by Sarah Dessen
Good Lord, I thought, picking up the newspaper and scanning the headlines. What was it about the women in this town? Was everyone emotional?
‘Okay,’ Heidi said slowly. ‘I just couldn’t help but notice… No, no, of course. What? Well, it should be in the office, right in that left-hand drawer. It’s not? Huh. Well, let me think…’ She looked around the room, then threw a hand over her mouth. Her voice rose as she said, ‘Oh, crap. It’s here, I see it over by the door. God, how did that happen? No, I’ll just bring it down right now. It’s not a problem, I’ll just pop Thisbe in her stroller…’
The person on the other line was saying something, the voice equally high and shrill. I took a gulp of my coffee, then another one, just as Thisbe began to chime in as well. I wondered if emotions were like menstrual cycles, if you got enough women together. Give it time, and everyone was crying.
‘Oh, dear,’ Heidi said, glancing at her watch. ‘Look, I’m going to have to feed her before we can go anywhere. Just tell the delivery guy… Is there enough cash in the drawer? Well, can you check?’ There was a pause, during which Thisbe went from sputtering to all-out crying. Heidi sighed. ‘All right. No, we’ll come right now. Just… hold tight. Okay. Bye.’
She hung up, then walked across the room to the bottom of the stairs, jiggling Thisbe slightly as she went. ‘Robert?’ she called up the stairs. ‘Honey?’
‘Yes?’ my dad replied a moment later, his voice muffled.
‘Do you think you can feed Thisbe for me? I have to run the checkbook down to the store.’
I heard footsteps overhead, then my dad’s voice, louder and clearer, saying, ‘Are you talking to me?’
Thisbe chose this moment to increase her volume: Heidi had to shout over her as she said, ‘I was just wondering if you could give Thisbe a bottle, I need to go down to the store because I left the checkbook here, and I thought they could cover this COD charge with cash but there isn’t enough…’
Too much information, I thought, sucking down the rest of my coffee. Why did she always have to make everything so complicated?
‘Honey, I’m not really at a good stopping point,’ my dad said. ‘Can it wait twenty minutes?’
Thisbe howled in response, pretty much answering this question. ‘Um,’ Heidi said, looking down at her, ‘I don’t know –’
‘Fine,’ my dad said, and instantly I recognized his tone, put upon and petulant. Fine, he’d said to my mom, you just support us with your job. Fine, I guess you do know more about what the publishing industry wants. Fine, I’ll just give up my writing altogether, it’s not like I was ever nominated for a National Book Award. ‘Just give me a minute, and I’ll –’
‘I’ll take it down there,’ I said, pushing my chair back. Heidi glanced over at me, surprised, but not nearly as much as I was myself. I thought I’d given up this kind of co-dependent behavior years ago. ‘I want to go up to the beach anyway.’
‘Are you sure?’ Heidi asked. ‘Because you were such a help last night, I don’t want to ask you to –’
‘She’s offering, Heidi,’ my dad said. I still couldn’t see him, only hear his voice, booming down from sights unseen, like God. ‘Don’t be a martyr.’
Which was good advice, I was thinking ten minutes later, as I walked down the boardwalk, the checkbook – and some muffins for the girls! – in hand. Twenty-four hours in Colby and already I didn’t recognize myself. My mother would be disgusted, I thought. I knew I was.
When I walked into Clementine’s, the first thing I saw was the dark-haired girl from the night before standing by the counter talking to a UPS guy. ‘The thing is,’ she was saying, ‘I know it’s stupid that I’m still crying over him. But we went out for, like, two years. It wasn’t just a fling. We were serious, as serious as things like that can be. So some days, like today… it’s just hard.’
The UPS man, who looked decidedly uncomfortable, brightened at the sight of me. ‘Looks like your checkbook’s here,’ he said.
‘Oh!’ She turned to face me, then blinked, confused. ‘Is Heidi… are you… ?’
‘Her stepdaughter,’ I explained.
‘Really? That’s great. Are you here to help with the baby?’
‘Not –’
‘I can’t wait to meet her,’ she said before I could finish. ‘And I love her name! It’s so unusual. Although I thought Heidi was naming her Isabel or Caroline? But maybe I was wrong…’
I handed over the checkbook, then the bag. When she glanced at it, quizzical, I added, ‘Muffins.’
‘Really?’ she said excitedly, opening the bag. ‘Oh, these smell delicious. Here, Ramon, you want one?’ She offered the bag to the UPS guy, who reached in and took one, then to me. I shook my head, and she helped herself. ‘Thanks so much. Here, I’ll just write the check quick and send it back with you, because I think Heidi needed it for some bill stuff, and I wouldn’t want you to have to make another trip. Although it is handy to have it here, but at the same time…’
I nodded – too much information, again – then walked over to a display of jeans, leaving her to chatter on. Behind the jeans, tucked away against a back wall, were some bathing suits on sale, so I started picking through them. I was checking out a red, boy-short bikini that wasn’t entirely hideous when I heard the front door chime.
‘I brought caffeine,’ a girl’s voice called out. ‘Double mocha, extra whip. Your favorite.’
‘And I,’ another chimed in, ‘have the very latest issue of Hollyworld. They just got dropped at the newsstand, like, ten minutes ago.’
‘You guys!’ Maggie squealed. I glanced over, but because of the rack of suits, my view was blocked: she was all I could see now, as Ramon had clearly left the building, lucky guy. ‘What’s the occasion?’
No one spoke for a moment, and I went back to my browsing. Then one of the girls said, ‘Well… the truth is, we have something we have to tell you.’
‘Tell me?’ Maggie said.
‘Yes,’ the other girl told her. There was a pause. Then, ‘Now, before we do, I want to stress that this is for your own good. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ Maggie said slowly. ‘But I don’t like the sound of –’
‘Jake hooked up with another girl last night,’ the first girl blurted out. ‘At the Tip.’
Oh, shit, I thought.
‘What?’ Maggie gasped.
‘Leah!’ one girl said. ‘Jesus. I thought we agreed we were going to break it to her gently.’
‘You wanted to break it to her gently,’ Leah replied. ‘I said we should just do it fast and all at once, like an eyebrow wax.’
‘Are you guys serious?’ Maggie’s voice was tight, high, and I shrank farther into the bathing suits, wondering if there was a back exit. ‘How do you know? Who was it? I mean, how…’
‘We were there,’ Leah said flatly. ‘We saw her show up and we saw them talking and then walk off to the dunes together.’
‘And you didn’t stop him?’ Maggie shrieked.
‘Hey,’ the other girl said. ‘Calm down, okay?’
‘Don’t tell me to calm down, okay, Esther? Who was she?’
Another silence. Stupid Heidi and her stupid checkbook, I thought, burying myself more deeply into the nearby one-pieces. ‘We don’t know,’ Leah said. ‘Some summer girl, a tourist.’
‘Well, what did she look like?’ Maggie demanded.
‘Does it really matter?’ Esther replied.
‘Of course it matters! It’s paramount.’
‘It is not,’ Leah said with a sigh, ‘paramount.’
‘Was she cuter than me?’ Maggie asked. ‘Taller? I bet she was a blonde. Was she a blonde?’
Silence. I peered out from behind the rack of suits, by this point not surprised at all to see the redhead and the girl in the pigtails from the bonfire. They exchanged a look before pigtails – Esther – said, ‘She had black hair and fair skin. Taller than you, but kind of bony.’
‘And her skin wasn’t that great,’ the redhead, who
had to be Leah, added.
I felt myself flinch, hearing this. First, I was not bony. And okay, so I had a couple of zits, but they were temporary, not a condition. And anyway, who were they to say –
Suddenly, the bathing-suit rack before me parted right down the middle, like the Red Sea. And just like that, with a clattering of hangers, I found myself face to face with Maggie.
‘Did she,’ she said, narrowing her eyes at me, ‘look like this, maybe?’
‘Holy crap,’ Leah said. Beside her, Esther slapped a hand over her mouth.
‘I can’t believe this,’ Maggie said as I fought the urge to try to protect myself with a nearby bandeau. ‘Did you hook up with Jake last night?’
I swallowed, the sound seeming louder than a gunshot. ‘It wasn’t,’ I began, then realized my voice was wavering and stopped, taking a breath. ‘It was nothing.’
Maggie sucked in a breath, her cheeks hollowing. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated. Then she dropped her hands from the suits on the rack, letting them flop to her sides. ‘You hook up with the love of my life, the boy I wanted to marry –’
‘Oh, man,’ Leah said. ‘Here we go.’
‘And it’s nothing? Really?’
‘Maggie,’ Esther said, walking over, ‘come on. It’s not about her.’
‘Then what it is about, exactly?’
Esther sighed. ‘You knew this was going to happen sooner or later.’
‘No,’ Maggie protested. ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that at all.’
‘Yes, you did.’ Esther put her hand on her shoulder, squeezing it. ‘Face it. If it wasn’t her, it just would have been some other girl.’
‘Some other stupid girl, ’ Leah added, picking up the magazine and flipping through it. Then, as an afterthought, she glanced at me and said, ‘No offense. He’s just an idiot.’
‘He is not,’ Maggie protested, tears filling her eyes.
‘Come on, Mag. You know he is.’ Esther glanced at me, then slid her hand down Maggie’s arm, wrapping a hand over hers. ‘And now, you can really start to get over him. If you think about it, this is probably the best thing that could have happened.’
‘That’s right,’ Leah agreed, flipping another page.
‘How do you figure?’ Maggie whimpered, but she allowed herself to be led back to the counter, numbly taking her mocha as Leah handed it off to her.
‘Because,’ Esther said gently, ‘you were still just hanging on, torturing yourself, thinking he was coming back. And now you have to let go. She kind of did you a favor, if you really think about it.’
Maggie looked back over at me, and I made myself stand up straighter. I couldn’t believe I’d actually been worried about her: she was tiny, pink as a powder puff. Thinking this, I emerged from behind the suits and started for the door.
‘Wait a second,’ she said.
I didn’t have to stop. I knew that. Still, I slowed my steps, turning back to her. But I didn’t say anything.
‘Do you,’ she began, then stopped and took a breath. ‘Do you really like him? Just tell me. I know it’s pathetic, but I need to know.’
I just looked at her for moment, feeling all those eyes on me. ‘He’s nothing to me,’ I said.
She kept her gaze on me a moment longer. Then she picked up the checkbook, walking over and holding it out to me. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
Maybe in the world of girls, this was supposed to be a turning point. When we saw beyond our initial differences, realized we had something in common after all, and became true friends. But that was a place I didn’t know well, had never lived in, and had no interest in discovering, even as a tourist. So I took the checkbook, nodded, and walked out the door, leaving them – as I had so many other groups – to say whatever they would about me once I was gone.
‘So,’ my mother said, ‘tell me everything.’
It was late afternoon, and I’d been dead asleep when my phone rang. Even without looking at it, I knew it had to be my mom. First, because it was her favorite time to make phone calls, right at the start of cocktail hour. It wasn’t like I was expecting to hear from anyone else, except maybe my brother, Hollis, and he only called in the middle of the night, having yet to fully grasp the concept of time zones.
‘Well,’ I said, stifling a yawn, ‘it’s really pretty here. You should see the view.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ she replied. ‘But don’t bore me with the scenery, I need details. How is your father?’
I swallowed, then glanced at my shut door, as if I could somehow see through it, all the way down to his. Amazing how easily my mother could get to the one thing I didn’t want to talk about. She always just knew.
I’d now been at my dad’s for three days, during which I’d probably seen him a total of, oh, three hours. He was either in his office working, in his bedroom sleeping, or in the kitchen grabbing a quick bite, en route to one or the other. So much for my visions of us hanging out and bonding, sharing a plate of onion rings and discussing literature and my future. Instead, our conversations usually took place on the stairs, a quick, ‘How’s it going? Been to the beach today?’ as we went in opposite directions. Even these, though, were better than the efforts I’d made at knocking on his office door. Then, he didn’t even bother to turn away from the computer screen, my attempts at dialogue bouncing off the back of his head like shots missing the rim by a mile.
It sucked. What was worse, though, was that if my father was nonexistent, Heidi was everywhere. If I went to get coffee, she was in the kitchen, feeding the baby. If I tried to hide on the deck, she emerged, Thisbe in the BabyBjörn, inviting me to join them for a walk on the beach. Even in my room I wasn’t safe, as it was so close to the nursery that even the slightest movement or noise summoned her, as she assumed I was as desperate for companionship as she was.
Clearly, she was lonely. But I wasn’t. I was accustomed to being alone: I liked it. Which was why it was surprising that I even noticed my dad’s lack of attention, much less cared. But for some reason, I did. And all her muffins and chatter and over-friendliness just made it worse.
I could have told my mother all of this. After all, it was exactly what she wanted to hear. But to do so, for some reason, seemed like a failure. I mean, what had I expected, anyway? So I took a different tack.
‘Well,’ I began, ‘he’s writing a lot. He’s in his office every day, all day.’
A pause as she processed this. Then, ‘Really.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He says he’s almost done with the book, just has some tightening up to do.’
‘Tightening up that takes all day, every day,’ she said. Ouch. ‘What about the baby? Is he helping Heidi out with her?’
‘Um,’ I said, then immediately regretting it, knowing this one utterance spoke volumes. ‘He does. But she’s actually really determined to do it on her own…’
‘Oh, please,’ my mom said. I could hear her satisfaction. ‘Nobody wants to be the sole caregiver of a newborn. And if they say they do, it’s only because they don’t really have a choice. Have you seen your father change a diaper?’
‘I’m sure he has.’
‘Yes, but, Auden.’ I winced. This was like being painted into a corner, stroke by stroke. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Not really.’
‘Ah.’ She exhaled again, and I could almost hear her smiling. ‘Well, it’s nice to know some things really never do change.’
I wanted to point out that since this was what she was so sure of, she shouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, I said, ‘So how are you doing?’
‘Me?’ A sigh. ‘Oh, the same old, same old. I’ve been asked to head up the committee rewriting the English core courses for next year, with all the attendant drama that will entail. And I have several articles expected by various journals, my trip to Stratford coming up, and, of course, entirely too many dissertations that clearly cannot be completed without a large amount of hand-holding.’
‘Sounds like qu
ite a summer,’ I said, opening my window.
‘Tell me about it. These graduate students, I swear, it just never ends. They’re all so needy.’ She sighed again, and I thought of those black-rimmed glasses sitting on the counter-top. ‘I have half a mind to decamp to the coast, like you, and spend the summer on the beach without a care in the world.’
I looked out the window at the water, the white sand, the Tip just visible beyond. Yep, I wanted to say. That’s me exactly. ‘So,’ I said, thinking this, ‘have you heard from Hollis lately?’
‘Night before last,’ she said. Then she laughed. ‘He was telling me he met some Norwegians who were on their way to a convention in Amsterdam. They own some Internet start-up, and apparently they’re very interested in Hollis, think he’s really got his finger on the pulse of their American target audience, so he went along. He’s thinking it could pan out into a position of some sort…’
I rolled my eyes. Funny how my mom could see through me entirely, but Hollis takes off for Amsterdam with some people he just met, spins it into a career move, and she goes for it hook, line, and sinker. Honestly.
Just then, there was a knock on my door. When I opened it, I was surprised to see my dad standing there. ‘Hey,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘We’re heading out for some dinner, thought you might want to come along.’
‘Sure,’ I mouthed, hoping my mother, who was still talking about Hollis, wouldn’t hear.
‘Auden?’ No luck. Her voice was clear through the receiver, a fact made more apparent by the way my dad winced. ‘Are you still there?’
‘I am,’ I told her. ‘But Dad just came and invited me to dinner, so I better go.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘so he’s done with the tightening for the day?’
‘I’ll call you later,’ I said quickly, shutting my phone and folding my hand around it.
My dad sighed. ‘And how is your mother?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
Downstairs, Heidi was waiting for us, her own phone clamped to her ear, Thisbe strapped into her stroller. My dad opened the door, and she pushed the baby out as she kept talking. ‘But that doesn’t make sense! I did the payroll myself, and we had plenty of money in the account. It just… well, of course. The bank would know. I’m terribly sorry, Esther, this is so embarrassing. Look, we’re on our way down there right now. I’ll get some cash from the ATM and we’ll work all this out on Monday, okay?’