Dedication (20 page)

I stare at the fluorescently illuminated chaos. The glass door swings open and JenniferTwo walks out, pulling her Hamilton hat on.

“Really bad?” I ask as she approaches.

“Ridiculous.” She nods wearily. “And the second machine just broke. So…lucky I got here at nine.”

“You’ve been here since nine?”

“Yeah. Got here right after Jake.” She slides her keys out and jangles them.

“Jake’s in there?”

“Over there.” She nods toward his Corvette, parked away from the others, headlights still on. “Later.” She unlocks her Honda and drops into the driver’s seat, Tone Loc blasting as she backs up. Stepping out of her way, I see Jake sitting on the pavement in front of his car.

I walk over, buttoning my coat. “Jake?” Getting closer I see papers spread out over his hood, motionless in the still night. He taps at the pavement with his fingers, legs crossed, Burton hat pulled low. “Jake.” I crouch down, but he doesn’t look up. “What are you doing out here?”

His beautiful face is vacant as he nods to some drumbeat only he can hear. “Nothing.”

“You been sitting here since nine?”

He continues to nod steadily, his expression blank. Standing back up, I look down at the Common Application forms, recognizing Susan’s handwriting everywhere.

“Your mom filled out all of this?” I pick one up. “So then you just have to stick it in the mail, right?” He doesn’t respond. “Where’s the essay?” I shuffle the papers, but there are no copies attached. “Jake, I thought you’ve been working on this all month?” Now I am my mother. I pull back my sleeve to check my watch. “Jake, come on, talk to me. I have to do my own shit, too, you know.”

“Couldn’t do it.” His words come out in foggy puffs.

I crouch to hear him. “What?”

“I couldn’t do it.” He lifts his eyes to mine. “I don’t want this. I couldn’t do it.”

“I have to get my stuff copied,” I plead for this not to be happening.

“Go,” he says.

“But, Jake—”

“Go.”

I rip open my bag’s zipper, the bundles of applications sitting inside. I glance back at the line. Fuck. I grab the stack from the hood, pull out my pad, and turn to a fresh page, simultaneously throwing open the passenger door. “Get in.”

“Katie.”

“Jake Sharpe, you are five hundred words away from getting this shit done like everyone else. We have fifty-eight minutes at ten words a minute, so you talk, I’ll write, but I swear to God I’ll run you over myself if you don’t get into the car right now so my fucking fingers don’t freeze! Move!” I bop him on the head with the notebook and he pushes up to standing and slides in, lifting himself over the gearshift to the driver’s seat. I tuck in beside him and slam the door against the first flakes of a fresh snow. “Okay! Here we go.” I sort through the applications, scanning for the essay question. “What person or experience has been the most influential to you and why?”

He clicks off the lights and stares at the steering wheel.

“Jake, come on.” I hand off the questions and tap the notebook with my Bic. “What person or experience?” He opens his mouth…and closes it. “Okay, skiing. How about skiing? Or lizards? That trip to Arizona? Or the band? The band works. Do the band—”

“You,” he interjects quietly.

“What?”

“You.” He swivels in the bucket seat. “Are the single most influential person, or experience, in my life.”

Astonished, I lean to kiss the ridge of his knuckles resting on the gearshift. “Thank you,” I breathe, before forcing myself to return to the responsibility of our reality. “But, Jake, you can’t do that—they don’t want to hear about me.”

“Well, that’s what I have to say.” He takes the pen from my hand and starts scrawling directly on the application. I sit beside him, unable to get out of the car, take my place on the copier line, move this whole process toward its completion.
“Central
America, right?” he checks, glancing over at me uncertainly.

“Yes.” I smile.

“She taught me you have to stand up, all the way up, on a desk, for what you believe in…” he scribbles furiously. “Katie?” He looks up.

“Yes.”

He leans over, his lips meeting mine. “Thanks.”

Denise Dunkman pulls her Nissan into our driveway and I reach for my seat belt. “Great!” I say, unhooking myself.

“I just don’t know how this happened,” she says for the three hundredth time since we arrived this morning at the empty parking lot of Smithton High, off by a full week for the Regional Debate Competition.

“Seriously,
it’s okay, Denise,” I say again. “I repeat: I’m happy not to sleep at that creepy motel tonight.”

“But I wrote it in my calendar, I double-checked the materials,” she continues to re-review her erroneous plan he last three hours on the highway apparently not having turned up any satisfying answers for her.

“I believe you.”

“I just don’t know how this happened.”

“This will be like our practice run, okay?” I give her a quick hug and grab the door handle, eager to exit this Beckett-esque loop. She continues to shake her head as I step onto the snowy pavement, the silence of our street a welcome break from her Edie Brickell tape—a tape I was quite fond of at seven o’clock this morning. I tug my overnight bag from behind the seat and heave it onto my shoulder, feeling the stiffness of the six-hour round-trip when I stand to slam the door.

“I wrote it in my calendar! I double-checked the materials!” she shouts from inside the airtight vehicle, and I smile and nod. Waving good-bye as I cross in front of her receding headlights, I see she’s still shaking her head, as she will be on Monday and, I’d bet, when we make the drive again next weekend. Note to self: bring tapes. Or a mallet.

Trudging up to the porch I see a car parked in front of the garage. Ugh, company. Completely drained from the buildup of competition adrenaline that fueled the first half of the day, I’m way too tired to be cordial.

I turn the handle and lean into the door, but it doesn’t give. Dad’s visiting Uncle Daschle in Dorset. Did Mom go out with a friend and lock the door? Shit. I move backward down the steps, hoping I brought my key, looking up to confirm that the lights are on upstairs. They are. I ring the bell just as the door pulls in and Mom steps onto the threshold, her hair tousled. “Katie.” She blinks at me, the collar of her dress tucked under.

“Hey.” I drop my duffel to the porch and arch my back. “The regionals weren’t until next weekend.” But she doesn’t step aside. And her feet are bare, not even slippers on.

“Um…” I look over her shoulder to see someone coming down the stairs. A man I don’t know. I go numb. I am not supposed to be here—not supposed to see this—know this. “Katie,” she says again, stricken, but still not moving.

“I just wanted to take the car,” I say, suddenly needing an excuse to come into my own house. They both stare at me, her in the doorway, him halfway down the steps, a tie hanging limply in his hands. I ignore it, trying to make him a plumber, an exterminator, someone with a reason to be upstairs that is not—is not—

“This is—” She goes to make the introduction, but I push past her, diving to the side as she reaches to touch me.

“I’m taking your keys.” I swipe them off the side table, cool metal filling my palm.

“Katie,” she says with false calm. “This is Steve Kirchner. He teaches at the middle school and just came by—”

“I’m taking the keys,” I say again, because it’s all that comes to mind that does not grant approval or even acknowledgment. I scramble away through the kitchen toward the garage, where the door whirs to life as I start the engine and hurl the car into reverse. But I can’t. I can’t go because his car is in the middle of the driveway. I shift into neutral, leaving the engine running to open the side door and call shakily into the house, “Can you move your car, please?” I fumble to unhook the plastic lid of the garbage can before vomiting up my rest-stop lunch.

“Sure. Yes. Definitely.” He steps quickly past, his cologne filling my nostrils as I wipe my mouth on the sleeve of Dad’s university blazer, and in moments his car has backed up, muffler pumping gray fumes beneath the streetlamp as he hovers. Hovers and does not go.

I rev her car backward until it is in front of his and shift gears to leave. It is only then that she comes down the porch stairs calling my name, the border of abandoned birdhouses at her bare feet. I don’t look back to see what his car does next.

My hand knocks against the Sharpes’ front door. I watch the steady motion of it back and forth, like those windup things they put over babies’ cribs to keep them distracted.
Knock, knock, knock.
And then Jake is there and I fall into him, against him, my knees giving way as I try to get out what has just happened—that everything in my life that was the before him will now be the before
this,
and I am in the early minutes of the rest of it, the After. My first memory of the After will be this very moment beneath the yellow glow of Susan Sharpe’s glass lanterns.

“Sshshhh, Katie,” he murmurs softly. Bending to keep hold of me as I crumble, he pulls my body up and into him as tightly as he can. I push my face into his sweatshirt, try to meld myself all the way into his bones, my mouth open, sound barely coming out as I gasp. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Katie.”

I lift my chin and look up, try to burrow into his worried eyes. “My mom,” I try. “My mom…” He rocks me into him on the cold brick, as I gasp and sob and try to form a sentence that will name this.

I wake on Jake’s chest, both of us wrapped together in all the blankets he was able to find in his cabin. My sore eyes focus over the scratchy wool, into the glowing embers of the fire, before I’m blinded by the image of Mom immobile in our front door. Hot tears begin again, sliding down my cheek and onto Jake’s bare skin, slipping around his ribs. He inhales deeply, tightening his hold on me. “Hey there,” he murmurs. “Awake again, huh?”

“Hi,” I say, running my tongue along the wetness lining my mouth as he strokes my hair. I lift my head to look at him, his own eyes red-rimmed in the firelight. I reach up and touch the salt tracks on his cheekbone. “You okay?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says, shaking off my hand. “Just sad. It’s sad.” He runs his hands over me.

“I don’t get how we got here.” I blink up at the ceiling, an image of her kissing Dad at his birthday last August seizing my chest. “My whole life she’s always been fucking on about fortitude and loyalty, and it’s all bullshit, everything she stands for is bullshit. My dad falls apart for a few months and she just fucking cuts.”

“Shhh,” he says gently, though his eyes are welling and I realize I’m officiating at the funeral of his escape family, but I can’t stop.

“How can I trust anything now?” The tears come faster. “How can I trust
anything
they say or do? Why did this have to happen, Jake?”

“I don’t know.” He rubs my back through the blanket. “Why is my mom like she is? Why does my dad travel all the fucking time? I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.” I roll onto my side facing him in the crook of his arm and he rests his hand on my hip, pulling me closer to kiss my forehead.

“Because they suck?” he offers.

“Yeah.” I manage a laugh before biting my lip. “What did you do when your mom ran into that tree? Where did you put it?”

“I don’t know. She just…I just sat on the floor by her bed all night and felt like shit and then, I don’t know…it doesn’t stay this bad. Just at first.”

“Really?” I ask, needing him to know, deciding he does.

“Really.” He looks at me and the broken in him resonates with the broken in me. “Right now you’re just on the floor at the end of her bed, that’s all, Brainy. Sun’s still gonna rise.”

“But I hurt so much.” I slide my hands around myself. “Everywhere, it hurts.” He gently lifts my fingers and lowers his head. I feel his warm lips on my side, over my ribs. He moves his mouth up my skin, along my neck, and to my lips.

“It doesn’t have to. I don’t want it to,” he says, his face just above mine. He kisses my cheekbone, the bridge of my nose, circling his soothing warmth around my eyes. I close them as I weave my fingers into his hair.

I awake to the sound of a car engine turning off, the cabin filled with the blue light of early dawn. Nausea envelops me as I unhook Jake’s arm to stand and step over him to peer out the window where Dad’s car is parked at the top of the road. The headlights go out. I shakily pull on my wrinkled black dress pants and push my feet into my loafers, shrugging Dad’s blazer over my skin, the smoky scent of last night’s fire puffing up from the fabric as I unlatch the door.

Upon seeing me, she gets out of the car and I pull the cabin door closed, silently replacing the latch. Still only in her dress, her arms wrapped around herself, she is surprisingly small beneath the towering oaks. I descend the steps, my loafers crunching the white down. I cannot—do not want to see this her. The her of the After.

Her breath fills the space between us in a visible cloud. “Katie.” She is hoarse, her face swollen, raw, and I will the cold to fill me up, allow no room for feeling. “Laura told me about the cabin. I couldn’t stand the idea of you out, driving around with this…” She breaks into tears I can’t let in. “He won’t talk to me, Katie, he won’t let me help. I don’t know how to make him better. I don’t know how to make him employed. I don’t. I’ve applied to jobs in Burlington, Boston even, wherever, whatever he wants, but he won’t
do
anything. These last few months I’ve been trying, you have no idea how hard I’ve been trying.” I gird my whole body not to throw myself into her embrace, let her make this better, the familiarity of her, the most familiar I know. “And then to have someone want to make me laugh, it just…”