I nodded, bracing myself for something about how I was annoying and overbearing and they all needed a break from me. It would destroy me to hear those words, but at least I would know.
“I didn’t want you to see me cry.”
I sat up, confused. “That makes no sense. I’ve seen you cry.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking, okay?” His entire face had gone red, and he wouldn’t meet my gaze. “That whole night just sucked, and I needed to fucking fall apart and . . .”
And he hadn’t wanted me there for it.
It was the explanation I’d been waiting for, and I knew he was telling the truth, but it still felt like something was splintering between us.
Everything had shaken him that night, but for the first time in our lives, my best friend hadn’t wanted me there.
NOW
On Sunday, the second weekend after graduation, the rare day when I don’t have anything else on, my mother places a line of fabric swatches in front of me while I’m halfway through breakfast. Mom 2.0 is always busy, grappling with important choices such as whether we need a whole new dinner set or whether the one we’ve had for the past decade is fine. I’ve learned that if there are any household items I’m particularly attached to, I have to tell her in advance, or I might come home and find them gone. It’s been one of the weirdest things to get used to, suddenly having to keep up with her.
“Thoughts? Complaints? Recommendations?” she asks, watching me eye the line of patterns in front of me.
“Nice. Super nice. All of them.”
She sighs. “Jessi! I need you to help me narrow it down. Even if you just close your eyes and point to something.”
I feel bad for not sharing her enthusiasm about our new couch set, and I feel even worse that she can tell.
I don’t close my eyes, but I do randomly pick something, a grayish cloth material.
Mom’s face lights up. “Really? That was the one I was leaning toward!”
“Great minds,” I say, and tap my temple.
“Will you go with me to the furniture store to place the order?” she asks. With Mom 2.0, one errand usually turns into five or six, so I quickly try to shoot down the idea.
“Um, I can’t. I’m . . . listening to a podcast. That Ernie recommended.” It’s a terrible excuse, and not just because Ernie can’t tell the difference between a phone and “one of those music recording devices,” despite his grandkids’ efforts to make him the most tech-savvy octogenarian there ever was.
“We can listen in the car while we drive,” she offers.
I concede.
First, with an excuse that lame, I deserve what I get. Second, I really don’t have anything else to do, and I’ve learned that the days when I have the chance to think—those are the worst. Third, my mom is trying really hard. It still catches me by surprise, seeing her bustling around the house and stepping out for groceries and going out for coffee or anywhere that isn’t work. This time last summer, like all the summers in my life before it, Mom was basically catatonic. Now she’s picking out fabrics for a new living room set.
It’s part of her therapy, changing up her environment and getting rid of any reminders of the “hole” in which she spent the last eighteen years of her life. I guess the sofa was particularly offensive to her.
“I’ll just go get dressed,” I tell her as I get up from the table.
“What’s wrong with how you’re dressed?” she asks.
I’m wearing a pair of cutoffs and a tank top I’m pretty sure I slept in. But if it passes Mom 2.0’s test of approval, it’s good enough for me.
“Okay, let’s go,” I say.
We pass Dad in the living room, where he’s watching TV and getting in as much time with the old furniture as he can. It’s almost as jarring to see my father stretched out across the couch on a Sunday morning, doing nothing. Before, if he wasn’t working, he was getting groceries or mowing the lawn or trying to talk Mom into eating something.
“Don’t have too much fun,” he calls out as we go.
“Right backatcha,” Mom says, shutting the front door behind us and slipping an arm around my shoulders, and it’s almost more than I can take. This sudden change in the universe, where my life now consists of my parents shooting cheery comments at each other and furniture shopping and wanting to do things with me.
It makes me feel both hopeful and like crying, realizing this is what I’ve missed out on all my life. As soon as I think it, though, I feel guilty. It’s not like I never had a family.
I did.
It wasn’t anyone I was related to, but they were still family. Even if, near the end, I sometimes doubted the way they saw me.
We drive by the spot downtown where Rosas used to be, and I’m suddenly desperate for red velvet cupcakes and mini cinnamon rolls and choc-chip cookie dough. I’m desperate for Mel’s voice and her laugh and the way she hugged people with absolute abandon, as if for one glorious minute we were merging into one being.
“I haven’t told your father,” Mom says, “but I’m thinking about us switching the dining room chairs too. Maybe we can look at those as well?”
The first time I heard my father joke that Mom’s was the most expensive recovery plan he’d ever seen—that was the first time I let myself even consider it. The thought that she might be healed. Or not even healed, but better. The fact that recovery was a word that could apply to her.
“Sure,” I say. As strange and as fragile as it feels, dealing with this new version of my mother, it also feels nice to have her care about my opinion. For her to want to spend time with me. In a messed-up way, it feels a little like having Mel back. It was from Mel that I learned what it was supposed to feel like to have a mother. The Cohens taught me what it felt like to have a home.
We spend the next hour perusing Sofa!Sofa!, debating the merits of leather versus cloth and stripes versus solid and wood versus glass. After that, we drive to the grocery store to pick up some stuff for dinner.
We’re headed for self-checkout when Mom realizes she forgot the waffles. I volunteer to get them and leave her in line, nervously standing behind some biker dude who is covered in tattoos on every visible patch of skin. My phone vibrates in my pocket as I walk back to the frozen food aisle.
It’s a text from Willow.
Pool party at Bailey Marvin’s tonite! You in?
The impulse to think of an excuse is instant, and I’m already typing my response—oh, I wish I could but helping my mom out all day!—when I find the aisle I need.
Let me know if you need a ride home though, I quickly add before hitting Send.
I’m a walking hazard, thumbing away at my phone as I go, but it’s not until I see him that I stop. In a microsecond, I take in every inch of him. His curly black hair, his broad shoulders, his jeans frayed at the hem like he’s been living in them. He looks older, tired.
Everything freezes when our eyes meet. The deep brown eyes that belong to the three people I loved the most in this world. They look different from here, full of grief and anger and something else I can’t name. He’s at the far end of the aisle, no longer walking this way. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.
I try again and fail again.
Finally, without permission from my brain, my legs start to move. Carrying me back out of the aisle, empty-handed.
When I reach Mom at the self-checkout, she looks confused.
“Where are the waffles?”
“I . . .”
“Jessi, what’s wrong?” she asks, following my gaze in the direction I just came from.
“They’re out,” I manage to croak after another second.
“Well, that’s okay,” Mom says uncertainly, like she’s not sure why she needs to reassure me about the fact that there are no frozen waffles in Wally’s. “We can check Safeway on the way home.”
I glance over my shoulder one more time, like there’s something on my heel.
I’m not expecting him to fo
llow me, and he doesn’t.
Of course he doesn’t.
I help Mom carry the bags out to the car, and the whole time she’s chatting about the avocados we found on sale. I’m trying to pay attention to her words, but the biggest part of myself is still standing there in the frozen food aisle with a boy who was family, but never my brother and not really my friend.
I know he comes back to Winchester all the time, but this is the first time I’ve seen him here since the funeral.
I think stupid things: I’m dressed like a hobo.
Mundane things: He’s growing a beard.
I fight to concentrate on this moment, in the car with my mother, but my ears are swimming with too many sounds.
My mind just keeps replaying it. Luke Cohen, in the middle of Wally’s, looking at me like I’m a complete stranger.
3
THEN
Mel called being sick her Big Bad. She had this theory that we all had one, whether we knew it or not. She also believed it could change over time, that the most pertinent issue in your life could go from having a bad temper to being bankrupt or something.
My mother’s Big Bad was that she was a barely functioning depressive. My father’s was that he didn’t know how to help her or how to be two parents, so he buried himself in running EyeCon. Luke’s, Mel said, was how determined he was that he would never end up like his father. And Rowan’s, I knew even without Mel’s telling me, was how desperately he wanted things. To play tennis in college, to perfect his already near-perfect forehand, to make his mother well. It oozed out of him, a desperation that made his skin glisten and his eyes blaze.
“What’s mine?” I asked her multiple times, afraid it was something like I didn’t belong anywhere or that everyone I loved was destined to eventually grow tired of me. Knowing Ro’s reason for kicking me out of their house that night helped, but in the days before he told me, an awful seed of doubt had taken root inside me. And it still made me wonder if there was something horrible at my core. Something that meant home would always be a fantasy for me, something I could experience only by proxy.
But Mel refused to tell me what my Big Bad was. “You’ll know when you know,” she insisted. I could never figure out whether she knew what it was and didn’t want to say, or whether she had yet to figure it out. Probably the former. Mel had this way of looking in your eyes and seeing your soul, of listening to your small talk and hearing the dreams you’d never said out loud. She read people the way some people read tea leaves. She knew me, the way no one else did.
So, of course, she knew about Luke.
The first time I suspected this was the day of the fair, during the summer between seventh and eighth grades. The Dog Days Fair always took place during the last days of summer in Winchester. The fair was downtown, just a couple of blocks away from the bakery, so Ro, Luke, and I walked over to it that morning while Mel stayed back at the store. The day passed slowly, the air sticky with sweat and humidity and the smell of roasting hot dogs. At thirteen, the prospect of endless rides and caramel popcorn had lost some of its appeal for me, but Luke took his boredom to a whole other level, trailing behind Ro and me and playing on his phone for most of the afternoon, as if it were a special kind of torture being forced away from his equations and scientific formulas for even one day. Not that I blamed him. I too wanted nothing more than to go back to the air-conditioned peace of Rosas and see if we could weasel any baked goods from Mel. But Rowan had a list of rides he wanted to go on and Mel said we’d all been spending too much time indoors over the summer, so we soldiered on.
By the time we were ready to head back to Rosas, I was ready to write the day off as completely unremarkable. Until Luke disappeared for a few minutes and reappeared with a small stuffed white polar bear.
“Here,” he said, holding it out to me.
“Where’s mine?” Ro said, trying to grab it out of his brother’s hands, but Luke swung the bear out of his reach.
“You won this?” I asked, stunned as I took it from him.
“I bought it.” Luke said it like it was nothing, like it was every day he bought me a stuffed animal at a fair, but it was absolutely a big deal to me. It was a gift. The first non–special occasion gift he’d ever given me, and I was convinced it meant something.
Ro made to grab it out of my hands again, but I held it behind my back. I was never letting it out of my grasp, if I could help it. To Luke, I whispered a shy “Thanks.”
He shrugged and went back to playing on his phone.
I was still on cloud nine when we walked into the bakery a few minutes later.
“How was it?” Mel asked.
Ro gave her a recap of the day, all the rides we’d gone on and all the games we failed to win. I contributed here and there, but I was still flipping out over this new development.
Luke had given me a freaking stuffed animal.
That’s what couples did on dates.
And then, as Mel was closing up the store, I’d seen it. Luke reaching into his pocket and handing her the change. She whispered something to him, and when he nodded, she patted his back. I knew right then and there what an idiot I’d been.
Mel had told him to buy me the bear. The gesture hadn’t been spontaneous or romantic or any of the things I’d thought just seconds ago. It was an act of charity, something his mother had made him do.
“Ready to go?” Mel asked, looking over at me and Ro. I nodded and followed them out of the store, feeling small.
I suspected then that Mel knew how I felt about Luke.
I knew it for sure when I strode into the Cohen house four years later, and Mel and Naomi were sitting in the living room, watching TV and laughing at something I hadn’t heard. Sydney was curled up at Mel’s feet, sleeping.
I hadn’t seen Mel since she had completed her first month of treatment two days earlier, so I’d taken the bus from summer school and brought snacks to celebrate. Boring snacks like rice cakes and saltine crackers, as they were the only things that didn’t set off her nausea.
Ever since Ro had told me the truth about that night, I was back to visiting Mel whenever I could. Not all the time, because I was still a little afraid to overstep, but I came over often enough that Mel knew I cared.
“Jessi-girl! Please tell me there is food in that bag,” Mel said, staring longingly at the plastic bag in my hand.
I pulled out the rice cakes, and she squealed.
She actually squealed.
I frowned, looking between Mel and Naomi. Naomi, who was famous for being in a perpetually bad mood, was actually beaming.
“Are you drunk?” I asked.
“Drunk?” Naomi repeated, offended. “What kind of question is that?”
I took a step closer to them, and that’s when I smelled it. I gasped.
“You’re high?”
“On life!” Mel said, then giggled. “And a wee bit of medical marijuana. No biggie.”
“No biggie,” Naomi echoed, and they burst into laughter again.
I couldn’t believe it. I shook my head, then went to the kitchen to grab some plates and peanut butter. While I was in there, Sydney scampered into the kitchen, and I set down everything I was carrying to play with her. Sydney and I had our little games. One of our favorites was when she stood on her hind legs and I took her front legs and pretended we were waltzing. Another was when I lay flat on the ground, playing dead, and she ran around me frantically, licking me back to life. I always tried to stay in character, but within seconds I’d be giggling at the ticklish wet feel of her tongue. That day, I knelt so we were eye to eye, and she slobbered all over my face.
“Hi, pretty girl,” I said in the baby voice I reserved just for her. “Is it just me, or have Nay and Mel completely lost it? I know! They’re freaking me out too!”
As I spoke, she licked my top lip and I backed away, laughing. Maybe it was because of how often we played dead, but Sydney seemed to believe that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was her life’s calling. One
of Mel’s (bad) jokes was that Sydney had taught us three kids how to French kiss.
“I love you too, girlie,” I said, still laughing. “But not like that.”
I wiped my lips on the collar of my shirt, washed my hands, and picked up the things I’d come into the kitchen to collect.
“So, which of my sons are you here to see?” Mel called as Sydney and I reentered the living room.
“I’m here to see you!”
“I thought for sure she’d say Luke,” Naomi said in a fake whisper.
“That’s what I was gonna say!” Mel cried. She scooched over on the couch so I could sit.
“Ugh,” I groaned, sitting beside her and trying my best to keep my expression even. “What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t be weird.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mel said. “I thought we were talking about three teenagers. I love y’all fiercely, but it’s already weird.”
I stared between her and Naomi as they kiki-ed all over themselves and dug into the rice cakes. What the hell did she mean?
If Naomi hadn’t been there, I would probably have forced Mel to tell me, but right then I couldn’t face the possibility of either of them saying out loud the words I’d never admitted to anyone—that I had a crush on Luke—and giving them more to cackle over.
I liked Naomi, but sometimes she brought out a side of Mel that I liked far less than all the other sides of her.
The good news was that I knew for sure that Luke and Ro were both at their jobs and not at home. The key was to not make a big deal out of it, not to draw unnecessary attention to myself by freaking out about what they’d implied. But for the rest of the afternoon I felt like a bottle that had been shaken up and was close to exploding. It took me a while to figure out what exactly it was about Mel’s and Naomi’s behavior that bothered me so much, and it wasn’t until I was on the bus back home that I figured it out: they had made my feelings for Luke seem like a joke, like some childish crush. I didn’t think they intended to be malicious, but it had still hurt. And maybe they were right and I had no clue what it was like to be in love, but I desperately wished I’d defended myself, told them that nothing about the way I felt was silly or trite.
Some Other Now Page 4