Since You've Been Gone (45 page)

I just nodded. I had dozens of questions, but none that I felt I could ask him. Maybe Frank sensed this, because he went on, “We didn’t really have all that much in common anymore. It was more like . . . we were just used to each other.”

“So . . . ,” I started, hoping this wasn’t the exact wrong question to ask. “It wasn’t because of me?”

“No,” Frank said, shaking his head. “I mean, when we first started hanging out this summer, I wasn’t thinking that way,” he said. “At all. I was committed to Lissa.  And you and I were friends. But then . . .” Frank glanced over at me for just a second, but that was all that it took. It suddenly felt like the truck was a good ten degrees warmer than it had been just seconds ago. He cleared his throat before speaking. “I don’t know. Maybe it was the night of my birthday. But at some point, I started . . . thinking about you,” he said, a little haltingly, “more than I knew I should. Much more.” Without even leaning over to look in my side mirror, I could tell that I was blushing. “But I wasn’t sure . . . I didn’t know how you might be feeling until you drove me home.”

“Right,” I murmured, thinking about the way I had kissed him, not the other way around, making my feelings pretty clear.

“And it wasn’t fair to her,” Frank said, glancing quickly into the rearview mirror and changing lanes. “Or you. So I drove down to see her.”

“What happened?” I asked, wishing I could seem impartial, detached, and not like someone who was desperate to know how things had turned out.

Frank took a breath and let it out. “She was feeling the same way,” he said. “It was why she didn’t come in July. She knew if she saw me, she’d have to break up with me, and she didn’t want to do that to me on my birthday. And as soon as I started to tell her what I was feeling, she was pretty quick to end it.”

“I’m really sorry.”

Frank nodded, and paused for a long moment before he said, “I think we’re going to be fine. I don’t think we’ll ever be great friends, but it’s okay.”

“Good,” I said, trying to sound cheerful about this when my thoughts were spinning. I remembered when Frank came to my house, and how happy he had seemed. He’d wanted to tell me then that they’d broken up. And I hadn’t even let him finish, and had run away from him. I suddenly wished, more than anything, that I’d let Frank tell me when he’d wanted to. Because I was no longer sure what any of this meant.

“So, um,” Frank said, sounding more nervous than I’d ever heard him, “what do you—”

“Oh my god,” I said, loudly, pointing out of my side of the car as 14A approached with worrying swiftness. “There’s our
exit.” Frank glanced at the mirror, then cut across the two lanes that were thankfully free of cars, to take the exit for River Port. “Sorry,” I said, when we were off the interstate and winding around the ramp. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” In fact, I really,
really
hadn’t wanted to interrupt him then, because it had seemed like he was about to ask me something important.

“It’s okay,” he said, stopping at a red and glancing over at me. “I was just . . .” The car behind us honked and Frank looked around. “Do I take a right here?”

I fumbled for the directions, and realized that this might be the worst possible moment to have an important conversation. “Right,” I confirmed, and Frank made the turn. I looked down at the directions, which got much more complicated than they previously had been, then over at Frank.

“We don’t have to talk about this now,” he said. He nodded to the directions in my hand. “Let’s just get there first.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding a few too many times. I was actually grateful to have a moment to try and process everything I’d just learned in the past few minutes. And following the instructions to get to 4 Brookside Lane, with their clear steps to a known outcome, seemed preferable to trying to sort through my tangle of thoughts.

I rolled down my window, and Frank did the same, and the warm, early evening air blew through the truck, ruffling the directions in my hand. We drove through a one-street downtown, drug stores and clothing shops, but also a lot of empty
storefronts, for-sale signs in the windows. We turned down a side road that took us through a neighborhood that looked grand but fading, with mansions on either side of the road, most separated by long stretches of land. We’d been driving for a few miles when I realized we were getting close.

“We should be coming up to Brookside,” I said, leaning forward to look for it. “On the left.” A moment later, I saw the sign, half hidden by an overgrown tree. “There.”

“They don’t make this place easy to find,” Frank murmured as he made the turn. We were looking for number four, but this didn’t appear to be an ordinary road, where that would have been a simple thing to find. We passed the drive for the first house, but it wasn’t until several minutes later that we saw the second one. The road was long, with trees on either side, so overgrown they almost met above us and formed a canopy.

I glanced at my phone as Frank drove slowly down Brookside and we passed the third house. It was almost eight, and night was falling, the shadows of the trees lengthening and stretching out all around us.

“Are you sure this is right?” Frank asked. He turned on the headlights, which were suddenly bright against the falling darkness and squinted out in front of him. “Because I don’t think—”

“It’s there,” I said, pointing to the driveway.  You would have missed it unless you’d been searching for it. There was a brick pillar on either side of the drive, and they both had brass plaques on them that read
4 Brookside
, but the bricks were crumbling
and it looked like the brass hadn’t been polished in a while.

Frank turned down the driveway and I felt my heart start to beat faster. When a house came into view, I took off my seat belt and leaned forward to look closer.

The house was big and white and sprawling, and you could tell it had once been impressive, but the paint was peeling, and the lawn looked overgrown. But I barely noticed this, because there was a girl sitting on the mansion’s steps in the falling darkness, reading a magazine and sipping a Diet Coke.

Frank had only just stopped the car before I was getting out of it, closing my door behind me and walking toward the house and my best friend.

Sloane looked up from her magazine and her jaw dropped open. She stared at me as I walked closer in the fading light and looked up at her.

I smiled at her before I spoke. “Hi.”

“Emily?” Sloane dropped the magazine and stood up, stumbling once as she took the steps down to the driveway. She stood in front of me, her eyes wide and shocked, like she wasn’t entirely sure this was actually happening.

“Hey,” I whispered, feeling tears come to my eyes.

“Oh my god,” she said, still looking stunned, shaking her head. But then she smiled, and I saw that her blue eyes were shiny with tears as well. “Oh my
god
,” she said again, and reached out and hugged me close. I hugged back, and couldn’t tell if I was laughing or crying, or both, but whatever it was, it sounded like Sloane was doing the same. “What are you doing here?” she asked when we broke apart. “How did you find it? I mean . . .”

“It’s a long story,” I said, still looking at Sloane, trying to take her in. I’d expected to see the Sloane I remembered—wearing some fabulous vintage dress, with red lipstick on and earrings that jangled when she turned her head. But she was dressed in a pair of jean shorts and an old T-shirt that she’d only ever worn before as a pajama top. Her hair was back in a messy ponytail, and her pink toenail polish was chipped almost to the point of no longer existing. She was still Sloane, of course . . . but not a version I was familiar with.

I took a breath to begin to explain when the truck door slammed and we both looked in its direction. Frank was walking around to the hood and leaning against it. Anyone else would have probably stayed put—or at least looked deeply uncomfortable, but Frank seemed like he was taking this in stride, like helping to reunite friends was just a normal thing he did. “Hi,” he called, raising a hand in a wave.

Sloane squinted through the darkness. “Emily, I might be hallucinating,” she said calmly, as she turned to me. “Because I could almost swear that was Frank Porter.”

I nodded and motioned Frank over. “Like I said,” I told her as she turned to me, jaw dropping once again. “It’s a long story.”

Twenty minutes later, it was just the two of us, sitting on the house’s back porch.

The porch was wide, with a screened area just off it, and a swing, flowerpots, and wicker chairs with patched and sun-faded cushions. It looked out on the brook that the street was
named for, that I could now hear better than I could see, as night was falling, a blue night with fireflies already lighting up intermittently from all sides. Sloane was on her own in the house—Milly and Anderson and her aunt Laney had gone to Charleston for the weekend. Because it seemed that they lived with her aunt now—they’d been living here the whole time.

Frank had claimed that he was exhausted, and asked if he could crash on the couch for a while. I wasn’t sure if this was because he was giving Sloane and me some time to talk, or if he was actually tired.  As I thought back on the day, and the fact that he’d been driving in the sun for hours—and hadn’t taken a nap, like I had—I realized it might have been some of each.

Sloane had gotten us both Diet Cokes, and was walking around the porch barefoot, lighting citronella candles and plugging in the twinkle lights that she’d told me her aunt absolutely hated, but that she’d gone ahead and covered the porch with anyway.

When the lights had been lit, she came and sat next to me, and we looked at each other. It suddenly seemed like there was so much to say—so much to get through—that it was hard to even begin.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said, tucking her legs up underneath her and shaking her head. “I keep thinking this is a dream, and I’m going to wake up at any moment.” She studied me, tilting her head to the side. “I
love
the hair,” she said. “It looks amazing.”

I smiled and brushed my bangs back. There was a piece of me that wanted, so badly, to just jump back into being Sloane-and-Emily again, for as long as I was here. I could see it would be easy; she’d already been giving me several
We need to talk about this
looks in terms of Frank, and I could feel the pull to keep things light, just have fun and let things go back to how they were. But I needed answers, and I hadn’t come all this way to leave without them.

I reached into my bag and pulled out the list, the paper deeply creased from a summer of folding and refolding. “I got your list,” I said. “I did them.”

Her head snapped up. “All of them?”

“All of them,” I said, handing it to her.

“Really?” she asked. She looked shocked—and a little skeptical. “Even the skinny-dipping?”

“You just left,” I said, hearing my voice shake, remembering her disappearance, the weeks of silence, and then what it had been like to get the list and nothing else, no explanation. “I had no idea where you were or why. Just this.”

Sloane just looked at me for a moment, and I could practically feel the part of her that hated confrontations shrinking away. But, surprising me, she nodded. “I know,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I just thought it was for the best.”

“How could it be for the best?” I asked. “I’ve spent the whole summer wondering what happened to you, and why you somehow didn’t care enough to tell me.”

“It’s not that,” she said quickly, her voice hurt and a little sharp. “Are you kidding me?”

“Then what?”

Sloane glanced out to the brook, where I swore I could hear what sounded like frogs somewhere in the distance. As I waited for her response, there was a piece of me that still couldn’t believe that I was here, with Sloane again, on a humid night on a porch in South Carolina, finally getting my answers.

“When you move as much as I have,” she finally said, still not looking back at me, “you know how it ends. You promise to stay in touch with people, but it doesn’t work out. It never does. And you forget about what the friendship used to be like, why you liked that person. And I hated it. And I just didn’t want to do it again. Not with you.”

I looked at her, her head still turned away from me, but I knew her well enough to hear the tremble in her voice, the one she was trying to hide. “So what, then?” I asked, trying to keep my voice gentle. “You just leave without an explanation?”

“I just thought it would be better,” she said, running her hand over her face and turning back to me. “To remember it as it was. As really great. Not anything else. Just the best friend I’ve ever had.”

I felt my lip start to tremble and bit down on it, trying to marshal my thoughts. I could see where she was coming from, in theory. But only in theory.  And before I’d worked it all out, I was speaking, my words coming out in a jumble. “No,” I said,
shaking my head. My honesty hat was on, and I was calling her out on this. Sloane glanced over at me, and I could see this had surprised her. “You can’t just leave people behind because you think it’s going to be too hard to commit to a friendship. You can’t live your life that way.”

“You don’t understand,” Sloane said, her voice quiet. She looked out to the water for a second, and I knew that the role I’d played in our friendship before—the one I could feel her wanting me to move back into, like the way you try and force your feet into a favorite pair of shoes even after they’ve gotten too tight—would be to let this go, not push her, smooth it over, go on to other things.

“So help me understand,” I asked, looking right at her, not letting her off easily.

Sloane let out a long breath that had a hitch somewhere in the middle. “You know why we move so much?” she finally asked. She was looking at the ground, not meeting my eye. “Because my parents blew through their trust funds and have never had real jobs. So we just go wherever people or relatives will let us stay in their summerhouses or second homes. And sometimes Anderson actually makes a good investment, and we have a little money, but of course, it’s gone immediately. . . .” Her voice trailed off, and I heard in that moment, just how tired she sounded.