A sob escaped Cressida’s throat, and for a moment she covered her face with her hands.
“He said he knew I probably would not want a full-fledged relationship with him, but that he’d be willing to take anything I could give him, even if it were just an hour or two once in a while. An hour or two. Like I was some kind of—”
She broke off, crying openly.
Finally, she mostly stopped crying and dabbed at her eyes with her fingers.
“I felt so gross and humiliated. And stupid. I felt so fucking stupid because he probably didn’t mean any of those things about me being talented and special, and I had believed him. I had felt so good about myself. That’s pathetic, isn’t it?”
“No,” said Avery. “I bet he meant what he said.”
Cressida blinked at Avery, her eyes wide and confused, like a little kid’s. “You do?”
“But even if he didn’t, that doesn’t mean you’re not talented or special. He doesn’t get to decide that.”
Later, Avery would be stunned that she’d reassured Cressida in that way and had said things that amounted to defending Cressida against her own father. But she realized that it was because, at that moment, her mind hadn’t completely absorbed the fact that the man who had sat at that table and made Cressida feel humiliated actually was her father.
“Anyway, then he reached across the table and held my hand, and before I could pull away, I saw your dad’s face change and he pulled away. He’d seen this guy from work watching us, and that was it. Your dad got fired. I quit. And people started spreading rumors about me being a blackmailing whore and my dad putting me up to it. And I wouldn’t even care what people said about me. But my dad—” Cressida started crying again, quietly this time. “He’s the best person and he’s had a shitty year. He got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And now people are saying terrible things about him. They’re all lies.”
Avery remembered the man with the cane, how Cressida’s face had lit up at the sight of him.
“I’m so sorry that happened,” she said.
“It’s not your fault. You know what’s crazy?”
“What?”
“For a long time, I felt sorry for your dad. I hated what he did, but I felt bad for him. He seemed—lost. Like a person who had lost his way.”
“He did. He wasn’t always like that. My mom says he got depressed.”
“That’s awful. But even though I felt sorry for him, when he kept calling me, even after he got fired and it should’ve been all over, I started to hate him.”
Avery froze.
“You’re saying he kept calling you, even after my mom found out, after I found out?”
Cressida nodded. “Every day, sometimes more than once a day, for a week. I answered the first time because I didn’t recognize the number, and he told me he wanted to see me. I told him not to call me ever again. But he didn’t stop. He left messages, saying that he loved me and needed to see me. He said he thought he would kill himself if I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to block him, but what if he did it? What if he killed himself because I blocked him? But then, after a week, the calls stopped. I thought it was all over, and then, two weeks later, he called again. I didn’t even listen to the message. I just deleted it and blocked his number. I deleted all his messages because I couldn’t even stand to have them on my phone, but now, I wish I’d saved them, so I could show people that my dad and I didn’t do what people are saying, that it was him pursuing me.”
Avery wrapped her arms around her stomach.
“No. He wouldn’t have done that. I don’t believe you.”
Cressida’s blue eyes regarded Avery with kindness. “Look, maybe he just wanted to see me to apologize.”
“Take me back to school.”
Cressida started up the car, but before she put it into reverse to back out of the parking space, she said, “It took a lot of guts for you to get in touch with me and for you to sit and listen to all of this. I just want you to know that.”
“Take me back,” said Avery, squeezing her eyes shut. “Please, please, please just take me back.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ginny
“I’d like to tell you something. It’s about what happened between us, after the fire. Wait. No. That’s not exactly right. It’s about how I behaved after the fire, when I failed you as a friend. And I want you to know that what I have to say is not an excuse because nothing excuses how I acted. I don’t expect you to absolve me. Absolutely not. So maybe it’s an explanation, although that also sounds too tidy. But at the very least it’s a true story, one that’s finally mine to tell, and I hope you’ll listen. But you obviously don’t owe me that or anything else, and if you don’t want to hear it, I’ll understand. I really will. But if you do want to hear it, please know that I don’t expect you to say anything right away. Or ever, if that’s better for you. It’s why I called you on the phone instead of seeing you in person. You should have time to absorb and sort out and think about this story—or to do nothing at all with it. If you want to talk about it, you can call in an hour or a month or a year. Whenever. And if you don’t, you shouldn’t have to, and I will never, if we see each other again, which I hope with all my heart we will, I will never bring it up again, ever. I promise.”
By the time I’d finished saying this to Gray, I was out of breath. It was a mouthful and also, as I was acutely aware, a painfully stilted, qualifier-riddled way to start a conversation. But I was trying to do what I should have done twenty years earlier: put Gray’s feelings ahead of my own. Would telling him the story be an unburdening for me? Of course. Would it be the best possible gift if after I told it, he forgave me? Yes, I can’t lie. But those could not be the reasons I was telling him. Gray had had a friend who loved him and that friend deserted him at the cruelest possible time and he never knew why. And maybe he’d stopped caring about why, but I didn’t think so, because what I knew, as surely as I knew anything, was that Gray had loved me, too. He had loved me and I had let him down and he was a good, kind person, and he deserved to know the story.
Before I’d even caught my breath, Gray was talking.
“I do want to hear,” he said. “I’ll listen to whatever you have to say.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I told him. I told him the complete story, from overhearing Trevor’s lie about starting the fire to hearing Trevor’s truth about telling the lie. It didn’t take long. It struck me as funny: that the story of how I’d misjudged my brother and betrayed my friends and lost so many of the parts of myself I’d loved best, the story of how Zinny had been frightened right out of her Zinnyness could be summed up in ten minutes and a handful of sentences.
At the end, I said, “I couldn’t have told you or anyone that Trevor set the fire. But I could’ve worked harder at staying your friend.”
After a few long seconds, Gray said, in a quiet voice, “So now I’m supposed to think about this, right?”
“Yes, if you want to think about it. And get back to me soon or later or never, as you choose,” I said.
“Okay,” said Gray. “Thank you. And thank you for telling me.”
“Thank you for hearing me out,” I said.
I’d told him he shouldn’t respond right away, that he should give himself time to digest what I’d said, and I’d meant it; I had. If I suffered a tiny hypocritical sting of disappointment that he hadn’t brushed aside that advice and verbally flung open his arms to forgive me on the spot, I also felt my reservoir of peace get a little fuller.
One thing, I thought, I did one thing right.
I would need all the peace I could get because next up was calling Daniel.
I knew Daniel closed his veterinary office early on Fridays, so I thought I’d ask him to meet me at the dog park, but as soon as I called him, while the phone was still ringing, I changed my mind. We don’t get many purely safe havens in this life, and even if Daniel and I never entered the sweet bubble of the do
g park together again, I wouldn’t dilute its magic with a painful conversation. Our phone call comprised three short, flat sentences, one of which was his giving me the address to his house, but afterward, driving there, I felt so flustered that I pulled off the road once, just to breathe and collect myself.
I didn’t have a plan. I thought I would see him and intuit what to do and say, but when he opened the door of his little brick, slope-roofed cottage, the sight of him in the doorway—tall and lean in a flannel shirt and khakis, his gray eyes wary and serious and sad—sent such an aching tenderness through me that all I could think to do was wrap him in my arms. But as I stepped forward, he stepped back, opening the door wider, and I walked into his house.
Immediately, Mose, like walking, flowing sunshine, appeared, bumping the palm of my hand with the top of his head. I stroked him and scratched behind his ears, and he regarded me with grateful, infinitely pretty black eyes.
“Do you want some coffee or something?” said Daniel.
“No, thank you. Maybe a glass of water?”
“Sure. Let’s go in the kitchen.”
The house was scattered with signs of Daniel’s daughter, Georgia—a soccer ball and a purple backpack in the hallway, bright hairbands braceleting the coat closet doorknob, and on the stairway, pairs of shoes, one pair per step: orange soccer cleats, black-and-white-checked slip-on Vans, a pair of duck boots just (I noticed with a pang) like Avery’s.
“The idea is that she grabs them on her way up the stairs and puts them in her room,” said Daniel. “At least, that’s my idea. Hers seems to be that she ignores them until I yell.”
“You yell?” I said, skeptically.
“Uh, no. Not usually. Not literally.”
“You yell figuratively?”
“I speak in a manner that suggests yelling but without the loudness.”
“I see. I pile things outside Avery’s room door, thinking she’ll get tired of stepping over them and put them away.”
“Do you do it at night when she’s asleep, so that when she goes to the bathroom in the middle of the night she trips over them and falls down?” said Daniel.
“No.”
“Well, there’s your problem.”
“Thank you, Dr. Spock,” I said.
“Mr. Spock,” corrected Daniel.
“You’re about to do that V-thing with your fingers, aren’t you?” I said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I laughed and Daniel smiled. It was a somewhat dimmer version of his usual star-spangled smile, but still, I felt as if I’d won a prize.
What if I don’t bring it up? I thought. What if we just take this moment, two people being parents of daughters and making each other laugh and smile, what if we just take this and run with it and never look back?
I might have done it, despite all my tough talk with Avery about truth, just cast the whole subject of the fire overboard and sailed on, but Daniel brought it up first.
“So I take it your brother recognized me,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I guess I should feel lucky that he’s the first person since I moved back.” He shook his head. “But I don’t.”
“Can I tell you what happened after you left?”
“Sure. Why not?”
I told him.
Afterward, in a synchronous moment that would’ve been funny at another time, we lifted our water glasses and sipped and set our glasses back down onto the table. As if proper hydration might help smooth the road ahead.
“That must’ve been hard. Thinking he’d done it,” said Daniel.
There was Daniel, reaching for compassion first thing.
“Thank you. It was awful. You know, when I first heard him confess it to my mother—or throw it in her face—I didn’t believe it. I knew instantly that it wasn’t true. As reckless and angry as Trevor could be, he wouldn’t be so horribly destructive. He just didn’t have it in him. But I’d heard it. I heard his voice saying it. And then I think what I did was, once I’d heard it, without meaning to or wanting to, I constructed a version of Trevor inside my head that matched what he said he’d done. And, honestly, I didn’t have to search very hard for memories of Trevor that tipped him from being just an angry, rebellious kid to someone who could be responsible for a man dying. He had a lot of rage toward my mother back then. He would go very, very far, too far, just to try to hurt her.”
“But not that far,” said Daniel. His face was closed, unreadable.
“No,” I said. “Not that far.”
Then I said, “Although the person who set the fire probably didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. It was nighttime; the building was empty; everyone was out watching the game. It might have been a prank that got out of control. Teenagers tend not to think things all the way through. All the neuroscience stuff we know now about teenaged brains not being all the way wired together; teenagers don’t always foresee consequences.”
After a pause, Daniel’s eyes met mine, and he said, “That would have been a pretty big fire for a prank.”
“Yes, but maybe it started off small. Maybe the theater curtains were exceptionally flammable or something.”
“The building might not have been empty,” said Daniel. “There could’ve been a custodian inside. Or a thief trying to jimmy open lockers, or a drunk kid trying to find a bathroom. There were a lot of drunk kids at that game.”
“I remember.”
Daniel’s gray gaze held steady. “Including me.”
“Oh.”
“When the police questioned me the first time, they said witnesses had seen a person matching my description hanging around behind the groundskeeper’s shed, drinking. And I told them that that person matched my description because that person was me.”
“I see.”
Daniel took another sip of water. “So now I guess you’re going to ask me if I did it, aren’t you?”
I looked around at Daniel’s kitchen, at the specific elements of his specific life: chili-pepper-red enamel tea kettle; thick white diner mugs hanging from hooks beneath his kitchen cabinets; a glass bowl filled with lemons and limes; a white doctor’s coat slung over a chair; in the corner, Mose’s round bed with Mose sitting in it; and on the wall next to the refrigerator, a bulletin board pinned with postcards and photos. I could see a girl in almost all of the photos. Georgia, in every phase of childhood. I couldn’t make out her features, but I could tell, to my surprise, that she was as buttery blond as Mose.
I sat up straight, folded my hands on the tabletop, and shook my head.
“No,” I said.
Daniel blinked. “Wait. No? No what?”
“I’m not going to ask you if you set the fire. On my way to your house, in the name of finding and facing the truth, no matter what, I thought I would. I thought it would be a failure of bravery not to ask. But just now I realized that not asking wouldn’t be a failure of anything. So, no, I’m not going to ask you if you set the fire.”
“You mean not right now?”
“I mean never. I mean I think it’s time I trusted my gut.”
“And what does your gut say?”
“That you hand me dogs when I’m crying, and, when Mag is sitting on the ground, you help her up every single time. That you have the most open, unguarded smile of anyone I’ve ever met, except for Avery. That you are an all-in listener. That I can say anything to you, even that I’m not sure whether or not I am sad about the death of my own mother, and you won’t judge. That talking to you feels like coming home. That you have a dog bed in every room of your house, and I know I haven’t seen every room, but I don’t have to have in order to know that you do. That your face fills with easy, graceful, lit-up love when you talk about your mom and dad. That you came back here, to this place that hurt you, that’s full of bad memories, the place you had escaped from for what could have been forever, because your daughter missed having conversations with you.”
A smile ghosted around the edge
s of Daniel’s mouth. “Your gut says all that?”
“So I don’t need to ask because I know you. I know you’re a person who grants others the full measure of their humanity. And I know you couldn’t set a fire that had the potential to hurt innocent people. Not now, not twenty years ago. Not ever.”
Daniel tipped backward in his chair and let out a huge, windy sigh that ended in a hoot.
“Thank God you didn’t ask,” he said. “You would’ve been within your rights. No one could’ve blamed you. Not even I could’ve really. But I have been asked if I was responsible for that terrible, killing heartbreak of a fire so many times by so many people, and I have said no so many times, and if you had asked me—”
He ran his hands through his hair and smiled at me.
“The thing is I like you,” he said. “I’m maybe an inch away from total, point-of-no-return in love with you. But I am finished with that question. And I just don’t know if I could be with someone who felt the need to ask it one more time.”
“Yikes. Dodged a bullet there, I guess.”
Then, he shook his head and laughed. “Okay, I would’ve wanted to be with you anyway. But I am still glad you didn’t ask.”
Regarding him across the table, his lean face and his smile lines and his inky eyelashes, I wondered how I’d seen him in the dog park for all those months without realizing he was the handsomest man to ever breathe air.
“So—an inch away? Really?” I said. “Because the word inch sounds tiny, but inches are bigger than people think.”
“Maybe a centimeter.”
“I was right about dog beds in every room of your house, wasn’t I?”
“Does a walk-in closet count as a room?”
I laughed.
He said, seriously, “You know it won’t be easy. I saw the way your brother looked at me. I’m thinking that some of your friends would look at me the same way.”
I considered this. “I’ll convince them it wasn’t you.”
“What if you can’t?”
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