“Do you ever feel like it was a mistake?” he asked in return, “Getting married after knowing each other for such a short time, and on your holiday, besides, my following you here. Any of it, really. I know I made mistakes, especially at the end when I stopped talking to you and resented everything so much, but I don’t know, Jess, it’s just that I’m going back, and I need to figure things out, and it was all so, civilized.”
He looked at her and was surprised that she was pushing away tears with the heels of her hands. “I never thought we were a mistake. I loved you. So much. You were the only thing I ever did that was off plan. You know how I like to plan.”
He pulled some napkins loose from the caddy on the table and handed them to her. Pushed her smoothie closer.
She laughed. Closed her eyes. Blew her nose in the napkins. “You know, I’m in a serious relationship right now.”
“Yeah?” Not even a tug on any part of his heart.
“Yeah. I love him, I really do. He’s really good for me, and we’re great together. He makes me think about myself, just myself, without all the plans.”
“That’s great, Jess. I’m really happy for you.” He was. He could see how her face got soft when she talked about this love.
“I’m happy for me, too. But can I tell you something?”
“Of course.”
“This guy, this wonderful man, he takes care of my soul, my heart. But I’ll admit to you that there are nights when I come home, late, and all I want is a Hefin to make me tea and rub my feet and do you remember how, when it was cold, you would put a blanket in the dryer to make it hot and tuck me in?”
“I do.”
“I loved that.”
“I loved doing that for you.”
“I know you did.” She leaned forward, her eyes going all X-ray vision again.
“What did you love that I did for you?”
He looked at her smoothie. At the lipstick around the straw.
“This man that I love? He makes me selfish. He makes me want to take things from him. Things like his time, and his attention. I make him selfish. He wants things from me. It makes me feel wonderful that he wants things from me, that he wants my attention on him all the time. It’s like he feels bigger and stronger just because I give him the time of day.”
“You needed me to be selfish?”
He looked up, and now she was looking away. “Yeah. I think I did. When we were in Wales, when I was on my holiday, do you remember that first day you ran into me at the beach?”
He couldn’t help his grin. He just couldn’t. Perfect days were perfect days, even in perspective. “Yeah, of course.”
“You ‘faffed around’ for a minute, as you call it, but it was just cute. Then you grabbed my hand and dragged me up to the village. Told me that you would make sure I had a good holiday. We barely made it to my room. I’d never done anything like that before. Or since, actually. The way you just took me—it made it easy to take you home, to take you here and make a home with you. I expected you to keep taking. To take of me. To grab life like you grabbed my hand. But instead, you just kept giving and giving, until you didn’t have anything left but your resentment of me. And when someone keeps giving, like you did, it just feels wrong to take from them all the time. I didn’t feel good taking what I really needed from you. I felt like I didn’t have anything you believed was worth taking, either. Like there was nothing inside me that you really wanted.”
He looked at her because she had touched his hand. She was handing him a stack of napkins. He tried to make sense of it, then realized he was crying. Great, hot tears over his face, over his neck, into the collar of his shirt.
Jesus.
“We’re quite the mess,” he said. He scrubbed his face with a napkin. “Why didn’t we—”
“Why are you asking? I feel like you’re asking me for my blessing for something we did years ago.”
Suddenly, he just wanted Destiny. He wanted her right next to him, her bony elbow in his side.
When he fussed after Destiny, it didn’t feel selfless. It felt like a moment’s respite from the fucking blind and dumb relentlessness of life.
He couldn’t fix her, he couldn’t fix anything, but he could fix a cup of tea. He could rub her neck. He could make sure she was well fed and well loved. He could take a moment he had no idea what to do with and make it pleasurable.
He could take what he needed from her, as well. When she was softened from his stupid tea and biscuits, even if nothing was perfect, he could kiss her and let his guard down and not understand everything that was happening and touch her and take comfort in her body even if he wasn’t certain, yet, what he needed comforting for.
“What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t gone with you? If we’d waited, took some time.”
“I didn’t want the man who would have waited or taken some time, Hefin. I married you as soon as our feet hit the soil in Ohio because after a week in bed you brought me around to meet your parents and proposed.”
Their food came then, and they tucked in without any more conversation.
“I’ll miss you,” she said after a while. “I’ll always miss you, especially on cold nights. I don’t regret it, I really don’t. I hope that your moving back doesn’t mean that you do.”
He realized he might have thought just that, just two weeks ago. That he was going home to lay his regrets on a familiar doorstop. “No,” he said, meaning it. “I’m glad you took me home. If only to know I’m not so stupid I won’t follow a beautiful woman wherever she takes me.”
Jessica laughed. It made her look like the Jessica he’d grabbed for himself on the beach, unpolished and perfect.
He’d miss Jessica, too. The one sitting here with him, right now, actually.
She’d been his wife, he’d been her husband, and they didn’t regret it. Their marriage was over, but the good things were still inside it, and what was not good in it had helped her find the love she needed.
The good and bad things might help him, yet.
“You’ll tell me how it works out with your new bloke?”
She laughed again. “If you’ll tell me how it works out with the reason you called me.”
He looked right at her X-ray eyes and let her see. It was easy enough to return her smile.
Chapter Twenty-two
“You’re boring.”
“You stink. Let the patient care assistant help you with a bath.” Des shifted in the hot vinyl-upholstered recliner to try to find a way to balance the laptop she had borrowed from Sam so that she could type without her wrists hurting.
“You’re supposed to be entertaining me.”
“I have to work, Sarah.”
“Work is boring.”
Des closed her eyes. “Do you remember when I used to follow you and Lacey to that lot where the broken merry-go-round was?”
“You were such a pest.”
“Lacey never thought so.” She looked at Sarah, wedged on her bed with an abductor pillow with the Styrofoam take-out containers from the food Des had brought scattered all over her chest and the blankets.
“No. Lacey dumped me for you, it’s true.”
Des grinned. “Yeah, she did.”
“It’s kinda gross when you think about it.” Sarah used her remote to try to get the head of the bed adjusted higher, forgetting that the nurses programmed it so she wouldn’t bend her hips past a certain angle and she was already at max. She threw the remote on her bedside table. “That lot was filled with trash. The merry-go-round was just the top part, and had been thrown there because it was trash. Our big hideout was a trash pile.”
“But it was a magical trash pile.”
“Yeah it was. I kissed my first boy there, remember?”
“Of course I do. Lacey and I paid you five dollars apiece to watch from behind that mulberry tree.”
“It was not a good kiss.”
“It didn’t look like it was. Not that I knew a lot about that kind of thing, but I knew I d
idn’t want a boy to do that thing Harry Pietrawicz did to your neck with his tongue. Ever.”
Sarah laughed so hard she grabbed her hip. “Oh my God! Do you remember after that Lacey started calling him ‘Hairy Petridish?’ I was so pissed.”
“You pretended that you had liked that neck thing for years just to lord your sophistication over us.”
“Maybe I would have relaxed and enjoyed it if you assholes weren’t hiding behind a tree watching me.”
“No. No one likes what he was doing. Even people who like being watched don’t like what he was doing.”
Sarah wrinkled her nose and laughed again. “You’re totally right.”
Des curled her feet up under her butt. “Do you miss Mom? I mean, I know you do, but do you miss her all the time? Like when you’re going through stuff like this?”
Sarah tipped her head back and looked at the ceiling. “Yeah.”
“I wish I remembered her better.”
“Do you know I got my first period three days after she died?” Sarah pulled the blanket up over her shoulders and the take-out containers rained to the floor.
“Oh, Sarah.”
“At the wake. I went to that bathroom at the church that’s by the choir-practice room, the one that’s super tiny and only has a sink and a toilet but a full-size radiator so it’s superhot and always stinks. No one uses it, and I wanted to be alone and cry. I thought I had to pee, but when I pulled down my panties there was, like, blood and stuff all over them. At first, I didn’t get it and I thought I had cut my leg high up or something. Then I remembered what it must be.” Sarah’s voice got thicker, softer.
“I kind of panicked, you probably don’t remember but Dad made me wear a dress and I only had one and had grown since the last time I wore it. It was one of those that were like an extralong polo shirt. It was light blue, and too fucking short, and now I was bleeding all over my panties, and that bathroom didn’t have anything to help me. There was something like twelve squares of teepee on the roll.”
Des laughed, but only because there wasn’t anything to say to a disaster so epic. She wished she had a time machine, and she’d go back to that moment with the biggest box of Kotex ever made. And underpants. And a pair of those jeans with the loops and pockets all over them that Sarah loved so much back then. “What’d you do?”
“I sat on the toilet and sobbed. I wasn’t even thinking anything specific. It was like throwing up—my body just took over and it sobbed.”
“God.”
“Eventually, I heard a knock on the door. It was Dad, and he said, ‘Sarah, you okay in there, honey?’ And suddenly, I was so happy because Dad was there and he could go get Mom.”
“Fuck,” Des whispered.
“Yeah. Fuck. So I yelled, ‘Daddy! Go get Mom I need her! Just tell her to come down here.’ ”
Des and Sarah sat in silence for a minute. Then Des remembered something, a fully formed memory from that time that usually was just a frustrating wash of sad grown-ups’ faces. “You weren’t at the wake. They had a table for us kids to eat dinner at together, and it was just me and the boys.”
“I just kept saying it, over and over, ‘Go get Mom, Daddy! I need her!’ and he never said anything back, and every time I said it I kind of remembered more and more. And then, by the time Mrs. Lynch knocked on the door, I had remembered that she was dead and that she couldn’t help me, not ever. That she wouldn’t even know I got my first period. Mrs. Lynch had her coat, and she put it around me and took me to her house. Gave me all the stuff. Then we sat on her sofa and watched Days of Our Lives while everyone else was at the church.”
Des grabbed a tissue from the tiny box they put in the hospital rooms and threw the box at Sarah. They spent a while blowing their noses and scrubbing their faces. “That’s a fucked-up story, Sarah.”
“No shit. Not the kind of menarche magic story I could’ve sent into Sassy magazine or some bullshit. ‘Hey girls! Getting my period freaked me out so much I forgot my mom was dead! Mazel tov!’ ”
“You and Lacey helped me with mine.”
“Oh my God. You were so weird about it, totally refusing to use a pad and making us talk you through a tampon for your first period. Jesus.”
“I wanted to be like you guys.”
Sarah looked over at her and smiled, and it was the first time in a while that it seemed liked Sarah was really smiling at her, was completely there, in the room with her. It gave her goose bumps and she rubbed her arms.
“It took like an hour. We had to figure out, like, ten thousand different definitions of the word vagina in the hope you’d figure out what part of your body we were talking about. Then you finally, finally got it in and swaggered out of the bathroom all sweaty, saying ‘I’m a woman now!’ ”
Des laughed. “I remember. I felt like a woman. You totally made me feel like a woman!”
And then Des and Sarah totally lost their shit. It was the best she’d felt with one of her siblings in forever.
Sarah wiped her eyes and blew her nose again. “What do you want now, Desbaby?”
“What do you mean?”
“That guy?”
“Hefin?”
“Yeah. Hefin. He’s into you. Like, game-changing into you.”
“Who?”
Des looked up and PJ was in the doorway, his hand over his eyes like he always did coming into Sarah’s hospital room after he walked in on a dressing change where he saw more of Sarah than he’d bargained for.
“I’m decent, PJ. Jesus.”
He put his hand down slowly, like he didn’t believe her. “Totally covered?”
“Yes. Don’t be such a prude.” Sarah yanked her blanket up higher.
“I’m not a prude. I’m categorically in favor of topless women, but my sister is not in that category.”
“Of women? Of toplessness?”
“Yes. All of those things.” He pulled open the dividing curtain and sprawled on the empty bed where Sarah’s roommate would be if she had one.
“Who’s into Des?”
“That guy.”
“The English guy? Evan?”
“Hefin,” Sarah and Des said together.
“And he’s from Wales,” Des said.
“And, like, really into Des. Really, really. He makes her stuff and I think he even promised to make me something, but I don’t totally remember because that was right before I almost died.”
“Sarah!” Des and PJ yelled together.
“What kind of stuff does he make you?”
“Taking notes, PJ?”
PJ glared at Sarah. “Just because you almost died doesn’t mean I have to haul ass over here after rehearsal with Peanut Butter M&M’S.”
“You have Peanut Butter M&M’S?” Sarah reached her hand out.
PJ reached into his jacket pocket. “You know these aren’t vegan, right?”
“I’m supposed to be getting more protein.”
He handed her the candy and tossed a Twix into Des’s lap. “Who’s your favorite brother?”
Des grinned. “I don’t have favorites.”
“It doesn’t bother me when you say that since I know it’s me. So what kinds of things does he make you?”
“He made me a dome.” Des carefully unwrapped her candy bar so she could fold the wrapper into an origami frog. As was her way.
“Huh.”
“Remember that movie with the artist who made things from sticks and rocks and leaves and stuff? You watched it with me.”
PJ moved to shift onto his side. “I had the most awesome dreams sleeping through that movie.”
“Shut up.”
“So he made you a dome?”
“A twig dome.”
Sarah poured another huge handful of M&M’S into her palm and shoved them in her mouth. “In her backyard. Also, he draws pictures of her. Like, compulsively.”
“You’re making him sound weird,” Des said.
“He is weird, Des. He makes domes and draws and barely tal
ks and his name is Hefin.” Sarah shoved in another handful of M&M’S. “Oh! And he calls her Des-tiny.”
Sarah said her name like it was a little bit of a taunt and not, well, her name.
“He’s kind of old, right?” PJ asked.
“Jesus, no.”
“I don’t know. He seems kinda old.”
“Says the twenty-two-year-old in love with a much older woman who won’t give him the time of day.”
PJ threw his sunglasses at Sarah and she caught them, put them on, and just grinned.
Des closed her eyes to see if there was any patience inside her brain. Except, she realized she was actually kind of happy. She was actually kind of hanging out with her brother and sister and they were having fun. True, one of them was hospitalized and not allowed to sit up past a thirty-degree angle and had some kind of machine attached to her hip sucking blood and pus out of it, but she’d take it.
She’d take the candy and the jokes and the laughing and the tears, too. Just to have them back. Have them all here.
It wasn’t sitting around their dad’s kitchen table, but maybe it was the start of some kind of new kitchen table. Maybe they could do this. Maybe that was the silver lining of Sarah’s getting sick, that they would have to stick together and be there for each other and really do this. Figure out what their new kitchen table would be.
“He sent me those, you know.” Sarah pointed at the wide windowsill where there was a very arty arrangement of spring green and white hydrangeas.
“Those aren’t from Marnie?”
“Nope, your boy Hefin. Look at the card.”
Des reached back and slid the square kraft-paper card toward her. It was obviously handmade.
The flowers and this drawing will have to do until I can manage a thermos of proper tea for you. And chocolate biscuits, of course. Speedy recovery. Hefin (Destiny’s friend)
There was a beautiful drawing of interlocking, many-toothed gears, with a bicycle chain worked through them.
Des watched the card go blurry.
“He’s a classy guy, Desbaby.”
“Yeah, he is.” She traced her finger over his note. He wrote with those precise typewritten letters that architects use.
“I will totally admit that the card and flowers made me want to do him. Just a little.”
Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series Page 24