“He came by again last night,” I said. “He sits out there like he’s waiting for me to sneak out.”
“If he gave a crap, he’d be at your door on his knees, begging for forgiveness.” She made a face, shifting in her seat. Now she really was huge; she couldn’t even sit against the table, her walk reduced to what could only be politely called a waddle. “I’m so hormonal right now I could kill him with my bare hands.”
I didn’t say anything. You can’t just turn your heart off like a faucet; you have to go to the source and dry it out, drop by drop.
It was around midnight a few nights later when I heard something ping off my bedroom window. I lay in bed, listening to pebble after pebble bounce off until I finally went and opened it up, sticking my head out. I could barely see Macon in the shadows of the side yard, but I knew he was there.
“Halley,” I heard him whisper. “Come out. I have to talk to you.”
I didn’t say anything, watching my parents’ window for the sudden light that meant they’d heard too, and I almost hoped they had.
“Please,” he said. “Just for a second. Okay?”
I shut the window without answering, then walked down the back stairs and even let the screen door slam a little bit behind me. I didn’t care about being careful anymore.
He was in the side yard, by the juniper bushes, and as I came around the corner he walked toward me, stepping out of the shadows. “Hey.”
“Hi,” I said.
A pause. He said, “How are you feeling? How’s your wrist?”
“Better.”
He waited, like he expected me to say more. I didn’t.
“Look,” he began, “I know you’re mad that I didn’t show up at the hospital, but I had a good reason. Your parents would’ve been upset enough without having to see me. Plus I had to walk to a phone and get a ride because my car was totaled, and ...”
As he talked I just watched his face, wondering what it was that I’d ever thought was so magical about him. I had been fascinated by the things he’d shown me, but they were all just sleight of hand, quarters pulled from children’s ears. Anyone can do that trick, if they know how. It’s nothing special.
He was still talking. “... and I’ve been coming by all week ’cause I wanted to explain, but you wouldn’t come out and I couldn’t call you, and...”
“Macon,” I said, holding up my hand. “Just stop, okay?”
He looked surprised. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said, and I wondered which hurt he meant, exactly. “I just freaked out. But I’m sorry, Halley, and I’ll make it up to you. I need you. I’ve been miserable ever since this happened.”
“Yeah?” I said, not believing a word.
“Yeah,” he said softly, and reached out to put his arms around my waist, brushing my bruised ribs and hurting me again. “I’ve been going crazy.”
I stepped back, out of his reach, and crossed my arms against my chest. “I can’t see you anymore,” I said to him.
He blinked, absorbing this. “Your parents will get over that,” he said easily, and I knew he’d said this many times before. Everything, each line I’d held close to my heart, had been said a million times to a million other girls under their windows and in their side yards, on back streets and in backseats, in dark rooms at parties, with the door locked tight.
“This isn’t about my parents,” I said. “This is about me.”
“Halley, don’t do this.” He ducked his head, that old hangdog P.E. look. “We can work this out.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. The truth was I knew, after all those flat January days, that I deserved better. I deserved I love yous and kiwi fruits and flowers and warriors coming to my door, besotted with love. I deserved pictures of my face in a million expressions, and the warmth of a baby’s kick under my hand. I deserved to grow, and to change, to become all the girls I could ever be over the course of my life, each one better than the last.
“Halley, wait,” he called out after me as I backed away. “Don’t go.”
But I was already gone, working a little magic of my own, vanishing.
I didn’t see her right away as I came inside the back door, easing it shut behind me. Not until I turned around, in the dark, and the room was suddenly bright all around me. My mother, in her bathrobe, was standing with her hand on the light switch.
“So,” she said, as I stood there blinking. “Things are right back to the way they were, I see.”
“What?”
“Wasn’t that our friend Macon?” She said it angrily. “Does he ever come around in broad daylight? Or does he only work under cover of darkness?”
“Mom, you don’t understand.” I was going to tell her then that he was gone, maybe even that she was right.
“I understand that even that boy almost killing you is not enough for you to learn a lesson. I cannot believe you would just go right back out there to him, like nothing had changed, after what happened to you. After what he did.”
“I had to talk to him,” I said. “I had to-”
“We have not discussed this because you were hurt, but this is not going to happen. Do you understand? If you don’t have the sense to stay away from that boy, I will keep you away from him.”
“Mom.” I couldn’t believe she was doing it again. She was taking this moment, this time when I was strongest, away from me.
“I don’t care what I have to do,” she said, her voice low and even. “I don’t care if I have to send you away or switch schools. I don’t care if I have to follow you myself twenty-four hours a day, you will not see him, Halley. You will not destroy yourself this way.”
“Why are you just assuming I’m going back to him?” I asked her, just as she was drawing in breath to make another point. “Why don’t you ask me what I said to him out there?”
She shut her mouth, caught off guard. “What?”
“Why don’t you ever wait a second and see what I’m planning, or thinking, before you burst in with your opinions and ideas? You never even give me a chance.”
“Yes, I do,” she said indignantly.
“No,” I said. “You don’t. And then you wonder why I never tell you anything or share anything with you. I can never trust you with anything, give you any piece of me without you grabbing it to keep for yourself.”
“That’s not true,” she said slowly, but it was just now hitting her, I could see it. “Halley, you don’t always know what’s at stake, and I do.”
“I will never learn,” I said to her slowly, “until you let me.”
And so we stood there in the kitchen, my mother and I, facing off over everything that had built up since June, when I was willing to hand myself over free and clear. Now, I needed her to return it all to me, with the faith that I could make my own way.
“Okay,” she said finally. She ran a hand through her hair. “All right.”
“Thank you,” I said as she cut the light off, and we started upstairs together, her footsteps echoing mine. It was still all settling in, this deal we’d made. It was like learning another way of something instinctive, like walking or talking. Changing something you already thought you’d mastered and figured out on your own.
As we got to the top of the stairs, to split off into our different directions, she stopped.
“So,” she said softly. “What did you tell him?”
Outside, across the street, I could see Scarlett’s kitchen light, yellow in the dark. “I told him he wasn’t what I’d thought he was,” I said. “That he let me down, and I couldn’t see him anymore. And I said good-bye.”
I knew there was probably a lot she wanted to ask or say, but she only nodded. We would have to learn this slowly, making the rules up as we went. It was undiscovered country, as wide as the Grand Canyon, as distant as Halley’s Comet.
“Good for you,” she said simply, and then she went inside her room, shutting the door quietly between us.
You can’t just plan a moment when things get back
on track, just as you can’t plan the moment you lose your way in the first place. But standing there alone on the landing, I thought of Grandma Halley and how she’d held me close against her lap as we watched the sky together. I’d always thought I couldn’t remember, but suddenly in that moment, I closed my eyes and saw the comet, finally, brilliant and impossible, stretching above me across the sky.
Part III
GRACE
Chapter Eighteen
“Oh, honey, you look so wonderful! Brian, come in here with the camera, you’ve got to see this. Stand here, Halley. No—here, so we get the window behind you. Or maybe—”
“Mom,” I said, reaching behind me again for the itchy tag that had been scratching my neck since I’d put the damn dress on, “please. Not now, okay?”
“Oh, but we’ve got to take pictures,” she said, waving me over by the potted plant in the corner of the kitchen, “some of you alone, and some when Noah comes.”
Noah. Every time I heard his name, I couldn’t believe I’d gotten myself into this. Not just the prom, not just a too-poofy dress with a tag that would drive me insane, but the prom with the dress with the tag with Noah Vaughn. I was in hell.
“Oh my goodness,” my mother said, looking over my shoulder, one hand moving up to cover her mouth. She looked like she might cry. “Look at you!”
I turned around to see Scarlett, much as I’d left her upstairs minutes ago, except maybe larger, if that was possible. She was at nine months almost exactly, her belly protruding up and outward so it was always the very first thing you noticed when she came into a room. Her dress had been made especially by Cameron’s mother, a seamstress, who was so happy Cameron was actually going to the prom that she spent hours, days, making the perfect maternity prom dress. It was black and white, with a semi-drop neck that showed off Scarlett’s impressive bosom, an empire waist, and it fell gently over her knees. She really did look good, if huge. But it was the smile on her face, wide and proud, that made it perfect.
“Ta-da!” she said, sweeping her arms over herself and back down again, as if she was a prize on a game show. “Crazy, huh?”
She just stood there, grinning at me, and I had to smile back. Since we’d decided we would go to the prom and fulfill our Seventeen daydreams, nothing had been normal. But then, nothing had been normal, or even close to normal, for a while.
Since January, something had changed. It was all subtle, hard to see with the naked eye, but it was there. The way my mother held her tongue when I knew she was dying to offer an opinion, to dominate a conversation—to be my mother. She’d take a breath, already gathering words, and then stop, let it out, and look hard at me as something passed between us, imperceptible to the rest of the world. She’d backed off just enough, focusing on other things: selling Grandma Halley’s house and visiting her often, as well as the new book she’d started writing about her experiences being a daughter again. Maybe I’d be in this one. Maybe not.
As for Macon, I hadn’t talked to him much since that night in my side yard. He seemed to be coming to school even less, and when he did I was skilled at avoiding him. But I still felt a pang whenever I saw him, the way I still felt a soreness in my wrist every morning, or a pain in my ribs when I lay a certain way at night. In March, when I heard his mother had kicked him out, I worried. And in mid-April, when I heard he was dating Elizabeth Gunderson, I cried for two days straight.
I made myself concentrate on something more important: the baby. I saw it, small and hardly recognizable, when we had the ultrasound during Month Six. It had hands and feet and eyes and a nose. The doctor knew the sex, but Scarlett didn’t want to know; she wanted it to be a surprise.
We had a baby shower at my house, inviting Cameron and his mother, the girls from the Teen Mothers Support Group, and even Ginny Tabor, who bought the baby a huge stuffed yellow duck that quacked when you squeezed it. But something was wrong with it, and it quacked whenever you picked it up, and then wouldn’t shut up until you took its head off, an option we never had with Ginny herself. Cameron’s mother sewed a beautiful layette set, and my parents gave Scarlett ten babysitting coupons, for whenever she needed a break. For my gift, I had blown up a recent picture of me and Scarlett, sitting on her front steps together. Scarlett’s belly was huge, and she had her hands folded over it, her head on my shoulder. I had it framed and Scarlett immediately hung it over the baby’s crib, where she or he would see it every day.
“The three of us,” she said, and I nodded.
And then we just waited, circling in a holding pattern, while the due date got closer and closer.
We planned. We bought a baby name book and made lists of good ones: something simple, not bringing to mind someone else, like Scarlett’s, or needing a paragraph of explanation, like mine. We both knew how far a name could take you.
We went to Lamaze classes, me sitting in a long row of fathers, her head in my lap. We were the youngest ones there. We breathed and we pushed, and I tried to tell myself that I could handle this when it happened, that I could do it. Scarlett was scared and tired, with all that huffing and puffing, and I always nodded at her, confident.
And Marion had come around. She acted like she was firm on adoption until about Month Seven, early March, when I walked in on her in the nursery. The sun was slanting through the window, warm and bright, bouncing off the yellow walls, and the constellations Cameron had painted on the ceiling. Everything was ready: the clothes all folded in the drawers, the crib and changing table in place, the stroller finally assembled (with the help of a neighbor, who was an engineer and the only one who could figure out the instructions). She was just standing there, arms crossed, surveying it all with a smile on her face. And I knew it then. There’d never been a question of where this baby was going or who it belonged with. Of course, when she saw me she turned around and scowled, muttering something about paint fumes, and hurried out. But that was Marion. I knew what I had seen.
And lastly, I walked with Scarlett to the mailbox as she carried the letter we’d worked and re-worked, all these months. Dear Mrs. Sherwood, it began, You don’t know me, but I have something to say. She dropped it in, the mailbox door clanked, and there was no going back. If we heard from her, we heard from her. If not, this baby had enough love to carry on.
And now, on May twelfth, we were going to the prom. I was doing this for Scarlett; it was important to her. When Cameron asked her, I had to go, too. Which is how I ended up with Noah Vaughn.
Actually, it was my mother’s fault. She brought up the prom one Friday night when the Vaughns were over, Mrs. Vaughn lit up like the sun, and it went from there. Of course I keep telling Halley she should go, my mother said, I mean, it’s the prom. Well, Noah, I can’t believe you haven’t mentioned this, said Mrs. Vaughn. Well, Halley’s best friend is going, you know Scarlett, but Halley hasn’t been asked, said my mother, and now I was realizing what was happening, how awful this could be, as Noah watched me from across the table and my father giggled at his plate. But Noah doesn’t have a date either, said Mrs. Vaughn, so I don’t see why you two couldn’t ... And then my mother, who had learned something, looked across the table, realizing too late, and said quickly, Actually I think Halley might have plans that weekend, but of course now it was too late, way too late, and Mrs. Vaughn was already clapping her hands together excitedly, and smiling big, and my mother kept trying to get me to look at her but I wouldn’t. All I could see was Noah across the table, eating a slice of pizza, with cheese all over his chin.
Of course Scarlett was ecstatic. She dragged me out to buy a dress and shoes, and insisted we get ready together. And I went along, trying not to complain, because I knew somehow that this was the end of something for her, before the baby came and everything changed.
“Smile!” my mother said, stepping back across the kitchen with her camera’s red light blinking. My father was leaning against the kitchen door, making faces at me. “Oh, you two look just great. So glamorous!”
Sca
rlett put her arm over my shoulder, pulling me closer, tighter in for the shot. I saw the red in her hair, her easy smile, the small sprinkling of freckles across her nose.
“Okay!” my mother said, now against the far wall, crouching down. “Now say prom night!”
“Prom night!” Scarlett said, still smiling.
“Prom night,” I said, more softly, my eyes on her, and not the camera, as the flash popped bright all around me.
I could tell that Noah was drunk the minute he crossed the living room holding the corsage.
“Hi,” he said as he got close, reaching out with the pin toward my bodice, his breath hot and sweet. “Hold still.”
“I’ll get it,” I said, taking it from him before he stabbed me while Mrs. Vaughn, who obviously hadn’t gotten close to him lately, and my mother, who looked like she might bust with happiness, watched from across the room. Beside us Cameron was carefully attaching Scarlett’s corsage, a group of pink roses and baby’s breath, to her ample bustline. Cameron looked very small and very dapper in his tuxedo and cranberry-colored cummerbund and socks. Very European, my mother had said when he arrived, with Noah in his rented tux and too-short pants with gym socks peeking out beneath. I stuck my corsage on, barely missing poking myself in my haste, and settled in for another round of pictures.
“Wonderful!” Mrs. Vaughn said, circling us with the video camera while Noah snaked his arm around my waist. The liquor had obviously emboldened him. “Halley, smile!”
“One more,” my mother said, going through at least another roll of film, flash after flash. “What a great night you’ll have! Terrific!”
Marion was there, with one of those disposable cameras, taking picture after picture of Scarlett in her dress. She was going to a medieval tournament with Vlad that night, and was already dressed for the part in a long velvet dress with puffy sleeves that made her look like Guinevere, or maybe Sleeping Beauty. She’d gotten into Vlad’s weekend hobby, bit by bit, and she seemed to like it, tagging along to tournaments and drinking mead while he jousted. Scarlett was embarrassed, but Marion just said being someone else was kind of nice, every once in a while.