I’d have gladly followed Wyatt off the nearest cliff. And I wasn’t alone in that because he was a magnet. Guys all wanted to be his best friend and girls couldn’t get enough of him. He always had someone calling him at odd hours. Jealous and a few steps behind, I waited for my turn.
But when he died, I faded even more into the background. That’s where I’m most comfortable anyway. I deleted all my social media accounts and dropped out of everything not specifically required for a standard high school diploma. I disappeared.
I tried to do what was expected. I clammed up around my parents, picked up the chores they dropped and kept the business of our life going. My family had lived in Canning Mills, a suburban utopia outside of Pittsburgh, for a couple of generations, so we had a steady stream of people stopping by to wish us well.
I washed and returned the hundreds of casserole dishes, and placed phone calls to wider and wider circles of people who hadn’t heard yet but for some reason needed to know.
The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt my parents more, so I ate my grief and steeled my resolve. This gave me time to steady my reactions, to learn to hide in the crevices of life. Chaos seemed to dog our steps and it would no doubt find us in Wyoming, so it was best to be ready. If I were betting, I’d lay it all on my mom causing the next catastrophe.
When Dad broke the news that he’d accepted a job with a hotel in Wyoming, she told him he was insane. He’d been a senior vice president for the largest marketing firm in Pittsburgh, so he pulled hyperbole out of his briefcase. “Crime is nonexistent in this town! People don’t lock their doors! There are probably only seven hundred kids in the high school!”
Mom, a fine artist who’s had shows in major galleries and wasn’t easily fooled, rolled her eyes. “We can’t leave Wyatt here,” she said. “We can’t leave our home.”
Their marriage had steadily disintegrated over the months. They’d gone from being blissful to bickering. Mom picked fights with Dad every day.
She did it in a whisper, through gritted teeth. She did it loudly, following him as he pushed a lawnmower through the overgrown grass. She stepped right through the muddy tracks that the mower left in the soggy ground, pointing her finger in his face and screaming at him to look at her, not caring that the neighbors were watching. She watched him from the breakfast table as he came in hunting coffee and sprang it on him before he could even take a sip.
My dad endured her near constant threats with an inhuman patience. He simply nodded his head and waited. So while it appeared we were all together in this move, we really weren’t. We were limping along and withholding judgment for the time being.
My phone buzzed in the passenger seat. I pushed the hands-free button and waited for Wyatt’s best friend Harris to talk. Whenever possible, he and I connected at four o’clock—the time Harris and Wyatt had run together since they were fifteen and up-and-coming long distance stars.
Sometimes we wouldn’t say anything, but having the line open between us, just in case, helped us both.
“What’s that banging in the background?” I said.
“I’m feeding the dogs. Hold on.”
I drove another mile listening to Harris’s dogs panting and crunching food, and to Harris speaking to them like they were children. Lots of good girl and who’s your daddy. Finally, a door shut and I could tell he’d closed himself in his room.
“How far away are you?” he said.
“I don’t know…a few hundred miles? It’s raining.”
“Yeah, here, too.” Harris clicked around on his laptop and then one of his favorite bands played softly in the background. “What’s your mom’s psychosis rating today?”
“Dad’s letting her drive so she must be functioning at a higher level. Or he slipped her a pill. The other option was to hitch her car to the moving truck and she won the argument against that.”
Harris snorted. “I can’t believe it. She was always my favorite mom before. My God, she’s Adele Kavanagh—famous artist—and she walked around with broccoli between her teeth half the time.”
“You’re weird,” I said.
“Nunh-unh.” He used his ten-year-old boy voice. “You and your mom were cool together.”
He was right. My mom and I used to be very close. I always thought she loved Wyatt more, but she loved me, too, with the strength of a mother bear. She counseled me through skinned knees, stringy hair, training bras, braces, and the savage meanness of girls at school.
She welcomed my independence—no, it was more—she practically forced my independence. She wanted me to see the world through clear eyes. My ability to form my own opinions contrary to the ‘temperature’ of the crowd in the room came from her. My understanding of words like deference and humility and the knowledge of how to apply them came from her.
I chuckled under my breath and Harris said, “What?”
“I was just thinking about how she used to sing with us in the car, at the top of her lungs with all the windows down.”
“Yeah, Wyatt loved that,” Harris said. “Remember when she would dance with us in your living room? Like tribal dances and stomping and crazy stuff?”
“Crazy stuff.” I’d lost so much more than Wyatt. I’d lost my mom.
“So did your parents thank you for all the crap you did to get ready for this move?” Harris said.
“No, but it’s not like they were able to do it all. I didn’t really expect thanks.”
Dad had left me lists of things to handle, and I would grit my teeth and make myself do them. Luckily, the hotel agreed to pack our house. We gladly let the movers wade through the months of jumbled sadness that had built up. I followed behind a woman as she took down picture after picture and wrapped them in bubble wrap—the huge bubbles distorting our faces like fun house mirrors.
We didn’t even apologize or feel awkward. As I sat on my bed, a stranger packed my room. I silently wished that he could pack up the mess in my head, too.
“Why isn’t your dad selling the house?”
“Because he couldn’t bring himself to do it,” I said. “You should’ve seen it this morning—all clean and organized. We left most of the big furniture. Most of Mom’s paintings are still hanging. It looks like we’ll be back in a few days.”
“What’s the new house in Chapin like?”
“It’s not new. It’s old—like circa 1918 old. Dad said it’s small and right in the middle of town.”
“It’s a long way from Pittsburgh, little sister.”
“Seventeen hundred miles,” I said.
Harris and I both got quiet, and I thought about those miles that stretched between us already. I pictured a map with a tiny Jeep wobbling along the crooked I70 line. Back in Pittsburgh, there was a tiny Harris leaning out a window waving at a tiny me.
“Did you notice Wyatt’s Facebook page appeared again last night?” Harris said. “I got a freaking friend request at midnight. His track picture popped up with the little, ‘Do you know Wyatt Kavanagh?’ message.”
“Who’s doing that?” The sour taste of old anger filled my mouth. Harris and I had deleted all of Wyatt’s accounts a couple of weeks after he died. Neither of us could stand that people who hardly knew him were posting about how close they’d been to him or how they’d had a crush on him. Everyone claimed to have been the last person he talked to. Soon after we took down his page, someone registered a new account in his name. No matter how many times Harris complained and had it removed, it always came back.
“I think it might be Sophie,” he said. “She stalked him enough when he was alive to make me suspicious. I’ll talk to her today.”
“Tell her I would really appreciate it if she’d leave him alone.”
Harris laughed. “You don’t have a lot of bite behind those words, though.” He called me on being too sweet all the time. “Listen, Meg, I’ve been thinking. I probably shouldn’t call you everyday.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be trying to settle in at Pe
nn and figuring out how to get along with a jerk roommate from Ohio who will never be Wyatt. And you need to make a break and start over without all this—”
“I want you to call me everyday.”
“Well, I can’t,” he murmured. “I can’t.”
I hated leaving Harris. He’d stuck with me through the darkest days. And I wasn’t the only one who needed this relationship. Harris had lost his best friend. They’d had plans for the future. They were going to take over the University of Pennsylvania, make names for themselves, and date the hottest girls. Probably not, but together they could make anyone believe anything.
“Promise me you’ll text me sometimes, though.” I didn’t want to beg, but I would, if necessary.
“I promise. God, little sis.”
“I know.”
“This is so hard,” he said. “It feels like I’m losing him again.”
Harris took a shaky breath that sounded exaggerated through the Jeep’s speakers. “I know what Wyatt would say to you. He’d say, ‘Meggie, I want you to move on and be smart and make friends. Ride a horse or date a cowboy or something. It’s Wyoming, right? Or don’t date a cowboy, ’cause I’d probably have to hurt him. And quit wearing miniskirts, for crying out loud.’”
I giggled and cried at the same time. Harris had always done a spot-on Wyatt impression.
“And I love you,” Harris said, his voice growing impossibly soft. “He’d say, ‘I love you.’”
“I know,” I whispered. “He loved you, too.”
Harris ended the call quietly. I couldn’t think of how to say goodbye, either.
I wasn’t good at saying goodbye. I still talked to Wyatt every day—and not his ghost exactly. It was my secret. He felt very flesh and blood to me. He warmed the space that I occupied. I could hear his voice. At night I wrote him letters, which I believed he read.
I knew he was in the Jeep with me on the highway headed west. His voice startled me out of the dazed, tunnel vision that I was feeling. There was silence…and then there was his voice, deep, gentle, and quiet.
“Don’t be afraid, Meg,” he said.
“But I am afraid.”
“You’ll be fine, and I’m here if you need me.” His warmth lapped against the windshield, and made my eyes close for a second.
I tried to ignore the other sound—the sound that was not Wyatt’s voice, the one sound I dreaded most—the ringing that glass makes just before it bursts. The tinny warning you get, if you’re sensitive enough, that somewhere something is getting ready to shatter. Maybe I’m the only one tuned in enough to the vibrations of breakable things…maybe it was just because my body resonated with the same frequency.
I was pretty young when I came to what I thought was a perfectly logical conclusion:
All glass will break.
I am made of glass.
Therefore, I will break.
FOUR
We spent the first night of our haul to Wyoming in St. Louis. We were asleep by ten and back on the road by six in the morning. Our second night, we stopped in Hays, Kansas and checked into a generic highway motel. We’d stayed at a lot of these and I used to love them. People who are running from something stay at highway motels. And that’s something I could get behind even now.
We picked through our luggage for the few things we needed for the night. My mom slowed down as we walked toward the stairs, so I waited for her. Her face was free of makeup and open in a way that looked like she expected the universe to answer her questions at any time. She was beautiful.
“You feeling okay?” I said. I hadn’t figured out the new check-in phrase to use with her. Before, instead of, “Hi, how are you?” we’d said, “You okay?” when we saw each other. That seemed like a stupid question with no good answer these days. I’d tried other variations, but each simple greeting felt like cotton in my mouth.
“I don’t know. Tell me how you’re feeling, Meg.” She caught up and gave me a one-armed hug and then left her hand on my arm. If you didn’t know she was an artist, you would wonder what such delicate hands could do. These hands could create new worlds on canvas.
“Just tired,” I said, shrugging. “I’m feeling every one of those eleven hundred miles.”
She stopped walking and glanced around, her features melting. “Are we that far from Pittsburgh?”
“Yes.”
She looked like a trapped animal. “Do you feel like a rubber band being stretched?”
I swallowed hard and stared at the enormous Kansas sky. I did feel like a rubber band. One that Wyatt was pinching between his fingers in Pittsburgh and Dad was stretching to Wyoming.
“I do,” I said.
“It may be too far.” Her eyes looked wild. “I told Jack that Wyoming is too far!” She squared her shoulders and followed Dad to the room, leaving me behind to consider whether her rubber band would snap back before we crossed the next state line. There was nothing stopping her from making a U-turn on the highway and heading home.
After she showered, she took her nightly cocktail of pills and climbed into bed, refusing to answer any of my dad’s questions. Just before she dozed off, she picked up her head and searched the room until her gaze landed on my face. I smiled at her, unable to tamp down my hope that she would be herself again. But the moment passed quickly and within seconds she was drooling on the scratchy hotel pillowcase.
My dad got lost in his laptop so I snuck away from the room and found a chair next to the pool. Our motel shared a parking lot with a country bar where the cowboys lined up around the building smoking and laughing.
Do Wyoming cowboys look like these—sort of like grown-ups in cowboy costumes?
“I’ve died and this is cowboy hell,” I whispered to no one but Wyatt.
In the darkness behind me, someone chuckled. I jumped and turned to look. My dad made his way toward me, walking barefooted on the cracked concrete. He pulled a chair next to mine and sank into it, edging lower and lower until his chin touched his chest.
“Cowboy hell,” he said, laughing. “Did you see the guy in the white hat?”
“Yeah, he’s all ‘Hi-yo Silver, away!’”
Dad snorted. “Tonto told him to go sleep it off.”
We laughed quietly, enjoying a moment that felt like all the nice moments before.
“Is Mom still asleep?”
“Yes.” He sighed. “I was worried about you. So here I am, kid. Now we talk.”
“Did you take the comforters off the beds? You know they’re disgusting, right?”
“Yes and yes.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, always patient for whatever came next in life.
“Why do cheap hotels give you stationery?” I tried out a topic that felt safe. Our family had always been comfortable with comedy. “Is it so you can write your loved ones a nice little note before you slit your wrists?”
“Meg.” He released a slow breath that meant he was disappointed with me. “Let’s not waste any more time. Let’s talk about how grateful I am that you’re here, willing to change your life so we can be together.”
What was the message behind those words? That I had a choice? That there had been a possibility we wouldn’t be together? That my old life was gone? I reached over and squeezed his hand. “You’re welcome.”
“What’s on your mind tonight, honey? Wyatt? Your mom? Chapin?”
“Yes.”
“Me, too,” he said. “All of the above. Your mom is okay tonight, though.”
“That’s the medication, Dad.”
She’d been surviving on anxiety meds for so long now that I wondered if she knew where she was half the time.
The depression fairy reached down to touch members of my mom’s family—full of artist types—often. Something about the creative brain seemed prone to too much ruminating on life. They were a danger to themselves. Add something awful to their lives, like, say, the death of an only son, and all bets were off.
“Actually, I was thinking about Aunt Leslie,”
I said. “Do you think Mom—”
“No.” Dad couldn’t bear for me to finish that thought. He swiveled in his chair to face me, straining the cracked plastic. He shocked me with the force of the word. “No, I don’t think your mom would ever in a million years make the same choice. Leslie had a complicated existence. You were too young. You don’t remember.”
Before Wyatt’s death, the most tragic happening in my family was when my mom’s sister Leslie committed suicide because she had untreated postpartum depression. She hung herself with one of those baby bouncy swings mounted in a doorframe. She wrapped the canvas straps around her neck and sat down on the floor.
“Your mom will fight harder.” Dad always leaned into generosity when he talked about my mom’s character, like he was leaning into a mountain so he wouldn’t fall off. To hear it from him, she was superhuman in her capacity to walk through fire unscathed. “She’ll come back to us.”
I stared at the honky-tonk’s neon signs burning through the dark and thought about what Robin would say right now. She’d tell me that I couldn’t expect more from either of my parents than they were able to give. She’d remind me that we were tired.
“Do you think Wyatt’s grieving, too?”
My dad bit his bottom lip. I could barely see his front teeth holding on while he considered the question. “No, I don’t. I think Wyatt is at peace.” He reached over and took my hand.
“Hard to be at peace when your last moment on earth was violent,” I said.
He traced the bumps of my knuckles with his thumb. “That’s just it, though. Moments on earth probably don’t matter much anymore to him.”
I tried not to let that hurt my feelings because those moments were real. We were real. And the moments we’d had mattered.
“He had some pretty good moments,” I whispered.
My dad chuckled. “He did, didn’t he? He sure did like Hannah. For years.”
Glass Girl (A Young Adult Novel) Page 2