Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (39 page)

The scream said,
I have fucking had it
.

May never howled.

She also never jumped ship when the going got rough, but she was walking from the lot now, her long legs eating up the asphalt.

“Where’s she going?” Nancy said. “She’s supposed to get her hair done in an hour.”

“I’m not sure.” Allie lifted onto her tiptoes, her body straining to keep May in view as
she winked in and out of sight between parked cars.

“May!” her mother called. “Where are you headed?”

May didn’t turn, didn’t slow, didn’t stop, and Allie found herself bouncing heels to toes. Straining toward her sister.

“Go on.”

“Hmm?” she asked.

“Go after her,” Mom said. “You’re dying to.”

But Allie didn’t want to go after May. She wanted to go
with
her. With an apologetic smile, she took off running.

“Wait up!” she shouted. “May!”

She had to chase her for a full block. Finally, she caught up with May as she was passing by the elementary school across the street from the museum.

“Where are you going?”

“I have no idea.” May sniffled and wiped her fingers beneath her eyes, then on her jeans. She didn’t slow.

“Mom’s going to have kittens if we’re not back there in a few minutes.”

“I’m finding it impossible to care about Mom right now.”

“Understandable.” Allie had to trot to keep up. She pressed her hand against the stitch forming in her side and tried to think what to say to this version of her sister. The one who howled. “I’m sorry he left,” she tried.

“I’m not.”

“You’re not?”

May cut a glance at her. “No. I was sorry for a minute, but now I’m really fucking
angry
that he left.” She kicked a stick off the road without even breaking stride. “He said the whole idea of our staying together was a fantasy, and I crumpled into this pathetic little paper ball of refuse, but you know what? He’s wrong. I don’t accept it. It isn’t okay with me. I know you have no idea, because I was gone for so many days, and then we were pretending he was Andy’s secretary so you didn’t get to know him. But he’s wrong. He’s plain
wrong
, and I can’t be sorry he left. I can only be irritated as
fuck
.”

Allie couldn’t remember ever hearing May swear so much. She tried to whistle, but keeping up with her sister was taking all her breath. “Mr. Un-fucking-believable is in the
doghouse.”

“Mr. Un-fucking-believable is on the way to Ashland in his bee van,” May said. “So it’s not like he’s going to care that I hate him.”

“You don’t hate him. You love him.”

“Yeah. I told him, too, though a fat lot of good that did me. I think I’m having one of those weeks where you do one stupid thing and then every subsequent decision you make keeps getting stupider.”

“You’ll probably end up living in a cardboard box under the railroad bridge.”

May huffed. “God, I hope not. Though I am jobless now, so I guess it’s possible.”

“Nah. I’m sure in a few months, everything will be back exactly the way it was before.”

May stopped so abruptly, Allie was six feet ahead of her by the time her body got the message and brought her to a halt. She turned around. The cooling wind scoured the pavement with dry leaves, and the sky was rapidly darkening, but it was the steady certainty in May’s eyes that raised goose bumps on Allie’s arms.

“I don’t want everything to go back to the way it was before.”

The words struck Allie like a pulled punch—hard enough to sting, with the promise of a hell of a lot of pain behind it.

“Sure you do. You’ll get over Dan, get your job back, and in a year—”

“No. You don’t get it. Ben didn’t say he doesn’t love me. He just said our relationship was impossible. He’s wrong. I’ll prove it to him. Somehow.”

Allie’s anger came first. An indignant, saber-rattling little homunculus inside her shouted that May had no right to be so sure. That she’d fallen for a guy who was supposed to be a fling, told him she loved him, and lost him. She’d fucked everything up with Dan, and for what? For
what
?

May was supposed to feel stupid, and she was supposed to be sad and sorry.

But May wasn’t sad. She wasn’t sorry.

May was supposed to understand that Ben had taken her hope with him, but she hadn’t surrendered her hope.

Tears filled Allie’s eyes, and she had to close them. She never cried. She wouldn’t cry. But God, she wanted to, because she’d just lost Matt.

She had to force the words past the cage in her throat. “I can’t marry him.”

There wasn’t any way. He was too awesome, and somewhere in the world there had to be a woman who would feel about Matt the way May did about Ben. If Allie married him, he would never meet that woman. Or worse—he would meet her, but he wouldn’t be able to be with her because Allie stood in the way.

She couldn’t marry him because she’d never wanted him the way he wanted her, and she never would.

“I can’t do it. I’ll hate myself forever if I go through with it. But I don’t want to tell him, because he’ll be sad, and I’ll have to move out, and the dogs will get split up. I don’t know where I’ll live, and I won’t get to be friends with him anymore, and I’m going to miss him, May. I’m going to miss him so much.”

Dark circles bloomed on the sidewalk. The rain began to come down.

May put her arms out, and Allie walked into them, her cheeks warmer than the drops that fell on them. “I’m sorry.” She pushed her nose into May’s neck. “I shouldn’t be doing this. It’s definitely still your turn to cry.”

May put her chin on the crown of Allie’s head. “It’s okay,” she said. “I can wait a while.”

Allie made a horrible seal-honking sort of noise. It hurt in her chest and in between her eyes, and she had to lay her face against May’s shoulder and close them. “This sucks,” she said between sobs. “So muh-much.”

“I know.” May petted her head. “We’re having a shit day.”

That made Allie laugh, which was hard to do while also crying and drowning in snot and freezing-cold rainwater.

“It hurts,” she wailed.

May stroked her back. “It hurts like crazy. And it’s scary.”

“Yeah. It’s scary. I hate it.”

“You’re allowed to hate it.”

Allie waited for May to offer some kind of comfort, some better advice. May held her.

“That’s it?” She stepped back and glared at her sister. “That’s all you’ve got?”

“That’s all I’ve got.” May’s voice came out hoarse.

“You suck,” Allie said, almost laughing.

“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t have the answers. I just know that sometimes … sometimes everything looks right from the outside, but it’s wrong. Sometimes it looks wrong, but it’s right.
Life is
awful
. It
rains
, you know?”

“Tell me you didn’t make a rain metaphor.”

When May grinned, her teeth were breathtaking. Her wet lips. Her everything. Allie stared at her sister’s wet face and the light in her eyes.

“I did. I’m not taking it back, either. Deal with my rain metaphor.”

Her rain-soaked hair plastered itself to her neck. Thunder rumbled. Allie felt alive and scared and awful.

But sort of wonderful, too.

“Remember when we were kids,” May said, “and it rained, and Mom would send us outside to play as long as there wasn’t any lightning?”

The white noise of the rain had always hurt her ears, hurt the inside of her head and forced her to be louder. In the rain, Allie would shriek and run and stomp in puddles, making herself big enough to drown all her fear.

“That’s what I lost sight of with Dan,” May said. “I knew he’d take care of me and be nice to me. I would never get wet, with Dan. He’d hold his umbrella over my head forever, and his arms would never get tired.” She spread her arms wide. “But he never made me feel like this. Not once.”

Allie’s nose scrunched up from the pressure of unshed tears. “Neither did Matt.”

“The thing is,” May said, “I want to feel like this as much as possible.”

Allie remembered the rainwater rushing out of gutter spouts to fill her boots. The shock of the cold. And she understood what New York had done to her sister. It had filled her boots with cold and made her shriek with the shock of being alive and wet and overwhelmed. It had taken away her fear and made her
more
May. Unafraid in a way that Allie had never been, no matter how stridently she bluffed.

“But what if there’s no mom meeting us at the door with towels and hot cocoa after?” she asked. “What if Matt is the best thing I’m ever going to have?”

“That’s the risk. But you don’t actually have to worry about that right this second. You can just stand here and get wet, if you want.”

“Oh good. I’ll focus on trying not to vomit, then.”

“Do that.”

But she didn’t. Instead, she lifted her face to the rain and let it wash the salt off. Let it
wash all the fear and guilt and dread from her, just for one second, and then for the next. The next.

She let herself imagine what it might be like to feel okay again.

And after the elation and the pain and the crying had all drained out of her, May put her arm back around Allie’s waist and turned them back toward the museum.

“Mom and Dad already paid for the reception, right?” she asked.

“God, I can’t think about that. The wedding. The money. Oh fuck.”

“No, don’t think about it. All I mean is, it’s a sunk cost. So after you tell him, we’ll have the party anyway.”

“We will?”

“We will. And we’ll get extraordinarily drunk.”

May gave her a gentle tug and began walking them back toward the museum. Back toward the terrifying thing that was the rest of Allie’s life.

Their sodden shoes squished with every step.

Ben drove north.

He didn’t think about May. He didn’t think about anything. He hid in the sliver between walls. But because he was older now, too large to fit perfectly, his hands shook on the steering wheel.

His fault. He’d done this to himself.

The modest cities of central Wisconsin gave way to smaller towns, the farmland to forests that crowded the narrowing road. After five hours in the car, he felt wind-scoured and eroded, as if every mile had removed another thin layer of the man he’d become since he left this part of the world behind.

He drove straight to the harbor, expecting to see Lake Superior’s shoreline with its tall pier of jutting steel, the long vertical line of ore chutes marching hundreds of feet out into the water like so many rusting soldiers.

But the ore dock was gone.

His whole life, the dock had been falling apart—endangered, structurally unsound, calving chunks of rust and paint like a postindustrial glacier. Now it had vanished. Tens of thousands of pounds of early-nineteenth-century enterprise.
Poof
.

There was nothing without it. No harbor to speak of. Only an absence. An ache that vibrated with noise.

The rest of Ashland looked the same—the quaint grid of downtown, with its collection of modest, well-maintained shops, the café, the coffee shop.

The blocks weren’t as long as he remembered them, though. The bank wasn’t as grand.

His hands shook, and he shoved them in his pockets. Walking the paths around the college, he pulled his hoodie up over his head, earning apprehensive looks from the coeds he passed. He veered back downtown. The cup of coffee he bought at a vegan-friendly cafe did nothing to warm him.

After the sun set, he checked into a run-down motel on the fringe, took a long, hot shower, and yawned almost continuously as he dried off and pulled on boxers and a T-shirt. The curtains were heavy, the room almost pitch black with them closed.

He didn’t think of May, because to think of her would be to cause himself pain, and there was no pain in this sliver that wasn’t even a place. There was nothing.

The bed sagged under his weight, and he wrapped himself in the comforter and dropped gratefully into darkness.

May leaned toward her bathroom mirror, seeking a better view as she slicked her sister’s lipstick over her bottom lip. Candy-cane pink, it made her look cheap and bubbly, like an extra in an eighties movie—particularly in combination with the earrings Ben had bought her and the spangly black top, its low scoop neck far more revealing than anything she normally wore.

As she reached beneath the cap sleeves to adjust the straps of her black bra, she heard her front door open, and her heart leapt.

Ben
.

“It’s just me,” Allie called. Her jaunty tone did little to disguise the weariness in her voice. “The life-wrecker.”

“I’m in the bathroom.”

“I know. I can smell your hair product from here.”

A jingling noise told her Allie must have dropped her keys and purse on the entryway table. May glanced at the shower, where Allie’s wedding dress and May’s own dark blue maid of honor dress hung side by side from the curtain rod.

“Whoa, Nellie,” Allie said when she came into the room. “What are you wearing?”

May did a little twirl. “You like?”

“You look unbelievable.”

May studied her reflection in the mirror. The woman looking back at her had dramatic, smoky eyes, fabulously tousled hair, and a pouting bubblegum mouth. She had great tits, a tight ass encased in faux-snakeskin pants, and shit-kicking cowboy boots.

“Thank you. The look I was going for was
tramp-who-got-dumped-and-is-in-search-of-rebound-action
.”

“Are you?”

May raised one shoulder and watched the slithery top fall off it. Maybe she should lose the bra. She’d be hiding the straps all night long. “Not really.”

“But it’s fun to pretend.” Allie grasped her shoulders from behind.

May squinted at her reflection. “I’m not pretending,” she said. “I like these pants. I like this whole outfit.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Only I never would have let myself wear it before, because I didn’t feel like I was supposed to.”

“Supposed to what?”

May brushed on one more coat of mascara as she thought about her answer, her mouth hanging open because for whatever reason she couldn’t apply eye makeup with her lips closed. “Just be.” She turned around and hopped up on the vanity so she could see Allie’s face.