Gabe looks surprised at that. “Sure.”
I open the cupboards. It’s definitely a vacation-house kitchen, full of random half-empty bottles of balsamic vinegar and not so big on staples, but after a couple of minutes I’ve scrounged mostly everything I need to make pancakes. “Impressive,” Gabe says, eyeing the supplies I’ve lined up on the island.
I shake my head. “This is nothing,” I tell him, using a coffee cup to scoop flour into a mixing bowl. “My roommate cooked an entire Thanksgiving dinner on the two-burner stove in the common room of our dorm. She’s an actual wizard.”
Gabe grins. “You really like it up there, huh?” he asks. “Boston?”
“I do.” I thought it was just that I liked the person I was there, shiny new Molly, but now that I’ve been away I realize that’s not totally true. I love the city itself: the tour guides riding the T in their silly tricorn hats and the bros in their Bruins jerseys and the trees bursting into bloom along Marlborough Street on Marathon Monday. I’m so lucky I get to go back there. Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, it became my home. “You should come visit sometime.” Then I hear myself. “Not—” I break off. “I just mean—”
“Yeah, no, totally.” Gabe nods quickly. “I know.”
I busy myself with the pancakes, wondering if he’s also thinking about last summer, how close he came to doing a lot more than just visiting. I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to have him so close by: if we would have been able to make things work between us. If I could have looked him in his face and told him I was pregnant. If I would have needed to reinvent myself quite so hard.
I add milk and baking powder and a teaspoon of cinnamon to the mixing bowl, olive oil when I can’t find vegetable. Outside in the courtyard I can hear crickets singing their lonely song, the night air cool through the open window and the faint smell of chlorine from the pool. I drop a pat of butter into the frying pan, listen to it hiss. “So how was your day?” Gabe finally asks.
“It was fine,” I say eventually, spooning a silver-dollar-sized amount of batter into the skillet and completely failing to elaborate. “How was yours?”
Gabe’s eyebrows flicker, but he doesn’t comment. “Good,” he says at length. Then, watching me: “You remember when my dad used to make us pancakes after dances?”
I make a face. “First of all, it was only you who ever went to any dances, if you recall.” Patrick and I were notorious for keeping to ourselves back in high school, the two of us camped out in the den watching movies or holed up in the collapsing barn behind the Donnellys’ house, locked in our own private universe. Still, Chuck could usually coax us out into civilization with the promise of late-night breakfast, the smell of butter browning on the stovetop and the corny yacht rock he loved, Steely Dan or Hall & Oates, playing on the ancient boom box above the fridge. Even Pilot used to get in on the action, all of us dropping bits of pancake onto the floor for him to snarf. “Second of all, do I remember? Dude, where do you think I got this recipe?”
Gabe’s mouth drops open, surprise and delight. “Seriously?”
“I got your mom to give it to me,” I confess, flipping the first batch of tiny pancakes as their edges start to bubble. “Like a hundred years ago, before—you know.” I wave the spatula vaguely. “All of it.”
Gabe doesn’t answer right away and for a moment I think I’ve ruined it, shattered this careful détente with my tanks and my machine guns, but when I chance a glance in his direction he just looks sort of sad. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot since we got here,” he tells me, opening an overhead cupboard and pulling out a couple of plates. “My dad, I mean.”
“Did you guys find his parents’ house?” I ask. “I never even asked you that, I’m sorry.”
Gabe shakes his head. “We tried,” he says. “We found the right town and street and everything, but not the house. I think maybe it isn’t there anymore.”
“That’s disappointing.”
“Yeah,” he says, looking rueful. “It kind of was.”
I consider him for a moment. “Can I ask you something?” I begin carefully.
Gabe raises his eyebrows, smirking a little. “I mean, you’re going to anyway, aren’t you?”
“Yes, actually,” I say, making a face in return. “Because it’s important. I just—” I break off, shake my head. “You know he’d be proud of you, right? Like, whether you go to med school or you don’t, or whether the shop folds or it doesn’t, or whether you find your grandparents’ house or you can’t. All Chuck ever wanted for you guys—all three of you—was for you to be good, happy people.”
Gabe wrinkles his nose at that, like he thinks I’m being corny—but I notice his shoulders drop a little, like maybe some of the knots there have loosened up just a bit. “No, I know,” he says quietly. “You’re probably right.”
“I am,” I say firmly. “Not often, maybe. But about this, for sure.”
I nudge the first batch of pancakes onto the plates and we eat in companionable silence, leaning against the island side by side. It should be horrible, the quiet stretching out all around us, wide and black as the Atlantic Ocean itself, but it isn’t, really. It’s actually kind of nice.
“Well,” I say when we’re finished, holding my hand out for Gabe’s plate and loading it into the futuristic French dishwasher. “I should probably get to bed.”
Gabe nods. “Yeah,” he says, though he doesn’t make any move to go. “Me too.”
“Okay,” I say, lifting a hand awkwardly. “Good night.”
“Night, Molly. And, um. Thanks.” He pauses for a moment. “For the pancakes and for what you said.”
That makes me smile. “Anytime.”
I slip back up the stairs to the room I’m sharing with Ian, careful and quiet. I stare out the window for a long time.
Day 7
Ian wakes me up in the morning with coffee and fresh, flaky croissants from the bakery down at the bottom of the hill. “I’m sorry,” he says, the bulk of his body making a dip on the edge of the mattress. His eyes are red and bleary, his normally ruddy face hangover-gray. “I was drunk. I was a huge asshole.”
“Okay,” I say uncertainly, drawing my legs up to my chest as I take the coffee cup, arranging the sheet over my knees. “Thank you.”
Ian winces. “I mean it,” he says, lifting his hand and letting it fall again like he can’t decide if he should touch me or not. “Of course I don’t want you to do anything you don’t feel ready for. And I don’t want you to feel like I do.”
I shrug. “Okay,” I say again, rubbing my thumb around the lip of the mug instead of looking at him. “Because you kind of made me feel like that was what you wanted.”
“I know,” he says. “And I’m sorry.” He shakes his head, and he looks very sincere. “Honestly, Molly, I just want to be around you.”
I offer him a watery smile, but the truth is I feel drained and exhausted: my body aches like I’ve been training for a track meet. My skin is itchy and raw. It occurs to me that I’m tired of traveling, of packing up and moving on and exploring places I’ve never been before. It occurs to me that I’m almost ready to go home. “I’m sorry too,” I tell him finally.
“Eat some of this,” he advises, nudging the waxed-paper bag of croissants in my direction. I nod, tearing a pastry in two and handing him half. Both of us chew silently for a moment; then Ian swallows, flopping back onto the bed with such force I lift my coffee into the air to keep it from spilling all over the sheets. “God, I feel like shit,” he says, shutting his eyes and digging the heels of his hands into them. “I’m never drinking red wine again.” He opens his eyes, peers at me guiltily. “You probably want to go out and, like, see stuff today, huh?”
“I do in fact kind of want to go out and see stuff,” I confirm, tearing off another piece of croissant and chewing thoughtfully. “But you don’t have to come with me, if you don’t want to.”
Ian hesitates, rolling over to look at me more cl
osely. I can see him trying to figure out if this is a trap or not. “It’s fine,” I promise. “Look, clearly you’ve already seen all this stuff, right? There’s no reason for you to schlep all over creation with me to go see the Mona Lisa.”
Ian looks so intensely sheepish I almost smile. “I really, really don’t want to go see the Mona Lisa,” he confesses.
“It’s okay,” I tell him again, and I mean it. I do want to see the Mona Lisa, actually; I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower, too, but if he thinks it’s dumb or boring I’d rather just go on my own. “Seriously, take the day off, chill out. I’ll be fine.”
I’m planning to say the same thing to Gabe and Sadie—the last thing I want is to wind up spending the day as their third wheel—but once I’m dressed and downstairs I find Sadie still unshowered, drinking coffee on a lounge chair in the courtyard with a set of borrowed headphones in her ears. “You know, I think I’m going to stay here today,” she announces, pulling out one earbud and squinting up at me in the whitish morning sunshine.
I blink. “Really?” I ask. “But . . . we’re in Paris.”
Sadie smiles. “You know, I heard something about that.” She shrugs, leaning back against the chaise. “We went to the Louvre yesterday. I ate some Brie. I’ve been traveling for ten days, and now I want to sit by this pool and listen to TED Talks. That’s what vacation is for, right? Going where the trail takes you, guilt-free?”
“I mean, yeah,” I agree. I think of my carefully planned itinerary, all the shoulds and musts and ought tos I packed in my suitcase on the way over here. It’s almost like someone else made all those plans. “I guess you’re right.”
Sadie grins at that, leaning back and stretching as luxuriously as a cat on a windowsill. “I like to think I usually am.”
“Well, Ian’s begging off too,” I tell her, frowning a little bit. “Massive hang-xiety up there. So if you’re committed to this chair for the day, that leaves—”
“You and me,” Gabe says, appearing at the sliding doors that lead back into the kitchen. He’s in the same clothes he’s been wearing since we got here, jeans and a soft-looking T-shirt, his short hair wet from the shower.
“You and me,” I say, trying not to sound too obviously panicked. I can tell my expression mirrors his, a combination of dread and false equanimity, don’t fight in front of the kids.
Gabe’s gaze cuts from me to Sadie, then back again. “I just gotta grab my stuff, okay? I’ll meet you inside.”
“Um, yup,” I tell him. “I’ll be here.”
Once he’s gone Sadie wrinkles her nose, tipping her head back against her lounge chair. “Anyway, it’s probably not the worst thing in the world for us to take a little bit of a break from each other,” she admits more quietly. “Yesterday we argued all the way around Montparnasse.”
My heart sinks like a penny in a fountain, turns over once on the way down. “Oh, Sadie,” I say, and I’m surprised to find I really mean it. I think I could have been a better friend to her while we were here. “I’m sorry.”
Sadie shakes her head. “It’s okay. It is what it is, right?”
“I guess,” I agree. “But it still sucks.”
She smirks at that, a sharper, wryer expression than I’ve seen on her face until now. “Yeah,” she admits. “It totally sucks.” She sighs then, determined and resigned as a hiker taking a break before the last long leg of a journey. “Anyway, I have no idea what’s going to happen when we get back to Indiana. But for today, I am going to enjoy my own personal Versailles.”
I consider her for a moment, Sadie with her quick thinking and indefatigable optimism and midwestern cornfield of yellow hair. Looking at her I can’t help but remember Tess, who Patrick dated last summer; she and I could have been real friends, I think, but just like always I let the Donnellys get in the way. “Look, Sadie,” I begin cautiously, “I’m really sorry I snapped at you the other night. I was just really tired.”
Sadie looks confused. “When did you—what, about Sabrina Hudson?” She shakes her head. “I thought about that, actually. And I think you were right.”
I blink at her. “I was?”
Sadie nods. “Yeah. I mean, what do I care if some celebrity wants to show her business to the whole world, right?” She shrugs again then, like it’s no skin off her tan, freckled nose. “I know I can be kind of, like, a judger sometimes, especially when it comes to other girls or whatever. But I meant what I said about you and Imogen. You guys make me think it wouldn’t be so bad to have more girlfriends.”
That makes me smile. It occurs to me that for better or worse Sadie is the only one of us who’s been one hundred percent herself the whole time we’ve been on this trip: who hasn’t been hiding secret family money or a paralyzing fear of the future or a messy, shameful past. Even if I haven’t always been her biggest fan, I have to respect that much. I hope I can be more like her in that way.
“I’m really glad you came on this trip,” I blurt before I can talk myself out of it, decide it’s too awkward or forward or out of the blue.
Sadie looks slightly confused, but she grins in return. “Well thanks, Molly,” she says. “I’m really glad I did, too.”
“I’ll bring you back some fancy-ass chocolate,” I promise. “You enjoy today.”
“Yeah,” Sadie says, and smiles like a person who knows herself down to the tiniest particle. “I think I will.”
When I get back inside I find Gabe waiting near the front door wearing a hoodie and a dubious expression, arms crossed like he’s already annoyed at me. “Hey,” he says. “You ready to go?”
“Um,” I say, standing awkwardly in place like my limbs aren’t working all of a sudden. “Sure.”
We shuffle down the front walk in tense, unfriendly silence, all the horrifying awkwardness we somehow managed to avoid last night rushing up at us like a high-speed light rail. “You know, we don’t actually have to spend today together,” I point out as we make it to the sidewalk. “We could just go our separate ways now, meet up with these guys back here later.”
Gabe’s eyes narrow. “Is that what you want to do?” he asks roughly.
I wasn’t expecting an argument; I blink. “I don’t know,” I say. “I just, I figured—”
“That’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?”
I raise my eyebrows, surprised. “More depressing than walking around Paris fighting all day?” Then I realize it sounds like I’m talking about him and Sadie. “I’m just saying, you and I haven’t exactly been getting along like gangbusters this week.”
Gabe smirks at that. “Well, nobody says we’re contractually obligated to fight all day,” he points out. “It’s not, like, a written requirement.”
“Oh no?” I look at him for a moment, skeptical. In the first place, I can’t actually imagine the two of us making it through a day of sightseeing without destroying each other. And in the second, I don’t actually know if getting along is a much better option. I haven’t forgotten the other night outside the hardware-store bar—that jolt right down the center of my body, enough white heat to rend me clear in half. He said it himself: we’ve never been just friends. “You really think that’s a good idea?”
Gabe makes a face like I’m being unnecessarily stubborn. “What if we don’t talk about it?” he bargains.
I squint as the morning sunlight filters through the trees, making patterns on his arms and chest and catching the coppery brown in his hair. “About what?” I ask, suspicious.
“About anything,” Gabe says. “What if we just act like two randos who happen to be traveling together? No personal discussions whatsoever.”
“You wanna role play?” I blurt.
Gabe blushes faintly, rolls his eyes. “Not in, like, a sexy way, thanks. Just—”
“I’m teasing,” I tell him. I don’t understand why he’s pushing this so hard for someone who doesn’t actually seem to like me very much; still, I’m so tired of trying to sort through my own emotions that spending a day pretendin
g they don’t exist sounds great. “Let’s do it.”
Now it’s Gabe’s turn to look surprised—but not, if I had to guess, disappointed. “Okay,” he says, and it sounds like a challenge. “Let’s.”
Paris without Ian is a completely different experience. Yesterday we slipped seamlessly into the fabric of the city, pulling treasures from its secret pockets and peeling back layer after hidden layer like so many raw-silk petticoats; today, we might as well be wearing tube socks with sandals and Bermuda shorts. Gabe and I fumble through as best we can, pointing to the simplest menu items at a patisserie and mangling the pronunciation of je suis desolé over and over. We get lost on the Metro twice.
Still, there’s something weirdly relaxing about being so unsophisticated, the two of us traipsing in hopeless circles like a couple of walking, talking Chicken McNuggets. It’s almost liberating, to be so bad at this.
“I think we were supposed to turn left back there,” I report now, squinting at the map on my phone and then back in the direction we came from, trying to read the street sign we passed half a block ago. We’re looking for the Arc de Triomphe, which Ian pronounced overrated and a magnet for bird poop but Gabe promised Julia he’d visit on her behalf. “I’m almost positive we passed this café before.”
“How would you even know?” Gabe asks. “All of these cafés are identical. Like, oh, right, that’s the one with a million tiny little tables out front, my favorite.” He rubs at the back of his head. “It’s a huge fucking arch, it’s at the end of a giant street, I don’t know how we keep missing it.” He holds his hand out for my phone. “Let me see?”
I peer over his shoulder while he orients it, our heads tipped close together as we squint against the glare. He smells clean and slightly sweaty, heat from walking around all morning radiating off him; when he turns his face in my direction, suddenly he’s close enough to kiss.
“Um,” he says, swallowing audibly. I can see the muscles flex in his throat. “You’re right, I think. We need to turn around.”
9 Days and 9 Nights Page 17