The People We Keep

by Allison Larkin

  * * *

  I sit on the bench again and watch Carly ring up customers at the register until she walks away and I can’t see her through the window anymore. I get up and walk closer and I still can’t see her. She must be in back. Hopefully it’s a smoke break and I have time. I want to run, make it quick, but I figure it’s better to walk in. Not call attention to myself. I don’t think I can run anyway.

  The bell on the door may as well be a siren. Part of me wants her to catch me. The rest of me doesn’t want to hurt anyone anymore. I don’t want to impose on the life she has now. I just want her to know that even though I left, I never stopped thinking about her. I just want her to know what happened.

  I place the envelope on the counter near the register and walk away before anyone comes out of the kitchen to try to take my order. I walk out the door and the bell rings again. It’s all there. I’ve left it. Everything. The paperback guy watches me, still chewing at his bottom lip as I walk past the window.

  — Chapter 68 —

  The campground is closed for the season. I park my car off the road down the street and drag a blanket and my guitar around the gate. I can barely walk. It’s more of a waddle and all the muscles in my back ache. But I make it to the right place and build a fire with twigs and left-behind wood. I play Dylan songs to the lake, even though my belly makes me hold the guitar funny and my singing is breathy because my lungs don’t have enough room anymore. One song after another. My fingers throb and my throat is raw. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right bleeds to All Along the Watchtower and runs into Tangled Up in Blue.

  I play until I run out of songs I know all the words to, and then I make up my own words and fudge the chords. It’s my funeral for my father. It’s my funeral for all the things I’ve wanted.

  I play until what Margo said finally makes sense. It wasn’t about Irene and the boy, or my mom leaving. It wasn’t about me at all. He did what was easy. He didn’t have it in him to do any better.

  Just because my father was a coward doesn’t mean I have to be. I won’t leave my child. I will do what it takes to give him a real home and a real bed and a real parent. I will do what it takes to be a person Max can be proud of.

  Somehow these things make sense to me as I play, and I can’t stop playing because I want to figure it all out. A song I never finished comes back to me. Where you gonna stay, where you gonna stay, whereyougonnastay, and I sing it again and again, playing with the chords until the rest of the words come out.

  Where you gonna stay

  When flesh turns into bone

  Where you gonna stay

  Now that you’re not alone

  When the sun shines past the treetops

  The light’s no longer dim

  Where you gonna stay, stay, stay…

  Stay with him.

  * * *

  I wake up on the bare rocks with my guitar still in my hands, not even in my makeshift tent. The fire is only embers and smoke. The sun is just breaking the horizon. My back throbs and my fingers are stiff like claws, but I don’t feel wrong. I feel like that place in me where all the wrong lived doesn’t exist anymore, like how I used to think there were monsters under my bed and there never ever were.

  Before I leave, I bury my father’s cracked guitar pick under the rocks by the shore, because it feels like the best way to say goodbye to the person I wanted him to be.

  It feels like the best way to start over.

  I wad up my blanket. My legs are shaky and the pain in my back is getting so much worse, but I’m ready to go. To call Margo and tell her I need help. Face Little River and figure out what’s next. I might even be ready to sit down and have a talk with Irene.

  I reach for my guitar case and all of a sudden there’s a flood of wet and warm and pain like I might break in half. I try to get up, to get to my car, but I trip and fall. I hear the crack of bone against rock. I taste dirt and blood.

  — Chapter 69 —

  I hear a voice calling to me, but there’s buzzing around the words, like someone turned up the drive on an amplifier.

  “April. Come on! April! April!”

  I want to answer, but I feel far away. My eyelids are heavy. Or maybe it’s dark. Maybe it’s dark. I forgot to tie a lifeline.

  “Come on, April!”

  There’s static behind my eyelids and the pressure churning through my body is so great that my ribs might shatter and my hips could explode. The pain goes beyond what I thought was possible until it gets so big I can’t feel anything at all. There’s a moment of peace and nothing. The static goes to black, and then the pain crashes through me again. I see blue sky and splintered wood and then my own static.

  “Let’s get you up, April,” that voice calls through the feedback.

  I think about an octopus with bright blue limbs.

  “Let’s get you up.” It’s such a nice voice.

  Arms hook under my armpits, pulling me to my feet. I try to make my legs work. They don’t want to, but I try. The ground blurs into the trees. Everything that isn’t my body feels far away.

  “I got you,” she says.

  It’s Carly. It’s a dream.

  I can see the lake, so blue.

  I’m in a car.

  “Max,” I say, or maybe I just think it. I don’t hear the sound at all. Max, Max, Max.

  I rest my cheek against the cold window. I can’t tell what’s static and what’s pavement whizzing by. There are so many bumps in the road. That pain crashes through my body again and the static turns to stars.

  — Chapter 70 —

  There’s a hand holding mine. I can’t get my eyes to open.

  There’s humming, off-key, I think it’s Dylan. I can’t find the song in my head, but I know the voice.

  “Margo,” I say before I even open my eyes. It comes out like a long lazy string of sound.

  “Girlie, you’re going to give me a heart attack one of these days.” She squeezes my hand hard.

  When I open my eyes, everything is blurry. I blink until my vision clears. Margo is sitting in a chair next to the bed holding my baby. He’s a little bundle tucked safely in the crook of her other arm, wrapped in a white and yellow blanket, wearing a tiny blue hat. An entire person, outside my body, and all I want to do is hold him.

  “It’s your mommy,” Margo whispers like they’re already good friends and she’s telling him a secret.

  She sits on the edge of the bed so I can see Max. His eyes are tiny slits, mouth pressed in a frown like he’s thinking hard about something important. I feel like I know him already. Like I’ve always known him. I cry. Margo puts her arm around my shoulder and we hold Max between us, because I’m still too shaky to take him on my own.

  I touch his chubby cheek. I have never met anyone so beautiful.

  “I love you,” I say, as soon as words will take shape in my mouth. Max yawns and makes a squeaking sound like a kitten. My tongue feels thick and my head is fuzzy and I worry none of this is real. I don’t understand how it’s possible for love to feel like the entire ocean churning in my chest.

  Max stretches his arm in the air. I touch his hand and he wraps his fingers around my pinky. I don’t know for sure, but I think he’s very strong for a baby.

  “He’s okay?” I ask.

  “He’s absolutely perfect,” Margo says. “Nurse confirmed.”

  She pushes hair from my face, and my forehead feels funny. I reach up and touch a bandage taped across my head.

  “You’re okay too,” Margo says. “You knocked your noggin pretty good, and you had a C-section, so you’ve got stitches in both places. Nothing that won’t heal, but your head might feel swimmy for a few days.”

  I think I can feel the pull of stitches in my stomach, but everything is numb. I try to wiggle my toes and I’m not sure if any of them move. I don’t remember going to the hospital. I was at the lake. I remember the lake.

  “How did you find me?” I ask.

  “Carly called.” Margo gestures t
o the chair in the corner and there’s Carly, curled up, fast asleep. Her tall black boots are splayed out on the floor and my guitar case is leaning against the wall beside her. I didn’t look any further than Max. I didn’t realize there was anyone else here. But there she is. So close and she’s not a dream. I remember her calling my name now. It wasn’t a dream. I want to wake her up, but her sleep looks necessary.

  “That girl hasn’t left this room. I told her I would stay and you were fine and she could go home and sleep, but she wouldn’t leave you,” Margo says, smiling, her eyes welling up.

  “How did she find you?” I ask. The thread from Carly to Margo doesn’t make sense. They’re from different pockets.

  “My number is in your notebook.”

  “How did she find me?”

  “I’m not sure,” Margo says. “She called and told me she brought you here and you were going into surgery. I got in my car so fast I didn’t stop to put on real shoes.” Margo points to her feet. She’s wearing fuzzy pink slippers. “I didn’t guess you were going to Ithaca, sweets. I thought maybe you were headed back to Florida.” She sniffles.

  “I was going to call you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “You don’t get to disappear anymore. You can’t go running off into the woods like a wounded deer. You lean on me when it hurts. That’s what we’re here for—to lean on each other.” Margo nods like we’ve made a pact.

  I nod too.

  It is so warm, the three of us, huddled on the bed. The room smells like summer. There are flowers. Lots of them. On the nightstand, on the windowsill.

  “Did you go crazy in the gift shop?” I ask.

  “Carly and I called all your friends in your notebook to tell them you had the baby. I thought they’d want to know. And then these started showing up.”

  There are daisies from Arnie and roses from Cole. All the girls on staff at Ollie’s in Florida sent lilies. Slim sent a basket of violets. And there’s a big vase of sunflowers. I wonder where anyone gets sunflowers like that in November. Margo tells me they’re from Irene and David and July. She says July wants to meet her nephew and they’re all coming to visit me tomorrow. For once, the idea of seeing Irene doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.

  — Chapter 71 —

  Margo is out getting us lunch because she says no one ever enjoyed a hospital meal before and she doesn’t expect it to happen now. She left me her slippers and wore my boots. She looked hysterical.

  Carly is still asleep, and I don’t know how she’s comfortable all wound around the arms of the chair, her hand hanging over the side and I know her fingers will have pins and needles.

  The sound of Max’s breath and then Carly’s then Max’s makes me feel like all the air I’m breathing is coming from their lungs. I imagine it making me strong, healing the ache in my guts. It seems like some kind of miracle that a doctor could excavate Max from the depths of me and introduce him to the world—that I am still here to see him after being taken apart and stitched back together.

  Max was stuck, Margo said, turned upside down. They were worried about the cord, and my head was bleeding pretty bad and the doctors couldn’t wait on any of it.

  I don’t know what I remember and what I’m imagining, but there’s so much in my mind that feels new, like a movie I watched when I was fighting to stay awake. One scene jumps into the middle of the next.

  There’s Carly driving us up to the hospital doors, screaming for help, and so many hands on my body. There’s the way it hurt to be lifted, how everything inside me was shifting, and I could feel Max, all elbows and feet, fighting to free himself like a raccoon in a pillowcase. Someone cut away my clothes and there were too many people touching too many parts of me.

  He’s breech! someone said.

  Get scrubs for her partner! someone said.

  Count backwards. Count backwards. No, backwards, someone said, so I started at Z and Carly laughed even though she was crying.

  A woman with a baby blue mask on her face stretched my arms out on a big white cross and the room was cold like the walk-in fridge at Ollie’s, but Carly’s fingers were sweaty between mine. Just as clearly, I remember the surgeon was a grizzly bear in a white coat and the room we were in was full of laughing salmon hanging from the ceiling on meat hooks. So how am I supposed to know if any of my memories are real?

  I stare at Max through the clear plastic sides of his bassinette and hope with all my heart that I’m not stuck in some kind of dream. He’s already my favorite thing that ever happened to me. He reminds me of Justin in the shape of his nose, and his dark eyelashes, and I think that’s okay because Justin was someone I used to love to see. He was smart and sometimes he could be very sweet and maybe I can teach Max to be sweet even more of the time. I’ll always look at Max and think about shouting into the waves at night and how the sand was still warm from soaking up the heat from the day and it felt like the world was a wild beast who allowed us to walk on her back. That was a good moment, and it’s where Max came from, so it’s even better as a memory than what I knew at the time. I wonder if maybe when Max meets the sea, he will understand how it’s his oldest friend. He’ll think, Oh, I know you, and he’ll feel like he belongs. I’m going to take him soon, I think. As soon as I can. Maybe Margo will come with us, maybe even Carly, and I’ll sing songs for my own baby on the beach.

  Max fusses and I don’t know what to do. My stomach is full of stitches. It hurts to move. I’m scared I’ll drop him.

  I catch Carly stirring out of the corner of my eye. “Oh,” she says, sitting up and looking around the room like she’s trying to figure out where she is. “April.”

  “I can’t pick him up,” I say, in a panic. His cries make me sure we’re not in a dream, but they also make me want to cry.

  “Can I?” Carly asks.

  “Please.”

  She nestles Max in her arms like she knows what she’s doing. “Hey, hey, little man,” she says. “It is all okay. Everything is okay.” She jiggles him and he starts to settle.

  “You’re a natural,” I tell her. I wonder what she thinks of me. I can’t believe she’s here.

  “I was the first one to hold him,” she says, tears spilling down her cheeks like they belong to those words.

  “You were there?”

  Carly nods. “One of your nurses demanded they let me in. I didn’t want to leave you. They said they had to put you under. I didn’t want him to be alone. Max, right? You said in your letters.”

  “Max,” I say.

  “He looks like you.” She sits on the bed next to me so I can see Max and smell his head and touch his cheek and he can get used to being near me. “He has that serious thing going on right here.” She points to her brow with her free hand. “And he’s beautiful. He was beautiful right away. He cried before they even got him all the way out and then he peed on the doctor.”

  I laugh and it hurts, and Carly can see it on my face. She winces too.

  “I saw your insides,” she says. “They told me not to look over the curtain they put up, but I heard all these noises and then Max was crying, and I thought, ‘Oh no! He’s hurt!’ instead of remembering babies are supposed to cry when they’re born. So, I looked over like he might need help and I could be the one to help him. They were still pulling his legs from you. Your blood is very red. And Max looked blue until he cried enough oxygen into himself. I had to sit down before I held him, because my knees were wobbling.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  Carly shrugs. “Don’t be sorry. Everyone has insides. I’m glad I got to be there with both of you.”

  We watch Max close his eyes and open them again, like he knows there’s so much to see even though he’s still exhausted.

  When Max finally falls back to sleep Carly says, “I remembered Margo’s name—I remembered you talking about her. I hope she was the right person to call.”

  “She was the perfect person. Thank you.”

  “I can’t beli
eve you didn’t tell me why you were leaving.”

  “I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  “So you hurt yourself instead?”

  “It was my fault,” I say. “All of it.”

  “You were a kid.” She rests her head on my shoulder. “You were a scared kid. You weren’t in it to hurt anyone. I could have found a way to help you.” She has that same perfume on. The one I remember. Like flowers pressed in an old book. “Rosemary was so full of herself. I’m sure I had some kind of leverage. You could have stayed.”

  “How did you find me?” I ask, changing the subject. I don’t want to think about all the things that would be different if I’d stayed. It’s too hard to pick apart what I might have gained from what I would have lost.

  “After I found the envelope, I figured you were already gone. But I was reading your letters last night. You wrote about how you could always see the lake in your mind, and then I knew I’d find you at our campsite.”

  Max screws up his face in another kitten yawn and we both get really quiet until he settles back in.

  “You talked to me, when I found you, remember?” Carly says.

  “No.” I try to search my brain to see what I can recall about being at the campground. It’s not much.

  “You kept saying, ‘Carly, don’t leave me here,’ even after I already had you in my car.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “That’s what friends do.”

  The ocean in my chest feels like it will spill out around us. After all this time, she’s still my friend.

  “How is Adam?” I ask.

  “He moved to Boston last year. He got a job there. He’s seeing someone. I think he’s good.” Carly says it carefully, like it might be hard for me to hear, but it’s a relief to know that I didn’t break him. “He was so sad when you left, but I think, overall, you fixed him a little.”

  “He fixed me a lot,” I say softly. So softly I’m not even sure if Carly can hear it.