The Words Between Us, page 10
“I did think about that,” she says, clearly pleased with herself for this unnatural turn of responsibility. “What about one of the big buildings at the marina where they store all the sailboats during the winter? It’s got to be empty in the summertime. You wouldn’t have to transport materials too far, and you’d be able to walk down there any time to see how it’s going.”
“See how it’s going? Am I not building this thing?”
Sarah stifles a laugh but cannot stop a mist of gin and tonic from escaping her lips and landing on my arm. I wipe it off with the damp napkin from beneath my water glass.
“You can’t build a dinosaur by yourself. You need a crew. You’ll need scaffolding and, I don’t know, cables and stuff. You’re going to need some people who know how to build stuff.”
“And who would you suggest? Caleb?”
“Sure! His whole Science Olympiad team could do it. Oh! I’m gonna text Coach Ryan.” She picks up her phone and I place my hand on it.
“Do you really think you should be texting right now?”
She mock glares at me. “I’ll thank you for not telling me when I’m drunk. I know when I’m drunk. And this”—she gesticulates wildly around her head and torso—“is not drunk. This is me at the top of my game, sweetie.”
I back off, but I’ve seen Sarah this way enough times to know that she is already over the edge. “Okay,” I say. “But you have to explain clearly that this is a volunteer thing. If there’s any prize money, I’ll make a donation to the Science Olympiad program, but we’re not splitting anything evenly. If I win I want to have enough money to pay my bills, restock the store, and get Dawt Pi’s family over from Myanmar.”
“Really?”
“But she doesn’t know,” I rush on, “and I don’t want her to know because I probably won’t win, and frankly, I don’t even know if their paperwork has come through.”
Sarah draws her fingers across her lips to zip them. “I can keep a secret.”
I give her a doubtful look.
“I can! I have all kinds of secrets.”
“Is that so?”
She nods emphatically and begins to count things out on her fingers. “I never told my sister that her best friend stole her diary and then showed it to everyone in their Girl Scout troop, and that’s why they all called her Hairy Hannah. I never told anyone that I caught Miss Carter and Mr. Billings making out in the janitor’s closet my sophomore year. I never told anyone that Jenni Garczynski peed her pants at my house in sixth grade—sixth grade!”
“Except you just told me all those things.”
For just a moment she is speechless as she tries to understand what I’m saying. “So what?” she finally says. “You don’t know half those people, and the other half moved out of town so you’ll never see them. And Mr. Billings is dead.”
“So you wouldn’t spill a secret about someone I did know then?”
She points a finger vaguely in my direction. “Right. Like I would never tell you that Brad Ellis didn’t actually cause that car accident senior year.”
“What?”
“And I would never tell you that Peter Flynt is still in love with you.”
“But—wait. What did you say?”
She puts her head down on the table and says into her arm, “You know you’re what we fought about most? More than we did about the thing with Mark.” She turns tired eyes upon me. “He never really got over you. You cracked him.”
I hardly know what to say. “You told me you hadn’t talked to him in years.”
“Oh, Robin,” she says like I’m an idiot. “Peter and I talk all the time.”
I forget the store, forget the dinosaur made of books, forget even the incredible statement that Brad Ellis hadn’t caused the car crash that took his life and forever altered Sarah’s. I forget it all and zero in on Peter Flynt.
“When was the last time you spoke to him?” I demand.
My intensity seems to alert Sarah to her mistake. Her eyes search the room as though she will find a rewind button hidden somewhere between the bottles. “Shoot. No. No. I haven’t. I didn’t say that right.”
“You have. It’s obvious you have. Were you two talking about me? What did he say? Why is he sending me all these books?”
She switches into damage-control mode. “I don’t know why he’s sending you the books.”
“Then what did you talk about? When did you last speak to him?”
“It was a while ago. Honest. I mean, we don’t talk all the time. Just every once in a while. Like we talked a lot when he came back from his second tour in Iraq. But now I think the last time was like, I don’t know, a while ago.”
“He was in Iraq?”
“Robin! Don’t you ever come out of your cave? Don’t you ever pick up a newspaper? He was in Iraq on his first tour when I got pregnant. That’s when the whole thing happened. See, this is the problem with you!” Sarah is practically shouting at me. “You only think of yourself. You’re always in your precious store with your precious books, and you never come out to the real world and participate. You’re selfish. There are people out here, Robin. People who need you to make an effort sometimes.”
“Sarah, I—”
“I’m not done.” But she seems to have lost her train of thought.
I jump on the silence. “Look, I’m sorry about the way I am. Really. I wish I could be someone else. I’ve tried. But you have no idea what it’s like.”
She stands up over her seat. “Are you serious? You can’t be serious. I had to finish high school the year after my class already graduated. I had to walk—no, lurch—around those halls with everyone believing some horrible rumor that Brad crashed into the ditch because I was doing all sorts of nasty stuff to him while he was driving drunk at ninety miles per hour. I know what it’s like to want to hide.”
I stand up too, but I can’t match her in height. “You got into that car that night, Sarah. No one forced you to do it. I had no control over what my father did. I had no idea what was going on. And yet somehow the rest of my life I have to be the one who’s on display. They’re both safe behind bars, and I’m out here having to deal with the aftermath.”
“Well, safe for now, anyway.”
Reality strikes me broadside. My father is not dead yet. But a stay of execution is not a pardon. It is a procrastination tactic. The majority of people polled—they actually polled people—are still crying out for his blood, still believe he had been colluding with al-Qaeda, still believe that lethal injection is too good for him, that the government should bring back hanging or the firing squad or erect a guillotine on the Capitol steps. The man I’d laughed with at the dinner table. The man who always told me how beautiful I looked. The man who taught me how to read. They all wanted him dead.
“I thought we were friends,” I say, a little breathless. “I thought you were one of the people I could trust. I let you into my life—”
“Ha!” Sarah pounces. “You let me into your life? Are you kidding me? You let me into your apartment, Robin. Once. You’ve never let anyone into your life.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, please. Where are all your friends then? Why do you have no one but me and some poor refugee who latched on to the first American who had time to teach her English?”
My eyes are burning to release the tears that are building up. “I let Peter into my life. I told him everything. And look where it got me.”
By this time everyone in the bar is staring at us. I don’t care. I stick a finger in Sarah’s smug face. “If you ever compare getting in a drunk driving accident to my entire life being destroyed again, I’ll—”
I can’t think of anything I’ll do. Instead, I rush out the door and into the night. I automatically turn to go back to the store, back to my apartment, back to my sanctuary. But there’s no comfort for me there tonight. I turn the other way, toward the cold, rushing spring flow of the river. I want it to take me out into the bay, into the lake, into the deepest waters where a tow truck could never recover me. I want to step onto one of those pretentious little sailboats, catch the wind, and leave all of this behind. To run again. It seems so easy and so impossible all at once.
I stride north along the riverwalk toward the bay, propelled forward by some interior furnace, like the rumblings of a long-dormant volcano coming to life. I haven’t felt this out of control in years. I rush beneath the Columbus Bridge and set my sights on the Magellan Bridge a mile away. I know the bay is there somewhere beyond it, waiting for me. But it’s cold and windy and I forgot my jacket at the bar. Forgot my purse and my cell phone. Forgot my good sense. I can feel a headache forming behind my eyes.
I wish I could take it all back. Take back the shouting, the anger, the bitterness. I wish I hadn’t stormed away from a friend who was keeping me sane. I know I’m not only thinking of Sarah. I’m thinking of Peter. Of the moment it all ended. His betrayal. My revenge. I wish it could have been different. I wish I hadn’t thrown it all away over one infraction, however serious. I wish I hadn’t been so ruthless. But I had. And nothing could change that.
I turn toward home. Slower, colder. The space behind my eyes is beginning to throb. I will crawl back into my hole and stay there until it crumbles in around me. I don’t need a dinosaur made of books. I can’t save the store. I will accept the inevitable and sell the place. Dawt Pi will find another job. I can move again, start over as someone else in some other place.
Before I reach home, I can hear someone in the alleyway pounding on the metal door and cursing.
“Sarah?”
“You left this stuff at the bar.” She presses my coat and purse into my arms and looks about to leave. “I drank too much, Robin. Don’t listen to anything I said back there. About Peter, Dawt Pi. I didn’t mean that stuff. Everything will be back to normal in the morning.”
How can it be? I want to ask her, but instead I say, “You could have let yourself in. My keys are in my purse.” I don’t tell her about the spare key I keep hidden in the alley, though her face is mere inches from it.
“Oh,” she says.
I try on a little smile and she offers one in return.
“Robin, you’re doing great. Most people? In your shoes? They would have snapped a long time ago. Like, bigger snapped. Like, rampage snapped. And here you are with your little dream, trying to make it happen.”
I throw my coat over my shoulders to stave off the shivering and dig in my purse for my keys. “Why don’t you come up and sleep here tonight. You can’t drive home like that.”
“Jeff said he’d give me a ride.”
“Who’s Jeff?”
“He’s from Kennedy. Class of ’98.”
“He hasn’t been drinking?”
“Not much. He’s big.”
I am not her mother. She is not my project.
“If you think that’s best.”
“It’ll be fine. Look, I’ll talk to Caleb’s coach tomorrow and stop by to let you know what he says, okay?”
“Okay.”
She starts to walk around me back out to Chestnut Street, but I redirect her into my arms for a hug. I think it catches us both off guard. But after a moment it feels right. In fact, it feels like something I’ve been missing for a very long time.
I release her to the dubious custody of Jeff and unlock my door. Upstairs I watch her weavy steps through the window. A man in jeans and a big Carhartt jacket stands by a black pickup truck. He guides her around to the passenger side and opens her door for her.
At my computer, I close the tragic Brick & Mortar balance sheet and open a new Word document. Despite my growing headache, I stare at the blank, bright whiteness. A clean, empty world. I want to fill it with a poem. But I’m no poet anymore.
I type the first words of the new draft of my terrible novel.
When I married Austin Dickinson I had no idea that I was really marrying his sister.
Then I delete them.
14
Then
When are we going to visit your mother?” Grandma asked for the hundredth time. She shoveled another bite of whatever-it-was into her mouth.
“We’re not.”
“Robin, you need to see her.”
I stifled my gag reflex as a string of spittle danced between her lips, and deftly changed the subject. “What did you say you call this stuff?”
“It’s a pasty,” she said around her food.
I stared at the lump of browned pie crust covered with ketchup and mused about the fact that pasty rhymed with nasty.
“Try it. You’ll like it.”
“What’s in it?”
“Meat, potatoes, carrots, onions, rutabaga. It’s the perfect food for winter. Miners up in the UP used to keep them in their pockets to warm their hands, and then they’d eat them for lunch.”
“What’s the UP?”
She gave me a disappointed look and then said, “Upper Peninsula. It’s the part of Michigan that’s north of the Mackinac Bridge.”
The answer didn’t make the meal look any more appetizing. It looked like something they might be forcing my mom to eat in prison—Lindy Windsor, the woman who used to cater in posh parties people talked about for years afterward. But Grandma had been so excited to bring a cooler full of these frozen meat pies home from Mass that I cut into the shapeless lump, releasing a plume of steam. I took an exploratory bite and shrugged. It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t anything.
“Probably needs salt,” she suggested. She leaned across the table and liberally salted my food for me.
The next bite was better. I gave her a little nod of approval. We ate a couple more bites in silence before she resumed the line of questioning I thought I had successfully deflected again.
“When are we going out to see your mother?”
I sighed and The Professor mimicked me perfectly.
“We need to get something on the calendar,” Grandma said. “And you need to at least write her a letter in the meantime. It would be nice if you’d get off your high horse and read one from her too.”
I poked at my food. “I don’t know what to say to her.”
“Tell her about school. Tell her about your friends. Tell her you miss her. She just wants to hear from you.”
It wasn’t true that I didn’t know what I wanted to say to her. There were plenty of things I could say. I wanted to ask her what in the world she had been thinking. I wanted to know what had made her and Dad so selfish. I wanted to know why their stupid choices ruined my life. I wanted to know why I didn’t even know who they were.
“How did my parents meet? I mean, how did Mom get from here to Amherst?”
Thankfully my grandmother took a moment to swallow her food before answering. “Your mother wanted to get out of Sussex since the minute she realized there was a bigger world out there. She met your father at Boston College her second semester. They had the same class—American history or something.”
“Did you like my dad?”
“I didn’t have a long time to get to know him. Like I said, I was only invited to the wedding. But far as I can tell, everyone liked your dad. He was very charming and obviously smart. I was sure Lindy would have a great life—a better life than I had. I was sorry she was going to be staying out east. And it took some time to get used to the idea of her marrying a Protestant, but I was happy for her because she was happy. I was as shocked as you were when everything came to light. I knew from the start that your mother had nothing to do with it.”
I wasn’t so sure. Mom had married him. She protected him. She let him do this to our family, and now I was orphaned and stuck forever in Sucky, Michigan.
“She should have stopped him,” I said. “Or left him and taken me with her. She shouldn’t have stuck around. It’s pathetic.”
Grandma frowned. “You should have a little compassion. Most women will put up with an awful lot to keep the men in their lives happy.”
“Not me. I wouldn’t have stood for that.”
She nodded and said, “Sure.”
“What?”
“Sure.”
The smirk on her face sent me into a rage. “I guess you’re the one who taught her to just roll over and take it when your husband’s a terrible person. Nice job, Grandma. Great legacy you’re leaving.”
I wished I could take the words back the minute they were out of my mouth. Grandma’s eyes glistened and her frown lines cut deep into her face. I should have said I was sorry. Instead, I started yelling.
“I don’t want to see her! And I won’t write her any letters. My life is none of her business anymore, and it’s none of yours either!”
I stalked off to my room and locked the door. I knew it was childish. None of this was my grandma’s fault.
Eventually I could hear the sounds of cleaning up, of Grandma tearing off a piece of plastic wrap to cover the uneaten portion of my pasty and washing the dishes. When I heard her turn on the TV, I opened my door and crept behind the couch. The Professor watched me crawl to the kitchen but said nothing, just tilted his head to keep one beady eye on me. When I silently took the phone handset from the cradle, he let out the sound of the ringing phone at the top of his infernal little lungs.
“Shut up, Professor!” Grandma snapped. “I’m trying to hear the TV.”
I quickly dialed Peter’s number. He picked up on the third ring.
“Meet me in the cemetery,” I whispered.
“Robin?”
“Yeah.”
A pause. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
I gently placed the phone back on the cradle, timing the motion with the applause of the Wheel of Fortune audience. I crawled on the floor under The Professor’s watchful eye as the big wheel was spinning and everyone was clapping, hoping it would stop at a large sum or a special prize. Something they thought would make their lives better. I slipped my boots on. Vanna spun the big lighted blocks around to reveal the letters. Another spin. More clapping. I waited. Ding. Vanna spun the letters.
Grandma bellowed at the TV, “The truth shall set you free!”
The Professor screeched.
I had my coat down from the peg by the door and on in a second. Grandma shouted out her answer again, hoping the slack-jawed contestant would hear her. “How can you not see that?” she moaned.
