That's like five miles."
"I know," she said. "So I'm sort of hoping for a ride home."
"Yeah, no, of course," he said, opening the car door and watching her get in. "It's just, five miles at midnight?"
"Well, it was eleven-ten when I started, and if you take a shortcut through the golf course it's only like three and a quarter miles."
"Maia, something could happen to you," he said, still standing on the passenger side, looking down at her. "You can't go walking by yourself in the middle of the woods."
She laughed, made a comment about how Calvert Park was not New York City, she was perfectly safe here, and was he going to get in?
But he stood there, suddenly aware of what was making him twitchy in spite of all the running and pool time. When he was around her, he had solid proof that she was safe from burns, cuts, and skipped meals. Out of his sight, who knew what was happening? She might, for example, get it into her head to go for a walk in the dark and get hit by a car. Or be attacked by a rapist on his way to the city. It sounded absurd, even to Leigh, but it was possible.
"Yes, I'm getting in," he said, walking around to his side of the car.
For whatever reasons, seeing Maia safe was the one thing that gave him a clear sense of why the world mattered. It was that one thing that brought his body down from Code Orange to normal. He may have, as he was to realize some four years later, already stepped off his road, but he didn't know it yet. Maia's safety, or, if he were honest about it, Maia herself, made Leigh feel normal. The irony of finding this state in the company of a girl who cut and starved herself was not lost on him.
"Just promise me that the next time you can't sleep, you'll call me," he said, looking at her briefly before starting the engine. "I'll come and get you, okay?"
"Okay," she said. "I promise."
"Thank you."
"You're sweet," she said. "I wish I'd known a boy like you years ago."
Astra had once called him sweet and been baffled that he didn't take it as a compliment. So he didn't say anything now, and refused to let himself wonder why she'd have wanted to know a boy like him years ago.
"Why do you wear an earring?" Maia asked, leaving the dreaded word behind, her fingers lightly brushing against the small silver hoop in his right ear.
Leigh usually said he'd gotten it to piss off Clayton, and that his father, after taking five months to notice it, had said, only, Interesting. The truth was he'd been talked into it by his boss at the gallery where he'd been an intern. Already that summer, two of the women he worked with, Wendy and Alice, had kept him from getting a haircut by telling him it didn't matter that it hung in his face, scratching his eyes—its length made him way cuter. They'd also said that he dressed like a hopeless straight boy, but he just couldn't find that a problem.
His boss, Marcus Fields, and only about ten years older than Leigh, was dating a woman who was heart-stoppingly beautiful in spite of having short, spiky hair and breasts so small that she was almost totally flat-chested. Marcus had once told Leigh that a woman could be like a painting. You didn't want to lose your heart to anything obvious (like a Monet, or a blonde), he said. Instead, you could (and should) take the time to learn what really moved you—it didn't have to be her breasts or the size of her ass.
Leigh thought Marcus was kind of pretentious and probably a jerk, but he appreciated being talked to like someone other than a deranged, sex-obsessed teenaged freak. Alice and Wendy wanted to get his ear pierced as a goodbye present, but Leigh told them no until Marcus said, "You should. It will redeem you from looking like a perpetual jock."
This was pretty funny since it was Marcus who had dragged fifteen-year-old Leigh to a truly disgusting gym with a boxing ring in the middle of it, and weights piled up like so much dirty laundry.
"You've got to be able to support your height," Marcus had said, showing him all of the different ways weights could be used to turn a skinny kid into a kid who might be able to knock someone out.
Still the word redeem made getting his ear pierced sound like a bit of vital business, and that was why Leigh allowed himself to be dragged to a tiny shop on West Eighth Street. He watched as Wendy and Alice picked out a silver hoop, and then paid a man with tattoos all over his arms to punch a hole through Leigh's ear.
Oddly, this was the version he gave Maia. The true one, not the one about wanting to annoy Clayton.
"Did you have a crush on them?" Maia asked.
"You mean Wendy or Alice?" Leigh asked. "No, but I had a pretty big crush on Marcus's girlfriend."
"Guys who get their ears pierced are usually the biggest jerks," Maia said.
"Or gay," Leigh said, remembering Marcus's order (which now seemed ridiculous and outdated) to get the left ear pierced, not the right. "I mean, as long as we're dealing in stereotypes."
It occurred to him that he had not asked her why she couldn't sleep, and he turned slowly onto Maia's street, not wanting her to leave the car. When he pulled into the driveway he would kiss her. Leigh had almost done it half a dozen times before but had been unable to get past her claim of having kissed enough boys. That and his sense that it was wrong to press an advantage. That you shouldn't kiss a girl you were helping to eat or picking up from the station. That when doing a favor for someone, you shouldn't ask for much in return.
But tonight was different. Tonight she had come looking for him and tonight Leigh would kiss her. He snapped out of this happy conviction in time to hear her say, "No gay man I've ever known has had a pierced ear. And, anyway, I knew you weren't gay even before I'd met you, because Millie never shut up about you and Astra."
And there went his kiss; this time not sucked away by Leigh's appalling lack of nerve but by Astra's long shadow. Maia asked him to park on the street, not the driveway.
"I don't want the car to wake up Charles," Maia said. "He's a light sleeper."
"I have to break up with her," Leigh said, determined to have something happen, even if it wasn't what he would have chosen. "I know that. And I would have—"
"Don't," Maia said. "You don't have to explain. It's none of my—"
"Let me finish," he said. "Please."
"Okay, sorry."
"I don't want to break up with her by e-mail or over the phone," he said. "That's..."
"Rude," Maia said. "Very rude."
He had been thinking spineless and weak, but rude would do.
"I understand," she said. "I really do. But don't do anything on my account."
"It wouldn't be because of—on your account," Leigh said. "I have to break up with her because of her."
That was so far from what he felt or had meant to say that Leigh wondered why he ever bothered to speak. He knew there was more to his reluctance than Astra's having a bad summer and claiming to love his e-mails. Leigh couldn't find words for what that more was, although it felt like if he closed something, something else might be forced open.
"Well, it's been helpful that you haven't," Maia said. "I've been waiting for you to get demanding—like I owe you, and so I've been holding what I know about Astra for that moment."
"Owe me what?" Leigh asked, still rattled by the gap between his thoughts and words.
Maia looked at him, her eyes asking, Do you really need me to spell it out?
Ah, no. He didn't. But he was disgusted she could think such a thing of him. What were all those boys like—the enough ones whom she had kissed—that she could believe Leigh would ever suggest she owed him sex in exchange for a car ride?
"Don't get all offended," she said. "In my experience guys want things, and I don't do that now."
He was quiet, trying to decipher what she was really saying without letting his own thoughts, questions, and fears shut down his ability to think.
"Anymore, that is," she said.
She hadn't just kissed enough boys. She'd been one of those girls. Those girls who slept with boys just because. There were two or three of them at his school, and until this moment, Leig
h had never really thought about them, except to notice they were both popular and unpopular. The funny thing about how they were treated was that they gave away the one thing every boy in the school wanted. But no one ever thanked them for it.
Which wasn't that surprising, as one of the things Leigh most admired in Astra was how closely she had guarded her body before letting him near it. He remembered that Elise Welsh, who had gone to rehab in order to eat, had had an older sister rumored to have slept with half the senior class. Leigh couldn't remember anything else about her, not even her name.
"It was the first promise I had to make to my shrink, even more than the eating," Maia said. "Because they don't want to set you up to fail with food promises."
She was chewing absentmindedly on the cuticle of her left thumb, and, as he had done several times before, he moved her hand away from her mouth. She had told both him and Millie to help her break the habit. Leigh, who chewed on the inside of his mouth when he was nervous, always felt a little hypocritical when doing this, but she had asked.
"I actually had to sign a piece of paper that I wouldn't act out sexually," Maia said, with a laugh. "Like a contract. I mean, you'd think it was worse than burning yourself."
It occurred to him that she brought up her scars whenever she thought they were getting too close. That she used them as a way of keeping him from ever wanting to touch her. Was she afraid of him—of them together—turning into one of those experiences that had been, for her, really bad?
He thought he understood now what Astra had meant when she'd told him that she was afraid of sleeping with someone who might be mean to her. At the time, Leigh had thought Astra simply didn't realize how unbelievably grateful anyone would be just to have a chance with her.
"Maia," he said, to keep his silence from growing into anything she might take the wrong way.
"It's okay, it really is," she said. "You've been so great. And I know you like me as much as you can."
That he liked her far more than he should was closer to the truth, and the first clear thought Leigh had had since Astra's name had been mentioned.
"Anyway, I want you to know that you're more important to me than any of those other times," she said. "That's really why I came out tonight. I wanted to tell you thanks. For making that possible."
He wouldn't, he swore to himself, say anything like You're welcome. He was incapable of speaking anyway.
"You've been better than a garden," she said, getting out of the car.
He watched her walk into the house, just as he had back in March when he'd walked her home. Only this time he knew that the something else he wanted to say—We could do this, or, You matter to me—hadn't found words either of them could believe.
chapter fourteen
the club
Pete Tahoe had indeed asked Lillian to live with him, and she, after asking for a month to think it over, said yes. She did not talk to Leigh before making her decision because, as she wrote in an e-mail, A child should never be put in the position of having to grant or deny permission for his mother's happiness.
Leigh was as irritated at her use of the word child, as he was grateful to Pete for making his mother happy. Lillian said that she would sublet the apartment for a year, just in case. Pete had offered to put all of Leigh's things (books he'd left behind, soccer trophies, bed, and shelves) into a spare room at the house in Maine.
Lillian moved up to Maine in the middle of August. She wanted Leigh to come to New York on the Thursday before Labor Day so they could load up Pete's Jeep and drive to Maine. The people she was subletting the apartment to were moving in on Labor Day itself. Everything needed to be cleared out by then.
Pete offered to pay for Leigh's airline ticket back down to Maryland, but Clayton chose to get very offended at the idea.
After listening to his parents try to hammer out travel plans, Leigh announced that he would drive himself to New York, leave the car in a garage there, drive to Maine in the Jeep with Lillian and Pete, and then pay his own way back from Maine to New York. This idea only succeeded in uniting Lillian and Clayton, who were dead set against it, saying he didn't have enough driving experience.
"I'm not asking you," Leigh told Clayton. "I'm telling you, so you and Mom can stop trying to arrange things as if I were five."
"No one thinks you're five," Clayton said. "And while you are clearly a good driver and a very responsible person, your mother and I think you shouldn't make your first long trip alone."
"Driving to New York takes only two more hours than driving to the prison," Leigh said, refusing to agree with his parents just because of a few compliments.
"We'd really rather you didn't," Clayton said.
"So noted," Leigh said.
He actually didn't think his parents were being all that horrible. He should just let them split the plane fare, but he couldn't bring himself to be that reasonable. His head ached, and while he wanted to put it down to the glare of the sun, or Millie's incessant playing of the song she had on repeat ("Something is wrong here/I don't belong here"), he suspected he was just furious. For the sake of it.
~~~
It was good to be home, however briefly. The air was hot, wet, and heavy, just like in Calvert Park, but here, with the swollen asphalt and soaring concrete buildings, it seemed more fitting. He plastered over the holes in the apartment walls left by picture hooks and nails. The almost-empty rooms were small and probably ugly, but it was the one physical place he loved most in the world.
On the drive up to Maine, Leigh had a hideous case of car envy. The Jeep, unlike his Camry, did not deliver every bump and jostle of the road right into your bones. It was a perfect ride, and he wondered if he should make some decisions about his future based on money. Perhaps it would be smart to go to law school like his father had. Money would lead to things like Jeeps, and away from things like shabby apartments, which no matter how well loved, were still small and ugly.
Leigh knew now that his desire for wealth back then had simply been a wish to have a clear idea—any idea—of what his future might bring. But as the car crossed into Maine he'd been aware only that entirely too much loomed before him like buildings shrouded in fog.
In fact, Pete's house, which Leigh had found so amazing in May, struck him that weekend as a symbol of all the things he might never achieve. Lillian commented several times that Leigh seemed out of sorts. She wanted to know if things were going badly with Clayton.
"Your father can be unbelievably clueless," she said.
"Except when he's not," Leigh said, thinking of Clayton's finding the way to get Maia to eat.
"Yes," Lillian said, that one word filled with doubt.
"Dad's fine," Leigh said.
"Well, I do think he has your best interests at heart," she said, "but you seem ... not yourself, exactly."
"I'm the same as ever," he told her, not thinking that was so great, but not wanting to have changed either.
"No," Lillian said. "You're different. Not you, but—"
"Jesus, let it go."
And he stomped off to one of the house's three porches to finish the book on Millie's summer list. He really needed to be reading Lord Jim, which was required for Honors English. It hadn't been on the list of suggested reading but was instead a book about which Leigh would need to produce an essay during the first week of school. Leigh had read only the introduction and maybe the first seventy pages. He could already tell that it would need hours of his undivided attention to fully grasp what was being said underneath the dense, carefully constructed arrangement of words.
Reading lasted about twenty minutes before Pete came out, carrying two beers. He sat down and offered one to Leigh before taking a swallow of his.
"Thank you," Leigh said, not willing to be rude no matter how much he wanted to be left alone.
"Your mother thinks you're having trouble with our new living arrangement," Pete said, "but I don't think that's it."
Leigh was tempted to tell Pete that
his mother was being self-important, but instead he stammered out something about being so grateful that his mother was happy. It wasn't actually a thank-you to Pete for being in love with his mother, because that would be pompous and weird, but it was, right then, the best Leigh could do.
"I dimly remember being seventeen," Pete said. "And if I'm not mistaken, you have all the signs of girl trouble."
"I do not have girl trouble," Leigh said in what he hoped was a pleasant voice, but prepared to do anything to keep Pete from giving him any version of the sex talk.
It's not that they were so terrible. Yes, Clayton had mortified them both when Leigh was fifteen, stammering around about respect, integrity, and pleasure. But Lillian had done a much better job when Leigh really needed it—at the age of eleven. She had used the clearest possible language so that no doubt remained about where babies came from or how every part of both bodies worked.
What Leigh mostly remembered was Lillian saying that sex had the power to start a life, end a life, and to change one. The life that changed most dramatically when things went wrong, his mother said, was a girl's, and she hoped that Leigh would keep that in mind.
It always amazed him that he ever wanted to have sex after such a comment, but to be fair, Lillian had added that when things went right, sex was both mysterious and beautiful.
"Like a Titian painting," she said, trying to be helpful, but making both of them laugh, as it sounded so peculiar.
And, even now, they would sometimes, if sex came up in conversation, refer to it as the Titian thing. Which was funny enough, and proof that talking about sex with a grownup, even one intent on giving advice, need not be a disaster. In spite of that, Leigh did not want to think or talk about girls. Especially not about girls and sex, which was, he guessed, what Pete meant by girl trouble. In the back of his mind, like passing traffic on a freeway, was the sound of Maia's voice saying, In my experience guys want things, and I don't do that now. Anymore, that is.
And behind that low noise were his own questions about how he would ever be able to afford offering a home to a girl—a woman—i n the way Pete had to Lillian. In the way even Clayton, with all of his shortcomings, had given a home to Janet. And not just to Janet, but to Millie, who'd been a small child at the time, and not, as Leigh currently was, a year away from leaving home. Home being some combination of Clayton's house, Pete's huge house, and the small apartment in New York, sublet out to strangers.
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