The View from the Top (12 page)

“Do what?”

“That they can stay together. That they can be high school sweethearts and stay together. I just thought, if you're devoted enough, if you never stop showing each other that you're totally, completely in love, you can get through anything.”

Anabelle held the dandelion chain up to her head. Her brow was all wrinkled and Matt wasn't sure if it was because she was trying to figure out if the chain was long enough, or because she was concentrating on what he'd just said. “You really think your parents could've worked it out?” she asked him.

“Well, not once my dad cheated. But before that. They could've stopped everything from going so wrong. If my mom hadn't been such a flirt. If my dad had paid her more attention in the first place.”

“Maybe, sometimes, people shouldn't have ever been together.” Anabelle carefully tied one last flower onto the chain and joined the two ends, completing the loop. “And maybe it's better to recognize it early, before you're married and have kids and it's too late.”

“But we can do it. We can, I know we can. We care about each other.”

Anabelle rubbed the top of one of the dandelions with her thumb.

“What're you thinking?” Matt asked.

“You said we care about each other.”

“Yeah...”

“But you never seem to think I care about you.”

“No, I do. Of course I do. I just get frustrated sometimes because I feel like I'm putting in more effort. Making you stuff, buying you stuff. But you're the most caring person I know.”

There was another thunder roll, this time much closer. Anabelle gazed off into the direction of the impending storm. She had this look on her face as if she wasn't buying a word Matt was saying. As if it were impossible for her to believe that he actually thought she was caring.

“You are,” he said. “I first fell for you because of your kindness. That night when I was wasted and you brought the trash basket to my bed and sat with me while I puked? Nobody else would've done that for me. Maybe Jonah. But it's not like I'd ever want to date Jonah. I'm just saying, no other girl has ever been so sweet to me. You used to do stuff like that all the time. You used to play me jazzy lullabies when I was sad. But then at some point you stopped. And I guess I felt abandoned.”

A lightning bolt flashed in the baseball field across the street. The thin crackly line looked unreal, as if it had been drawn in a comic book.

“I'm sorry,” Anabelle told him, placing the dandelion crown over her bouncy ringlets. “I don't know what to say. I guess I care about you, but I don't want to always have to take care of you.” She looked like a princess. Some kind of earthy goddess.

Matt's throat started to burn. It was a feeling he'd gotten used to during his parents' divorce—it came from swallowing his tears before they could leak out of his eyes. “I'd take care of you,” he said, trying to control the quake in his voice. “Whatever you needed. Whenever you needed it.”

“But I don't know if I'm ready to make that kind of commitment to you. And I'm not sure I want you to make it to me either.” She said it completely calmly and stony-faced.

It was clear: she didn't want to make this work. She'd made up her mind, and if he kept trying to convince her that there was a solution, he'd just sound whiny. And yet, he couldn't help but whine. “What about us getting married?” he asked. They'd been planning on doing it right here at the little chapel in the cemetery the summer after she graduated Oberlin. A small wedding, only them and their families.

Anabelle just looked at him. Serene, elegant, and poised, like a sixteenth-century marble sculpture.

And then, he couldn't help it: in one big exhale, the tears let loose. It was as if a dam had broken behind his eyes. “What about Mount Desert Island? I've got the cabin booked.” His voice sounded like some half-feminine version of himself.

“We should cancel it,” she said simply.

He lifted the neck of his shirt and wiped his eyes as the thunder kaboomed straight overhead. “You know, I've actually been thinking we should break up,” he lied. “For kind of a long time:”

“Really?” she said, cocking her dandelion-crowned head.

“Uh-huh.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “you make me too happy. And I can't create when I'm happy. No artist can.”

“Oh,” she said, sucking in her lower lip. “Well, I wouldn't want to hold you back.”

There was something about seeing her hurt that made him able to stop crying so much. As if now they were even.

A few tiny raindrops fell on the grass in front of them. And then, within seconds, the sky completely opened up.

It was the kind of rain that made it impossible to see anything more than five feet away. But on their bench under the trees, all they felt was a little mist.

Matt leaned over and picked a dandelion from the grass. One of those fluffy ones that looked like a tiny globe of snow. He handed it to Anabelle. “Make a wish,” he said.

She shut her eyes and held the dandelion under her chin. The rain whished. She blew.

The white airy seeds parachuted out into the storm.

Anabelle reached over to his eyelashes. “Hang on, one didn't make it.” She pulled the seed off of his face and blew it away.

Then she picked a dandelion for him. “Your turn,” she said.

Make this a good one
, Matt told himself as he closed his eyes. He sat there for a second, letting the seeds tickle his lips.
I wish that we get back together someday
, he thought, huffing at the flower as if it were a birthday candle. There was something really romantic about the idea that this wasn't it, that they'd suffer for a while without one another and then realize that they just couldn't bear to live apart. Like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

“So this is really happening?” Anabelle asked.

“It's what you want, isn't it?”

“I guess. But it's so hard.”

Matt grabbed her hand and squeezed it three times. Once for I, once for
love,
once for
you
. She waited a beat, then did the same back to him.

She leaned in close. “Can I, um ... can I kiss you one last time?”

He answered her by pressing his lips to hers. It lasted through the next three rolls of thunder. The rain pounded down harder, creating a curtain all around them.

Matt ran his fingers along the bottom of Anabelle's belly. It was warm and soft. “Can I do this one last time?” he asked, creeping his hand up higher and higher under her shirt.

She nodded, pushing her hand inside the elastic of his boxers. “Can I do this one last time?”

“Uh-huh.”

They weren't really
doing
anything, just holding each other in places where nobody else had ever touched them.

“I can't imagine doing stuff with anyone else,” she said.

“I know, me neither,” he said.

“Can we just sit here for a while?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. It's not like they could go anywhere else right now without getting soaked.

Matt looked out at the headstones, darkened from the rain. There were the couples, the families. And then there were a few sad ones all off on their lonesome, their names worn off.

Anabelle leaned her head on his shoulder, her hair brushing the underside of his chin.

He was already imagining the poetry he could write about this moment, the paintings he could make. The sculptures. It was going to be a busy year.

F
or the twenty-fifth day in a row, Mary-Tyler woke up imagining she was in a coffin.

Tucked tightly in her sheets, she lay on her back, listening—and heard absolutely nothing. Her eyes fluttered open and she saw the same pitch black as when they'd been shut. It could've been five A.M. or two in the afternoon; she didn't know and she didn't care. That was the freedom of being in a lightless room.

She could never keep it up for too long, though, because eventually she'd convince herself that she really
was
trapped in a box deep in the earth and there were all sorts of things up there in the living world that she'd miss: swinging on a rope over a stream; flipping on a trampoline; going on that salt ‘n' pepper shaker ride at the little amusement park with the funny name. She had to get on that thing before her life was over.

Mary-Tyler took out her earplugs. And there was her dad's voice, somewhere outside the blackness:
Get a whiff of that honeysuckle! Is that to die for or what? Then,
the crisp snipping sounds of garden shears. She stood up and felt her way along her bed, and then the wall, until she reached her closet. She opened the closet door and groped around the inside, running her fingertips over a panel of buttons, and pushed the top one. The automated blinds whirred, first letting in pinpricks of light, then long stripes. Mary-Tyler squinted as the sun flooded her room and watched the blinds rise to the top of her two expansive windows—one on either side of the corner.

Down by the path to the beach was her father, all pudgy and balding and sucking on his water bottle with the little nipply top. As usual, he was standing beneath the gardeners' ladders, pretending he wanted to make small talk but really making sure they didn't miss any spots—that they got the giraffes' necks just right.

Mary-Tyler groaned. She'd asked her father several times to let the gardeners do their work in peace. Last week she'd even made him a Bloody Mary—his favorite drink—and set it on a table by the pool, along with the Wall Street Journal, which she'd opened to the stock pages. But he'd just picked up the drink and the paper and carried them with him as he trailed the gardeners, eyeing their work while they shaped the elephants' tusks and the monkeys' tails; it was the thin, delicate parts he worried about most.

Once her eyes had adjusted to the light, Mary-Tyler threw on her fluffy white bathrobe to protect her legs from the arctic-cold air-conditioning and walked down to the second-floor bathroom, her flip-flops clapping against her soles. She undressed, trying not to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror-lined walls and ceiling. It was impossible, though, to avoid seeing her body in reflection upon reflection upon reflection. She grabbed a handful of her stomach, wishing she could squeeze the blubber right out of it and—
prestos!
—she'd be thin. Standing in the whirlpool tub, she turned the showerhead to its highest pressure setting and let it pelt water at her scalp like a barrage of BBs.

As she lathered up, she eyed her razor. She hadn't shaved her entire time here. It's not like there was a point; she didn't see anyone besides her parents. But maybe, she thought, just maybe if she did it today, it would give her motivation to venture away from this place, to be seen in public. She squirted a glob of pink shaving gel in her palm, then rubbed it into a foam over her armpits and legs and slowly scraped it off. After she'd rinsed and shut off the water, she felt a sharp stinging in both of her Achilles tendons. She knelt down to find blood trickling down her heels. Blade must've been too sharp. Or too dull, maybe.

She stepped out onto the floor and dragged her feet along the tiles, tracking trails of blood behind her—and in the never-ending reflections. She wondered what would happen if she'd cut her wrists instead of her heels.

How long would it take for her parents to realize she was lying in the tub bleeding?