When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  But now I think there was more to it too. The barren countertops, that cold, dispassionate print, the cheap, boxy mass-produced furniture: I believe that night Jason understood, perhaps for the first time, the smallness of all these things for which my father had traded me.

  * * *

  We took some wrong turns getting to the freeway on the way back, and it was late. I wasn’t tired, though—of everything I was feeling, tired wasn’t part of it. I watched out the window as exit signs and overpasses blurred by. When I blinked, everything was clear for a moment, but when I held the gaze, my eyes filled again.

  We were back on 101, and we’d reached Santa Clara, when Jason cleared his throat.

  “Maybe next year,” he said, “when he visits you at college, you’ll tell him about this and you guys will laugh about it together.”

  Of course that wouldn’t happen, and of course Jason never for a moment imagined that it would. But there’s a particular sort of dialogue you enter when you know something’s over, how you keep talking as though it isn’t—not because you believe it, but because you’re fantasizing about the way things might have been. You can talk about these things, you can give form and detail to their grandiosity, precisely because you know you’ve lost them already, or you’ve never had them at all.

  “Yes,” I said, and I forced a smile. “Remember that time you ghosted me?”

  Jason laughed softly—a kindness. I felt my eyes welling again, because I understood: In that laughter, he was bearing witness to my loss.

  I STAYED home Sunday, less because I wanted to and more because there was nowhere I could imagine going that would make me feel any different. I would be myself wherever I went. Jason called to see how I was, but I got off the phone after a few minutes—I couldn’t pretend to feel better or fake an upbeat mood.

  I was scared to ask him what he was going to do, to ask any of them. Grace had gotten into St. Mary’s, forty-five minutes away from Berkeley, so they could all still go without me. For a while, I let myself imagine them trying desperately to work it out somehow—squeezing an extra bed into Sunny’s room for me, or all of us renting out something off-campus together. (We couldn’t go without you, they’d say. It wouldn’t be the same.) Maybe that would be better than dorms, and then Grace could live with us too, and commute. But when I went online to look up rentals, I knew it wasn’t possible; I’d never be able to come up with the rent each month, and anyway I doubted their parents would all let them live somewhere besides the dorms.

  Was this what Jason felt like when he’d gone to the bridge? It wasn’t that I wanted to die—I was afraid of it—but at the same time the thought of feeling nothing felt like a beckoning friend.

  I’d been alone most of that day because my mother had gone to Mass and then up to see my grandparents again. She got home in the late afternoon and came upstairs right away, and knocked on my door. Immediately, I went tense—I didn’t want to be around her right now, didn’t want to dodge her questions.

  “I brought you some leftovers,” she said, and held out a takeout box. “I tried to save things that would keep well.”

  I said, shortly, “Thanks.”

  She tried to catch my eye and smile at me. “And I got some oxtail at the market while I was there. I’ll make stew.”

  I let the box sit on my desk for a while—dim sum is so much less appealing cold—but finally I was too hungry to ignore it anymore. I was peeling the paper off a steamed char siu bao when my mother came back in, this time without knocking. There was a strange look on her face, and she was holding some kind of letter I didn’t recognize. She said, “What is this?”

  “What is what?”

  “Why is your credit card bill over a thousand dollars? Why is there this limo ride—and this ticket to New York—”

  My heart slammed into my throat. Where had she even gotten that? I’d been so careful to check the mail every day. It was a Sunday. “Were you going through my things?”

  “Did you go to New York without telling me?”

  “It wasn’t—”

  “Did you go to New York?”

  “I—yes.”

  “When?”

  “Um—a few weeks ago.”

  “When you said you were at Sunny’s house?”

  I looked away, which I suppose was an answer in itself. She made a choked, gasping sound and sank down onto my bed, staring at me as if she didn’t recognize me. I said, “Why were you going through my things?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “But why—”

  “It came with the bills recently. I just opened them. When were you planning to deal with this?”

  “I was going to pay it over the summer.”

  “Over the summer? Beth, you’ve missed four payments. Have you been getting phone calls? Are debt collectors calling you?”

  There was a plummeting sensation in my stomach. “I thought you could take a year to pay them.”

  She stared at me. “No, you absolutely cannot take a year to pay them. You have to pay the minimums at the very least. Where did you get that idea?”

  I didn’t know what a minimum was. “I don’t know, I thought—”

  “And who did you go to New York with?”

  “Just some people from the orchestra.”

  “Were their parents with you?”

  “It was—it was just a quick trip.”

  “I have sacrificed so much to provide for you, Beth! All year I’ve been trying to help you with the college process, and you didn’t even tell me about this?”

  The way she was staring at me, the naked, baffled woundedness in her expression—I felt something cold settle around me. “You mean Dad’s been providing for me,” I muttered. “You were lying to me all this time.”

  “What do you mean I was lying to you?”

  “I mean you act like he doesn’t exist when all this time he’s been giving you money. Why did you never tell me you were making him do that?”

  “Beth, that’s not—I’m not making him do anything. It’s a legal agreement.”

  “It’s a legal agreement that you set up! No one made you arrange it that way. I would’ve told you not to.”

  She blinked at me. “You would’ve told—that’s not how it works. The judge decided—”

  My throat was hot and scratchy. “Okay, well, the judge decided he was supposed to have partial custody, too, but it’s not like you make him see me every month.”

  She closed her eyes. “Some things are easier to enforce than others.”

  “And you chose the one that makes me seem like a bill to him.”

  “Beth—I don’t think you grasp how hard I’ve always worked to provide you with the best possible life I could. Which includes fighting for every resource available to—”

  “If you wanted that, then why did you get divorced?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you really wanted me to have every available resource—”

  “I have done everything—everything—in your best interests, Beth. Everything. All your life, as best as I’ve known how.”

  Some foundation in me trembled and shifted, like jackhammering a concrete wall so that long-hidden structures were exposed, and before I could stop myself, I snapped, “Then why didn’t you try to stop him?”

  I’d said it so loudly—nearly yelling—that my voice echoed, reverberating off the ceilings to descend back down on us. My mother stared at me. She said, slowly, “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you let him leave you? You could’ve been different! But you didn’t even try to change. You just let him leave.”

  “You think I didn’t try to stay married? I went to counseling—I made your father go to counseling—we met with the priest, and—”

  “None of that was what he wanted! He wanted you to be different. You were always so—you would hover around him and make so many demands on him, and—”

  “Because he was my husband. He was your father. He was an adult,
and he had responsibilities to both of us.”

  “But you didn’t—”

  Her voice was rising, going shrill. “That is in the past, and that’s entirely irrelevant right now, Beth. You think this is acceptable behavior?” She dangled the credit card bill between her thumb and forefinger like it was dirty laundry. “Lying, and going behind my back, and racking up over a thousand dollars on a credit card bill? How could you do this, Beth?”

  “Because why would I want to turn out like you?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I was doing those things because it was important to my friends. You obviously don’t think people should work at relationships, and look what happened to you.”

  She looked as though I’d hit her. She pressed a fist against her chest, over her heart. When she spoke, her voice was shaking. “I have worked very hard to—”

  “To make me hate him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You sabotaged our relationship. You wanted us to hate each other.”

  My mother was crying and not bothering to hide it. “Everything I have ever done as a mother has been for your benefit,” she said. “Everything. I never wanted you to turn out anything like him. But apparently I’ve failed, if this is what you are.”

  She turned and left the room. I heard her slam her bedroom door, maybe the first time I’d ever heard her do that. I flung the dim sum into the trash. One of the har gow fell out and stuck to the side of the trash can, and I watched it glop its way slowly to the bottom, its skin tearing on the way down.

  * * *

  In my room that night, still feeling sick from fighting with my mother, I rummaged through my desk drawer for my compass and protractor set from eighth-grade geometry and took out a blank sheet of computer paper. I cranked the compass into three-inch circles and drew a circle for each of our names, making a careful Venn diagram overlapping on the acceptances we had in common. I shaded in each circle lightly with a colored pencil, and I drew thick black lines around our top two overlaps: UC Irvine San Diego.

  It wasn’t cold, but I was shivering. That promise we had made each other was sacred, a lifeline, and besides that it was everything to me. It was the most I’d ever had.

  I slid the chart neatly into my binder, careful not to crease its edges. When I stood, there was a palpitation in my heart, a heavy, hollow thump like a knock on a door. I couldn’t keep my mind from descending into panic over all the machinations that could be happening out in the world without me.

  I was the first to our spot at lunch the next day, and I settled onto the ground and waited. The quad was mostly empty still, the lunch line snaking around the cafeteria. It was sunny that day, and warm, and my sleeves felt damp under my arms.

  Grace showed up first, and then Jason, and then Sunny and Brandon together.

  “I made something,” I said, when they’d all sat. My fingers trembled as I reached into my binder and took out the chart I’d made, and I hoped they didn’t see.

  “Whoa,” Brandon said, when I put it down between us. “What’s this, Beth? Nice color-coding.”

  I cleared my throat. I was going to answer, but then I saw it in all their faces at once—they’d realized what it was.

  We were sitting in our usual five-pointed circle, the crumpled bags and wrappers from our lunches in between us, and no one looked at me, not even Jason. Grace put down her sandwich, resting it on top of her brown paper bag. Brandon looked up, though not at me, and I followed his gaze to Sunny; their expressions changed almost imperceptibly, and then they both looked down again.

  A loud humming started in my head. A doctor described to me once the sound an aneurysm in the brain can make, a roar that pulses in your eardrums, and that was what it sounded like—my heartbeat pounding louder and louder in my ears until I started to wonder if you could go deaf this way, or if your heart could pump yours veins so full they exploded.

  A group of freshmen passed us, and then a little rush of wind lifted the corners of the chart and rattled it slightly, and still they said nothing. Sunny pushed at her cuticles. Jason reached up and took off his glasses, and then rubbed his temples with his thumb. Grace hugged her knees to her chest.

  “Beth,” Brandon said finally. “This is—this is really great of you to put together, and it looks like it was a lot of work. But I don’t—it would’ve been cool if we all got into the same places, but then that didn’t happen, and I just don’t see how—”

  “We can do the NorCal one,” I said. “Or even if it isn’t all of us at Irvine—Irvine isn’t that far from LA, so—”

  Jason started to say something else and then stopped himself when I turned to look at him. He crumpled his juice can with his fist, a cracking sound like tiny gunshots. My pulse was thunderous. I felt again how much your heart and all those other things inside could rise against you—the lungs, the intestines, the medulla oblongata. So many small disaster sites we all contained.

  “I have something to say about that, actually,” Grace said. She was sitting cross-legged, and she rested both her hands on her knees and took a deep breath. “I’m… going to Boston next year! I decided last night.”

  “You—what? But we—that isn’t—” I stopped, the words running out, my throat constricting.

  Grace wouldn’t look at me, and she spoke fast. “Of everywhere I got into, it was the one I was most excited about, and obviously I’m terrified to leave home and move across the country, but I had a really long talk with my parents last night and I think I’m going to go for it, so—”

  “That’s great,” Jason said, sincerely. “You’re going to love it there.”

  “But the rest of us,” I said. My vision was wavering, refracting and then going back into focus. “Okay, fine, Grace, whatever, but the rest of us—we can all—”

  “Beth,” Brandon said gently, “I just don’t know if it makes sense to—I mean, Berkeley makes sense if you’re doing like EE or something, but—”

  I met Jason’s eyes then, which took effort, everyone watching the way they were, Sunny holding herself still like she hoped I wouldn’t notice her, Brandon’s expression pained. “But we all promised—I’ll stay here and come visit Berkeley as much as I can. I’ll take classes at De Anza, and then I’ll try to transfer, and—”

  “What do you mean we all promised?” Jason said.

  I’d been waiting for the right moment to tell him. I’d thought about it after he didn’t get into Juilliard, except then it had seemed better to just not mention college at all, and there had been a hundred other times I almost did. Brandon had still gone to Salinas, Grace spent probably half her time now with Chase, but Jason would know that all this time we’d held him close; we had knitted him into our dreams and our futures.

  “We made a pact,” I said. “Back—right after Thanksgiving.”

  He said, slowly, “What exactly was this pact?”

  “We’d all go to the same school next year. There was just—there was a lot going on, and we wanted to be there for you and for each other.” I said it to him, but I meant it for all of them, too. “So we’ve been committed to that all this time. That was more important to us than any specific school or location or city or whatever, or any other—”

  “You got into UCSD, though,” Brandon said. “That’s a really good school, Beth. You don’t want to just throw that away.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I got into Juilliard, but I’ll give that up too. Because none of it means anything if it’s just me there, by myself, and—”

  But now they were all staring at me, openmouthed. I stopped talking. I went cold.

  “You got in?” Brandon said. “Holy shit, Beth, you got into Juilliard?”

  “Wait,” Jason said, “you said you didn’t.”

  My heart was pounding. I’d promised myself I would never tell him. Having the words out there dangling in front of us was like being plunged into the ocean, that icy shock tunneling itself all the way through to your bones
. Then Jason laughed, incredulous, all the lines on his face softening. “Beth—my God.”

  “I just—I didn’t—” I could feel my face draining of color. Why had I flung it at them that way? “It’s just that it didn’t matter. I don’t mind giving it up to—”

  “Are you kidding?” Brandon said. “Is this a joke? I can’t believe you got in. You’ve got to be shitting us that you’d just throw that away.”

  I was shaking; you could see it even through my sweater. I placed the heel of my hand against my chest and pressed, trying to slow the beat. I saw again the empty third space at our kitchen table, the empty spot in the garage, the sterile walls of my father’s new apartment.

  “So you all were lying, then,” I said. “You didn’t care. And all this time whenever I started to worry but I kept making excuses and I kept telling myself you were better than that—I was wrong about you. It was never real to you, was it?”

  Brandon winced. “Beth—”

  “It wasn’t a lie,” Sunny said. “It’s just that things change, and—”

  “But nothing changed for me.” I struggled to breathe. “It only changed because a promise didn’t matter to you, and that’s great for all of you because you’ll go on to your perfect futures, but for me—for me this was the first time in my life that I thought I actually had people who cared about me and something real to hold on to, and—”

  My voice gave out. They looked stricken.

  “We do care about you,” Grace said. “We—”

  “Tell yourself that all you want.” I struggled to my feet. “But leave me alone.”

  “Beth, wait—” Jason said. “Let’s talk about this.”

  I grabbed my backpack so quickly I almost dropped it. “I’m leaving,” I said, and though they blinked at me, startled, and glanced at each other—and I felt them reaching for a consensus, I felt the emptiness of a future when that kind of meaningful look would go unanswered—they didn’t try to stop me.

  As I kept lifting my feet to make myself keep going, even though I didn’t know where I was headed and the longer I walked across the courtyard, the more it felt like the whole campus was seeing me all alone like that, I realized it was the first time I could say this: I had been the one to leave.