by Paula Garner
“Let me see,” he said, coming over to us.
“There’s nothing to see,” I said through clenched teeth.
But Meg moved the ice, and he sucked air in through his teeth. “You’re gonna be spending some quality time on the bench, son,” he said.
He so did not just call me “son.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It’s just a bruise. It’s no big deal.”
“You think?” he asked, looking amused. “Race you around the block in the morning.”
“Jeff,” Meg chastised him, getting up and leaving the ice balancing on my knee.
“There are no blocks,” I said. “Have you looked around?”
He rolled his eyes. “Okay, fine, I’ll race you up and down the verdant country roads. Better?”
I ignored him. I was sort of bummed he knew a word like “verdant.”
“What are you doing?” I called to Meg. She stood at the sliding-glass doors, rubbing at a spot with a towel as if the survival of the planet depended on it.
Jeff heaved a sigh and walked over to her. He came up behind her, taking her arms gently in his hands, and whispered in her ear. She handed him the towel and snapped the rubber band on her wrist.
What the fuck?
My mom slid open the door, and Jeff and Meg stepped aside. “What happened, Otis?” She hurried over to me. “I heard you took a spill.”
“Jesus, it’s nothing!”
She gave me a look and picked up the ice to look underneath.
“I’ll get the arnica,” she said, turning and heading for the bathroom.
“I’ll find something to prop up your foot,” Meg said, and disappeared into the living room before I could protest.
Thankfully, my mom was back with a tube of arnica cream before Jeff and I had to make small talk. I tried not to wince as she rubbed the ointment into my knee. She winced for both of us.
Meg brought a throw pillow from the living room and lifted my foot to set it under. Then she knelt by my side, one hand on the ice pack.
“You really don’t have to —” I began, but she cut me off.
“I don’t mind.”
Jeff watched her for a minute and then wandered outside.
My mom gave me a Motrin and told me to sit still with the ice for a while, then she joined the others outside.
Meg didn’t talk — she just stayed. I felt like crap for being such a dick to her. “Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, about sticking to me —”
She shook her head. “You’re right. I need to get my head on straight, I know that.” She sighed. “This is just a weird place to be with Jeff. I mean, this is . . .” Her eyes met mine. “It’s our place. You know? And I go back to California in a few days. This was supposed to be our chance to talk and . . .” She gave a quick shrug. “I had a whole plan for this trip, for these three weeks. A list of things I needed to try to do. But it didn’t go so well.”
I took off the ice and stood up, because if she was working up to telling me she had made her decision and she wasn’t moving back, I kind of wanted to skip it. I could just see myself starting to cry, and then Football Guy walking in and seeing.
Meg rushed to put my arm around her so she could support me. “Let me help you,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“To take a leak.”
“Ah.” She smiled. “Hm.”
“I’m fine on my own,” I said, moving away from her.
“I should probably get out there, anyway.” She glanced outside. “The fireworks and everything . . .”
“Right. Well, don’t let me stop you.” I hobbled away quickly, wondering if she’d recognize the words she had flung at me that night at Dara’s party.
When I came back from the bathroom, I sat with my back to the windows and played games on my phone, ignoring the whistles of bottle rockets and the shouts of the kids next door. After a while, I got up and poked around in the freezer, finding an unmolested container of brownie fudge ice cream. Chocolate, good. I grabbed a spoon and limped outside.
It was almost dark now. The moonlight shimmered on the now-still lake. Mosquitoes buzzed around the yellow patio light by the door, and firecrackers popped in the distance like gunshots, their smoky sulfur smell hanging in the night air.
“Hey, Ot,” my dad said. He scrubbed the grill with a crumpled ball of aluminum foil. “How’s the knee?”
“Fine. Where is everyone?”
“Down by the pier. Waiting for the fireworks.”
I scraped a layer of ice cream onto my spoon and licked it off.
“You going?” my dad asked. “I think the Dunhams are doing a bonfire. Mom bought stuff for s’mores.”
I certainly didn’t want to sit there during the fireworks while Jeff and Meg made fireworks of their own. I wondered if he ate chocolate, or if he avoided it for Meg. I hoped he was addicted to the stuff. Suddenly I didn’t want the ice cream; now I just wanted to brush my teeth and gargle. “I think I’ll call it a night,” I said.
“Well, there’ll be plenty more fireworks over the next couple nights. You know how it goes here.” He came over and gave me a one-armed hug and, weirdly, a kiss on my head.
I limped back inside, tossed the container of ice cream back in the freezer, and went to get ready for bed. Maybe I’d try to sleep through the next two days. And then we’d go back home and then Meg would go back to California and then . . .
I didn’t know what then. I’d start over, I supposed. Again.
I sent Dara a message just to say hi, but I didn’t hear back, probably because of the lesbian sex, and then pulled out Gatsby. After reading for a while, I stared to doze, and it felt so good that I set down my book and went with it. But then the fireworks started in earnest, and there was no sleeping through that racket, especially with the Dunhams’ terrier barking back at it. So I lay there, tortured by thoughts of Meg kissing Football Guy during the fireworks, and waited for it all to be over. Finally, sometime after midnight, I fell asleep.
I was awakened by noises. From upstairs. His room.
My heart started to pound. Please, don’t let me hear them. Anything but that. But even over the rattling whir of the box fan by my bed, I heard them. I pulled my pillow over my head, but the noises were just echoing in my head now, and I was sure I was hearing Meg’s moans, headboards banging, all kinds of things. I considered getting up and going outside, putting as much distance between me and them as I could. But when I moved, my knee howled. Fuck.
I grabbed the nearest thing to me — it happened to be an old alarm clock — and hurled it at the ceiling. It exploded, louder than I’d dreamed possible, breaking into pieces.
Silence. Total, utter silence.
A minute passed. My mom called softly from outside my door, “Otis?”
Shit.
She opened the door a crack. “Otis?” she asked again.
“I’m fine. It was nothing.”
“What was the noise?”
“I broke the clock.”
“What? How? Why?”
“I was having a bad dream and — I guess I threw it.”
She was quiet. For too long. Finally she said, “This is not passing my sniff test, Otis.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Are you alone in there?”
“Desperately. Come see.”
She sighed. “Okay. Good night. Love you.”
I lay there, wide awake, until after what felt like forever, my door creaked open again.
This time, it was Meg.
“OTIS?” SHE WHISPERED.
What the hell could she want with me? If she was coming to tell me that the spectacular fuck upstairs had clinched the decision to return to California, frankly I thought that could wait until morning.
“Otis? Can I come in?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t want her anywhere near me, especially if she was all covered in eau de Jeff and whatnot.
“No?” she repeated
, like it had never occurred to her I would actually say that. Maybe because I’d never said no to her in all the years I’d known her. “I just — I really need to talk to you.”
“Well,” I whispered, “there’s broken glass in here and you’re barefoot, so . . .”
“How do you know I’m barefoot?”
“Because you’re always barefoot!”
She padded away, and I could hear the door next to mine creak open. I shifted in bed, trying to get comfortable again, but pain radiated from my knee. There was no way I’d be involved in any footraces with Football Guy. Fuck.
There was another tap. “I’m coming in,” Meg whispered. I hear the soft smacking of flip-flops across the floor, then the crunching of glass.
“What do you want, Meg?” I said. “It’s kind of late for a chat.”
“What time is it, anyway?”
“I don’t know — you’re walking over the pieces of the clock right now.”
“Is that what that racket was? What happened?”
“Bad dream,” I muttered. More like a nightmare.
“God, it’s pitch-dark.” She shuffled her way to the bed. “Can I sit? I don’t know where you are.”
I moved to the other side of the bed, heaving a mighty sigh. “Go ahead.”
I felt her sink onto the bed. A hand brushed my arm. “Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m right here, obviously,” I said, scooting away from her.
“Why are you being so mean?”
“I’m not being mean. I just don’t know why this is your first stop after fucking your boyfriend.”
“What?” She sounded confused — and a little indignant.
“I know you’re no spatial genius, but I’m right below his room.”
“We weren’t . . . God, Otis.”
“I have ears, Meg.”
“Well, I don’t know what you think you were hearing, but it wasn’t . . . that.”
Silence. Then, sniffling.
“Are you crying?”
“No,” she said, in the most tear-soaked voice I’d ever heard.
“Hey,” I said, reaching out for her. My hand made contact with some soft fabric, and I patted it reassuringly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just assumed . . .”
She sniffled again, then scooted closer and lay down next to me. I could feel the heat coming off her body, only inches away from mine.
“Otis?” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“You smell like chlorine. How is that possible?”
I shrugged. “It’s in my pores.”
More silence, then:
“Are you naked?”
“What if I am?” The smell of her hair combined with her speaking the word “naked” was not the thing I needed just then.
“Seriously, what are you wearing?”
“Boxers.”
“That’s it? Just boxers?”
“It’s like a thousand degrees in here. And I wasn’t expecting company.”
Her hand slid down my arm and found my hand, nestling inside. I was glad it was pitch-dark, because the idiot pig was starting to poke out of the barn, so to speak, and I didn’t even have a sheet over me.
We lay that way for a while, neither of us talking. Finally I whispered, “What if your dad checked on you and didn’t find you in your room, so he went looking for you in Jeff’s room . . . Imagine.”
“I know. But he won’t check on me. He has no idea how to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Parent. Without my mom.”
I thought about that. “Yeah, I can see that. I mean, even with my own dad, my mom is in charge of discipline.”
“Ha, as if you require disciplining.”
“You’d be surprised. I really piss her off sometimes.” After a moment I asked, “Was that part of the draw of Willow Grove? Less discipline? Easier with your dad?”
“Nothing would be easy. Anywhere.”
At this point I realized I wished she would just say it. That she wasn’t coming back. I wished she’d just fucking say it.
“So? What’s going on?” I asked.
“There was no sex, Otis.”
“I heard stuff . . .”
“It wasn’t sex. In fact, for the record, I’ve never had sex with Jeff.”
Before I could even begin to soar on this happiest of news, she let go of my hand and shifted. I figured I’d blown it, but she lifted my arm and laid her head on my shoulder, leaving my arm with really nowhere to go but around her.
“Why does this shoulder feel like the safest place in the world?” she whispered.
“Why do people think I’m so safe?” I grumbled.
She settled her head a little lower onto my chest.
This had to have been the most nearly perfect moment of my life. I was so completely nearly happy. And yet. “Meg? Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
She exhaled. “We broke up.”
I started to sit up, but of course her head was on me, so I lay back down. “What?”
“That’s what you were hearing. Arguing. Not sex. Jesus. Is that how you have sex?”
I smiled a little. “I don’t have sex, remember?”
“Well, maybe that’s a good thing, if that’s how you’d do it.”
I could hear the smile in her voice, despite everything. “What happened? And what’s going to happen tomorrow? Is he going to stay?”
I felt her shake her head. “Give me a minute. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And I don’t know about tomorrow. This sucks. There are no airports around here. We’re kind of stuck. He really shouldn’t have come — we weren’t in the greatest place anyway. I told him I wanted to be friends, but — I don’t even know. This isn’t fair to him. But it wasn’t fair to me, either.”
We lay there for a while in silence, and I started wondering if she would ever say anything, or if maybe she was falling asleep. It was so surreal to have her there with me. It was surreal that the boyfriend upstairs was apparently history. It was surreal that we were in bed together. Or on a bed, anyway. Technically.
But most surreal of all was the fact that we’d spent three whole years apart, living entirely separate lives, having all these experiences that the other person knew nothing about.
“I don’t understand it,” I said, as though I’d been thinking aloud this whole time. “I don’t understand how there can be three years where I didn’t know you.”
“Well, you didn’t know me before. I mean, before I was nine.”
“That’s different. You didn’t exist for me yet. Everything changed after that. There was life before you, and then life with you. There wasn’t supposed to be life after you.”
She squeezed my hand. “I know.”
“I always wondered what you were doing. All that time.”
She lay perfectly still. Then: “They weren’t my best years, Otis.”
“Well, sure. I mean, I can imagine.”
“I could tell you about it. But you won’t like it.”
I felt the chill of dread, the familiar urge to turn away to protect myself from something I didn’t want to hear. But that was the very thing that had cost me Meg in the first place. If I wanted to convince her to stay, to show her we could be okay, this was my chance.
“Tell me.”
“Okay . . .” She took a deep breath. “After we moved, I wanted, I don’t know . . . I wanted to start over, I guess. I wanted to separate myself from you. From everything that happened. But no matter what I did, I still felt you there. None of it went away. I did so many stupid things, trying to get away from everything, from you . . . There was this one thing. I’ve never told anyone.” She hesitated. “I want to tell you. I think I need to.”
“Okay.” I squeezed her hand, although I didn’t know which of us I was trying to reassure.
“So when I started at my new school, I went straight to the wrong crowd. Drinking. Smoking pot.”
“In
junior high?”
“I know. It’s awful. I actually dyed my hair black that year.”
“What?” I tried to envision Meg with black hair. I couldn’t.
“My parents weren’t doing so great, either. My mom was falling apart because of . . .”
“Because of what happened.”
“Yes, but . . . Not just that, Otis. Your mom cut my mom off. And it just about killed her.”
It occurred to me I didn’t know what the hell my mom was doing at that time. She stayed in bed a lot. She cried all the time. And she “if only’d” constantly: If only I hadn’t said he could have his nap at the Brandts . . . If only we’d used the monitor . . . If only the Brandts had never moved here . . . She pushed both my dad and me to our very limits. Losing Mason was hard enough. But living in the vortex of her grief every day, while she continually replayed what had happened — it was too much. But I knew now that as awful as she’d made it for everyone else, it was probably nothing compared to the hell she herself was living through.
“You okay?” Meg asked quietly.
I realized I’d been quiet for a while. “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It’s all just . . .”
“I know,” she whispered.
“Anyway, you were saying . . . ?” I prompted.
“Right, yeah. So, by the time I started high school, my parents and I were fighting all the time. I’d come home drunk, get grounded, act horrible. One night I sneaked out and went to this party. And . . .” She paused for a moment. “I’m just going to say it: I ended up having sex with someone there. Someone I didn’t even know.”
Her words filled me with anger, jealousy, confusion — and, yes, disappointment. I fought the urge to pull my hand from hers.
“And it was awful. I didn’t like the way he kissed. I didn’t like the way he touched me. I didn’t like any of it. And I went kind of numb, and then it was like I was watching myself. Part of me was thinking, I shouldn’t do this, this is going to be a horrible mistake . . . But part of me was, like, cheering me on. Wanting me to do it.”
I did pull my hand away then. “Why?”
“Well. I could say it’s because I was drunk. And maybe that helped. But it wasn’t just that. I think part of me wanted it. Part of me wanted to change myself so I wouldn’t be the same person, wouldn’t still be mired in everything that happened in Willow Grove. It’s like I was walking around as this broken, fucked-up version of that person. And I wanted to be someone else, I wanted out. My therapist says the act was like a burial for my old self. I think he’s right. I don’t know if I can explain it any better than that.”