—11—
St. Louis was still sleepy with winter, the grass like frosted straw, the sky an anemic blue and the Mississippi muddy green, sluggish but unstoppable. Skyscrapers glinted harshly, mirroring the cold white sun.
Park took us to a club that let under-21s in and his bartender friend looked the other way when I drank from Evan’s glass. We watched Park flirt with a gorgeous mixed-race girl, cinnamon skin and laughing eyes, but he left her with a frown and came back to us, saying she wanted Evan’s number. I nearly choked. When I kissed Evan I tasted the whiskey and cola we were sharing. He took me out on the floor and Park joined us. They both danced with me, Evan’s eyes hypnotic and his smile slow and our bodies edging closer and closer until Park wrapped a ridiculously muscular arm around my waist and picked me up, spinning me away. Evan laughed and let me go, and I danced with strangers for a while until he slipped behind me, his mouth at my ear, his erection pressed against my ass, saying, “Everyone’s in love with you.” Guys were staring at me, and so was a cute pixie-haired girl, and I smiled. Cones of hot colored light flashed in my face, scarlet, violet, indigo. I was drunk as much on whiskey as on the liquor of sweat and cologne. We caught our own cab to the loft. Evan pressed me into the soft leather seat and put his hand between my legs until I gasped and the cabbie threatened to kick us out. I tipped him double and we rushed upstairs. The elevator made me shriek with surprise, forgetting the haunting, and Evan laughed and kissed me and once we got inside he picked me up, turning with me in his arms. “What are you doing?” I said, and he said, “Being in love,” and I started kissing him again and he let me down to focus on the kiss. We broke apart and moved around the loft aimlessly, picking things up, flipping switches with a restless, agitated happiness. It’s all still here, I thought. All the things we touched and all the things we felt. It was too intense, being near each other, and we orbited from across the room, keeping large objects between us.
“What if this is it?” he said in front of the windows. Beyond him the night sky was an oil painting of deep, swirling blues, starless, the bright streets sketching a map of light across the city.
I sat on the arm of the sofa, ankles crossed.
“What if this is all we have?” he said, coming closer. “What if you go to California, and I never see you again?”
“Then I’ll make movies about it for the rest of my life. About a girl who falls in love with her teacher, and loses him tragically, and never loves again.”
He looked at my hand on the couch: the Claddagh ring on my finger again, its heart turned toward me.
“Why won’t you come to LA?” I said in a hushed voice.
He took a deep breath. He kept looking at the ring. “Your life is just beginning, Maise. You have so much ahead of you, so many new things. And you’re already way too damn cynical. Don’t argue, it’s true.”
I closed my mouth. Then I said, “I wasn’t.”
He smiled. “I don’t want to take that from you. The thrill of discovering things for yourself. Of feeling like the world is new and made just for you.”
“That’s the exact opposite of how it is.” I was shivering suddenly, shaking. I felt an understanding building in me after a long, arduous unveiling. Revelation. “You’re right, I was cynical. I thought I knew everything, I thought the world was vulgar and crude, all cheap thrills. You couldn’t make me any more jaded than I was when we met.” I let my arms fall, let my spine hold me, a slender fin of bone. How had it borne the weight of so much cynicism all these years? “You changed that. You’re the one who made it new for me. If I hadn’t met you, I would’ve gone off to college thinking everything was the same. I would’ve become hardened and walled up and—” Just like my mother. “—empty. A perfect shell, protecting nothing.”
“Maise,” Evan said.
“Don’t you see how different I am now? Didn’t you see it in my film, and every day we spent together, and apart? The world is new when I’m with you.” I took his hands in mine. “And I’ve seen you, I’ve seen how you light up when you’re with me. It’s the same for you. We’re both kids with each other, and this world is made just for us. So that can’t be your reason for saying no.”
“Am I saying no?”
“You’re not saying yes.” I pulled him toward me. “Do you really want to teach high school in Southern fucking Illinois the rest of your life?”
He gave me that patented furrowed brow.
“And,” I said, pulling him closer, my voice lowering, “do you really not want to fuck me, every day, in our house full of sunlight and Santa Ana winds, in Southern fucking California?”
He put his mouth on my neck, his stubble raking my throat. “I want to fuck you now.”
Do it, I told him with my eyes. Please, please do it.
He took my clothes off, and his own, and laid me on the bed on the icy silk sheets, and the gravity that had threatened to throw us into collision finally did. I held him close as he moved inside me, hard and deep and with an urgency that felt somehow final, and we gave ourselves to it, fully, without reservation. No future and no past, only an endless now. Afterward, as we lay with our limbs tangled and stared at the pipes on the ceiling, his words ran through me. What if this is all we have? This closeness, this space between breaths, holding each other like air in our lungs, the oxygen metabolizing into our blood in a thrilling, ephemeral rush?
How could it ever, ever be enough?
#
“How was your spring break?” Hiyam said, dropping her Cheshire grin on me.
“Best I’ve ever had,” I said, smiling back. “You?”
She rolled her eyes, tossed her hair, bared her smooth coppery neck to me. She laughed at the ceiling. Kids sitting nearby stared.
“In-fucking-describable,” she said.
Translation: coked out of her mind.
I kept smiling, but she didn’t see the way it deepened in my eyes, the dark flash.
“Hey,” I said. “What do you have next period?”
“American History.”
“Ditch and meet me in 209.”
She lowered her face, curious. “Why?”
“I’ve got something for you,” I said, and patted my pocket.
Hiyam laughed her rich, sultry laugh. “You freak.”
Green light, I texted Wesley after class.
Hiyam caught up with me on the stairs to the second floor, where I’d unknowingly made my way to the class that would change my life. Part of me still expected to open his door and catch him glancing up from his desk, smiling. I’d kissed him in here like I meant to devour him, let him push me against the whiteboard and fuck me with his fingers. God, I thought. Was that really my life? It seemed like a dream now. A movie.
There was no Evan inside the dark class. There was, however, a Wesley, sitting with his laptop on the dais at the back. The projector was on, its lamp burning hot as a quasar.
Hiyam’s eyes drifted from him to me. Intrigue, suspicion, but no fear.
Not yet.
“I didn’t know you nerds were into this,” she said.
“Into what?” I said, waiting for her to walk in so I could stealthily lock the door.
“Getting high.”
“We’re not,” Wesley said, moving the mouse cursor over a video.
“We’re into revenge,” I said. “Have a seat.”
Hiyam was so fucking confident, so used to getting away with everything, that she laughed and sat at her old desk, crossing her legs as if we were back in Film Studies, vying for Mr. Wilke’s attention. Now she knew it had always been mine. I took the teacher’s chair, propping my feet on the desk.
“And now for our final victim,” I said, echoing Evan, “Hiyam Farhoudi.”
Wesley clicked play.
I’d seen this a dozen times, so I mostly watched Hiyam’s face. She shook her head knowingly, a smirk curling in the corners of her mouth, when the first frame came up:
Farhoudi residence. New Year’s Eve. Hiyam snorts coke off a mirror in her princess bedroom.
“You little shit,” she said without taking her eyes from the screen.
The scene cuts to black, and the title comes up in caps, just like Wesley’s first film. This one, though, is called ADDICTION.
Hiyam’s burgeoning smirk faded.
There is no soundtrack, only live audio. Hiyam’s laughter. The click of a credit card against glass. Her hard snort and the delicate sniffs that follow. She smiles at the camera, high as fuck, not realizing why we’re recording her. I get her to show me the thirty grand in her secret account. The pills and weed she has stashed all over her room. She loves the attention. She admits to Wesley that she’s blackmailing me. I watch her lick her finger and stick it in her nostril to get all the white. She looks at the camera and says dully, “Ever sucked coke off a guy’s dick? It’s called a blowjob.” She bursts out laughing.
Then, finally, my pièce de résistance.
Hiyam smiles at Gary Rivero in the restaurant, oblivious to Wesley and his hidden camera, and the mic in my sleeve captures the deal for a half-kilo of cocaine.
The film ends. There are no credits.
“So,” I said, rocking my feet side to side, “class? Thoughts?”
Hiyam scooted her chair back with a metallic screech.
“Sit down,” Wesley said. “We’re not done yet.”
“Shut the fuck up,” she said.
I spun my chair to face her. “I’d like to hear what the star thinks about her film debut.”
“You dumb cunt,” she said, moving toward me. “You can’t do shit. My father will destroy you.”
I stood, waiting calmly for her to reach me. I felt so much like the teacher, all the knowledge and power in my hands.
“I doubt it,” I said, my voice light. “Because we sent him the same video an hour ago. You gave me the idea yourself, with your semester project. Your dad seemed to really care about you. He wouldn’t want you throwing your life away on drugs. You should be getting a call from him very soon.”
“You,” she said. Just that: pronoun, no epithet.
“Let me guess. ‘You won’t get away with this. You’ll regret this.’”
She leaned closer. Her breath smelled like wintergreen. “You will regret it. I’ll make sure of that.”
I leaned close, too. “You know, I feel sorry for you, Hiyam. You have everything, all this money and opportunity, and you’re miserable. You want to live without feeling anything. Why even bother living if you’re just going to numb yourself? I’ve had it way worse than you ever will, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
She had the dignity to keep her mouth shut. She stared at me with dark, murderous eyes, then whirled and stalked to the door. It took her a moment to realize it was locked. Wesley muffled a snort.
Hiyam shot a glance back at me and said, “Did you even fuck him in here that day?”
I smiled at her, pityingly.
She slammed the door.
“God,” Wesley said, heaving a huge sigh. “Did it work?”
I was shaking. I wasn’t sure when that had started.
I sat back down and said, “I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.”
All I really wanted was for her to leave me and Evan the fuck alone. She could buy her coke direct from Gary and scrub her brain blank with it for all I cared. I’d told her dad I just wanted this to be over—I wanted to move on, go to college, not live with this sword hanging over my head.
I prayed he’d understand.
“At least the hard part’s over,” Wesley said.
But this wasn’t the hard part. Confronting this junkie was easy. There was one more I had to face, and she wouldn’t surrender before drawing blood.
#
I sat in the kitchen waiting like I had so many nights when I was little, hungry, bored, alone in the house. When I thought of my so-called childhood, that’s what I pictured above all: a sylvan girl with bramble hair and spooky green eyes, kicking her bare, dirty feet on a kitchen chair, waiting. Waiting. Waiting. That girl should have been running in the woods with a boy, scratching secrets into the walls of an old wolf den, howling, chasing each other, wild and free. Not sitting in a room that smelled of marijuana and drain cleaner, her belly growling. On good nights Mom came home with food, a bag glistening and transparent with French fry grease, smelling like heaven, and I’d go to bed with salty-sweet lips and sleep like the dead. On bad nights she came home stoned, or with a man, or not at all. Those nights I didn’t sleep much. I listened for her key in the lock, or grunting and the bed knocking against the wall downstairs. Once a pair of heavy footsteps came to my door. I lay in bed, terrified, paralyzed. I thought they’d finally gone when the door creaked open, and I screamed, and Mom came running, still drunk, hitting the guy in the back until he left.
I always locked my room after that.
You, I thought, timing it with the ticking clock. You. You. You.
She walked in at midnight. My ass was numb, and my heart, too. I looked at her woodenly. You have my face, I thought. What have you done to it? It’s so old and sad.
“What’s going on, babe?” she said, pulling a tallboy from the fridge.
“Sit down, Mom. Please.”
Hiss, crack, fizz. I could hear her swallowing, working that dry, burned throat. She sat across from me.
“Gary says you took care of things,” she said.
I nodded.
“How the hell’d you manage that?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s my business.”
“Your business is my business, babe.”
“No.” I leaned forward, looking her in the eyes. “It’s mine.”
For a minute I thought she’d pick a fight, but I guess clearing her debt temporarily cowed her. She picked at the tab on her can instead.
“Mom.” I waited till she met my gaze. “I got into college in Los Angeles. I’m leaving the second week of June.”
She said nothing. Her eyes were flat, unblinking. She took a swig.
For the first time I realized my mother might be jealous of me. Of my unspoiled life, all the possibilities I still had to make something of myself.
Deep breath.
“I saved some money. Enough to replace what Nan gave me.” I opened the folded paper on the table and slid it over to her. Until a second ago it had been mere junk.
Mom’s eyes bounced off the paper to my face. “What is this?”
“Read it.”
She mouthed the words. She stopped at Rehabilitation Center.
“It cost every penny I had, but I got you in for sixty days. It’s a good clinic, Mom. They’re willing to take you June 1st.”
She looked at me like I was a potted plant that had just started talking. “What the hell is this?”
“I’m trying to help you,” I said, my voice straining.
She pushed the paper at me, pushed her chair back. “This’s some intervention shit.”
“It’s voluntary.”
“You ain’t making me do nothing, little girl. I call the shots. I’m your mother.”
My palm hit the table, the ring making a sharp clack. “You lost the right to call yourself that years ago. This is not a negotiation. This is your last chance to fix your fucking life before you’re too old and brain-damaged to remember it was ever different.” I stood, glowering down at her. Somehow this woman always brought my accent out, and I let it take the reins of my voice. “This is my offer, Mom. Take it or leave it. You complete the program, you stay clean, and I’ll come see you for Christmas. If you don’t, I’m out of your life forever.” I hit the table again, softer. “Do you understand me? You will never see me again.”
She was breathing shallowly, fast. She stared at some central point on my face, not quite my eyes. “This how I raised you? To make fuckin’ threats about disowning me?”
“No,” I said quietly. “This is how I raised me.”
#
Green slowly crept back into the world, reawakening it as my own body reawakened. I spent spring weekends in St. Louis with Evan, walking along the cobblestoned wharf, listening to the world thaw. If this was all we had, then I would love it unreservedly. When we stopped to watch the boats I leaned back against his body, my neck arching over his shoulder, my face to the sun. I could feel it kindling in my bones. A cold breeze whipped off the water, smelling of mud and fish, and gulls shrieked and their cries echoed eerily under the stone arches of the Eads Bridge. We walked through sun and shadow and sun again. Our own shadows were long and thin, stretching far down the wharf.
I didn’t ask about LA. My cards were on the table. His move.
#
The sky was a crisp azure on graduation day. They held the ceremony on the football field, the grass lush and emitting a rainy perfume, our royal blue gowns gleaming in the sun.
Hiyam wasn’t there. She’d been pulled from school, finishing her year with a private tutor. Mom wasn’t there, either, as I’d expected. But the Browns were, all of them—Siobhan, Natalie, and Jack the professor, a man in his sixties, still handsome in a Clint Eastwood way, straight brow and deep-set eyes beneath a wing of silver hair. He sat next to Siobhan, and they chuckled together over private jokes. Once I saw Jack touching the small of her back, looking at her with an old, smoldering fondness.
“Dad’s current girlfriend is twenty-two,” Wesley whispered to me as we sat through the valedictorian speech. “Please tell me you’ll never date a dinosaur like him.”
I flicked his ear, hard.
Evan was there, at the back of the crowd. When they called us to the stage for our diplomas I screamed my head off for Wesley, and on my turn the Browns cheered wildly, but the only person I saw was Evan, standing at the back, the sun slanting in his hair and outlining him in gold, clapping so hard he drowned out everyone else.
Afterward we ran the usual gauntlet of family hugs. When we slipped away and reached Evan, he was surrounded by half our old Film Studies class, eagerly telling him their plans. Rebecca was going to art school in Georgia. A few kids were heading to NYC for theater. Everyone was impressed when we said we were going to LA, and Wesley basked in the attention while I met Evan’s gaze, something twisting in my chest, a strangling vine. The boys shook his hand and the girls hugged him, and when it was my turn I breathed in his ear, “You changed my life, Mr. Wilke.”
His arms tightened around me, and he whispered back, “You changed mine.”
Wesley looked at the two of us, then away.
The crazy thing was that after all of this, no one knew. No one gave me a second glance or raised an eyebrow. They talked excitedly about Hollywood and New York. They asked Evan about his college days. The rumors had died down without Hiyam fueling them. Now he was just a teacher, and I was just another student, not connected to him in any special way. I drifted across the grass, leaving him there in the sun and the warmth of their attention, closing my eyes and letting the light soak through, blinding me with my own neon red blood.
#
Wesley left with Natalie the day after graduation, heading to California. I had plans to take a plane next week. Carbondale graduated later than us.
I stayed with Siobhan after her kids left. We made Manhattans with maraschino cherries and sat on the back deck, talking long after sunset. She planned to travel now that Wesley had left home. She wanted to see Europe, write a novel, date a young Italian (“At least three times younger than me,” she said, “to get even with Jack.”), live for a while in a villa by the sea. She knew I was waiting for an answer from Evan.
“I am not the wise woman you think,” she said, tilting her glass. Starlight skimmed off the rim and shot into her eyes, sparkling. “But I will tell you this: don’t put your life on hold for someone, or you’ll wake up at forty-two with an empty house and a terrifying sense of freedom and no energy or innocence left to enjoy it.”
I wanted to hug her so much. “If Wesley doesn’t call you every week, I’ll beat the shit out of him.”
“Perhaps you should do that anyway, as a preventive measure.”
I laughed, she cackled, and we got drunk under the leaves and stars.
#
When I got home, I discovered two shocking things.
One: Mom was gone.
She’d scrawled a note on the back of an envelope and left it on the kitchen table. Her childish, blocky handwriting: Checking in to clinic. Sorry I’m a shit mom & no good with words. This letter came for you.
I blinked the sudden tears out of my eyes—I was drunk, that was the only explanation—and turned the envelope over. My name in florid, scrolling letters. Return address: Ahmad Farhoudi.
Shocking thing number two: a letter from Hiyam’s dad.
I opened it, my heart going at lightspeed. A smaller slip of paper fluttered out. I focused on the larger one.
My deepest gratitude for your discretion and concern regarding my daughter. You have given both of us a second chance. I hope this small gift helps you transition to an exciting new period in your life.
The smaller slip of paper was a check.
For ten thousand dollars.
I started laughing, breathless, crazy laughter, and then I jumped up and did a sort of whirling dervish dance around the kitchen, saying, “Thank you, sweet Jesus, I fucking love you,” and could not stop laughing with hysterical joy and relief.
#
And then the only thing left was him.
We spent that last week in St. Louis. Summer was in full bloom now, the city wild and drenched with color, the sidewalks breathing warmly beneath my sandals. I tried my best to live in the moment. To not think about the fact that there were only five more days before we might part for the last time. Then four. Then three. But the tension was always there, a wire tightening in me, pulling my limbs and neck taut like a puppet, and when I looked up at the Arch I thought, That’s how I feel. A terrifying upward pull, away from terra firma.
One night in the loft, Evan was pouring a drink in the kitchen when he suddenly put the bottle down and walked over to me, sinking to his knees. He clutched my legs, his face pressing to my shins, stubble grinding against smoothness. I was bewildered, and when he said, “God, what am I doing?” my confusion became fear. I stroked his hair tentatively, asked what was wrong. He looked up, his face full of panic, and said, “I can’t do this to you. You don’t know what you’re doing, Maise. You have a life to live, not a broken man to fix.” I stared at him, horrified, starting to cry as I realized what he was saying, and that quickly he flipped a switch and became the one comforting me, apologizing, soothing me with promises that he was just tired, stressed, not thinking clearly. But that night we both lay awake, staring at the ceiling, silent. I thought, Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who’ve already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can’t even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else.
Two days.
The wires finally snapped at lunch.
I sat on a patio in front of a plate of something I couldn’t even process as food. The sunlight ricocheting off the concrete was blinding. Silverware flashed, all sharp edges. Everything was bright and incomprehensible.
My fork clattered to the plate, catching Evan’s attention. His skin had tanned slightly, and in the sun his eyes were so vividly blue it didn’t seem the right word anymore—they were azul, the color of the Mexican Pacific, so pure it almost hurt to look at. He put his fork down. He looked so beautiful sitting there, a fine scatter of sand on his cheeks, the sun drizzling his hair with light, gold on gold.
“Stop acting,” I said quietly. “Stop pretending you’re not scared.”
“I’m scared,” he said, his voice also soft.
“We made it through the worst, Evan. School’s over. This should be the easy part.” The summer sun was in my blood, shining through my skin. “Why can’t you let yourself do what makes you happy?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It really is. You drop the bullshit and tell me yes or no.”
His gaze broke away from me, his eyes tightening. “Just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s bullshit.”
“That’s exactly what it means.”
“You know,” he said, focusing on me again, “you talk like you’re so jaded and wise, but sometimes you’re pretty naive.”
My mouth dropped. I felt like he’d punched me. I swallowed, and said, “I’m eighteen fucking years old. Excuse me for being naive.”
Evan leaned across the table, lowering his voice. “That’s right. You’re eighteen. I’m thirty-three. I’m a grown man, Maise. Fifteen years older than you, fifteen years’ worth of problems, and bitterness, and second-guessing myself. You don’t need that. Not when you can have a clean slate in California.”
Adrenaline pumped through me, turning me cold, my hands and feet tingling. Finally. This was finally all coming into the open.
“Like I don’t have my own problems?” I shot back. “How about my junkie mother and deadbeat dad? And the guys I was with before you, who I just wanted to be nice to me?” My voice cracked; I swallowed again. “And Wesley stalking me, and Hiyam blackmailing me, and every crazy thing that’s happened this year?”
“What happened with Hiyam?” he said, frowning.
God, stupid slip-up. I hadn’t told him about the blackmail, knowing he’d use it as another example of how he was ruining my life. It was a story for another time.
“The point is, I don’t have a clean slate. All of that shit comes with me. It’s part of who I am. Your problems have always been part of you, and I accepted them. That doesn’t change now.”
“You’re young, Maise,” he said gently, giving me that mournful look that took me apart inside. “You don’t know any better.”
I could not believe this. I could not believe, after everything, he was playing the fucking age card. Reducing me to a number.
“Fuck you,” I said.
I stood up. The lion in me wanted to flip the table over, listen to the glass and china shattering, see the shocked faces, but it would only prove his point about my age. I turned around and walked out. I had no idea where I was going, no idea where or who I was, just a meaningless blur of blood cells floating over white-hot concrete. I knew what he was doing. Trying to piss me off, make me leave him. You fucking coward, I thought. If you think you’re so wrong for me, own it, and let me decide. Don’t try to do what’s best for me. Don’t try to teach me.
I ended up in one of those urban parks that were everywhere downtown, this one all swathes of velvet green grass and trees centering on a plaza with a huge pool. In the center, a bronze Olympian runner stood frozen midstride, plumes of white water pulsing to either side of him. Behind the statue you could see the Old Courthouse and the Arch, a visual timeline of history. I sat on the coping, dipping a hand into the cool water and pressing it to my neck. Breathe, I told myself. I smelled wet metal. I watched the sun chip shards of light into the pool’s surface.
Evan eventually found me. He stopped a few feet away, his hands hanging loosely, his pale short-sleeved Oxford glowing with sunlight. He stood there while I stared into the pool.
“You look so beautiful,” he said. “So beautiful and far away.”
Do something, I thought. Jump in the water, propose to me, tell me you’re moving to South Africa. Don’t just let me go.
But he only stood there, breaking my heart.
I got up. Headed toward his car, across a street bordering the park, my sundress snapping at my legs as I walked fast. Evan caught me before I crossed and touched my shoulder and I stopped right in the middle of the street.
“Don’t leave like this,” he said.
The muscles of my throat were tight as a noose. “This is it, Evan. This is how it’s going to end. Not on some romantic runway at midnight. It’s going to end in broad daylight, on a crowded street, with people—shut up!” I snapped when a car honked behind me, “—with people hurrying us so they can go pick up their laundry. Is this how you imagined it? Is this really how you want it to end?”
He looked at me miserably, his voice thick. “I don’t want it to end.”
“That’s not good enough,” I said. The car veered around us and zoomed away. I started to cry. “If you’re not on that plane with me, it’s over. And I’m not holding my breath a minute longer to find out. Are you coming with me or not?”
This is what he said:
Nothing.
Not a word to stop me, to explain himself, no matter how futile it would be.
He just gave me that aching, tender look that ripped me to shreds.
“Give me your keys,” I said. “Give me your fucking keys.”
He did.
Autopilot engaged. I opened the trunk, pulled my bags out. Some of my clothes were still in the loft, trivial things, toothbrush, lotion. Nothing I cared about. Not that I cared about anything anymore.
“Maise,” Evan said, “please.”
I dropped my bags into the street. Cars were honking again, edging around us. I ignored them. I knelt to unzip one of the bags and yanked out that fucking stuffed pony I’d won almost a year ago and hurled it at him. Goodbye, Louis. Then I bounced to my feet, flagging down a taxi.
“Maise,” Evan said again.
I didn’t look at him. The cab coasted over, popped the trunk, and I shoved my bags in. Threw myself into the backseat and slammed the door. I couldn’t feel anything. My brain registered the hot sun-baked leather, but my body was numb.
“Where you headed?” the cabbie said.
“Just drive,” I said, refusing to wipe the tears off my face. “Drive around for a while, please.”
He pulled away, and I lasted all of eight seconds before I started crying again, openly, horribly, lowering my head and shrouding myself in the dark curtain of my hair. The hem of my dress turned transparent with tears.
Mr. Driver didn’t say a word.
The brain is an incredible multitasker. At the same time that it’s piercing itself with superheated needles of anguish, it’s ruthlessly making plans, contingencies, plotting out a future, giving zero fucks whether it’ll ever see it. On the day I die, it’ll be calculating what to have for dinner as it bombards itself with pain signals from my amputated legs or my clocked-out heart. And so, when I stopped crying, I wiped the snot off my upper lip and took out my phone.
In sixty seconds, I had an address for the driver.
Park was waiting in the cool green shade of an elm outside his building. He took my bags as I paid the fare.
“You’ll be all right,” the driver said.
I laughed, sniffling. “Yeah. I will.”
Park led me upstairs without a word. He had a condo a few floors up, pristine cherry hardwood and sleek modern furniture, tracklights, art on raw canvases, everything in shades of gray and touches of chrome. A view of the Arch through enormous windows.
“This way,” he said, still carrying my bags.
He showed me to a bathroom. It was so white I squinted, hard lights hitting the mirrors. It looked like a place where androids slept. I scrubbed my face, brushed my hair, tried to tease out some vestige of my humanity, instead of looking like a decomposing waif.
When I came out Park was at the granite kitchen counter, sipping a beer. “Drink?”
“Water, please. I’m really sorry to show up like this.”
He made a quick, dismissive gesture, handed me a glass, and looked at me with muted curiosity. Men, I thought. They’ll never ask, even if they’re dying to know.
Fifteen years. Was that really what it came down to? I’d been with Evan for the better part of the past year, so why was age a problem now? Because he’d be committing himself to something, I guess. Uprooting his life, leaving his friends, the easy jobs and low cost of living, all for a city full of broken dreams and a screwed-up eighteen-year-old who’d already left him twice.
I took a deep breath and drank. When I thought of it like that, I couldn’t blame him.
“The first time I met you,” I said, “you thought it was happening again, didn’t you? What happened with the other girl.”
Park’s eyes narrowed. He took a moment to answer, sipping his beer first. “She came to me, crying and begging. I thought she needed help. It was all an act. Eric—” He caught himself. “—E felt so guilty, he refused to see what she was doing. I told him, ‘You were wrong, but so is torturing someone for a mistake.’ I was moving to St. Louis for a job and offered him a chance to start over.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Since college. We were roommates.”
“Why was that girl torturing him?”
Park spun his bottle on the counter. “She thought she was in love.”
But she wasn’t. She was just a hurt, fucked-up, obsessed little girl. Maybe that was how Evan saw me.
“You know,” Park said, peering into his beer, “I’ve known E half my life. He’s family. Even my mother loves him, and she is impossible to impress. Like, doesn’t carry the gene.” He grinned at me, let it slowly fade. “He has changed so much since he met you. He talks about getting back into acting. Helping you launch a movie career. I haven’t heard him talk so much about the future since college. He’s finally looking forward, not backward.”
I swallowed. I was a mess inside, part of me lifting at this, reaching for any shred of hope, but the greater part knowing it was just that, just talk. We were past that stage. No more dialogue. Action beats only.
“He can talk about the future all he wants, but it’s not going to wait for him to start.”
Park gave a quick laugh. “You sound like my mother. She would like you, too.”
He went to shower, and I stared out the windows at the Arch looping over the shining blue thread of the Mississippi, like a silver shoelace. I couldn’t imagine getting through the next two days. Not in this haunted city, not with the laughing ghost of a girl who thought she was getting away with some grand secret. Funny, how easy happiness had been when it was us against the world. Guess that was the trick after all.
I took out my phone.
When Park came back, I said, “I rescheduled my flight. I’m leaving tonight. Can you drive me?”
“Of course,” he said, but apprehension flickered in his eyes.
I checked and rechecked my bags, texted Wesley that I’d be arriving early, watched TV with Park on his absurdly large screen. My new departure time was nine P.M. It was a long drive.
“I guess we should go,” I said when the sky began to turn lavender.
Park paused with my bags at the door. “You sure about this? Maybe you should wait, sleep on it.”
“I’ve been waiting for months,” I said, but what I thought was, I’ve been waiting my whole life. I was so sure this was different, the kind of love story they made movies and books about, but in the end it was just a summer to a summer, a dizzying breath of honeysuckle and whiskey and candle smoke, inhaled, held, let go.
Park told me funny bar stories on the way to the airport, trying to take my mind off things, and I laughed but I felt outside myself, an observer. The camera watching the girl. He walked me inside the terminal all the way to the TSA checkpoint, because he said no one should go to an airport alone. That almost made cry. He said he’d tell Evan I got here safely. I hugged him goodbye, and he winked.
Lambert International was cold and bright as a hospital, everything sterile white. I was freezing but I walked slowly to my gate, wanting to prolong it all, listening to the voices on the PA talking about gate changes and delays with an intense reverence. Lives changed here, stories beginning and ending. Somewhere lovers met for the first time after talking online, touching each other’s faces with amazement. An Afghanistan vet with sand in her boots hugged her husband and kid. And a girl headed west, chasing the setting sun, without the man she loved. It was so surreal. It was going to end in an airport after all, just like Ilsa. I stared at the signs, the names of cities, but I was lost inside myself. Regrets Only Beyond This Point.
I checked in and sat watching the planes glinting in the sunset, sleek painted steel against the fire in the sky. I listened to Sophie Barker’s cover of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” until I thought I was as sad as I could get, then switched to “Maps” and found out I could get sadder, and started laughing at myself, ridiculously, and then they called us for boarding.
Okay, I thought, walking down the gangway. This is it.
Goodbye, Rick. Goodbye, Captain Renault.
Goodbye, Eric Evan Wilke.
God, get to your seat without crying, Maise O’Malley.
I was in the first row of coach, window seat. When I buckled my belt I thought suddenly of getting in the front car of Deathsnake and my eyes went blurry. I turned to the window, forcing myself to focus through my reflection. In the deepening twilight, the runway lights looked like the carnival fireflies that night in August, distance making them beautiful. Wish you were here. Someone took the seat next to me and I tried to school my face. God, the last thing I needed was people thinking I was crying because I had a bomb strapped to my chest. In a few minutes, I’d be getting the world’s best view of the only place I’d ever lived or loved, but I’d be seeing it all by myself.
I could still smell Evan on my clothes, my skin, as if he was right here. I should have fucking changed.
The captain got on the PA, announcing our flight like a movie. Tonight’s feature is the Rest of Your Sorry Life. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the window, wanting to drink in as much of St. Louis as I could, knowing somewhere out there, one of those infinitesimally small lights was him. I wondered if he’d look up and see the planes crossing the sky like shooting stars, knowing one of those lights was me.
“You’re pretty brave,” the guy beside me said, “sitting up front by yourself.”
The floor fell out of the universe. I was in freefall.
I turned.
All I saw was blurred gold, and a small, hopeful smile, and the haze of city lights through the window across the aisle, twinkling. I couldn’t speak. I could only contain the heart and lungs that were beating inside me, that filled my whole body until I was nothing but breath and blood.
The camera zooms in on the shine of an eye, the tremulous quiver of a lip. He’s smiling but his eyes are wet. She’s crying but her heart is infinitely light. Background noise recedes. Music fades in, swelling.
Spontaneously and simultaneously, they reach for each other’s hands.