The door opens. He’s alone. So I don’t even try to hide what I’m feeling. He looks sad and sympathetic and angry, and he gives me a big hug. I feel like a little girl. Which is what I am.
“What did he do to you?”
I tell him that Thomas was wonderful and didn’t do anything wrong. I just picked the worst (but necessary) moment possible to remember Andrew’s advice that it’d be wrong for me to settle for anything less than love.
At this point, he has one brotherly arm around my shoulders and invites me in. I freeze, and his surprise makes me ask to make sure he’s alone. He doesn’t understand why I’m asking.
“I told you Carmen and I broke up.”
I don’t have it in me to act my way out of this one.
“I saw you driving around with this very pretty blond girl.”
He looks at me with his lopsided smile. “If I was driving someone around in my car, why would they necessarily be in my apartment at eleven o’clock tonight?”
Throwing all self-respect into the gutter, I say, “Because before she got into the GEM with you, she came out of your apartment at eight o’clock in the morning.”
My mind floods with all the humiliating questions about how I could know something like that. But instead of asking them and instead of wearing a face that would hurt my feelings, he says…
“You’re just having a really bad night. The person you’re talking about is Cassie. She’s my sister-in-law. She got into a horrible fight with my brother. And we’re close, so she came over late and crashed. And then I spent half the day telling my idiot brother what an asshole he is and how lucky he is to be with someone who really loves him.”
I stare in his eyes. “You should really charge for this stuff. Putting broken girls back together.”
“You’re not broken,” Andrew tells me. If only he knew the half of it. Or the other half of me, as it were.
So we sit in his kitchen, and he makes me hot chocolate and we pitch mini-marshmallows into our mugs as we talk. He wants to know how I left things with Thomas, and I tell him that things aren’t terrible. Thomas simply figures that being younger than I look, I got in over my head a little and need more time to figure out what I want. It would’ve been incredibly rude of me, not to mention courageous, to have told him that I already knew. So I didn’t. I’m also worried once I tell him that, despite all his perfectness, I don’t want to date him, my chances for Robin will go from slim to none. I’d like to believe he’s genuine in his assurance that whether we date or not won’t affect business. He’s a good person. Andrew reminds me that ultimately it’s not Thomas’s decision who gets the role either way.
We talk for about an hour. He makes me bacon and eggs since I dashed out of Thomas’s before dinner.
“You never asked why I was staking out your apartment when I saw Cassie and you this morning.”
“And I’m not going to.”
“Here’s why. I had a dream last night. In this dream, I was sort of me, but my name was something else. I was just starting to date some guy in my high school, and he had to get up in the middle of the night to pick up some once-and-future girlfriend at the airport.”
He stares at me. He’s a terrific listener. So I tell him that this dream does not explain in any logical way why I was drawn to spy on him. But it is the reason.
“And I guess because the boy in my dream lied to me, it made me doubt how wonderful he was. And maybe I thought if you were lying about Carmen, it would mean that you weren’t as terrific as I need you to be.”
“Why do you need me to be terrific?”
“Because I need someone to be terrific. And you are, and you’re very important to me.”
“But this guy in your dream, that was like a boyfriend.”
“Yeah. The dream is always different from my life. The same in some ways and modified and twisted and different.”
“The dream.”
I simply make one of the real threshold decisions of my life. “It’s a dream I have every night. Every night since forever. It’s never the same dream, it’s the same alternate life.”
I’ve said the words out loud. He is stunned by them. The second hand on the clock on the wall seems to move faster and the words tumble from my lips as I explain.
“Yes, alternate life. That’s what it is. My name is Sloane, which is actually my real first name. I live in a little town called Mystic, Connecticut, where I have actually only been twice. I go to high school. I get to be blond and have actual breasts…”
He laughs in a very nice way, which helps me feel brave enough to continue.
“My father is alive there and very nice, though not my best friend like my dad was. I have no sister and two brothers. My mom there is the opposite of Nicole. We are close, but there’s a huge anger thing in my heart toward her that I don’t really understand. At least not there, I don’t.”
“But you understand it here?”
“I think I do. We can’t read each other’s minds.”
“What do you mean ‘we’?”
I take a deep breath. “This is the really hard part. This is the part where you learn how crazy I am and you’ll have to decide if you’re still going to be my friend.”
“I already decided. And I already know you’re crazy. And you can stop talking about this right now if you want.”
“Here’s what ‘we’ means. Every night, I dream about her life in Mystic. And when she falls asleep in Mystic, she dreams the whole day I live here in New York. And I think I’m real and she’s my fantasy…”
“And she thinks the same?”
I’m too afraid to speak. The kitchen falls silent. I can hear the tick-tick of the clock on the wall.
“But you know the difference, right? I mean, you know you’re real. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be either, or Jade, or your dad, or everyone out there on the street right now. Right?”
I nod. And I quietly say, “That’s what Sloane thinks too.”
He smiles. “Only a storyteller like you could come up with something like this. Amazing.”
I start to cry. He thinks it’s a story. The truth of this is far more than insane. It separates me from everyone and everything. Anyone, who isn’t my shrink, I tell this to will never really love me or be close to me.
Because of my tears, I can see in his face that he realizes this is actually true. And I am a freak. And this makes me cry harder, so that he comes over and hugs me tight to calm me down. But I know when he lets go, he and I will never be the same.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
sloane
I wake up feeling utterly betrayed. Even if James never liked me the way I wish he’d liked me and I misread his actions and words as flirtatious, he must like me enough to want to be my friend. Why lie about this airport run? I guess he didn’t lie so much as omit. Which leaves my mind to do horrible imagining. If it is an uncle or a guy friend, he’d just say it. It has to be some girl and he realized I have an enormous crush on him and he knew that telling me that would be devastating.
And I strangely feel betrayed by Maggie. We share the world’s weirdest secret and she goes and blabs it to Andrew, what, to try to impress him or something? She obviously wants him to want her, even though she’d run like crazy if he did. Just like she ran like crazy from Thomas. Andrew has had plenty of opportunities and hasn’t taken them. Showing up on his doorstep crying and spilling a sacred secret just seems desperate.
I would never tell anyone about us. Especially not a boy I wish liked me. I feel a tremendous ache to tell James everything else in my heart and soul and mind. Except Maggie.
I roll on my side to stare at my tree and see a star on my pillow. A fallen star. Looking up, I can tell it has fallen from the Field of Wildflowers, a constellation to the left of Delicioso, where all the great sky beings go to make wishes. I guess I should make a wish.
I suddenly feel inspired by Maggie’s spying. I jump into jeans and a T-shirt, ones that fit pretty tight and great just in ca
se he blows my cover. I take the time to coat my lashes with some mascara because he’s an eyelash guy and all. Skip breakfast entirely, sneak out of the house undetected, and ride my bike down to James’s house, throwing caution to the wind and leaving my life-sustaining helmet at home. A fatal head injury might be just the thing, particularly just outside his front yard, where he and his strumpet (Shakespeare for “slut”) will drive by my mangled body in his stupid Targa, having to swerve wildly to avoid treating me as roadkill, only to jump from the car, run to my side, tears on his face as he desperately feels for my pulse, lifts me in his strong arms as if I were weightless, and turns to her and announces that I’m the one he really loves.
Sounds like a plan.
He isn’t home. Nor does he come home during the nearly three hours that I sit behind that stupid tree, playing Fruit Ninja on my iPhone. Every time a car drives by, I lie flat on the ground so they can’t see me from the road. Mystic is a small town. Not sure how I’d explain what I’m doing here.
Once I’d been at a keg party at Esker Point, basically just a bunch of kids from school sitting on the beach, drinking bad beer out of red plastic cups, your average rite of passage, and I responsibly walked home instead of getting a ride from Joe Stevens, who definitely had done at least one keg stand. The next morning our neighbor Mrs. Lamb came over to borrow some eggs and mentioned in front of my mom and dad that she’d seen me walking down by Beebee Cove. “Can’t get away with anything in this town,” she said, and winked. Luckily she made no reference to the fact that I most certainly had appeared inebriated.
Since my phone is running out of batteries and I’m losing my mind, I give up on my stakeout and hop on my trusty Schwinn. I take Marsh Road and bike through Noank, the little village right next to Mystic. I pass by the park and Carson’s General Store, where I’d usually stop for an ice cream soda. Instead, I pedal as fast as I can and fly down the big hill toward the town dock. The water is sparkling out before me. If my brakes give out or if I was very adventurous, I could fly straight off the dock and into the mouth of the Mystic River. But I turn left at the last minute and coast onto Front Street. Right past Bill’s house.
His family lives in the prettiest house. They moved to town when I was twelve. It is a green house, set back from the road with big gorgeous trees protecting it. The rolling lawn in front spills down to the water. As I coast by, I can see the corner window of Bill’s room. The shades are open and I wonder what it looks like now, if they’ve turned it into a sewing room or an extra bedroom. Or if they left it just as it was.
I bike on, heading toward home. When I get downtown, I decide to head over the drawbridge and go visit Kelly. She works at Kitchen Little on Saturdays, which is the best breakfast spot in town. I get there just before she gets off at one. Neither of us has eaten all day, so she convinces the cook to make us Portuguese sweet muffins covered in hash and fried eggs. Of course, I can’t eat a bite. Of course, she notices. We sit on the patio. Kelly takes the river view, leaving me staring out at traffic on Route 27.
She assumes I’ve come by to discuss last night’s concert in Providence. I spend the next three minutes telling her what actually happened in one breath so I can get it over with. Although Lila is my friend from earliest childhood, she would’ve been a terrible choice for this moment because her idea of making me feel better would be to join me in a bitch fest against the pig who crushed my soul. I love Kelly because her insight into making me feel better is to walk me back from my completely uninformed and paranoid conclusion.
“Why in the world would he lead you on if he had a girlfriend? So that he could get some action until she showed up? He absolutely has Amanda available for that duty. More to the point, and I don’t know him at all, but I feel like even if he may be a little bit in love with himself, he’s basically a trustworthy guy. He doesn’t seem like he’d hurt someone recklessly for no reason.”
“You told me you didn’t like him.”
“I still don’t. I think he’s honorable, and he’s certainly foxy, but like you originally said, I don’t think he’ll ever give his heart to anyone, and I’m sorry to say that includes you.”
Her words have barely died away in the afternoon air when directly into my vision, braking to a stop at the light on Route 27, is an old red Targa. The woman in the seat beside him, touching his arm as she leans to speak in his ear, is not only stunning enough to put Amanda Porcella in the shade, exotic/intriguing enough to put Angelina Jolie in the shade, she is clearly old enough to have her own apartment, big enough for a cat and a gorgeous boyfriend.
It doesn’t feel real. And yet my shattered heart feels too sharp for it not to be real. I am completely ruined with grief and humiliated by my longing.
The light changes, and they simply drive away. It’s true, you can’t get away with anything in this town.
“You okay?” Kelly’s back is to the road.
I take too many deep breaths.
“What is it? Come on, give.”
“What if you’re wrong? What if he has a girlfriend?”
Kelly looks at me strangely. “I don’t understand the question. If he has a girlfriend, she wins, you lose, and the guy you lost is a lying d-bag.”
“What if he’s a lying d-bag who I can never get out of my heart?”
“That stuff is bullshit. You cry yourself to sleep. I give you tough love, Lila conspires to cut his jewels off, your mom tells you it’s a teachable moment, you either have the good sense to run to Gordy or feel bad until freshman year at Columbia when twenty spectacular guys do amazing cartwheels to get your attention. Bitch, he ain’t that cute.”
The only thing she’s wrong about is the last part.
Kelly and I hang out all afternoon so I won’t be alone. We hike through Haley Farm all the way along the tracks to Bluff Point and sit up on the warm rocks looking out at the sound. She lets me think my thoughts without interruption. What comes clearly in focus is that I am even more obsessed with this boy. Does that mean I’m in love? What does it even mean to be in love? Is it the same thing as just being hypnotized, and mooning and irrational? I know that’s not what I want love to be. I don’t want to be in love with someone who is not in love with me back. It feels much better to be loved back.
It’s bad enough not to get the thing I want. It’s much worse to not know how to stop wanting it.
I lie to my folks and say that I’m grabbing a bite with the girls. Mom makes me feel extra bad by saying it’s a great idea. But I don’t really want to be with anyone, so I just wander all over alone. I wind up back in Noank at the park on the swing and just swing on that swing for what seems like hours, feeling more sorry for myself than Hedda Gabler or Ophelia or any other tragic heroine.
When I walk back up my street around ten, he’s there. He. As in James. He is there alone sitting in his car in front of the house. He jumps out of the car, practically runs to me up the street, and stands there looking so awkward and unhappy that it makes me feel happy and vindicated. He feels guilty and came to confess and let me down face-to-face. And at least that means I’m important enough not to be kicked to the curb without a decent explanation.
I just stand there, saying nothing, determined not to show any weakness or desperation. He tells me that he knocked on our door two hours ago and my dad said I was out. So he waited because he has something important to tell me.
“Right here in the street?”
“I lied to you.”
“Really? About what?”
“The person I picked up in New York is someone I used to be with. I want to tell you everything about it, but only if you want to hear.”
Unfortunately, my eyes completely flood with tears. I don’t want to wipe them away or let them fall, so I just say, “Some other time.” And walk quickly past him.
He grabs my arm before I can get by. “Please,” he says, “please let me explain.”
I guess I want to hear this so badly, I do the ridiculous and say, “Okay. Just make
it quick.” And brush the tears from my eyes as casually and absently as I can manage.
“There was no cat girl in San Francisco. That’s why I laughed when you asked. I didn’t want to tell you about who she really is, so I lied by omission. I should’ve explained it to you at the Ocean House. Her name is Caroline. She’s two years older than I am; she’s a sophomore at Northwestern. We met two summers ago in Paris when I was bumming around on my father’s dime, just after Outward Bound.”
“Meaning just after Amanda.”
“That’s right. I told you I met someone. She was taking a summer course at the Sorbonne, and we wound up living together in her little one-room place with Peaches.”
“So why did she fly here to see you? And why was it such a secret?”
He looks down at the ground, as if getting up the nerve to tell me the truth. “I was pretty crazy about her. I thought I was in love, but I was definitely obsessed. When she dumped me, it hurt worse than anything I thought could ever hurt me. And for two years, I thought about her pretty much every day. Until…”
His voice becomes so quiet I can barely hear him.
“Until you.”
I have no idea what he means, but my heart is racing as if somehow it could mean what I know it can’t possibly mean.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, even though I didn’t know you, and I still don’t, this is the first time in two years that I wanted to be with someone other than Caroline. And I wasn’t sure that would ever happen. So I kept my mouth shut for a while, to see if the feeling went away. And it just got stronger and stronger.”
“So strong that you brought your ex-girlfriend out here to parade around town.”
He just blinks.
“I saw you guys in the car on Route 27. She was wearing a striped sweater and big sunglasses. She’s very pretty. Congratulations.”
“Sloane, this is what happened and what you really saw. She called me out of the blue Thursday night. She said she’d been an idiot to break up with me; she was flying into New York on the red-eye just to see if we could make it work.”
Lucid Page 17