“Oh!” I yelped when I saw him, sitting with his head bent and his elbows on his knees on the giant glider at the far end of the yard. It was reflex, just the one skittish syllable. I stopped so fast I almost tripped.
Sawyer glanced up with the barest flicker of interest, stared like he didn’t know who I was. I’d seen him that morning at the funeral and the blankness of his expression had intrigued me, made me wonder if there was anything beating and alive beneath it. Even close up, there was no way to tell.
“Sorry,” I said, almost over my shoulder as I turned to run away from this place forever, or probably just for tonight. We hadn’t talked since the scene at the hospital. I couldn’t imagine what we’d possibly begin to say. “I didn’t … nobody told me you were out here. Sorry.”
“No,” Sawyer said, not entirely friendly. “You’re all right. Stay.”
I stopped and looked at him. He was still wearing his clothes from that morning, gray tie hanging loose from his neck, funeral shoes shining like onyx. In church he’d kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. “I don’t think—I should really—”
“I mean it.” He glanced at me sideways. “Don’t look so scared, Serena. I’m not going to hurt you.”
God, that wasn’t what I was afraid of, not by a long shot: What scared me was that I was a person capable of still feeling the things I felt for him after everything that had happened. What scared me was that my best friend was gone. Sawyer was the one person in the world who could maybe understand that, the one person who knew what we’d done, and for a second I almost told him everything: why Allie and I had stopped being friends to begin with, how I’d wanted him for so long I didn’t even remember what it was like not to. In the end I chickened out instead. “I’m not,” I lied, shaking my head like even the idea was ridiculous.
Sawyer snorted, a low animal noise. He slid over and made room. “Prove it,” he said.
“I … Fine.” Annoyed and bewildered and unprepared, I crossed the expanse of patio between us and perched carefully on the edge of the glider. He smelled faintly of soap and sweat and the air was warmer near him, like his body gave off more heat than normal. “Here I am.”
“Here you are.” He was holding a half-empty green bottle and he ran his thumb once around the rim, offered it to me without looking me in the face. “You working?”
“Yeah.” I took it from him, wrapping my hands around the cool glass and hoping he wouldn’t notice if I didn’t actually drink any of it. “Well, sort of.” There was a feeling in my chest like a moth against a windowpane, the desperate scrape of wings. “I just broke a bunch of plates.”
Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “On purpose?” he asked.
“No.”
“No,” he repeated, looking at me finally, smiling a small, languid smile I’d seen a hundred times before in the decade and a half I’d lived on his periphery. “I guess not.”
Sawyer sighed. I waited. We sat quiet as death and just as still and listened to the wasps as they sang their elegies high in the leaves above our heads.
15
After
Aaron and Shelby’s mom lives in a kitschy little bungalow out in Poinsettia Heights, cool tile floors and spiny green succulents exploding like alien life-forms all over the raised deck that surrounds the pool. Hannah’s in heaven, drifting through the cool blue water in her yellow plastic baby raft, no shortage of middle-aged women in neon-flowered bathing suits to coo over her and her star-shaped kiddie sunglasses.
Eventually her small fingers go pruney, and we climb carefully up onto the deck, water from my hair running in cold rivulets down my back. Hannah’s body feels cool and slippery, like a seal’s. I wrap her in a hooded towel that looks like a bug-eyed frog and take her inside to get changed, stopping in the kitchen on our way back to pull some snacks out of the bag I packed this morning. Shelby’s rooting around in the fridge for a lime to go with her beer. “Was wondering where you got to,” she says, holding out the bottle. She’s wearing cargo shorts and flip-flops, wet hair knotted at the nape of her neck. “You want?”
I glance over the line of baby cacti on the windowsill, taking in the big, inclusive tribe in the yard. “I’m not going to drink underage in front of your entire family.”
“Oh, like anybody cares. You’re already here with your illegitimate child and they all love you. Speaking of: What about you, baby girl?” she says to Hannah. “Mai tai? Margarita?” She glances at me, frowns. “What?” she asks. “I’m kidding. I’m not actually going to make your kid a margarita. She’s a baby. That would be bad form.”
“Huh?” I blink at her, distracted, still gazing out at the crowd on the deck. “No, no. I’m sorry. I wasn’t even really listening.”
“Well, thanks,” she says faux-snottily. Then, bumping my shoulder with hers: “Hey. How you doing over there?”
I shrug, trying for a bright smile and probably missing. “I’m fine,” I promise. “Not really sleeping so well.”
“Yeah.” Shelby breaks off as two of her teenage cousins amble through the kitchen, bony elbows and legs like gazelles. “Look,” she says, when we’re alone again. “You can talk to me. I know it’s weird now because you date my goony brother and you’re hanging out with all my fat aunts and whatnot, but you talked to me before that and, you know. It doesn’t mean you can’t tell me stuff. You can tell me stuff.”
I hand the baby her Goldfish, stalling, but it’s useless to do that with Shelby. She waits me out every time. “Sawyer was at my house today,” I confess finally, eating a couple of crackers myself for good measure. “We had, you know, the talk.”
“The I know we’re really Catholic but this is where babies come from talk?” Shelby laughs, blue eyes going wide. “No offense, Reena, but you probably should have had that one like, two years ago, you know what I’m saying?”
“Oh, you’re very funny.” I make a face. “The we made a baby and here she is talk, smartass.”
“Ooh,” she says, leaning back against the counter with her beer bottle, clicking the glass mouth lightly against her front teeth. “That talk. How’d it go?”
“Fine,” I say again. “I don’t know. Nothing the rest of the universe didn’t know already, right? We’re going to hang out tomorrow, all three of us.”
“As a family?” she blurts, and I physically startle at the sound of it. Is that what we are, the three of us? That can’t possibly be what we are.
“Um, yeah,” I say after a moment. “I guess so.”
“Well.” Shelby’s quiet, and I know from experience that she’s working the logic of it out in her mind like some kind of medical puzzle: muscle and tendon, cartilage and bone.
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it? I mean, for better or for worse, Sawyer is your—”
“Don’t say it,” I plead, knowing what’s coming. Shelby loves this particular phrase.
“—baby daddy. There’s bound to be some big feelings there, or whatever, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be in your kid’s life. Right, Hannah?” she asks, taking the orange cracker the baby proffers, kissing her crumby hand. “You want your hot but degenerate father to take you to Disney World and stuff, don’t you?”
I laugh, I can’t help it. “Can you cut it out?” I beg.
“I’m teasing. I’m sorry, I’m not being helpful.” She slips her free arm around my waist as we head back out into the sunshine and noise. “Just, you know, don’t forget all the shitty stuff he did. And remember that you’re happy now.”
“Yeah,” I tell her, still distracted, glancing at the crowd around the table. Shelby’s uncles are arguing politics good-naturedly; her cousins are playing a noisy game of Marco Polo. I think again of families, hers and mine and Sawyer’s, of what exactly they look like and what exactly they do.
Shelby’s looking at me hard. “You are happy now, aren’t you?” she asks.
At the grill, Aaron is burning a hot dog because that’s how I like to eat them, a cloud of smoke like a dark corona around hi
s face. “Yeah,” I repeat, more certainly this time. “Yeah, of course.”
16
Before
Sawyer pretty much disappeared the summer after Allie died, lying so low as to go practically subterranean, skulking around bars on the seedier side of Broward and getting into loud, rowdy fights. In June he got arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge. In July he wound up with a broken hand. In August he finally mentioned to his parents that, by the way, he had no intention whatsoever of shipping off to college like he was supposed to, which, while not exactly a revelation to anybody following along at home, had Roger and Lydia practically apoplectic and turned the restaurant into a backdrop for all kinds of huge LeGrande family drama.
“His dad flipped the hell out,” Cade told me on the ride home one night, the rain a steady patter on the windshield, the wipers a rhythmic swoosh. It’s a myth that boys don’t like to gossip: Cade in particular couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. “Said he had to move out of the house if he didn’t go to school. They dropped a lot of money on his tuition deposit.”
“That’s what I figured.” The LeGrandes were richer than us, I knew, but not rich enough that things like college deposits didn’t matter. Still, I suspected Lydia would probably be more upset than anyone else: Sawyer was, after all, the one living soul she never had a critical word for. Even if she’d never admit it to anyone, I could only imagine how much his apparent commitment to complete and total self-immolation got under her skin.
It got under mine, too, obviously, but it wasn’t like I was going to say that out loud.
The college thing sort of made sense to me, though. Even before everything happened, I remember thinking how odd it was that he was headed to FSU, Go Seminoles, just like every other senior in the state—how pedestrian, as if somebody like Sawyer should be headed for pastures way greener than keg parties or freshman seminars on the history of Western civilization. He should have been haunting cafés in New York or playing open mics in California, slouching around looking beautiful and waiting to get discovered.
Or, you know, traveling the world with some girl who was into that kind of thing.
Whatever.
“So,” I said, affecting a carefully honed poker face and glancing at Cade out of the corner of my eye. “Where’s he going to live?”
Cade shrugged. “With some friends in Dania, I think. There’s a bunch of them living in some split-level off the highway. Roger was all pissed off about that, too, because apparently you can, like, smell the meth cooking all up and down the street.”
“Sounds very attractive.” I slipped my shoes off, put my bare feet up on the dash. “Did he say why he’s not going?”
“I dunno. He’s pretty screwed up, I guess.” Here my brother hesitated, glancing at me sort of nervously. We didn’t talk very much about Allie in my house. It felt like everyone was a little bit afraid of what I might do if they brought her up—go off like an improvised explosive, maybe, glass and shrapnel everywhere you looked. Three months in the ground and it was almost like she’d never existed in the first place, like maybe she’d only ever been my imaginary friend. “Because of everything that happened.”
“Right.” I swallowed the sudden thickness in my throat. “Well,” I said brightly, “State is filled with screwups. He’d have fit right in.”
*
One thing Sawyer definitely wasn’t doing was showing up for his shifts at the restaurant, which is why I was so surprised when I came in to work the dinner shift one Friday in September and found him mixing a mojito at the bar. “Hey,” he said, grabbing a rag and wiping a spill from the glossy surface, barely looking up. “Your dad said to come find him when you got in.”
“Do you still work here?” I blurted, my backpack slipping from my shoulder. I was used to not seeing him by this point, used to the notion that we were never going to talk about anything: that I was going to spend the next twelve months in a sinkhole of guilt and confusion and sadness, and then I was going to leave. For a second I thought of that night in the parking lot, the taste of chocolate ice cream and the feeling of his fingers on my neck.
You kissed me, I thought as I looked at him. You kissed me and then Allie died. For a second it felt like she was sitting at the bar in front of me, sharp chin cradled in one skinny hand—both of us watching Sawyer just like we used to, back when watching Sawyer never felt like something that hurt.
Now he tilted his head, lips barely quirking. “It’s nice to see you, too,” he told me, snapping me back to the present. Just like that, Allie was gone.
“That’s not what I meant.” I blushed. “It’s just … you know. Been a while.”
“I guess so.” He rattled the shaker a couple of times, poured its contents over ice and added a couple of mint leaves for garnish. Sawyer had been tending the bar at Antonia’s practically since puberty; he could have mixed drinks in his sleep. “You miss me?”
“No,” I said immediately. I glanced around, skittish—it was early yet, three or four people nursing drinks at the bar. The Best of Ella Fitzgerald pumped in through the speakers, afternoon music. “I don’t know.”
I picked up my bag again, ready to go find my father, but Sawyer wasn’t finished. “I saw you the other day,” he told me. “In your car, by the flea market.”
I blinked. “What were you doing at the flea market?”
“I wasn’t at the flea ma—I had band practice,” he said, as if perusing antiques and collectibles was any more ridiculous than the rest of the James Dean/James Franco crap he’d been doing. “Our drummer lives over near there.”
“How do you play piano with a broken hand?” I asked him, and Sawyer grinned wryly.
“It’s not broken anymore, princess.” He nodded for me to sit down on an empty stool and, once I did, slid some pretzels down in my direction. I glanced at the clock above the bar—I had a couple of minutes before I needed to punch in.
“Is that what you’ve been doing instead of coming to work?” I asked, cautious. “Playing with your band?”
“You mean as opposed to pursuing higher education?”
I shrugged. “As opposed to … whatever.”
“I guess,” Sawyer said. “I don’t know. We play at the Prime Meridian sometimes.” He raised his eyebrows like a dare. “You should come.”
The Prime Meridian was a seedy little club off the highway in Dania, Bud Light and bouncers who didn’t bother to card. People got stabbed at the Prime Meridian. “Why don’t you ever play here?” I asked, without comment.
Sawyer snorted like that was hilarious. “My father would love that, I’m sure.”
“Why?” I shot back. “Do you suck that bad?”
“Hey, now.” He laughed again. “We’re freaking awesome, Serena.”
“Well,” I said, fidgeting. “I’m sure you are.”
A guy at the end of the bar ordered a scotch and soda; Sawyer stood up and reached for a bottle on the top shelf, shirt riding up his rib cage to reveal a small tattoo winding above the waistband of his jeans, a curling green infinity that I recognized from my calc book. “Did that hurt?” I asked as he scooped ice into a rocks glass.
“Did what hurt?”
I gestured vaguely. “On your back.”
“Oh. Nah.” Sawyer handed the guy his drink and leaned over the bar like he was going to tell me a secret. I smelled polished wood and limes. “I’m really manly.”
“Right,” I said, leaning in a little bit myself without meaning to. “Obviously.”
He tapped the bar twice, like a rhythm, and straightened up. “What about you, princess?” he asked me, in a voice like maybe he was kidding and maybe he wasn’t. “You got tattoos nobody knows about?”
I was opening my mouth to answer when my father came through the swinging doors at the far end of the restaurant. He stopped when he caught us at the bar. “Reena,” he said sharply—and I think he was more surprised than anything else, but still we’d never talked about what I’d been doing with Sawyer
that night at the hospital, and one look at his face said he didn’t like what he saw. “You know I don’t want you sitting up there when we have customers. Come on.”
“Sorry,” I said, scrambling down from the barstool. My skin felt tight and hot. I didn’t look at Sawyer as I headed back to the office, two minutes late to punch in.
17
After
“It’s not a date,” I promise Soledad the next morning, when she asks for the particulars of my playground trip with Sawyer and Hannah. She’s sitting at the table drinking her favorite chai latte from an old Northwestern mug she ordered a million years ago, her tawny skin smooth and makeup-free. I really, really hate that mug. “He just wants to spend a little time with Hannah, so I said he could.” I tickle Hannah’s feet in her high chair, and she giggles. “Kiss, please,” I demand, then wait for her to plant one on me before I turn back to Sol. “I actually think it’s very adult behavior on my part.”
Soledad eyes me over her latte like she thinks perhaps the lady doth protest too much. “I hear you and Hannah have a very busy social calendar,” is all she says.
“Oh, you’re hilarious.” I scowl.
Now it’s three thirty and 89 degrees out, and Sawyer and I are pushing Hannah in the baby swings on the playground outside the elementary school, asphalt warm and sticky under our feet. My car is still at the mechanic’s and Sawyer picked me up at the house, just like he used to; Count Basie was on the stereo and I had to concentrate hard on looking out the window, on not breaking to smithereens right there in the front seat. I don’t remember why I agreed to this. It didn’t even seem like a good idea at the time.
“So what made you change your mind?” he wants to know now. He’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead, and I’m shocked to realize that he looks not like a rock star or a runaway boyfriend, but like a dad. He’s got another Slurpee and he brought me one, too, Coke-flavored and freezing, sweating pleasantly in my hand.