by Laura Hankin
“Let me see!” she said.
He stuck out his right leg. “I can’t always find it,” he said, “’cause I have so many actual freckles.” He walked his fingers up and down his calf. “Oh! Okay, I think this is it. See?”
In the half light, she had to lean closer to make out the dark dot. “Oh yeah. Does it feel any different from an actual freckle?”
“Nah, not really,” he said, rubbing his thumb over it. “It’s not bumpy or anything. You can feel it if you want.”
“Do you let all your friends touch your fake freckle?” she asked as she gently traced a tiny circle on his leg with her fingertip.
“Constantly,” he said, his eyes on her face.
She drew her hand back and put it in her lap. “I think I’d be too scared to get a tattoo. Oh, that’s a good getting-to-know-you question. What are you afraid of?”
He considered as the last of the light faded from the sky and pinpricks of stars arranged themselves in the dark. “I guess—the people I love dying, with no chance for us to say good-bye.” He was silent a moment, and then he smiled. “That, or poisonous snakes. Hate them. Luckily, none of the species in Maine are venomous. What about you?”
She knew the answer to this one immediately. “That, in the moments that really matter, I won’t be the person I want to be.”
“I can’t imagine any version of you not being good,” he said. Somehow, they’d ended up only inches away from each other. Cicadas cheeped a quiet symphony in the trees. The waves whispered to the rocks below. The branches above them hung perfectly still, hushed in expectation.
“Do you sit this close to all of your friends?” she asked.
“No,” he answered. “I can move away if you want me to.”
“I don’t.”
His voice, when he spoke again, was lower, softer. “I promised I wouldn’t try to kiss you,” he said, “and I’m a man of my word.”
So she leaned forward, bridging the distance between them, and kissed him.
THIRTEEN
So what happened with the car?” Ally asked, poking her head into Grandma Stella’s bedroom after the glint of Beth’s hair disappeared down the driveway.
Grandma Stella sat in front of her dark wood vanity, brushing her short hair with halfhearted strokes. The far wall of her bedroom was lined with cardboard boxes. Earlier in the day, the girls had helped her fill them with winter clothes, shoes, and anything else she wouldn’t be needing in her remaining week at home. Those boxes gave the room a strange, impermanent feeling, making it seem like it wasn’t quite a place where somebody still lived.
“Oh, the car,” Grandma Stella sighed. “That woman from the Internet is going to take it after all.” Her voice sounded different than normal, more mumbly, and Ally realized, when she turned around from the vanity, that she didn’t have her false teeth in.
She’d never seen Grandma Stella without her false teeth before. Grandma Stella was very careful about them, and about her appearance in general. If she normally could’ve passed for seventy-five, with her dyed blond hair and her joyful energy, she now looked her full eighty-four years. Without her teeth, her soft face collapsed. Her mouth hung lower than normal. Ally felt that Grandma Stella, by allowing Ally to see her without her teeth, was letting her in on a secret. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to be a keeper of this particular confidence.
“She’ll be taking it away on Saturday,” Grandma Stella said.
“Shit,” Ally said.
“Yes, shit indeed. I hope Tim and Mary feel happy about that, because I certainly don’t.” Grandma Stella looked at Ally, defeated, for one more moment, and then she took her teeth from a case on the vanity and popped them into her mouth. She applied some red lipstick and picked up a book from the top of her dresser. Teddy Roosevelt’s stern, mustachioed face peered out from the cover. Grandma Stella had gotten to pick the book for her last-ever Britton Hills book club, and she’d jumped at the chance to discuss the Bull Moose, who she always said had been the most attractive president.
She attempted to stuff the hardcover in her purse as she headed out the door. “Have a good night, dear,” she said to Ally and then, to Teddy’s unsmiling face, “Get into my purse, you testosterone-filled hunk of a man!”
• • •
ONCE Ally had the house to herself, she started her alone time by decimating the remaining chocolate chunk cookies, trying to stick to her new plan: intentional myopia. Since Beth had returned from the dump with Owen yesterday, practically vibrating with joy and confusion and a need for her friend, Ally had decided to simply toss away the worries of past and future, of what would happen when Beth went back to Haiti, of what had happened when she was there before. Instead she focused on having as much fun as possible for as long as possible. If she viewed herself and Beth through a soft-focus lens, she could believe that nothing had changed since high school, that they were still in those early years of college, before the splintering had begun. Everything they’d done that day—from printing and handing out flyers for the party to packing clothes into boxes—had felt good. Easy, fun.
Of course, her mother still expected an answer about whether she’d be taking that flight back to New York. She realized that she hadn’t told Beth about Marsha’s engagement. She had no idea what would happen when she saw Tom. She knew that Beth would be leaving her soon, and that Grandma Stella was miserable. All of these things cohabitated in a little room in the back of her mind, but she chose not to knock on their door. They could keep each other company, because she had other things to do.
She finished the last cookie and went to rifle through Grandma Stella’s CD collection, which they had yet to box up. A whole lot of Barbra Streisand, with the occasional Aretha Franklin, Etta James, and Celine Dion—Grandma Stella clearly liked sassy divas with stratosphere-breaching voices. She put on Aretha’s greatest hits, half walking and half dancing around the living room, her feet shuffling against the soft gray rug. As she listened to the singer wail her way through “Think,” her hands started to itch. Stretching her fingers out into the air, she realized what she really wanted to do with her night.
She walked in the door of Hooked on Tonics at 6:56. Nick had his feet on the counter, leaning back in his chair, his eyes shut. “We’re closing in a minute,” he said in the direction of the door, his voice laced with frustration.
“Is there enough time for me to buy a guitar?” she asked.
He opened his eyes and swung his feet to the ground. “Oh, hey. It’s you.”
“Take pity on me,” she teased. “In NYC, things never close. I don’t understand how small towns work.”
“You don’t have a guitar already?”
“It’s broken,” she said.
“All right, naif, here’s how this is gonna go.” He thumped his fist on the counter, making the coffee mug resting there rattle, then stood up and walked to the wall of guitars. Today, he wore a T-shirt with a picture of Stevie Wonder, even more threadbare and worn than the one he’d had on when she’d met him, with Jeff Buckley’s face. “The wife wants me home for dinner at 7:30. But I will be generous, and keep the store open for another ten minutes, because I believe in encouraging talent.”
“You’re too kind,” she said, already drawn to the Fender she’d used when they’d sung together the other day. “I think I’d like this one.”
He took it off the wall for her. “You gotta test it out, right?”
“Is that okay?” she asked. He raised his eyebrow at her, like she was being incredibly stupid. He made her feel that she was taking an exam testing her own worthiness. “I mean, I know you have to go, and I played it the other day.”
“I could’ve replaced it with a different Fender. You don’t know. Don’t ever buy a guitar without testing it out,” he said, and handed it to her. She caught a whiff of his soap, or cologne, or something, as he got close to her—a c
lean, rainy smell, and then the scent of coffee. Quick as lightning, she flashed back to Sunday mornings with Tom, when, freshly showered, they’d sit side by side at her kitchen table, drinking cheap coffee. (“This coffee is terrible,” he’d always say. “I need some water,” and then he’d grab a chunk of her still-dripping hair and put it in his mouth, sucking out the moisture. She’d scream and call him a weirdo, and he’d pretend to be horribly affronted, and she’d very slowly unbutton his shirt while whispering apologies.)
“You should probably play it with another guitar,” Nick said, nudging her. “I guess we could have a five-minute jam session. Just ’cause I’m so generous.”
“I don’t even know how to repay such benevolence,” she said. They sat back on their stools from last time, and he asked her what her favorite song was.
“How is it even possible to answer that question,” she asked, “when there are so many?”
“That’s the correct answer,” he said.
“Want to play ‘Think’?” she asked. “It’s stuck in my head.” They fudged their way through it, and then he waxed rhapsodic about “Last Goodbye” (“It’s just so fucking lush”), so they played that one too.
“What about Lou Reed?” he asked, fired up, color coming into his cheeks beneath the stubble. She looked at the clock ticking away above the counter.
“It’s been over ten minutes,” she said. “We’ve got to get you home.”
“Oh yeah.” He shrugged. “Fine.” He led her over to the counter, where he put her new guitar into a padded black case. “So it doesn’t get broken,” he said, inadvertently reminding her of that night on the subway. Then he rang her up, poking at the cash register in a perfunctory fashion. She handed him her credit card, inwardly chastising herself. She was already getting close to her limit, and finances were tight this month what with her taking a week and a half off from all her babysitting jobs. Nick pushed a receipt over to her. As she bent to sign it, she paused.
“Wait—I think you made a mistake,” she said. “The price on the wall for just the guitar said $275.” She pointed to the $99.99 on the receipt.
He met her eyes and stared her down. She noticed that he had the undereye circles of an insomniac. “No mistake.”
“Oh. But—” She looked at the guitar, then at him. “Are you sure?”
“It’s my music store. I can give a customer a fucking discount if I want.”
He seemed to be daring her to challenge him further, so she exhaled and then smiled. “Well, thank you.”
“Come back earlier in the day next time, and we can record something in the studio.”
“I’ll try,” she said. She slung the guitar in its case over her shoulders, its weight feeling as natural to her as a turtle’s shell.
“Don’t just try,” he said. “Make it happen.”
FOURTEEN
Beth and Ally sat sprawled on a couple of sun-soaked rocks at the top of Breezeway Mountain, looking out over Britton Hills. “Mountain” was a slight misnomer for what they’d just climbed—it was more like a very large hill, but still, from their perch, downtown seemed so fragile. Beth could blot out the harbor with one hand. The ocean, though, that went on forever.
“Okay, I’ve got one,” she said. She took a heaping handful of trail mix, then passed it on over to Ally. “Would you rather have the body of a Victoria’s Secret model, but be so allergic to all types of clothing fabrics that you always had to walk around naked, or have the nicest, most flattering wardrobe imaginable with a normal body, but you also had a ten-pound bulldog permanently living on your head?”
Ally snorted. “Victoria’s Secret model body, definitely. Obviously. Come on.” She tossed the trail mix back, and Beth caught it in one hand.
She had forgotten how wonderful it felt to have a best friend. The past few days, she and Ally had been nearly monogamous. They’d worked together with an old, familiar ease, checking off items on a Helping Grandma Stella Move list that Beth had written up with a ceremonial joy. They’d been more efficient than Beth had expected, planning the food for the party, finding a bartender, even deciding to combine the yard sale with the party itself so that they wouldn’t have to worry about getting a large number of people to Grandma Stella’s house twice.
With this unexpected efficiency, they had much more free time than anticipated. They couldn’t do many of the items on their list until after the party. What would be the point of broom-cleaning the rooms if people were going to be tramping through them anyway? And Beth’s parents would be coming up that Friday, arriving just in time for the celebration, so they’d provide two extra pairs of hands for the final days before the move. So that morning they’d sunscreened-up and decided to hike Breezeway Mountain one last time.
“Okay, but think about it for a minute,” Beth said. “Constant nudity means you wouldn’t be able to wear coats in the winter. You’d be freezing all the time.”
“I could move to Hawaii,” Ally said.
“Fair point,” Beth said.
Ally laughed and got to her feet. “Shall we head back down? Stop by the grocery store to check in about the food for the party?”
“Yeah, perfect,” Beth said. She sprung to her feet too and stretched out her arms, looking down over the rocks one last time. “Good-bye, hilltop.”
“May you prosper, and grow many trees,” Ally intoned.
They hiked downhill in a companionable silence, listening to the birds chattering and to their own steady breathing. Underneath the shield of trees, everything was cool and peaceful. Beth placed her feet in careful patterns, navigating the steep slope, content.
“Okay, my turn,” Ally said. “Would you rather know definitively that there is no God, nothing greater out there than randomness, or have God actually speak to you, but have him or her or it say, ‘Hey, sorry about genocide and stuff, I’ve just been really distracted watching reality TV’?”
“Yeesh. That’s a good one. What would you pick?”
“Oh, this one’s easy for me,” Ally said. “I’d rather no God for sure. That’s no change from my current belief state. But this isn’t a question for me. It’s for you.”
“I really don’t know. The idea of a fallible God definitely scares me. Especially a God fallible enough to get addicted to reality TV.”
“But here’s what I don’t get about believing in God. If God exists, he or she or it must be fallible, right?” Ally asked. “Because so much shit happens in the world that an infallible God would shut right down.”
“Well, I don’t think fallible versus infallible is the right way to describe it, necessarily.”
“So what is?”
“Omnipotence versus non-omnipotence, I guess. I don’t think God sits up there on a cloud taking requests and decreeing, ‘I shall answer your prayer for a new car, but I’m going to look the other way as a dictator slaughters his own citizens.’ In my mind, God’s more of this amazing creative force that started things. And now it’s an energy, a source of comfort and hope rather than an active participant in shaping the world.”
“I don’t know,” Ally said. “I have a really hard time comprehending the idea of a being who is powerful enough to create a world, then sticking around as a presence but nothing else. Did he or she or it just get tired and weak? It makes so much more sense to me to think about particles colliding and all that.”
Beth pushed aside a couple of low-hanging branches in their way, and held them back as Ally walked past. “Yeah, I totally get that. Don’t you ever feel really lonely, though, thinking that there’s nothing greater out there?”
“Of course,” Ally said. “But don’t you feel lonely too, even thinking that there is?”
“Well, yes. But I like the idea that there’s a point to things, a purpose to it all, a reason that we’re all here.”
“So you would choose the reality-TV God over no God.”
“I guess I would.”
“Interesting,” Ally said. “Okay, moving on, would you rather bang Jesus or Martin Luther King, Jr.?”
Beth laughed. “You are insane. I’m not answering that.” Jokingly, she pushed Ally, shoving her gently with one hand.
“Hey!” Ally said, and looked sideways at Beth, her mouth open in a big smile. Beth grinned back. Then Ally’s mouth turned to a perfect little O of surprise. Her eyes clouded with a momentary confusion as she lost traction and fell. She hit the ground at an especially steep patch and kept on going, skidding down, making unnatural crunching noises amid the leaves and the sticks on the ground.
“Ally!” Beth screamed. For a few agonizing seconds, she didn’t know how Ally would stop falling, or if she ever would. She might bump all the way down the mountain, or crack her head open against a rock. And as the nightmare scenarios threatened to paralyze her, she was right back in Haiti, overwhelmed by the same terror, with an identical feeling of things spinning out of control too quickly while she was powerless to stop them.
• • •
SITTING at that clunky Open Arms desk, Beth heard the screaming outside and didn’t know what to do. I should open the door, she thought. But the door seemed to open on its own, pushing on its hinges to reveal a woman, thin, dragging a child by the hand. The screaming tore out of the woman’s mouth, a wail mixed with Creole and some broken English, but the child stayed silent, bumping along in his mother’s wake like a rag doll. He couldn’t have been more than six years old, with his enormous eyes and his sticklike limbs. He had no shoes on his feet, and he wore a faded shirt that said Cincinnati Bengals. Beth noticed blood dribbling out of his mouth.
“Doktè! Doktè!” the woman was shouting, and all of a sudden Beth recognized her—the patient she’d seen Deirdre with on her first night at Open Arms. Nathaly? Yes, that was her name. Nathaly’s sweet shyness was gone, replaced by desperation. “Didi!” she screamed.