Anything More Than Now (Sutton College #2)

by Rebecca Paula

  Goodbyes aren’t fast and hearts can’t be untied from one another so quickly. I’m Jane, tied to Rochester, miles and miles away, my heart bleeding as the string finally unravels and snaps.

  Minus FaceTime, it’s the first time I meet my new roommate in person as she flings open the door to a tiny place in Astoria. Her name is Kate but she insists I call her by her stage name, Imogen. Her long blond hair is curled and pinned back, her eyes encased in thick teal eyeliner.

  “Come in, come in. I have a show,” she says. “I’m glad you didn’t catfish us.”

  My words make a survivor out of me, my words carry my body forward as I shake her hand and try my best not to come off as a complete weirdo. I follow her around the shoebox of an apartment we’re getting robbed on, noticing the years of paint slathered onto the old molding around the cream walls. A giant poster of a watercolored bird, its wings vivid splatters of color as it dives down for invisible prey, takes up the only yellow wall. There’s a half-dead plant beside a small TV, and the small kitchenette looks like a game of Tetris.

  “I share a room with London,” she says. “She’s a burlesque dancer. You’ll meet her tomorrow maybe. We keep weird hours.”

  Kate, I mean Imogen, snaps down on a piece of celery. “So this is your room.” The door opens, hitting the few boxes I sent early. “I guess you can sleep on the futon in the living room since your bed is buried right now.”

  This was what I wanted, I tell myself, faced with the dark, claustrophobic box. I nod again. “Sure.”

  “Our last roommate was a nightmare. I’m sort of glad you’re quiet,” she declares, then pulls off her shirt, racing away in a yellow bra. “Shit, and I’m late. Have something to eat and if you leave, lock the door. We have five locks. You need to lock all of them, especially the deadbolt. Next door has been robbed three times in the last month. And don’t go to that Thai place across the street unless you want food poisoning.”

  Then I’m wedging myself back into my room, straddling boxes stacked on the chipped parquet floor, staring out of my window to a fire escape. Signs from a convenience store and a Thai restaurant across the street flash in dueling neon, burning my eyes with a new future. The sky has fallen down on me and I’m lost among the giants of steel and stone. I’m stuck and alone and brokenhearted. And the lights keep flashing, the cabs passing by beep as an ambulance cuts through the traffic, and somewhere within my building someone cranks their radio to a heavy electronic beat.

  I throw my bag aside and sink against the nicked plaster wall. I bury my head in my knees and close my eyes to New York, while my heart mourns for everything back in Montana.

  Noah

  Funerals are strange. You stand there and watch the body of someone you spent so much time and energy on being lowered into the ground and it feels so final and so surreal. It feels as if you’re burying a piece of yourself too. It unsettles your bones and makes your heart ache, and suddenly, they’re gone and you’re left to live.

  It’s a hot Montana summer evening. The kind without wind and kindness. The heat is brutal, even if coolness is waiting to sweep in after the setting sun.

  I listen to the preacher bless Isla, share another prayer, mention how she’s in heaven with our daughter. Those are just words to me. This whole day is just one motion after another, just like our relationship.

  We were set on this path from the start, it seems. A bad boy who catches the eye of a girl, a quick and lustful relationship, some awkward sex, and then a beautiful mistake. A drunk groom and a sobbing bride, a baby born to a father who was an idiot, a trailer masquerading as a home with two teen parents. Hollow promises, nasty words, sleepless nights, and time locked away in juvie. Then a string of black days after burying that baby. An empty trailer, emptier hearts, a broken love.

  Young love is messy, ours especially. I can’t change what it was or what happened. I can’t make it better, though I tried. I can’t bring her back, even though I wish I could. I wish I could bring them both back so I can prove I’m worthy of a second chance with them.

  I wish I had the chance to show them just how much I loved them in my own way.

  Young love and regrets, young love and mistakes, young love and growing up. Each one step after the next, each setting a course I can’t take back.

  I feel like I’m burying the last part of me, a younger version of myself as if life had layers of revisions, too. One part of my story is finished, the next is still uncertain—a list of ideas, of words struck out from being too impossible to achieve.

  It’s a small service with only our family and a few friends. I hear the unsettled air as soon as I’m asked to say a few words. I glance up, not meeting anyone in the eye but taking in the mountains, in the way they’ve always anchored me to the ground here under the big sky.

  I squint my eyes to the wildfire spreading across the sky with the setting sun and I think, just for a moment, I see her standing by the large maple tree just beyond, her bangs hiding away her beautiful blue eyes.

  “I’m not going to pretend what Isla and I shared was perfect,” I start, then swallow. I pull out the wrinkled paper from my suit jacket, and fix my eyes to the words I scratched across it at four this morning, drowning in coffee and exhaustion. “But I will say that what we brought into this world was. I can’t fix what happened. I can’t bring them back. I can’t heal broken hearts.” Isla’s mother begins to cry and her husband draws her close. I focus back on my speech and sigh. What I wrote doesn’t feel right either.

  “We spend our life learning to be a certain version of ourselves, lying to everyone else that it’s the true version. What we hide away, the person we find when we’re alone, that’s the person who truly loves and loses. That’s the person who has to weather the storm. Isla and I had our battles, we sailed our ships, and it was too much. But who we both loved, our Poppy, brought us both an unexpected surprise.

  “We crumbled after losing our daughter and I tried my best to help Isla. I wish I could write us a different ending. I wish we could stay in the good memories forever. I wish I knew what to say now to make the pain of losing her bearable for everyone here, but I don’t know if there are words for today. Only, I love you, Isla.”

  *

  An hour later, I’m sitting on the steps of the ranch, hoping to be erased with the last trace of daylight. I flick my lighter open and close, open and close, staring at nothing, feeling a whole lot of nothing.

  “I brought reinforcements,” my dad says, stepping out of his truck. The headlights flood the space around me but even then I don’t notice. Life and death has always made things easy to figure out—it’s black and white, do or die, right or wrong. Living through the black and white is a constant rush of adrenaline. I’m tired of being forced to decide and act on the either or.

  Either I fess up to my secret life, or I continue to lie. Either I graduate or I fail. Either I get try to make things better with Reagan, or I let that go.

  I laugh at that last one. There’s not a chance in hell I’d let her go, and yet that’s what I did. I knew she was leaving and I said nothing to stop her, made no promises. I didn’t even say I’d call. I just let her go, easy, as if in one breath I was in love and the next she meant nothing. Black and white. Live or die. Everything and nothing.

  Nathan climbs out of the passenger side of the truck, a carbon copy of my father as they both stride toward me in cowboy boots and hats. I’m the pierced and tattooed black sheep of the Burke family.

  My brother walks up and holds out an ice-cold beer. I wave it away. They sit beside me, sandwiching me in the middle. I came here to think, not to be lectured, not to be patted on the back. I don’t need consoling, I just need answers.

  “Hanging in there, son?” my dad asks.

  His skin is freckled, tanned, and wrinkled. It’s worn like an old leather chair, and gives him a softer appearance than when he was younger. Back then, he was a towering giant. Sometime he went from being a superhero to me, to someone I hated, to s
omeone who I learned to love. He elbows me as I roll the unlit cigarette back and forth in my mouth.

  “Been better,” I answer honestly.

  “It was nice,” Nate says, “what you said about her.”

  I flip the lighter open again, the sparking flint the brightest thing before me as the sun sets in the distance. “It was the truth.”

  I don’t know what it says about me, but I really just want to hear my mother say things will be okay like when I was younger. I miss the way she’d bend down, wrap her arms around me, and squeeze me tight. I miss the perfume she wore, even if she was about to go out and work in the barn. I miss the way she smiled and settled the chaos of two boys and a cowboy into order for a brief moment. I miss her reading softly to herself as she prepped for dinner. My mother lived in a world of words like me and she shared them with me every day, even when I didn’t want to listen. I miss having her around now that I’m in a place in my life to appreciate her. I’d like to think I wouldn’t be such a disappointment now. Maybe.

  “Come home soon, Noah,” my dad says, rising to his feet. Nate follows, as always. “I’ll cook us some steaks on the grill. Maybe you’ll be up for a beer then.”

  I nod, leaning onto my knees, staring at the ground.

  “You’ve done a nice job on the place,” Nate says before climbing into the truck.

  I nod again, not even caring if my dad just comes out and asks me why I’m working on the house. I’m tired of lying to him. I continue my staring match until the ground begins to fade, disappearing as the night grows darker. The crickets are in full chorus, the fireflies flicking brightly across the field.

  It’s like dancing in the sky.

  Her shadow cuts across my vision, the memory of her skirt floating around her like sunflower petals and she’d spin with her arms up in the air, her bare feet lost in the depths of the field. That sweet laugh of hers, that smile that sliced away the hard edges of my life—everything here reminds me of her now. This house no longer is about the life I had, but a peek at what I could have. I’m not sure which is better. Both hurt. Both seem impossible to possess.

  I cave and light the cigarette, hanging my head. When headlights flood around my feet, I look up, unable to tell if it’s my brother or father.

  “I’ll be home later,” I snap between a deep drag. I hate the taste of this, but it’s better than drinking, sure as hell better than letting me get in a car right now. Still, I feel dirty with the cigarette smoke clinging to me.

  “Sure thing, darling,” Beau shouts out to me in the dark. “Want me to bake you a pie, too?”

  I’m surprised when a rough laugh scrapes through my throat. I grind my cigarette out against the stones steps, then stand, meeting him halfway. He pulls me into a hug, patting my back just like I didn’t want. Strangely, it doesn’t matter. I’m happy he came.

  “How have you been?” I ask, throwing an arm over his shoulder and leading him to the porch. “How’s that hole in your head?” A hundred questions pour through my mind, my heart hammering. “Where’s Matisse?”

  “Mati’s back at the motel. Sorry we missed the funeral. I didn’t get your message until last night. We’ve been hiking up in Canada.”

  If I wasn’t such a horrible friend, I’d know that. Instead I ignored everything this summer for a girl who I ended up losing anyway. “You didn’t have to come at all.” I open the screen door and wave him in, realizing I sound like an asshole. “But thank you.” The kitchen light filters down the long central hall and I flick on a switch. “Show me, Frankenstein.”

  Beau pushes shaggy hair from his forehead and shows me the scar across his scalp from his brain surgery. It wasn’t cancer after all. “The chicks dig it.”

  “Chicks?”

  He shrugs, a dopey smile spreading across his face. “Fine, one chick in particular.”

  “I’m guessing things are good then?” I can’t stomach that “I’m in love” face of his, so I turn around and head to the kitchen, opening up the fridge to find a few beers left behind from working on the house with Reagan. My stomach wants to jump out of my throat when I straighten and watch him come into the kitchen, his eyes narrowing in on me.

  “We’re great.” But his voice trails off and I suddenly want to hide. “I’m sorry, Noah. About today.”

  I guess I buried my voice with Isla because I only nod again. I grab the bottle opener, snap off both caps, and hand one to Beau. “Thanks. Thanks for coming. I mean it.”

  We shoot the shit for a while on the back porch. I lit the fire pit and we talk about freshman year, about his surgery. He takes a drink, then turns his head, peering at me, his lips pressed into a tight line.

  I swallow nervously, scratching the back of my neck. “What is it?”

  “Just wondering when you’re going to tell me about you and Reagan.”

  It’s a strange sensation when everything inside your lurches forward, but you’re stuck on a porch step, stationary. The world zooms by, as does your heart, and your thoughts. It’s something I’ve felt too often in my life.

  “I didn’t know how to tell you. Or when.” I empty my beer and grab his, dumping it out into the shrubs Reagan’s planted. “Or if it was ever going to turn into something….”

  The words die off in my throat. I wasn’t sure if we’d ever be more than a few pity-fueled hookups. I didn’t think she’d ever get to a place where she’d find space for me in her life after my best friend.

  “Serious,” he finishes for me.

  It’s always been serious for me. I shrug.

  Beau stands. “She’s…a lot to handle on her best days.”

  I’m glad he can’t see my face because I smile. She is never too much to handle for me. She is just right. We both are.

  I follow him into the kitchen, where he starts opening up the mostly empty cupboards, finally arriving at a few stacked-up water glasses. He fills one up, studying me as he drinks.

  “You had enough shit going on and it just kind of happened….”

  “I’m not mad, Noah.”

  Hope bounces inside my chest. “No?”

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” he says laughing. “I’ve gotta get back to Mati. I’d ask where Reagan is but I’m guessing she worked up the nerve to go to New York.”

  I shut off the light and grab my truck keys, following him out and locking up the house. “She did, yeah.”

  “And what about you?” He takes a step as though he’s going to leave, then sits down on the stairs. “Are you staying here or going back to Sutton?”

  I join him, taking out another cigarette from my pocket. I roll it between my fingers, asking myself a million silent questions, waiting for some divine inspiration to help point me in the right direction because even if I had a map right now, I’d be hopeless. “Those are my only options?”

  “You have money,” Beau says. I look down at him, expecting that to be his solution to my problems, but he surprises me. “Maybe you don’t go back to Sutton. But you and I both know you can’t stay here in Splendid. Maybe take a year off and travel.”

  “Where would I go?” I don’t want to go anywhere without Reagan. I don’t want to see the world without being able to share that with her. “It doesn’t matter. I have another year. I’ll just get it over with.”

  Beau turns to me, his elbows folded over his knees. I caught him in the middle of a fight my freshman year. For such a tough hockey player, the guy can’t land a punch. I saved his sorry ass that night and then he asked if I wanted to grab a beer. I can’t even get a friend without having to fight.

  “You don’t want to live your life just getting through it. Seriously.”

  I’m waiting for him to play the cancer card. I’m waiting for him to tell me how he thought he was dying this year and had some sort of revelation. I’m waiting because I expect it. Just like I expect Scott to tell me I’m capable of better work, of how my father keeps asking where I get all my money. “I don’t need—”

  “Don’t worry,
” he says on a heartless laugh, “I’m not giving you some come-to-Jesus speech here. I’m just saying you don’t owe anyone anything. You’ve done your best by everyone when I’m sure a lot of people would have just left. But that’s your thing, Noah. You’ve always been this loyal guy even if you think the world hates you.” He snatches the cigarette from my hand and tosses it out into the lawn. “Just think about what you want. And maybe….”

  “Fuck, no,” I say, knowing what he’s about to say.

  “It can’t be fun hiding all the time.”

  I scratch the back of my neck and get up, overcome by the day and life and why I’m even here to begin with. “People are going to want something of Asher that I can’t give them.”

  Beau sprints forward, spinning around to face me as he backs up toward his Jeep. “Dude, you are Asher. Just think about it. Oh, and get your sorry ass out of bed in the morning, we’ll go out to breakfast before me and Mati head back to Portland. We need to find an apartment.”

  “So you’re going to be roommates again?”

  He jumps into his Jeep and beeps the horn, sticking his head out of the window. “With benefits.”

  My phone all but burns a hole in my pocket as I climb into my truck. I see a few missed calls from my dad, but otherwise, nothing. I pick it up and find her in my contacts. I try to text her. My cursor erases my sorry-ass apology. I try again, erasing my “I miss you,” then “Today was shit. I want to hold you.” My heart hammers again as I decide I don’t need words, I don’t need her reply. I just need to hear her voice.

  I dial. It rings while I hold my breath, unsure of what I’ll say. Hi is pretty fucking lame after everything. Disappointment rises up in my throat as a prerecorded voicemail prompts me to leave a message. I hang up and drive to my dad’s where I have that beer and a few more.