How to Love Page 6

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, no.” It suddenly felt enormously stupid, this game I played with myself, like hopscotch or Barbie. “It’s for my admissions essay.”

  “To college?” Sawyer raised his eyebrows, licked the dripping bottom of my cone before handing it over. It was an old-fashioned shop, wood paneling and knickknacks on the walls, an antique cash register that sprung open with a loud ring. I smelled sugar and cold air. “Already?”

  I nodded. “Northwestern,” I told him. “I’m graduating a year early, so I’m going to apply in the fall.”

  Sawyer tilted his head to one side. “That’s ambitious.”

  “I’m ambitious.”

  “I know,” he said, taking his own ice cream and herding me back toward the door, holding it open with one foot as I scooted through. “So that’s what your essay’s about, then?” he asked as we crossed the lot toward the car, navigating a teeming crowd of noisy, restless kids about our age, shouts and laughter. “Traveling?”

  “Yeah, kind of.” I shook my head, embarrassed. “It’s stupid.”

  “I doubt that.” We were back at his Jeep by this point. Sawyer climbed up on the hood to eat his cone, angled his head at the empty space beside him until I got the message and pulled my sneakers up onto the bumper along with him. “Tell me.”

  “Ugh, fine.” I rolled my eyes a little, blushing in the dark. “The program I’m applying to is for creative nonfiction, you know? Travel writing.” The words sounded wooden and unfamiliar; this wasn’t something I’d told a lot of people besides Allie. “So I’m writing the essay like a travel guide, basically—go here, do this, avoid this gross hotel—only instead of it being about a particular place, it’s actually about, like—my life.” I shrugged again, embarrassed. “Or like, the life I want to have.”

  “That’s not stupid.” Sawyer was grinning. “That’s cool. I want to read it when you’re done.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, right.”

  “I’m serious,” Sawyer said, considering. His white T-shirt seemed to glow in the light from the storefronts. “Early graduation, huh?” he asked after a moment. “You’re that desperate to get out of here?”

  “No,” I explained, “it’s not that. I mean, of course I’ll miss my family and everybody. I love my family, I just …” I shrugged. I didn’t know how you could explain something like loneliness to someone like Sawyer—the feeling that I had to find something to wrap my hands around, and that whatever it was, it wasn’t here. “There’s not a whole lot for me here, you know?”

  Sawyer smiled a bit, unreadable. “So I better hang out with you while I can, is that what you’re saying?”

  Which—what? What was going on here? I had no earthly idea what he was after. “Pretty much,” was all I said.

  We sat in silence for a little while, watching the cars go by on the highway. I ate my ice cream. I waited. “You’re quiet,” he said eventually.

  I considered that for a moment. “Well,” I said, “so are you.”

  “Reena.” We were close enough that our arms were touching, warm and the slightest bit sticky with heat. “Why are you here?”

  I looked at him sideways. My heart was a foot on a kick drum inside my chest. “You tell me.”

  Sawyer shook his head. “I’m serious.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I really am.”

  “Sawyer.” I hesitated, blushing. I was ninety percent sure I was completely misunderstanding whatever was happening here. “Look. Allie’s my friend. Or was my friend, at least, and—”

  “Don’t you get tired?” he interrupted.

  I stopped. “Of what?”

  Sawyer shrugged. “Being who everybody thinks you are.”

  “What? No.” I shook my head, stalling, and glanced out across the highway at the strip malls and the palm trees. I smelled wet pavement and car exhaust. “Who else would I possibly be?”

  Sawyer seemed to know I was faking; he looked at me for a second in a way that made me almost nervous, like he could see the tissue underneath my skin. Fighting the creeping feeling that I was in way, way over my head, I did what any rational human being would do when confronted with a question she didn’t want to answer, by a person she’d had a miserable crush on for two presidential terms:

  I nudged my cone right up into his face.

  “I’m sorry,” I said immediately, giggling a little hysterically. “Jesus Christ. I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just did that.”

  Sawyer stared at me for a second, ice cream smudged over his mouth and his nose. “I … kind of can’t believe you did, either,” he said, but he was laughing. When he put his free hand on the back of my skull and kissed me, I tasted chocolate and rainbow sprinkles. I didn’t even close my eyes.

  He pulled back a little bit. “Is it okay that I just did that?” he asked, after a second or two.

  I nodded dumbly.

  “Did you like it as much as I did?”

  I nodded again.

  “Are you ever going to talk to me again in your whole life?”

  I nodded. “I mean,” I said, recovering slightly, thoughts skittering like moths at the panicky edges of my brain. “Yes.”

  Sawyer grinned. “Okay,” he said. He tossed the rest of his ice cream into a nearby trash can and cupped both of his hands around my face. “Good.”

  He was still kissing me when his cell phone rang inside his jeans a minute later, and I made to pull away but his grip tightened, a gentle fist in my hair. “Ignore it. Ignore it,” he muttered, and I did for a minute, but then mine started ringing, too.

  “Sawyer,” I said, reaching for my purse even as the rest of me was still otherwise engaged. “Sawyer, it’s my house. I have to pick it up. Hello?” I said, while—oh God, oh hell, we were in the middle of a parking lot and my dad was on the phone—Sawyer moved his mouth down to my neck. “Hi. What’s up?”

  “Reena,” my father said, and there was a sound in his voice I’d never heard before, panic and anger. “Oh, thank God. Where in the hell are you?”

  I jumped off the hood of that Jeep so fast that I just about took Sawyer’s head off, squeezing my eyes shut as I tried to figure out what to say: I’d lied to my father for the first time in my entire life and I was caught. How was that even possible?

  I was still trying to come up with an answer when he pushed on: “Are you with Allie?” he demanded.

  I curled my free hand into a fist, felt my nails dig into my palm. Sawyer was watching me carefully. I fumbled around for something plausible, finally had to settle for the truth. “No,” I admitted. “No, I’m not.”

  “Thank God,” he said again, then, to whomever was in the room with him, Soledad or Cade: “She’s okay. I’ve got her.”

  “What?” I said sharply. Suddenly I was very, very afraid. “What’s going on?”

  “Reena,” he said, and I knew I’d never forget this as long as I lived, the neon lights of the ice cream place in the near distance, the curious expression on Sawyer LeGrande’s pretty face, and the tiny shards of glass embedded in the asphalt, like something fragile and bright had only just exploded there. “I have to tell you something bad.”

  11

  After

  I don’t see Sawyer for the rest of my Sunday brunch shift, although he might as well be breathing down my neck the whole time the way everybody’s talking about him—like he’s some visiting movie star and not a degenerate who up and abandoned everybody who ever gave half a damn. The regulars are delighted to see him. The waitresses can’t get over his hair. He’s been traveling this whole time, Finch tells me in the kitchen, rambling around the country like a tumbleweed or Jack Kerouac, with no particular destination in mind.

  “Traveling,” I repeat slowly, the colossal unfairness of it hitting me with a force so physical I actually grab the edge of the prep table until I steady out. I feel like my insides have been excavated, like I’m some screwed-up ghost version of myself. “How nice for him.”

&nbs
p; By five fifteen, all I want to do is go home and curl into a ball under the covers, but right after I punch my card I turn around and he’s there in the doorway of the office, rubbing at the stubble on his cheek.

  “Jesus Christ,” I say, louder than I mean to. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “Sorry,” Sawyer says, in a voice like he’s actually not. He slouches casually against the jamb. For the first time since he turned up, I let myself stare at him for longer than a second, more than a quick, hungry glance out of the corner of my eye: He’s broader than he was when he left here. The hair on his arms is bleached pale from the sun. Sawyer is patient; he stands there and he lets me look.

  “What?” I snap, when I’m finished.

  His lips twitch. “Nothing,” he says.

  I pick up my purse and dig through it for my car keys, pushing The Very Hungry Caterpillar out of the way for the second time today. “Have you been here all afternoon?” I ask, eyes on the jumbled contents of my bag so I don’t have to look at him.

  “No.” As soon as he says it I look up at him anyway. Sawyer shakes his head. “I looked at the schedule.”

  “Why?”

  “To catch you when you were leaving.”

  “Well,” I say as nastily as I can manage, finally putting my hands on my keys, “mission accomplished. Here I go.”

  Sawyer doesn’t move from the doorway. “Looked pretty busy today,” he says. “Have to get used to it again, I guess.”

  My eyes narrow. “Why’s that?” I demand. We have another bartender now, a fiftyish guy named Joe who’s always sending me home with lollipops for Hannah, even though she’s too young to eat them. “You’re not picking up shifts, are you?”

  “Are you going to kill me if I say yes?”

  “Possibly,” I tell him, and he smiles like I’m trying to be funny. I’m not trying to be funny. I think I might burst into tears. “Can you stop?” I ask, voice brittle. For a while Hannah was doing this thing when she got upset where she clamped her hands over her ears and screamed. “I mean it. I’m not—just—stop.”

  Sawyer quits smiling, makes a move to come toward me. I hold out my hands to keep him away.

  “Reena,” he starts.

  “Seriously,” I tell him. “You can’t just come here after all this time and try to joke around with me and act like nothing happened. That’s not—Stuff happened, Sawyer. You can’t just be back.”

  Sawyer shrugs once, just barely. He looks so much older than he did. “I am back, though,” he tells me softly. “You gotta … I am.”

  The hideous thing is this: I want to forgive him. Even after everything, I do. A baby before my seventeenth birthday and a future as lonely as the surface of the moon and still just the sight of him feels like a homecoming, like a song I used to know but somehow forgot.

  And God in his golden heaven, how completely messed up is that?

  “Stay away from me,” I mutter, and shove past him out of the room.

  *

  “How was work?” Soledad wants to know when I get back to the house a while later. She’s sitting cross-legged on the sofa, wearing her reading glasses and working intently on the crossword in the paper. Soledad learned English when she was twenty-two and still she does the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen, and that’s only one of the reasons why I love her.

  “Sucked, thanks. Hey, pretty lady,” I say, scooping Hannah up from where she’s playing on the floor and planting noisy raspberries on her tummy until she’s giggling like gangbusters, squirming happily in my arms. “How was your day, huh? You have fun today?”

  “She was a dream,” Soledad reports, same thing she says every time she watches Hannah. They spend a lot of time together, and I like the idea of her as a second mom to Hannah, just like she was to me. Soledad lived with our family for nearly a decade before my father asked her to marry him, another piece of this family clicking quietly into place. It is not good for man to be alone.

  “Where is he?” I ask her now, toeing off my sneakers and hefting Hannah onto my hip. My dad has been avoiding me since our run-in at the tomato plants, studiously absent whenever I’m around. The baby chatters happily into my ear.

  “In the yard again. Reena …” Soledad looks sorry. Sometimes her voice reminds me of water over a fire, the steam rushing up like that. “You might want to give him some time.”

  “Oh.” I nod. I’m not entirely sure what she’s worried about, his temper or his heart. Both, most likely: When I used the computer this morning I saw her recent Google search for the effects of stress on cardiac conditions. “Okay. You know, I was thinking of taking the baby for a ride.”

  “We’re supposed to meet Roger and Lyd in a little bit anyway,” Soledad tells me. “Gonna check out that new place on Las Olas.” She looks like she wants to say something else, and for a moment I almost ask her how it’s possible that my father can eat a friendly dinner with Sawyer’s parents, size up the culinary competition, but can’t find it in his heart to look at me. In the end, though, both of us let it lie. “Have a good time,” is all she says.

  “We will. Come on, you,” I tell the baby, and bring her upstairs for a change before we go. “We’re road trippin’.”

  *

  Hannah had wicked colic when she was an infant; she didn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time until she was nearly six months old. Changing her feeding schedule didn’t work. Laying her down on the dryer didn’t work. Backrubs didn’t work, and neither did long soaks in the baby tub. Soledad helped as much as she could, but in the end it was Hannah and me sitting on the floor and crying, two men trapped in a mine. I honestly had no idea what to do.

  She did like driving, though, and if I wasn’t too exhausted to get behind the wheel of a car, it usually wasn’t too long before she’d pass out in the backseat—head lolled back, tiny fist shoved in her mouth. Still, for the first hour or so the slightest stop would wake her, so I took to driving for miles on the interstate, where there was no threat of red lights or pedestrians to slow us down. Once, I ran out of gas in Miami and had to call Cade to come get us. Another night I made it all the way to Vero before I realized it was probably time to head home.

  Eventually, Hannah’s bellyaches subsided and our moonlight excursions up and down 95 became less and less frequent. I haven’t driven this stretch of highway in months. But tonight, as the baby drifts off to dreamland to the dependable droning of public-radio jazz, the scene out the windows is as familiar as home.

  12

  Before

  Sawyer didn’t say a word as he sped away from the ice cream shop and toward the hospital, went quiet as nighttime and just as still. A gorge had opened up inside my chest. The CD in the stereo was still spinning, old Louis Armstrong Sawyer must have gotten from my dad, and I reached forward and clicked it off. “It’s bad, right?” I asked.

  Sawyer shrugged once, eyes on the asphalt in front of him. “I don’t know.”

  “It must be bad, right? If she’s already in surgery and my dad wouldn’t—” I broke off, the words swallowed up by guilt and confusion and this huge, endless fear. I dug my fingernails into the passenger seat, willing the car to go faster. “It must be bad.”

  “I said I don’t know, Reena,” he told me, and I was quiet after that.

  We parked in the cavernous garage at the hospital and got lost on the way to the ER, the two of us wandering the corridors like some panicky, overgrown Hansel and Gretel. “This way,” Sawyer said finally, and I followed him dumbly down a freezing, fluorescent hallway, then through a set of doors and into chaos.

  There was a crowd in the waiting room, small but restless: Allie’s parents and Sawyer’s, Lydia with her wild hair secured in a complicated knot. Lauren Werner was there, crying noisily. And there were my father and Soledad, watchful and waiting, somehow already gutted like carcasses or husks. Soledad looked heartbroken. My father looked old.

  They got to their feet as I ran across the wide expanse of linoleum, and I
saw my father’s eyes narrow in confusion: On the phone we had never actually established where I was or who I was with, and now here was Sawyer close behind me, throwing off fear and heat.

  Allie’s boyfriend, I thought, for the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes. I was with Allie’s boyfriend.

  He didn’t have time to ask, though, because Allie’s mom had spotted me and was rushing forward, grabbing me so tightly it was painful. I felt my ribs scrape together inside my chest. “She’s dead,” Mrs. Ballard wailed. It was a sound I’d never heard before and, if it pleases God, a sound I would like never to hear again. “Reena, baby. Our girl is gone.”

  I thought, very clearly: This isn’t happening.

  I thought, very clearly: This is our fault.

  I stood there with Allie’s mom for a while, let her sob into the limp fabric of my shirt. I didn’t cry. I didn’t do much of anything, to be honest; I felt frozen, bizarrely quiet, like something had been hermetically sealed inside me. I heard the whine of an ambulance in the distance, the whoosh of a door whispering shut. Finally Mr. Ballard pried her gently out of my arms.

  “We didn’t make up yet,” I told him.

  “Reena.” That was Soledad, coming closer, but I stepped away, out of her reach.

  “I’m serious,” I said, and my voice was louder this time. I was having a hard time getting what was going on. “We weren’t—we were …”

  I trailed off as Soledad wrapped her arms around me, stood there loose-limbed and bewildered while she whispered Spanish prayers into my ear. “I’m not kidding,” I told her, voice cracking. I felt my ribs start to collapse. I looked up one last time before I stopped remembering anything, just in time to see the sharp, jagged pleat of Sawyer’s backbone as I watched him slip out the sliding doors.