“You asked me that already,” Gabe says, lips twisting in the pale light from inside the store. “It’s good.”
“No,” I say, embarrassed, “I know.” Still, I think of Sadie in the bathroom earlier, press him. “You still think surgery is what you want to do?”
I’m trying to keep my voice casual, but Gabe’s eyes narrow, his whole body straightening up the slightest bit. “Did Sadie ask you to talk to me?” he asks.
“What?” I bluster, shaking my head. “No, not at all. I’m just making conversation.”
Gabe doesn’t buy it. “She did,” he accuses. “I can’t believe her.”
“I think she’s worried about you,” I tell him, wanting badly to change the subject. This was a stupid gambit. “That’s all.”
Gabe sighs noisily. “What else do you imagine me doing, exactly?” he asks me. “Should I drop out and go play the guitar on street corners, trying to find myself? I’m literally tone-deaf. Or maybe I could take a sabbatical in Florence and write romantic poetry or, like, try out for the NBA.”
“Eh,” I joke, trying to lighten the mood again, “would never work. You’re not tall enough.”
Gabe smiles at that, just faintly. “I’m pretty fucking tall,” he points out. “The point is, somebody in my family needs to keep it together and think about a long-term plan.” He shrugs. “Julia’s the baby. Patrick is—” He breaks off. “I mean, you know how Patrick is.”
I do know, actually, but it’s not going to help either one of us to get into it. “And your mom?” I ask instead. “She’s the grown-up, remember? I don’t think she’d be wanting you to put all this stuff on yourself.”
Gabe shakes his head. “My mom isn’t great, Molly. Like I told you, the shop is in the crapper. She’s weird lately. She forgets stuff. She’s not holding up like she was right after my dad died.”
My heart seizes at the thought of it, Connie, who taught herself to fix their ancient station wagon by watching a YouTube video and bought me my first box of tampons and mommed me when my own mom didn’t always know how. “I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think,” I try, then immediately wish I could take the words back. “I just mean, maybe if you guys try some of that stuff we were talking about this afternoon—”
“Can you stop?” Gabe interrupts, sounding suddenly tired. “It is that bad, Molly. We’re hanging on by our fingernails.” He shakes his head again, irritable, and then he tells me. “We’re probably going to have to close the shop.”
I blink. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, Molly, seriously.” Gabe laughs bitterly. He shoves his hands into his pockets, goes quiet for a moment. “Star Lake is coming back, right? That’s what everybody says. We were in Travel and Leisure this year, did your mom tell you that? We made some BuzzFeed list about the hippest summer getaways in the Northeast. There’s all kinds of shit opening up all down Main Street, yoga studios and a green juice place and this home-goods store that sells, like, nine-hundred-dollar blankets. We don’t fit there anymore. All the rents are going way up. We’ll be lucky if we’re even open in a year.”
I close my eyes for the briefest of seconds, breathing in the tomato-garlic memory of the shop—the checkered oilcloths covering the tables, the ancient register clanging its noisy hellos. Chuck taught us how to throw pizza dough in the kitchen, all four of us—Julia, Patrick, Gabe, and me—turning it on our tiny knuckles as fast as we possibly could. I grew up back there. All of us did. The thought of it shutting down is unbearable.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him quietly. I feel like an idiot, parachuting in with my cheery suggestions and my Susie Sunshine optimism. Have you tried theme nights, Jesus Christ. “I had no idea it was that bad.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Gabe snaps. “You don’t actually know what it’s like to be in my family, okay, Molly?”
I recoil, taking an actual step away from him, the impact as physical as a slap. I made my peace with not being part of the Donnelly family anymore a long time ago—or at least, I tried to. But every once in a while it hits me: passing a woman in Boston who wears Connie’s perfume, or hearing a joke I know would make Julia laugh. They were my home, once upon a time. But I wrecked it, and kept on wrecking, and that’s my burden to bear.
“I’m sorry,” Gabe says, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I’m being an asshole, I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”
I shrug, don’t answer. Gabe leans against the glass. We’re quiet for a long time, the sound of a car passing by a few blocks over and the blue-night breeze tickling the back of my neck. I keep expecting him to make an excuse and go inside, but he doesn’t. Finally he sighs. “Pilot died,” he says.
“Wait,” I say, my heart like a capsized ship inside my chest. “What? When?”
“My mom put him down a few days after the Fourth of July party this year,” Gabe says, clearing his throat and not looking directly at me. “He was full of cancer.”
“Oh no,” I say, leaning back against the window and hugging myself a little, thinking of Pilot’s silky ears. He was old last summer, using a stool to hop up on the bed and the couch for his daily snuggles, though in my head he’s still the lean, long-limbed puppy who pooped on the presents at Julia’s seventh birthday party and was afraid of his own reflection in the mirror. “Oh, Gabe.” Before I know it’s going to happen my eyes fill with tears—for Pilot, for all the Donnellys, for Gabe most of all.
“I’m sorry.” Gabe swipes a hand over his face in the darkness. “This was a fucked-up way to tell you. I don’t know why I didn’t say something last night when you asked about him. I just, like, didn’t have the heart.” He rolls his eyes, like he thinks he’s being maudlin. “I know it’s stupid to be so upset about it. It just feels like—” He breaks off. “Forget it.”
“No,” I say—reaching a hand out to touch him, then thinking better and jamming it into my pocket instead. “Tell me.”
Gabe sighs so loudly it’s almost a cough, like he’s trying to clear something foreign from his lungs. “I just mean—like, clearly, this dog dying doesn’t mean my family is falling apart. My family fell apart a long time ago, and that’s fine. That’s what it is.”
I shake my head, denial my first and fiercest instinct. “Your family didn’t fall apart, Gabe.”
“Really?” Gabe asks, his eyes flashing in the darkness. “Because I’ll tell you, Molly: my dad’s dead, my mom’s losing her mind, my brother’s a lost cause, and our damn restaurant is going to be a Panera Bread by the time I graduate college. So I guess the point I am trying to make here is that me quitting school isn’t really an option.”
His voice cracks on that last sentence, ragged. For one heart-stopping, heartbreaking second, I’m pretty sure he’s close to tears.
“Gabe,” I say quietly. There is, in this moment, nothing I wouldn’t do to make things okay. I would fight with claws and teeth and knuckles. I would eat someone’s heart. “Hey.”
He clears his throat. “I gotta go,” he says. “I’ll see you inside, okay?”
“No,” I say, and this time I do touch him, grabbing his arm so he can’t run away from me. “Can you wait for a second?” I ask him. “I’m your friend, okay? Whatever else happened between us, we were friends first.”
“That’s not true,” Gabe says immediately. “You were friends first with my brother, maybe. But you and me? We were never friends. So you can stop—” He inhales damply, the sound of it thick and painful in his throat. “You can just stop.”
I let go of his arm like I’m freeing a trapped animal, opening my mouth to contradict him and coming up blank. After all, it’s not like he’s wrong. Patrick was my forever human, my closest heart, the person I could tell whole stories to just by catching his eye across the room. Gabe and I never quite had that—we’ve known each other since we were kids, sure, but growing up he always seemed a little too cool for Patrick and me, perpetually gamboling off to a party or a canoe trip or his coronation for prom king. I had no idea he’
d ever even noticed me either way until the moment I suddenly realized that maybe I was the one who’d been too distracted to pay proper attention.
We made up for lost time last summer: we saw old movies at the theater in Silverton and went to noisy parties with his friends down at the dock and rode the Ferris wheel at the Knights of Columbus carnival, all of Star Lake spread out in front of us as bright as a quilt. I lost my virginity to Gabe, for Pete’s sake: I loved him. And I thought—no, I was sure—he loved me, too.
It wasn’t until the fall that I started to worry that none of it had actually been real.
“Gabe,” I say now, and it sounds like I’m begging him. “Hey.”
“Fuck.” He scrubs savagely at his eyes with the back of his hand, sniffles once, then shakes his head hard enough to rattle his brain loose. “Fuck. I’m fine. This is embarrassing. I’m good, seriously. I’m drunk, is all.”
He’s lying; I’ve seen him drunk, and that’s not what this is. “Why is it embarrassing?” I ask. “It’s just me. I’m the last person you need to be embarrassed in front of.”
Gabe doesn’t answer. We stand there. We wait. The door to the hardware store opens then, bright light slicing across the pavement and two drunk, giggling girls ambling out, squawking as loud as chickens; I reach for Gabe like an instinct, pulling him around the corner into a darkened alley along the side of the building to give him some privacy. It’s darker back here, deep shadows and a pale sliver of moonlight. It smells like old beer and pavement and trash.
“Look,” I say finally. “It’s a lot of problems to solve, I’m not going to lie to you. But what I don’t understand is how it helps anything to stay in a program you hate to learn how to do a job you don’t want to do.”
“Who says I don’t want to do it?” Gabe asks, but he’s arguing for the sake of arguing; almost immediately, he exhales. “Now isn’t the time for me to chuck my whole major just because I decided it’s not, like, following my bliss.”
“And going off down a road that’s going to leave you with a million dollars in med school loans and a gig you hate just because you’re too stubborn to change course isn’t the way to help them, either.”
“It’s not about me,” he insists. “It’s about seeing things through. It’s about being a person other people can count on.”
“You are, though,” I promise him. “You always have been.”
Gabe shakes his head, smiling wryly. “You’re saying that because you’re worried I’m about to fill my pockets with rocks and walk into the fucking ocean.”
“I’m not, actually,” I tell him, taking a step closer before I quite know I’m going to do it; he smells like the detergent Connie buys way back home in Star Lake. “I’m saying that because I know you. Like, everything else that ever happened between us, if you put all that aside, don’t I know you?”
Gabe looks at me for a moment. “Yeah,” he admits finally, and his voice is so, so quiet; he doesn’t say it like it’s a good thing at all. “I guess you do.”
The air changes between us then, heavy and crackling like this morning before the storm rolled in behind Imogen’s cottage; it’s end-of-summer cool out here, and I shiver inside my clothes. I didn’t notice Gabe move, but he must have, because all of a sudden we’re standing closer than is probably a smart idea.
“I miss the hell out of you, you know that?” he tells me, and it doesn’t sound like that’s a good thing either. In fact, he sounds downright annoyed. “I try not to. Like, fuck knows I’ve tried not to. But I do.”
“Gabe.” I startle. Our hands brush with the motion, just barely, and it’s like every nerve ending in my body is concentrated in the tips of my fingers; the shot of desire is shocking, a surgical jolt to my heart. I should tell him he’s being ridiculous—I should tell him I need to go back inside—but all I can come up with is the truth. “I miss you too.”
Everything seems to slow down then, the last year unspooling between us. Gabe tilts his head to the side. I want to put my thumb on his clavicle, to feel the tick of the blood beating deep inside his body. I want to catch his collarbone between my teeth.
“We can’t,” I tell him, swallowing thickly.
Gabe doesn’t move—or he does move, but closer, so his warm forehead presses against mine. “We can’t what, exactly?” he murmurs.
“You know what,” I say, straightening up with no small amount of effort, stepping back and putting both hands on my flushed cheeks. “And we can’t. Or like—I can’t. I’m not that person anymore. I have worked so, so hard to not be that person.”
“Can you stop saying that?” Gabe complains, and just like that he’s irritated again; he steps back too, his whole body all angles, like a coat hanger or a cage. “Like, who is this other person you supposedly were?”
“A person who kissed other people’s boyfriends,” I remind him immediately. My voice is rising again, creeping up along some invisible seawall. “A person who never learned. A person who—” I break off, take a deep breath. “Okay. Gabe, there’s something I have to—”
I’m cut off by a crash of biblical proportions down at the back end of the alley; Gabe and I spring apart like we’re on fire, even though we aren’t even standing that close. When I whip around I see it’s just a busboy flinging a bag of trash into the Dumpster, but the stupidity of us standing out here like this together is sickeningly, immediately apparent.
Gabe clears his throat and the moment is over, his narrow body angled away from me and his hands shoved deep into his pockets. I think suddenly of Imogen’s artist nun from yesterday, all her deepest secrets catching up with her in the end. “You look really pretty in that dress,” Gabe says to the mouth of the alley. Then he walks away without looking back.
I wait a few moments before I follow in a sad, sneaky attempt to stagger our reentrances; I have no idea how I’m going to explain our absence to Ian, but he seems to have barely noticed we were gone. “Come meet these guys!” he says, swinging one heavy arm around my shoulder and introducing me to a crowd of Seamus’s newly arrived friends from rugby. Imogen is watching me warily from behind her pint glass, and I do my best to pretend not to see.
Instead I tuck myself into the safe, familiar circle of Ian’s arm and take the bottle of cider he offers, trying without much success to follow a complicated story one of Seamus’s buddies is telling about a prank involving a jar of orange marmalade and someone else’s broken-down car. I want to relax, to enjoy myself like everyone else seems to be able to, but everything that was charming about this place an hour ago is suddenly grim and claustrophobic to me: empty beer bottles litter the tiny tables. There’s a mousetrap on the floor behind the bar. I’m achy and empty and guiltily out of sorts, unable to settle. I’ve had enough of the traveling life for one night.
“I’m exhausted,” I tell Ian finally, popping up on my tiptoes to murmur in his ear. “I’m just gonna head back and go to bed, okay?”
Ian frowns. “Hang on,” he says, “I’ll come with you.” He holds up his mostly full pint glass. “Just let me kill this first.”
But I shake my head. “It’s like thirty feet from here to Imogen’s,” I remind him, mustering a smile I hope is convincing. “You stay, finish your beer. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” Ian says after a moment. “But text me when you’re safe.”
Outside the air is cool and crisp and head-clearing, like gulping a deep drink of water after a particularly long run. I take big breaths as I head up the deserted lane toward Imogen’s, holding them in my lungs for a moment before I exhale. You can see every single star here, bright clusters of them like someone has tossed a generous handful of glitter, and for a moment I’m hit with a wave of homesickness so strong it almost takes me out by the knees.
I let myself in through the back door of Imogen’s silent cottage, not bothering to flick any lights on as I slip my muddy shoes off and pad through the kitchen. I’m about to turn down the short hallway that leads to the bedroom I’m sharing wit
h Ian when I hear a quiet sound from the living room, a moan or a whimper; I glance in that direction before I can think better of it, my whole body getting ferociously hot all at once. In the glow of the twinkle lights strung up along the ceiling I can see two bodies moving together on the pullout: a corona of messy blond hair that is definitely Sadie’s, and a pale, narrow back that’s unmistakably Gabe’s.
I dart down the hallway quick and quiet as a cockroach before either one of them notices me, shutting the door with a barely audible click and pressing my back against the jamb. I want to climb out the window and run all the way to Dublin. I want to jump in the ocean and swim all the way home. More than that I want to hit rewind on the last two days, back to that night outside the pub in London: Let’s keep our reservation, I wish I’d said to Ian. Let’s stick to the plan.
Now I lie awake for what seems like hours, marinating in my own self-loathing and loneliness. Every breath sounds loud enough for Gabe and Sadie to hear all the way down the hall. Eventually the back door opens, Ian’s laugh and Seamus’s deep murmur filling the hallway, Imogen hissing at them to pipe down. A moment later a sliver of hallway light slices the bed in half as Ian stumbles across the rag rug; he slips under the covers beside me, warm and solid and beer-smelling. “We had the best time,” he tells me, exhausted and happy as a little kid after a day at Disneyland. “You should have stayed out.”
“Yeah,” I say, taking a breath so my voice will be even and trying for all the world not to let him see I’m crying. “I wish I had.”
He’s out cold in less than a minute, one heavy arm slung over my hip bone. I don’t fall asleep for a long time.
Day 5
I wake up in the blackest of moods, a headache thumping dully at the base of my brain stem and my jaw on fire from clenching it all night long. I know I’m being completely irrational—after all, Gabe and I have been broken up since last summer—but I can’t stop picturing Sadie and him tangled together on the pullout, can’t stop hearing their quiet private sounds. It’s compulsive, like poking at an abscessed tooth.
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