Wherever You Go (28 page)

Aldo fashions a smile. "What's on your mind tonight? Oh wait, don't tell me, let me guess—you're jealous of Holly and Jason."

"Quit busting my balls," you say.

Aldo laughs. "See? A sense of humor, that's what I like about you." He eyes you. "Sorry, kid. You were moping your way through that very nice luau in my honor. What gives?"

"Earlier, I was hanging out with my folks and they were doing some kind of counseling session where they were talking about me—that was freaking depressing. I hung around with them for a few hours, and then I come to check on you and it's luau night. And Holly, she's—"

"Happy. The word you're searching for is
happy
."

"Yeah." Your eyes flicker to the TV, where a girl is standing in a fountain.

Aldo shakes his head. "Come on, now, don't act so defeated. Did you really think she was never going to love anyone again after you?"

"No. It's not that. It's the way she looks at him. I mean, how does that happen?"

Aldo mutes the TV. "Son, when you love someone, you just know. I loved my wife from the moment I saw her standing with that group of rowdy children on the field trip. I knew she was for me."

You feel a tightness in your throat. "I never had a moment like that. Not with anyone."

"That's a shame. Everyone should know love like that." His eyes are kind.

"Aldo, can you help me? I need to go now. I'm not kidding around. I need to go where things don't hurt, where things make sense."

"I don't know where that is, kid."

The words hang in the air for a moment while the two of you watch the movie roll on without a soundtrack. "You know, my parents"—you look down at your transparent hands—"my parents think the accident maybe wasn't an accident."

Aldo lets out a deep breath. "You finally ready to tell me about that night?" he prompts.

"There was a lot I couldn't remember, you know," you say, your voice taking on the sound of fear, uncertainty.

"Maybe you didn't want to remember," Aldo says gently. "Pain isn't an emotion anyone wants to sort through."

"Yeah." You glance at the TV, where someone is running up a cobblestone street. You focus back on Aldo, who is waiting patiently in his recliner, his hands in his lap. "You know how this last September was dreary, like we were in the depth of winter? I hate how it can turn like that here."

"It was your last year of school, right?" Aldo says. "That should have been something you were excited about."

"I guess. But I had my dad breathing down my neck about my future, I was trying to keep my mother happy by volunteering down at the church food bank, I was keeping up with my sports, though I was never a star player or anything. They kept repeating that I needed to be well-rounded on college applications. It was like my father's freaking mantra. Anyway, I was trying hard to do what they wanted, to be what everyone wanted."

"So, wait—you didn't like your father's business? Me neither, though mine was the town butcher, not a banker."

You give him a weak smile. "Finance seems so boring. I thought about doing architecture, maybe. I liked the idea of drawing something and having someone build it into reality."

Aldo nods. "I've seen some beautiful buildings—so many in Italy."

"Yeah, it would have been nice to travel for a year and check out Europe before I went to college. Dad wasn't into that at all."

"So, it was the start of school," Aldo says, steepling his fingers. "Where were you that night of the crash?"

"At a party after the football game, over at my friend Mark's house. There were a lot of kids there."

"And you were with Holly."

"Yeah. She was pissed at me. We'd been dating for a while. And, I admit, I hadn't been paying her enough attention since the end of the summer. I had so much on my mind."

"So she was angry with you about that?"

You pause, thinking of how to put things. "She thought we should be more ... romantic."

Aldo raises his eyebrows. "She wanted you to get married after high school?"

"I don't know. Maybe. But that night she just wanted us to, you know—"

"Oh, oh. I understand." Aldo rubs his hand on his forehead.

"God, this is weird."

"Oh, I'm sorry—do
you
have a ghost talking to you about his intentions with your granddaughter?"

You almost smile, but the memory of the party comes flooding back. "Mark's parents were gone. There were empty bedrooms. She'd had some beers."

Aldo sits up straighter. "You didn't want her?"

"I didn't know what I wanted." Your voice is flat.

"Roberto, you're telling me that my Holly practically threw herself at you and you didn't want her?" Your face burns as much as a ghost's face can.

"Are you—"

"No, I don't like guys. Okay? It wasn't like that."

Aldo gives you a long, appraising look. "You drank too much."

"No. I didn't drink too much. I mean, I know it must sound weird, but I didn't feel like it. Not at some stupid party with all this shit going on around us. I was under a lot of pressure. My mind was on a million other things."

"You couldn't do it," Aldo says. "This happens to all men at some time."

"Okay, just stop," you say. "It wasn't that. I didn't have problems in that department."

"Forgive me, Roberto. I'm just trying to understand. It's been a long time since my first time. A little shepherd girl named Lu-ciana in my town. She brought us cheese on Tuesday mornings and had these green eyes." Aldo's smiling, but you can't return the gesture. "I'm sorry," he says. "Go on."

Closing your eyes, you can picture everything just like it's happening all over again. You can almost hear the soundtrack of deep-bass music, the murmur of kids milling about, the slosh of beer in keg cups.

"Holly was really hurt. Just pissed off at me in a way she'd never been," you say, remembering. "She started flirting with some of the other guys, trying to make me jealous or some stupid thing. I tried to talk to her, to calm her down. People were wondering what was going on. Everything was just totally screwed up. I thought I'd lost Holly forever. She stayed inside at the party with her friend Marisa while I sat in my car in my driveway, alone. I didn't want to face anyone. I didn't want to face her. God, this is embarrassing. I'm not some kind of wuss or something. I just couldn't deal, you know?"

Aldo nods. "But you were her date—you were supposed to drive her home..."

"Yeah. After an hour, I decided the whole thing was stupid, and I needed to talk to her. I got out of the car and walked back into the party, and no one seemed to know where she was. I went downstairs and finally found her in the family room, on the couch with my friend Mark. She was about to pass out, draped over him. His arm was around her waist, and when he saw me he had this guilty look in his eyes. 'I was taking care of her,' he said, but I could tell what he had been planning. It was just like what he'd done to he. She was other girls at parties—he always blamed it on booze the next day."

"Doesn't sound like a good friend."

You shake your head. "Nah. He turned out to be a real scumbag. I guess maybe I knew that about him. But I had defended Mark to people who talked shit about him. Seeing him there with his hands on Holly, though—well, that was different."

Aldo smiles grimly. "So you got Holly into the car."

"Yeah. I wanted to get her home. I wanted us to talk. I wanted to make everything right. I didn't know if that was even possible, but I had to get her home." You pause, and Aldo reaches out to you, as if he thinks he can put a hand on your shoulder, but of course he can't.

"Go ahead, son."

"The road was dark, and there was this thin drizzle of rain hitting the windshield. Not enough to make you use the wipers, but enough that it was getting harder to see."

"And you lost control."

Your invisible heart squeezes so hard you can barely breathe. "I started thinking that I'd probably lost everything—me and Holly, my so-called best friend Mark. That I was a huge disappointment to my parents. That I was a lame boyfriend who didn't even want to be with a beautiful girl like Holly. Everything started adding up, started pressing down on me." You swallow around the lump in your throat, barely able to talk. "Aldo, see, I started thinking, one little turn of the wheel and it would all be over. One little turn of the wheel and I wouldn't have to deal with anything anymore."

Aldo presses his lips together. "That's dangerous thinking, kid."

"I didn't mean to do it," you say, your voice so small, so quiet. Silent tears start to roll down your ghostly cheeks. You know they're there, even if you can hardly feel them. Your vision is clouding, your tongue thick in your mouth.

"What did you do?" Aldo asks.

"One little turn of the wheel." Your voice is just above a whisper in your mind. "Just to see if I had it in me. Just to see if I had the guts to do one decisive thing in my whole freaking life, I did it. A fraction. Not even far. But I turned the wheel."

"What about my Holly?"

"It was like I didn't even realize she was in the car," you say. "It was like the whole world drilled down into me and the night and the car."

Aldo closes his eyes, absorbing. He lets out a long exhale. "I can't forgive you for this," he says. "I can't tell you that it doesn't matter. You almost killed Holly."

"I told you I didn't mean to," you say, your voice shaking. "I didn't mean for any of this to happen."

"Meaning and doing are two different things," Alnt fodo says.

"I don't need your forgiveness," you say. "I don't need you to tell me it's okay."

"I know. You need Holly to forgive you," Aldo says.

You close your eyes again. "I can't tell her."

"Then you're here for good, probably. What, you think this isn't the reason God's making you stick around? You take your life—"

"I didn't take my life."

"You take your life," Aldo repeats, pointing at you, "and you nearly kill the sweet girl who loves you, and you don't think you owe anyone an apology?"

Your throat tightens. Inside, your heart is shattering. You can't say anything because there aren't words for how much you hurt now and for how much you hurt then.

"I'm glad you told me," Aldo says. "I'm glad to know the truth."

But you aren't. You start to fade.

"Wait!" Aldo calls, too late to reach out to you.

You come out of the nothingness and onto McCallister Road. You stand on the rainy, rocky cliff above the abyss. Maybe it's fitting you're doomed to haunt this place forever. You deserve nothing less than this afterlife drenched in the kind of pain that won't let you go.

"I knew things would work out," said Marissa, cutting the chocolate cupcake from her lunch in half. "I can't believe how right I was about you and Jason. When it comes to love, I'm like a psychic."

I picked up the half she slid across the lunchroom table to me and took a bite of the thick frosting, not caring that it was smearing across my upper lip. That was the nice thing about being a lip gloss girl: you could always wipe it away and put more on. "Yeah, you were sure right."

Marissa grinned and cut a small piece of her cupcake with a fork, lifting it to her mouth, bracelets jangling on her wrist. "Ohmigod, do you realize that you'll have a date to prom? Your reentry into society is excellently timed."

I rolled my eyes at her. "Yeah, this was all about my reentry. I didn't think of that."

"But of course, I'm mostly just happy because you're happy," Marisa said, eating a bite of cupcake. "So, you did the luau on Saturday ... What did you guys do last night?"

"We wanted to go to the movies, but I only could get a few hours free, so Jason drove us to West Seattle. We got fish and chips and walked along the beach at Alki."

"I love Alki."

"It was great. Sunset and yummy, greasy food."

"And Jason."

"Yeah, and Jason," I said. I wanted to tell her more, but I was still working on describing how I felt about him. It wasn't just that I enjoyed his company and that his kisses made my knees go weak like in some romance novel, it was that I loved his kindness. And, I was beginning to see, I loved him, in general.

"So, you're over Rob," Marisa said, glancing at me beneath her long lashes. "You've finally let that all go?"

"I don't think I'll ever be over him. But life does go on, you know?"

"Yeah." Marisa folded the cupcake paper into a triangle and set it on her lunch tray.

I chewed the last bite of the sweet, wondering where Jason was this lunchtime. I hadn't seen him since our chem class that morning.

"Hey." Mark took a seat on the bench next to Marisa. He was wearing a plaid button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled perfectly against his tan forearms. His gaze traced over my lunch tray, like he was hoping I was going to share a bite of the fries hanging out in the paper boat.