by Mary McNear
“Yeah, have him call me.”
She reached for her backpack, though she didn’t want to leave.
“So that’s it?” Jake asked. He ran his hands through his hair, messing it up a little more.
“Uh-huh. Unless . . . there’s something you want to add?”
“No, I’m done talking. But what about you? I don’t know any more about you than I did when we started.”
“You’re not supposed to,” Quinn said. Instead of looking at Jake, she closed her legal pad and looked briefly over to where some kids were kicking a soccer ball on the far side of the field.
“I’m still curious, though,” he said. Quinn looked back at him. His eyes caught the afternoon light. There was another smile from him. Did he have to keep smiling at her like that? “Come on. Tell me something about you,” he said.
“There’s nothing to tell. We’ve been going to high school together for three years. You already know all the basics.”
“That’s almost nothing.”
Quinn laughed. She was the least mysterious person she knew.
“No, it’s true,” Jake said. “All I know about you is . . . you run the paper. You’re always in the communications room. And you hang out with that guy. Gabriel. By the way, what’s up with you two? Are you guys friends or . . .”
“We’re friends,” she said. But she knew in the past that people had wondered if they were a couple. Well, that was high school for you. A girl couldn’t be friends with a boy without people wondering. “And now I feel like you’re interviewing me,” she said to change the subject.
He ignored this. “Did you grow up in Butternut?”
“Born and raised.”
“And what about your family? I know you don’t have any siblings. What about your parents?” Here it comes, Quinn thought.
“It’s just me and my dad,” she said.
He started to ask her something else and then caught himself.
“My mom died when I was little,” she said. It was best to get that out there right away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “How old were you?”
“I was eighteen months old. I don’t remember her.” And this was true. But Quinn had formed an image of her based on photographs her dad had taken and stories her dad had told her.
“She must have been beautiful,” Jake said, surprising Quinn.
“Why, why do you say that?”
“Because she had you,” Jake said. This could have—perhaps should have—sounded cheesy, but somehow, coming from him, it didn’t. She was flustered. She’d fielded questions about her mother for most of her life, and the script, by now, was well known to her. This was the point at which most people asked how her mother had died, although they were always careful to couch the question in an apology. If you don’t mind my asking . . . I hope it’s not too personal . . . I don’t mean to pry.
“She died from a head injury,” Quinn said to the question Jake hadn’t asked. “An epidural hematoma.” What she didn’t tell Jake until months later was that one morning, when her dad was at work, and her mom, Celia, was home alone with a napping Quinn, she’d climbed a ladder to put something on top of a storage shelf in the garage and had fallen and hit her head. Afterward, she’d felt dizzy for a few minutes, and then she’d felt fine. In the late afternoon, though, she’d felt dizzy again, and by the time Quinn’s dad came home from work, she’d told him she needed to go to the hospital. He’d left Quinn with a neighbor and called an ambulance. By later that night, her mom was in a coma, and by early the next day, she had died.
Her dad told Quinn that one day he had a wife whom he adored, and the next day she was gone. For the year after she’d died he’d been bereft. And not only that, but Quinn’s maternal grandmother—known to Quinn as “Grandmother Shaw”—had insisted that Celia be buried in a family plot in Chicago. So her dad could only visit her grave if he traveled five hundred miles away.
“My dad was a good dad,” she said to Jake now, again unprompted. “Still is, actually.”
“I can tell,” Jake said. “Is he . . . like both parents to you?” he asked. “I heard that’s what happens when you have one parent. They have to be both.”
“Is he a dad and a mom?” Quinn asked. She laughed. “No. He’s just a dad.” She had no idea whether or not her mother would have been more domestic than her father, but she could hardly have been less domestic than him. That hadn’t stopped her dad from finding creative solutions for running a household. Once, when he was teaching a nine-year-old Quinn how to do laundry, he’d instructed her, in all seriousness, to cram as much clothing into the washing machine as it would hold. Another time, when Quinn wanted him to put her hair in a ponytail and he couldn’t find a hair elastic, he was delighted to discover that a plastic cable tie made an acceptable alternative. And then there was his cooking, which not only didn’t improve over the years but seemed to get worse. One of his favorite fixes for a bland meal, and they were all bland, was to melt cheese over everything on the plate. It was years before Quinn discovered that not everyone ate dinners that came buried beneath a bubbling sheet of Velveeta. “But we do all right,” she said to Jake. More than all right. And, realizing how much more she’d told him than she’d intended to, she said, “Now that we’ve covered my childhood, I think this interview is over too.”
“One more question,” he said. “I swear. That’s it.”
“What?” she asked, a little curious about what it would be.
“Why don’t I ever see you outside of school?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you ever go to parties?”
“Oh. Well, because they’re not my thing. Big parties, I mean. I hang out with Gabriel, and some of our other friends, and we watch movies or play pool. Sometimes someone brings something to drink, but it’s not . . . a scene. You know, like Leigh Downer’s parties.” Leigh Downer, who was in their class, was the undisputed party queen. It helped that she lived in a big house and that her parents were never home. “The last time I went to one of those,” she said, “everyone was so drunk, they couldn’t even stand up. There was no one there I could have talked to.”
“You could have talked to me,” he said. “I don’t drink.”
“Never?”
“Almost never. I don’t want it to interfere with my training. Plus the last time I got drunk, a couple of years ago, I acted like an idiot.”
“In what way?”
“I jumped out of Dom’s second-story window. It was after a snowstorm. I thought the snow would break my fall.”
“Did it?”
“Uh, no. I broke my arm. My dad was so pissed.” He shook his head. “He said if I’d broken my leg, my running career might have been over.” It was getting windier now, and a succession of white, puffy clouds were crossing over the athletic fields. Quinn could track them in Jake’s eyes, his gold irises darkening and lightening as they moved into and out of the shade.
“I should get going,” she said, without much conviction.
“Can I walk you to your car?”
“Okay,” she said, again surprised by his seriousness. His chivalrousness. This wasn’t a side of Jake she’d seen at school. Then again, that side of him was never alone; it was always surrounded by friends. It was easygoing, outgoing, extroverted. He was different now. Quieter. More thoughtful.
They climbed down the bleachers and headed for the tunnel that linked the locker rooms to the football field. It was cool and dim inside, and Quinn thought about how it was one of the places on campus couples went to make out. When she and Jake came out the other side, into the green sea of summer, they still said nothing. Jake looked relaxed, but Quinn felt agitated. Too much caffeine. Too much sugar. She was acutely conscious, though, of her body in space, and of his body, too, near to hers, near enough to be touching hers, but not touching hers.
When they got to her car, he said, “Do you want to go to the beach sometime?”
“Let me . . . think a
bout it,” she said.
He smiled. His smile was even better now, if that was possible. A smile he’d saved for her. “Don’t think too hard about it, Quinn,” he teased. And then he took the pen and pad she was still holding and wrote his number across the top. “Call me,” he said.
“It was nice interviewing you,” she blurted. (That night, replaying the scene, she cringed at those words. Had she really said them?)
“It was nice being interviewed by you,” he said. She was standing close enough to him to smell the soap he’d used in the locker-room shower.
“Bye, Jake,” she said, getting into her car. By this point, she didn’t really want to go. And maybe he didn’t either. His truck was parked only a few spaces from hers, but he didn’t get into it. He stood there and watched until she’d driven away.
Chapter 10
Hello, Quinn.”
Quinn, startled, looked up. While she’d been writing about Jake, the Corner Bar had gotten more crowded. Dominic Dobbs’s mother, Theresa, was standing beside Quinn’s booth.
“Mrs. Dobbs,” Quinn said. She started to stand up to greet her, but Dominic’s father, who’d joined his wife, waved her back down again.
“Don’t get up, Quinn,” he said, apologetically. “Theresa just came over to say hello. We’re going to go back to our table.” He gestured at the table across the restaurant where the mayor and her husband were still sitting.
Quinn smiled at the Dobbses. “I thought the ceremony today was so moving,” she said, still trying to find her bearings. To have been so deep into her memories and writing, and then catapulted to the present and the Corner Bar was disorienting. But there was something else giving her pause. Something about Theresa Dobbs’s appearance. She looked both as if she were having difficulty focusing on Quinn, and as if she herself were out of focus. Her silk blouse was wrinkled and her mascara was smeared.
“Thank you,” Mr. Dobbs said now. “We thought the ceremony was moving too.” He took his wife by the elbow and tried to steer her back to their table.
“We didn’t see you at the reception,” Theresa said, shaking her husband’s hand off and lurching to one side with the effort. “Why weren’t you there?” she asked. Her words were slurred.
She’s drunk, Quinn thought. “I was planning on going to the reception,” she said, feeling regretful now that she hadn’t gone but also wondering why it was any of Theresa’s business whether she had or not. “But I went to see a friend of mine, someone I’d lost touch with,” she explained, though she realized this would mean nothing to Theresa.
“So you had better things to do?” Theresa asked. Quinn felt confused.
“No, that wasn’t it—” she started to explain, but Mr. Dobbs interrupted.
“Theresa, Quinn came to the dedication,” he told his wife, speaking to her the way he might speak to a recalcitrant child. “Obviously, there were things she needed to do afterward.” His hand closed over her elbow again, but Theresa wouldn’t be budged. Quinn glanced over at the mayor’s table, where there was a flurry of activity as the mayor and her husband settled up the bill and gathered their belongings together. Although neither of them looked over at the booth, Quinn got the impression they both knew why Theresa was there.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t at the reception,” Quinn said. “I spoke to Tanner after the dedication, and when he said his parents weren’t going, I thought . . .” She stopped. She didn’t want to use the Lightmans as an excuse.
“You’d do something more fun,” Theresa finished for her, her hands resting on the table as if to steady herself. It was impossible to ignore the contempt in her voice. Mr. Dobbs looked embarrassed. “Theresa,” he said, pulling on one of her arms. “Come on. Let’s go. Please. I asked you not to come over here.”
Theresa, though, gripped the side of the table now, her expression a grimace of concentration that made her wrinkles—the furrow lines on her forehead, the commas around her mouth—appear even deeper. The table wobbled a little, and Quinn reached out a hand to steady it. What the hell was going on? she wondered, her heart beating faster. Why had Theresa wanted to come over when it was obvious she didn’t like Quinn? Or was that why she’d wanted to come over? It was hard to imagine why she disliked Quinn so much, though. She barely knew Quinn. Aside from saying hello a handful of times at high school events, they’d never spoken to each other.
“Theresa, I think it’s time we went home,” Mr. Dobbs said, a different, harder tone in his voice. “It’s been a long—” he started to add, directing this at Quinn.
“A long ten years,” Theresa interrupted. She swayed forward. “Thanks to you,” she said to Quinn.
What? Me? Thanks to me? Quinn almost said, her face flushing. But she wondered if she’d heard her correctly. Mr. Dobbs, with a twist of Theresa’s elbow, finally succeeded in steering her away from the booth. “Please excuse us,” he said, heading to the exit. Theresa stumbled as she walked, then turned to watch Quinn, her mouth moving as if forming words that wouldn’t come. The mayor and her husband hurried after them, trailing winter coats and murmured apologies, though who the apologies were for Quinn didn’t know; they never acknowledged her.
Dawn came over when they were gone. “Jeez, what was that about?”
“No idea,” Quinn said. She felt overwhelmed.
“Do you know her?” Dawn asked.
“I did, once. But even then, not really.”
“Wow. I’m sorry.” Dawn said. “Do you want something else? Another pinot grigio? I bet Marty would comp it.”
“What? No, thank you,” Quinn said. “Just the check.”
“Right,” Dawn said. “I have it right here, dear.” She put it down on the table next to Quinn. When she left her alone, Quinn touched a finger to her cheek, almost as if Theresa had struck her there. My God, did she actually say that to me? she thought. That it had been a long ten years because of me? Does she believe I’m somehow to blame for Dominic’s death? Is that what she meant? And not just Dominic’s death, but Jake’s and Griffin’s as well? No one had ever blamed her before. At least, not that she knew of. Although, of course, in her darkest moments she’d blamed herself. After all, there was the question of what had happened between her and Jake the night of the accident. But no one knew about that but the two of them. All anyone else knew was that three young men—one of whom, in Theresa’s case, was her son—had died needless, useless, and heartrending deaths. And nobody could change that fact.
Well, not now, a voice inside her said. Not anymore. It’s too late. Too late to undo what you said and did that night. Too late to take back what you and Gabriel did. The question that Gabriel had asked her earlier that day, about guilt and responsibility, came swirling back into her head. And, without caring who saw her in a bar that was now crowded, Quinn put her head in her hands. She had held up so far, but she didn’t know if she could anymore.
LATER, BACK IN her motel room, with her coat still on and the lights still off, Quinn sat in a chair by the window and watched as the occasional car glided past on the highway. She pulled a Kleenex out of her coat pocket, and, as an eighteen-wheeler rumbled by, she dried her tears. She hoped she was done crying. The trouble was that in the hour since she’d left the Corner Bar, the shock of Theresa’s words had worn off, but the pain they’d caused had not. She wanted to leave Butternut, she realized. And what better time to do it than now, under cover of darkness? But something made her stay in that chair. And not only stay, but dig in a little. She couldn’t leave. She knew this. Even if this was all that she knew. There was simply too much at stake.
How much was at stake had become increasingly clear this past winter, when she’d driven by a car accident, or, rather, driven past the aftermath of a car accident. It was a January evening, freezing cold, and she was returning to Evanston after an interview she’d done for an article she was writing. The traffic had slowed to a crawl and then, finally, inched past the scene of an accident. It must have happened recently: flares still burned on th
e road, debris and glass were everywhere, and an ambulance, its lights flashing, was still on the scene. So was one of the vehicles involved: a blue pickup truck.
It was empty, and it had a shattered windshield and a crumpled hood, grill, and front bumper. And maybe it was the uncertain light of dusk, or the weird pink light being thrown by the flares, but the truck looked uncannily like the one Jake had driven. “That’s it,” Quinn had murmured, seized by the entirely irrational belief that it was, in fact, Jake’s truck. Without thinking, she’d pulled over, gotten out of her car, and walked up to a police officer who was talking to an EMT. “Excuse me, Officer,” she’d said, tapping him on the shoulder, “is the driver of that truck okay?” He turned to her, startled. “Ma’am, you can’t be out here,” he’d said. “This is an accident scene. You need to get back in your car.” “But, Officer, is the driver all right?” she’d asked, again, pleading with him. “He’s at the hospital,” he’d said, curtly. “Now move along.” He’d pointed her in the direction of her car, and she’d gone back to it, meekly. She’d known better than to argue with him. She’d driven home, then, a little unsteadily, but it wasn’t until she’d gotten back to her apartment that she’d let herself fall apart. She’d sunk down on the kitchen floor, shaking uncontrollably.
She’d had one of the dreams that night. She’d been having them for years, off and on, but once she’d seen the mangled blue pickup, she started having them more frequently. Afterward, she couldn’t fall back asleep and was tired the next day. She’d kept up with her daunting freelance workload, but, increasingly, she’d felt gripped by a strange kind of inertia. It was an uphill battle to get out of bed in the morning, and, once out of bed, to keep her day in motion. So those days became a series of mantras. Brush teeth. Make coffee. Pour cereal in bowl. And these mantras continued, from morning to night, when all she really wanted to do was to crawl into bed, pull the covers over her head, and stay there, indefinitely.