I said, “We didn’t. Not all the way. I mean, he finished, but we didn’t.” I’d gotten equally wound up in embarrassment and euphemism, but plain, brown Beth seemed relieved to have this part of his story verified. She also looked puzzled. “It’s possible,” I said. “Not likely, but it can happen.”
We all knew it meant pregnancy. We all knew it was Natty.
Clayton picked his story back up. “Right after, I was embarrassed, but then I was also really nauseous from being so drunk. I got up and tried to walk away to be sick, but I couldn’t even walk. I crawled. I crawled on the grass with my pants down. I crawled until I started throwing up. It’s likely I had alcohol poisoning. I weighed maybe a hundred and fifty pounds?” He didn’t look to me like he weighed any more than that now, but I kept my mouth shut and let him finish. “It was a lot of beer. I threw up, and then I crawled away from that place, too. I crawled until I passed out. I woke up half under the bushes in the side yard with my pants still down. It was early morning. I went around back to the grill, but you were gone.”
The three of us looked at one another. I remembered none of it, but I hoped this part was true. I hoped he did wake up with his bare ass pointing skyward, as vulnerable as he’d left me.
“I wish I could believe you,” I told him. “I want it to be true, for a lot of reasons. But none of it sounds like me. I can’t see myself doing any of that. Ever. I’ve never in my life told a guy I loved him. I wouldn’t say that to some stranger, no matter how effed up I was. It was still an asshole move, going off to the backyard with a superdrunk girl you just met. It’s gross. I mean, who acts like that? But it’s not illegal, and I could sort of empathize. I want it very badly to be true, but it . . . it’s not a thing that I can gamble on.” And once again, we all knew the it in question was my son. “I have to know, for sure. Can’t you tell me something, show me something, that would prove the smallest piece of it?”
I knew even as I said it, it was hopeless. I was asking for a miracle.
“I’m sorry. All I can tell you is what I remember.” He went back through it, ticking the points off on his fingers in a way so like William it made me uncomfortable. “You kissed me first, and in the kitchen you were saying that you loved me. You said I caught you on the wall, so I got to have you.” He pauses, forehead creasing as he concentrates. “I remember, it was weird, how you said that part. You said you loved me because I had you pinned. Because I caught you on the wall.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “You came up to me, you said. I wasn’t running.”
“No,” he said unhappily. “It didn’t make sense. I had you pinned, though, because we were both leaning. You said it in a weird way. Maybe wall-pinned? Like the frats pin girls? But no, that wasn’t it. It was a weird word, though. I remember that.”
“Wall-caught?” I guessed, and then I heard what it sounded like, out loud.
“Yes! That’s it,” Clayton said. “Wall-caught. One word almost, very archaic sounding. I remember wondering if being wall-caught was a cultural thing I didn’t know about. Like handfasting.”
“Walcott? I said it like one word? I said ‘Walcott,’ and then I said I loved you?”
He nodded, and then his eyebrows knitted up all puzzled as wild color rose in my face and I clapped both hands over my mouth. I stood up, my body unable to contain itself even with a whole sofa to itself.
I’d called Walcott earlier that night, when the drugs first hit. I must have been looking for him. Of course I would be so happy to see Walcott, if I had three boys angling me up some stairs while I was feeling sick and off, or drunk and wrong, or even just loose and crazy. In the loud, dark party, drugged and reeling, if I saw someone so long and tall, someone with those spider arms, I might well hope it into being Walcott.
“I told you that I loved you,” I said into my hands. They couldn’t understand me, probably, but I didn’t care because I was speaking to myself. Was Walcott right? Had it always been between us, like a present we were waiting to unwrap when we were older? I couldn’t remember it that way. But I had been so terribly derailed.
Now Beth looked as puzzled as her boyfriend.
I took my hands off my mouth and said to them, “I might know a way to find out. I might know a way that would let me believe you.” None of us knew what to do with that. “I have to go home.”
I started for the door.
“But then what?” said Beth. She meant Natty. She meant we couldn’t stop this conversation until we found a way to talk about him. I wasn’t there yet, not by half. It was possible, it was even likely, that Clayton Lilli hadn’t set out to hurt me, four years ago in the Kappa Nu house, but oh, I could see a hundred ways that he could hurt me now. And I had to be sure.
I stopped at the door and said, “Let’s pause, okay? For now? Let’s all agree right now to not do anything fast. I don’t know you, and I don’t trust you. You don’t know me, either, but I can promise if you push me now, it’s going to get so ugly. You don’t know what all I’m capable of doing. This is . . .” And then I put it all right out in the open. “This is my kid we’re talking about. You need to let me think.”
This could go bad, so fast. I knew it, and they had to as well. Between us, the threat of jail for him, the loss of sole custody for me. I could go back to my story, insist he was a rapist. I’d have Walcott’s testimony and Clayton’s DNA to back me up. His story was good, though. He could win, and end up with half of Natty’s life in his untrusted hands. Also, his financial future, he must have been thinking of that. I could sue him for child support.
But I looked at their faces, and his was earnest. Hers was frightened, but also relieved. They both looked just as young and scared as me.
Clayton nodded. “Going slow is right. It’s good.”
I said, “Slow, or even nowhere. I start school next week, so I will be in town a lot. You can decide if you even want to talk more. That’s the first thing. We could all walk away from this. It’s an option, and I believe you enough to be open to it. We all cut our losses and walk away. It may be best, even. But it’s possible I could be open to other things, if you let me go home and think. If we are very slow. Slow and very careful. Because for me, the only person who matters in all of this is Natty.”
That made Clayton sit up straight. “That’s his name?”
Beth got up and crossed to Clayton’s chair. She put her hand on his shoulder.
“Yes,” I said. “His name is Natty. Nathan.”
“Slow,” he said. He looked up at his girl. Her restored faith in him had pinked her cheeks. She looked less dour and beige, at least. I wondered if his story was really true, and if I was in love with Walcott. I wondered if I could ever come to trust Clayton. I wondered if I could stomach a person named Beth.
“We can do that,” Beth said for him. She looked to him when she said it, though, and he nodded.
I dug in my bag and wrote down my cell phone number for them.
“Call me next week, if you decide you want to talk,” I told them both, and then I left.
Maybe they would walk away. That would be easiest. But maybe they would want to be involved in Natty’s life, in one of a hundred possible capacities. If I came to believe him, we might step toward that, eventually. Maybe I would even go after those three boys and find out which of them put chemicals into my Coke, taking away my memories and my choices. That person should be made to pay. But I didn’t have to decide anything right now.
I didn’t know how it would unfold. I didn’t even know how I wanted it to. All I could do was go home and see what happened. My heart was divided. It mostly hoped Clayton would never call, but the small slice left hoped in a frailer way that he might come to be a good thing in my son’s life.
The only thing I could hope with my whole heart was that we would all be slow and very careful with one another. So I hoped it, and I went home, t
o Mimmy and my baby.
I didn’t call Walcott. Too much had happened. My brain couldn’t think and decide if I had, when drugged and helpless, looked for him so hard that I had seen him in the first long, tall shape that had come toward me. That I had told him I loved him. That I had said his name into a stranger’s mouth. I was too blank and scared and tired and hopeful all at once to know if I had loved him my whole life or not. It was all I could do not to pass out from exhaustion and run off the road into a ditch.
Once I got back home, up on the mountain, I pacified Mimmy as much as was possible. I didn’t bother with my room. I went to Natty’s and wedged myself into my sleeping son’s twin bed. I fell to deep-down sleeping almost instantly, breathing in the smell of his apple-clean shampoo.
When I wake up, it’s past nine.
I don’t call Walcott until after I have showered and dressed and eaten Mimmy’s fluffy, buttered pancakes with Natty while Mimmy ate some fruit. I wait until Natty has gone with Mimmy to the candy shop, to see the pretty girls in their sash dresses making fudge and dipping Oreos in chocolate like I used to do.
He answers his cell by saying my name, and his voice is very worried. “Shandi? Where have you been?”
“I’m home at Mimmy’s. It’s a long story,” I tell him. “Can you meet me at the halfway place?”
He knows right where I mean.
“Now?” he says.
“Yes,” I tell him. “Now.”
My hair is down, still damp around my shoulders. I haven’t bothered to put makeup on. My face is just my face.
I start walking through the woods to this grassy place we know, too big to be a clearing, but not quite a meadow, either. It lies between our house and his momses’ B and B. The path is sloped, but not too steep, winding me in S shapes up the mountain toward him. Blackberry brambles line this path, but most of the fruit is gone here at the end of summer. There are a few left, dull black and fat and almost, almost overripe. I pick and eat them as I walk, though I have no way to wash them. I let them stain my mouth with dirty sweetness.
When I break out of the woods, I see Walcott coming toward me.
I walk toward him across the gold late-summer grass, and my body is alive underneath me. Alive and wholly mine, with the heat of all the sun caught in my skin. I am as fat and ripe as one of those late-summer berries. I am juicy and bursting under all my skin. I go toward him slow; no need to hurry through this heat. No need to hurry toward knowing when my body feels as if it may have already decided. He is smiling, and as I come close he sees my face and his smile changes and his eyes change. He slows down, too. His spine straightens and he is Walcott, long and tall, coming toward me in a grassy place too small to be a meadow.
He knows me so well. I don’t have to say it. Not any of it. Not yet. There will be time for it later. For now, it is enough. It is enough and it is easy. Easy to walk the last few steps between us. Easy and so beautiful to step into his arms.
He kisses me. He kisses me.
I kiss him back.
About the Author
JOSHILYN JACKSON is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, including gods in Alabama and A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. A former actor, Jackson is also an award-winning audiobook narrator. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband and their two children.
www.JoshilynJackson.com
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Credits
Jacket design and illustration by Mary Schuck
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SOMEONE ELSE’S LOVE STORY. Copyright © 2013 by Joshilyn Jackson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-210565-3
EPub Edition DECEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062105677
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