99 Days (10 page)

Gabe furrows his brow in mock consternation, then grins. “I . . . definitely shouldn’t drive, yeah,” he says cheerfully, reaching for my hand and tugging until I scoot closer on the chair, the heat of his body bleeding through his T-shirt and mine. “I’ll find somebody to take you, though.”

“I could take your car,” I suggest. “I could drive it back tomorrow before work, or—”

Gabe shakes his head. “I gotta open the shop tomorrow,” he tells me, then, like he’s just realizing: “Ugh, I gotta open the
shop
tomorrow, I’m stupid, I’m gonna hurt. Anyway. Let me see if—”

“I can take her.”

I startle, head whipping around in the darkness: There’s Patrick, hands in his pockets and the same hard, unfamiliar stare I’ve gotten used to lately, like we never slept side by side in the hayloft in summer or told each other our ugliest fears. He scratches at a mosquito bite on his elbow, idle.

I feel myself go pale, sitting there on the lounge chair. I’ve left him alone all day on purpose, wanted to give him as much space as I could—or, at least as much space as I could after showing up at his party. “Patrick.” I swallow. “You don’t have to.”

But Patrick’s already turned toward the driveway, car keys jingling like bells in his hand. “You coming?” he calls over his shoulder.

All I can do is nod.

According to the clock on the dashboard, it’s twelve-thirty A.M. by the time I climb into the passenger seat of the Bronco across from Patrick, fussing with the tricky seat belt until I finally hear the buckle snick into place, just like I have a million times before. This is the car I think of when I think of the Donnellys—the one Connie used to haul us all around in, the one we crowded into every morning for the sleepy drive to school. We used to climb up onto the roof and look for comets.

“Thanks for taking me,” I say now, swallowing down the strange thickness of memories in my throat as Patrick pulls out of the driveway. “You really didn’t have to do that.”

Patrick keeps his eyes on the road, his face cast reddish in the dashboard light. He’s got the faintest batch of freckles across his nose. “I know,” is all he says.

We ride in silence the whole way to my mom’s house, no radio and the woods pressing in on either side of the road, close and haunted. The headlights carve broad white slices through the dark. There’s not another car on the road, just me and Patrick; I open my mouth and close it again, helpless. What can I possibly say to him? What could I possibly tell him that would matter?

After what feels like a living eternity Patrick turns up my mom’s winding driveway, the Bronco coasting to a stop on the side of the house. “Okay,” he says, shrugging a little, hands resting loosely on the steering wheel. It’s the first time he’s opened his mouth since we left the farm. “See you, I guess.”

“Uh-huh.” I nod mechanically like a robot or a marionette. “Okay. Thank you. Seriously. I—seriously, yeah. Thank you.”

“No problem,” Patrick mutters. He barely waits until I’m out of the car before peeling back down the driveway, which is why I’m so wholly surprised when he slams on the brakes again before he’s even halfway to the road.

“Fuck it,” he says, getting out and slamming the door of the Bronco behind him, closing the distance between us in what feels like three big steps. “I just. Fuck it. I hate this.”

“Patrick.” My heart is pounding wetly in my throat, fast and manic. I didn’t even make it up the walk. “What the hell?”

Patrick shakes his head. “I
hate
this,” he repeats when he’s reached me—when he’s close enough so I can smell him, overwarm and familiar. “Jesus
Christ
, Mols, how can you not hate this? Just being in the same car with you makes me want to scrape my own skin off. I fucking hate this. I do.”

I stare at him, stunned, unsure if this outburst is global or specific, if I should apologize or yell back or kiss him hard and honest right here where we’re standing.

If he’d even let me. What it would mean if he did. What it means that part of me might want to, even as I can feel myself falling into Gabe.

“I hate it, too,” I venture finally, ten years of history pressing at the insides of my rib cage, like time itself is expanding in there. I wish for the hundred thousandth time that I knew how to make this right. “I’m so sorry, I—”

“I don’t want to hear you’re sorry, Mols.” God, he sounds so, so tired. He sounds so much older than we actually are. “I want it to stop feeling like this.” Patrick shakes his head. “I want . . . I want . . .” He breaks off. “Forget it,” he says, like he’s suddenly remembered himself, like a sleepwalker coming back from a dream. “This was stupid, I don’t know. I wanted to make sure you got home; you’re home. Like I said, I’ll see you.”

“Wait,”
I say too loudly, my voice ringing out in the quiet yard. “Just. Wait.”

I sit down on the ground where I’m standing, night-damp grass whispering cool against my legs. Then I turn my back. “Come on,” I say, facing away from him just like we used to when we were kids and needed to talk about something important or embarrassing. “Sit for a sec.”

“Are you serious right now?” he asks me instead. “I—no, Molly.”

Even though I can’t see him I can picture the look on his face exactly, the barely contained annoyance, like I’m embarrassing us both. For once, I don’t care. I tip my chin backward until just the top of his head comes into view behind me, that curly hair. “Just humor me for a second, okay?” I ask. “You can go back to hating me right after, I promise. Just humor me for one second.”

Patrick looks at me for a long minute, upside down and scowling. Finally, he sighs. “I don’t hate you,” he mutters, and sits down on my mother’s front lawn with his broad, warm back pressed to mine.

I breathe in. “No?” I ask when he’s settled on the ground behind me, the first physical contact we’ve had in over a year. I can feel each individual pleat of his spine. We’re hardly even touching—it’s nothing to write dumb romance novels about, certainly—but it’s like my body is full of sparks anyway, like I have no skin and I can feel him in my organs and my bones. I try to hold very, very still. “You don’t?”

“No,”
Patrick says, then, all in a rush: “I don’t like you with my brother,” he tells me, so fast I know that’s what he was trying to get out a minute ago. The back-to-back on the ground trick still works. “I just—I think about you with him, and I don’t—I don’t like it.”

I feel the blood moving through my veins, a low frantic swish.
What does that mean?
I want to ask. “Well, I don’t like you with Tess,” I say instead, addressing the trees at the far end of the property. Patrick’s hand is planted on the grass not far from mine. “As long as we’re airing our grievances.”

“I don’t know if you get to have an opinion about me and Tess,” Patrick says immediately. He moves his hand away from me then, sitting up a little bit straighter. A breath of cool air slices between his back and mine.

“We were broken
up
,” I blurt, turning around and losing the physical contact entirely. “Come on, Patrick. Before anything ever happened with him, you
broke up with me
, remember?”

I’m surprised at myself for saying it—I never even think about it that way, because it feels like making excuses. It’s true, at the basest of levels: Patrick wasn’t my boyfriend when I slept with his brother at the end of my sophomore year. We’d been fighting for months, ever since I’d first floated the idea of going to Bristol, when we finally hit a wall and he told me to get out. But technicalities have never, ever mattered when it came to the two of us.

“Are you really going to try to argue that with me right now?” Patrick demands, still facing away from me. “We were together our whole lives and he’s my
brother
, and you’re telling me it doesn’t matter cause we broke up five minutes before?”

“That’s not—” God, it feels like he knows how to twist everything, to make it seem like I’m trying to wriggle out of what I did. “I’m not saying—”

“You kept that secret from me for a
year
,” Patrick says, and he sounds so hurt it’s heartbreaking. “A whole year. If your mom hadn’t written that freaking book, would you ever have told me? Before we got married or whatever? Before we had kids?”

“Patrick,”
I say, and I know that I’ve lost this one. He’s right—the secret was almost worse than the act, how every single day we were together after that was a lie of the most epic proportions, a million small untruths hardening like a crust on top of the big one. I faked the flu at Christmas junior year just to avoid seeing Gabe while he was home from Notre Dame, I remember suddenly. Patrick brought me soup and
Home Alone
on DVD.

Now I turn around again, settle my shoulders against his one more time. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. I mean, it’s not.” Patrick exhales, waits a minute. Leans back, so I can feel him breathe. “We’re even, then, is that what you’re saying?”

It takes me a minute to realize he’s looped back around, that he’s talking about me and Gabe versus him and Tess. I shake my head though he can’t see me—he can feel it, probably, and that’s enough. “I don’t know that I’d call us even, exactly.”

“No,” Patrick says, and I don’t know if I’m imagining him pressing back a little bit harder against me, like he’s letting me know he’s still there. “I guess not.”

We sit there for a long time, both of us breathing. I can hear crickets calling in the trees. A dog barks far away, and Oscar answers. My stomach makes a sound, and Patrick snorts.

“Shut up,” I say automatically, sending my elbow back into his rib cage. Patrick grabs it for a second before letting me go. “What do we do now?” I ask him quietly.

“I don’t know,” Patrick tells me. For somebody who thought this was a stupid experiment he hasn’t made any move to turn around, I notice: I wonder if he’s afraid of it like I am, like seeing his face again will break whatever spell we’re under, the night and the privacy and the feeling of being home. “I have no idea.”

“We could try being friends,” I venture finally, feeling like I’m edging dangerously close to a precipice, like I’ve got more to lose than I did twenty minutes ago. If he shuts me down again that’ll be the end of that. “I mean, I have no idea if we can actually do it, but . . . we could try.”

Now Patrick does turn to look at me; I turn, too, when I feel him moving, his gray eyes locked on mine. “You want to be friends?” he asks, the barest hint of a smile I can’t read pulling at the edges of his mouth. “Seriously?”

“If you’ll have me.” I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah.” Patrick shakes his head as he climbs to his feet, like that’s typical. “You never did.” Then, before I can contradict him: “Let’s be friends, Mols, sure. Let’s try it.” He heads back across the lawn toward the Bronco. “Can’t be any worse than what we are now.”

I take a different route than usual on my run, closer to the highway, past some weird commercial remnants of Star Lake’s failed 1980s redevelopment—a McDonald’s, a family-owned water park called Splash Time that looked like a lawsuit waiting to happen even when I was five, and a Super 8 with a scrubby lawn housing a broken fountain and a flimsy sign stuck into the grass reading
BUILDING FOR SALE BY OWNER
. I’m so distracted thinking about Patrick—have been thinking about him for more than twenty-four solid hours by now, the moment in front of my house and everything it might or might not mean—that it doesn’t really register until I pass it again on my way back, pushing hard through the last couple of miles.

BUILDING FOR SALE
.

Huh. I wonder if the contents are for sale, too.

Probably the smart thing to do would be to go home and call them like a grown-up, but the truth is I’m excited now, this little lick of adrenaline flicking its way through my veins. I cross the mostly empty parking lot and the drab, faded lobby to where a sleepy-looking clerk is slouched greasily behind the desk. “Can I help you?” he drones, blinking twice.

I take a deep breath. “Hi,” I say, sticking my hand out in what I hope is an authoritative manner, pasting a let’s-make-a-deal smile on my red, sweaty face. “I’m Molly Barlow, from the Star Lake Lodge. I was hoping to talk to somebody about purchasing your TVs.”

*

“Oh, you’re clever,” Penn says, grinning across her desk at me when I report my early morning success story—forty late-model flat screens available for a fraction of what I’ve been able to negotiate anywhere else, provided we can haul them away by next weekend. Turns out the owner is about to foreclose. It feels kind of bad, making bank of somebody else’s bad fortune—but not bad enough that I don’t grin back when she continues, “You’re
good
.”

I’m embarrassed all of a sudden, not used to the praise. “It wasn’t that big of a deal, really.”

“Don’t do that,” Penn advises, shaking her head at me. “Don’t downplay what you did over there. You saw an opportunity, you took the initiative, and you got it done. I’m impressed with you, kiddo. You should be impressed with yourself, too.”

“I—” I shake my head, blushing. “Okay. Thank you.”

“You earned it.” Penn looks at me from over her coffee cup, curious. “Hey, Molly, what are you studying in the fall, huh?” she asks. “Is that a thing I know about you?”

I shake my head. “It’s not a thing I know about me, even.” I shrug. “I don’t really know what I want to do.”

Penn nods like that’s not at all unusual, which I appreciate. It feels like everybody else I know is a hundred percent sure of where they’re headed—Imogen off to art school, Gabe headed back to his org chem classes. Pretty much every girl in my graduating class at Bristol was enrolled in specialized programs in things like engineering and political communications and English lit. A lot of times it feels like I’m the only one still lost. “They’ve got a business program at BU, don’t they?” she asks.

“Oh.” I nod back, unsure where she’s headed. People always ask me if I want to be a writer like my mom. “They do, I think, yeah.”

Penn nods. “You should think about it,” she advises. “You’re good at it, what you do here. You should know that about yourself. You’re doing a really good job at this.”

I grin at that, wide and happy. It’s been a long time since I felt good at much of anything. “You’re doing a really good job at this, too,” I tell Penn finally, head out to the lobby to see what else needs to get done.