She smiles at me. “Actually, I’m glad we have some time alone. There’s a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about.”
My heart sinks.
She knows.
She knows that Luke and I have been faking, that deep down he still secretly hates me, that deep down I still secretly hate myself. She knows what I did.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I still remember the talk we had up in my bedroom last year. Do you remember?”
“Of course,” I say, not sure whether to be relieved about the direction this conversation is taking. I remember feeling that she loved me when she told me I had always just fit with them. I remember the courage and certainty it had given me for the next few weeks, foolishly believing that I wasn’t a bomb waiting to detonate on everyone I loved.
“I know everything blew up in our faces after that,” she says, using the perfect metaphor. “That you found it too hard to be around me and Luke anymore once Ro was gone.”
I swallow over the lump in my throat. Is that what she thinks? That I found it too hard to be around them?
“I know how much you miss him.”
“I do.” Just saying so nearly makes me crumple with sadness after a year of not being able to talk about him with any of the people that matter most. I miss Ro so much every day, it’s like a physical ache. I miss our shed meetings, miss hiding out with him in the dark. I miss the way he made me laugh, the way he frustrated me. I miss playing mixed doubles with him, even though I hated it. I miss eating cinnamon rolls with him, miss tracing the calluses on his palm to tell his fortune.
I miss my best friend with everything inside me.
“I hope you know I don’t hold it against you,” Mel says now, and for a second I think she means she doesn’t blame me for what happened the night he died, but then I remember, she doesn’t know.
I swallow. “Hold what against me?”
“Your staying away all this time. I’m just so relieved that you and Luke figured out a way to move forward.”
I nod, unable to speak.
“I’m also still not asking you to look after him, because he’s a big boy. He can look after himself,” she says. “Not that anybody needs my permission or anything, but will you remind him that he’s allowed to be happy?”
“How?” I ask.
Mel narrows her eyes at me. “I love you, but we’re not discussing the methods you’re going to use to keep my firstborn happy.”
I give an embarrassed laugh. At least she hasn’t figured out the truth.
“And you’re allowed to be happy too, you know,” she adds.
I can’t meet her eye. “Thanks, Mel.”
“No, don’t ‘thanks Mel’ me,” she says firmly. “I mean it.”
She looks me dead in the eyes. “You and I are lucky that we found our people relatively early in life. Sure, shit happens. Gary turned out to be a cheating SOB, but he’s still the reason I found two of my actual people—my two boys.” Her voice breaks. “Naomi is my people, if there ever was a people.”
I laugh.
“And Luke and Ro and I, we have always been your people. And we always will be. My big, dysfunctional blended family.” She’s joking, but it reminds me of what my mother said a couple of weeks ago, about the way her family refused to accept Dad because of the color of his skin. If Mel and Naomi and Ro and Luke and I could form our own little unit despite all our differences, how sad is it that my grandparents were willing to lose their only daughter rather than take in the person she loved?
“Did you know that Mom’s parents cut her off because Dad is black?”
“No,” she says. “How do you know that?”
I tell her everything my mother told me, and I tell her how it makes the story of us even more special.
“The story of us,” Mel muses. “I like it. And you know, it doesn’t have to have a tidy ending—hell, I was so looking forward to being a cranky bitch of an old lady.”
“So like Naomi?” I offer, even though my eyes are welling now.
Mel throws her head back and laughs the way Luke did in the pool the other day—with what is left of her whole body. “I’m going to tell her you said that.”
“Please don’t,” I say, only half joking.
“Anyway,” Mel continues. “I don’t even remember the point I was trying to make. Just that you and Luke, you’ll be what’s left of us soon. Love each other well, okay?”
I blink at her. How do I tell her that there is no love between Luke and me anymore? That I destroyed any chance of us ending up together, broke whatever chains used to bind us and made him “my people.” How do I make her see that she was wrong about me all along? That I could never have fit with them, because it turned out I was jagged and misshapen, not made to fit anywhere.
“God, I feel like I’ve been on this endless farewell tour,” Mel says, resting her head back against the couch. “One of those rock stars that make you feel nostalgic. You’re sad the first time they announce they’re leaving. Then you look up and they’re still there, and they’re still there—”
“Mel,” I say, interrupting her. “I’m glad you’re still here.”
A wave of guilt hits me again over what I thought when I first walked in. That she is no longer who she used to be, but I was wrong. She is, in every way that matters. She is still vibrant, funny, beautiful Mel, and the Big Bad can never take that away from her.
I can’t believe I stayed away so long. I can’t . . . What if one day I had seen the obituaries and her name had been there? I would never have forgiven myself. Never.
I still can’t forgive myself for everything I destroyed, but I remember what Mom told me that night: at least I’m here now. At least I get to see Mel again. Luke’s idea sounded so ludicrous at first, but now I’m grateful that I agreed to go along with it.
It brought the three of us back together, if only superficially, one last time.
“I feel good today,” Mel says out of nowhere now.
“Really?”
She nods. “Do you know what I feel like doing? Listening to some of the classics.”
I grin at her. It’s been so long since we sat around doing nothing but listening to her favorite jazz songs. Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.
Even though most of the good songs are on my phone, I get up and turn on the old CD player.
Before I can sit down, though, Mel holds up her hands to me. I’m confused at first.
“Help me up!” she says over the sound of “Bugle Call Rag.”
“Wait, but . . .” I panic as she attempts to pull herself into a standing position.
“It’s criminal not to dance to this song,” she says, pushing up weakly with her arms. Her blanket falls to a pool at her feet and the papers she’d hidden fall, too. I grab one of her hands to steady her, and then I bend down to pick up the stuff she’s dropped.
I want to respect her privacy, but my curiosity gets the best of me and my eyes sweep over the page on the top.
It says in writing so jerky it’s hard to read, “reading from Psalm 23—too cliché???”
I place the papers on the couch, stand, and offer Mel my second hand.
“Are you sure about this?” I ask her as she struggles to catch her breath. Just standing seems to have taken all her energy.
“I’m not going to break,” she says, sounding like she very well could. So I hold her hands while we shake our hips and shimmy our shoulders and make faces at each other. My mind keeps going back to the piece of paper I found. It can mean only one thing: Mel is planning her funeral, and I want nothing more than to curl into a ball and cry. But she’s counting on me, so I keep dancing and grinning like I have no cares in this world.
Before the end of the song, Mel shakes her head apologetically, and I know she needs to sit down again. I’m in the process of helping her onto the couch when I spot Luke standing in the doorway, his eyes wide and his shirt wet with sweat.
&
nbsp; “That was the most fun I’ve had in forever,” Mel says, laughing. I’m too aware of Luke’s gaze on me as I readjust her blanket before sitting down beside her.
“Hey, Mom,” he says, stepping out from the doorway. They chat about random things for a couple of minutes. I don’t think I’m imagining that his gaze keeps coming back to me.
When I stand to leave a few minutes later, Luke says, “I’ll walk you out. Be right back, Mom.”
We go out through the front door and down the driveway in total silence. Finally, when I can’t stand it anymore, I say, “She said she wanted to dance. It wasn’t my idea.”
“What?” he asks, looking distracted.
“She said it was criminal not to dance to that song.”
“No,” Luke says, shaking his head. “No, you don’t have to explain.”
“Oh.” Of all the things I was expecting him to say, it was not that.
“Listen,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “The one thing I’ve never doubted is how much you care about her. Never.”
He meets my eye on the last word, and I feel like I’m drowning in the pool of his eyes.
“That’s good. I . . . I’d never hurt her intentionally.”
“I know,” Luke says.
I slide in behind the wheel of my car, and Luke steps back so I can drive away. As I go, I hear his words again: the one thing I’ve never doubted.
And I’m glad he doesn’t doubt that, but it confirms what he hasn’t said this whole summer: that he doubts everything else that happened between us.
13
THEN
“How can you tell me not to come home? She’s in the hospital,” Luke said over the phone, and I imagined him tugging at his hair the way he used to do when we were little and he was stressed about something. “I can be there in six hours. Five, if I push it.”
“Yeah, but the doctor said the fever’s under control and she’ll probably be able to go home tomorrow,” I said. “Plus, you have like three midterms.”
“Screw midterms,” he said, and I wasn’t used to the dark tone in his voice.
“Luke—” I said with a sigh.
“I should never have come here,” he said. “I knew I shouldn’t have, but she swore she’d be fine. And she said all that bullshit about wanting to see me live my life so she’d know I would be okay.”
I stayed quiet so he could keep venting, but he was silent after a minute.
“I promise I’ll call you if anything changes,” I said.
“Even if it’s bad?”
“Even if it’s bad,” I promised.
Mel ended up being in the hospital for two nights. Her treatment had weakened her immune system and she’d caught an infection, but by the time Naomi brought her home on Wednesday afternoon, there was a little more color in her cheeks.
Ro and I sat at attention in his room while Mel slept across the hall. Technically, Ro was pretending to play a game on his computer and I was pretending to do some history homework.
“What do you think happens to the house when she’s gone?” Ro asked out of nowhere.
“Don’t talk that way,” I scolded him.
“Don’t tell the truth?” he asked.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen. She could . . .” Get better? Outlive every known patient with her diagnosis? “She could still have a long time.”
Ro made a noncommittal sound and went back to his game.
“I say, Luke gets the house,” he said. “He’s older, more responsible, all that good shit.”
I swallowed. I didn’t want to think of anyone divvying up any of Mel’s possessions, but Ro was in the kind of mood where it was better to let him get everything off his mind.
“Maybe I get her car or something. She’ll give you her whole music collection.”
“Can we talk about something else?” Despite myself, I couldn’t go on with this conversation.
Ro eyed me for a second, then, mercifully, went back to playing his game.
I couldn’t concentrate, so I stared at the lineup of trophies that took up most of the space on his bookshelf. Where normal people (i.e., me, Luke, and basically everyone I knew) had books, Rowan just had a collection of silver declaring how good he was at the thing he loved best in the world. It must have been a pretty good feeling, I thought, to have that kind of validation. He would never say he was good enough, of course. He’d say he could always improve, his forehand could be better, his drop shots better executed, his serve faster, but even Ro knew he was pretty damn good at tennis.
“Been talking to my dad a bunch,” he mumbled now, still focused on his computer screen.
“About?” He didn’t hate his dad as much as Luke did, but he also never made much effort to have a relationship with him. In fact, for as long as I’d known him, he’d always seemed pretty much indifferent to his father. If there was such a thing as a mama’s boy, Rowan was definitely it. Always had been.
“I keep waking up with my elbow all stiff,” he said. “And it hurts like shit to hold stuff. Even like a glass.”
My eyes widened. “Does your coach know?”
“No. You think I’m an idiot?”
“Does Mel?”
“No,” he said. “And you better not tell her.”
“But Ro, what if it’s something serious?”
“It’s fine,” Ro insisted. “I’ve probably been training too much. I’ll just lay off for a while.”
“What did your dad say?”
He shrugged. “He wanted to refer me to this orthopedic surgeon, but I said no.”
Rowan could be so freaking frustrating sometimes. “Why would you say that?”
“ ’Cause then it will be this big thing where Coach has to get involved and I can’t travel to Florida for the last competition of the season next month. And then Illinois will have to be on notice that they might be getting damaged goods.”
“Damaged goods?” I repeated, incredulous. “Injuries heal.”
“Exactly. Don’t need to get everyone all worked up.”
I sighed. “I just hope you don’t make it worse.”
“I won’t,” he said. “Dad said to keep doing cold compresses, take Advil, and see how it goes.”
After a moment he said, “I’ll probably end up living with him and Vanessa after.”
We had circled back to talking about Mel’s death again. I hated the way it lingered, clouding the air constantly like a bad smell.
“You don’t think he’d let you finish out the year here?” It was the first time I’d considered this. If Mel didn’t last till next May, Ro might have to leave in the middle of senior year.
“Where would I stay?” he snorted. “With you?”
“You could,” I said, but we both knew he couldn’t. Right from the beginning of our friendship, everything that mattered had always happened at the Cohen house. We had playdates at Rowan’s, ate at Rowan’s, slept at Rowan’s. My house was just this sinkhole full of dark energy. It stung that I knew I could never give Ro what his family had given me, that I could never take him in and take care of him.
“It’d only be for a few months,” I said, trying to make us both feel better.
“Maybe I could stay at Eric’s,” Ro said, and I prayed that was the start of hope in his voice. “His sisters are hot as fuck, so it would be a win in more than one way.”
I threw my pen at his head. It bounced off his temple, making a satisfying thunk before falling on the ground.
“Nice aim,” Ro said.
“I try,” I said, grinning. “So you’re going to hook up with Cassie Clairburne and Eric’s sisters? He’ll kill you.”
Ro gave a shit-eating grin. “He’s already used to getting my sloppy seconds.”
“Ew,” I said.
“I meant he could have Cassie, not his sisters! What’s your problem?” But he was still smiling.
“Cassie’s not a thing that he can have,” I said, sounding even to my own ears like his mother. “B
ut I guess it’s Rowan Cohen’s world and we all just live in it.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “It’s Luke Cohen’s world and we all just live in it.”
I frowned. “What does Luke have to do with anything?”
“Just stating facts,” Ro said, returning to his game.
I rolled my eyes, too tired to try to decipher the latest grudge Ro apparently had with his brother. Ro had always been jealous of Luke, with good reason, since his older brother got the kind of grades Ro could only dream of and seemingly without having to try very hard for them. But then again, there was a bookshelf full of trophies boasting of Rowan’s adequacy in other ways. As far as I could tell, he’d never had a bad day on the court. The irony was, while the two brothers were each convinced that the other one had an easier life, it was unbelievably clear to me that they both worked hard at what they loved. Sure, they were both born with gifts, but they’d worked to cultivate them. Why was it so difficult for them to acknowledge this? And why, in the past few months, had the gulf between them seemed to stretch further than ever?
NOW
“You’re asking questions I can’t answer,” Ernie says stubbornly, leaning back in his rocking chair.
“You said you wanted me to fill out the crossword for you!”
“Yes, and I thought you’d think of the answers and then write them down,” he says.
“Ernie,” I sigh.
“Jessica,” he echoes.
“My name’s not Jessica. I told you.” I remember the conversation I had with my mom about my name. “It almost was, though.”
“Hmm,” he says. “Never met a girl who was just Jessi before you.”
“I’m one of a kind,” I say, and wink at him.
He snorts. “You’re just lucky you haven’t met my granddaughter. She’d add a ttifer or cules to your name. Jessittifer. Jessicules.”
I laugh. “Okay, so forget the crossword. Can we go for a walk today?”
“If you feel that I have not suffered enough in my eighty-some years, then yes, we can certainly go for a walk.”
“Great,” I say, clapping my hands. “It’s gorgeous outside.”
Ernie harrumphs as I grab his shoes from near the door. He leans forward to put them on, his hands shaking. I would offer to help, but he likes to do it himself. I drag his walker to him and he stands and follows me to the door.
Some Other Now Page 18