The Love Letters of Abelard and Lily

by Laura Creedle

  I set my glass down on the counter, picked up the pitcher, and lifted it over my head to look for the bubble on its bottom. The pitcher was heavy. It tilted in my hands, and a small stream of lemonade hit the counter and dribbled to the floor. In a rush to stop the flow, I set the pitcher down hard on the marble counter.

  The pitcher made a strange, hollow thump.

  On the side of the pitcher a crack had formed around the base.

  I picked up the pitcher and the bottom fell off. The glass bottom hit the marble counter and shattered, sending a spray of glass, lemonade, and sliced lemons everywhere. I stood for a moment holding the handle of the pitcher, wondering if anyone had heard.

  I had to clean the mess up. My Converses were covered in lemonade, soaked through. A pool of lemonade spread across the polished wooden floor. And I mourned the pitcher, because it was pretty, like so many of the things I end up destroying, and because Mrs. Mitchell had gone to all the trouble to make lemonade, and she’d cut up like a thousand lemons to make lemonade from scratch, which was a thing I hadn’t even known you could do because my mother never made lemonade, and the only lemonade we ever had was from P. Terry’s, but there had to be paper towels somewhere. Abelard was upset, and I was only making things worse.

  I found the paper towels by the sink, hidden behind a polished chrome breadbox like they were ashamed of paper towels because of the environment, or maybe they didn’t fit the decor. Weird because the Mitchells were rich and nice and had nothing to be ashamed of, and now I’d gone and destroyed a hand-blown pitcher, and I didn’t even know where to look for a replacement or if I could afford it if I found one.

  Abelard was in the other room with his father. Had they heard the crash? Things had gone horribly wrong. Breathe. Count to ten.

  I unspooled the paper towel roll—great heaping sheets of paper towels—and threw them on top of the lemons and glass on the floor.

  “Breathe, Lily. Think,” I whispered. “Broken stuff goes in trash cans.”

  I threw an entire roll’s worth of paper towels on top of the spill and opened the under-sink cabinet looking for the trash. Nothing. I opened all the under-cabinet drawers and only found pans and glass baking dishes, neatly stacked cookie sheets. No trash can. I skirted the mess of lemons on the floor and opened the larger cabinet near the breakfast nook, but all I found were Christmas decorations, an ironing board, stuff. They didn’t have a trash can. How was I going to clean up this mess without a trash can? Were they so rich they didn’t have trash? Did they have some magical way of dealing with trash that I couldn’t see?

  There was nothing, no broom or mop or trash can, but there was the back door.

  And then I had my Frankenstein monster moment.

  I needed to leave, to walk away from the mess without a word, run down the street to freedom. Before I made things worse. Everything I touched went wrong, starting and ending with Abelard.

  I went through the kitchen door into the backyard. There was a stone patio surrounded by a well-tended garden of herbs and flowers, and beyond, a small yard ringed by a tall wooden fence. I lunged toward the fence and circled around the edge until I found the gate. It had a black steel hasp, padlocked. I shook the door by the handle in frustration, and the fence wobbled slightly. Who locks their own yard?

  I looked to the wrought-iron deck chair for something to stand on to scale the fence, but then I imagined getting to the top of the fence and pulling the whole thing down. It was pretty wobbly.

  I’d have to go out the front door and sneak past Abelard and his father.

  I opened the kitchen door. Mrs. Mitchell stood by the pile of lemons on the floor, surveying the wreckage of her once-perfect kitchen.

  “Lily, what happened?” Mrs. Mitchell said. She held a net grocery bag with popcorn, French bread, greens.

  “I broke your pitcher. I’m so sorry it was an accident,” I said breathlessly. I stood like a runner on the blocks, waiting to lunge away from my own disaster.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, dropping the grocery bag on the dry counter by the sink.

  “I tried to clean it up, but I couldn’t find the trash can or a broom or anything. I mean I looked all over, and I just—”

  “What were you doing in the backyard?” Mrs. Mitchell leaned against the counter, apparently unconcerned by the sticky mess on her kitchen floor. Focused entirely on me. They probably had a maid or something, someone who came every day to sweep the floor. Maybe Mrs. Mitchell didn’t know where the trash can was either.

  “I couldn’t figure out how to clean the mess up, so I just thought I would . . . leave, I mean . . .”

  I looked away as tears began to well up in my eyes, tears of shame and rage.

  “Oh, honey, don’t worry about the pitcher. It was old. Just go back to the movie, and I’ll clean up in here.”

  “It was so pretty, though.” The thought of Mrs. Mitchell down on the floor picking up glass in her tan shirtdress and espadrille flats seemed wrong—like she was dressed to tour the Parthenon, not clean kitchen floors.

  “It really doesn’t matter, Lily.” A strange note of impatience crept into her voice.

  “But it was part of a matched set. I should just go before I break something else.”

  Mrs. Mitchell picked up my empty lemonade glass and hurled it at the wall of subway tiles behind the stove. The glass shattered with a loud crack, leaving a tiny little nick in one of the tiles.

  For an old white-haired woman, she had a surprisingly good pitching arm.

  “There,” she said. “Now it’s not part of a matched set.”

  I stood speechless, tears drying on my face as though the force of her blow had swept a wind through the kitchen. I forgot why I’d been upset as the world turned upside down—nice old ladies smashing glasses, lemonade sinking into a polished wood floor.

  Mrs. Mitchell shut her eyes and shook her head.

  “Listen, Lily,” she said in a low voice. “Abelard doesn’t have many friends, and very few that even bother to come over to the house to see him. He may not seem that emotional, but I’m his mother, and I know it hurts him. You’re the first girl he’s had over. If you run away now—”

  “Mom!” Abelard was standing in the doorway, his voice a strangled cry, like the moan of a cat.

  Dr. Mitchell appeared behind Abelard.

  “I heard a crash,” Dr. Mitchell said.

  “There was a slight accident,” Mrs. Mitchell said with exaggerated cheeriness.

  “What happened?” Dr. Mitchell said.

  “We’re breaking things,” Mrs. Mitchell replied. “Would you care to join us?”

  Dr. Mitchell appeared to consider this. Seriously.

  “No thank you.” He turned and retreated to his study.

  Abelard left the kitchen. I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

  I closed my eyes momentarily. All I wanted was a dark room to think in. I wanted to leave. But if I left now, I knew I’d never come back. I’d be too ashamed. And I’d never see Abelard again.

  Mrs. Mitchell opened a smooth stainless-steel drawer in the central island and began piling lemons and glass into it. Trash compactor. One mystery solved.

  I turned and walked upstairs to Abelard’s room.

  Abelard had left the door to his room open. He sat upright on the edge of his bed with his eyes cast to the side, his left hand rubbing the back of his neck, in a way that seemed either soothing or irritating or probably both. Distant, like he was encased in his own bubble of misery.

  I didn’t sit on the bed. It seemed like a bad idea. I was afraid to sit next to him, afraid that my presence would send him spinning back into smashing his head against things. Along with robots and fractals and medieval poetry, there was a whole universe of chaos inside his brain that was beyond my reach.

  Sometimes I felt like smashing my head against things or running into stuff just to remind me that I was real and human. But only once. Once would have been enough to bring me back to myself. I cou
ldn’t imagine what it would be like to do it over and over, and not be able to stop. It scared me.

  I pulled out the chair from his desk and sat in it. Like many things in his world, it was covered in a fabric that was both soft and invisible, a neutral brown. Abelard didn’t look at me, but his hand moved a tick faster on the back of his neck. I worried that he would rub his skin red—my fault.

  “You were leaving,” he said quickly. “I heard Mom ask you not to leave, not to run away because I don’t have any friends. She begged you not to go. Is this why you’re here, because she begged you not to go?”

  “No. You don’t get it. I destroyed your kitchen. I break things, I run away. This is the kind of monster I am.”

  Abelard moved his head back and forth across his hand, a slow-motion “no.”

  “People laugh at me every single day,” he said. “They think I don’t notice, but I do. People think I’m stupid because I don’t read social cues.”

  “No one thinks you’re stupid, Abelard,” I said. “They may think many things about you, but stupid . . . no.”

  Mrs. Mitchell stuck her head around the door.

  “Everything okay in here?” she said in a cheery voice. She rubbed a dishtowel between her hands, presumably dabbing off the last of the lemonade, or massaging out broken bits of glass and blood.

  “I’m good,” I said in my equally fake lady voice.

  Mrs. Mitchell regarded Abelard with alarm. Her eyes went to his hand on the back of his neck like she was trying to quantify his agitation for a future conversation with Abelard’s doctor. I knew that look.

  “We don’t have any more lemons, but I’ve made some iced tea,” she said. “Why don’t you both come downstairs and play a game of chess? I’m making sugar cookies.”

  Her words dropped into the room like a stone into a pond and disappeared, a strange awkward noise and then silence. It wasn’t just “people” who thought Abelard was stupid, it was his mother. Not stupid really, but ten years old. Like all his complex relationship issues could be whisked away with a plateful of sugar cookies. No wonder Abelard wanted to leave.

  “I’ve got to go check on the cookies,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

  I waited for Abelard to speak.

  “You were running away,” he said.

  And for an instant and only an instant, Abelard looked at me. His eyes were a clear bright blue. Dispassionate and utterly truthful.

  He was right. I wanted to run away when he started hitting his head on the table. I wanted to help him, and I couldn’t, and when I saw that I couldn’t help him, I wanted to be as far away from him as possible. Push the reset button and wait for another day. Wait for the Abelard of fractals and poetry to return.

  I still wanted to leave. Run. Find a dark and quiet room to think about things. Run. Like my father. Stupid, free-association brain—filled with dark, unseemly truths! My father? Let me tell you about my father!

  I put my hands over my eyes. Maybe I was going to cry. Maybe not. Breathe. Count of four in. Hold for two. Count of four out. Forget that I’d tried to touch him and he’d flinched and howled.

  “Okay,” I said, exhaling noisily. “This is what I have to say. My life has gone to shit. I could go into all the ways that everything in my life has turned to dust but . . .”

  I paused. I hadn’t even told Abelard about my father. Our lost trip to Portland. Dreams. Smashed.

  “Anyway, I was okay with my terrible life before I met you, because I didn’t need anyone. I read books. I knew that I was smarter than half the straight-A students in school, and I was only failing because of a bunch of stupid rules. And I thought that if I ended up working the fry station at McDonald’s, at least I’d still have my ironic detachment, and my books. So—fuck the world.”

  “You’re not going to work at McDonald’s.” Abelard resumed shaking his head from side to side. A tic—or maybe a world of no. I didn’t know.

  “The point is, I was fine until you called me a woman of ‘surpassing beauty and purpose.’ I was fine being alone, because I didn’t even know I was alone until I met you.”

  I looked up at Abelard through blurry eyes.

  “I don’t know how to help you. I don’t know how to be the person you need me to be. Which sucks, because I’ve come to realize that I need you,” I said. “And it’s absolutely terrifying.”

  Abelard didn’t say anything.

  The urge to run was still in me. I went downstairs and sat on the couch. I wrapped my arms around my chest. I didn’t trust my hands—not anymore.

  Mrs. Mitchell crept quietly out of the kitchen.

  “Do you want to watch the movie, Lily?”

  I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice.

  Thirty minutes into the movie, Abelard came downstairs and sat on the opposite end of the couch. We didn’t talk. When my mother came, I said goodbye, but Abelard didn’t say anything. Mrs. Mitchell walked me to the door and waved to my mother. I was kind of surprised she didn’t bring Mom a cookie.

   Chapter 24

  Seven o’clock.

  “Lily?”

  “Abelard.”

  “You’re here.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because I had a meltdown,” he texted. “You’ve seen me at my worst. I thought you would decide you wanted a normal boyfriend.”

  “Normal boyfriend? Really? I’m not exactly normal. I destroyed your kitchen, remember?”

  “You’re more normal than I am.”

  I leaned back on my bed and closed my eyes. More normal. It had never before occurred to me that I might be more normal than anyone in my vicinity. But in Abelard’s case, it might just have been true. I had a tight spot in my chest when I thought of the moment when I’d touched him and he’d flinched away. A residual feeling of helplessness.

  “You scared me,” I said. “I felt like you were lost to me.”

  “I was lost. When you were late, I thought you weren’t coming. And then I felt lost.”

  Time. I’d thought Dr. Mitchell was just being a jerk when he suggested that I’d precipitated Abelard’s meltdown by being late. Maybe not.

  “I’m bad with time, but I wouldn’t just not show up.”

  “Time is important. Time is discrete, and mathematical. You can’t just shear off minutes here and there and expect everything to come out equal.”

  “Sorry.”

  I waited. A couple of minutes passed, and Abelard hadn’t said anything. I thought he was angry.

  “Oh, I understand now,” I texted. “Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey bits.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Who,” he replied.

  Relief. If we could joke around, it meant he’d forgive me.

  “Sometimes I crawl into my blue box, and I think minutes have elapsed, when really it’s been hours. Days even. Decades.”

  “Time is important. Time is absolute. Even for Time Lords.”

  “I won’t be late again. I promise. I suck at time management. It is literally the thing I’m the absolute worst at. But for you, I will do whatever it takes not to be late again.”

  “I’ll try harder” seemed too small for his level of distress. Being on time really mattered to Abelard. I leafed through The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, and found what I was looking for.

  “Let us not lose, through negligence, the only happiness which is left us, and the only one, perhaps, which the malice of our enemies can never ravish from us.”

  I wrote it out slowly, arguing with autocorrect over negligence and ravish. Stupid autocorrect!

  His response came quickly.

  “I love you, Lily. More than seems wise.”

  “I love you too, Abelard. I’ll try not to be late again.”

  “Then we understand each other?”

  “Perfectly.”

   Chapter 25

  The doctor had an office in Meridian Square where Mom did her medical billing for a group of pediatricians. Dr. Carpenter, one of the people she worked for, was also I
ris’s and my doctor, so I was intimately familiar with the decor—heavy wood doors and pale green carpet and chairs covered in industrial fabric in the weird color that could only be described as “puce.”

  Unlike my doctor, whose waiting room was crammed with puzzles and toys and magazines—Parenting and Psychology Today and Parents—Brain Doctor had nothing fun in his waiting room. And I appreciated that. It saved me from having to read another “Ten Tips for Coping with Your ADHD Child” article and comparing it to a “Ten Tips for Dealing with Your Tantruming Toddler.” Because, basically the same article. Apparently every problem in the entire world could be fixed by “maintaining a regular schedule, encouraging proper sleep habits, and avoiding processed foods and sugary treats.”

  Mom and I sat in the waiting room, giving each other forced smiles, being . . . nice. It felt awkward.

  “What do you want to do after this?” she said.

  “Don’t you have to work?” I said. Mom always had to work.

  “I took the morning off,” she replied. “I don’t know how long this is going to take, but we could go—”

  “Lily?” a woman in pink scrubs called out.

  Mom and I followed her to the hallway where the woman weighed me and checked my height. She escorted us into an office where she took my blood pressure and temperature, then asked me about a billion questions about my history with medication, most of which Mom answered.

  Mom and I waited, side by side, facing an empty desk. After ten minutes, a smaller, older man bustled in.

  “I’m Dr. Grillstein,” he said, extending a hand to me across the table. He had brownish skin that looked like he’d undergone some sort of skin process that distributed the wrinkles evenly. The most impressive thing about him was his hair. Mostly black with a bone white streak at a left side part.

  “Dr. Krillstein, this is Lily,” Mom said.