Authors: Emma McLaughlin
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Coming of Age, #Contemporary Women
Our eyes meet. “You have to tell him.”
She reaches out, but I step from her. Her gaze flickers, swiveling me to where Jake leans in the doorway cloaked in a blanket, face tight with concern. “I’m not going back until you do,” I say, retreating to the cabin, my shoes retracing their tracks.
“Katie,” her voice is thick with tears.
“Katie.”
I push myself up the steps, buckling into Jake’s arms.
175
December 23, 2005
Abruptly the lid of clouds is lifted and the pendant moon once again illuminates our converging and diverging paths on the ice. His touch slips away.
I slice to a halt, a spray of flakes arcing, the famous lyrics of her arrival that morning, which I am forever keeping at bay, flooding me.
And shielded in his blazer, razored against your skin, you walk down the steps, but you won’t let her in, the one who made you, and broke you—
“Dude, we’re going up!” Sam shouts as he picks up his skates and starts hiking back up the white bank.
“Should probably head back!” Todd adds as he finishes lacing his boots on the log bench and follows. I rest my hands on my thighs, steadying myself as Jake throws a thumbs-up to the hill, atop which the house I hid in for days erodes against Jake’s immortalization of the event.
“Ready?” He slices past me toward the dock. I take off in a hard fast loop, pushing into the wind as I cut along the perimeter of the overhanging tree limbs, with every slicing stride reassigning my rage from the excruciating imagery of that album to its creator.
We pull up at Todd’s house behind the few remaining cars. Someone has left a knit hat on the electric snowman. “Katie, it was great to see you.” Todd reaches back to pat my knee.
“You, too,” I say.
“Sam,” Todd acknowledges.
“Todd.” Sam nods wearily.
“And I’ll have my guy send you those autographs,” Jake reassures as Todd grabs him in a bear hug, his hands slapping against Jake’s suede.
“Thanks, man.” The dashboard lights illuminate Todd’s beaming profile as he opens the car door, collapsing the passenger seat forward for Sam to boomerang around. “Merry Christmas, guys.”
Jake parallels with the curbside snowbank at Sam’s house. It’s dark save the kitchen window throwing a low light onto the garage, the sheer plastic walls of the partially completed addition above billowing in the breeze. He shuts the engine off again.
“Cool.” Sam swings the door open. “I’ll just run inside and get the papers.”
“Sam,” Jake catches his wrist. “Man, you know I can’t. I wish I could. But the label owns the songs—”
“Fuck you,” Sam spits, pulling his arm away, before letting out a long breath. “Or fuck me, right, Jake? Fuck me for thinking that playing Reunion would get you to pony up.”
“I wasn’t playing.”
“You said you’d been doing some thinking.”
“I have—
for years!
I’ve missed you guys! I feel like shit for losing touch. I can’t believe the boys are three already—they do look just like you. It’s awesome, you and Laura—just awesome.”
“That’s…that’s what you have to say to me?” Sam stares at him, his jaw clenching.
Jake’s eyes drop to his lap. “I miss you, man.”
Sam pivots to me and I mirror his disbelief. “Well, Jake, I’m sorry,” he says slowly, nodding as he speaks. “That must have been hard for you.” Another deep breath, a smile of incredulity. “But I was right here. I own one of those telephone things. I even fly. So…yeah.” He swings his legs out onto his driveway. “It must be something, Jake. To be where you are.”
“Where’s that exactly?” he asks quietly to Sam’s back.
“Wherever it is you made a decision to keep us from being there with you.” Sam slams the door behind him so hard the window rattles. As he stalks up the driveway Jake suddenly revs off, sending me flailing back against the bucket seat, an empty beer can lurching to the floor with a hollow pip. I brace myself against the ceiling as we race past a stop sign.
“Jake!”
I scream.
He screeches to a halt at the side of the street. “Get up front.”
“It’s safer back here, thanks.”
“Dammit!” He slams the steering wheel. “It’s not that simple. You know it’s not that simple, right?”
I suck in my cheeks, my eyebrows lifting.
He spins around, craning to the side of his headrest. “Crediting them at this point is just
not
possible. The label’s lawyers have said no fucking way.”
“Please,”
I cut him off, my fury spiking. “How you can sit there and feel you don’t owe—”
“What?! What do I owe everyone?!” He throws his hands up. “It was
my
vocals that got that scout out here—to watch some stupid garage band.”
“That stupid garage band helped you write some pretty fucking amazing music,” I sacrifice admission of my opinion to make my point.
“None of you have any idea what it’s like out there. They never would have made it—they would have fucked up their whole lives.”
I hold his gaze. “Well, how incredibly selfless of you to save them from fame, fortune, and their very own koi ponds.”
He closes his eyes for a second, shutting me out. “He didn’t want them,” he says evenly.
“Who?”
“The scout. It was me, solo. Or nothing. I didn’t know how to tell them, so I just…”
“Took off. With
their
guitar riffs and drum solos.”
“Fuck!” He twists back around. “Should I tell them now? So, sorry guys, but you actually weren’t wanted. Isn’t it better to let them have this dream? Let
me
be the one who thwarted it? And what’s your fucking deal anyway? You weren’t in the band. I didn’t take anything of—”
“Except my life!”
“What?” He blinks into the rearview, genuinely confused.
“My life! My
life!”
I hurl the beer can at his head.
He ducks. “I didn’t take your life!” He slaps his hand to his heart. “Those are
my
memories!”
“Of
me!”
I kick the back of his seat.
“My
mother!
My
body!
My
bedroom! The freckle on
my
neck!”
He twists himself back to me, a stunned expression on his face. “I wanted you to hear the songs and know that I never stop thinking about you.”
“That’s
what I’m supposed to think?”
“Don’t you?”
“Oh yeah. Right after I realize all my fellow shoppers at the Piggly Wiggly are being treated to a lyrical blow-by-blow of my oral sex capabilities I usually abandon my cart, blaze screaming from the store without my purse, and the whole time all that’s running through my mind is,
aw, he never stopped thinking about me.”
“They don’t play
that
song at the Piggly Wiggly,” he duhs me.
“No,” I smile, ultra-chipper. “But they do play it in a lot of bars.” I look at him with insouciance, cocking my head. “Do you enjoy coming along on all my dates? Is that it, Jake?”
He turns away.
“When I start a song”—he sighs—“no matter where it begins I just end up seeing…you. It brings you, I don’t know, closer.”
“I’m not dead, Jake!” I scream at the back of his head. “I haven’t been in hiding—you could have come found me at any point!”
“I’ve been on a tour bus for the last ten years!”
he shouts to the roof before spinning back to me. “There’s no nurseries to renovate, no neighborhood parties, no Christmas pageants.” He searches my face with the same expression that he had on his mother’s stairs that first afternoon. “It’s not a life. You didn’t miss anything.”
180
My chest feels manacled. “Except your face in the morning.” My eyes prickle. “Except the prom. Except you looking me in the fucking eye and telling me you’re leaving.”
We stare at each other.
Suddenly he turns away, his hand twisting the key. “The prom I can do.”
En route to Georgetown I reach into the McDonald’s bag lodged between my coat and the gearshift to feel around for any remaining french fries, folding them into my mouth and pretending they’re hot. Pretending I’m driving over to Jake’s. Pretending it’s Laura asleep next to me. I turn up the volume the tiniest notch on “Jake’s Tape for Katie” as the car rears onto the roaring grate meant to wake dozing truckers.
“Stop fiddling.” Mom opens one eye.
“Please.”
“Fine. But I can’t hear anything.”
“Just put on NPR,” she murmurs, her eyes drifting closed.
“There
is
no NPR. We’re in the middle of nowhere and it’s the middle of the night,” I mutter back, glaring at the black hills barely visible against the sky.
“NPR is everywhere. You just have to find it.” She pops her seat upright and rolls the volume, the Pogues blasting us.
“I love your breasts, I love your thighs, yeah, yeah—”
She shoves the eject button, sending the tape clattering to the floor. Shaking her head derisively, she begins to move the dial methodically through the fuzz.
“Mom.”
I feel around under my seat for the jilted cassette, my remaining link to sanity. The car swerves again onto the thunderous rail.
“Kathryn! Would you please! Focus! On your driving!”
“I can’t focus on my driving when you’re doing that!” The radio alternates between scratch and muffle until bursts of some guy talking break through.
“There.” She sits back and crosses her hands in her lap. The static continues to punctuate his every other word.
“This is not a station.”
“And then, when you have followed the directions as we have prescribed—”
“It’s a call-in show, it’ll be fun,” she says through clenched teeth.
“Jesus will appear and you will be taken in by the righteous. And you won’t have to worry about baking those pies in the kingdom of heaven.”
She switches it off. We pass a road sign, our headlights arcing across its green face. “Two more hours till Littleton. You going to be all right?”
“Yeah.” I rest my cheek in my free hand, my eyes aching. But anything’s better than just sitting there in the passenger seat, trusting her to steer us, thoughts chasing each other from whizzing mile marker to whizzing mile marker.
“So, Mount Holyoke,” she begins wearily.
“Yeah.”
“It was kind of…”
“Freaky?” I fill in.
“Yes!” She swivels to me. “No one was smiling. Not a single person, not a student, not a teacher. Even the woman in the gift shop was grim. So strange, it’s such a lovely campus.”
“It was really weird,” I concur, having already mentally scratched it off the list of the six schools vying for my attendance.
“God, I’m starving. Any fries left?”
“Sorry.”
She feels under her seat. “I think I dropped a juice box last week on the way to work.” She continues to root around. “Well, here’s your tape, at least.” She holds up a cassette.
“That’s not mine.” Mine has a lizard drawn on it by my boyfriend.
“Oh.” She holds the cream plastic to the green radio light. “Oh my God,
Chorus Line.
Remember how you used to love this?” I stiffen. Although we’ve come a long way in three months—Dad’s moving out not leaving me another option—still, I cannot reminisce with her. She pops it in and grins, singing along as she turns it up.
“I really need this job,”
she trills. “I bought this back when I was applying for my first teaching job. I used it to keep my spirits buoyed when I was finishing my degree. Burlington made me wait three months for the acceptance, you know.” She readjusts her tortoiseshell combs.
“I didn’t.”
“It was miserable. But you used to sit in the backseat and sing your little heart out with me.” She smiles in my peripheral vision. “That was great. You were great.”
“Thanks.”
“Really, Katie, you were.” I feel her study my face, the water in her eyes glittering off the dashboard lights as she relaxes into her seat. I turn the tape up, the words coming back to me—the memory of when all I had to do was belt it out from the backseat harder to locate.
“And we’re walking…and we’re walking…” We dutifully shuffle along in our third clump in as many days of applying juniors, accepted seniors, and potentially paying parents. The third alarmingly bubbly blonde strides brazenly backward across the third green. “And we’re stopping.” Heels and toes are trod as we freeze. “This is Rodin University’s main building. Also known as the Harte Center, after James Harte, who was chancellor of the college from 1817 to 1842. We like to say this building is the heart of the school, or the vena cava, if you will. The main artery, get it?” The parents of the applying attempt a laugh, in case they’re being secretly evaluated on how amusing they make our tour guide feel. But the rest of my, I’m now guessing, non-pre-med cohorts and I remain stony-faced.
“Okay! Let’s keep moving!” Stacey keeps barreling backward and we follow like an ungainly school of fish pulled in her wake. Grimacing, Mom stops to press the back of her new tan pump down with her foot.
“We could’ve just watched the videos from the comfort of our own home,” I remind her. “If you’d spring for a replacement VCR since Dad took the old one.”
“But then you’d miss out on the chance to be her friend.” Mom smiles that we’re coming and nudges me onward with her shoulder.
“Are you? Ever going to buy a new one?” I keep my eyes on our guide because the VCR is not what I’m talking about.
“I suppose. Why is no one outside?” she asks chummily, once again changing the subject from the three lives she’s ripped apart. “Why is no one playing on the grass? It’s strange. It’s a beautiful day. Where is everyone?”
“Excuse me?” a mother raises her hand, her purse, a full-size replica of a tabby cat, swinging as she keeps pace with our leader.
“Yes?” Stacey perks even further up.
“Sometimes my daughter, Jessica, forgets to take her vitamins. Is there anyone who can help her remember to do that?”
I follow Mom’s gaze to assess how such a daughter, might, in fact, have gained admission to this school. But, other than wearing Buster Browns, Jessica shows no sign of being in need of a personal vitamin assistant.
“That’s a great question! There are R.A.s in every freshman dorm, and I’m sure Jessica and her R.A. can work something out.”
Mom widens her eyes at me and we stare at the mother and her feline accessory. She does realize Jessica will be leaving home, right? That Jessica could, say, choose to blow the entire lacrosse team and her lack of B
12
will be the least of this lady’s worries? Mom slackens her expression as the tabby cat turns in our direction.
“And here is the Pilgrim Building, where the bulk of freshman classes are held.”
“Woooow,” Mom whispers in awe,
“Ugly.”
“This building was a gift from the class of ’seventy-three,” Stacey announces.
“And no one kept the receipt.” Mom tries again, eliciting laughter only from the father-daughter team behind us. Stacey beams at the feedback.
“Yes! So, all freshmen are required to check in here at weekly meetings to share feel-ings and feel-outs. And here is our freshman dining hall!”
We peer in the yellow-tinted windows on what looks like a circa 1970s production of
Oliver.
The faux-wood mustard-yellow mirror-shard decor says “Brady den,” but the collective facial expression on the picking masses says “Inedible.”
“We have over twenty different kinds of cereals and toaster strudel available three meals a day!”
Jessica’s mother shudders.
I watch a student, a look of dismay on his face, raise his spoon high over his bowl and let the contents splash back down in beige clumps. I try to picture myself on the long line with my tray, eating below the sign for
VAGINA AWARENESS
or standing on the equally long line to heat my toaster strudel, and my throat tightens. Not a single Laura. I scan the greasy faces. Or Jake. No one close.
“Great! I’ll take you back to the Admissions Building where some of you are scheduled for the three o’clock group interview. Congratulations to those of you already accepted. Remember, I’m Stacey and my door’s always open!”
We plod in silence along the vast green, the spring wind whipping through my coat. I look at the faces of the kids readying for their three o’clock, one kid’s eye visibly twitching with nerves. In passing classrooms students sit staring at teachers obscured from my view, googly-eyed with witless intensity as they take dictation. To what end? More papers, more grades, more teachers, some stupid job, and then what? If Jake and I can even make it through all this together, then we just—what? Have some kids so we can start them on the whole stupid path all over again? Rip their hearts out filing for a trial separation along the way? It all just seems so, so—
“Your door won’t always be open, will it? That doesn’t sound safe.”
“Mom.”
She pushes into the gift shop, the buckle of her raincoat tapping the glass. “Katie, we need to have a discussion about how you’re going to protect yourself when you—”
“Moooooooom!” Several beats of inflection convey that I cannot even begin to discuss my safety at a school I cannot even begin to imagine myself at, when I can’t even begin to imagine myself anywhere else, including what
was
my own home, and I might be having a breakdown right here by the wall of purple Frisbees, coffee mugs, key chains, and visors, so please, please justbackoff.
“Okay,” she channels my frequency. She picks up a little mongoloid-looking bear and squeezes it in my face. I stifle the impulse to hurl it across the crowded shop.
“I need, like, five minutes.”
“To call Jake,” she strains for impartiality.
“No. To just…take a walk or something.”
“Kathryn, you have to be able to assess your own needs without constantly factoring in Jake’s.” She squeezes my forearm. “I’m grateful he’s been there over these hard few months, but I’m worried you’re getting too dependent on him and losing yourself in the process.”
“Oh my god! I’m just taking a walk!”
She studies my face. “Honestly?”
Fuck. You. “Yes.” I step back from her gaze. “I’m saying I
need
to be
by myself.
Not in a group of freaked-out kids and parents, not in a car with you.”
“Fine.” She hardens.
“Fine.” We walk out of the shop into the lobby of the Admissions Building, where we wordlessly part ways. She continues on to the parking lot and I’m left standing in the pavilion. Alone. I take a deep breath and let it out, not sure what to do next. Not wanting to go back out onto the prairie-size green. Not wanting to hang out in here. I walk obediently past the pay phones, continuing to assess my needs, and on to the bathroom as I check my watch. He’ll be practicing now anyway.
Coming out of the stall, I see Jessica in a new college sweatshirt bent over the sink counter, holding her hair out of her face with her left hand. Catching my eye in the mirror she straightens, holding a small straw in her right.
“You still have the tag.” I point to the nape of her neck, where the Champion logo dangles.
“Thanks.” She smiles, her Scottie dog earrings glinting in the reflection. “This place seems awesome,” she says as she runs her finger over her compact and then across her gums, catching the last particles of powder.
Stepping out of the UVA bookstore I squint in the strong sun, wishing I’d brought Jake’s Ray-Bans, but how could I have known it’d be spring here, real spring—full-bloom, sweet-air summer’s-around-the-corner spring, not the lame depressing April-shower spring of home? At the bottom of the steps I pause, undecided where to take myself next—a library, a cafeteria, another charming brick building—and suddenly the cloud of lung-stifling ache that has been lodged there since February surfaces. Here, under the hazy sun, surrounded by Technicolor grass and the fragrant blooms of stately gardens. It all reaches me through a web of tissue in my chest straining under the weight. Like I have just been beaten. Only it isn’t “just.” Without the noise of Mom trying to chatter over it or the warm drug of Jake to distract it, I am freshly, acutely inside the pain of what has transpired, what has been lost—the comfort of who we were together.
I emerge from the walkway to the stretch of green leading up to the Rotunda. It is, like everything else here, heartbreakingly beautiful. And dotted before it, in some
Alice in Wonderland
twist, are rocking chairs. I slip off my flats and collapse into the closest one, letting the ground cool my feet.
“Hey, do you know if the Treehouse’s open today?”
I squint up at an approaching guy, blond hair flopping as he jogs over. “Sorry, I’m just visiting.”
“You don’t go here?”
“Undecided.” I gesture down at the bookstore bag.
“Well, you seemed right at home.” He grins. I am unused to being grinned at by anyone but Jake. The guys at school know not to bother.
“Is that a good thing?”
“Could be.” He playfully taps my exposed shin with his flip-flop.
“Yo, Jay! Stop picking up the ladies and let’s go!” Jay looks over my head and I peer through the slats of the chair at a group of guys waving him back to the walkway.