The Beginning of After

by Jennifer Castle

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just go. To the dance. I’ll . . .” I glanced at David. “I’ll go home with him.”

  “But you’ll miss the fun,” she said weakly.

  “Not really,” I said. “And you’ll have more of it without me there.”

  Meg tilted her head as if she was about to shake it in denial, but stopped. She knew I was right.

  “What do I tell the girls?”

  “Tell them I realized I wasn’t ready for a big social event yet. It’s kind of the truth anyway.”

  “Let me go with you,” she said hesitantly.

  “No, I want you to stay.”

  “I promised Nana . . .”

  “She’ll be okay with this, I swear.”

  Meg narrowed her eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “Please just go. I’ll fill you in later.” I wasn’t sure if that was true.

  Meg gave me a confused, dirty look before walking back to school without saying good-bye. I watched her rectangle of white Styrofoam grow smaller on her way across the grass, then turned back to David.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I really can’t wait to see Masher.”

  “He can’t wait to see you,” I replied, and started following David to his father’s Jaguar, which was parked in the faculty lot and definitely not shiny anymore.

  We drove to my house in silence. My costume was wedged in the Jaguar’s backseat, and I fought the urge to climb back there with it. Anything to not be sitting silently next to David, dressed head to toe in white like a gigantic neon sign of dorkiness.

  When we passed the Kaufmans’ house on the way to mine, David craned his neck to look up at it, not bothering to hide the pain in his eyes.

  We pulled into my driveway, the Volvo still absent, but he didn’t turn off the car. He just stared straight ahead at our garage door.

  “Sometimes I play that night over in my head, with things going differently,” he said. It came out sounding distracted, dreamy.

  I didn’t answer.

  “You know, like, instead of going to Kevin’s to piss off my parents, I do the decent thing and go with them to Freezy’s. We would have had to go in two cars.”

  He looked at me, and I tried to hide the shock on my face.

  “It might have changed everything,” he said.

  I thought of my Wondering Well. It had been Suzie’s suggestion. Every time I felt myself drowning in what-ifs, I wrote them down on a piece of paper, folded it up, threw it in an old mayonnaise jar, and screwed the lid back on tight. It was a way of getting them out, letting them go.

  My Wondering Well was getting full, and I’d need to find another jar soon.

  Swallowing hard, I finally said, “It might have. But it didn’t.”

  David sighed and nodded, then turned the car off and sat there, his hands still on the wheel.

  “I’ve been driving for so long,” he said softly, “it still feels weird to stop.”

  Silence again. It felt like David needed me to take the lead here. We’re on my turf now. So I just said, “Thanks for the letters.”

  He turned to look at me, expressionless.

  “I mean, Masher thanks you. I think they smelled familiar or something.”

  David smiled wistfully. “I’m glad he liked them.”

  “Let’s go see him,” I said, opening the car door. We climbed out of the Jaguar, and now he was following me to the house.

  As soon as I took out my keys and they jingled, we could hear Masher barking and panting inside, which made David laugh. In seconds the door was open, and Masher leapt through the doorway straight at David, a frantic blur, and had his paws on David’s chest and his tongue on David’s face. He’d known David was there, even though we hadn’t said a word. Somehow, he was sure of it.

  I stepped around them into the house, toward my room, so I could change out of all that white. When I got there, I walked into my closet and closed the door behind me, thinking of David’s eyes laser-beaming at the place he’d always called home.

  Sometimes I play that night over in my head.

  It had never occurred to me that David was haunted by the wondering too. It was so simple, and so obvious.

  I cried hard but quietly with relief in the dark.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  An hour later, Nana was laying out some Pepperidge Farm cookies for us on the kitchen table, apologizing that she didn’t have anything homemade.

  “It’s fine, Nana,” I said. “Can you chill?”

  “I’m just kicking myself because we had that pumpkin bread but I brought it all down to the Dills’, and I should have kept some for us.”

  She smiled down at David, who was sitting with Masher’s head on his lap, inhaling defrosted mulligan stew as if he hadn’t eaten in days. I had to give Nana credit; when she got home about ten minutes after we did, she was unfazed by his presence at the house. She didn’t even seem to mind that I was blowing off the dance. She just went straight to the freezer to see what kind of food she could offer.

  When David finally took a break from the stew and reached for a cookie, Nana made her move.

  “So, David, what brings you home?”

  He flinched for just a second but continued his cookie grab. “Oh, didn’t you hear?” he said lightly—too lightly. “My grandparents sold the house, and I have to go through my stuff to decide what to keep.”

  We were silent. I had driven or walked by the FOR SALE sign every day since it first went up, but still the thought of someone else living in that house never entered my mind. It didn’t seem possible. I’d grown to see it as an empty, perfectly preserved memorial of my family’s last night alive.

  “Who did they sell it to?” asked Nana.

  “Some married couple with a baby,” said David, practically spitting out each word.

  We were quiet again. There was really nothing to say to him that would be appropriate. It only felt right to stay in the small, here-and-now details.

  “Do your grandparents know you’re here?” Nana asked.

  “No, not yet.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be happy to have you home again.”

  David shook his head. “I’m not staying there. I . . . I can’t. Stay there.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and squinted at the display. “I’m trying to hook up with Kevin to crash at his place, but he’s not calling me back.”

  Nana glanced at me, and I just raised my eyebrows at her to let her know, Go ahead.

  “Well, you can stay here if you want,” said Nana. “There’s a nice sofa in the den that I can make up for you.”

  “Really?” David’s face lit up. “That would be great. I could bunk with Mash here.”

  He had a look I’d never seen before. Sincerity maybe, mixed with a little self-pity. I didn’t know him well enough to pin it down.

  I kept wanting to say something to him, but after my little closet episode, I found myself speechless.

  “How’s your father?” Nana asked casually. I’d been hoping she wouldn’t ask that. I didn’t want to know.

  And it made David’s face fall again. “He’s the same.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Nana.

  “I’m going to go see him while I’m here.”

  “I’m sure he’d like that.” Nana paused, then put her coffee cup down. “I’ll go get the couch ready. You must be exhausted.”

  She left the room and I almost followed her, but David turned to me.

  “Masher seems great. Thank you for that.”

  I looked down at the dog and couldn’t help but smile. “He’s a good boy. And he doesn’t even mind the new cat.”

  “New cat?” David frowned.

  I’d been hoping for a way to tell him what I was doing, what was going on in my life. Suddenly it seemed easiest just to show him.

  “Come check it out,” I said, then simply stood and jerked my head toward the hallway.

  The next morning, I woke up late.
I’d gotten used to Masher waking me up at a certain time to be let out, but there’d been no wet nose on my neck at seven. Then I remembered why.

  The couch in the den was neatly made up, and David’s army duffel bag lay on the floor next to it, its contents creeping out.

  “Where is he?” I asked Nana, who was doing dishes in the kitchen.

  “Well, look who slept in today! Good morning, lazybones.”

  “He’s gone already?”

  “Just to his house. Masher, too. He wanted to get an early start.” She paused and shook her head. “I don’t envy him that job. It’s one of the reasons why I keep putting off my trip home.”

  I thought of David sitting in his room, with his dog beside him, surrounded by all the things he ever owned in his life. Trying to decide what was important enough to keep.

  Then I remembered Suzie asking about what we were going to do with my parents’ and Toby’s things.

  “Are we going to do that here? With their stuff?”

  I regretted it almost instantly, as soon as I saw the anguish on Nana’s face.

  “I’m not ready to talk about that,” she said sharply. It was so easy for me to forget that where I’d lost a father, she’d lost her only son; where I’d lost a brother, she’d lost a grandson (“My darling boy,” she called Toby, which always made him cringe).

  “I’m sorry . . .” I mumbled.

  “Meg called,” said Nana, turning back to the dishes. “She said she also sent you a message.”

  I found my phone and read Meg’s text, which was the expected check-in to see if I was all right. I sent her a response that yes, I was fine, and I hoped she had fun. I knew I was supposed to call her and get a full report on what had happened at the dance, and I was supposed to tell her everything David said and did all night. But I didn’t feel like it, and didn’t think about why.

  So I grabbed my journal and tried to brainstorm ideas for my Yale essay.

  David didn’t come back until dinnertime, although Nana acted like that was too early.

  “Oh, you’re not having dinner with your grandparents?” she said, pleasantly surprised, as soon as she opened the front door for him.

  He looked tired and defeated, his eyes red. He just shook his head no and moved slowly over the threshold of our house, Masher behind him quiet but with tail wagging.

  I was sitting in the living room doing English homework but not making much progress. I’d given up on my essay for the day, and had just read the same paragraph in The Scarlet Letter three times, listening for footsteps up the driveway. Now I put the book down and followed him.

  David sat down at the kitchen table, and I wondered if he expected Nana to produce some food, but he just folded his head into his hands and took one, two, three deep breaths. Nana gestured that we should give him time alone, and we moved to leave.

  “Don’t go,” said David behind us.

  We turned and froze. Why had I been waiting all day for him to come back? Things were just weird when he was here.

  “I had no idea how much crap I owned,” he joked. “I don’t want to get rid of any of it, but my grandmother says there’s only so much room in the storage space they’re renting.”

  “Oh, a storage space! What a smart idea!” offered Nana, like it was the most brilliant thing she’d ever heard.

  “I thought so too, at first, but now the idea of all my stuff, my parents’ stuff, locked away in some concrete block somewhere depresses the hell out of me. My mom always thought those things were so ugly. She wouldn’t have wanted . . .”

  David stopped himself, his voice cracking. He ran a hand—dirty fingernails, callused knuckles—through his hair and sniffled quickly. Several seconds passed, and although he didn’t look at me, I felt that somehow he expected me to speak.

  “We can keep it here at our house,” I said, the words taking the express route from my brain to my mouth, with no thought stops along the way. “We have a huge attic, and it’s mostly empty.”

  Nana gave me a startled look, and I just shrugged back at her. Then she smiled.

  “Really?” David asked, his eyes meeting mine for the first time that night.

  “Sure,” I said, staring back at him.

  “Thank you.” This came out sounding stiff and polite, and he put his head back in his hands. I took that as my cue to go back to The Scarlet Letter, which I grabbed off the couch and took with me into Toby’s room, where Lucky waited with her deep purr and yellow, contented eyes.

  Later that night, there was a knock on Toby’s door.

  “What?” I asked, cranky, sure it was Nana. I’d finished my reading chapters and was now working on calculus at Toby’s desk. It was creepy, I knew, but I loved how Lucky sat next to my arm, with one paw across my wrist, as I tried to write.

  “Can I come in?” It was David. I turned quickly in the chair and Lucky, startled, shot across the room. Her toenails left a thick white scratch on my arm.

  “Ow!” I yelled.

  David now opened the door. “You all right?”

  “Fine,” I said, holding my arm. “Just got nailed by the cat.”

  David came in, although I hadn’t told him it was okay, and closed the door quickly behind him so Masher couldn’t follow. A couple of tortured protest barks came from the hallway.

  David sat on the floor, and Lucky came out from under the bed to check him out. We were quiet for a few moments as David petted Lucky, and kitten mews drifted faintly from the dog crate.

  When I’d brought him into the room the night before to show him what I’d been up to, he’d just smiled, satisfied and not surprised. Like he expected there to be homeless cats, like there couldn’t possibly be anything else that made sense. Unlike Nana and Meg, he’d had no questions. He just liked it.

  It felt fair now. I’d learned so much from his postcards about what he was doing on his way across the country, and now it was my turn to fill him in. The balance seemed about right. It made our silence more about comfort and less about itchy strangeness.

  Finally, David reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I found this today,” he said, opening the paper and holding it up.

  It showed a drawing of a rocky hillside with the opening of a cave smack in the middle, shaped perfectly into an upside-down U. The cave was black, except for two sets of wide eyes in the Magic Marker darkness. One set of eyes had long eyelashes. Purple letters along the bottom announced, “LAUREL AND DAVID EXPLORE THE CAAAAAAVE!”

  “Oh my God,” I said, then laughed.

  “So you remember?”

  I remembered just two moments from a day a long time ago. One was David leading me through the woods toward the cave in the woods behind our houses, a place where most kids in the neighborhood were afraid to go, as he held a big walking stick and I held a plastic bucket full of snacks like I was Little Red Riding Hood. The other was us in the darkness of the cave, me feeling proud that I had actually walked a few feet in until the top of my head brushed its roof. We were eight, maybe nine years old. So long ago and so improbable that at times, when I thought about it, I wondered if it had really just been something I’d seen in a movie.

  To David, I just nodded and then smiled.

  He folded the drawing and put it back in his pocket. “I was thinking of going there tomorrow morning. It’s been awhile since I took Masher, and he loves it. Do you want to come?”

  He made the invitation with his eyes fixed on the cat, but I could tell it was a serious one.

  “Sure,” I said, then to cut the tension I added, “Should I take my basket of snacks?”

  Now David chuckled a bit and stood up. “Only if you think we’re going to get lost and need bread crumbs to find our way back.”

  Then he left the room without saying good night.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  By eight o’clock the next morning, David and Masher and I were heading out the back door dressed in jackets and boots, since the forecast was for rain and th
e sky was already deepening into a dark gray. The wind blew dead leaves around our ankles as we walked across my backyard, silently, our hands in our pockets because it was just way too nerdy—even for me—to wear gloves in October no matter how chilly it got.

  After we crossed Watch Hill Road and continued farther into the woods, David cleared his throat and said stiffly, “I know I said it last night, but I really do want to thank you for offering to store my stuff.”

  “It’s fine, David,” I said. “We have the room. Those storage places are yucky.”

  He paused, and I could hear him swallow hard even though our feet crunched loud along the ground. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Maybe,” I said, trying to sound funny.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  “Am I?”

  “My dog. My stuff. Honestly, Laurel, you’d think that I hadn’t been such an asshole at that party that night. And you’d think that . . .” David stopped walking. It seemed like his throat was closing around something, and he took a quick little breath. “You’d think that my dad hadn’t been the one everyone blames.”

  It seemed so fitting, suddenly, that David would be the one to say this out loud, this thing that so many people up and down our street and through the neighborhood and across town had thought to themselves, or maybe whispered to the one or two friends they trusted most. The thing I’d jammed into a place deep within me, because I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Not even Suzie had been able to pull it out, and she sure had tried.

  “I mean, I don’t give a crap what they think,” he continued, waving his hand. “They can go stick it up their gossip-loving, SUV-driving, Bob-and-Pam-are-meeting-us-at-the-golf-club butts.”

  He reached out and actually touched my shoulder with two of his fingers. “But you, Laurel . . . You have the right to think the worst, and I have a feeling I know how bad that really is, because I think it too.”

  I thought back to prom night, and David’s reaction when I told him his father was a murderer.

  “Yeah, David. I do think the worst. But you told me your dad wasn’t drunk. Now you’ve changed your mind?”