by Sarina Bowen
And his kisses… Wow. We’re skin against skin, and it’s glorious.
Running my fingers down Jake’s torso, I find a little trail of curly hair which begins at his belly button and thickens on the way into his boxer shorts.
I follow it.
His body is unfamiliar territory, and I had only a vague idea of how to touch him. But if the giant groan he lets out is any indication, then I’m doing all right.
But then he grabs my hand. “Hang on,” he pants. “I have to think about English 125 for a minute.”
“What?” He hates that class.
“Chaucer in verse. It’s the most boring thing I can think of right now. I don’t want this to end immediately.” He exhales slowly. “Which one was the tale about patience?”
I’ve been holding my breath, but now I let it out in a whoosh. “‘The Franklin’s Tale,’” I sputter. I bury my face in his neck to avoid laughing in his face.
He nuzzles me. “I ruined the mood. Didn’t I?”
“No!” I wrap my arms tightly around him. “You’re perfect. Perfect, and you have no idea.” In fact, my laughter unhooks the last pinch of anxiety from my heart. I reach for Jake again, and he pulls me into a kiss that goes on and on.
I forget to be afraid. I stop thinking, and let myself just feel.
* * *
Eventually the candle flickers and dies. We rest together, his body curled around mine. Jake drowses, but I don’t feel like sleeping. Whenever I shift position, his hand finds a new place to rest, on the curve of my hip or on the back of my leg. I drink it all in.
But I must have fallen asleep, because I’m next conscious of someone bumping and tripping nearby in the pitch dark.
“Jesus Cristo,” Aurora’s voice says, sounding thick. There’s another shuffle, and then a crack. “Mierda!”
As I blink in the dark, Jake’s hand closes around mine. I hold my breath until Aurora makes her way out of the room again. The outer door opens as my roommate presumably heads to the bathroom.
“Does she usually come home ripping drunk at one thirty?” Jake whispers.
“Never.”
His hand trails up the side of my hip. “Do you need me to sneak out? If you’ll be embarrassed, I’ll go.”
“Don’t,” I whisper. Please.
He kisses my neck. “Hand me my boxers, then. Quick, before she comes back.”
“Good idea.” I slide off the bed. I hand Jake his underwear and grab a nightie out of my dresser drawer. I fling the nightie over my head just as the outside door opens again. I hop back into the bed as quietly as possible.
Humming to herself, Aurora stumbles into the bedroom. She drops her toiletry caddy noisily on the floor and paws at her bed. Then she begins singing. The words are slurred Spanish, but the tune is unmistakably Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”
It’s quite a performance.
I feel a giggle rising in my chest, but I hold it in. At least I try, until Jake also begins shaking with barely suppressed laughter. I have to clamp a hand over my mouth.
Aurora’s song breaks off as she struggles with her bed covers. Then the room is quiet, except for the tremors of choked-back laughter rippling through two people in one small bed.
Behind me, Jake snorts, forcing me to roll my face into the pillow to suppress the giggles.
“SHHHH!” Aurora hisses from her end of the room. “Silencio!”
But that only makes it funnier. We clutch each other, trying to laugh noiselessly.
“Maybe you two had—” Aurora belches. “—a nice night. But mine was horrible. Now, go to sleep.” Her voice rolls toward the wall.
Jake takes a deep breath. “Goodnight, Aurora,” he whispers.
“Night,” she answers. And in spite of the fact that Jake and I are still shaking in the dark, my roommate soon begins to snore.
When my spasms of laughter finally subside, I put my head on Jake’s chest. “Goodnight,” I whisper.
He strokes my hair. “Goodnight, my love.”
I lie there for a while, wondering if it’s possible to die of happiness. Instead, I fall asleep.
Chapter Thirty
Three days later, I meet Frederick in front of a big house on Choate Street. As I approach, he unlocks the door. “Seriously, the key is in the mailbox?” I ask.
“Apparently there’s not a lot of crime in this town. Norah told me to go ahead and show you the place. It’s vacant.”
I step inside to see a gorgeous curving staircase in front of me. “Wow. Fancy.”
“I really like it,” he says. “I want to buy it, but Norah said I had to show it to you first before I make an offer.”
“She did?”
“Yeah. She said ‘It’s great that you love this house, but give your people a minute to get used to the idea.’”
“Doesn’t she like it?”
“She likes it fine. But she already owns a house, and thinks I’m being extravagant. The thing is, we’re going to need some more space.” He walks me through a grand living room and into a dining room at the rear. “Look out the window,” he says. “That little building in back is currently an art studio.”
“Interesting. With some ugly black foam, you could soundproof it.”
“Exactly. My man cave.”
I turn around. “What a kitchen.” In addition to miles of gleaming countertops, there are barstools and even a little fireplace.
“Isn’t it great? The previous owners must have spent a bundle on renovations. They made it into a really nice family space.”
In my mind, I populate this room with Norah and a baby. There will be a high chair at the kitchen table, and Frederick will wave at them through the window on his way to his backyard hideout.
The perfect little family, at home in their new mansion.
“Come upstairs,” he says.
At the top of the curved staircase is a hallway that leads to four bedrooms. “Here’s the nursery.” Frederick walks along the shiny wood floor and points into a little room. “It’s connected to the master suite.”
As I peek into the empty rooms, I can picture how this will work. Frederick will stand over the crib in that cozy room in this gracious house. He’s setting himself up for a do-over. If he’s a good father to his second baby, then he can move on and declare himself cured. He can resign from Assholes Anonymous.
I feel a pain in my chest.
“Rachel, come here a minute,” he calls. “See, most of the bedrooms are together. But once you go through this door, there’s one more.”
I follow him through a narrow little hallway until we’re standing in a very pretty room with dormers and window seats. Out the windows, I can see buds on the backyard trees.
“Okay, it’s over the garage, which is probably a bit cold in the winter,” he says. “But it’s very private, with its own bathroom too. And it’s kind of pretty. It made me think of a girl’s room. If I buy this house, I want you to have it. I know you’ll be in a college dormitory for much of the year. But over summer and winter vacation you’ll need a place to roost.”
I turn around, taking it all in. There are built-in bookcases under the window seats.
“Look.” He beckons. “There’s a second staircase too, that goes down to the mudroom. What do you think?”
It’s the bedroom of a girl’s dreams. When I was little, I’d always wanted a fancy room like this.
I walk over to perch on one of the window seats. The room is too nice for someone who only needs it during vacations. It would be a waste, really. At that realization, a brittle piece of my heart chooses to splinter and break.
“Don’t you like it?” Frederick asks.
“Of course I like it,” I whisper. “But…” My eyes fill up with tears, and a sob escapes from my chest, unbidden.
“Rachel, what’s the matter?” Frederick wears a panicky, what-have-I-done face.
“It’s just… WHY? Why now?”
At first I think he doesn’t understand the quest
ion. But then I see him swallow hard. “By ‘why now’ I suppose you mean why not a long time ago?”
I can only nod. The tears have begun to stream down my face.
“Oh, honey.” He turns around in a complete circle and puts his hands on top of his head. “The reason you can never have an answer to that question is because I don’t have one to give.”
“But what were you thinking all that time?” I gasp. “And don’t say it was a long time ago, or that you don’t remember.” I slip a photo out of my back pocket and hold it up. It’s the one with my mother at the drums.
Frederick flinches as if he’s been slapped. He sits down on the wood floor in the center of the empty room. “Have I ever said one unkind word about your mother?”
I shake my head.
“We were young and stupid. I was stupider than she was, trust me. But it takes two people to have a baby.”
I sit lean back on the window seat, putting a little more distance between me and Frederick’s story.
“We were great together, actually. She was smart and funny. But she was also full of opinions about my career. And I was a twenty-one-year-old jackass who didn’t want anyone’s help.” He stops, swallowing hard. The sun angles in the window to put a spotlight on his shoulders. “Music was the only thing I’d ever been good at. And when the producers finally started showing up with offers, they didn’t want Wild City Blues. They said blues weren’t hip enough. They wanted the solo stuff I’d been recording on the side. They gave me a contract and I…” He takes a deep breath and sighs. “I signed it.”
“She didn’t want you to?”
He stares at a patch of the polished floor. “She thought if we went on tour, it would work out for both of us. But I wasn’t willing to wait.”
I tried to imagine how that would feel for my mother. But since I’d never known her as musician, I can’t picture that dream.
“We fought about it,” my father says, his voice dropping low.
“Is that how it ended?” I can’t get those happy images out of my head—my mother and Frederick with love on their faces.
“Almost. I did something awful just to prove she didn’t own me. I…” His confession seems to lose steam. “I didn’t come home one night after a gig. And then she retaliated in a way that was designed to hurt me too. That’s how it ended.”
I try to decode this last bit of information, and find it impossible. “She cheated? With who?” It’s hard enough to imagine my mother taking off her clothes for Frederick. But for a stranger?
He looks up at me and shakes his head. “She was really upset with me. And probably afraid. I think she already knew she was pregnant. But I was clueless. And then I went on tour, leaving her behind. The tour went really well, and I basically never came back to Claiborne.”
He stares at the pretty slanted ceiling, as if the story is written up there. “She didn’t even tell me about you until after you were born. She sprung it on me just as I was about to go to L.A.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to L.A. I told her I had to do it for my career. I didn’t want to be forced into coming back.” He leans back on his hands and looks up into the dust motes floating on the sunshine. “I didn’t know any babies, Rachel. I didn’t have a clue what they needed. Your mother, on the other hand, was the most competent person I’d ever met. I didn’t think you needed me.”
“But you sent us money.”
“Well, she didn’t ask right away, because she was smart and she knew there was no point. I get that now. So it happens that she asked right after my first album. But I didn’t see her timing as good common sense. I felt manipulated.”
“But you paid.”
“I did. And it made me feel very benevolent. The rising star pays off his little people. I doubled it at some point too. She didn’t even ask me to. Every month I mailed a check, and every month she cashed it. And those months, they turned into years really fast. If you have a child you’ve never met, every year it gets a little easier to tell yourself that the kid is better off without you.”
“But it wasn’t true!”
He nods. “See, but she was very nice about helping me to perpetuate the myth—that I fulfilled my obligation with those checks. She never wrote me a letter, never sent me pictures. I sent the money, and she was willing to leave me in perfect ignorance. The problem was I never got a whiff of what I was missing, either.”
“She did that because of pride,” I sob.
“No kidding, you think?” His eyes are shining now. “When I lie awake at night, it’s her I feel bad for. You—I’ve got years to make it up to you. But I can’t imagine her final months. If I’d been in the picture even a little bit, I could have put her mind at ease.”
He wipes his eyes with his fingers. “There was only one time when I almost did the right thing. It was five or six years ago.”
Frederick doesn’t look me in the eye, and I feel a pit in my stomach. Maybe I don’t want to hear what he’s about to say.
“It was the only time she asked me for something. I got a note in my P.O. box, asking for two tickets to an Orlando concert.”
My heart begins to ricochet.
Two tears track onto his famous cheekbones. “I took two tickets, and I put them in an envelope on my desk.” He wipes his face on the sleeve of his shirt. “And then I started to talk myself out of it.”
I press my hands to my mouth, trying not to choke on my tears.
“I knew I couldn’t just send them and not see you. So I told myself that it was all too complicated—it was a big tour, all big venues, lots of industry people. I had to stay sharp…” His voice breaks. “I didn’t send them. I’m so sorry.”
I fold over and cry, because if he’d sent them it would have made all the difference in the world. And my mom! I had begged for those tickets, and she had said no. But then she’d swallowed her pride and asked anyway. And she’d been rebuffed.
He gets up off the floor and comes over to where I’m sitting. He pulls my damp face to his shirt. “I’m so sorry, honey. It was a terrible thing.”
“I’m still so angry,” I choke out. Finally, I’ve said so. I’ve said it with snot running out of my nose. But I’ve said it out loud.
“I know,” he says. “I know you are. And I can take it. I’m not going anywhere.” I cry, and he holds on tight.
CODA
CODA: (Italian “tail”) An ending section which brings the composition to a close.
Chapter Thirty-One
“I really don’t see why they do this on April Fool’s Day,” Jake grumbles. “That’s just mean.”
We sit on the S.L.O. together, my legs across his lap. It’s college acceptance day, and we’ve agreed to look at the Claiborne College website at the same time. Jake is all stressed out.
“Can I look at yours for you? Would that make it easier?”
Wordlessly, he passes me his laptop. The password is already typed in. He’s just reluctant to peek.
But I’m dying to find out if he’s gotten in. He wants it so badly. I press the button.
Six seconds later the screen lights up in green. CONGRATULATIONS JAKE WILLIS! WELCOME TO THE FRESHMAN CLASS.
I must have squealed, because his face breaks with disbelief. Then he grabs me by the hips and into his lap, so he can see too. “Damn. This better not be an April Fool’s joke.” His grin is enormous.
“Congratulations,” I say, hugging him.
“Now we have to look at yours.”
Right. “If you say so. Can’t we just bask in the glow of your victory for a while?”
Jake swaps our laptops, putting one on the coffee table and lifting the other one. “Go on.”
I follow the link from the email and tap in my user name, all the while telling myself it will be okay if I’m rejected. Jake wants it more. His parents are professors there. And I’ve already been accepted to a good school in California.
But, God, please.
My fingers shake a
s I click the button on the screen.
It turns green, and Jake lets out a whoop of joy.
“Wow,” I breathe. “I’m in.”
“You so are!” He wraps his arms around me and kisses me.
I lean in, but my brain is going a hundred miles an hour. “Can’t believe it,” I murmur against his lips. Next year just got even better. Jake and I will be together.
“Mmm,” he agrees, his tongue stroking mine. Then he pulls back. “If you’re staying in Claiborne for the summer,” Jake says, “I can drive up to see you.” Jake is working another season at the clam shack on Cape Cod.
“That sounds like fun. But if you’re working at the beach, it should be me who visits you. Except I don’t have a car. Maybe I can borrow one.”
“Awesome,” he says, kissing me again.
The door bangs open and Aurora walks in. “Sorry,” she mumbles.
Jake and I break apart. “Hi, Aurora,” he says with laughing eyes. Lately, we are never alone.
“We both got into Claiborne,” I say by way of explanation. “Just now.”
“Congratulations,” she says, her voice softer. Aurora isn’t applying to colleges this year. Her dad thinks she needs a PG year at Claiborne to shore up her résumé. “You must be so happy.”
“Yeah.” I squint at her. She isn’t happy, and hasn’t been for a little while.
“You should come to the beach this summer with Rachel,” Jake says, trying to include her.
She sits heavily on the window seat. Lately, she’s spent a lot of time there, staring out the window and drowning in her teacup.
“Aurora,” Jake tries again. “Did you hear the question? Don’t make me come over there.”
“Sorry,” she says, looking our way. “I’m just distracted.”
“We noticed,” I say, watching her. “Don’t you want to tell us what’s wrong?”
