Kirsten leaned forward to glare across me and Gray at CJ.
“You can’t know that. You think that if you say ‘forty-eight’ instead of ‘fifty,’ we’ll all think you know. But you don’t.”
“You don’t know it’s not forty-eight,” observed CJ.
“What about wind chill? Does that forty-eight include wind chill?”
“Wind chill is crap.”
“Wind chill is not crap,” said Kirsten. “Every person who has ever been in wind knows that.”
“Wind chill is based on human perception, which varies, obviously. There is no universally accepted standard of measurement. It’s crap.”
“Do you have gloves?” said Gray.
“In my pockets,” I said.
Gray reached over, put his hand over mine, the one holding my hank of hair. Gray held on to my hair, wound it once around his hand, and I looked at his face. I’d seen that face a million times. I’d never seen that face before. I didn’t stop looking at him as I slid my hand out from under his and wrangled my right glove from my pocket. I didn’t stop looking when he reached out and with enormous carefulness, took my cup of hot chocolate. I did stop when I put my gloves on because my hands were suddenly confused and fumbling, and I couldn’t find my thumbholes. But by then it had already happened.
It wasn’t the fact that he did something nice for me. Because in the two and a half years we four had been friends, ever since the start of ninth grade, Gray had always done nice things, done them just like he did with my hair: automatically. It wasn’t even that he touched my hand, because he had to have done that before. All I know is that there it was: love. Love in the sunlight, in the colors of the kites, in Gray’s deep-set brown eyes, in the fuzziness of my gloves, and shining right out of Gray’s hands as they reached toward me, first one, then the other. And more than anywhere else, inside of me, like I was made of it. Love right down to my mitochondria.
I didn’t say it out loud or ask Gray if he felt it, too. I just said, “Thanks, Gray,” and his name was a sweetness in my mouth, and I took back my hot chocolate and my twist of hair.
That night, though, I got out my craft box and made boats out of heavy, shiny paper, shades of blue and purple. I made tiny white origami swans, folding and creasing as perfectly as I had ever done anything, and I made little white snowflakes with my smallest, sharpest scissors. Then the next night, I threaded them onto fishing line: swan, flake, swan, flake, swan, flake, with knots in between and a knot at the end, until I had eight strings full of paper birds and snow. And then, last night, I got a long piece of grosgrain ribbon and cut holes all along it and then looped each piece of fishing line through, one through each hole, so that when I stood up from my desk chair and held up the long ribbon by its ends, the eight strings dangled and danced and made a kind of swan/flake curtain, all white.
Maybe an hour before sunrise, I put the swans and boats and a roll of duct tape into a cardboard box and sneaked out my back door and drove to Gray’s house. When I got out of my car, I stood for a minute in the cold air, looking at the house and imagining Gray inside it, inside his room, inside his bed, and the thought of him—out of all the people in the world—tucked into his own personal space of sleep, that Gray-shaped alcove in the universe that was a secret from everyone but him, made me feel so protective, like I’d kill anyone who ever tried to hurt him.
Then, I went to the back of the house and found the big kitchen window that overlooks his backyard. I stood on the sill and taped the ribbon to the top of the window frame. When I jumped down and looked, even in the dark, the swans and snowflakes twirled and gleamed. I placed the boats, one by one, in the pond Gray’s dad had made in the backyard. They looked brave and quiet floating there. I didn’t see any, but I hoped there were fish flickering just under the surface, gazing up with their round eyes, wondering.
He will probably guess that I did it. Someday soon, I’ll probably tell him. I’m almost positive he’s going to love me back. But right now, sitting here at my window writing this, with the sky turning flamingo-colored over my yard, all that matters is that I gave him something beautiful.
Maybe he’s awake. Maybe he’s seeing it right now.
March 24, 1997
Today, I opened my locker, and there, riding atop the slick ocean of my AP Bio book, was one of the boats I’d made, a purple one, a little misshapen from getting wet in the pond and then drying out, but still looking basically like a boat. And inside were two cutout figures, like paper dolls, a boy one with crayoned dark brown hair and eyes and a girl one with light brown hair and eyes. They weren’t great works of art or anything, but it didn’t matter. They were us. They were holding hands.
April 21, 1997
We talk every night. The next morning, I remember sentences from the night before and play them over and over inside my head. I tell myself I will never forget them, and I haven’t yet, but if we are going to be together forever—which we are—I figure I should write them down for safekeeping. That way, when I get old, Gray and I can sit on a porch swing or something and read them and reach back and gather up the sound of our voices, soft in the dark. Gray’s voice is low and deep and dove-gray like his name and feathered around the edges. Catch that and hold on: the dark room, our voices the only thing in the entire universe.
Here are some things we said. We have never said any of these things to anyone else.
This:
Gray: “I thought I’d get used to missing my mom. But she died nine years ago and it turns out there are always new things I want her to be here for, so I miss her in new ways all the time. Like you. Just this week, I missed her in six different ways, just because of you.”
Gray: “You’re the only person I know who is never afraid of anything.”
Me: “But I am. I’m afraid of being ordinary.”
Gray: “Never gonna happen.”
Me: “It might.”
Gray: “Nope. No way.”
Me: “What if you help? What if every time I start to be ordinary, you pull me back. Do you think you can do that?”
Gray: “You won’t need me to. But if you do, it’ll be easy. I’ll just remind you that you’re Zinny Beale, love of my life.”
This:
Me: “For me, personally, I think the only right thing to do is put new things into the world. Things no one has ever thought of before. Like writing and art. I feel like there are all these unmade things inside my head, waiting for me to let them loose into the world. A whole galaxy of unmade things, so bright it hurts.”
This:
Gray: “I love my dad. But it’s like he doesn’t know me. I feel like he sees me in snapshots: on the football field, being a good student. But he doesn’t see the big-picture me. I know this sounds weird, but I think I see myself that way, too. Like I’m an outside person watching me do things. Except when I’m with you. Then, I’m on the inside.”
Chapter Four
Ginny
When my brother, Trevor, and I needed to escape our house, which was often, we would wait until our mother was in bed, sneak out the back door, and ride our bikes to the Quaker burial ground. I don’t exactly know why we’d chosen that spot; I don’t even remember deciding on it. It seemed to me that as soon as Trevor headed for it, that first time, in the serpentine way he liked to ride and that I liked to imitate, I knew where he was going. We had both been on field trips there to see the graves of the local abolitionist hero and of the signer of the Constitution, and to stand on the wide brown floorboards in the square, restrained space of the Friends Meeting House to hear about the Underground Railroad. So maybe it was the association with freedom that drew us, although I’m relieved to say that self-absorbed and aggrieved as we were, even we didn’t put our suffering on par with that of actual enslaved people.
What I mostly remember about the place is how ours it was. The headstones small and rectangular, like molars, rising just above the grass line; the oaks and maples, huge and breathing all around; the imper
turbable Meeting House standing quietly by. Trevor and I would sprawl on the grass where the graves were gathered like friends and look up at the sky or into the thick crochet-work of branches. We didn’t always talk. Often, we would just lie there, letting our anger dissipate into the trees or be carried away by the looping whine of a distant siren. We listened to the city, which was all around but felt far away, all the while knowing that if we did want to talk, in that place, we could say anything, voice thoughts we would never have spoken anywhere else and that we would never, in the outside world, mention again. Later, in high school, when I was assigned the book A Separate Peace, the title sent my mind straight to that graveyard. It was our island, our snow globe, our tiny piece of peace. After Trevor had his final apocalyptic fight with our mother and left our house, I never went back there. That little bit of preciousness got lost along with everything else—the tiniest, innermost grief in my Russian nesting doll of grief—and I believed I would spend the rest of my life missing it.
And then, six months ago, on a very early May morning, not long after we’d gotten Dobbsy and Walt, I discovered the dog park. I’d known it was there, of course, a big green splotch in the middle of a woodsy city park not a mile from our house, but I discovered it all the same. When I stepped out of my car and stood on the dewy grass, under a sky of pink and gas-flame blue and floating gold, surrounded by a snowfall-quality hush, I felt like Henry Hudson, blinking at the dazzle of the bay. I recognized where I was: in a completely new world and also home. On that first day, a Tuesday, there were just two other early risers, a very short, not-thin woman and a very tall, thin man. Mag and Daniel. Owners of Dinah the Lab and Mose the golden, respectively. Within a week of mornings, we were friends, our dogs were friends, and the dog park was my new—our new, although probably they’d never had an old one—Quaker burial ground.
Which is maybe why, fewer than forty-eight hours after Harris knocked the legs out from under our family life, when Daniel smiled and said, “Hey, we missed you yesterday morning,” I blurted out, “Harris got fired,” and I put my hands over my face and started to cry, audibly. So audibly that, in an instant, Dobbsy and Walt were loping across the grass—and if you think that tiny short-legged dogs can’t lope, you’re wrong—to rest their front paws on my shins, one dog per shin, and Mag’s muscular arm was gripping my quaking shoulders.
“Ugh,” said Mag. “Fired?”
“Spectacularly,” I said, bitterly. “A big, splashy fireworks firing. With a scandal and attempted bribery and God knows what else.”
“Shit,” said Mag.
“And there was a thing,” I wailed, “with a girl!”
“Shit again,” said Mag.
“Not sex. At least, not sex yet, but a thing, a fixation-type thing, and she was way too young.” Even there, in the dog park, I wasn’t ready to say just how young.
Still crying, I dropped my hands from my face, wiped them on my jeans, and looked bleakly from Mag to Daniel.
“And I have to tell Avery.”
“Aw, shit, shit, shit,” said Mag.
Daniel didn’t say a word but walked over to me on his very long legs, bent down, picked up Walt, and put him into my arms. Walt stared at me with the kindest concern I’d ever seen on anyone’s face and then began to rub the side of his head against my cheek. Standing there with the warm weight of Walt, with his silky fur buffing my skin and his adorable skull bumping against my cheekbone, I felt the anger and shame and sadness seep away, just a little. I sighed and sat down cross-legged on the prickly fall grass so that Dobbsy and Walt could settle into the nest my legs made. After a few seconds, Daniel sat, too, a fairly complicated procedure, like a music stand folding up, and then Mag plopped down between us.
“If Harris got into some kind of compromising situation with a girl, when he is married to gorgeous, funny you, he’s colossally dumb, as damn dumb as dirt,” said Mag. “Right, Daniel?”
“As damn dumb as damn dirt,” agreed Daniel.
I laughed and rubbed my eyes. “Thanks.”
I thought for a moment and then said, “Is it weird that that’s not the worst part? The betrayal?”
There was a silence before Daniel said, “Well, no. It makes sense that telling Avery would be the worst part. Georgia is only twelve, not a teenager yet, but if I screwed up like that, especially if her friends found out—and you know I’m not even married, so she wouldn’t have to come to terms with the adultery stuff—well, it would be . . .” He made a face like a person who had just witnessed something horrible, like a murder or a train wreck, but then caught my eye and said, “Not—that bad?”
“Nice catch,” I said.
He gave me a rueful half smile. “I’m sorry. Tween angst is new territory for me. I guess I’m pretty spooked by it. I’m sure it’ll be okay.”
“No, you were right. It’ll be awful.”
“Okay, but is the betrayal the second worst thing?” asked Mag, eyeing me.
I considered again and shook my head.
“Third?” asked Mag. “Because Sara and I have only been married a couple of years, but if she had a thing with a girl at work? It would definitely be top three. Hell, it would be number one, but, then, we don’t have kids.”
I sighed and began to count on my fingers. “One, telling Avery. Two, worrying about worrying for the next who knows how many years about how it might be affecting her. Like, if she doesn’t date in high school or college, is that because she can’t trust men? Or if she never gets married, is that because she doesn’t think marriage ever works out? Or if she does get married but decides not to ever have kids, is that because her father let her down so profoundly? These are just a few examples.”
“Worrying about worrying,” said Mag, with awe. “I don’t think I knew people did that.”
“Pre-worrying,” I said. “Laying the groundwork for other worrying. One of my specialties.”
“Three?” said Daniel.
I lifted a third finger. “Pity. The pitying looks I’ll get. I hate and despise pitying looks, even when they’re sincere.”
“Yeah, I know the feeling,” said Daniel, nodding.
I remembered then that his wife had died two and a half years earlier.
“Oh God, of course you know.”
Reflexively, I scooped up Walt and handed him to Daniel, who, reflexively, kissed the top of my dog’s head, right at the spot where his hair parted in the middle.
“So—fourth?” said Mag. “The betrayal is fourth?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe? I did ask him to sleep, for the foreseeable future, in this little guest suite we have that’s over the garage, which I guess means I’m upset about the cheating or the potential cheating or the flirtation or obsession or dalliance or whatever it was, right?”
“Well, that’s an interesting question,” said Mag, scratching her head.
“Dalliance,” said Daniel. “I like it. I mean, I don’t like that he dallied, obviously, but since you’ll need a word to call this, uh, turn of events, that seems like a good choice.”
“Thanks. I just thought of it. Here’s the thing. More than once over the years, and this started not that long after we were married, I’ve thought that my marriage wouldn’t last forever.”
“Oh,” said Mag. “Wow.”
“I can’t believe I just said that,” I said.
“Why?” said Daniel. He looked truly puzzled, a line appearing between his dark, straight eyebrows.
“You’re right. I can absolutely believe I just said that.”
“You should say what you want,” said Daniel.
“Well, in that case.”
“Uh-oh,” said Mag, laughing. “Here we go!”
“It hasn’t been so much an active desire for our marriage to end as it’s been a failure of my imagination to envision us being together forever. Maybe it should have been an active desire for it to end, but we had Avery not long after we got married, and she never slept, ever, and, for years, I was so tire
d all the time.”
“Too tired to want your marriage to end,” said Mag. “That’s tired.”
“How old were you when you got married?” asked Daniel.
“Twenty-three.”
“Shotgun wedding?” Mag asked.
Daniel winced. “Sheesh. Do people still call it that?”
“Yep,” said Mag.
“I guess what I mean is do people still call it that when they’re talking to a person who might have actually had what might technically qualify as that kind of wedding? Especially when that person is in kind of a shaky emotional state?”
“Nope,” said Mag. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “My mother didn’t threaten anyone with a shotgun, but possibly only because she didn’t have to. The pregnancy just kind of decided it for us. Or something. It’s all a bit of a blur. We’d been dating since I was nineteen, dating in this day-to-day kind of way. Not really a cumulative way, if that makes sense. For instance, until I found out I was pregnant, I never thought I’d marry him. Not actively thought anyway.”
“I’m sensing a certain lack of urgency in your relationship with Harris,” said Daniel, deadpan.
I laughed. “I think that’s what I used to like about it, actually.”
“Calm seas,” said Mag. “There are worse things.”
“Avery was a terrible sleeper, always. No naps, except by accident or out of sheer screaming exhaustion. God-awful night sleeping, wake-ups every two hours. She still struggles with insomnia, which is painful to watch. Anyway, I honestly think that Harris and I spent so many years so sleep deprived that we didn’t notice just how lacking in luster our lackluster marriage was.”
“And now I guess you’re noticing,” said Mag. “Which, if you don’t mind my saying, is maybe not the worst thing to happen.”
“Maybe not. But what the hell, Harris? Calm seas! Calm seas was the whole point of Harris. That’s what I wanted for Avery. Stability. A home she could have faith in.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” said Daniel, with a weariness that made me want to hand him another dog, even though he still had his hands full of Walt and Mose had come back from his adventuring to rest his butter-yellow chin on Daniel’s knee.
I'd Give Anything Page 3
