November 24, 1997
We were sitting at lunch, when Coach came up and asked Gray if he could have a minute in his office. When Gray came back, for the first time since he’d come out, he looked shaky, unsure of himself.
“Whose ass do I need to beat now?” asked CJ.
Gray swallowed. “The parents of a couple of the guys on the team are demanding that I be kicked off.”
“You?” I said. “You’re the only reason we’re in the finals.”
“Not the only reason,” said Gray. “But thank you. I guess they think I’m a health hazard.”
“If this is about HIV, I will start screaming,” I said.
Gray shrugged. “Coach asked if I’d consider getting tested before the game.”
“Are you serious?” said Kirsten. “So he can share your personal medical information with moron Mongo’s and moron Kenny’s moronic parents? Hell, no.”
“Actually, I saw Mongo’s parents here this morning. I got here early to fine-tune my bio experiment. But it wasn’t Kenny’s parents they were with,” said CJ.
“Who were they with?” asked Kirsten.
“Robby Fulton’s.”
“Robby’s?” said Kirsten. “He’s kind of a decent guy. I don’t think he’s friends with Mongo.”
“He’s the backup quarterback,” said Gray.
“Oh shit,” said CJ.
“But he’s nowhere near as good as you,” I said. “We can’t win in finals with Robby out there.”
“His parents might not agree with that,” said CJ.
“You told Tremblay he was insane even to ask, right?” I said.
Gray’s face turned red. “Uh, I said I’d think about it.”
“No,” said Kirsten. “No way.”
“I agree,” I said. “Hell, no.”
Gray groaned. “Ugh. I know. You’re right. But I just want to play.”
“Coach said you can’t play if you don’t take the test?” I said. I wanted to leap up, march straight to Coach’s office, pound the living crap out of him with my bare fists, and then slap him with a lawsuit until he screamed for mercy.
Gray shook his head. “No. But he wanted me to take it. He said, ‘Let’s prove ’em all wrong, son.’”
“I hate him,” said Kirsten. “I hope he drops dead.”
“Don’t do it, Gray,” I said. “Rise above, remember?”
“I won’t,” said Gray. “I won’t do it.”
I wanted to grab his hand and squeeze it, but, instead, I rested my hand on his wrist. “I’m sorry this is happening. It sucks.”
“It’ll be okay,” said Gray.
But then tonight, he quit the team.
Not because of the HIV test. Or not only because of that.
When he opened his gym bag after practice, it was full of women’s underwear and fishnet stockings.
And when he opened his football locker, it was full of maxi pads and tampons dangling from the hooks, damp and dripping with ketchup.
I will be forever glad I wasn’t there to witness his face when he opened that locker door.
Gray took out the underwear, removed his ketchup-stained clothes and equipment from the locker, and walked out, never, ever, ever to return.
I hope one day those boys look back at what they did to Gray and are eaten up with remorse. But I’m not betting on it.
Sometimes, it’s hard, it’s all I can do, not to lose faith in humanity.
November 29, 1997
Kirsten, CJ, and I were going to boycott tonight’s game, but Gray asked us to go and then report back to him tomorrow. He’s going to be working at the fire station with his dad all night. He says his father is talking to him more now, although they’re still not back to what they were.
What’s crazy is that I think Gray still wants LM to win tonight, which I’d say is carrying the nice guy thing a bit far. But we’re playing the Cole School, our archrivals since the beginning of time, and old habits die hard, especially, it seems, when it comes to high school football.
So we agreed to go, on the condition that we could all wear sweatshirts with Gray’s name and number. When he handed them over to us, he said, “Keep them. I don’t need them anymore.” But he sounded so downcast that I said, “I won’t hold you to that,” and he smiled and said, “Thanks, Zin.”
I hope that, whatever else happens to me in the future, I find a way to get over Gray Marsden. I hope I move on and fall dazzlingly in love with someone else. I can even believe—just barely—that I will someday.
But here, now, just the sound of his voice saying my name makes me want to run out into the wilderness and cry for days.
I won’t though. I’ll stay here and put on Gray’s sweatshirt, and go to a football game like I promised.
Go, Owls! I guess . . .
November 29, 1997
11:30 P.M.
I can’t write it. I can’t. If I don’t write it, maybe it never happened.
I will never stop smelling smoke.
I will never stop seeing the school on fire, as if it were being eaten from the inside out, orange light staining the sky.
Everyone, the players in their pads and jerseys, the parents and students, kids from all the schools in town, holding on to one another, every face turned up.
And then, later, Gray. My Gray.
I can’t write it.
But I will never stop seeing him, big Gray somehow shrunken to childlike smallness inside his firefighter’s jacket, his arms dangling, ash in his hair, soot striping his face, his eyes dark and wild with shock and fear and disbelief.
And his father stretched before him, strapped to a board. Motionless. Slack-faced. Looking—no matter what we all hope or pray is true—like a person broken beyond repair.
Chapter Ten
Ginny
I was trying to capture Walt’s right ear, the one that folds over instead of standing up like a sailboat sail as it’s supposed to, when Harris told me that he was moving out. Or that he had been moving out, little by little, for weeks, slowly shifting his belongings—the bare essentials anyway, since it could be argued (although it seemed Harris had no intention of arguing) that almost every item in our house at least half belonged to him—from our house to the room above the garage to his rented furnished apartment not five miles away, an ebbing away so subtle and slow that I hadn’t even realized it was happening.
Still, I should not have been as surprised as I was, rendered temporarily speechless, my sketching hand frozen midstroke, when he came into the sunroom, a cardboard box in his arms, and said, “This is the last of it, Ginny.”
I sat cross-legged on the rug at eye level with Walt, who had, at that very moment, revealed a previously undiscovered talent for modeling, sitting regal as a New York Public Library lion, paws evenly spaced, head nobly lifted. When Harris and his box made their entrance, Walt didn’t jump up or change position, just opened his bright root beer–brown eyes wider and smiled his incomparable gap-toothed, guileless smile.
“You mean you’re leaving?” I finally managed to say.
“You didn’t know?” he said.
“I— I—” I shook my head. “No.”
Should I have known? We’d been sleeping apart for weeks—no, months—addressing each other cordially whenever one of us slipped into the other’s orbit, which wasn’t even daily. Christmas had been an almost jolly holiday, with Harris coming into the house for gift opening followed by breakfast: Avery’s homemade cinnamon buns—warm, redolent, yeasty, golden, palm-size galaxies—and French press coffee lashed with cream. Harris and I never touched once, not even by accident, but Christmas performed its sleight of hand, nonetheless, magicking us into a happy family and Avery into a dancing-eyed, carol-humming, carefree child.
Mostly, Avery kept her guard up around Harris, and their relationship seemed reduced to homework talk and wooden hugs. I’d watch her face, though, whenever he left, her eyes following him, her gaze staying on the kitchen door, even after he’d shut it
behind him.
“You want to set that box down and stay for a minute?” I said.
Harris tensed and then said, “Sure.”
He sat in the blue armchair; I stood up and sat down on the sofa, grateful when Walt settled into my lap, curling himself up like the warm cinnamon bun he was.
“You have an apartment, I guess,” I said.
“I rented it six weeks ago,” said Harris. “I bring boxes over every so often, spend the night there now and then.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I knew you went somewhere, but I didn’t know where.”
“I didn’t want to tell you and Avery until I was sure. As you know”—he smiled ruefully—“I’m not really a guy who makes bold moves or quick decisions. More of a go-slow, test-the-waters type. Cautious.”
“Mostly cautious,” I said, but I smiled back at him.
“And look where that got me,” said Harris.
“Here we two are,” I said. “Joking about what happened. It’s about time.”
Harris said, “I’m so sorry, Ginny. I’d give anything to change what I did.”
“I believe you,” I said.
“Thank you for finding my therapist. He’s helping me see.”
“See what?”
“Myself,” said Harris. “I never did that before, stepped back and really saw myself.”
“What do you see?”
Harris sighed and said, “I am a man who things happen to. School, my job, even you.”
I was tempted to disagree. Maybe it would’ve been kinder. But I said, “Yes.”
“I met you and you were young and gorgeous and interested in me, for reasons that I could not fathom. And I should have tried to fathom them. But instead, I went with it, with you, without stopping to ask questions about where we were going or whether or not you were actually in love with me.”
“Or whether or not you were actually in love with me.”
Harris nodded. “That, too. I knew you were beautiful, and back then, you seemed so fragile. I wanted to take care of you.”
“And I let you. I was fragile. I hadn’t always been. Before you knew me, I was brave, an adventurer. Everyone said so, and it was true. But by the time you met me, I was bruised and searching for a safe haven. You happened to me, too.”
“But none of that is quite the same as being in love, is it?” said Harris. “Maybe we would have figured that out, but then suddenly, so quickly, there was Avery. Avery happened to me, and I could not believe my luck.”
“Our miraculous girl,” I said.
For a moment, we just basked in the exquisite light of our daughter, bound by shared luck and shared cherishing. Harris and I needed to end, should have ended long ago, but in ending we were each losing the person—the only person—who had shared in the private moments of being parents to Avery. The moments when our eyes met over Avery’s head. The foods and books and toys she’d loved. Her sleeplessness at four in the morning. The time she came home from school with her pockets full of marbles and beads and pebbles, “manipulatives” from her kindergarten classroom that she’d stolen because they were “so pretty, like stars that wanted to come down from the sky to live in my house.” The small, precious, shiny daily stories of her childhood. Losing that—more than betrayal or anger or incompatibility—was the tragedy at the heart of our story. Briefly, I wondered what I could’ve done to save us from this loss. But I did not wonder what I could do to save us. That horse, I remained well aware, had left the barn.
“What else did you figure out with your therapist?” I asked.
“That I’ve been depressed. Not myself. For a long time.”
“Really?” I said, genuinely surprised.
“And it’s no excuse, but before I—” Harris broke off and rubbed the spot between his eyes with his finger. “Before last summer—”
“Before Cressida came to work for your company.”
“Yes. Before all that began, it had been months, a year maybe, since I’d felt—”
“Felt what?”
“That’s it,” Harris said. “Just felt.”
“A year,” I said, evenly.
“Don’t blame yourself for not noticing,” he said. “I did everything I could to hide it.”
I knew firsthand what depression was, the lightlessness and bone-deep weariness. The gray, spiraling misery. The hope jumping ship.
“No, don’t let me off the hook,” I said. “I should have paid closer attention to you, Harris. Not only during that year.”
I paid attention now. In the sunroom with winter surrounding us on three sides, the lace of trees, the stone-gray sky, sun like a pearl, I took in the man before me, Harris McCue. I saw that in the months since he’d been fired, he’d lost weight, his sweatshirt loose around his middle, his square-jawed face catching shadows. But if these changes were the aftermath of depression, he didn’t look depressed now. There was—I don’t know—an animation to him that I realized I hadn’t seen in a long time, a receptiveness to his features, a new sharpness in his movements and his gaze and his edges. As I observed him in the here and now, I also tried to summon the Harrises of the year before and the one before that. Harris after Harris after Harris. It wasn’t easy. But even my blurred and patchy recollections of my husband, from past to present, coalesced into a vision of a man walking, slowly and at long last, out of the fog and into the open.
“What a disservice I’ve done you,” I said. “Not paying attention. I’m sorry.”
The defeated, hangdog Harris of a few weeks ago would’ve waved off or protested my apology. This one said, “Thank you. And I’m sorry, too, from the bottom of my heart.”
“Thank you,” I said.
We remained for a few more seconds in the new, well-lit clearing we’d made for each other, and then Harris leaned over, picked up his box, the last one, said, “Okay, then,” and stood up.
As he turned to go, I said, “It hurts to see you leave. I know it’s what’s best, and I know we’ll both be okay, but it stings. I just wanted to say that.”
Harris didn’t turn around, but he stopped in his tracks. His shoulders rose and fell, hard inhale, slow exhale, before he said, “Thanks, Ginny,” and kept walking.
“You’re creepy, okay?” I told Kirsten. “What do you have? Spies? Camped out in my front yard? Harris just left, left-left, left for good not—no exaggeration—forty-five seconds before you called me. I may actually still be able to hear his car engine.”
“I know, but don’t worry. I don’t think he saw me. I parked a little way down your street; plus, I may have, you know, ducked when I saw him backing out of your driveway. And even if he saw my car, it’s Harris. He could’ve seen it a million times before without it making even the tiniest imprint on his memory. Harris is oblivious. Hold on. There’s probably a word to be created there. Oblivharris?”
“What? You’re here? You’re the spy you have camped out on my front lawn?”
“Is that a problem for you?”
“Get in here. No, wait, meet me at the garage. You can help me clean the garage guest suite.”
“Being your friend is so fun, Gin. It’s like one long party, really.”
“Come on. It’ll be cathartic.”
“Drinking wine is also cathartic.”
“Fine. I’ll bring wine.”
“Yay! And not to be insensitive, but did you inherit those super-huge Waterford goblets from your mom? Because you know how I like heavy stemware.”
“I did. And I do. But I think they’re for red wine, and all I’ve got is white.”
“Awesome. What better way to get revenge on Adela than use her glasses for the wrong wine?”
“Not to be insensitive.”
“God, of course not.”
My friend Kirsten has the reputation of being fundamentally unable to keep a secret, but that’s only partly true. She’s kept every secret I’ve ever told her since we were twelve years old, which is every secret I’ve ever had (minus one that I barel
y shared with myself before I erased it from my personal history forever and so doesn’t really count).
What she’s terrible—wretched, abysmal—at is keeping her own secrets. In high school, she cheated on every boyfriend she ever had, would tell me about it practically while her lips were still locked on the mouth of the forbidden guy, and swear me to secrecy. But within twenty-four (or four or two) hours, she would have spilled the story to everyone we knew, from her mother to her math tutor to Mr. Jones, the head maintenance worker at Lucretia Mott (who almost didn’t count because he was the most trustworthy human on the planet and the best listener and ended up on the receiving end of everyone’s secrets), to the poor, dumb, cuckolded boyfriend himself.
So it was not a surprise that we weren’t even halfway up the steep stairs to the garage apartment when Kirsten, two steps ahead of me, spun around, flung the back of her left hand in front of my face, just inches from my eyes, and screamed. I screamed, too, and grabbed her hand, and we performed a heartfelt, if highly, possibly life-threateningly precarious, dance for joy right there on the staircase.
“Isn’t it shiny?” she said, when we were settled on the couch in the garage apartment. She flipped her hand around in the air in the manner of a very enthusiastic conductor so that the emerald-cut diamond that used to belong to Tex’s grandmother scattered prisms all over the room.
“It almost blinded me. Literally almost put out my eye,” I said, and then I leaned over and kissed Kirsten’s cheek. “I’m deliriously happy for you, sugarplum.”
“There was a time, like twenty years, when I thought I’d have to ask you to be my matron of honor, which sounds so, you know, thick-waisted and dowdy, but now you can be my maid of honor, and I can be your matron of honor!”
“What about thick-waisted and dowdy?”
“I’ll be your newly married matron of honor, which is obviously totally different. Although if you don’t move fast, I might be sporting a baby bump under my matron of honor dress because the wedding’s in June, and we’re launching Operation Baby ASAP.”
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