Everything Between Us (16 page)

His shoulders tremble, and I realize he’s chuckling. “I might have to make an exception.” He raises his head, grimacing. “I never imagined what it would be like to lose her, and now I think about it every time I look at her.” He glances at me and laughs, his eyes glittering with pain. “And I don’t talk about this stuff with anyone, so why am I saying it to you?” He curses under his breath. “I have to go.”

He gives me a quick kiss on the cheek and picks up his toolbox. “Sorry. I’ll see you Wednesday?”

I blink, so confused by the last thirty seconds that it takes me a few moments to reply. Unfortunately, by the time I do, he’s already out the door, striding to his car. “Bye, Daniel,” I whisper, swallowing the lump in my throat. I spin around and jog for the enclosed porch, my cage of glass, my window on the world, the place where I began to fall.

On the table, where Daniel usually sets his sketchpad, is a piece of paper. On it sits ten hundred-dollar bills. Scrawled on the paper is a note:

Stella, I meant it when I said there wasn’t enough money in the whole world.

Chapter Thirteen: Daniel

I put my arm over my mom’s shoulders as she looks through an old photo album. In one of the pictures, she and my dad are on the beach, each holding a sunburned, blond, crying little boy. Me and Nate. Thing One and Thing Two, they used to call us. “We put sunscreen on you, but you sweated it off so quickly,” she says with a chuckle. “And we had trouble catching you and getting you to stay still long enough for us to put more on!”

“We must have been such a pain.” I smile, looking at my brother’s plump baby face. He’s twenty-two now, lean and lethal and able to drink me under the table. He’s stronger than I am, I think—I emailed him to see how he was doing after my mom told me he lost one of his friends, and he told me he was good, looking out for his buddies, determined to get home in one piece. I wish he was here now.

“You were both gifts, Daniel. Rambunctious, unstoppable, obnoxious little gifts.” She laughs, then coughs. The sound sends a spike of anxiety through my chest. Tomorrow morning at five, we leave for the hospital. Her doctor said the surgery will take about three hours, and then she’ll be in intensive care for the rest of the day. My dad is across the room, watching the Red Wings on TV. His eyes are glazed and I know he’s not really seeing much. He’s barely said two words today, though every time my mom asks him for something, he’s right there, desperate to provide. Seeing them together makes me ache—I’m not sure how well either of them would do without the other.

“Good thing there were two of you,” I say, fighting the urge to squeeze her shoulder. She’s not a very big woman, especially compared to the men in my family, and now she’s lost some weight, so she seems like a fragile cluster of twigs.

“Why do you think we didn’t have more kids? We were terrified of being outnumbered.” She laughs again. Always cheerful and determined not to let things get her down. She looks up at me, her mouth twitching with mischief. “Do you remember when I put the curse on you?”

“What?”

“One day, you convinced your brother to climb all the way onto the roof to fetch the boomerang you threw up there—”

I rub my hand over my face. “I’ll never forget it.” He was only eight, and he slipped on a loose shingle and fell. Fortunately, he landed in my mom’s flower bed, full of loose, soft mulch, and limped away with a twisted ankle, but my mom had just come outside to garden, so she had to witness the whole thing.

“But you don’t remember the curse,” she says. She screws her face up, all angry and dramatic, and says in a shrill voice, “Someday, Daniel, when you have children, I hope they give you a scare like this! I want you to know how it feels!” She grins. “I’m still waiting for it to take effect.”

I sigh. “You might be waiting a while. I’m in no hurry.”

She leans her head on my shoulder. “That’s okay. You have to find the right woman first.” Her eyes meet mine. “Any movement on that front?”

I stare down at her, my thoughts tumbling over one another. She rarely asks me about my love life, something for which I’m truly grateful. The fact that she’s doing it now means she’s wondering if she’s going to be around to see her grandchildren. And I don’t know what to say to her, how to reassure her. “How am I supposed to know when I’ve found the right woman?”

Her eyes narrow. “She’ll be able to see right through you, Daniel Alexander Van Vliet.” She pats my cheek, but her look tells me she knows more about my life than she lets on, knows me better than I ever really understood.

“Why would I ever want that?” I tease.

“Because she’ll
like
what she sees,” my mom says softly. She looks back down at the pictures, of me and my brother through a decade of Halloweens, a lifetime of Christmases, skinny, pimpled boys with big Adam’s apples who grew ridiculously fast and ate her out of house and home. Somewhere in there, I started to hide, to put on an act. Somewhere in there, I split myself down the middle, the part of me I wanted to keep to myself and the part of me I was willing to share. I got so good at it that people never noticed they got only half of me—except my mom, apparently.

And Stella. She’s inside my walls, and I keep ducking and hiding, but she finds me every time. When she took me in her arms this morning, I almost fell apart. I couldn’t let her see it, and I got out of there as quickly as I could. She sees right through me, but does she
like
what she sees? I’m not sure she feels much one way or the other, and her indifference hurts more than her hatred. I think that’s what I’ve been afraid of all along—the me I keep to myself is not that impressive. I’m just a guy, one who’s kind of quiet, who loves his mom and dad, who doesn’t know if God exists but really hopes he does, who likes to think about stuff but isn’t an expert in anything, who’s honestly not sure if he’s talented or not but likes to explore. Nothing special, nothing amazing. I’ve tricked people into thinking I’m a fool, a crazy person, a god of sex, an extreme one way or the other. They think I’m dangerous, or stupid, or shallow, or too deep to comprehend. No one has ever called me out, because they like the show. Until Stella came along and basically called bullshit on the whole thing. She stared me down, stripped me bare, pulled me apart.

And then she decided she found the show more interesting than the reality, enough to pay a thousand dollars for it.

Mom nudges my shoulder. “Where’d you go?”

I try to smile, but it doesn’t quite work. “Just thinking about what you said. Seems like a lot to expect from someone.”

“That she would see you for who you really are and love you? Daniel, I don’t think you see yourself very clearly.”

“You’re my mom. You have to say stuff like that.”

“Are you suggesting I’d lie, young man?” Her tone reminds me of Sundays, sitting in a pew, where a simple look from her would make Nate and I sit up straight. Not because we were scared, but because we didn’t want to disappoint her.

“No, ma’am,” I say, kissing her temple and wishing we could go on like this, that tomorrow would wait a while before creeping up on us. But I know it won’t, so I’ll sit by my mom until we have to let today go.

I’m staring at the wall in the family waiting room when Caleb walks in. I’ve been here with my dad for hours—my mom’s surgery took a lot longer than they anticipated and they’ve just taken her to recovery. The exhausted-looking surgeon said she bled more than they expected, and my dad listened quietly, asked when he’d be able to see her, and nodded when the doctor told him it might be another few hours. As soon as we were alone again, he told me he needed some air, but that I should stay here. I think he needed to go break down in private, and I wasn’t going to crowd him.

“Hey,” says Caleb, dropping into a chair beside me. “Katie’s finishing up her day in her partial hospitalization program, and I thought I’d come early and check on you.”

“Thanks.” I blink, trying to bring the room into focus. “What time is it?”

“About three. How’s—”

“How’s Katie?” I ask quickly. I need to talk about anything but my mom right now.

“She’s Katie. She’s doing a little better, but she still doesn’t like it when I spend too much time with Romy. At this point, though …” He sighs.

“At this point you don’t like to spend too much time
without
Romy.”

“Yeah.” He chuckles. “I feel sane when I’m with her, you know?”

“Not really.”
Sane
sounds like a word in a foreign language to me right now.

His fingers tap his thighs. He’s got paint smeared along the back of his hand. “Markus said something to me.”

“Markus is an asshole.”

“Sometimes. He said Liza’s daughter …” He runs a hand through his hair. “Never mind.”

“No, tell me what the asshole said.” Maybe I’ll go down to the co-op and pick a fight with him. I desperately need to hit something.

“He said she wanted to pay you to …”

“I never should have told him.” I was a mess when I did, right after she’d dropped that bomb on me, so I mentioned it to exactly the wrong person. Markus likes to spread shit around.

“It’s true, then.”

“Yeah,” I say. Caleb, at least, I can trust. He doesn’t say much anyway, and he’s not into drama.

“I guess Liza doesn’t know about it.”

I laugh. “No, most definitely not. She’s been at some spa since last week.” I didn’t really think about what would happen if she found out, either. I didn’t think about anything except Stella.

“Are you going to do it?” He gives me a sidelong glance. “I thought you guys were at each other’s throats.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “Things changed.”

“Ah.” That’s all he says, but like a lot of stuff with Caleb, even that little word speaks volumes. “So you’re going to do it.”

“I
did
do it.” My heart thumps as the memories crash like waves against the walls of my skull. “Not for money though.”

“She got to you.”

I groan and rub my hands over my face. “That’s one way of putting it.” It’s been all I can do not to call the mansion, praying she’ll pick up. I want to hear her voice. I want her to make me laugh. I want her to poke holes in something I say because that means she’s really listening. I want her to push back, to meet me halfway. One thing has kept me from pulling out my phone: “I don’t think I got to her, though.”

Caleb leans forward and sets his elbows on his knees. He looks over his shoulder at me. “She’s got a lot going on. She might not know how to deal with it. She might be scared.”

My throat tightens. “I’m sure she is. That’s kind of the problem.”

“She gave you her virginity. That means something, however she tried to make it happen. Most girls don’t do that kind of stuff coldly. Especially not the first time.”

I stare at him, wondering if he could possibly be right. But Stella was raised that way, to use money to get what she wants. And she let me go pretty easily. It didn’t seem to bother her at all, that it was over, that I was leaving. If I hadn’t told her I wanted to stay that night, she would have walked me to the door ten minutes after I’d pulled out of her body. “She might be the exception to the rule.”

God knows, she’s the exception to so many others.

He rolls his eyes. “Right.”

“What am I supposed to do then?”

“What do you want from her?”

“No fucking idea.”

He chuckles, hanging his head. “She twists you up,” he says quietly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Except … he’s pretty much nailed it.

“Nothing, I guess. It’s just how I think about what Romy does to me.” He stands up. “I’m headed to the vending machine. Mountain Dew?”

My thoughts spinning, I manage to nod. Caleb stares down at me for a few seconds. “You should talk to her and quit dancing around it. Maybe you could figure it out together.”

“But then she could hurt me,” I mumble.

“You’re doing a pretty good job of that all by yourself, bro.” He pats my shoulder and strides down the hall.

Chapter Fourteen: Stella

The snow is piled in grayish walls on either side of our driveway, around the trunks of the trees that line the narrow lane. From the window in the entryway, I see the sun glint off the roof of Daniel’s car as he maneuvers slowly along the road. My stomach is tight. He hasn’t left my thoughts since he walked out on Sunday morning, and I’ve been like a gerbil on a wheel ever since. I’ve spent hours online, researching lung cancer and surgery, and everything I’ve read is scary. Every time the phone has rung, I’ve sprinted for it, thinking it might be him, that maybe he’d need something from me and call.

He hasn’t, though. Which … makes sense. I mean, I’m just this crazy art student of his, the recluse girl who can’t live in his world. Why would I expect him to turn to me? He has a whole life outside of this mansion. He’s only shared a few hours with me. At times I’ve convinced myself that it meant something to him, but really, how could it? We’ve known each other for a few weeks, and seen each other an hour a day, and half that time, I was a raging bitch who was trying to drive him away.

And the other half, I was a love struck girl offering him money for the chance to get a little more of him than he wanted to offer. I looked it up in the dictionary—it turns out that’s the definition of pathetic.

So now what? He didn’t take the money. Is that because he realized how sad it was and decided to give me a freebie? I had to laugh when I saw his note. I could almost see him shaking his head. Like he saw right through me and tossed the money back in my face. Not to be mean, because he’s not a mean guy. No, it’s because he’s playing a game that’s far too sophisticated for me to join, and he knows it.

I rub the goosebumps from my arms as his car disappears behind a snowdrift, headed for the side entrance. Willa calls from the kitchen. “Your art teacher’s here, Stella! Do you want me to bring your care package out?”

“No,” I call, my voice breaking. In my stupid daydreams, it had been the perfect thing. Four different kinds of brownies, and I individually wrapped each one, because I figured Daniel and his dad would be at the hospital a lot, and might need a snack. I just wanted to do
something
for him. But now that he’s here, and I’m imagining giving it to him, it feels so childish. “I’ll give it to him later,” I add, probably too softly for her to hear. I head for the enclosed porch, because that’s where he expects to find me. I sink onto my chaise and promise myself that none of this is a big deal, that I may not be able to keep up with him, but I don’t have to chase him like a fangirl, either.