by Mary McNear
“What?” he said, watching her. He turned off both water faucets.
“Nothing,” she said. “I was thinking.”
“You looked sad for a second there,” he said, and then, as if he’d decided he’d said too much, he looked away.
“No, not sad,” she corrected. “Surprised. I mean, when did you do this? When did you get married?”
“Three years after high school. I was twenty-one.”
“Wow, that’s so young. How old was she?”
“Nineteen,” he said.
“An old nineteen?” she asked, remembering herself at nineteen. There was no way she’d been ready for marriage.
“No, she was a young nineteen. I think that’s why she wanted us to get married. She was young enough to think it would change things between us, I guess.”
“And did it?” Quinn asked.
“No,” he said. She wanted to ask, though, what those things were that Callie had wanted to change between them. But instead she asked what might be a harder, more personal, question to answer.
“Did you love her, when you married her?”
He leaned back against the sink, his eyes searching for something, and not finding it in a far corner of the basement. “I’m not sure it was about love,” he said, looking back at Quinn. “She was lonely and I was . . . tired of being alone.”
Quinn nodded. She understood, but she couldn’t imagine doing this herself, getting married to relieve loneliness. Then again, she couldn’t imagine getting married at all. She couldn’t stay in a relationship for more than a year. And it occurred to her that Gabriel’s marriage had only lasted a year too.
“How did it end?” she asked.
“She went back to Colorado,” he said, leaving the sink for the hot water heater. More valves needed to be adjusted.
“Why, though?” she pressed.
“She said she was lonelier with me than she was without me. Oh, God,” he said, “that sounds like the title of a country music song.”
“Maybe,” Quinn acknowledged. “But why was she lonelier?”
“Have you shifted into your journalist mode now?” Gabriel asked.
“Does that mean you’re not going to answer my question?” Quinn said, hopping down from the washing machine.
“She said I was inaccessible,” he said, starting for the stairs. “Can you believe it?”
There was a trace of humor in his voice, but as Quinn followed him up the stairs she was circumspect. He was inaccessible, inaccessible in a way he’d never been when she’d known him before. Then again, he might not have been alone in this. Because as Gabriel locked up the cabin, she wondered if she might have become inaccessible in some ways too.
“So,” Quinn said as they got into his truck, “she left and that was the end of married life?”
“Yes, Quinn. I didn’t have a second impulsive marriage,” he said, looking at her with a wry smile. “Anyway, I’m not proud of it. Though I’ve done other things I’m much less proud of,” he added.
“Like what?” Quinn frowned.
Gabriel waved his hand as though dismissing the subject. What, in the relationship department, could be worse than having an impulsive marriage that didn’t work out? Quinn wondered. Did he get some girl pregnant? No. She couldn’t imagine that.
On the drive back to Gabriel’s cabin, the two of them settled into silence, and Quinn wondered if he felt he’d revealed too much to her. She stole a look at his profile; he didn’t look upset, but he seemed moody again.
“Can I see you tomorrow?” Quinn asked, when Gabriel turned into his driveway.
“I’ve got to be somewhere until late afternoon.”
“Where?”
“You don’t need to know, Quinn,” he said, with more weariness than unkindness.
“What about when you get back? Around four o’clock?” she asked as he parked his truck in front of the garage.
“You sure you want to stay in Butternut that long?” he asked as he got out of the truck. She grabbed her bag and got out of the truck, too, hurrying around to the other side.
“I’m sure.”
“You’re exhausting,” Gabriel said, shutting his truck door. But he smiled, just enough, for Quinn to feel encouraged.
“Thank you,” she said. She gave him a hug, and he gave her a quick hug back. After she got in the car and pulled onto the main road, she felt happy. More than happy. She hummed to the radio all the way back into town.
Chapter 17
Later that afternoon, Quinn checked in to her cabin at Loon Bay and was relieved to find it free of both clutter and kitsch. Whoever had furnished it—and she suspected it was Annika—had understood that guests didn’t need to be reminded that they were, in fact, where they already understood themselves to be: in a cabin in the North Woods. The single room was rustic but clean, with a queen-sized bed with a Hudson’s Bay point blanket on it, and an older-model TV mounted on the opposite wall.
In the sitting area was a small but serviceable fireplace, a red Aztec-inspired rug, and two well-broken-in red leather wingback chairs that Quinn wanted to take back to Evanston; there also was a kitchenette with all the necessities. But the cabin’s main feature, of course, was the windows, which looked out over Butternut Lake. She would be comfortable here, she thought, swinging her suitcase onto the luggage rack and hanging her coat up in the closet. She’d bought a few grocery staples at the IGA in town, and she put them away now in the kitchenette and went to light the already laid fire in the fireplace.
Once that got going, making the already cheerful room even more cheerful, Quinn went over to the windows and admired the view of the lake through the trees. It was late afternoon now—after she’d left Gabriel she’d gone back into town for lunch and for groceries—and the lake was a different color than it had been earlier; it was colder, darker, and, somehow, bluer. But still, of course, beautiful. Always beautiful. She had grown up on this lake but she never, ever, got tired of looking at it. She’d planned to go running on one of the trails that edged it this afternoon, but given the warmth of the cabin and the comparative coldness of the day, she decided to stay right where she was instead.
She turned back to face the room. It was, she knew, a perfect place to write. She tried to organize her thoughts about Gabriel, tried to shape them into something resembling a meaningful narrative, but she kept coming back to just one thing: Gabriel had been married.
Obviously, he had changed since high school. But she still couldn’t square this person, the person who had married both young and impetuously, with the person she had known then. She thought about what an eighteen-year-old Gabriel would have said about someone who had ordered a cup of coffee at a diner and ended up bringing the waitress home with him. For six months. Until he married her. It would have been beyond his understanding. The Gabriel she’d known in high school had never mentioned marriage to her. And yet, three years later, he’d gotten married, at twenty-one. Twenty-one. An age at which Quinn had still been in college, living on ramen noodles, hanging out with friends in coffeehouses, and pulling all-nighters at the library.
He’s got you beat there, Quinn, she thought. She was no closer, she knew, to being ready for marriage now than she had ever been. Which wasn’t to say that Gabriel had been ready for it either. The marriage, after all, hadn’t lasted long. What had he said, though, when she’d asked him why he’d done it in the first place? He’d said he was tired of being alone. Which was strange. The old Gabriel had always been comfortable being alone, and, what was more, he’d had plenty of friends to call upon when he hadn’t wanted to be alone anymore. So there was that mystery. Why couldn’t he be alone? And then there was the mystery of why he’d never left Butternut. That, too, was unsolved.
She got up and walked over to the windows again and looked out on the trees, etched ever more darkly against the sky’s changing light. It would be a clear, cold night. A good night for the fire that was already burning. So why not just enjoy it? She wasn’t,
after all, going to understand Gabriel’s last ten years in twenty-four hours. She could, though, take heart from the progress she’d made with him today. His mood had thawed, he’d let her tag along, and, more than that, she felt as if she’d gotten somewhere with him. She’d seen flashes of the old Gabriel. His wry tone, his sly smile, what she used to think of as his sardonic sweetness. And she remembered then his smile when she’d jumped at the bear rug on the wall. That had been pure Gabriel. What was more, he’d said she could see him again, tomorrow afternoon.
It occurred to her, not for the first time, that spending time with Gabriel might be helping her come to terms with her senior year. And, maybe, she could help him, too. Help him jump-start a life that appeared to be stalled. She rested her forehead against the window. Yes, she felt better. She felt hopeful for the first time since arriving on Friday.
She saw someone out the window, a man, walk into the resort’s little bar and restaurant, visible from her cabin. She looked around at the half-dozen or so other cabins she could see from the window. Was one of them Tanner’s? And would she see him later if she had dinner at the bar? He’d said he’d be up here for a week. If she didn’t see him tonight, maybe she’d call him tomorrow. And they’d have that cup of coffee. She’d go by herself to the bar tonight, she decided. And later, when she got into bed, she’d find something dumb to watch on TV, something that would put her to sleep.
She left the window and went to make a cup of decaf. Doing this brought Theo to mind. So much of their relationship so far had consisted of meeting for coffee that she almost couldn’t picture him without a cup of it attached to him. She thought about calling him now, telling him of her decision to stay in Butternut for a while, but decided against it. She’d call him tomorrow and bring him up to date on things. He would be pleased, she knew, that she’d gone to see Gabriel again, though she knew he wouldn’t say so. He was careful not to have any clear or articulated expectations of Quinn. Personal expectations, that is. Instead, he gave the impression that whatever she did was fine with him. Which was a good thing. An attractive thing, to Quinn’s mind. Professional expectations, on the other hand, were a different story. He kept her steadily employed writing articles for his online magazine. He did, however, have an annoying tendency to push her to write more about herself. And, as if in response to his silent prodding, she brought her coffee cup with her over to the bedside table, set it down, and turned on the reading light. Then she took her laptop from her computer bag and, getting comfortable on the bed, thought about Gabriel. Why didn’t you go to RISD? It was the one thing you wanted to do. More than almost anything. She tapped her fingers on the keypad, remembering the December that Gabriel had gotten in, early decision, to RISD. I was there when he got accepted, she thought. Not there at the very moment, but right after.
Chapter 18
December, Senior Year, Gabriel Gets Acceptance Letter from Rhode Island School of Design
At four o’clock on a gray, slushy afternoon, when the daylight was already leaching out of the sky, Quinn parked her car in the Shipps’ driveway, and, bypassing their front door, headed for the kitchen door instead. She only had an hour before she had to meet Jake, but she wanted to see Gabriel. She felt like she didn’t see him enough these days, and sometimes it made her feel funny, off-balance. The kitchen door was unlocked, as she knew it would be, and once she’d pulled it shut behind her, she was enveloped in the chaos that was the Shipp household. She passed the laundry room, where mounds of clean laundry waited to be folded—they would never be folded—and the kitchen, where a stack of empty pizza boxes sat on the counter—did any family, ever, consume as much pizza as this family? Once in the living room, she encountered the Shipps’ three dogs, lab mixes who hadn’t heard her come in over the noise of the unwatched hockey game on TV, and the rap music thumping from Aiden and Colin’s open bedroom doorway, but who now flung themselves at her with abandon. She petted them, then stepped over a jumble of hockey gear, video-game consoles, and displaced sofa cushions scattered across the living room rug and made her way to the hallway, where two of Gabriel’s brothers were playing soccer.
“Head’s up, Quinn!” Colin shouted, and she threw herself against the wall to avoid a flying soccer ball.
“Is Gabriel home?” she asked. But they didn’t answer. They were savagely athletic, and they were never happier than when they were inflicting the maximum amount of damage on their home or on each other. She unflattened herself from the wall, and, pausing to straighten a childhood picture of the four boys that was hanging askew, she knocked on Gabriel’s door.
“Go away,” he called out. This wasn’t directed at her, though. This was directed at his brothers.
“It’s Quinn,” she called back.
“Come in.”
She opened the door, not to the familiar scene of Gabriel sitting at his desk, scrolling through his photos on his desktop computer, but to Gabriel lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. She came inside, amazed, as always, at the contrast between the rest of the house and Gabriel’s bedroom. In here, it was eclectic, minimalist, uncluttered. And quiet. Blessedly quiet.
“Ahh, I can hear myself think,” Quinn said, letting her backpack slide to the floor and coming over to lie down beside Gabriel on the rug. “What are we looking at?” she asked, following his gaze up to the ceiling.
“That,” Gabriel said, pointing up at a rectangle-like crack. “I’ve never noticed it before. But it’s the exact same shape as Utah.”
“Really?” Quinn studied it. “Hmm. I don’t know. All those big, squarish western states look the same to me.” She slipped her hand into her blue jeans pocket and touched the ring she’d put there before getting out of her car. Jake had given it to her the day before, but she was nervous about showing it to Gabriel. She thought he would think things had gotten too serious between her and Jake. She hated this, not telling him. But Gabriel’s opinion of Jake hadn’t changed since September. She would have to tell him eventually, though. Maybe she’d do it tomorrow.
“That’s definitely Utah,” Gabriel said.
Quinn looked sideways at him. “We haven’t hung out in days,” she said. “Why didn’t you wait for me after school?”
“I thought Jake would hijack you,” he said. There was a crash from outside the room as one of his brothers collided with a wall.
“Well, he didn’t,” Quinn said. “And he’s not the only reason I’ve been busy. I’ve been working on my college applications. We didn’t all apply early decision.” She turned on her side, propped herself up on one elbow, and studied his profile. “And speaking of early decision, shouldn’t you be hearing from RISD soon?”
He was silent, looking at Utah, but one corner of his mouth twitched.
“Wait. You haven’t . . . heard already?”
He smiled.
“You got in,” she breathed.
“I got in.”
“Gabriel!” Quinn yelped. She grabbed him and hugged him with such force that he laughed.
“When did you find out?” she asked, when she let go of him.
“Today. My mom was home when the mail came.”
“You idiot,” she said with a smile. “Why didn’t you text me?”
“I wanted to tell you in person.”
“Okay, fine. But did we have to have a geography lesson first?” she asked, pointing at the ceiling. She sat up. “Come on. I want to read the letter.” She held out her hand for it, and Gabriel got up, opened his top desk drawer, and handed her the envelope. She sat on the floor, leaning her back against his bed, and slid the sheaf of papers out of the envelope. She read the acceptance letter with a glowing satisfaction. Truth be told, when she got her own acceptance letter to Northwestern, almost four months later, she was no more excited than she was right now. After she’d read the letter again, she shuffled through the rest of the documents, including his financial aid offer. It was a generous scholarship, but not a full ride. “Can your parents help you with the rest?”
she asked.
“I’ve got three brothers, Quinn. But there are student loans.”
Quinn nodded, putting the papers back into the envelope. “So you’ll figure out the finances, but what about you?” She looked at him carefully. His gray-blue eyes gave nothing away. “Why aren’t you more excited?” she asked. “This is your dream. I thought you’d be bouncing off the walls when you got this.”
“No, it’s good,” he said, coming to sit next to her on the rug. “It’s just . . .”
“What?”
“Have you ever gotten that thing you wanted and worked for and prayed for and then felt . . . I don’t know, nervous? Like, what if it all gets taken away from you? Or, worse, what if you can’t, you know, live up to your own dream?”
“Gabriel, that’s ridiculous. You’ll probably surpass your own dream,” Quinn said.
“Yeah. You’re right. It’s ridiculous,” he said. He smiled at her. “I’m talking nonsense.”
“I’ll miss you. I’ll come visit you,” Quinn said.
“But you’ll be in the Midwest. It won’t be that easy,” he pointed out, referring to her first choice of Northwestern University.
“That’s true. But there are these things called airplanes. I hear they’ve revolutionized travel.”
“Why don’t you apply to Brown?” he asked.
“Because I’m not Ivy League material. As it is, I probably have a better chance of getting hit by a meteorite than I do of getting into Northwestern.”
“You’ll get in,” he said.