Chapter 29: Nothing says “fun” like a room full of drunken straight girls and a male stripper.
We only head back to the cabin when we get too cold to keep making out on the dock. And after the frigid air surrounding the lake, stepping into the warm glow of the living room is like walking into a sauna.
As much as I’d hoped we’d stayed outside long enough to miss it, the table with the board game on it has been pushed aside, couches have been shoved out of the way, Hall & Oates has been replaced with something bass-ier, and the first thing that greets me when I open the door is a grinning, fish-pale white guy in a Speedo, dancing on the coffee table and thrusting his sausage skyward. Heavy-and-Pink, she of the “naked as a jaybird” toddlers, is squealing with delight and shaking what her mama gave her, dollar bill pinched between her first two fingers.
Oh, Jesus H. Fucking Christ.
These are the times when you want to firebomb your retinas until permanently blinded. But it doesn’t matter, because you know that even once your eyeballs are burned out of your skull, you’re still going to be seeing that, seeing fucking Grace Adler get pushed on top of the coffee table, dancing drunk and out-of-sync and flushed red as Mr. Sausage turns his attention onto her and starts grinding mere inches away, his mostly fit but not-quite-buff skinny body snaking up and down like one of those Gumby air tube men that used car dealerships put out in the front lot to announce a BIG SALE!!!
Amy and I slip in quietly, unnoticed by the room full of drunken, middle-aged women, and I help her out of her coat.
“I’m going to need a drink to make it through this,” she says to me in a low tone.
“Only one?”
She quirks a sardonic eyebrow. “Or five. You want one?”
I nod.
“Any preference?”
“Anything,” I say. “Rubbing alcohol, maybe.”
“I’ll be right back,” she says, squeezing my hand.
“I’ll put our coats away.”
I watch as Amy skirts around Heavy-and-Pink and a few other women, making her way towards the kitchen. A blonde head turns when she passes.
Jenny.
She looks over her shoulder, catches my eye. Her smile falters for a moment, but then she goes back to clapping and swaying and giggling with everyone else.
Giggling. There’s a lot of fucking giggling, and I’m finding that I’m glad I never spent the night in a sorority house, after all. I head for the bedroom with the pile of coats on the bed.
#
I’m draping Amy’s damp pea coat on top of my leather jacket when I hear the door to the bedroom closing softly, muting the thumping music emanating from the living room.
I look over my shoulder, and there’s Jenny, leaning back against the door, hands pinned behind her. Her pale face is flushed red, either from too much booze of from the heat of the makeshift, living room dance floor.
“Hey,” I say, surprised and a little confused by her sudden appearance.
She rakes long blonde hair away from her face. It’s the first time I’ve seen it unbraided this week, making her look less mom-like and more like the Jenny I once knew.
“Hey,” she answers weakly. Then says nothing more.
I turn away from the pea coat. “You okay?”
Her eyes fall. She shakes her head.
Mild alarm courses through me. “Are you going to be sick?” I ask, because I know all-too-well about Jenny’s low tolerance for alcohol, and the disaster that strikes when she mixes her grains. “Do you need help into the bathroom?”
“I’m not drunk,” she says. Then amends herself with, “Well, I’m not that drunk. Only a little.” She holds up her thumb and forefinger, an inch or two apart, to show me just how not-drunk she is.
Which, in other words, means she’s either really tipsy or full-on fucking drunk.
“Oh. So then… what’s wrong?”
She lifts an index finger slowly, points it at my chest. Rotates her hand, points at her own chest. “We are,” she whispers.
I play dumb, even though I worry that I know exactly what she’s talking about. “What do you mean, we’re wrong? I thought we had some very fucking civil, adult lunchtime conversations this week.”
She crosses the room slowly, walks around the edge of the bed. She stops when she’s two feet away from me, just outside the outer boundary of Personal Space Zone, and points at my neck.
“You have something on your throat,” Jenny says, and I reach up automatically, run my fingers across the place where I know there must be a hickey showing in the space left by the unbuttoned collar of my shirt. Even though I know there’s nothing there that’s going to magically wipe away, I look down at my hand anyway, swiping my thumb against my fingertips.
Jenny breathes out a laugh. “It’s still there, Ani.”
“Don’t call me that.”
She shrugs. Neither of us speaks.
“You must like her,” she says after a moment. “To let her leave a mark like that.”
“It’s a hickey, Jenny, not a tattoo.”
“You could’ve stopped her.”
“Maybe. But why should I have?”
“Because you hate hickeys,” Jenny says plainly.
Now it’s my turn to shrug. “Never too late to turn over a new leaf.”
A frown flashes across her face. Suddenly she asks, “Why did you stop talking to me? Five years ago? I thought we were doing fine, but then you came to town for your sister’s wedding, we hung out a few times, and then… nothing. Not a single word to me for five years. Not until this week.”
“I thought we agreed not to talk about the past?”
“It’s just one question. Is it really that hard to answer?”
I sigh. “We did a lot more than ‘hang out’ when I came home for my sister’s wedding. You know that. It was wrong. And it hurt too much. And I couldn’t do it anymore — not to me, not to you, not even to fucking Mason. My sister found out about how much time you and I were spending together — and she guessed what we’d done — and she and my brothers confronted me. Told me I needed to take a break from you. And I realized they were right.”
The frown comes back; she seems to think for a few seconds. “I get that we needed to stop… that, but did you really have to cut me out completely? Why couldn’t we have at least just stayed friends?”
“Jenny…” I say, her name a long breath through a tightening throat.
“Five years of complete silence, Ani. And you didn’t even warn me. You didn’t think I deserved some sort of explanation?” She turns her head sharply away from me, blinks a few time, presses her lips together. When she looks back, her eyes are brimming with tears and her chin trembles like a child’s. Her next words are high-pitched and cracking. “I thought we were doing okay. We’d gone back to being friends — best friends, like we always had been, but then one day you were just… gone. Just like that.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. We were never good at being ‘just friends.’ What we were doing… you were married.”
“Mason’s not you. He’s never been you.”
My hands curl into fists. “Jesus Christ, Jenny! Then I guess you should’ve fucking thought of that before you let him get you fucking pregnant!”
That does it. The dam breaks and the tears spill from her eyes, roll down her cheeks, drip off her trembling chin. Her red cheeks flush redder; her brown eyes shine with moisture.
And the sight just about kills me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, voice softening. “I shouldn’t have yelled.”
“I shouldn’t have made you move back to Ohio,” she says, and her breath hitches around a sob. “And I shouldn’t have asked you to stop playing basketball for me, it was so selfish, I was just so hurt after Rhianna, so angry with you, and it was like — I thought — if we could just go back, back home, back to the place where we’d started, when things had been good between us, then maybe… maybe…”
Her crying overwhelms her words, and she can’t speak anymore; her chest and throat spasm with silent tears. She closes her eyes, presses a fist against her mouth.
“Jen…”
I can’t stop myself from reaching for her. I bridge the narrow gap between us, wrap my arms around her as I pull her forward. She fits against me the way she always has, burying her face against my chest, and the moisture of her tears and the heat of her breath bleed through my shirt and dampen my skin.
I rub her back soothingly and stare at the ceiling while she cries it out, blinking back my own emotion.
And then that rat, Marty McFly, appears in the corner.
“She felt awful about Mason, you know,” Marty says, hands shoved into the pockets of his letterman jacket. “Just like you felt awful about Rhianna. She would’ve stayed with you if you’d forgiven her. Like she’d forgiven you the year before. You could’ve been Andrew’s second mom.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Doc’s got the DeLorean right outside. We could go back if you want. We could change the past right now.”
I ignore stupid, All-American Marty Fucking McFly. I know better than that. You can’t change the past. What’s done is done.
I squeeze Jenny a little closer to me, close my eyes when she tightens the arms around my waist.
But in my mind, I’m following Marty McFly into the driveway, stooping low to fit into the goddamn DeLorean, buckling my seatbelt when he sets the clock for
Back to the future: Eight and a half years ago. Marcine, Ohio.
I walk out of the bathroom still dripping water, nothing on but a towel wrapped around my waist. I hold the dental floss I’d meant to throw away in one hand, a pregnancy test in the other, its two pink lines telling me a story I don’t think I want to know.
Jenny’s sitting up on the bed, kindergarten progress reports spread around her, the way I’d expected to find her when I’d first walked in a while ago.
“Is this Grace’s?” I ask, but already there’s an accusatory tone in my voice, because Grace was the one with dry eyes.
But it has to be Grace’s. How could it be Jenny’s? It couldn’t be hers. She’s never been with anyone but me.
Jenny looks up from her spot on the bed, her eyes still red from crying earlier, and she opens her mouth to say something, to answer me, but no words come out. Her brown eyes go big and round and start to glisten with fresh tears.
“Is this Grace’s?” I repeat, shaking the pregnancy test at her as if she might not know what I’m talking about. “Jenny? Tell me this is from Grace. Tell me that’s why you guys were crying earlier.”
Her bottom lip begins to tremble. “It’s mine,” she says, words nearly inaudible.
Somehow I already knew she would say this, but I fling the stick with the two pink lines across the room anyway, as if realizing I’ve been holding a poisonous snake all this time that I need to get rid of. It smacks against the bedroom window, falls to the carpet.
We lock eyes. Questions swim through my head in such a thick swamp that it’s impossible to distinguish one from the other. I don’t realize that I’ve started to cry until Jenny goes blurry before me. I swallow thickly, blink her back into focus, and finally find a question distinct enough that I manage to voice it.
“Who?”
She covers her eyes with her hand.
“Who, goddammit?”
“Ani, it doesn’t matter, you don’t want — ”
“Don’t tell me I don’t want to know!” I scream, because I know that’s what she was going to say. We’ve been completing each others’ sentences for a decade.
“But it doesn’t — ”
“It does matter! It matters to me!”
She doesn’t take her hand away from her eyes. “Mason,” she whispers.
“Mason?” I repeat incredulously. “Mason who got me a job, Mason? Mason who I fucking work with every day Mason?”
She nods. Hand still covering her eyes.
I swivel, slam a fist into the door frame behind me. It shivers, and I fleetingly think it’s a good thing that I didn’t hit the wall because my fist would’ve gone right through it.
Now my hand fucking hurts, and it competes with my heart to see what’s going to break first. I feel faint, and so I lean back against the door frame, slide down until my wet ass hits the carpet.
“Why?” I ask, choking out my next question. “I thought things were getting better.”
Finally, she takes her hand away from her face, revealing wet, red cheeks. “They were — they are,” she says, pushing aside progress reports to climb off the bed.
She kneels beside me, reaches for me, but I push her away.
“It was a few months ago, when we first got here. And I — ” her voice breaks “ — I was still so angry at you about Rhianna, and we were barely talking, and so I — we… Mason asked what I was so upset about, and…”
“Only once?” I ask hoarsely. “It only happened once?”
Her face falls. “Twice.”
“Fuck,” I mutter, turning my head away from her as the tears fall freely down my face. I’m back in high school again, sitting across from Jenny on New Year’s Day, and she’s telling me that the kiss we’d shared was meant to be a joke. Just a fucking joke to her.
She puts her hand on my chin, turns my face towards her. “I don’t want Mason, Ani. I want you. You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted.”
Marty McFly materializes behind Jenny, crouching over her, listening intently, his hands on his knees. “This is it. This is the moment,” he tells me. “Get ready — this is where we change everything. The whole course of your life.”
“We’ve always said we’d start a family one day,” Jenny says, and I can tell she’s pleading with me. “This isn’t the way we thought it would happen, but I… maybe we…”
“Fucking Christ, are you asking me to fucking raise Mason’s fucking baby?! You cannot be fucking serious!”
“Listen to me, Anika,” Jenny says, resting her hands on the sides of my face, wiping away my tears with her thumbs. “Please just listen. We can do this. We can — ”
“No. We absolutely can’t fucking do this.” I stand up, gather my towel around me, leave Jenny kneeling on the carpet in my wet spot. “I can’t fucking do this. Not anymore. We’re done. Once and for all. Done.”
Behind Jenny, Marty McFly slaps a palm to his forehead, shakes his head at me. “I brought you back here to do things differently,” he says. “Not repeat the same mistakes.” He straightens up, calls over his shoulder, “Doc! Reset the clock on the DeLorean — we’re going to have to come back and do it all over again.”
Back to the present
Jenny lets go of me at last, pushes herself back and wipes tears roughly from her face.
“I wish we’d done everything differently,” she says. “I wish we hadn’t been so young and stupid.”
“We were who we were. And we can’t change the past.”
“I know. But what if we could still change the future?” She tilts her head to the side, gazes up at me with a hopeful expression on her face.
I shake my head. “We don’t have a future. Not anymore.”
“But we still could. You’re still my soulmate.”
Soulmate. The word that sounded so magical, so imbued with power twenty years ago. The word that sounds like a cruel fucking irony today.
“I don’t believe in soulmates anymore.” I hear the bitterness in my own words, but I can’t help myself.
“I do.” She looks down for a moment, then back up. “Mason and I separated two months ago. At this point, I’m just waiting for the divorce to be finalized. That, and all the custody paperwork.”
Bomb.
Dropped.
When I don’t respond, she says in a rush, “I was going to tell you, the first time I came to Soul Mountain. That was the whole reason I went. But you — you seemed like you were still so angry, and I could barely get you to talk to me at all, let alone tell you how I… and so I chickened out. But when I saw you tonight, I knew I had to tell you. I knew it was maybe my last chance. I should’ve done this five years ago. I never should’ve let you go back to Switzerland.” She reaches up, gingerly touches the hickey on the base of my throat. “But maybe it’s already too late,” she whispers.
I wrap my hand around hers, pull it away from my neck. There are a lot of things I want to say to Jenny in this moment — like how it’s been too late for a long fucking time, and how I stopped talking to her, stopped touching her five years ago because I’m an addict like my brother, and how after five years of abstinence from my addiction I still teeter on the brink of relapse, and how my sister thinks she’s a manipulative bitch, and how I told Amy only thirty or forty minutes earlier that I’m willing to try to have something real with her — but I don’t say any of that.
Instead, I tilt my head towards the bedroom door, look down at her, and say, “They’re going to be wondering where we went. I should get back out there.”