Downstairs, I slip out the kitchen door, avoiding all those Birkuses, all of them except for Care’s oldest sister-in-law, who glares at me as she comes in to get more beer. “You’re feeling better I see. All dressed up.”
“It’s a tank top.”
“It’s a Lilly,” she says, fuck you and your shirt. “Everyone knows those are dressy.”
I wave and slam the door. Fuck her too. Already I’m better, outside. I start the car I borrowed from my mom. I am going to see him, going to see Jon, and I am smiling and I turn on the local radio—Springsteen, “I’m on Fire.” I back out of the driveway and I roll down the windows, all of them. Gnats swirl, fireflies too. I feel more engaged than I ever did when I was engaged.
EGGS
It was almost fun at first, me staked out by the Birkus house, Lo back home, reading about Chloe’s art on the computer, searching for clues about Jon, make room for me in your rabbit hole, Eggie. I stare at the Birkus house, I will the door to open, same way I stared at Chuckie when he was sleeping, I willed him to come back to us. Now I stare at that fucking door and I will it to open as I did five minutes ago, five hours ago.
And then it does.
It’s her, Chloe. There’s no ring anymore. She’s beaming, she’s light on her feet, there’s light in her eyes, there’s light everywhere around her, bouncing as she makes a beeline for her car. She starts her car and backs out of the driveway and I’m on her tail, this is it, this is for him, for Jon. He’s here. Somewhere close. He reached out to Chloe and she tore off her ring and now she’s going to meet him. I can’t believe it. She can’t believe it either. That’s why her driving is so jerky. She’s speeding up to red lights and then beating her hands on the wheel, resting her elbow on the open window, caught in a maelstrom of nostalgia and anticipation, excitement and fear, she’s never been so alive and I’m in her rearview mirror, coasting on her nerves, her hesitations, her jitters.
We hit a little traffic once we get onto the main roads, once I know where we’re going: the Finch Plaza Mall. I bet Jon told her to meet him in the old jewelry store where he spent all those years pining for her. I bet he’ll be there on one knee, with a ring he made out of tinfoil or a token of some kind, a piece of their past.
An ambulance flies by and I remember what the Beard is, a murderer.
Chloe guns the engine and I’m right there with her, far enough behind to fly under the radar, watching as she parks, checks her face, bounces out of her car into the empty lot. Her smile could save the world, maybe Jon too.
The second she disappears into the mall, I open my car door. But right away I know I’m fucked. I know the squeeze. The sound. The stench. I sat too long. And you can’t do that when you have a bag, you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. If you do that, it pops on you, soiling your clothes, your skin.
I have my overnight bag in the car, all the gadgets I need to deal with the stoma, a change of clothes. I can’t go straight to the jewelry store like I want. After all this time, I have to go to the damn bathroom. And by the time I finish up in there they might be gone. And gone might mean on their way to who knows where.
For Chloe, it also might mean dead.
CHLOE
I don’t walk across the parking lot of the mall. I float in on my memories of this place, all of them bubbling beneath my feet, the ground that isn’t there. I’m here he texted, just as I was parking, as I was realizing the same thing, that I’m here, I’m ready. Memories flood me: being here when he wasn’t, when I was goofing off and being the girl with no Jon; being here when he was, those strained moments when he saw me with my friends, with Carrig, when he witnessed me being that other girl, the one who lied and said she was staying home to study, all those times he waved, not wounded, not angry. The weight of his forgiveness, his love. The weight of walking around this place when I had no idea that he was underneath, sleeping, the pressure of my wonder, the unanswered questions, the buried tears, the knock on the dressing room, my mother or Noelle, Do you have it on yet? Can I see?
I open the first door, and I remember all those times I went to see Jon in the shed, the look on his face, he was always there first, always waiting. I open the second door and now I’m in the mall, I’m here. I’m here. I’m calmer than I was out there and I forgot about how Jon feels, how he quiets this thing in me, this need to be liked, to be pleasing, to be included and invited. I get within fifty feet of him and there’s nothing else but us. It terrified me, the evenness of our seesaw when we were alone, how he didn’t mind when I jumped off and left him sitting there on his own. It was hard to be that young and feel like you were so close to understanding yourself, every weakness, every plus.
But I’m old enough now.
The door to Jack’s is closed. Old newspapers are plastered over the glass. I knock on the glass the way I knocked on the door to the shed. There’s no answer. My hand is trembling as I grip the metal handle. The door gives easily and I step onto the electric green carpet. The halogen lights are hot, buzzing. I’m unsteady and then I hear him.
Knock knock.
Jon.
He wasn’t lying. He is here. And I am here. My hand covers my mouth and he’s in the back, in the room behind the Plexiglas that was always full of new equipment, golf clubs and Louisville sluggers. He’s in a black T-shirt. Jeans. Boots. Hair. I take in his clean shave. The lines around his eyes. The years. He’s still Jon. A little removed, not bursting through the door to come hug me.
He takes me in too. His eyes dart to my ring finger and back to my face. He knows.
I walk to the door to the back room and he doesn’t take his eyes off me as I jiggle the handle, as I do what anyone would do. It’s the same doorknob that was always there, bronze and dented. I pull harder. It resists. He holds his breath. He doesn’t move from where he’s standing. He doesn’t unlock the door and sweep me up in his arms. He didn’t do it then and he doesn’t do it now and I let go of the handle.
“Jon?” It’s the heaviest question, the one I’ve carried for years.
“Chloe,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
I crumple to the ground and I cry because of what life is. I thought things would be different because they are different, because I’m a grown-up, I’m not torn anymore, I walked out on the wrong one and ran toward the right one and it felt like this was it, my new life. But there’s another door. And it feels like it’s my fault.
“I’m sorry, Jon, I’m so sorry. I know I should have been better to you. I’m sorry I’m me.”
He knocks on the glass again. “Chloe, don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”
The tears stop. But he’s still just standing there. He’s still not opening the door.
“So why won’t you come get me, Jon?”
“I can’t.”
There’s a chill now, like when you wake up freezing because you left a window open. “Jon. What do you mean, you can’t? Are you sick? Are you okay?”
He exhales deeply and I see his mind racing to keep up with his feelings. His eyes are welling up. His fists clench. All the parts he keeps on the other side of the glass, as if they could hurt me. And the way he looks at me, I know it isn’t a lie. It isn’t fear. It’s something real. The risk. The closed door.
I touch him the only way I can, through the glass. His hands meet mine on the other side. He’s crying quietly.
“Jon, what’s wrong?”
“I thought you’d be mad.”
“Jon, I was never mad. The only way I’d be mad is if you waited until it was too late. But we’re here. And life is long.”
He doesn’t say anything and his silence feels like a counter. No, Chloe, life is short.
I ask him again. “What’s wrong?”
“I was at your show,” he says.
My head spins and my hands press onto the glass. “That was you.”
�
��You fainted.”
“The way I did when I first saw you when you came home.”
“Yes,” he says. “I think deep down you know, Chloe. I can’t explain it. I don’t want to be this way. But he did something to me in the basement when I was sleeping. It sounds crazy, but my feelings, when I care about someone…I hurt them.” He looks at me. “Kody didn’t run off, Chloe. And Noelle…”
My skin tingles. I glance at the doorknob. For the first time I understand what’s happening here. He doesn’t have a contagious flu and he isn’t punishing me. He locked that door to save me.
“Noelle,” I say. And it’s like waking up after a dream, knowing real from unreal. The cop who asked me about Noelle, a heart attack? And the years in between Noelle dying and now, this is why he kept his distance. When he came back, when he stayed away, this is why. I always wondered and now I know and it’s as if a new language is implanted in my brain and I’m fluent without ever having tried to learn. I know it but I don’t understand it.
“Chloe,” he says.
I nod. “You told me how your mom fainted, your dad was always woozy. That was you?”
“Yes.”
I can’t look at him for a second. I’m afraid of him for the first time in my life. I feel like I should have so many questions, but all I can do is picture him in front of his house, me and my wet head, and how the earth disappeared under me, how mad I was at the universe for robbing us of that hug, that moment, that joy.
“He left me this book. The Dunwich Horror. I couldn’t understand it. All I knew was that he turned me into a monster.”
And just like that the fear is gone. I know what Jon is, what he isn’t. I look up. “Jon, you’re not like that. You’re not a monster. Whatever is wrong, we can fix it.”
“I don’t know how, Chloe. I’ve tried, for years, for you. And I drive myself crazy, thinking if I had just told you how I felt sooner, if I had been brave enough to say it, this never would have happened. Blair wouldn’t have gotten me. And you and me…”
It’s too much to picture him in the woods and I shake it away. I tell him it was us. I tell him how nervous it made me to feel so appreciated, I didn’t know what to do with it. I wasn’t ready to have someone thinking I’m so amazing.
“I wasn’t brave enough to hear it,” I say.
This is how it always was. I don’t talk a mile a minute the way I do when we’re online. When we’re in the same room, we have these silences. We had them in the shed. They’re not awkward. They’re heavy, sticky, they’re us knowing where we’re both coming from.
“Jon,” I say. “Even after you got back, and you wouldn’t see me…”
“Couldn’t see you,” he says. “Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.”
“Didn’t,” I say. “It’s just how it worked out. How it always seems to work out. That no matter how close we are…”
“There’s something keeping us apart,” he says.
My hands are on the glass against his hands, the closest we’ve ever been, the pores on his cheeks, denser there than anywhere else, his Adam’s apple, the veins in his neck, the little flecks of black in his eyes, his lashes, his lips. What we want is irrelevant. It’s nothing compared to what is.
He nods toward a chair. I’m sitting on my side and he’s sitting on his side. Like prisoners, which we are.
“I have to know, Jon. Was that you in Providence?”
He raises his voice in song, that jingle for the furniture store, Alex Interiors. I forgot how funny he is, I forgot about the laugh I have around him, the one from deep inside. And then the moment cools, it transforms into something else. That was him calling me. That was also him hanging up. All those years. I cross my arms over my chest. He reads me well.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he says. “I just missed you and I wanted to hear your voice so bad. I’m sorry. I am.”
“Jon, I’m still confused. You could have written to me. You could have told me about this…whatever it is.”
“But I don’t know what it is.”
“But you know what this is, between us.”
His hands become fists. “It’s the hardest thing in the world, staying away from you. I knew it going into this. I thought, okay, I’ll get to see you and talk, but then I have to tell you about how messed up I am and you’re gonna be let down, the way you were when we were kids.”
“No, Jon. You didn’t let me down. I thought we had our whole lives together. I always thought I let you down. I stayed up night after night when you left. I missed you so much. And then I changed. I could feel it happening. And it was horrible, Jon. It was like a horror movie, feeling myself grow away from you, getting older, looking different. I would look in the mirror and realize how long you’d been gone and it just hurt.”
“Chloe, I’m sorry.”
“No,” I say. “We’re here again. It’s like before. You came back, Jon. You came back.”
“I did but I didn’t,” he says, and I see the pain breaking across his face.
And now it’s dawning on me. The expanse of it. The misleading image of him in the paper, on TV, the bold, fresh-faced survivor, the new lease on life. The lie of it all. The half-truth of his toxic, great big body. I did but I didn’t. It’s dizzying to realize how powerless I was. To know how irrelevant love is when it comes to fate intervening. Is that what Roger Blair was? Was he fate? Did he beat us?
My phone buzzes and I’m startled. It’s him. It’s Jon. He moved and he’s sitting on the floor with his back against the glass.
Chloe is all he writes.
I sit on the ground directly behind him, on the other side of the glass, my side. I write back. Jon.
He sends me a link to an obituary of a man in Lynn. And while I’m skimming that, he sends me another link. And then another. This is what his life has been, he’s carried these links around. He’s waited to show them to me until now. These people he didn’t mean to hurt. The reason for the glass barrier. The reason for his tears.
The links are piling up, dizzying, the pictures, the loss. I send him a link to our song, “Way It Goes,” that song we liked, his favorite version. When the song ends we connect through our silence. I feel his pain. His goodness. The paradox. The boy with the hamster.
It’s time Jon. Let’s go. We have to go. We can fix this.
Chloe we can’t go.
Of course we can. We’ll figure it out.
“Chloe,” he says. His voice startles me. I didn’t hear him shifting, getting on his feet.
I pocket my phone. I wipe my forehead. I lost my sense of time, place. I’m dizzy, like some woman who was hypnotized.
His puts his hands on the glass and I raise my hands to meet his hands. “I love you,” he says.
“I love you, Jon.”
We said it. We finally said it.
The atmosphere changes immediately. And there’s an out of the way place where your mind stores things. You can’t reach it yourself. It’s like the game Operation and you are the body and someone else has to have a steady hand, they have to poke that part of you, that hot spot. When you get what you want, what you always wanted, what it means to be you is to want this thing and now you have it and there is a roar. Love.
We are quiet again. I feel him imagining our future, or the future that would have been if things were different. He’s right here in front of me after all these years and it’s the most I’ve ever missed him somehow. My vision blurs with tears. I stare down at the electric green carpet. Life is short. Life is long.
He smiles. “You are so beautiful, Chloe.”
I choke back a sob. “It’s okay, Jon. It’s all going to be different now.”
“I love you,” he says again, and there’s something new to his voice, a whiff of departure. My heart starts to race. How can three words sound like goodbye when only a moment ago they m
eant hello? I put my hands back up on the glass. He does too.
And then the door smashes open behind us, and it feels like an earthquake has hit us out of nowhere.
I whirl around and it’s him. It’s Carrig.
He is a hunter and he always was and Jon steps back and I was wrong. Things aren’t gonna be different. People don’t change.
If they did, then Carrig wouldn’t be here with a gun.
His legs are spread wide. His feet are lodged to the ground. His arms are extended, the barrel of the pistol moving from me to Jon, from me to Jon. Even that brings us together, the weapon that could kill us, will kill us.
“I knew it,” Carrig says. “I fucking knew it would come down to this.”
JON
He’s drunk and he’s crying and he stomps back and forth with the gun in his hand. It’s a small gun. A handgun. And that’s all I can think about. He has this weapon in his hand. He’s armed.
Chloe’s hands are trembling. Every time she steps toward him, my whole body seizes up. If he shoots her, if it ends like this, it will be my fault.
“Carrig,” she says. “Don’t do this.”
“Fuck you, Chloe,” he says. He points the gun at her. “You don’t get to speak to me. You had your chance.”
She doesn’t cower. She doesn’t cry. “Carrig, we were just talking.”
“She’s telling the truth, Carrig,” I say. “Don’t hurt her.”
Carrig swings around to face me. “This is how you treat a girl? You hide back there in your little hidey-hole? What the fuck is this even? Your girl’s out here and you don’t move? Get out here and be a man.”
She takes another step toward him. “Carrig, let’s talk,” she says. “Let’s just go outside and talk. You don’t want to do this. You’re mad at me, I know. But I also know you don’t want to do this. This isn’t you.”
He extends his arm, that gun, that weapon, and she drops to her knees. I could kill him in an instant, but opening that door would mean killing her too.
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