I turn red and reach for his hands and pull him onto the sofa. He collapses, laughing, saying he doesn’t know what he’s saying. I tell him it’s okay and I rock him in my arms and he falls asleep on me. I am awake, bitten by mosquitoes. But this is just what happens when you go home. One minute you want to live here forever, the next you’re fucked up and you remember why you can’t live here.
It gets later, into the darkest part of the night. I don’t hear Jon but I would swear that he’s nearby. There’s a vibration, like that red haze around a firefly. I remember a town Jon told me about a long time ago, something he read in the Weird News section of the Telegraph about a town in England with a humming sound that everyone could hear, but nobody knew where it was coming from. That’s what this is. Jon is close. And were Care not asleep on me, I could stand up and open my eyes and see him.
JON
You regress when you go home. My dad says that’s why he never went back to Scotland, never wanted to become that child ever again. But I think that might be why he drinks so much as an adult. I think maybe you need to be that child, at least sometimes, like tonight. I was nervous about being here, unsure if it would just be too much, if it would be wiser to disappear without saying goodbye. I was nervous when I parked my car by the old phone company (probably where Roger parked when he hid to take me). I was nervous I wouldn’t remember how to find my way to the shed, but I did. You don’t forget the important things, the things that made you who you are.
I saw her. Chloe. And it’s like a big meal, a hot shower, warm sun on your back, I saw her and she saw me—I would swear on it—and I feel all the Chloe parts of my brain lighting up, the circuits are smoking. I’m so tapped into this place that I don’t have to use my flashlight on my way back to the shed. I just play the moment in my head over and over.
There I was in the woods, and there she was on the sofa, and there was this thing between us, the thing that was there in the shed when we were kids, the thing that was between our phones, our computers, a glue string. It never died.
And that’s true freedom. That’s what Roger was wrong about in his letter to me. You are free. I wasn’t. I am now. I saw her. I felt it. True love.
The door to the shed still sticks. You have to push the knob even as you pull it, a ridiculous dance, another one I remember, like riding a bike. I brought the same stuff with me that I would bring when I was a kid, my sleeping bag, a jar of fluff, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread. I eat a sandwich and I lick my fingers before I reach for the ball I found in the woods by Carrig’s house, a customized ping-pong. Chloe and Carrig. I cover the Carrig part with my thumb. But then I remember that Chloe painted their names all over everything. I saw the ping-pong ball, I saw her friends snapping photos of the customized plates, cups, everything. She did this. She wants this. She has a future, a plan, a life. And I won’t destroy it.
On the other side of the ball it says C&C. I wonder if this is destiny, if their marriage was in the stars all along, if my being here was an accident, an inconvenience, a rain delay. I get mixed-up and I’m not sure if their love is the monster, if I am the monster. Our names don’t go together. Maybe we don’t go together. Maybe she painted me because she felt obligated. Maybe she came here when we were kids to get a break from her friends. You don’t marry your break.
I close my eyes and my heart fights back. I see another party in my mind, a party for me and Chloe. My mom is stringing lights up in our backyard, through the bars on the swing set. The cast of The Middle is here. There are Spidey plates and hats. There isn’t any beer pong, there are no shots of Fireball. Noelle is alive; nothing bad ever happened. I know I’m dreaming when Chloe makes a speech. I know you’re here, Jon. I saw you in the woods. I want to tell her everything, that I saw her, that I love her, that I don’t hold any of this against her, but she’s looking at me like I’m crazy because we’re in this dream together, at our wedding, we have everything we want. I can’t say anything. My mouth is full of fluff.
Alarm bells ring and I wake up gasping. My mouth isn’t full of anything, it’s just sticky from the Fluffernutter I ate before I passed out. Chloe’s ping-pong ball rolled over to the other side of the shed. It’s for the best. I saw Chloe. Now it’s time to see my parents.
It’s still dark when I get to my parents’ house.
My old swing set is still there but the wood on the limbs is rotting. I can see us here, me in the dirt, playing Spider-Man, my parents puttering around, my dad grappling with a garden hose while my mom tells him what people are up to on Facebook and he asks her to do something useful with that phone, find out where he should go for a hose. There’s a greeting card in their trash, a thinking of you card from someone named Nadine. I don’t even know who Nadine is. I close the lid of the trash, super quiet, mouse quiet. Then a twig snaps and I get that feeling I get a lot, that someone is watching you chill. But there’s never anyone. The guy at the hospital was right when he said, It’s post-traumatic stress. Sometimes it goes away. Other times…
But I’m safe, blasted by memories:
My dad laughing, Bronson men hit the road, Jack, and they don’t come back. My mom smacking him, Watch it or one of these days he’ll think you mean that and he’ll walk into those woods and never come back.
My mom after I came home, when I started to stay in my room and she would be out here, scrolling through Facebook, pursing her lips. Once I asked her why she didn’t quit. Because it exists, she said. You can’t make it un-exist.
I’m so close I can smell the inside of our house. I swear I can hear my dad’s old songs. I want to go in, get into my bed, eat a burger off our grill, complain about being forced to eat broccoli out of the microwave.
Instead, I reach into their box for the first paper I ever loved, The Telegraph. It still smells the same and my heart starts thumping as I flip the pages, as I turn to the back, to the classifieds. I put an ad in here, a message for my parents. I’ve never done this before, never put myself out there, in here, and even though I already saw the proof online, it’s exciting to see it, my words, my little black-and-white box:
Mom and Dad. I Love you Forever and I will always miss you and love all the times we had, all the laughs at dinner, all the love. Thanks for always letting me be me, I know I wasn’t the easiest kid. But I also know you guys are the best. Love Jon.
My mom and dad are gonna know it’s me. My mom will know it’s me because your mother knows your voice, your odd ways. And my dad will know because of my mom. She’ll tell him how one year I had to do all my thank-you notes twice for my birthday because I capitalized every word of every sentence. I groaned but my mom tossed the new cards on my bed. Do you want people to think you’re crazy? Because only crazy people capitalize every word.
I circle the ad with a Sharpie and I put the paper back in their box. I graze my hand over the box one last time. I remember the day it arrived. I do love them, so much.
I start my car, I pray it doesn’t wake anyone—it doesn’t, so far as I can tell—and I head down the street toward the Kinzys’. They have people visiting, cars parked tight and close, out-of-state plates, same as every summer, which is good for me, means I have a safe place to hide. I just line up my car with the Kinzy cars, I hunker down, I wait.
And eventually it begins. I hear one of the first sounds of my life, our screen door opening, followed by another sound I know, the sounds of the morning, my dad yawning, his barefoot footsteps. He’s wearing his same Bread T-shirt he always slept in. It’s hard not to leap out of the car, not to run over there, hug him. He scratches his neck and reaches into the Telegraph box. He’s half asleep so he doesn’t look closely enough. My heart aches. I thought I was gonna get to see it happen, gonna get to see them read it together. And then he realizes something’s off about the paper. It’s open. He sees my ad.
He gulps. “Penny!”
His accent is thicker, the way it alwa
ys was in the morning, and now my mother is outside, in her robe, holding a small little dog, smaller than Kody. I bet she never lets go of the dog unless she has to. He shows her the paper and she kisses the dog.
And then she drops the dog and the little dog doesn’t move. A Pomeranian, I think.
My dad groans. “Where’s the leash?”
My mom mimics him. “Where’s the leash? You call me out here and you’re asking about the leash. Jed, this is him.”
He picks up the little dog and he’s talking her down, telling her there’s no way to know, that it could be anyone, people are sick and they do sick things, this is a prank. You can tell he never holds the dog. His arms outstretched, the little dog’s legs dangle like his tongue, wagging. I love my parents so much it hurts. I might get out of this car and walk over there and risk ending their lives just to hold them, just to show my mother that she’s right, it is me, and to show my dad that he was right all those years ago, when he told my mother that things would be okay, that I would come home. I put my hands on the door.
I can’t do that to them. To anyone.
My mother insists it’s me, That’s his voice, I’d know if it wasn’t. My dad sniffs, Pen, you go your way, I’ll go mine. You want to hope? Fine. Hope. But I’m not gonna set myself up for a goddamn letdown. He’s gone. My mom groans, she smacks the paper. He circled it, goddamn it. Look at it, Jed. Look. But my parents are different. When I was little, I thought that meant they were wrong for each other. Now I get that it means they’re right. My mom wants to call Shakalis and my dad scratches his head. I think he retired, hon. My dad says he’s gonna fix the lawnmower and my mom rocks her new dog, her baby. Love is forever, but at some point hope becomes a liability. I can tell by the way my mother’s cradling New Kody that she’s not gonna call the police. She’s gonna believe. But she’s not gonna hope, not gonna share her belief system with practical naysayers, authorities. Too much time has passed. When she’s inside, my dad leans against the bed of his truck and lights a cigarette. He lays the paper out flat.
I can tell by the way he reads it over and over again that he still has hope, he just can’t bring it into that house and show it to my mom. He can feel me out here. He knows it was me. But he won’t come looking for me. His parents let him go. He’s doing the same for me.
My mom appears in the doorway. Are you coming in or what?
My dad folds the paper in the way he never did when I bugged him to keep it tidy. He rolls it up and walks up the driveway to join my mom, to eat her eggs and listen to her, and not listen to her, and love her. I imagine myself in a yard like theirs, ours, me with no shoes, with a paper, Chloe in a doorway, calling my name.
I pull up her contact in my phone. There it is. Chloe Sayers. It’s amazing to me, the power of these little machines, the potential in them to bring us together, the simple fact that I could put my finger on that little telephone icon and call her. If I wanted to.
My heart races. My palms sweat. I never felt so human and inhuman all at once.
CHLOE
I told Carrig I have cramps. I’m up in his room, hiding from his giant family, letting them think the worst of me, that I’m uppity, too good for them, bored by their Bud Light and their dogs running around, the game on the TV, the conversation about home renovations, townie gossip. I’m feeding it all by staying up here in Care’s bed, Googling Eggs from the party, searching for Jon and Providence.
Carrig’s mother is telling him that Oprah says that women with bad cramps generally suffer from poor nutrition, a sedentary lifestyle, and various genetic hormonal imbalances. I listen to this and I know I should be down there but soon they’ll turn the game off, they’ll lose themselves in the new Iron Man. Which of course reminds me of Spider-Man, of Jon, how pathetic he was, the opposite of an animal that evolves to protect itself, to develop camouflage from predators. Jon wearing his Spider-Man costume to school when we were way too old to do that. Jon telling people he loved Spider-Man when we were supposed to love other things, cool things. He didn’t know how to protect himself. And it made me hesitate, to think of what it would be like if we were together, really together. I’d have to hide that Spider-Man costume, I’d have to protect him.
It stung when Jon talked about his movies, his Spider-Man, his Middle. He had this ability to love things too much, movies that had nothing to do with him. I think he got it from his dad, who was so obsessed with America, with old songs. Jon loved things in a way that most people don’t. I mean with Carrig there was never any question. He doesn’t love his family all that much—how could he?—and he loves me more than the Red Sox, more than anything.
I close my eyes and curl up in the sheets, wrapping myself in a cocoon, trying to block out the TV downstairs, all those overgrown Birkus brothers and sisters, the squawking wives, the dull husbands.
My phone buzzes and the screen comes to life. One new message.
I assume it’s Marlene—she’s been texting all day—and I tap the little green icon and it’s in slow motion only it’s not in slow motion. It’s my heart that can’t keep up, my eyes. Because what I always wanted is happening. It’s not a hang-up call from a strange number and it’s not Marlene.
It’s Jon and I know it right away because of how it starts, how it sounds like him, so direct, so emotionless and emotional all at once, so much that already my head is spinning, I am in high school again. I read the words once and already I know them by heart: It’s Jon. Can you come see me now? I’m in Rolling Jack’s. It’s a long story.
I read it forward, backward. And then I respond: I’m on my way.
I am dizzy when I stand, it was hot in the sheets, it’s hot in the house. It’s hot inside of me. Jon. I don’t know what to wear and I want to wear all my clothes at once, summer dresses and cutoffs, my old Tenley’s T-shirt that’s covered in paint and charcoal stains, my sexy panties, my granny panties, everything I ever owned, I want to put it on so he can take it off, so I can tell him where it comes from, what it means. I settle on a little pink dress but then I remember Carrig’s family, the wall of them, why are you so dressed up? That should be the state fucking slogan of New Hampshire. I find safe territory. A Lilly Pulitzer tank top, denim cutoffs.
Carrig knocks on the door as I finish changing. “Oh,” he says. “You’re up.”
He gets that tone around his mom, that suspicious tone, he can’t help it.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m up because it turns out I have to go out.”
“But you said you have cramps.” Again that suspicion.
“Yeah, but Marlene texted, she had a fight with her mom.”
“Do you want her to come here? We’re gonna grill and have a corn hole tournament.”
I invite him to the bed and he comes and we sit. “Care, she was crying. I have to be a friend, you know?”
He pouts. Your family makes you into a child, no matter how old you are. “But it’s Sunday and you know how my mom is about stuff. I mean everyone is staying.”
“I’ll be back.”
“But you could also just not go.” He turns red. “Can I say something and you won’t get mad?”
“No, Care, if you hurt my feelings, I will get mad.”
“Well my mom says you put panty-liner things in the trash can and she says you shouldn’t have cramps if your period is that light and she thinks you’re up here cuz you don’t wanna be down there.”
“Your mother riffles through the trash?”
He swallows my knee with his hand. “I know,” he says. “She always did that though cuz my sisters lied about stuff and put things in the toilet, it was a whole fight that was always happening when we were kids and I guess she still looks in the trash just because.”
I fold my arms. I want to leave. In every possible way. I stare at the wall. “I’m mortified.”
He surprises me, springing off the bed. “Well, me too
. Why wouldn’t you just watch the fucking movie?”
“Because I had cramps.”
“Right,” he says. “It’s always something.”
“No, Care, it’s a pretty known fact that fiancées get anxious sometimes. And anxiety is hell on cramps.”
He clicks his jaw. “You always talk like that when we come home, you know.”
He won’t look at me and I try not to blush. “Like what?”
“Like a newspaper,” he says. “And you know what I mean by ‘newspaper.’ ”
“Are you kidding?”
He looks at me. “You think I’m retarded? Jesus Chloe you get here and you talk like that freak and you look for that freak every time we go anywhere, you watch doors, Chloe.”
“No I don’t.”
He shakes his head. “You think I’m blind? Your eyes, Chloe, they shoot over there happy and they come back sad. You’re not the only one who can see shit. Even your fucking paintings. What do you make? Eyes. Why do you make them? Him. And it’s fucking embarrassing, okay?”
“Embarrassing.”
“Yes,” he says. “It’s fucking embarrassing.”
That’s what he cares about the most, that everyone here has this fantasy that we’re perfect. Embarrassing isn’t a love word. I could do anything and Jon would never be embarrassed. Carrig grabs his bong, his high school bong. This is how I know I’m really leaving him, because of how at home he is right here. It doesn’t even have anything to do with Jon, not right now. He’ll come back here, home to mommy. Destiny is evident, it’s your fiancé tapping a bong, showing you who he is, who he’d rather be, if you would just let him fucking be, once and for all.
I take my ring off. I put it on the nightstand. He doesn’t fight me. He coughs. “Seriously?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just know I don’t know you right now.”
Providence Page 28