First There Was Forever (13 page)

N
ana died on January fifth. Dad was with her. He called us in the late afternoon to give us the news. It was a perfect blue-sky day. The worst kind.

Dad and Mom were all business right away, not talking about Nana or death or anything like that. They immediately started making phone calls, coordinating logistical things with Aunt Caroline, and planning the service.

“Ask Hailey if she’s coming to the funeral,” Mom said to me.

Hailey and I hadn’t talked since New Year’s. Hearing her name gave me a jolt, and I hoped Mom didn’t see it. With each passing day that Hailey didn’t call to apologize, my hurt and anger turned more into bitterness.

“Lima?” Hailey sounded surprised when I called her that afternoon.

“Hi,” I said flatly. “Nana died.”

She sighed. “Oh no. I’m so sorry. Is your dad okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Hailey took a deep breath. “Lima, I am so sorry about New Year’s! I’m such a terrible person!”

She didn’t sound sorry at all. She said it in the same tone of voice she would have used if she’d forgotten to return my math book or something. Like, “Whoops! Silly Hailey!”

It wasn’t what I’d expected, and it wasn’t satisfying. She had been mean. She had been cruel
.

“I was an asshole. I totally get it if you’re mad,” she continued cavalierly. “Just remember I was wasted. It was New Year’s Eve. I mean, everything was crazy. Let’s not fight.”

My whole body suddenly burned with anger. I felt like screaming at her. Instead, I said icily, “You said some seriously hurtful things.”

“I know. It was just a stressful, sloppy night,” she said quickly. “I was probably being insane. I was trashed.”

“And you left me at Bridget’s house. By myself,” I said, shaking.

“I thought you didn’t want to come with us to the party,” she said. “You told me you wanted to go home.”

“Because I was so upset,” I replied. “I mean, I didn’t want to go to the party because we were fighting but . . .”

“Yeah, it was really complicated. It was such a messy night,” she said. “But whatever. I’m so sorry. So so sorry. I told you that already.”

With every fake sorry, my level of anger seemed to rise. I was speechless.

“Lima? I’m sorry,” now she sounded annoyed. “How many times do you want me to say it?”

“This actually isn’t why I called,” I said curtly, ignoring her question. “My mom wanted to know if you wanted to come to Nana’s funeral. You knew her, too.”

There was some rustling on the other end of the line, “Shit, Lima, can I call you back? My food is burning. I have to put the phone down.”

“Okay,” I said.

She never called me back. She didn’t need to. I assumed she wouldn’t go to the funeral, I just didn’t want to be the bad friend who didn’t invite her. I’d rather she be the bad friend who didn’t come.

T
he morning of Nana’s funeral, I got dressed in my room with the windows wide open so I could listen to the waves crashing on the beach. How strange, I thought, to be picking out an outfit for a funeral. Clothing just seemed so insignificant.

I fingered a wrinkled black dress that Mom had bought me in seventh grade for a classmate’s bar mitzvah. It was tucked into the back of my closet. I pulled it off its hanger and shimmied into it. It was fading and flecked with dust, but it still fit. It had a high neck and cap sleeves. I put on black tights and a black cardigan, and braided my hair.

The cemetery was overcast and breezy, and the sound of the priest’s voice got lost under the sound of the wind. My dress was itchy. I was cold, and my sweater didn’t keep me warm. I had worn the wrong thing.

All afternoon, I waited for the fact that Nana was gone to hit me. I waited for a big wave of sadness to crash over me. But instead, I felt self-involved and petty. I couldn’t wrap my mind around Nana being dead, and every time I tried to understand it, my mind rebounded to something really stupid, like whether or not the food at the reception would be more like snacks or a sit-down meal. I even found myself getting impatient with Mom and Dad, who seemed distracted and barely looked at me when I tried to talk to them all day.

• • •

Dad stayed in Santa Barbara and Mom and I drove back to Malibu in the evening. We didn’t talk or listen to the radio in the car. We hit traffic on the 405, so all of a sudden we were just inching along through the polluted, depressing outskirts of LA. Outlet malls, bland housing developments, and neglected diners punctuated the barren landscape. It was twilight, and the sky looked a grimy orange.

Mom was distant and, even though she wasn’t complaining, I could tell she was sad.

“What are you thinking about, Mom?” I asked.

She sighed and shook her head slowly. “You know? Nana dying—it makes me feel so old.”

Mom turned and looked at me then, and in that awful light I saw shadows underneath her eyes that I had never noticed before. Maybe it was because she’d been crying at the funeral, or maybe it was simply because she’d said it, but it was true—Mom looked old.

“Stop it, Mom,” I scoffed, trying to be comforting. “You’re forty-four. You’re, like, the youngest mom ever.”

She tried to smile. “Want to get dinner on the way home? I’m too tired to cook.”

“Yes. I’m starving,” I said. “Where?”

She shrugged. “McDonald’s?”

My jaw dropped. In my whole entire life, Mom had never taken me to McDonald’s. Not once. When I was little, Dad and I snuck there together a few times, but it was our secret. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I know this is probably weird to say, but it made me sad to think about Mom eating McDonald’s. It made me think she was more tired and sad than I could possibly imagine.

I nodded. “Okay.”

We sat in a hard plastic booth and ate combo meals—burgers and French fries and milk shakes.

I was taking some of her leftover French fries, squishing them in my fingers, dipping them in a pile of salt, and eating them when I looked up and saw her looking at me with wet eyes. She was smiling.

“I love you so much,” she said. She blinked and the tears spilled down her face.

I know it’s not possible for your heart to actually break, but I felt like mine was shattering into a million little pieces. Seeing Mom cry just made it hurt so much.

• • •

Back in my room that night, I put on
Blue
by Joni Mitchell and sat on the edge of my bed. The whole day had left me feeling out of sorts. Mom was sad. Dad was sad. Nana was dead. Our house felt so empty, as if all the people and all the music in the world couldn’t fill it up again.

I could hear the sounds of Mom putting things away downstairs, the gentle patter of her footsteps. I knew I couldn’t make her feel better. I knew she was sad for Dad and for Nana, and now I had this new knowledge that I didn’t even really want. That Mom knew she was getting old.

Outside my window, the night sky was polluted and starless. A plane flickered slowly, moving in a straight line over the ocean. I couldn’t believe how much everything was shifting around me, like the ground giving way underneath my feet. Life was feeling like nothing more than a disorganized, directionless series of events.

I picked up my cell phone, wanting to call someone, to be cheered up, to talk about something petty. I missed Hailey. Not the Hailey who had been around recently, but the old Hailey. I missed having a best friend. It was confusing to miss someone who wasn’t actually gone. She was alive, but she was so different. It occurred to me for the first time that maybe Hailey wasn’t going through some awful phase. Maybe she really had changed. Maybe sometimes people transform slowly into someone unrecognizable.

The person I really wanted to talk to and see was Nate. I wanted to feel his attention on me. I felt that telling him about Nana would actually make me feel better. I wanted him to tell me what he went through when his dad had died. That kind of loss was unimaginable to me. I wanted him to feel safe and cry, and I would understand and make it better. I wanted to hold him close to me and feel his heart pounding, and the pressure of his body against mine, and I wanted to smell his hair and his skin. I could almost imagine him here on the edge of the bed with me, the way his hot and cold blue eyes would look right now. How his hands would feel on my face.

T
he rest of January remained cold and overcast. The sun came out every afternoon, but it was weak and pale and it always went away quickly, receding into a veil of clouds. I caught a cold the morning after Nana’s funeral and it lingered, coming and going for weeks.

As I walked to the car-pool lane one Wednesday at the beginning of February, people were already filing onto the big yellow bus that would take them to Clean the Bay. The week before, I hadn’t done Clean the Bay because I was sick and today I had lied and told Mom it was canceled so I wouldn’t have to go. I couldn’t handle being around Hailey. And seeing Hailey and Nate at the same time would be even worse.

I barely saw Nate at school, but I didn’t stop wondering about him. In spite of all the bad things that had happened over winter break, I still got this rush every time I thought about him. It had been almost two months since Skyler’s holiday party, but still I replayed the moment we shared that night over and over in my mind, scanning the memory for clues.

Something had shifted in me that night and now I wanted to see him with an intensity that felt new. Every time I walked past the patio behind the administration building, I checked to see if he was there. Was this what a crush felt like? Was this how Hailey had been feeling about Nate forever? For the first time, I understood why she constantly talked about Nate, weaving him into every conversation we had.

I started to wonder how many girls Nate had been with and how far they had gone. I knew he had kissed Hailey, but how far had he gone with Sophie? And who else had there been? I had only kissed two guys in my life. The first was a guy from outside of school during spin the bottle at this girl’s birthday party in seventh grade, and the second was a guy name Alec Foster who I kissed last year. He had been a senior when I was a freshman, which made it a really big deal when he asked me out.

Alec was really good-looking and easygoing. He had an angular, chiseled face and a lean, athletic body. He was super-nice and smart and well rounded. He had one girlfriend forever named Katie, who was equally perfect. A few weeks after they broke up, Alec came up to me out of the blue at lunch and invited me out. Hailey practically fainted.

That weekend, Alec picked me up and we went to some stupid movie. It didn’t matter what movie we saw, though, because I couldn’t focus on it at all. I was totally preoccupied with how I was supposed to behave and what was going to happen after the movie was over.

Hailey had dressed me that night, putting me in a baby blue cardigan that she said matched my eyes.

“Listen,” she said, when I told her I wasn’t sure if I wanted to kiss him. “It’ll be easy. He’ll know what to do. He’s hooked up with tons of girls, I’m sure. Just try not to overthink it.”

She was right. Alec knew just what to do, leaning across the center console of his car and cupping my face in his hand. It was just like it looked on TV. His mouth tasted like gum and something unfamiliar, but it wasn’t horrible. While it was happening, all I was thinking about was making sure I paid attention to all the details so I could give Hailey the full scoop afterward.

When Alec asked me out again, I lied and said I wasn’t feeling well. I don’t know why I didn’t go. I could have. It wasn’t bad going out with Alec; it just wasn’t anything.

I was lost in thought about Alec Foster when the front entrance to the school swung open and Nate stepped out, stopping on the sidewalk a few feet away from where I stood. We hadn’t seen each other since Skyler’s party, and when our eyes met, I felt the air around me grow still and warm. I felt totally transparent, sure he could tell how much I’d been thinking about him lately.

He opened his mouth like he was about to say something to me, and then an older boy who I didn’t know bounced out of the door behind him and yanked on Nate’s backpack, jerking him backward.

Nate’s attention slid away from me to his friend, and the two of them turned and walked in the direction of the bus.

My heart pounded in my chest.

As I walked to the spot where Mom would be picking me up, I wondered when and how I would ever get to be alone with Nate again.