“I guess I’ll wait here with the dogs,” Stella said as we pulled into the lot. Hula, hula went the girl. Bob, bob went the dog. “And then I guess you owe me a million dollars.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I’ll just listen to your supersweet, super-girly music and mellow out. I look at it as my contribution to finding a cure for ulcerative colitis.” She crossed her arms and leaned back, shut her eyes.
“Ha. I’m sorry. But I can’t drive on my own yet! I mean, I still only have my learner’s.” Getting my license hadn’t been first and foremost on my mind.
“I realize,” she said. “It’s no big deal.”
“I guess,” I said. “Thank you, Stella. Really.” I turned toward the boathouse.
The last time I was here I could barely walk. I was skinny and breakable, and I had leaned on Connor the whole way down. Now, he was separate from me. I saw him from where I stood, alone, far away. His feet dangled over the rickety peer and Verlaine sat next to him, tail wagging along the splintery wood.
Oh my God, it was like some crazy ad for perfect boy clothes or something. Tousled Connor, green down vest, old sneaks, sad eyes, golden retriever. When would my heart stop skipping, just at the sight of him?
Question: Who do you go to first? The boy you love or the boy you love’s dog?
“Verlaine!” I said, running toward them.
Verlaine is so elegant and . . . trained. He wagged his tail some more and sat and smiled at me. When I patted my chest, he brought his front paws up and dog-hugged me.
“Hi,” I said through his scruff. And then: “Hi.” I looked through the scruff to Connor.
He stood up and we hugged. This is what it was like: like all the parts of me that had been exposed, all my nerves and cells and synapses, were finally again connected. Click. Connor.
I could feel him crying. Or maybe that was me.
The last time we were here, we’d gone out in that little boat and he’d had to carry me out of it. I had thought I might die then. Of illness, of shame, of sadness. But I lived and I’m not that sick person anymore.
I wondered if he could even lift me now.
“What brings you here?” I asked him, weaving my fingers through his. It was amazing to touch him again. I had thought maybe I would never touch him again.
He looked down. He squeezed my hand, hard. “I have to leave,” he said.
“Why are you even telling me this? I haven’t seen you anyway. I mean, what’s the difference?”
“Well, there’s a difference to me. My parents have been trying to get me into this place in California, and they finally made space for me.”
“California!”
“Yes! That’s what I’m saying. Even if I haven’t seen you, I know you’ve been near.”
I nodded, swallowing.
“After I got kicked out of Stone Mountain, this was where they wanted me to go.”
“Got the Stone Mountain memos. I feel bad about that.”
He nodded. “It was my fault.”
To that, I said nothing.
“It wasn’t unpleasant. Precisely the opposite. It was so worth it.”
“But you lied! Again! And you’ve been here, just a town away from me.” Just to say it enraged me. I was angry that we had lost all that time and I was mad that Connor had lost it for us. “Again!”
“So I could see you,” he said. “Greater good.”
I was silent.
“How are you, by the way?”
“By the way? I’m fine. I’m going in for surgery next month. All fine!” I said, falsely bright.
“I want to be there for that. When you wake up.” Connor gripped my hand harder. I felt his bones.
“I don’t see how that will happen, do you? I’m a long way from California.” I imagined waking up from the anesthesia and seeing Connor’s freckled, sunny face. “But I want you to be there too.”
“I’ve got to go really soon. My dad is waiting at the restaurant down the road. I’m just going to text him when we’re done here.”
“Done?”
“Just with this particular good-bye.”
I looked at him. “Okay. Slow down. Give me a minute. I’m always trying to catch up with you.”
“This place has, like, four kids to a classroom. Everyone gets their own horse to take care of. That’s what my parents were so into. They want to help me. You don’t see me. When I’m alone. I have to say I fell back on some bad habits.”
My mind went there. Right there. The girl. The one who he never spoke to again. And how many others? “What kind of habits?” I asked him. I was shaking.
“Nothing that involved me leaving the house. Or being with another person. Nothing like that.”
I breathed out.
“It’s not like that. It can just get really bleak where I live.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I wish you could have told me. That you could tell me.”
“I know. I know.”
“You could have.”
“Anyway, so the horses. You get to take care of something that needs you so much. But also gives a lot back,” Connor said.
“Yes. I get that. That’s what you do.” I shivered.
“DC. My parents think it’s a shitty place for me. All the people I smoked with. The scene of the accident. They’re not totally wrong. I want to be better.”
“And me.”
“No,” Connor said. “Not you. Never you.”
I smiled. Just a little smile.
Suddenly, Connor snapped Verlaine’s red leash on his collar. “Can you take him?” he asked, holding the leash out to me.
“Sure,” I said, taking the leash. “Hello, Verlaine! Want to go for a spin?”
“No.” Connor looked at me so seriously. “Take him take him.”
I didn’t stun easily by then—what could be more shocking than what had already happened?—but here I was, stunned.
“Connor.”
“Please, Lizzie. He loves you. He’s always alone at my house. He’s already changed,” Connor said. “He chews things up. He barks a lot. He’s used to companionship.”
I knew he was also talking about himself. My new superpower told me so. I wonder what it was like for Connor, when he was invisible in his room.
“If I’m all the way in California and know he’s all alone, I won’t be able to . . . concentrate on getting better.”
I imagined my parents. Voilà, I’d say. Please give a warm welcome to Dog Number Three!
“Okay.” What else could I say?
“And that you two will be together makes me so happy.” He seemed suddenly lighter. The old Connor, as bright as if he’d borrowed the sun. “And Frog. I bet she’s huge now.”
No kidding. Frog was growing bigger by the second, already the size of my palm. Zoe said we should have a ceremony and let her go in the backyard, but that isn’t true about turtles, that they want to be let go. They can die that way, trolling the suburbs, looking for home. “Okay,” I said again, resolved, and trying to quiet the noise of dealing with my parents in my head.
“I want to be there when you go in for the surgery. But it will be hard to maneuver.”
“Don’t,” I said. “That’s how you got into this mess, remember? At least part of the mess anyway.”
“I’ll be back for summer, though,” he said. “For sure.”
There were a few boats out on the water, some rowers, and a father and son in a canoe farther out. The sun was so bright on all of them.
Connor hugged me, tightly. So, so tightly. “I won’t check out again. I won’t,” he said. “I promise.”
I hugged him back with everything I had. All my strength and love and openness. There was no shell to me anymore at all.
I felt the hard plastic when I placed my hand in my pocket. “I went back,” I said. “With Mabel. To the hospital. And Collette gave me this.” I brought it out and opened my palm. “It was Thelma’s daughter’s,” I said. “This butterfly.” I placed the barrette in his hand, and he curled his fingers around it. “I don’t know, I know we didn’t know Thelma or anything, or really talk to her that much, but I just feel like it’s some kind of talisman, I think. From the past to the future.” Had the God’s eye brought me luck? I think that it had.
Connor’s phone buzzed. “I know that’s my dad,” he said. “We have to go. All my stuff’s in the car. Catching a plane in a few hours.”
I swallowed.
“Well, bye then,” I said. “Again.”
“Bye.”
But we didn’t move. We just looked at each other.
Abruptly Connor squatted down and hugged Verlaine. I couldn’t watch. It was too awful.
He stood up and faced me. “I love you,” he said.
“Me too,” I said. “Love.” Would I ever hear the word from Connor and not feel fluttery and light?
He kissed my nose. Then my lips. Just lightly. So lightly and sweetly. “I’ll be back,” he said.
“I know you will. I have your dog.”
“No, but I’ll be back. I just know it.”
I nodded. Good-bye again.
And then I turned to leave with Verlaine, who kept looking back to see if his person was coming too.
But his person wasn’t coming, not then anyway.
I turned around and waved to Connor, my Connor. The golden boy.
I watched him put this butterfly in his pocket. Proof that we had all been there.
Why would I put Frog in the backyard like that? I thought as I headed back to Stella and the dogs I knew were waiting with the heat and the music on. It was a random thought, but that was what I was thinking then. I couldn’t look back at Connor. I thought how I would just get a bigger tank. And then a bigger one and then a bigger one.
I looked down at Verlaine, who was walking with me tentatively. Stella’s car was just around a patch of trees. I will hold on to Frog forever, I thought. We will grow up together. Together, we will grow strong.
I startled Stella, who was zoning out to Angus and Julia Stone. “I don’t know how you stay awake listening to this shit,” she said, sitting up. “It is peaceful, though.”
I held out Verlaine’s leash. “Parting gift,” I said. I opened the door for Verlaine and he hopped in. I climbed in the back with him.
“A real beauty,” she said as she looked in the rearview.
I nodded. “I know.” I hugged Verlaine. “He’s a keeper,” I said.
When I went away to camp six months ago, I left behind one dog and a life of regularness. And then I was counting losses. I lost so much about my life, I’d thought. But when I walked back toward my house that day Connor and I said good-bye again, I had: everything. Three dogs, a turtle, a true friend, a new job, someone I loved so much it hurt my heart to think of it. What was missing? Nothing was missing anymore.
Almost everyone was here.
After Stella dropped us off, I struggled up the front steps, stumbling over the three dogs I held by their collars. She honked her horn and sped off. Her horn? It played “Johnny B. Goode.” I heard it all the way down my street.
They pulled every which way, straining against my grip. I looked up at my house. That white front door. My mother’s newspaper. My father’s garden. My sister’s textbooks. I leaned down. For a brief moment, the dogs were still. And then, I let go.