Meant For Me (3 page)

“Do you ever wonder why the hell you do something?” I asked rhetorically. “I don’t know why I brought that with me.”

She nodded. I could see in her blue eyes that she understood what I was getting at. It was bizarre to me that she could effectively communicate without words. Maybe in a way it removed the white noise of verbal clutter. Maybe sometimes we talked too much or around the subject. Chloe just nodded or shook her head. Agree or disagree. Nothing more. No running dialogue or theory. Yet at the same time, it was frustrating in its simplicity. What was the thought passing through her head? It made me curious.

“I was engaged to Caitlyn Deprey,” I said, conversationally. Why, I wasn’t sure. I never talked about Caitlyn. But there was something easy about confiding in someone who seemed empathetic but would have zero opinion to offer. “That’s the ring I was going to give her. I asked for it back, which was really shitty of me. And all I’ve done with it is let it sit in a drawer. I almost feel like I should give it back to her so she can sell it. I mean, it was a gift. You shouldn’t ask for a gift back, right? I did it because I was pissed off.”

Chloe was biting her lip, the soft fabric of her shirt shifting at the hem in the breeze as she glanced over at me. Then she started typing on her phone. After a second, she showed me the screen.

Squinting in the sun, I read it.

How long ago did you break up?

“Eighteen months.”

She typed again.
Maybe it doesn’t matter now?

I gave a snort. “Ha. Good point.” The only one it mattered to was me. I was the loser who hadn’t moved on. Way to feel pathetic at two in the afternoon. “I guess it doesn’t matter at all.”

Swallowing hard, I stared out at the water. Vinalhaven was exactly like I’d imagined it- clapboard buildings dropped here and there with no plan or order, the harbor dotted with boats, both fishing and sailboats. It had the briny scent of the ocean clinging to it, and commercial and residential dwellings interspersed along the coastline. We were going right. Apparently that was all I needed to know. Go right and you’ll get there. If only life were that fucking simple. Now I had no clue which direction to take. A small hand on my arm jerked me out of my dark and cyclical thoughts.

Startled, I turned to see Chloe staring at me.

“I’m sorry,” she mouthed.

There was something beautiful about her silent sympathy. That she didn’t know me at all, but felt compelled to try to tell me she felt bad. She was compassionate, that was obvious. Yet at the same time that my chest swelled and I felt the stirring of gratitude, I hated that she would see me like this. That somehow I had become a victim. A victim. Like the kind of guy other dudes made fun of and girls felt sorry for because I had lost. I had lost the girl to another guy and I had lost in the aftermath because I had done nothing to prove that I had ever been worthy of her in the first place.

Staring at Chloe made me hate myself. In her face, I saw reflected back at me every poor choice I’d made, every girl I’d fucked, every day that stretched ahead of me with zero purpose whatsoever. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her I didn’t want her goddamn sympathy, but I stopped myself. I couldn’t do that to her. It had nothing to do with her and for whatever reason she didn’t talk, I couldn’t spit in the face of her fairly bold gesture of attempting to communicate with me.

“Thank you,” I said, my voice raw and low. “It’s okay, you know.” Maybe it wasn’t okay. I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure why it mattered so much. Like who the hell hadn’t been hurt in a relationship? Everyone who had ever breathed, basically. So why was this such a big deal to me?

No answers. I’d spent a long time looking for them and they weren’t showing up. Maybe they never would. That was a pleasant thought. Chloe’s hair had fallen into her eyes and without thinking about it, I reached out and brushed it off her cheek. She sucked in her breath and pulled back. I realized that it wasn’t appropriate to touch a stranger that intimately. Not really. But I did it all the time. Every time I went out I touched someone in a way that was personal, suggestive, intimate. It had warped my sense of what was okay and why we touched someone in the first place.

I dropped my hand. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out. You just had a hair in your eye.”

She didn’t say anything.

Jesus. I suddenly wanted to get the hell away from her. It was too bizarre and more than I could handle before I’d eaten anything for the day. She made me think too hard and it was uncomfortable.

We walked up the road and left the vestiges of town behind in that businesses disappeared and only houses were strewn about here and there. When we had gone another twenty minutes in silence and I was sweating bullets in the summer sun, wishing a beer would magically appear in my hand, she finally paused in front of a house that might have been painted gray or maybe was just weathered to the point that the boards appeared gray. She pointed to the house and then to her chest.

“That’s your house?”

She nodded.

“Okay, thanks for getting me this far, I really appreciate it.”

She stretched her arm out and pointed to the next house down the road, then to me.

“Aubrey’s?”

Nod.

“It was nice to meet you, Chloe. Maybe I’ll see you around town.”

She nodded with a quick smile and started up the driveway.

For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder what she had been doing on the ferry. Who let a girl who didn’t speak go to the mainland by herself? What had she been doing there? It was a mystery. One I wasn’t sure I cared enough to solve.

I didn’t seem to care about much besides avoiding reality and making myself feel like shit repeatedly.

Aubrey’s house was about as weatherbeaten as Chloe’s and even smaller. It was tired, with no bushes or landscaping besides one lone pot of flowers sitting on the edge of the porch. It didn’t look like a place my sister would want to hang out. It had a barn, for fuck’s sake. Aubrey was a suburban girl. She was Abercrombie and Fitch. She was jaded and complaining.

But then again, maybe that was just my perspective as her older brother. I hadn’t spent much time with her in the last year. Hell, even before that. From everything she had said, she was happy here. Maybe she’d been a bit of a whiner before because she hadn’t found her place.

She’d figured out where she belonged and I had lost any sense of what to do with my life. Total role reversal. Not a comfortable feeling.

Going up onto the sagging porch, I knocked on the door. She answered immediately, the door swinging open and revealing her standing there in athletic shorts and a tank top, her chest bursting out of it like the shirt no longer fit. Her hair was no longer blonde, but a reddish tone, and she was smiling widely. But the biggest change was that in her left arm was a chubby baby facing out towards me, bubbles forming on her lips.

Whoa. My sister was a mother. Seeing it made it definitely one hundred percent real.

“Hi!” She reached out and gave me a one-arm hug, partially squishing the baby between us.

Aubrey looked and sounded so cheerful it made me feel totally melancholy and I wasn’t even sure why. I was happy for her. I’d missed her. “Hey. So what have we got here?” I bent over and checked out the baby, running my finger over her cheek. Her skin was softer than I would have guessed. I hadn’t spent much time around babies and the way she stared up at me, solemn, her brown eyes glassy, her features all in miniature perfection, kind of blew me away.

My sister bounced the baby a little in her cradle hold. “This is Emma. Say hi to your Uncle Ethan, Emma.”

Then she did the unthinkable and tried to hand the baby to me. “I don’t think…” But then I was holding her, awkwardly for a second, then settling into it, and my protests died. She smelled like skin and diapers and something else I couldn’t place. Her head lolled a little and I shifted her so that I could hold her safely and check out her little face. She was pretty damn cute, there was no denying it. “Hey, Emma. Look at you with your perfect little nose, and your tiny little lips.”

Aubrey laughed.

God, I heard myself and had to laugh too. I sounded like every other idiot talking nonsense to a baby.

“Come on in,” she said, moving into the house. “I’m so glad you’re here. I wish you could meet Riker but there’s plenty of time for that. He’ll be back in six weeks. You’ll have to come up again.”

Carefully walking with Emma in my arms, I followed Aubrey, glancing around curiously. The inside of the house wasn’t as worn as the outside. It was small but clean. “You guys own this house?”

“No, we rent it. But I like it okay. It’s not too big, not too small. The kitchen is retro, but whatever.” She sank down onto the couch. “I’m not working so this is perfect for a one income family.”

So adult. That was what struck me about her. Aubrey looked calm, happy. She had a family of her own. She wasn’t just a daughter and a sibling any more. She was a wife. A mother. Freaky shit for a big brother to realize that his little sister was all grown up and then some. Maybe it wouldn’t seem so real if I had one ounce of my own shit together. But I didn’t.

“You look great,” I told her, and I meant that. She looked beautiful in her peacefulness. I sat down in the easy chair carefully, descending with the baby in my arms. Emma made a face like she was going to cry and I felt a momentary panic. “Crap, I think she’s going to cry. What do I do?”

“Bounce her a little.”

I attempted a bounce. The baby let out a protest, making the first actual sound since I’d arrived.

Aubrey laughed. “Maybe I should have said gently rock her. You just bounced her like a basketball.”

Emma started crying for real now, louder than I could have ever imagined a human being that tiny could manage. Her face was all screwed up and red, and a fat wet tear rolled down her cheek. That was it. I was out. Standing up, I foisted the baby back at Aubrey. “You’d better take her.”

She rolled her eyes at me. That looked more like my sister.

“Ethan, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look so scared in your life.”

“Lack of experience, what can I say? I feel like I made her cry.”

“You didn’t make her cry. She’s hungry. See how her lips are trying to suck on nothing?”

I eyed the baby. “Yeah, I guess.”

Suddenly Aubrey pulled her tank top and did something to her bra and then her breast was just there, nipple and all, for a split second before the baby blocked it. “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked, horrified.

“I’m feeding my baby.” Another eye roll.

I looked at the floor. “I get that but holy shit, give me some warning so I can look away.”

“It’s not like you haven’t seen about a thousand boobs in your lifetime.”

Possibly a slight exaggeration. “You’re my sister. The creepy factor is high, I’m sorry.” Really high. Like so high I needed to distract myself in an attempt to banish that visual from my memory banks. “So, uh, what’s with your neighbor?”

“Paul? What about him?”

“Not Paul. Chloe. The girl who doesn’t talk. I met her on the ferry. What’s the story there?” Glancing up, I saw Aubrey had adjusted her shirt so she was covered, Emma blocking the rest of her. But nonetheless I concentrated on my sister’s face as I spoke.

“What do you mean? Chloe is Paul’s daughter.”

“Why doesn’t she talk?” I asked impatiently. That wasn’t a normal thing. There was a reason for it.

“She has selective mutism. It’s caused by anxiety. I guess she’s been like that since she was seven.”

What the hell? Astonished, I asked, “She hasn’t talked since she was
seven
?”

“Well, she talks to her father though I’ve never seen it, and she will occasionally whisper in her little sister’s ear. I have seen her do that.”

Okay, that just totally threw me. “Wait a minute. So you mean she can talk, she just doesn’t? Like she’s mute on purpose, for a dozen years? Who does that?”

My God, no one in my family could go twenty minutes without saying something. A decade of silence? It was crazy.

“It’s not on purpose,” she said, and there was censure in her voice. “From what I understand, she wants to talk, she just can’t in front of anyone she isn’t totally comfortable with.”

“That’s weird,” I said flatly. “She’s pretty enough. I don’t get it.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know. It just seems if you’re bullied or socially anxious or whatever it’s because you have something about you that makes you an easy target, like a disability or a physical deformity. I mean, it’s terrible to say, but true. Usually being pretty guarantees a reasonable amount of social success.”

“You sound like an asshole,” she said.

“What?” I protested. “It’s true. I just think it’s odd and really pretty damn sad that this girl doesn’t talk when she probably hasn’t been brutalized or bullied like some kids.”

“You’re quantifying her pain?”

That made me pause. “No. Yes. I don’t know. Has she gotten treatment?” The conversation was starting to make me uncomfortable and I wasn’t sure why exactly. Maybe because I was sitting from that place of privilege I was ascribing to Chloe. I always had been. Good parents, suburban upper middle class upbringing, an overachiever. Well liked by my classmates. Aubrey was right to be looking at me like that. But it still seemed bizarre as hell. I was standing by that.

“I don’t know. She’s my neighbor and my babysitter but I’ve never asked her. Like how would I say that? Hey, are you trying to fix your shit? It’s rude.” Aubrey lifted Emma up to her shoulder and pulled her shirt down. As she rubbed Emma’s back, she narrowed her eyes. “Why are you so interested anyway?”

I shrugged. “It’s not every day you meet someone who doesn’t speak. In fact, this is a first for me. I find it strange that you aren’t more interested. And did you say she’s your babysitter?”

“Yes. She’s great with Emma. I asked her to come over tonight so we can go into town and get some pizza. I didn’t have time to go to the grocery store and buy food.”

That shattered my dreams of being well fed. Domesticity didn’t extend to cooking apparently. But I had to ask. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to leave your three month old with a girl who doesn’t talk?”