“But she got better,” I say. “Right? She went to school and met Beth and—” I pause, look at Mom and Dad. “Did she ever tell you that she and Beth were together?”
“No,” Mom says. “We’d hoped she would, but I guess after Claire she was—I think maybe she was afraid she’d get her heart broken again.”
I broke my own heart.
I swallow.
“So, what exactly happened with Claire?”
“We don’t know,” Dad says. “We knew they were seeing each other, but how it ended—we assume it’s because Claire got pregnant, but we didn’t even know about that until Tess told us. Do you remember when she did that?”
As if I could forget that day, Tess coming home and going straight up to her room, not even taking phone calls, and when Mom asked how Claire was at dinner, Tess had stared at her for what felt like forever before she finally said, “Pregnant,” spitting the word out like it was poison. After that, she’d left the room whenever anyone said Claire’s name.
I look at Mom and Dad, so close, so together, and think of the last two photos of Claire and Tess. The first one, Tess lit up like an angel, sleeping in Claire’s bed as if she belonged there. The second, Tess staring at the camera and smiling even though her eyes were so not happy.
Your Choice.
“I have to go,” I tell them, standing up, and they both rise too, questions in their eyes.
“I have to get out of here, I have to think,” I say. “Today has been … I thought I knew Tess, but I—was she ever who I thought she was? Is anyone who they say they are?”
They don’t answer me.
They don’t have to. Tess wasn’t who I thought she was, and you can never fully know anyone, not ever.
I see that now. I see so much now.
I leave the house and start walking down the street.
Claire is sitting on her porch, staring up into the sky, and I stop at the end of her driveway, wait for her to look down. Look away from whatever she’s watching—or thinking about—and see me.
forty-one
Claire doesn’t look at me, though. She’s staring up at the sky like she’s reading it, like the stars are speaking to her, and so I clear my throat and say, “Hey.”
She looks away from the sky then, looks at me. It’s hard to see her face from where I stand because she’s sitting so the porch light cuts her into areas of light and dark, shadowing her eyes but showing the fingers of one hand curled up tight.
“You want to talk about Tess,” she says, and there’s no question in her voice at all.
“I found—” I say, and then stop, thinking of the photos. Of Claire’s face turned toward Tess’s, of the two of them smiling. Of the picture Claire took of Tess sleeping. Of how Tess had them all hidden, like she wanted to pretend they never were.
I bet that’s what Claire wants too.
“I found out,” I say. “I figured it out.”
Claire moves into the light then, motions for me to sit on the porch with her. “Just—be quiet, okay? Cole’s asleep and you know how he wakes up super easily.”
“I know.”
“I know you know,” she says, and then sighs. “How did you figure it out?”
“Well, you were—there was everything you said in the car, you know,” I say. “And then I went home and started thinking. And then I walked by Tess’s room and remembered how, um—”
“You found something,” Claire says, and for the first time, she sounds surprised. “Tess kept—she kept things?”
“Pictures,” I mutter. “On her computer.”
“Oh,” Claire says. “So you know know.”
“Yeah. Or at least, I think I do.”
“If you saw what I think you did, I don’t see how you can not know,” Claire says. “Wait, did that make any sense?”
“No,” I say, and she grins at me.
“I didn’t—if I’d known we’d be friends I wouldn’t have—”
“Kept it from me?”
“Ever talked to you,” she says. “I don’t—”
She takes a deep breath.
“I wanted Tess to go away and never come back. I wanted her to—I wanted her to tell me she was wrong. That she was sorry.”
“I’m sure she is,” I say, though I’m not really sure at all. How can I be, when the Tess I knew never spoke Claire’s name, but the Tess I didn’t kept pictures and remembered her every time she used her computer?
“No,” Claire says. “She isn’t. She—I had to drop out of school because of her, Abby. She made my life hell.”
“Well,” I say slowly because she’s right, Tess did ruin high school for Claire. “I guess she—I guess she was so hurt when you got pregnant that she felt like she’d broken her own heart for thinking you wanted her like she wanted you, and—”
“What?” Claire says, and the word is so sharp and loud that down the street, a dog barks, and inside Claire’s house, Cole stirs, calling, “Mommy?”
Claire gets up and goes inside. I can’t hear what she says to Cole but I hear the sound of her voice, a faint, calm thread. Eventually, it fades into silence.
I sit on the porch, waiting until I start to think Claire isn’t coming back out. She finally does, though, a pack of cigarettes in one hand, a lighter in the other.
“I thought you were quitting,” I say, and she says, “I thought you wouldn’t still be here,” and sits back down next to me.
“I don’t know the whole story,” I say.
“Are you sure you want to?”
I nod and Claire pulls out a cigarette and lights it. Its scent rises up to me, harsh and with a chemical tinge that reminds me, weirdly, of the hospital. I wave the smoke away.
“It’s funny, but I didn’t start smoking until I got the job at the hospital,” Claire says. “I was so excited back then. Finally, I had my GED, I had a job, I could take care of me and Cole—well, at least take care of us if we lived at home. But that place, it just—”
She looks at me. “There’s no good way to die, you know? No way I’ve seen, anyway. It all ends with tubes and bedpans and IVs and I just—smoking gets me out of there. Gets me outside, gets me away from all the—”
“Sick people?” I say, and she shakes her head.
“Away from my life. This isn’t—I wanted to go to college, Abby. I wanted …” She sighs. “I wanted Tess. But she—she didn’t want me. Not like I wanted her.”
“She must have, because I know you two—”
“Yeah, we had sex,” Claire says. “And she even said she loved me. But she didn’t—I asked her, right before senior year, to stop with the guys. To stop pretending. I mean, I know it’s Ferrisville, but it’s not like we’d have gotten lynched. Your parents already knew, and mine—well, what did I care then? I was going to get out of this place.”
“Wait a minute,” I say, thinking of the picture of Tess and the guy on the beach. Of the anger in Tess’s eyes and how I assumed it was because Claire had hurt her, gone off with a guy like Tess had, only for real. “I thought—”
“You thought I got pregnant and broke Tess’s heart.”
“Yeah. I mean, before that, back when I thought you were just friends, I thought she was mad at you for—I don’t know. I thought she was judging you. You know how Tess could be. She liked things to be—”
“How she wanted them,” Claire says. “Believe me, I know.”
“But you two weren’t just friends, and she—”
“Tess couldn’t do it,” Claire says. “Wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t stop being who everyone thought she was, even though it wasn’t who she was. She said that if we—she said if we told everyone we were together, we wouldn’t be who people thought we were. That’s just how she said it too. ‘If we do this, Claire, nobody will think we’re who we say we are.’” She looks down at the ground.
I think she’s going to cry so I say, “Claire?” and touch her shoulder.
She looks at me and I see she isn’t going to cry. She??
?s furious, so angry her mouth is working like it’s full of words and she’s trying to get them to come out in order.
“It was such a load of crap,” she says. “Tess just—she wanted to be Homecoming Queen like everyone said she would be. She wanted everyone to keep trying to dress like her, be like her. She didn’t want—she wanted to be Tess, the girl every guy wanted and dreamed about having even if he had a girlfriend. She didn’t want to be Tess, the gay girl.”
“Wait,” I say, because this is not what I pictured, this is not what I pictured at all. I can see Tess being the one to break Claire’s heart. I remember the pictures and can see them for what they are now, how Claire used them to show Tess what she’d felt they’d lost. What she thought Tess had given up. “My parents said Tess—they said she—”
Stupidly, absurdly, I lower my voice, as if someone might hear, as if what I’m going to say could be somehow overheard. As if Tess could somehow hear it now. “They said she had to go see a doctor. They said she was upset and—”
Claire shrugs. “Maybe she was. Maybe after she told me we had to be who people thought we were, and I said no when she wanted to mess around and then went off and screwed Rick and got pregnant, proved I could be straighter than she ever could—yeah, then maybe she might have gotten upset.”
“No, I think she—I think my parents meant she was upset over you.”
“Over me?” Her voice cracks on the last word. “She wasn’t upset over me.”
I think of Tess refusing to let any of us even say Claire’s name. I think about the day with the meatballs. I think about how Tess always turned away whenever she saw Claire, or Claire and Cole, like she didn’t want to see them. Like she couldn’t.
“Look, I know how Tess is—was,” I say, and it hurts to say that, to put Tess in the past tense. Even now, hearing that she broke Claire’s heart because she wanted to keep on being the girl everyone wanted, the girl who was always just out of reach, it hurts.
I didn’t know I loved Tess this much. Not until now.
I look down at the ground, blinking hard, my eyes burning.
“I know how she was,” I say after a moment. “She was—she loved being adored, and I … you know I hated living with that. Being Tess’s little sister. Being the one who wasn’t as nice, who wasn’t as pretty. Being the one who had to watch her get everything she wanted. But she—when she found out that you were pregnant, she changed. It was like she had … like she decided her life was a role or something. She’d go out smiling, but at home she was upset. She was so silent sometimes.”
“Oh, so she was quiet?” Claire says, and although there’s scorn in her voice I hear something else too, something wounded and hesitant, and think of how Claire always manages to come by Tess’s room at the hospital.
I think love is huge, overwhelming. I think it’s terrible and beautiful, and I wish Tess had found a way to live with it. To let it in when she had the chance. I wish she hadn’t broken Claire and then broken herself.
“I never saw her cry,” I say carefully. “But she … she would come home and sit in her room and just stare at nothing for hours, and I thought—well, my parents told me she was worried about college, and you know how her grades were.”
“I remember,” Claire says, but I can tell she is thinking of something else. Of a Tess I never knew at all.
“She was unhappy,” I say. “She was—”
“And I was what, spinning around full of joy?” Claire says. “Tess broke my heart and then made life impossible for me. She was beyond cruel.”
“Your name is her computer password,” I say in a rush. “She kept pictures you sent her. She even—you’re the reason why she and Beth broke up. She didn’t—”
“What? Love Beth the way she loved me?” Claire says. “I’ve seen Beth visit her, I see how Beth looks at her. I know that look. Tess wouldn’t choose her either. Beth was just smart enough to be the one who left.”
“It’s not—I don’t think she knew how much …” I take a deep breath. “I don’t think she knew how much she loved you until you got pregnant. Until you … I guess maybe she thought you’d come back or—”
“You know the really pathetic thing?” Claire says. “I would have. I would have gone back. I told her I wanted to actually kiss her in public, that I wanted people to see how much I loved her, but I would have kept on being the best friend. I would have kept on going on double dates with her and making out in my room, in the dark, when we got home.”
She taps ash off her cigarette. “I would have done anything for her. But she couldn’t get over the fact that I got drunk, had sex, and got pregnant. She couldn’t understand it. That’s what she said. ‘I don’t understand.’ Sometimes I think that’s what made her the maddest, you know. That I could want somebody else, even if it was for just a little while.”
“Tess wasn’t—she isn’t evil, you know.” I’m surprised to hear myself say it, because there have been times when I’ve pretty much hated Tess. Times before the accident. After the accident. But she wasn’t—she wasn’t who I thought she was. And now that I’ve learned more about her, the real her, I see what a mess she made of things. How imperfect she was.
How she could and did break her own heart too.
“I know,” Claire says, and then seeing my face, adds, “I do. Now, anyway. The first time she came home from college and I saw her, I didn’t feel like I was going to die. I just thought, ‘Oh, there’s Tess. I wonder if Cole’s hungry.’ Having him—” She shrugs. “I couldn’t think about just me anymore. I can’t think about just me anymore.”
“But you miss her.”
“No,” Claire says, shaking her head. “I just—I look at her lying there, and I think, No. I think Wrong. I wish she’d wake up. I wish we were fifteen again. I wish I’d never met her. I wish she’d said, ‘I want you, just you.’ I wish she’d said she was sorry for everything.”
“She would have …” I say, and then stop, because I don’t know if Tess would have. The Tess I know wouldn’t—she never apologized for anything because she never had to, because she never did anything wrong. But the other Tess, the real Tess, maybe she wouldn’t have either. Maybe she knew some things are too big for “sorry.”
Maybe she knew what she’d done to Claire couldn’t be forgiven.
“Look, sometimes you just have to live with how things are, even if they aren’t how you want them to be,” Claire says.
“I want her to be sorry.”
“I want her to be sorry too,” Claire says, stubbing out her cigarette. “But I’d also like to be able to move out of my parents’ house and meet someone who wants to hold my hand where people can see.”
“You’ll meet that someone,” I say, and she looks at me.
“No,” she says. “I probably won’t. I’m twenty, with a two-year-old, and I live with my parents in a town where everyone is pretty much each other’s cousin. I get up, I take a shower, I go to work. I give dying people sponge baths and change bedpans. I come home, I see my son, I go to bed.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t be happy.”
“Who says I’m not happy?” Claire says, and then grins at me. “I’m not unhappy, Abby. I just am. I have Cole, I have my parents, I have a job. It’s enough.”
“It’s not,” I say, so strongly I surprise myself.
“Why not?” she says. “Look at you. You’re doing the same thing. Before the accident, you got up, you went to school, you came home. Now you get up, you go to school, you see Tess, you come home. You totally blew off El—”
“I don’t want to talk about Eli,” I mutter. “Especially not if you’re going to bitch at me again.”
“Fine,” Claire says. “Throw away something that could be great because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Go ahead and—”
“I’m not like Tess.”
“Yeah, you are, because you’re afraid too. Not of the same things she was, but you’re still afraid. You know what I wish someone had told m
e back when I was trying to decide what to do after Tess said sorry, she wanted things to stay the way they were?”
“That you were better off without her?”
Claire shakes her head. “No, I told myself that. I told myself lots of stuff like that, right up until I woke up, went to take a shower, and realized I hadn’t had my period in a while. I wish someone had told me to believe I deserved what I wanted, that wanting Tess to love me like I did her was okay. I wish someone had told me I deserved to be happy. I wish … I wish I’d believed I deserved to be.”
“But that’s so obvious,” I say. “I mean, everyone knows they deserve some happiness. That’s all people think life should be, Claire. Happily ever after all the time. It’s not—no one wants to be unhappy.”
“You do.”
“I—yeah, I asked for Tess to be my sister. I asked for her to be in an accident. I asked to live here. I asked for all of it, when all along, I should have been asking for candy and ponies. What was I thinking?”
“You know I’m right,” Claire says. “I can tell, because you’ve gotten all bitchy.” She looks down at her hands, and then at me.
“Look,” she says. “I’m going to say this to you because I really do wish someone had said it to me, even though right now you’re being a total pain in the ass. But you—Abby, you can be happy. You should be. And I wish you would see that. I wish you would believe it.”
There is so much sorrow in her voice, and it’s not just for her, it’s for me, and it breaks my heart.
It makes me think. “Claire—”
She stands up. “I’m going to bed.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“For Tess?”
“No. I mean, yes, for what she did, but also for not—I should have known you would never hurt her. You aren’t that kind of person. And what you said, I just, you know …”
“You’re welcome,” Claire says, and then laughs a little. “Only in Ferrisville could my best friend be my former never-really-real-girlfriend’s younger sister. Although I think you trying to say thank you is weirder.”
“If I believe what you said, will you believe it too?”