“I think it’s better if I don’t.”
“Miah, I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing. I came to find you and you weren’t here….”
He turns to look at me, and the emptiness is in his eyes too. When he speaks, his voice is controlled and quiet. So quiet. “Are you really throwing this on me like it’s my fault? I’m not here, so you might as well get it on with the next guy you find?”
“No, of course not. Look, I didn’t mean it, and I don’t know why I did it. It’s like I was there but I wasn’t there. I know that doesn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t make it okay, but that’s how it felt.”
“You can’t use sex or kissing or anything to erase shit. Jesus, Claude.”
He never calls me Claude, and then I can feel them—the tears burning the backs of my eyelids. Before I can stop it, one leaks out and down my cheek.
“If it makes you feel any better, it only made me feel worse.”
“No, it doesn’t make me feel any better. But hey, I get it. Life can be shitty, and that stuff with your dad, that’s just fucked up. But I didn’t do that, Captain. That wasn’t me.” He sits there calmly. So calmly. His voice is even and measured and completely devoid of emotion, and I’ve done this to him.
He gets up, and for a second I think he’s going to hug me. But then he pulls on his shorts, slips on his shirt, and walks out of the room. I wait one, two, three seconds, and then I throw on my clothes and follow him. Without looking at me, he opens the front door.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“I’m driving you home.”
* * *
—
The drive to Addy’s seems like it takes three years. As we pull up, as he stops the truck, as we sit there with the engine idling, which tells me he’s not walking me to the door, I say, “I’m sorry.”
I’ve never in my life wanted to go back in time to fix something like I want to right now. If only I hadn’t gone to the Dip. If only I hadn’t crashed into Grady. If only I hadn’t gone up to his room. I run through it all over and over again, like reliving it will somehow change the outcome.
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
“Me too.”
* * *
—
Half an hour later, on the pull-out sofa, I lie back, head on the pillow. I am alone in my head and alone with myself, the most dangerous place I could be.
He’s got every right to be hurt and angry. You’d be hurt and angry too. You know you were wrong and you hate that you were wrong, but that doesn’t change anything. You need to say you’re sorry and keep saying you’re sorry and stop being so afraid of being you.
I dig the blue notebook out of my dresser and write every last, horrible thought.
DAY 25
The next morning, we walk Addy to the dock so she can meet the ferry. Miah carries her overstuffed luggage like it’s weightless, and when we get to the pier, Grady is sitting there with Emory and a couple of the local guys. His eyes go to me and then to Miah. He stands. “I’ll take it from here.”
“That’s okay,” Miah says. “I got it.”
He strides past him, sweeps the bag up as if it doesn’t weigh eighty-five pounds, and swings it onto the ferry. Addy offers him a tip but he holds up his hands and backs away. “Not necessary,” he tells her, flashing that grin.
“See you later,” he says to me. Not See you in an hour or See you later tonight, just See you later. I watch as he walks past Grady again, as Grady calls something out to him that I can’t hear, as Miah keeps right on going without a word, Grady watching him the whole way.
“What was that about?” Mom is next to me.
“You know. Men.” I say it lightly, but I’m looking at her face for signs that she agrees because she knows about my dad and this other woman, whoever she is.
“Men,” she echoes.
“Men,” says Addy. “I wish I didn’t love them so goddamn much.”
The captain strolls by and Grady follows. I look away so he can’t catch my eye. Suddenly there are other guests there with luggage, boarding the ferry, taking their seats. Archie, the island dog, goes ambling along with them, tail wagging lazily in all this heat.
Addy’s arms are around my mom and then me. “You take good care of her,” she says in my ear. “And let her take care of you.”
“I will.”
“And be careful with that heart of yours. There’s been enough heartbreak in this family for a while.” And I don’t know if she’s making a general statement or one specifically targeted at Miah, but I want to go, You should warn people about me, not the other way around.
And then she’s hugging my mom again, and when she lets go, I see the tears in Mom’s eyes, and I have to look away from this, too.
We wave as Addy boards the ferry and takes her seat, and we wave again as the ferry goes sailing off. Mom stands there longer than I do, hand in the air, smile on her face. When Addy’s out of sight, Mom turns to me. “It’s hard to see her go.”
I don’t say anything, but I throw my arms around her. “I’m glad it’s just us again.”
She studies my face, but I’m not giving anything away. I go blank and smiling, the dutiful daughter, the one whose heart is still intact. “I was thinking I could help you at the museum today if you want.”
She’s still studying my face, still trying to read me, but finally she says, “I’d like that.”
* * *
—
Mom and I spend the rest of the day together at the museum, sifting through and organizing Claudine’s papers, and I don’t say anything about my dad.
We walk home together and I don’t say anything.
We eat dinner together and I don’t say anything.
We sit on the porch of the inn and watch the lightning bugs flickering in the trees and across the grass. And I don’t say anything. She’s already been through enough and now it’s my job to protect her and buy her honeysuckle perfume and tell her she’s beautiful and make sure she has a floor—as flimsy as it is—to walk on.
The screen door slams and I look up. Wednesday waves at me like, Come here. I look away. I hear footsteps, and of course she’s walking over. She frowns down at me. “I need to talk to you, Mainlander.”
“I’m busy.”
“Claude.” This is from Mom.
“Fine.”
I get up, feet dragging, and follow Wednesday across the porch, inside the inn to the library, which is empty.
She says, “Did Grady hurt you?”
“No.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“No. I was stupid. It was my fault.” I hurt me. Not Grady. Not Miah. Me.
“Did something happen?”
“No.”
“Claude?”
And maybe because she’s using my real name for once, I say, “It started to, but I stopped it.”
“You know he’s a total dirtbag.”
“I know.”
She sighs. “Does Miah know?”
“I told him.”
“Why?”
“I had to.”
“Shit.” She shakes her head, and the braids swing back and forth like pendulums. “So look, when I was sixteen, I started putting myself in a box because I figured it would keep me from getting hurt. I took care of that box like it was my freaking home. At first, the box was good. Small, compact, everything safe inside it. I kept it neat and tidy. I painted it. Painted who I wanted to be. I didn’t let myself be seen or heard. I made my sexuality small and quiet instead of big and bright. But I started not being able to breathe, so that’s when I pushed open the box flaps, one by one. The last was running away from Alabama to live the life I wanted to live. And saying to someone other than myself, This is me. I want to be a singer. I want to change the world with my music. I want to
fall in love and get my heart broken. I’m pansexual. I seem tough, but I’m not. At least not always. So yeah. Here I am. Out of the box. And sometimes it sucks. But at least I can breathe.”
After a long moment, I say, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s all I wanted to say.”
And then she walks away. A second later, I go to the doorway and call after her, “Hey, Wednesday?”
She’s by the stairs leading down to the dining room, one hand on the railing. She looks back at me. “Mainlander?”
“Thank you.”
* * *
—
My bicycle is waiting on the porch of Addy’s house. Mom and I climb the steps and I look around at the woods and the inn and the road, but there’s no sign of anyone.
Mom says, “Where did that come from?”
“I don’t know.”
* * *
—
Inside, we curl up on the couch, Dandelion between us, and watch a movie, Wednesday’s words swimming in my head. Do I put myself in a box? Is that what I’ve been doing? I chew on my fingers, lost in thought.
The minute Jean Seberg comes onto the screen, my mom looks at me. “Now I recognize that haircut.”
Her voice pulls me out of my own head. I watch Jean Seberg’s bright face. “She looked effortless, and that’s what I want to be.”
“She does, and this film made her an icon, but she had an unhappy life.” My mom’s voice is soft. We are reading the subtitles. “She died at forty of suicide. She was missing for ten days before they found her body in the back seat of her car, three blocks from her Paris apartment.”
This hits me harder than it should. On-screen, Jean Seberg smiles and laughs and strides down the street, and some part of me still wants to be her, or at least this pretend version of her. “If I could dig a hole and hide in it, I would,” her character is saying.
I think, You never know what someone’s hiding. We all hide ourselves when we need to.
“Is everything okay with Jeremiah?”
The question surprises me, but I keep my eyes glued to the screen. “I did something really stupid and really hurtful that I wish I could take back, but I can’t.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. I feel bad enough. I just want it to go away, like somehow build a time machine and go back to yesterday and change everything so that it never happened.” I wait for her to say, Maybe you should try harder. Be a nicer, less complicated, less fucked-up person. Maybe you shouldn’t lock yourself away behind that wall you’ve built. All the things I tell myself.
Instead she says, “Oh God, we really are alike.”
I look at her.
“I’m just saying I have, from time to time throughout my life, been known to do stupid things that I wish I could take back and make right.”
“You’re perfect.”
“I’m not. No one is, thank God. Otherwise what a boring world this would be. There are so many things I wish I’d done differently at the time, including with your dad. But we can only pay attention, hope we learn something, try not to fuck up again—at least not in the same exact way—and keep going forward, knowing that we’re absolutely going to fuck up. A lot.” My mom rarely swears, and I raise my eyebrows. She smiles. “Sorry. The important thing is to do your best, always, to not be too hard on yourself when you don’t, and to let go of regrets. You have to trust me on this because I’m a lot older than you and I know things.”
I run my hand over my hair, smoothing it around the ears, around the forehead. “I get that I’m going to fuck up a lot, no matter what I do. And I get that I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. But right now I don’t want Miah to be some sort of life lesson. I want him to be more than that.”
“Then talk to him—even if he doesn’t want to hear it—until you’ve said what you need to say.”
DAY 25
(PART TWO)
It’s eleven o’clock and I am pedaling through the night to Miah’s house. I’m not sure what I’m going to say to him, but I just know I need to tell him how I feel.
So my dad has a girlfriend.
The words run round and round in my mind. I say them out loud, hoping this will stop the endless loop, and they escape into the air where I can see them, right in front of me, just out of reach. I want to take them back, but I can’t take them back because they’re true.
My dad has a girlfriend.
It’s not that I thought my parents were getting back together. I don’t actually know if I thought that or not. But this makes it clear that’s not going to happen and my mom and I were in the way.
And these words are also true. We were in the way.
* * *
—
I find him outside on the porch, under the moon, shorts, black shirt, bare feet. He stands, arms folded across his chest, looking up at the stars. I prop the bike against a tree and wade through the grass and the cactus spurs. I climb the steps and now I’m next to him.
“Hey,” I say, a little out of breath.
“Hey.” His eyes don’t leave the sky.
I think of all the things I want to say to him, and then I don’t say anything. I follow his gaze upward and it’s like a blanket of the deepest, darkest blue, covered in a million tiny pinpricks of light.
He says without looking at me, “What do you want, Captain?”
“I want to tell you I’m sorry. I want to apologize a thousand times and tell you why I think I did what I did, not that there’s any excuse. I want to tell you how scared I am that I just fucked this up, when it’s the best thing that’s happened to me for a long time. You’re the best thing that’s happened to me for a long time. I want this Grady thing to not exist, but it does exist and that’s my fault and I want you to know that I know it’s my fault, no one else’s. I want to tell you how much I hate my dad right now and how confused I am and how lost I feel, but how I know that doesn’t make it better. I want to be here with you, even if I do all the talking and you never speak to me again. I want to have the chance to tell you how I feel and what you mean to me. Like, you’ll never know how much you mean to me. I want to tell you that I don’t want this to be the end of us, right here, right now. I want to ask you to forgive me.”
My throat has gone lumpy and my eyes have gone wet. Miah is looking at me now, not the sky. For a moment, he just stands there. But then he says, “Let’s get out of here.”
Before he can change his mind, I am up and in the truck. I wait, listening to my breath. I sound like I’ve just run a marathon. I focus on breathing in, out. Steady. Calm. I wait, and he doesn’t get in, and he really has changed his mind. But then a thud as something is dropped into the back of the truck, and then the door swings open and he’s climbing in.
* * *
—
We drive in silence, bouncing down Main Road. I have no idea where he’s taking me. I’m trying to think of the right words to say, but there are too many things to say, so we’re both just sitting there. We turn toward the beach on a wide, overgrown trail I don’t recognize. Every time I think I know this island, he takes me down some road like this, somewhere I’ve never been.
We don’t talk and there’s no music except for the cicadas, which seem louder than normal. Trees blur past and we move through the dark, no headlights, fireflies lighting our way. I half expect us to drive until we hit the ocean, but at some point he slows the truck, and then we’re stopped.
He gets out and I get out, and we still haven’t spoken. He grabs something from the bed of the truck—a bag—and I follow him under the tree canopy for what seems like a mile. We cross the inner dunes, the ones closest to the woods, and before we get as far as the beach, he turns into the little valley between the inner and outer dunes. Here, sheltered from the wind, he stops, drops the b
ag, and hands me a pack of matches.
“What’s this for?”
“It goes with this.” He holds up a bottle of lighter fluid.
“It’s a little hot out for a bonfire, isn’t it?”
But too late: he’s gathering driftwood and stacking it in the basin of the dunes. He douses it with lighter fluid and then he nods at me. I strike the match and drop it onto the wood. I watch as it catches hold and the fire grows, snapping, crackling, flames dancing in the night.
He digs through his backpack and comes up with a notebook, which he hands to me. “Write down every shitty thing you’re too scared to say out loud. Write anything that’s keeping you from you. Write anything that’s keeping you from me.”
“Why?”
“So we can burn them up.”
I don’t mention the day I spent on the beach waiting for him, tossing shells and worries into the ocean. I’m too busy thinking there isn’t enough paper in that notebook or even on this island to write down everything that scares me or every bad thought that’s filling my mind.
He writes Grady on a sheet of paper, then rips it out and holds it over the fire. I watch as the paper starts to smoke and burn, dissolving away, one letter at a time.
He writes, I miss my brother, rips it out, drops it on the fire.
He writes, I want to live my own life, not someone else’s.
And I just want to be eighteen.
I write, I hate my dad.
I miss Saz.
Grady means nothing.
I’m sorry, Miah.
I will never trust anyone again.
For the next twenty minutes, we take turns writing things down and tossing them into the fire. I empty myself onto the paper until there’s nothing left.
Breathless Page 28
