I placed both hands on my hips. “How am I supposed to help you if you’re withholding information?”
Luke laughed. “I didn’t realize your advice was so specific.”
“It absolutely is,” I insisted. After a moment I said, “Okay, let’s try it this way. The person who invited you . . . is it a girl?”
When he nodded, my heart sank, but I forced myself to maintain an unbothered expression. “Okay, so definitely go with the gray,” I said, pointing to the Henley. “That’s the one.”
“You sure?” he asked, and I nodded.
We went over a couple more details—I approved the Keds he planned on wearing and told him to pick a song everyone knew, like by ABBA—and then he said, “Thanks, J.J.”
“No problem,” I said, still feeling stung by the whole thing but also a little bit delighted that he’d trusted me enough to ask. Even though he seemed reluctant to talk about it, I had some seemingly innocuous questions up my sleeve that I intended to ask about this girl who invited him. For example, did she work with him? Had she invited other people?
But I never got the chance to get those answers because right at that second, Ro burst into Luke’s room.
“There you are!” he said, as breathless as if he’d run a marathon. “What the fuck? I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I’ve been right here,” I shrugged, as if this were a normal occurrence.
Ro looked between me and Luke, started to say something, but then shook his head and said, “Nine nine nine. Major emergency. In the shed.”
“Right now?” I asked, catching Luke’s eye. I had intended to stay right there on his bed until he kicked me out.
“Right now,” Rowan said. He repeated, “Nine nine nine,” as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.
I sighed and stood, wanting to stay and talk to Luke, but knowing that Rowan needed me. If he wanted to go to the shed, if he was using our not-so-secret code, it was serious.
No matter how I felt about Luke, Rowan was still my best friend. I hated how different everything felt between us lately. Tentative and fragile. I wondered now if this was why he’d come to find me, if he was missing me as much as I missed him, if he was as desperate to talk—really talk—as I was.
So I said goodbye to Luke and followed Ro outside to find out what the emergency was.
NOW
I know this is not a matter of life and death.
Everything will be okay, I tell myself, but it doesn’t help.
It doesn’t help, either, knowing that Mel doesn’t care. That she won’t be looking at the way my hair is styled or the clothes I’m wearing or how much mascara I have on. If she’s asked to see me, it means she’s finally ready to say everything she hasn’t said since last fall. Everything she hasn’t said since Rowan’s death.
I think about not going.
I can’t stand the thought of looking in her eyes and seeing the same anger that was in Luke’s eyes. Can’t stand the thought of her not calling me Jessi-girl, of her yelling in my face or, worse, crying. But in the end, I force myself to climb into the car and go.
It’s the least I can do.
The very least.
I feel unsteady as I walk up the Cohens’ driveway, and my fingers have developed a sudden tremor. I push the doorbell and then clasp my hands inside each other, trying to force the shaking to stop.
About a minute passes before the door swings open, and I don’t know why I’m so surprised to see Luke.
He barely looks at me as he nods for me to come inside.
One step in, and I’m hit with a deluge of memories. Ro and I sliding down the railing from the top of the stairs. Helping Mel bake or cook. Lying on the ground and playing dead while Sydney sniffed me up and down and tried to lick me awake.
Luke watches as I unbuckle my sandals and slip them off in the foyer. I feel stupid the whole time, like we’re playing at something. I’m pretending to be polite, a stranger who takes her shoes off at the door and has never climbed into his mother’s bed fully clothed.
The silence is heavy and thick, so I try to think of something to say.
“Where’s Sydney?”
“We gave her away.”
I was just making small talk, but his response is like a punch in the gut. Sydney’s gone?
Luke is looking off to the side, impatient and bored. Like he just told me the sky was blue, not that they gave away the dog whose fur I cried and laughed into routinely during the last nine years.
“Oh,” I say belatedly, and try to get myself under control. This visit is going to be a nightmare if I’m already crying and I haven’t even seen Mel yet.
Once I’m finally out of my shoes, I follow Luke past the living room to the small guest room off the dining room. The last five or so years, it was where I’d sleep when I spent the night at their house. Mel had this rule that as soon as I was old enough for training bras, there were no more sleepovers in Rowan’s room. Even if we were both in separate sleeping bags.
Luke knocks twice on the guest room door. “Mom?”
A voice I’d recognize anywhere calls back, “Come in!”
He pushes the door open, and then I’m standing in what is obviously Mel’s new bedroom. A hospital bed is the centerpiece, but the same IKEA table I spent far too little time doing homework on is pushed against one wall.
It takes me a second to spot Mel, another second to realize she’s in a wheelchair. A lump so big lodges itself in my throat, making speaking an impossibility.
Mel, too, seems speechless.
She blinks at me a few times, and in the silence that passes, I notice how small and frail she looks. The old Mel used to try out diets every once in a while (starting them, but never finishing), claiming sabotage over the fact that she worked in a bakery and had two sons who ate like bears, but now she’s the kind of skinny that no diet could cause. Her skin is pale, and I can’t stop looking at her wrists. There’s so little flesh there.
“Jessi,” she breathes finally.
I shuffle closer, wanting to touch her but so afraid.
“Baby, hi,” she says, and that’s the thing that finally undoes me. I burst into tears and kneel in front of her, hugging her legs.
She laughs and runs her hand over my hair. “Oh God, that’s so not the response I’m looking for. Making people cry with just one look.”
I’m sniffing and shaking and gasping for breath all at the same time. Why is she hugging me? Why is she comforting me right now?
“What are you doing here?” she says, as if she didn’t know I was coming.
“Told you, Mom. She’s your surprise.” It’s the first moment I remember that Luke is still in the room. It’s also when I realize that she didn’t know I was coming. I turn around and look up at Luke, confused, but he’s just leaning against the wall, watching us.
I’m her surprise?
But he said . . .
He told me . . .
Luke is the reason I’m here?
“I’m so mad at you,” Mel says now, cupping my face in her hands. My heart drops, and I lower my gaze.
Here it goes.
This is the reaction I expected.
This is the reaction I deserve. Maybe she’s only holding my face so she can slap it.
“So, so mad at you,” she continues. “Except you win, because I’m so fucking happy about you two that I’m willing to overlook your disappearing on me.”
Us two?
She points at me and then at Luke as she speaks.
Confused, I back away from her and get into a standing position.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say.
Luke is suddenly beside me, saying, “She means about us.”
I jump when I feel his arm snake around my waist, and I look down at it to make sure I’m not hallucinating.
“I . . .”
“I know we were going to keep it on the down low, but I told her. I couldn’t help it,” Luke says.
I tur
n and gape at him, and that’s when he brings his hand up to my face and softly brushes the tears off my cheeks.
My heart stops at the feel of his skin on mine after so long.
“I hope that’s okay,” he adds.
Luke’s gaze is like a magnet, and there’s a message in his eyes. A challenge? No, a plea.
But a plea for what? What exactly is he asking me to do?
The silence stretches out so long that Mel’s curious stare is starting to burn a hole through the side of my face.
Finally, I croak out, “Oh, yeah . . . it’s . . . fine.”
Whatever else may have changed about her, Mel’s intuition remains unrivaled. “Okay, I wasn’t born yesterday. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“What . . . what do you mean?” At this point, I’m practically squeaking.
Mel narrows her eyes at us, and then Luke laughs.
I haven’t heard his laugh in so long. Up close, it’s like standing too close to the epicenter of an earthquake. I flinch.
“We might as well tell her,” he tells me conspiratorially, tugging me closer with the arm around my waist. “Mom, trust me, you don’t wanna hear how it happened. Us getting back together.”
She still seems skeptical, but she leans forward. “Tell me.”
“It’s kind of . . . personal,” he says, and I’m just looking from him to her, entranced by this show, in which I have absolutely no idea who any of the characters are, not to mention what the plot is.
“All the better. Have you ever known me to have boundaries?” Mel says.
“Mom,” Luke groans.
“Don’t Mom me. You want to deny a dying woman one of her few pleasures in life?”
The atmosphere in the room turns at that, Luke’s expression becoming sober. The Mel I remember didn’t call it dying. She called it surviving her Big Bad.
“Another day,” he says quietly. “Marilyn should be here any minute.”
“Marilyn’s my nurse,” Mel explains to me, and I nod like it’s normal that she’s telling me this. Like it’s normal that she’s telling me anything or acting thrilled about the lies spewing out of Luke’s mouth. I have no idea what is happening.
“I . . . have to get to work,” I say, seeing my quickest exit out of this conversation.
“Oh, right, I forgot about that,” Luke says, and scratches his head. My bullshit radar is so broken at this point that I wonder for a semi-second when the hell I told him anything about my having to work. When I realize that I didn’t, a cloud of anger temporarily overtakes my confusion.
“Well, give me a hug before you go,” Mel says, and I step forward, out of Luke’s embrace and into Mel’s.
“I love you,” Mel whispers in my ear. “Always have, always will.”
Which is the exact moment that I realize she doesn’t know.
How?
How does she not know? After all these months?
“I love you, too,” I manage to choke out over the tears forming again.
She squeezes me tight, her patented Mel hug, and then I step back and leave the room.
Luke tells his mother he’ll be right back, and he follows after, his hand on the small of my back. My head is spinning as we walk all the way down the hall, confusion quickly turning into a wave of hot red anger.
As soon as I’m certain we’re out of Mel’s earshot, I turn on him, shrugging his hand off my back. “What the hell was that?”
He looks over his shoulder and signals for me to keep walking until we’re in the living room. Once we’re there, he grabs a half-finished bottle of water from the table and takes a swig.
“Why did you do that?” I ask again, and his look of total disinterest makes my blood boil even more. “You told me she wanted to see me.”
“She did,” he says.
“Bullshit! She didn’t even know I was coming. You lied to me!” My voice is escalating by the minute.
“Calm the fuck down,” he says, finally looking less impassive.
“Don’t tell me what to do!” I spit back, and for a second, it’s a standoff. I can’t believe Luke and I are speaking this way to each other. Me and Ro, maybe. But never Luke and me.
“She’s sick.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“It made her happy.”
“So you just made up a lie? Because it made her happy?”
“Yeah, I did,” he says. “And you know what, it’s more than you’ve ever done. Where the fuck have you been? All this year, where the fuck were you?”
I step back at his words, my voice quiet. “I thought she didn’t want me here.”
“She was fucking ecstatic to see you just now, so no, that doesn’t work,” Luke says. “Try again.”
“I thought you didn’t want me here.”
He runs a hand through his hair, but he doesn’t deny it. “This isn’t about me.”
“I’m not lying to her,” I say after a long moment. “You want to make her happy? Fine. But leave me out of it.”
“Jessi, she’s sick.” His voice is quiet, and he’s not looking at me.
“I know she is!” I say, exasperated.
“Then think about someone other than yourself for once!”
I flinch. “I’m leaving,” I say, turning for the door.
“You owe me!” he calls just before I reach it. I bend down to slip on my shoes, not even bothering with the straps.
“You know you do,” he says in a quieter voice, and I stop.
I turn around to look him straight in the eye. “Screw you,” I say, and run out of the house. In my car, I’m shaking so hard, I can barely grip the steering wheel.
His words haunt me all throughout the drive.
You owe me.
You know you do.
I turn on the radio and try to let the music drown my thoughts. When that doesn’t work, I go back to that positive affirmations thing Mom’s therapist taught her to do.
I know me.
I’m allowed to make mistakes.
The past is past.
But I can’t outthink or outdrive it—
I know he’s right.
5
THEN
I had made a terrible mistake.
As soon as Ro opened the door of the shed, a line of sunlight illuminating the entire space, I saw the old sleeping bag and the cans of beer on it.
This is why he’d dragged me from Luke’s room?
My heart plunged, and with it, all my hope that we were going to have a heart-to-heart, that we would finally connect again.
He just wanted to drink.
“You said it was an emergency,” I said flatly.
“It is,” he insisted, walking inside and flopping down on the makeshift mat. “It’s a fucking disaster.”
He patted the space on the sleeping bag beside him.
I hesitated, looked back at the house, and followed after him. Whether there was alcohol involved or not, Ro was asking to talk. That had to count for something.
He handed me a can of beer, and I shook my head. “Where’d you get it?”
“It’s not Mel’s,” he said defensively.
“I know it’s not,” I said. Mel didn’t drink cheap beer.
A couple of years ago, Ro and I had gotten into Mel’s liquor, getting completely wasted on vodka while Luke and Mel were out of state for some Mathlete competition of Luke’s. It was the first real hangover I’d ever had, and still the worst to date, but it paled in comparison with the crippling amount of guilt I felt when Mel got home. It had taken no more than fifteen minutes for me to break and confess the entire ugly truth. Since then, none of us knew where she kept the keys to her cabinet, and I wasn’t interested in finding out. Since then, Ro also (rightly) considered me the biggest stick-in-the-mud of all time, second only to his brother, who didn’t drink at all.
“So, what’s the emergency?” I asked.
Ro sighed, tried to run his hand through his hair, and gave up mid-motion, re
membering it was mostly gone.
“I kissed Cassie Clairburne,” he said.
I blinked at him.
“Cassie Clairburne?” I repeated.
“I know,” Ro said miserably. He fell back in surprise as I shoved him.
“An emergency, you said! Nine nine nine, you said!”
We’d adopted the code after watching some British TV series and realizing it was their equivalent to 911.
“Plus, flipped, it’s the devil’s number,” Rowan had added at the time. “Anytime one of us uses it, we’ll know they mean serious business.”
Serious business like a medical emergency or a breakup or—hell—even discussing his mother’s illness, which Rowan still wouldn’t talk about. When I knew more of Luke’s thoughts than Ro’s on something that big, there was a major issue.
“It is both those things,” Rowan said, unyielding. He pulled the tab off his can of beer and took a big gulp, as if he were drinking water. One of my eyebrows skirted up, but I said nothing.
Ro was finally confiding in me again about something, and maybe it wasn’t what I wanted him to tell me, but that didn’t matter. At least he was here. “So,” he went on, “you know Cassie and Eric are now paired up for mixed doubles, right?”
I nodded and got comfortable.
Honestly, Ro had called enough emergency shed meetings centered solely around his love life that it shouldn’t have surprised me. The difference was that those had actually been game changers, even if they were a little on the frivolous side.
The first time he’d called a shed meeting, we were ten and Jenna R. had just agreed to be his girlfriend. A secret so big, he couldn’t say it in the house for fear that his mom, brother, or dad—who still lived there at the time—would hear.
When we were fifteen, he’d asked me to ride over and meet him in the shed. “Don’t even go into the house,” he’d said, and I’d known it was really big. He told me he had lost his virginity to Ashley Paul.
I’d called my own shed meetings in the past, of course. When I’d overheard Dad on the phone one night, talking to someone I didn’t know about possibly hospitalizing my mother. When I was fourteen and it seemed for a while that we might be moving to Massachusetts, where Dad’s family lived. We needed more family support, Dad said, and Mom’s family weren’t an option because she hadn’t spoken to them since right before she married my father. In that shed I had told Ro about my first kiss, even though it was cheating because I’d technically spilled the beans to Mel first. I’d told him that I wanted to stop being his mixed doubles partner after four years of him being the standout and me being average, not to mention bored of tennis. (Watching it was fine; playing was an entirely different story.)
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