* * *
I wouldn’t care if I saw anyone. I stumble along the road in the darkness, pulling my jacket tighter around myself. Under the cave of the trees my breaths come loud and broken, scratching over the shards of chokes and cries.
I can’t stop crying, and the hot tears slide over my face and mingle on my lips into a taste that’s less like salt and more like pure sadness and anger.
How could he?
How could he choose risking everything again over us?
How am I leaving again, with the connection between us a thing that hurts—like we’ve been tied together all along, this thing we’ve never cut?
It takes me a long moment to realize what the scraping, growling sound behind me is. A truck, coming up quick behind and then slowing to a crawl.
Despite everything, a shiver of fear slithers from my animal brain down my spinal column. I pull my jacket closer and try to look over my shoulder subtly, steadying my step, preparing myself in case I have to—what? Throw myself down the slope into the bushes that edge the Morgansen’s property?
The truck pulls up parallel to me, and I’m frozen with indecision when the window rolls down and I see Chase’s concerned face looking over from the driver’s side. “Hey.”
JJ called him. Of course he did. And Chase is here to take me back, so we can—what, scream at each other some more? Drag ourselves over the wreckage of us again, like the dreams we used to have are so much shattered glass?
I tug my eyes away from the pale worry of Chase’s face and look forward, out into the snowy darkness. I set my jaw and don’t say a thing. One more solitary tear slides down my cheek before hanging at the tip of my nose. I brush it away furiously.
Chase keeps the truck at a steady crawl beside me. “Raquel. Get in the truck.”
“No.”
I can hear his huff of frustration. “For fuck’s… Please just get in.”
I turn to him now, too angry to appreciate the worry on his face. “So you can take me back? I don’t think so. I want to be alone, Chase.”
“I’m not going to take you back. I’ll take you wherever the hell you ask. I’ll drive you to Cheyenne if that’s what you want. We’ll just go safely in a vehicle like goddamn normal humans. Or do you want Brooke and me to be awake all night worrying about you?”
I look ahead again rather than answer.
Chase sighs. His voice sounds like resignation. “I’ll follow you all the way into Jackson if I have to.”
“I’m not walking to Jackson. I’m walking to the spa at the end of the street and getting them to call me a taxi.”
“You don’t even have your cell? Jesus.”
There’s a moment of silence as another car passes us, alone in the darkness. I’d forgotten how dark it gets on this road at night. There aren’t many properties here along the ridge. They’re all set so far back from the road. It feels almost like driving in the wild, broken only every fifty or so yards by a discreet entrance with a locked automatic gate.
When I stop walking, Chase immediately stops with me. From the look on his face as I open the passenger door, he’s thinking exactly the same thing I was.
Chase doesn’t worry often. It’s strange to see him pale, worry creased over his forehead. A breath eases out from his lungs when I step in, as if he’s been holding it for a long time and can only now relax.
“Where are we headed?”
I wrap my arms around myself to hold in my cry.
“The airport,” I whisper.
Part 4
Fall
Raquel
I have to give my mom and my sister credit: they never say I told you so.
They’re at the airport when I arrive, and I hardly have time to see Claire before she’s barreling into me. She scoops me up into the tightest hug I’ve ever had.
She’s always been taller than me, but it’s the first time she doesn’t feel like my little sister. She feels big enough to take care of both of us.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers into my ear.
I’m grateful for the way Claire wears her heart on her sleeve, but I’ve always taken after my mom. She holds back like I would, and just the same as me, her reserve doesn’t mean that she doesn’t feel an indescribable amount of love. When I go to her she kisses my cheeks before smoothing down my hair, and her eyes are so deep with compassion I could drown in them.
“You’re home now,” she murmurs. “We’re going to take care of you.”
They bundle me into the car, and when I can’t manage to speak they seem to sense that I’m soothed by the sound of their voices. I sit in the passenger seat, closing my eyes and listening to them chat about Claire’s job and the charity gala my mom’s helping to organize.
Claire reaches forward from the back seat, holding my hand the entire way, and the feel of her fingers wrapped around mine is the anchor that keeps me from falling apart.
When we get back to the house, they won’t let me be alone. Claire all but nips at my heels as she shepherds me onto the couch, wrapping me in a cosy throw and putting a hot herbal tea and a handful of Hershey’s Kisses where I can reach them.
I pull the throw up to my face. I have no more tears left to cry.
“Let’s watch something awesomely trashy,” Claire says, curling up next to me and resting her cheek on my shoulder. “How about Real Housewives?”
I don’t care about TV. I don’t care about anything.
I just know that everything has fallen apart, and faced with the gaping hole inside of my chest, the presence of my sister is the only thing that makes me feel any better at all.
“You should go back to your place,” I manage to whisper, not wanting her to have to take care of me.
“My place is with you,” she tells me.
* * *
After a break up, you expect to feel bad. But somehow, even the first break up didn’t feel like this.
The days unspool around me, and they feel meaningless. At once heavy as lead and light as a feather. Like my whole life could just float away on the breeze, and yet I’m crushed beneath the weight of it.
There is nothing that gives me any pleasure. It’s not just that I wake in the night crying from dreams of him. It’s not just that I can’t force myself not to care about how he is, no matter how much I try.
It’s that everything is colorless, tasteless.
The light has gone out of the world.
This is what I want, I remind myself. I’m going to get my life back in order. I’m going to learn from this mistake, finally, like I didn’t learn from the first.
And yet everything feels hollow.
LA doesn’t excite me. I have no desire to leave the house. The days feel empty, pointless. There are no hikes. No Sunday breakfasts in bed. No trips to see the stars. There’s only the routine of my parents going about their work, and Claire visiting in the evenings to try to coax me into talking.
My life feels smaller than I imagined. A thing I find hard to want.
I try to tell myself that I’m excited to get back to consulting, and yet I can’t drag myself to do it. For the first time in my life, I neglect my work. It takes me hours every morning to open my laptop or look at my phone, and when I do I can’t bring myself to handle all the things I’m supposed to do.
With Claire’s help I draft an email saying that I’m ill, and I’ll have to cancel my appointments for the foreseeable future.
Then I go back to the same aching circle of bed, couch, bed.
“You’re just a bit low,” my mother reassures me, stroking my hair as I don’t watch another hour of meaningless television. “That’s normal.”
But this doesn’t feel only like I’m sad over something that had to happen.
This feels like my heart has been ripped from my chest and is walking around independently, all the way over the mountains in Wyoming.
This feels like nothing has meaning anymore.
* * *
It’s three days later when the
knock comes to my door—late at night, when I’m sitting up and trying not to think about JJ.
I’m startled. “Yes?”
Dad looks round the door and smiles. “Range?”
Ever since I was a little girl, my dad has taken me to the driving range when I get stressed.
I used to be pretty good at it, once upon a time. Dad loves golf. He wanted Claire and me to love it, too. Claire was always a lost cause, but I kept up for a while. I wasn’t great, but I was fine. I used to follow Dad around when I was a kid before stopping for a few years in the awkward early teen stage. Then, when I hit the real teenage years with the stress of AP classes and SATs, I started going again. Not to the course, not properly. But Dad would lean his head around my door and say: “Range?” and I’d just nod.
Now I’m thirty, and apparently nothing has changed.
When I was a little girl, I loved the way my daddy made me feel. Safe. And secure. Like he could fix everything that was wrong in my life.
All these years later, I’m not a little girl anymore. And my father can’t fix anything and everything that ever happens to me. But with the way he looks at me, I know he’ll always wish that he could.
At the range, I stand and watch as he gets ready. September is still warm, the night air moist over my skin. I can hear bugs flickering around the lights. Out beyond us the darkness spreads, with the painted white lines of the range reaching away.
Dad does the ridiculous warm-up he always does. The one Claire and I used to tease him for, saying that he’d better hope he was never seen by anyone from the college. That they’d find it ridiculous to see the chair of economics doing the wiggles and twists which were almost as embarrassing as his moves on the dance floor.
Now the sight warms my heart.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” he says finally as he reaches for his clubs. “But I thought maybe you could hear me out on it, if you weren’t too sore.”
My mouth is suddenly dry. I swallow against the fuzz of my throat. “Mmhmm?”
“You’re a grown woman now. And even if you weren’t, you’ve decided to do exactly what you want since you could walk.” Dad takes his time lining up, testing out his swing before he leans down to place the ball. He doesn’t look at me. “But I do know a thing or two about marriage after more than thirty years.”
Thwock. He hits the ball cleanly, and it flies far into the air. We watch, and he grunts out grudging approval before he begins to get another ball ready.
“Your mother and I love James,” he says steadily, straightening and adjusting his grip. “We always thought he was perfect for you. Ambitious. Generous. He had the values we tried to instill in you and Claire. A family man.”
Thwock.
The ball is blurry, glistening and wet, as it moves across my vision and dissolves into my just-held tears.
“He was a lot worse at this than you are.”
It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that JJ and my dad have—had? I don’t even know anymore—a relationship, too. They would come out here together sometimes. JJ didn’t have much to relate to my dad with in the way of academia or financial policy research. But this was the overlap of their enjoyments.
I imagine them out here together, and I ache as I try to laugh.
“I don’t think he’s a golf person. There’s not enough movement for him.”
Dad smiles with half of his mouth, watching the ball long after it lands. It takes him a long time to put down another. He’s considering everything that he says.
“I didn’t want to talk to you about it because it didn’t seem my place.” He carefully sizes up his position, shifting his legs back and forth. In profile I see his eyes narrow as he looks out to where he’ll propel the ball.
“You’re my dad,” I say around my dry mouth. “I’m interested in your opinion.”
He laughs. “What I would’ve given to hear you say that when you were fifteen.”
I can’t help but smile at that—properly, as I try to discreetly wipe a tear from the edge of my eye with a fingertip.
“Your mom said no to me when I first proposed to her.”
I wasn’t expecting that. The breath is gone from my lungs. If I had a drink, I’d spit it out. “… Really?”
My parents have always been in love. Not showily or flashily. But quietly, discreetly, undeniably. The same way that you don’t see the tide move moment to moment, but over a day it’s impossible to ignore. Mom and Dad were made for each other. I’ve always known that without needing to be told. It’s the truth behind the secret kisses they share in the kitchen on Thanksgiving, and the flowers he brings her every Sunday morning. The way she smiles at him when she thinks no one can see. Everything.
Thwock. Dad watches the shot move before he steps away. Finally he looks at me with that steady, slightly earnest look he fixes on his students.
“I don’t blame her. She knew what this career would mean. Years of not enough money and too much work. Moving wherever I received a job offer. And then, if we were very lucky, plenty of money but even more work than that.”
When I was a kid, Dad was late home every night. I remember the worked weekends. The school plays he missed. All the time it was me, Claire, and Mom at home alone.
He always made an effort. I never doubted how much he loved us. But he wasn’t around as much as other dads.
“We’ve been very lucky. But there’s one way money made it harder: it made it obvious that I was doing this because I wanted to.” His gaze ticks side to side, his eyes looking for something in mine. “I was taking that time away from the wife and children I love more than life itself, because I wanted to do something else. Your mom knew that’s how it would be. And so when I asked her, she said no. Because it’s not what she wanted in a husband.”
The world has tilted on its axis. No one else at the range seems to have noticed. To either side of us, spread away, come the sounds of their strikes, the occasional word exchanged by the few people who’ve come here with someone else.
None of them matter. There’s only Dad and I, looking at each other, the golf ball between us forgotten.
“But she said yes to you eventually.” It doesn’t sound like my own voice.
Dad grins. “You might not believe it, but I was a handsome twenty-five-year-old. I could be very persuasive.” The smile fades, not a lie but something fleeting. Unimportant. What matters is what’s beneath.
“I quit for her.”
I can feel my eyes widen. Dad’s always loved teaching more than anything. “You quit?”
“I got close to it. I applied for a job at a bank. I was accepted. For about ten times my doctoral stipend.” His smile is tight. “I was ready to put on a suit and go work in Manhattan, just to make your mother change her mind and marry me.”
“So what happened?”
“Your grandfather came and told me not to muck his daughter around.”
He must be able to see my confusion. He shakes his head: no, not like that.
“He said to me that if I lied to your mom about who I was, and what I needed, it would only come back to bite our marriage in the end. Maybe in five years. Maybe in ten. Maybe when you kids left home, or maybe when we still had two of you not even in kindergarten yet, and we hadn’t slept in a month or showered in a week. Sometime, I was going to resent your mom for making me give up what I loved. Or…”
A pause, hanging.
“Or she was going to realize that she had fallen in love with the Joe Sfeir who had a passion. Who had drive. Who had a reason for getting up in the morning. And she’d realize that this new Joe Schmoe who put on a sober suit and went to a bank every day wasn’t someone who made her heart skip a beat.”
I can hear my heartbeat. The world has receded, leaving only my father and I standing here, as he shares all these things I never knew.
“I was honest with your mom. I let her make her own decision. Told her we’d compromise on it all the way. I’d work my hardest to stay out of the aca
demic father stereotype. I’d work my hardest as a professor and as a father. I’d make sure we made the most of the good sides of this career: the vacations. Sabbaticals. Years teaching abroad.”
“I loved my childhood,” I say, knowing somehow that he needs to hear it.
Dad’s smile is warm. “Good. Because that was what your mom decided in the end. That she loved me for who I was, and she couldn’t get the rest without me doing what I wanted to do. Didn’t mean I got out of compromising. Didn’t mean I didn’t have to work harder. Your mother isn’t a woman who lets anyone get away with pulling crap, El. You know that.”
I smile weakly. Of course we both do.
“I’m not saying you should be with James.” Dad wants me to focus on this. He steps toward me so that we stand side by side, looking out into the darkness, seeing the balls fly away. “There’s a very real chance he’ll get badly hurt, or worse. That’s not a great thing.”
My lip wobbles. I take a deep, slow breath. Dad must feel it. His arm is a surprise, looping around my shoulder, tensionless. I’m the one who decides to lean in, tucking into his hold.
“I’m just saying that this is who he is.” Dad’s voice goes on, slow and soft, into the darkness. “You’ve known that for a long, long time. Now if he can’t compromise, that’s a load of bull, and you should find someone better. If he isn’t willing to sacrifice, that’s no marriage you want a part of. But this is who he is. It always has been. You just didn’t face what that really meant. So now you have to think.”
“I did think,” I protest weakly. “He’s the one who chose his sport over me.”
Dad’s mouth tugs down to the side. He looks away, thoughtful, every word considered. “Did you ever think that maybe he feels like you chose safety over him?”
I can’t find words at all.
“You used to talk about his passion. His drive. How exciting he was.” Dad’s voice drifts, like those are happy memories for him—the time when I was happy with JJ. “I know you still love those things about him. I just think that maybe you should consider whether those parts of him aren’t despite his calling. Maybe, just maybe, that calling made him into the man you fell for.”
Crash: The Wild Sequence, Book Two Page 27