The Art of Losing Yourself (23 page)

Elias let go.

I wiped my palms along my jeans.

“Have any fun plans for Thanksgiving?” he asked.

I groaned and lay back against the dock. A patch of clouds broke apart around a pale sliver of a moon. “My mom invited Carmen and me to the rehab facility.”

“You gonna go?”

“Carmen thinks we are.”

“You don’t want to check on your mom? See how she’s holding up?”

“Oh, I know how she’s holding up. For now, at least.” The last time I answered her 6:30 p.m. phone call, she was all sunshine and roses, like life had turned colorful again. As if the last seventeen years didn’t matter, because she was all better now. I’d give her two weeks post rehab before she fell off the wagon again. “Do you think it’s weird that Carmen and Ben aren’t spending Thanksgiving together?”

“Coach Hart’s not going with you?”

“I don’t think so.” I overheard them arguing through the walls last night. Something about him wanting to spend the holiday with his family in New Orleans and her not wanting to deal with his mother. That hadn’t gone over too well. “What about you—do you have any Thanksgiving plans?”

“My mom and I always go to Pastor Zeke’s. It’s a fun time.” Elias lay back beside me. “So what’s the deal? Are you really not gonna come to the state finals?”

“Nope.”

“Have you even seen a football game? Because it’s not fair for you to hate on a sport you’ve never seen.”

“Trust me, I’ve seen football games.” The scathing words tumbled out before I could censor them, and in the tumbling, they felt much too revealing.

“Back in Apalachicola?”

I stared up at the sky, pleading the fifth.

“Come on, Gracie, there’s a story here.”

I twisted the ring on my finger. Around and around and around and
around. With each spin, my mind changed. Tell Elias about Chris Nanning; don’t tell Elias about Chris Nanning. When the clouds covered up the moon, I was on the “tell Elias about Chris” spin and decided to go for it. “The team you played tonight? I used to have a thing for the quarterback.”

He turned his head. “Chris Nanning?”

“You know him?”

“I know
of
him.”

“Last year, we had a couple classes together. I have no idea why, but I had a crush on him.” I rolled my eyes at my own stupidity. “He invited me to his games, and despite my opinion of the sport, I actually went to a few. We started hanging out a little.”

“And?”

“And I was flattered by his attention. It was the first time anybody had ever really given me any.” My dad and Carmen certainly hadn’t. The only time my mom ever did was when I was getting into trouble. Then along came Chris. “I thought the more I gave him, the more he’d like me. Turned out, the more I gave him, the less he cared.”

Elias shifted beside me.

“Stupid, I know.” I took a breath and continued. “He did the whole Fellowship of Christian Athletes thing. He did the whole partying thing too. Anyway, there was this one party last spring. I was a little…high. One thing led to another, and well, you know…” Heat rose in my cheeks, but I’d already gotten this far. Might as well get the whole thing out; let Elias judge me with
all
of the facts.

“That Monday at school, the whole student body knew about it, and Chris laughed at me like I was a big joke.” I pulled my sleeves over my hands, feeling like a fool all over again. “For all my talk about clichés, it turns out that I’m the biggest one of them all: a stupid girl who lost her virginity to the stud football player, thinking he cared. What an idiot, right?”

I waited for Elias to say something about my confession. He had to be thinking plenty. The entire situation was much too similar to the one he rescued me from a couple months ago. The longer I waited, the quicker my heart raced.

“Gracie,” he finally said, “Chris Nanning is the idiot. Not you.”

And just like that, Elias Banks had my gray mood melting altogether. I folded my hands over my stomach. “Too bad the judge didn’t agree.”

“The judge?”

“I got a little angry. And Chris had such an obsession with his car.”

Elias propped himself up on his elbows. “What did you do?”

“Blew off some steam with a baseball bat and a can of spray paint.” Despite all the trouble my bad decision had caused, I couldn’t help but smile. “It only cost me two thousand dollars in fines and one hundred twenty hours of community service.”

One would think I’d have learned my lesson. At least where cars were concerned.

C
ARMEN

Temperatures on the Florida panhandle in November hovered near perfection, with highs in the midseventies and nighttime temps dipping into the upper fifties. At the moment, seventy-four degrees of sunshine warmed my back, bolstering my sense of accomplishment as Natalie and I walked up the stairs—renovations had officially moved to the second floor of The Treasure Chest.

All ten first-floor units were clean. With Gracie’s help, I had washed the walls, polished the furniture, pulled up the carpet, and scrubbed the bathrooms. We pitched all ten moldy shower curtains and roughly half of the comforters. Thanks to copious amounts of Tide and stain remover, I was able to resuscitate eleven. The others were unsalvageable. But with plenty of extra bed sheets to go around, all of which we’d washed with bleach, none of the beds were completely naked.

Natalie and I reached the second-story landing and made our way to the biggest of the three apartments, where Ingrid had lived for the majority of her life. Natalie set the bucket of cleaning supplies on the ground. “I can’t believe you and Gracie have tackled this entire place on your own.”

“Not entirely on our own.” I searched the key chain for the right key. “We had someone install the windows and replace the carpet.”

“Have you decided what you’re going to do with it yet?”

“Hopefully hire a manager. Get the place up and running again.” I twisted the master key into the lock. The door creaked open and a wall of stench nearly knocked us both over.

We covered our mouths and noses and stepped back from the smell.

“Either someone cleaned the carpets with sour milk,” Natalie said, “or there is a dead, decaying mouse in there.”

“That smells like more than one dead, decaying mouse.” I used the crook of my elbow to cover my nostrils and prodded the door open with my toe. With the shades drawn, all I could see was darkness. “I don’t understand how it could have gotten that bad.”

“It’s the law of entropy. Without regular upkeep, things fall apart. Like my house.”

“Your house is not falling apart.”

“You only think that because I clean it before you come over. All month, Mason assured me he was cleaning the toilet in his and Reese’s bathroom. When I checked yesterday, the thing was emitting toxic fumes. Little bugger had been lying to my face.”

I stared at the half-open door. As much as I wished there was some reverse entropy button I could push, there wasn’t. And since it was technically my mess to clean, I wasn’t going to make Natalie do the dirty work. I took a giant gulp of air, then hurried inside, flung open the drapes while dust billowed like smoke, and attempted to open the windows. They refused to budge. By the time I managed to pry open two, my lungs were starving for oxygen.

I hurried outside and inhaled the clean, briny air while Natalie gave my shoulder an encouraging pat. “You’re a brave, brave woman.”

Once I restocked my blood stream with O
₂
, I slapped on a mask and stepped back in, this time armed with two cans of Febreze, and sprayed figure eights of mist into the room, my arms moving in slow circles like some sort of karate sensei. When the mist settled over the disgusting odor, I flipped on the light switch and Natalie stepped in behind me.

“Whoa.”

Whoa
was right. What I saw before me made me question the mental acuity of the manager Ingrid had hired. Honestly. The guests took better care of the motel rooms than this man took of his own living space. The place looked as though he invited a den of foxes to be his roommates. Even though he took his stuff and moved out, the aftermath remained. Multiple stains dotted the carpet. There was a hole in one of the walls, like he either punched it or ran something through it, but never bothered to fix it. Broken window screens. Busted trim. Naked electrical sockets and uncovered light fixtures. All made worse by the usual signs of neglect: layers of dust, cobwebs in the corners of the walls, grime on the windows.

We began a cursory check of each room, bracing ourselves for the worst. All were in serious disrepair, but thankfully, we only found one freshly dead mouse in a vent. Back in the living room, we did the only thing there was to do: dive in. We started at the top. Natalie removed cobwebs from the corners
of the ceiling while I wiped away a thick layer of dust from the blades of the ceiling fan. We scrubbed the walls, the windows, and the window ledges.

Natalie removed the drapes. “I’m gonna go beat these outside.” She gathered them over her arm and shot me a smile. “Unfortunately for my children, that is not the first time those words have escaped my mouth.”

As she stepped out of the room, a bead of sweat trickled down my temple. I wiped it away with the short sleeve of my T-shirt, pulled the rubber gloves off my hands, and stared at the plastic-covered couch. I was positive I would find more unidentifiable stains upon removing it. Instead, I found memories. A whole slew of them awakened in the uncovering. I set my hand along the length of the blue-and-white striped backrest, recalling all the times Ben and I sat here on this couch watching the TV with an antenna sticking up from the box set like a pair of rabbit ears.

“Name something,” the game show host had said inside the screen, “that costs more money if you have a daughter instead of a son.”

“Weddings!” I shouted.

Ben and I were watching
Family Feud
. Richard Karn, better known as Al Borland from the sitcom
Home Improvement
, was the host. I liked him a lot better than the previous host, Louie Anderson. Richard turned to his left, deferring to a bearded guy dressed in an argyle sweater.

“Clothes!” the man declared.

Richard pointed the cards he held in his hand toward the game board. “Survey says…”

The second black rectangle flipped over with a ding, which meant the woman on Richard’s right would get a chance.

“Weddings?” she squeaked.

The number one spot on the board flipped over. The woman’s team started jumping up and down like they won the lottery. I turned to Ben, a smug smile on my face. I was good at
Family Feud
. He pointed the remote at the TV and switched it off.

“Hey, I was watching that.”

He scratched the back of his head—a boyishly cute gesture that made me want to lean in and plant a kiss on his lips—then straightened his arm over the backrest of the couch. “What are we going to do?”

My smile slid away. He wasn’t talking about what we were going to do
right now, or what we were going to do later that night. He was asking
the
question—the one neither of us had touched since he wrote our sort-of initials on the wall of wisdom a month and a half ago. The time between then and now had been filled with laughter and stolen kisses, fun dates, and ceaseless flirting. When we walked, we held hands. When we sat, our legs touched. When we stood, Ben put his arm around my waist. And when we got moving again, his hand would touch the small of my back. It wasn’t enough for us to be together, we had to be
touching
while being together. I would never get enough of this man beside me, and now he was asking
the
question.

I pulled my feet onto the couch and faced him with crossed legs. We might not have talked about it, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t thought about it. Oh, I had. Over and over again, every night after Ben and I pulled ourselves apart and said our “see you tomorrows,” I lay in bed thinking about it. Praying about it. Begging God to make the decision an easy one.

His finger found my skin and traced feather-light circles on my shoulder. “We have to talk about what happens next.”

I looked down into my lap. I didn’t want to talk about what happened next. I wanted to keep each moment we had left unmarred by
next
.

“I’m in love with you, Carmen.”

My heart took off, a million beats per second. I looked into eyes as blue as the ocean and as serious as a storm. More than anything, I wanted to tell him that I loved him too. So much at times that it was a physical ache. But what I said instead was the one thing I couldn’t get past, no matter how often I rolled the various scenarios through my mind each night. God hadn’t made the decision easy, but He had made it simple. “I’m leaving in a week.”

“And I start practice in three days.”

“So you’re going to be busy with work. And I’m going to be at UVA finishing my senior year.” I didn’t see how it could work, with me in Virginia and him here in Florida. “I know how important coaching is to you, Ben. I hear the way you talk about football. It’s not like you’ll be able to get away on the weekends. And me, I’ll be applying to grad schools and sending out résumés.”

Somewhere in the middle of my speech, Ben had started to shake his head.

I picked at the hem of his cargo shorts. “Can’t we just spend this last week together?”

“And then what—say good-bye? That’s what you want to do?”

I bit my lip. Of course not. The thought of saying good-bye left a gaping hole in my chest, but what other option did we have? A tear gathered in my eye and spilled over.

Ben wiped the trail of moisture with the pad of his thumb.

I put my hand over his and leaned into his palm. Relishing the warmth. The calluses. The smell of his cologne, so subtle you had to be extra close to smell it. He curled his fingers around the back of my neck and drew me in for a kiss—so sweet at first it made the hole in my chest bigger, then growing in passion and urgency, as if everything we couldn’t say or wouldn’t say resided inside of it. By the time he pulled away, we both had to catch our breath.

Ben touched his forehead to mine. “People do long distance all the time.”

“I know, but I don’t know where I’ll be after I graduate.” Limiting myself to the Pensacola area would be putting every single egg in one very tiny basket. The chances of my getting a job here were minimal. I wasn’t going to graduate with a degree and not use it. I pulled away from Ben’s touch. If I had any hope of remaining practical, I needed some space. “I’ll be applying everywhere. I could end up in California. And then what?”

He didn’t have an answer.

“Ben, my roommate did long distance her entire freshman and sophomore years. She was always thinking about him, trying to get to him, organizing her entire schedule around phone calls and weekend visits. She was miserable. Her grades suffered.” In exactly one week, carefree summer Carmen would return to the closet, and perfectionist, studious Carmen would come out to take her place. Carefree summer Carmen might be able to flit back to Bay Breeze every weekend, but perfectionist, studious Carmen could not. “I have to focus this year.
You
have to focus this year.”

“What we have doesn’t come around very often.”

“I know, but if it’s meant to be—”

Ben ran his hands down his face and groaned. Loudly.

“What?”

“Don’t say that. I hate that. It’s like the girl’s version of ‘It’s not me; it’s you.’ ”

I reached into his lap and took his hand, hating the hurt on his face. The hurt I was putting there. He felt rejected, I could tell. I wanted, more than
anything, to kiss him, declare my undying love, tell him that we could try. But from my vantage point, that outlook would only lead to more heartache. “I can’t do long distance.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

I didn’t answer.

With a dullness in his expression, Ben pulled his hand from mine and pointed the remote back at the TV. Richard Karn stood with his arm around the bearded man in the argyle sweater for the bull’s-eye round, the part of the show that usually had me shouting a stream of answers at the screen. This time, however, my heart wasn’t in it. Of all Richard’s categories, I couldn’t think of a single answer.

“Drapes are officially beaten!” Natalie announced, breezing back into the room.

I let my hand slide off the back of the couch, away from the memory. Nine years wiser and I understood something I didn’t back then. Distance was more than physical. Two people could live under the same roof, sleep in the same bed, with all the distance in the world between them.

“You okay?” Natalie asked.

I bit the inside of my cheek. I told Natalie a lot of things. She knew about my miscarriages. She knew about my frustrations with Gracie. She knew my concerns about Aunt Ingrid. She knew how I felt about my mother-in-law and her incessant, unsubtle hint dropping that she needed more grandchildren. My relationship with Ben, however, remained close to my chest. That particular hand felt too important to share.