front of him.

  Too soon to tell him the reason why.

  And yet.

  I left my apartment with nothing but my big, sloppy bag and my big, sloppy feelings, and I took the same walk—well, in the other direction—Reid took two weeks ago, all the way across the soaring, spectacular Brooklyn Bridge. Somewhere along the way I’d noticed, with a distant sort of awareness, all the lettering scribbled along its various beams, graffitied proclamations of protest, of identity, of love. I’d thought, That should interest you, but still I’d turned my eyes down, watching my shoes pass determinedly, rhythmically, over the worn wooden planks.

  Once I’d descended into the city, it’d been firmly in the middle of rush hour—Lower Manhattan in honking, people-swarming action, a busy anonymity that’d felt unusually welcome to me. It was hard not to walk straighter amid all that focus, all that determined hustle to get home after a pressured workweek, and so maybe that’s why I’d descended the subway steps at City Hall without stopping to consider the too soon-ness of what I was about to do.

  It isn’t until I’m outside his building that the full force of what I’ve done, where I’ve come, hits me. I hold my phone as though it’s hot to the touch, switching it back and forth between my hands, uncertain. Text him and say I’m here? Text him but don’t say I’m here? Forget texting him altogether and walk away, walk off the rising threat of a sob that’s been swelling behind my sternum since Sibby spoke to me?

  Before I have time to decide, though, he’s there, striding up the street in that perfect, upright way: dark suit, the jacket folded and draped neatly over his arm. Another white shirt, fitted slim, the top button undone, the sleeves buttoned at the wrists. Blue tie, loosened, pulling to the right from the strap of the bag crossing his body.

  Face, face, face.

  And as soon as I see him, my own crumples.

  I don’t know how he gets to me so fast, but he does, his arms coming around me, his body curving over mine, his voice low and soothing in my ear.

  “Meg, honey,” he says, and I think, Too soon? But I also don’t think that. I think Reid calling me honey is actually exactly like honey. Slow and thick and golden.

  A balm.

  I like it so much.

  “What happened?”

  “Sibby,” I manage, my face against his perfect shirt—why am I always messing up his nice shirts?—and for a few seconds he only holds me tighter, closer.

  “Let me take you inside,” he says, and I nod against his chest, probably making the makeup/tears/snot-smearing situation worse, but he doesn’t seem to care. He keeps his arm around me as he lets us into the building, his posture straightening as we enter the lobby, as if he’s daring anyone around to look at me, to judge me for loudly sniffling, for unceremoniously swiping my hands across my face.

  Inside he takes my big, sloppy bag and settles me on his too-stiff couch; he shuffles around his kitchen and returns with a cup of tea, holding it in his two hands as though it is his very own heart, and that makes me cry even harder, and for long minutes afterward all he does is sit next to me, his arm around my shoulders strong and warm and soothing, the cup of tea unfurling its steaming comfort into the air from its spot on the coffee table.

  And then I tell him about the fight.

  He’s quiet for almost all of it, and that’s what I expect—Reid’s always been a good listener, a determined listener, and even as I’m telling it I can feel the way he hears it, the way he hears all the pauses at the hardest parts, the way he feels my breath catch with tension.

  But when I tell him about the worst thing—some big “I’m not your real mom” scandal—he stiffens and leans away from me, tipping my face up to his.

  “What does that mean?” he says, his brows lowered in concern, or maybe something closer to anger. I feel an unexpected, new pang of sadness, but strangely, it’s not about my parents, about the “scandal” Sibby referred to. It’s about Sibby, Sibby and Reid, about how telling him this story means something forever about how he’ll feel toward her. My very best friend and my . . .

  Nope, I scold myself. You only like him, remember?

  But I tell him anyway.

  “It means that when I was nineteen I found out my father was a serial cheater. And that . . . well. That I was the result of one of his . . . affairs, I guess? Though that’s probably too strong a word for it. I think it was one night.”

  The rest of it, surprisingly, comes easily. I tell Reid about my parents’ constant fighting: how for long, lonely years of my childhood I didn’t know any different, I thought it was how all parents were. I tell him about how it worsened as I grew older: more distant but also more snide, the passive-aggressive barbs they would trade with each other through a veneer of politeness. I tell him about how I’d tried to be their arbiter and their adhesive; how I’d always been good at stopping them from fighting; how even in spite of their unhappiness with each other, they had at least seemed to share a happiness with me.

  And then I tell him about my birth certificate.

  “I was supposed to have it for school,” I say. “Really, I was supposed to have it even before classes started, but my parents kept putting me off about it. My mom called the school, somehow talked them into letting me start without it. And my dad—he said he’d lost it, had thought it was in a safe he kept at work. We’d have to order a new one, he’d said, but every time I’d ask about it, worrying about registering for the next semester, he’d put me off.”

  Just leave it alone, Meg.

  Reid’s jaw tightens, and he moves, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear.

  “Anyway, I guess I should’ve known—or I don’t know, suspected—earlier. There’d been some difficulty when I got my driver’s license, too, but I guess I hadn’t really paid much attention. I don’t know if I got old enough, or curious enough, or what. So I requested a new one.”

  I still remember looking at it. Fourth line down, . This is a mistake, I’d thought, staring down at the letters there, precise and mechanically made. Who was Darcy Hollowell?

  My mother’s name is Margaret, I’d thought. My mother’s name is the same as mine.

  But even as I’d thought it, I’d known. I’d felt it click into place as if it were a puzzle piece, a thousand tiny inconsistencies from my childhood suddenly making a painful sort of sense.

  Those letters were true.

  This
part of the story, of course, is the worst: the revelation and what it led to, my parents presenting a unified front in the face of my sobbing outrage, the way they’d gently condescended to me as they’d presented their explanation. My father and an “indiscretion.” A woman who’d decided to carry her pregnancy to term, but would place the baby up for adoption. My mother, who had struggled with her own ability to get pregnant, who had wanted to have a child for years and years.

  And me, an imperfect solution.

  More and more imperfect as the years went on, apparently: my dad still full of indiscretion, and my mom increasingly full of resentment—at him and, I suspected, at me. I was their adhesive, but in the worst possible way.

  They’d been stuck together for years.

  “Meg,” Reid whispers at a certain point, all sympathy, and that gives me the strength to finish it cleanly, no more tears.

  “It was a relief for them, in the end. Sort of a . . . ‘the truth will set you free’ situation, I guess. They told me that night they’d be divorcing. I’d never seen them get along better, when they told me. Like peas and carrots.”

  It had been, ultimately, what had hurt the most. That I’d been some kind of excuse for them, for staying together in a household that was poisoned by their fighting. That they’d used me, in a way, to keep themselves from having to make a decision about their marriage.

  I had screamed at them. The worst night of my life. I left for New York the next week. Six months later, overwhelmed with curiosity, I’d contacted Darcy Hollowell and had gotten a very short, very polite reply that ended with a wish for me to “reconcile” with my parents and to “have a happy, healthy life.”

  It hadn’t been difficult to see the hidden message there, and we’ve never been in touch again.

  When I finally sag back against him, my cheek resting on his broad chest, I notice that there’s no more swirling, rising steam from the teacup. I feel guilty for not drinking it, Reid’s heart-in-hand offering, but his body has been the best kind of comfort, even though it feels stiffer now. Even though he hasn’t said anything in a long time.

  Too soon to tell him, probably.

  But finally, he speaks again, his voice soft. “Did you ever forgive them?”

  I close my eyes, thinking. It’s taken years between us, to get back to a decent place, a place where I call each of them regularly. Longer with my dad, and it’s still only the weather and the Buckeyes when we talk, and of course the occasional slip when I’m sending him a hand-drawn message of congratulations. With my mom, it’s the weather, too, but also garage sales and trips she goes on and a man named David she calls her “companion,” which is somehow both slightly gross and not-so-slightly adorable. I go home for Christmas, and I bounce awkwardly between their new houses: my dad and Jennifer and Jennifer’s three bichon terriers in a house so similar to the one I grew up in that I hate sleeping there. My mom and her tidy, tiny-gardened townhouse, a few things of David’s tucked away discreetly in her closet, happier than she ever was when I was still at home.

  “I understand them,” I say, after a minute. “I think they love me. I think they were trying to protect me.”

  “And themselves,” he adds.

  I nod, and feel a fresh press of tears behind my eyes. It feels impossible that I have any at all left, but it’s a reminder of what brought me here in the first place.

  “That’s what Sibby’s been trying to do. Protect herself. And I couldn’t let it go. I—”

  “She shouldn’t have said it,” Reid says. “There’s no excuse.”

  I close my eyes and nod, and I’m not sure if it’s because I agree or because I’ve entirely exhausted myself. That fight with Sibby might as well have happened days ago, years ago, for all the strange, sad distance I feel from it. When I try to think of what I’ll do next to try to repair the damage, nothing comes to mind. My brain is a slate that’s been wiped entirely clean—dull black and not a piece of chalk in sight.

  I think fleetingly about my sketches, my deadline, dreading the thought of trying to return to them when I feel this way. I’m so tired that I suspect I could fall asleep right here, with this too-soon man I like so much holding me.

  Except.

  “Your couch is awful,” I say, sitting up and wriggling my butt against it. “It’s like sitting on pizza boxes.”

  He laughs softly, clearly surprised at the change in topic. “It came with the place.”

  “Ew.” I dramatically hold out my arms so my skin is no longer touching it and wonder idly if someone in this building has a blacklight we can borrow.

  He reaches out, gently rubs his thumb across my cheek. “It was new. This is a furnished rental.”

  Oh.

  It’s another one of those reminders for me, the ones I’ve been trying so hard to take to heart about Reid’s impermanence here. The too soon-ness of this whole evening reasserts itself. It’ll always be too soon with me and Reid, because Reid is leaving.

  I drop my arms, hoping the motion hides my sigh. Suddenly, coming to this apartment feels like as bad of an idea as staying in my own. I open my mouth to say something—maybe a casual Let’s go get a sandwich and walk and pretend this never happened—but Reid interrupts me.

  “Do you want to go for a drive tomorrow?”

  I blink at him.

  A drive.

  How could he possibly know?

  “We could get out of the city,” he says, a note of caution in his voice. “For some fresh air. Distance, you know?”

  “Yes, I know exactly.” At the very thought of it—wind in my hair, buildings and trees streaking past the windows, a break from everything here—I feel lighter already. I almost bounce on this pizza box couch.

  “Where would we go?

  Reid clears his throat, shifts as if he also hates this couch. “I’ve been meaning to get down to Maryland before—well, I haven’t been in a while. It’s a short trip, under three hours if we leave early enough.”

  “Oh. To meet your family?”

  “We could—that is, I could say you’re a friend from the city.” When I don’t answer right away, he stands, gathering the teacup from the table. “It’s too soon, I’m sure.”

  “Reid.” I still him with a hand on the outside of his thigh, the closest place to him I can reach from where I sit. He looks down at me, that faint flush on his cheekbones. Too soon, he’d said, his mind a mirror of my own.

  The loop around my heart squeezes, a warning and a warming all at once. This is no way to protect myself, probably, crossing another threshold of closeness with Reid. Leaving the safe haven of the city, the only place we’ve ever known each other. Seeing him with the people who made him who he is.

  But tonight, he held me while I cried. He listened to me talk about my falling-apart friendship and my fallen-apart family. He knew exactly what I needed. He protected me.

  “I’d like to go,” I say.

  His eyes light—same as the blue sky outside your windshield on a clear day.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Oh, yeah. A drive like that? Think of the games we could play.”

  His mouth pulls to the side, that funny concentration face he has. “License plates. Highway signs. Billboards.”

  I shrug casually, standing up and taking the teacup from his hands. I take a sip of its now-cool, bottom-of-a-flowerpot taste, and wince dramatically just to hear Reid laugh quietly again.

  I press up on my tiptoes and kiss him, reaching up a hand to touch his sandpapery, long-day-on-the-job cheek, and he immediately pulls me closer. When I pull my mouth away from his, I move so I can whisper in his ear.

  “Sounds to me like it’s right on time.”

  Chapter 16

  “Well, I think it’s time for tea, don’t you?”

  Cynthia Sutherland asks this question of the table exactly one hundred and twenty minutes after our arrival at the Sutherland family home, a small, well-maintained ranch in a somewhat run-down northeast Maryland suburb. Normally
, counting the minutes—okay, counting anything, really—isn’t my style, but over the last two hours I’ve learned, bit by bit, how keeping track of numbers might be important in a household like this one.

  Mostly it’s a matter of the residents themselves. Cynthia, Reid’s mom—a petite, smiling woman with a head full of dark curls who retired from her job as a high school teacher only last year—has the kind of time-aware, resources-aware efficiency of a woman who has raised seven children in a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom house. In her kitchen, every move she makes seems calculated to get the most from the space; at her dining table, every turn in conversation she directs seems calculated for balance, for making sure no one dominates. Maybe it ought to seem disconcerting, too mechanical, but somehow it doesn’t. It only seems as though you’ve been put in the hands of someone capable and kind, someone who wants to make the most of her time with you.

  Thomas Sutherland—a man who looks so like an older version of Reid that I’d stammered in shock at his initial, sternly put “Good afternoon” to me—is more literally a numbers guy, an accountant who works out of a tidy home office at the front of the house. He’s quiet, observant, blunt when he speaks, and within three minutes of learning about my work he asked me whether I was careful about the deductions I took for my supplies. My lips had quirked in a smile, my eyes catching Reid’s across the table, and for a second I think we’d both forgotten about numbers, remembering instead letters he once wrote to me: I was nervous.

  Finally, there’s Reid’s sister, Cady. Twenty years old with long hair in mermaid shades of pink, blue, and purple, a dye job that would cost hundreds of dollars at even the cheapest salons in New York, and only six months to go in the cosmetology program she’s in. Cady—bright and talkative and obviously something of a mystery to her more reserved parents and brother—counts herself in years of distance from her older siblings, none of whom are here for our spontaneous visit. Eight years younger than the youngest, Seth; ten years from Ryan; eleven years from Reid; thirteen from Owen; sixteen from the twins, Connor and Garrett. These numbers, it’s clear, matter to her, some way that she defines herself in relation to siblings who are so much older than her, and even though I don’t have any experience with that kind of count, I get the sense that in her adolescent years, Cady probably felt very much like an only child.