“You don’t get to tell us how to feel, my girl,” said Cornelia. “We watched you around him, always on tenterhooks, constantly poised to jump in and smooth things over. We should have intervened, helped. At least, let us help you now.”
“I can’t just leave you to deal with the fallout!”
Cornelia said, wryly, “If it makes you feel any better, there’s bound to be plenty more fallout later. You can deal with that.”
“Go pack,” said my mother, pointing to the door. “Everything but your wedding dress. Then, go home. Although you are certainly not getting behind the wheel of a car.”
“But I want to be alone.” This wasn’t true. Being loathsome and cruel, I was actually the very last person I wanted to be alone with, but I didn’t want other people, either. What I would’ve most preferred was to be put in a medically induced coma for at least a week, possibly a year.
“Sorry,” said my mother. “Not on those winding country roads, not with those shaking hands.”
“They aren’t shaking.”
I glared at my hands, the little traitors, clenched them to try to stop the trembling, then gave up in disgust.
“We’ll ask Dev to drive you back,” said my mother.
“Not Dev,” I said, quickly.
She glanced up at me, startled.
“Because it might hurt Zach,” I said.
Such a sweet and considerate girl, so thoughtful of Zach’s feelings, so protective.
God, I made myself want to throw up.
Hildy and Aidan drove me home, and even though the two of them were among my very favorite people to both talk and listen to, I couldn’t do either. In the backseat, I hunched my shoulders, pulled my cardigan around me like a straitjacket, and tried to think about nothing at all, while outside the car windows, twilight dwindled, turning the Blue Ridge gray.
* * *
At 4:22 a.m., at home in my childhood bed, I woke up panicked, sure in my bones that I’d made a terrible mistake. Zach was right when he’d said marriage meant adapting! Everyone knew that! I should have stood by my word, zipped on my stupidly expensive white dress, and marched down the aisle straight into my beautiful future. Panting, sweating, with my heart stuttering and my sheets twisted around me like a boa constrictor, I swore to myself that it wasn’t too late. I would call him, beg him to take me back. I would fix everything. My scrambling hands groped my bedside table for my phone and yanked out the charger.
On the illuminated screen was a text message from Dev that he had sent after I’d fallen asleep: If this is totally inappropriate and exactly what you don’t need, delete immediately. The message accompanied a photo of him and Teo shoving handfuls of wedding cake into their mouths, the pocked and dilapidated cake listing in the background. I didn’t laugh, but I almost did, came closer than I ever thought I could, leaning back into my pillow and smiling ear to ear into the dark like an idiot, and not only because the photo was funny, but also because of what had always been true: even when I wasn’t with him, just knowing that Dev existed in the world made me happy.
Okay, no, that hadn’t always been true. Almost always, but there was a year in there—my last year of high school—when it hadn’t been true at all, not by a long shot.
When we were a couple, Dev and I didn’t live in the same town and would go as long as two months without seeing each other, and there were moments when I missed his physical proximity acutely and in very specific ways: his arm against mine—the slightest whisper of skin on skin—as we lay on our backs on a blanket, staring at the night sky, or his head in my lap as we watched TV, the blue light resting on the side of his face. But, while there were tough days, the missing never hurt that much because we texted constantly, e-mailed, and talked into the night, and I could always see an end point not far away, a date on my calendar, circled with a heart and marked “D-Day.”
And then Dev went to Africa. Africa. Not Spain or France or Oxford, England, or New York or any other place I’d ever heard of a person spending his gap year. Dev signed on for nine months in South Africa doing HIV/AIDS education and assisting in a rural medical clinic, with an additional three months at an orphanage tacked on for good measure. South Africa, and not even Capetown, but a village so tiny and remote that his phone would be useless.
When he told me he wanted to do it, my whole body went cold, but I gave him my support. Who could argue against helping people who were sick and poor? Who could align herself against orphans? Also, the gap year wasn’t just for these people; it was for me. Dev had skipped eighth grade, so that even though we were the same age, he’d graduated from high school a year ahead of me. But our plan had always been to start college together. He deferred his acceptance to the University of Virginia, where I would apply early, and where, as a resident of the state and a crackerjack student besides, I was sure to get in. The one year apart meant we’d spend the four following—and all the years after that—together.
I held up nobly—everybody said so—until Dev’s graduation party, a week before his flight to South Africa, when I stood in Cornelia and Teo’s pretty, bloom-riddled backyard watching Dev laughing at something Cornelia’s brother Toby had said, his head tilted forward, his eyes dancing, and felt the bottom fall out of my world. I didn’t settle for just breaking down; no, I exploded like a pipe bomb, barely making it into the house before the jagged pieces went flying. Sobbing hysteria, flailing, unintelligible ranting. When my mother put her arms around me, I threw them off and ran blindly upstairs and into the nearest bedroom, which happened to be Dev’s. Confronted with his books, his computer, his sneakers lined up in a row inside his open closet, his Milky Way poster, his basketball signed by Allen Iverson, his old cotton quilt worn to the softness of silk, and picture after picture of a dark-haired girl so glossy and sassy and blithely grinning that she could not possibly be me, I lost my bearings and fell, missing the bed and landing on the rug, completely unhinged. Dev lay down on the floor of his room and held me, clamped on tight and whispered shh, shh, shh like a mother to a child until I finally calmed down.
A few hours later, when I’d regained the ability to sit up like a normal person and speak in sentences, I begged him not to go away or at least to go somewhere in the United States, a place with phone service and Internet, a place he could fly home from at Christmas and that I could save up and fly out to once or twice, a place without black mamba snakes, dengue fever, unstable governments, and lions (it would take months for me to flush with shame at my stereotypical depiction of Africa, that’s how far gone I was). I expected Dev to agree to change his plans and was stunned when he didn’t. He said it was too late to cancel. He said the trip meant a lot to him. He talked about how privileged he was; when he used the phrase “giving back,” I covered my ears and considered screaming.
Which is when he took my face between his two hands, and in the most loving voice I’d ever heard, said this: “We’re us, remember? Even when we’re apart, we’re together. Quantum locality? Electron entanglement? Remember? We’re outside the space-time continuum, Clare, where distance just isn’t. Wherever I am, I’m yours. We’ll be okay. I’d never leave if I weren’t sure about that.”
They may have been the sweetest words he’d ever spoken to me. They may have been the sweetest—and also nerdiest—words anyone had ever, inside or outside the space-time continuum, spoken to anyone. But I didn’t care. All I wanted was for him to stay.
He left.
And I turned into a person I didn’t know. Sad. Disorganized. I stopped finishing books. Slept a lot. Got quiet. Lost too much weight. Quit tennis; played the most halfhearted field hockey in the history of the sport. Stopped going out on weekends with my friends. For the first time in my life, my grades slipped; that they didn’t fall to wrack and ruin was due to a combination of autopilot studying and sympathetic teachers. I believed what everyone around me believed, that I was in limbo, waiting for Dev to come home so our life together could start back up, but then an odd thing happened. Whe
n it came time to apply early action to UVA, I let the deadline pass by, and when I did apply to colleges, without discussing it with anyone or examining my motives, I found myself sending my application there but also to a lot of other, more far-flung places, big midwestern universities, two colleges in California.
Worried about my lackluster, weirdly un-Clare-like letters and the reports of my decline he’d been getting from his parents and Cornelia, Dev skipped the orphanage, came home early, three weeks into April, and drove down to Virginia to see me before he’d even unpacked his bags. Even though I could tell he was shocked by the changes in me—shocked and tender and heartbroken—our reunion was joyful, but when he saw the stack of acceptance letters on my desk, he breathed, “Oh, wow,” and looked like he’d just lost his best friend. Still, when I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that. Of course, I’m going to UVA,” he’s the one who said, “I really want you to, but I think you probably did this for a reason.”
So he went to Virginia, and I went to Michigan to figure out how to be a real person without him. Our plan was to stay together, but after two months, I understood that it wouldn’t work. Steady-hearted and ever at home in his own skin, Dev could keep the faith, love me outside of space and time, carry me around like a turtle’s shell, same as always, but I still didn’t know how, so at Thanksgiving break, on the worst day of my life and probably his, I broke it off for good. Eventually, because we couldn’t stand not to be, we became best friends, and Dev became a person who sent me perfectly timed, completely inappropriate wedding cake pictures, a person whose mere existence in the world made me happy.
So I didn’t call Zach after all. I walked downstairs, made coffee, took it outside, sat down on a white Adirondack chair under a blooming catalpa tree, tucked my legs under me, sipped, and watched a hummingbird stitch and hover among the columbine, doing some sipping of its own. Relief did not wash over me. I still felt like a low-down, selfish, disgusting scoundrel, but there, in my own backyard, I could envision a time when I might feel slightly less bad, slightly more like the old Clare, deserving of at least a little forgiveness.
The sense of almost-peace lasted all day. I took a long walk, followed by a short run; weeded the flower beds; played chess on my computer; and, in a breathtaking stroke of luck, found a shoeshine kit in the top of the odds-and-ends closet and shined every shinable shoe in the house, a task that will forever rank—even if I live to be a hundred—as one of the most bone-deep satisfying things I’ve ever done.
After sunset, I walked to a nearby, pocket-square-sized public park, lay down on a bench with a sweatshirt tucked beneath my head, and watched tiny bats careen against a sequined sky. Home again, I took a shower, put on my high school gym shorts and my oldest, softest T-shirt, dug up my set of Narnia books, plopped down on the family room sofa, and submersed myself up to my ears in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
I’d just gotten to the chapter where Eustace wakes up to discover he’s been turned into a dragon, when I heard a car come down the driveway. Or start down the driveway; it pulled in and then stopped, sliding a wedge of headlight light between the not-quite-shut curtains and onto the wall. Gordon and my mother weren’t due back until the next morning. Fear zipped through me, and I tried to wish the car back down the driveway and into the night, but the wedge stuck, unwavering, to the wall. Thirty seconds later, the back screen door creaked and someone began to bang out a slow, continuous doomsday rhythm with what sounded like the heel of his hand.
“Clare! Are you there? Please tell me you’re there.”
Zach, either drunk or crying or both.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
“Clare! Please! I don’t need to come in. Just come talk to me!”
Our next-door neighbor’s Irish setter, Galway, began barking; Hedwig, the corgi across the street, followed suit. I knew that soon the entire neighborhood would go off like a string of canine firecrackers.
“Coming!” I called and with dread creeping up my spine, I walked into the mudroom, switched on the outside light, and turned the knob. Zach stood on the second step, his elbow propping open the screen door. With his golf cap, T-shirt and shorts, tear-streaked face, anxious eyes, and shaky smile, he looked like a fourteen-year-old, here to confess that he’d broken my car window with his baseball.
“Oh, Zach,” I said, sighing.
“Will you come out and talk to me, just for a minute?” His words slid into one another, blurred at their edges.
“God, tell me you didn’t drive here.”
“No, no. I wouldn’t do that.” He jerked his head in the direction of the driveway. “Ian. He only agreed to it because I threatened to drive myself. He said, ‘All we need is for you to get a DUI and bring more shame and ignominy down upon the dignified heads of your family.’”
“He said that, did he?”
Zach waved his hand aimlessly around in the air. “Something like that. We spent last night at his fancy condo in Baltimore. The natives call it Bawlmore, which is pretty appropriate since I’ve been bawling more these past couple days than I ever have before.”
“Ian drove you all the way from Baltimore?”
“He did. You know, you should probably let me in or else you come out and shut the door. Wouldn’t want to let bugs into your family abode.”
Zach held the screen door open for me and edged away so that I could slip by him, then he let the door shut. We stood a few feet apart, just at the foot of the stairs. He took off his cap and ran his hand through his hair.
“I feel like I should get down on my knees,” he said, with a limp chuckle.
“Zach, why are you here?”
He smiled bleakly. “I just needed to check to see if you’d changed your mind yet.”
I started to speak, but he reached out and touched a shushing finger to my lips. Reflexively, I jerked my head back like I’d been stung and could have kicked myself afterward.
“And on the off chance that you hadn’t changed your mind yet,” he went on, “I wanted to ask you to please consider doing it soon because no one will ever, ever love you like I do.”
His voice broke at the word love, and he pressed his golf cap to his eyes, then took it away. My own eyes burned, and I wanted to hug him so badly that I clasped my hands behind my back to stop myself.
“How could I have caused you so much pain?” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, all you have to do to fix it is come back to me. On any terms you want. We can start all over. God, we can date, even. Remember when you took me hiking?”
I swallowed a sob. “A bee stung you. And it rained.”
“I loved it.”
Behind my back, my two hands gripped each other for dear life.
“Zach, I can’t come back to you.”
He reached out and rested his hands against my upper arms. I didn’t flinch. “You don’t have to decide now. I just wanted to check and see if maybe you had, but you don’t have to until you’re good and ready.”
“Please. I’ve decided already.”
He froze and I watched his soft expression clear away like a window defogging. For a split second his hands began to grip my arms, but then he yanked them off, spun around, and frisbeed his hat into the shadowy yard where it snagged on a rosebush.
“This is why,” he said, his voice rising. “This is fucking why!”
I stepped up onto the first step.
“Your perfect house! Perfect family! I hate my family because they suck, but I hate yours even more!”
I stepped onto the second step and silently slipped my hand through the screen door’s handle, my thumb on the button.
Zach whirled around, his teeth flashing in a bitter grin. “Your perfect parents! And Cornelia and Teo, whoever the hell they even are! Not even blood relatives. All those people. They’re why you think you don’t need me! Right? Am I right?”
I stood, fear thrumming through me, the yard looking watery and weird, the button under my thumb the only
solid and true thing on the entire planet, and then, from deep inside the house next door, on the other side of the row of flame-shaped cypress bushes, Galway began to bark, to send clear, wild sounds flying into the night.
“Shut the hell up, dog!” spat Zach.
Drawing his leg back like a soccer player taking a penalty kick, Zach slammed his foot against the terra-cotta planter next to the back gate. He probably expected to send it flying, but the planter merely fell over and lay on its side, intact. In the yellow light, I could see a handful of potting soil splash out, but the fern inside didn’t budge. In the stillness that followed, Zach stared down at the planter, and I pulled open the door and slipped inside the house.
“The neighbors will be out here any minute,” I told him, quickly. “You need to leave.”
Without taking his eyes off the planter, Zach nodded. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. We’ll talk later.”
He swiveled his head to catch my eye. “Okay? Later. Soon.”
I didn’t speak or move, just regarded him blankly, through the screen, then watched as he jogged out of the yard. As I listened to Ian’s car pull out fast, tires whining, and blast off through my pretty, sleepy, tree-lined neighborhood, there it was at last, unmistakable, ribboning like a cool, bright stream up through my chest, trickling down my legs and arms: relief.
Chapter Nine
Edith
Edith didn’t fit.
She had not fit before, plenty of times, although she was nearly positive that she had never been regarded as odd, not full-blown odd anyway. Aloof was what she usually got, even occasionally—ridiculously—mysterious, her sort of looks somehow taking the more accurate adjective shy out of contention. Although even shy wasn’t quite right. The truth was that Edith had always done her best within a clearly defined context. School. Nursing school. Work. She could talk—could even be funny or clever—when there was something real to talk about: books, tests, teachers, current events, music, patients, cases. Concepts. Edith could get downright voluble about concepts. Evolutionary theory. Communism. Fascism. Ethics.