You Were There Too

by Colleen Oakley

  Harrison is smiling at the boy and he catches a glimpse of Harrison and smiles back, stumbling a bit and missing a beat. I watch them, my husband and this boy, and I am no longer cold. The hope of what could still be warms me.

  After the parade, we walk around, buying a bag of spiced nuts and hot chocolate, and then when we get closer to the town square, Gabriel comes flying at us, his eyes bright with excitement. Whitney trails him, trying to keep up.

  “You came!”

  “I said I would.”

  “I messed up when I saw you.”

  “I thought you did great.”

  “Hi, there.” Whitney offers a kind smile and a small wave when she reaches us.

  “Hi,” I reply, but Gabriel is still chattering on about the night’s festivities ahead of us, Santa and the fireworks.

  “And did you see?” he says. “In the town square? It’s a carousel!”

  Chapter 29

  Oliver

  It doesn’t matter where he’s been—a mountain eco-lodge in Peru or a high-rise condo in Khartoum—Philadelphia always looks dirtier when he returns, as if an extra layer of dust has settled over the city, clinging to the buildings, the sidewalks, even the windshield of the Impala he’s in—an ancient model driven by a kid that doesn’t look old enough to drive, much less work for Uber.

  Oliver stares out the window, at a businesswoman in a skirt suit and sneakers rushing past, a kid on a skateboard weaving in and out of pedestrians, a homeless man with matted white hair muttering to himself, and wonders, Why do I continue living here? What’s holding me to this city? The answer is nothing, save habit, and maybe his own apathy.

  When the Uber comes to a stop in front of his apartment building, he grabs his oversize duffel bag out of the trunk and heaves it onto his back. Flanked by a sushi place to the left and a palm reader to the right, the familiar glass front door to his building looks exactly as he left it months ago—a spiderweb crack in the center that maintenance has yet to fix. Rita, the palm reader, stands guard at her usual position, eyeing him and holding a Virginia Slim, as he digs his keys out of his jeans pocket and unlocks the front door. “When you coming to see your future, boy,” she drawls in her indeterminate island accent, which he’s fairly certain is a put-on, and then blows out a never-ending exhale of smoke.

  “You should know,” Oliver replies, completing their once-every-few-weeks exchange, and just like that, it feels like he hasn’t been gone at all. She cuts her eyes away and he slips in the door, greeted by the familiar warm stench of dead fish that wafts over from the sushi place next door. He goes through the foyer where the mailboxes are and to the stairs, which he takes two at a time, despite the extra weight of belongings on his back—and he thinks of Mia.

  He hoped the distance between here and Finland would lessen the connection he felt, but unfortunately, it traveled well. Perhaps it would have helped if he had thrown out her letter after he got it, instead of taking it with him, rereading it ad nauseam, as if the words would change on the eighth, ninth or tenth evaluation.

  He unlocks the dead bolt to his apartment and drops his bag as soon as he walks in the door. He meanders over to the kitchen counter, where his neighbor has left stacks of mail—mostly bills and advertising circulars. The red dot on the base of his cordless phone is blinking wildly, alerting him to messages. He needs to listen to them. Sort the mail. Shave. Unpack.

  He casts his gaze around the apartment and it falls on the open doorway to his bedroom, where he can see the corner of his bed as he left it—sheets and coverlet haphazardly pulled up toward the top. All he really wants to do is crawl in and sleep for the next four days.

  But he can’t do any of those things.

  He promised Caroline.

  He puts a pot of coffee on to brew, peels off his shirt and gets in the shower, trying not to wonder if Mia will also be at the parade.

  * * *

  “Your belly!” Oliver says two hours later, after he’s parked and maneuvered through the hordes of people in downtown Hope Springs to finally find his sister. She looks professional in all black—pants, gloves and an overcoat that does nothing to conceal how round her stomach has grown. She clutches a walkie-talkie in one hand and is speaking into it when he approaches her. After she lets go of the button and listens to the satisfactory response, she lets it hang by her side as she throws her free hand around Oliver’s neck and squeezes.

  “Did you see the parade?”

  “Caught the tail end of it. Very impressive,” he says and he means it. “All of this, Care, really.”

  She beams. Then punches him in the arm. “I missed you. How was Finland?”

  “Fine,” Oliver says. He doesn’t tell her he couldn’t sleep at night for the nightmares about Mia. Or that, during the day, he saw her everywhere.

  In the dog park, she was in a beige sundress and a pair of large round sunglasses calling to a droopy one-eyed beagle.

  She was the dark-haired girl in tennis shoes and a flowing skirt riding a bicycle with a spray of flowers in the basket.

  When he stopped at a café in Helsinki for a sweet bun, she was taking orders behind the counter, a pencil stuck behind her ear, a wad of gum tucked in her cheek.

  He can’t explain it—he knew it was the right thing, for her to be with her husband. But then, it felt right for them to be together, too. And he misses her, or he misses what could have been. He’s not sure if there’s a difference between those two sentiments. And the missing isn’t an absence, as the word connotes, but a presence. A constant that he feels with his whole body. The same way he felt when his mother died. His eyes flick to the swarms of people around them, looking for her without meaning to.

  “Have you been to the square yet?”

  Oliver focuses back on his sister. “No, I just got here. Why, what’s going on there?”

  “It’s the coup de grace!”

  He stares at her, amused. “I don’t think that means what you think it means.”

  She narrows her eyes. “It’s, like, the main event, right?”

  “No, it’s more like the final blow in a fight to the death that kills someone. Like that scene in Game of Thrones when the Mountain stuffs his fingers into Oberyn Martell’s eyes, blood gushing everywhere, crushing his skull.”

  Her face twists in disgust. “I do not watch that show. And no, that’s not what I meant. Although the kids might die with excitement when they see it.”

  “Are you ever going to tell me what it is?”

  “I’m telling you now! There was this amusement park in Altoona that was closing, and they were selling all of their rides and everything. So I got some of them for the town square! It will be like a real carnival! Well, for tonight, anyway. The carousel is the only thing that will permanently stay here. The bumper cars and the Tilt-A-Whirl have to go back. I just rented them.”

  Oliver doesn’t move at first. He can’t, as if he’s frozen in place, as if he’s in a dream. A carousel, he wants to say. A Tilt-A-Whirl. But his mouth is dry and everything has stopped or is in slow motion or isn’t real. And then, just like that, he snaps out of it with an unnatural-sounding yelp, panic blinding him, climbing up his throat.

  He thinks of Mia.

  And then he starts running.

  Whitney

  “So what do you do?” Whitney asks Harrison’s wife, Mia, as they wait for Harrison and Gabriel to be done with their carousel ride. Mia seems awfully quiet and Whitney wonders if she’s stuck up or just has some kind of social anxiety.

  “I teach art,” Mia says, never taking her eyes off the carousel a dozen yards in front of them, even though there’s a crowd of people waiting in line, obscuring the view of the actual riders.

  “Oh, what grade?”

  “Huh?” Mia asks, her gaze flitting to Whitney. “Oh, uh—to adults. It’s like a continuing education thing. At Fordham.”


  “Cool,” Whitney says. “I’d love to get information on your next session.” She’s been looking for something like that—new hobbies to expand her horizons, like learning Italian or taking an improv class or a cake-decorating seminar. Things she always thought about doing when she was married to Eli, but never did for one reason or another. She didn’t even realize how confined she had felt until she left him and suddenly didn’t have to consider his (often strong) opinions on her life.

  Mia doesn’t respond and the two women stand in silence, while Whitney tries to think of something else to ask her. That’s when she looks up and sees him.

  Eli.

  He’s standing near the hot chocolate stand in his beige jacket that she ordered him from the Land’s End catalog. She remembers how she took it out of the mail slip and laid it on their bed, and when he saw it that evening, instead of saying “thank you,” he said, I thought I told you I wanted the blue one. And she apologized. She hates that she apologized.

  Now, she feels a mix of irritation and apprehension. That’s the problem with small towns. And divorce. Every time you leave the house, there’s a risk of running into the person you’re running from.

  But then, he looks directly at her, and she sees his eyes, blank, emotionless. And she knows. She has seen that look before. And all she can think is: Gabriel. The judge just awarded her custody and she knows it hurt Eli. He cried in the courthouse, his face turning purple with rage. And she was afraid this would happen. That he would come for her son. She knows the statistics. Most children are kidnapped by someone they know—most often a disgruntled parent stemming from a custody dispute. She frantically scans the crowd in the direction Harrison walked off with her son. Are they still in line for the carousel? Did they make it on the ride already? But she doesn’t see them anywhere.

  “Whitney, are you OK?” Mia asks. Whitney doesn’t respond.

  Panicked, she looks back at Eli.

  And that’s when she sees the gun.

  And strangely, she thinks of her sister Holly. How Holly always laughs at her when they watch crime dramas because Whitney is never able to pin the bad guy. It’s always a surprise up until the very end. And suddenly she understands.

  Caroline

  Where is he going? Caroline wonders. Her brother took off so suddenly, right in the middle of their conversation, and he had the weirdest look on his face. She starts to follow him, but then a voice crackles over her walkie-talkie. She’s needed at the stage. Kelvin can’t remember if Santa goes on before the choir or after and the microphones aren’t working properly, so maybe no one can go onstage. And Caroline sighs because she knows she planned it all, but does she really have to do everything?

  Halfway to the town square, she hears the popping. No! They weren’t supposed to start the fireworks this early. She looks up to the sky, but all she sees is a bright blue, the sun just starting its afternoon descent—not a star or moon to be found. And not one firework.

  Oliver

  He sees Mia first. Or maybe that’s not accurate. Maybe he sees everything else first, the crowds of people milling about, the carousel right next to the Tilt-A-Whirl, exactly as he’s seen it before, inexplicably, in his dreams. But once he spots her, she’s all he can see. But he’s too far away. Then there is a loud sound like popcorn popping right next to his ear and some part of him knows it is not popcorn.

  He runs as fast as he can, pushing people aside, people who are starting to understand that they have not been hearing popcorn, either, and they all start to scream and scatter in opposite directions like a frightened flock of birds. He doesn’t slow down, not even when he’s reached her, seeing the terror in her eyes up close. He shields her body with his, half a second before a searing pain rips into his shoulder like a white-hot metal poker, the force of it all crashing them both to the ground.

  And then, time passes. Whether it’s thirty seconds or thirty minutes he’s not sure. But the popcorn is no longer popping and the air is still. He lifts his head and sees one man in uniform and then a dozen and he can’t help but think they are too late.

  Mia

  I knew it was the carousel the second I saw it. The one from Lakemont. And to the right was the blue Tilt-A-Whirl and I felt light-headed and terrified all at once. But Gabriel was bouncing with delight, and Harrison was beaming, and I couldn’t think of a reason in the world to explain why I didn’t want them to go on the ride together. So I stood there rooted to the sidewalk, listening to Whitney, and tried to come up with a reason we had to leave the instant they got back.

  I’m sick. That was what I planned to say, and it wasn’t even a lie because I was—nauseated with a fear, a knowing that I couldn’t name.

  And that was when Whitney gasped beside me and I followed her gaze to a man I vaguely recognized. It was the man from Sorelli’s. Whitney’s ex-husband who had made a scene.

  She clutched my hand and suddenly I couldn’t tell my fear from hers.

  The first bullet hit Whitney in her right shoulder. And then I heard a second pop—or was it the first? Did she get hit before I heard it?

  But everything was happening too quickly to react.

  And then I saw Oliver. Oliver?

  One second he wasn’t there and then he was, and I was falling and people were screaming and I hit my head with a loud thud on the cement and I couldn’t move and for some reason I started counting the shots as if I was going to be quizzed on it later.

  Three (or is it two?).

  Four.

  Five.

  Six.

  Seven.

  When I get to eight, everything goes quiet.

  I look to my right and see Whitney lying on the ground beside me, a bloom of red on her shoulder, a splatter of it on her face. I close my eyes and turn to the left and that’s when I see the top of a familiar head level on the ground with me. But I can’t see his body.

  I try to push Oliver off of me but his body is so heavy and all I can do is scream Harrison’s name. And so I do. I scream like all the words I have spoken, have shouted, have yelled my entire life were merely vocal cord practice for this one moment. I scream with everything I have. And when I finally am free, when Oliver has rolled off of me or I have somehow managed to push him off, I get to my knees and I see Harrison’s red fleece and I try to stand to go to him, but my legs buckle because I remember that the fleece he put on this morning was gray.

  Harrison

  Harrison wants to sit up, but there is a fire in his chest, his arm, his leg. It’s a wildfire, hot and all-consuming, and it’s hard to think of anything else but the urgent pain of it all. He tries to block it out, blinking at Gabriel, who is lying on the ground beneath him, whimpering. He’s not immediately sure how he got there. It all happened so fast. The carousel came to a stop and they got off and were walking back to Mia and Whitney when he saw the man, and he saw the gun. Harrison stepped in front of Gabriel. Not consciously, he wasn’t trying to play the hero, it was just like some innate instinct took over.

  And now, he’s on the ground lying on top of the boy, vaguely aware of the screaming and chaos around him and a warm wetness on his chest and he wonders briefly if Gabriel wet himself. “It’s OK,” Harrison says, though he isn’t sure anything is OK. He isn’t even sure if he spoke the words out loud or just in his mind.

  And then he glances down and sees the wetness is red and it’s coming from the burning in his chest and he starts to feel light-headed. It reminds him of Noah. The blood that was everywhere.

  He thinks of the days, weeks, months that he wanted to die for what he did. That he felt he deserved to.

  But then: Mia.

  He doesn’t know if he said that out loud, either. But the word fills his mouth and then his body, the way her presence fills a room, the world.

  With great effort and agony, he slowly rolls off the boy and turns his head to where he left her, with
Whitney, but she’s not there. And suddenly he’s desperate in his need to see her. Did she run? Is she hurt? He tries again to lift himself up, but his body screams back at him, willfully disobeying his commands. He grimaces in pain and closes his eyes.

  And then he hears her. Through the din of everything happening around him, he hears a keening, a primal wail that he’s never heard before but still instantly recognizes as Mia. It’s being carried to him like a gift on the breeze. It’s his name, in her voice, drawn out, as if being played by a clarinet. A saxophone. A harmonica.

  He wants to call back to her, but can’t. He can’t even open his eyes.

  But he sees her anyway.

  In a yellow wrap dress with pink barrettes in her hair. In cream lace walking to the beat of that awful Peter Cetera song. In a heap on the cement floor of her studio. And then in nothing at all, which has always been his favorite way to see her, if he’s being completely honest. He sees her face, wearing a thousand different expressions, each one a contortion of her eyes and nose and mouth that is as instantly recognizable as his own name. He has a vague thought that he’s hallucinating. He’s lost too much blood. And then another vague thought that his life is flashing before his eyes, even as he thinks how ridiculous that is, that it’s something that only happens in those terribly cheesy movies she loves, but how it also actually makes perfect sense because his life is Mia.

  She is the only thing worth living for.

  It’s romantic, the sentiment, and it surprises him because romance has never been one of his strengths. And now he wishes he had thought it before this moment, said it to her out loud. Surely he has, though, right? He’s said so many words to her over the collection of their hours, days, months, years together. But for some reason, he can’t recall any of those words just now. All he can remember is the first time she told him she loved him. She didn’t mean to say it. It slipped out on the way back from that wedding they went to in Maine. When they were pulled off in the emergency lane of the highway and she was hanging her head out the door, vomiting bile because she had nothing left in her stomach. He was rubbing her back and it came out in a little groan. “OhIloveyou.” At first he thought she was still drunk and not sure what she was saying, but then she turned her head and looked directly at him, her face paler than usual, dark circles under her big round eyes. “I do. I love you.” She said it as though it were a simple fact she was stating, but it was one that amazed him. Like learning that ninety percent of the earth’s oceans haven’t yet been explored. Mind-boggling. Overwhelming.