by Nicole Baart
Lucas nodded. “I think I do.” He paused, bit the inside of his lip. “But you . . .”
“Tried to seduce you?” Angela finished. She picked at a buckle on her purse and avoided his eyes as much as he tried to evade hers. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “Old habits die hard, and it’s difficult for me not to try and gain the upper hand in any situation by using what I’ve been given. My body, my face, my charm.”
He pondered that for a moment. “Well,” he said eventually, “someone certainly thinks highly of herself.”
“You made a joke!” Angela applauded him. “That was funny, Lucas. Well done.”
“I’m a funny guy,” Lucas protested. “I make jokes.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Sometimes.”
“Rarely. Admit it, you’re uptight.”
Lucas frowned. “I prefer ‘conscientious.’ ” He chanced a peek at Angela and saw her narrowing her eyes at him with an almost palpable skepticism. Raising his hands in defeat, he said, “Fine. You caught me. I’m uptight. But it’s just because I want to do the right thing.”
“How do you know what the right thing is?”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I’m quite sure you have a conscience, too.”
Angela nodded. “And yet you took the ring.”
“Character malfunction.” Lucas sighed, trying to be droll.
But Angela didn’t laugh. Instead, she dug in her purse and produced the box that held the ring. Flipping open the top, she plucked it out with her thumb and forefinger and offered it to Lucas. “Maybe it’s not always about being right,” she said softly, watching his face with a look he couldn’t quite decipher. “Maybe, sometimes, it’s about being good.”
“There’s a difference?” Lucas said trying to lighten the mood. He accepted the ring and stuck it in his pocket without looking at it.
“It wasn’t right to take the ring, was it?” The question was rhetorical; Lucas didn’t bother to answer. “But if this name leads us in the right direction and we figure out who she was, that would be a good thing, right?”
Maybe. Maybe not. Did they have any idea what they were getting themselves into? Had he paused for even a second to consider the implications of his selfish, impulsive act of potentially damning theft? If he had known that taking the ring would lead him to a parking lot in Omaha where a woman ten years his junior would reach across the car and tempt him, again, would he have taken it? Lucas shivered, suddenly aware of the cold, and reached to start the car. “I get it,” he said, “but I’m not in the mood for a theological debate with you.”
“It’s not theology.”
“I’m not in the mood for an ethical, philosophical, existential, metaphysical, or theological debate with you.” He pressed his lips together in a smile of finality. “Look, I think we’ve lost sight of our goal. We got excited, we went a little crazy, but we’re okay now. It’s been enlightening.” He paused, his hand on the gearshift and his countenance declaring the subject closed. “We okay?”
Angela held her tongue, and since Lucas didn’t want to think anymore about what had happened, he chose to interpret her silence as assent.
“Good,” he said, looking over his shoulder and putting the car in reverse. “Because my mystery woman is ready to be named.”
Lucas started when he felt her hand on his arm in spite of what they had just been through. His stomach sunk a little, but when he turned to confront her, Angela’s eyes were wide and serious, her expression earnest.
“Your mystery woman already has a name,” she said. “It’s Jenna. I wouldn’t forget that if I were you.”
Because Lucas didn’t know what to say, he didn’t say anything at all.
22
MEG
Meg liked her new roommate. Katie was the antithesis of a California girl, with jet hair and skin the color of the ivory-rose underside of the shell Meg had found on the beach. She was also the most self-assured person Meg had ever met, but her confidence made her selfless and friendly, quick to smile and happy to forge her own path in life.
Katie wore jeans when it was ninety degrees, but occasionally forgot to don shoes when she left the apartment. Her lips were striking, no matter the time of day, in a shade of cheap Revlon lipstick that reminded Meg of apples, so shiny and smooth, it seemed a reflection played off the pout of her ample mouth. Best of all, her long arms and the soft curve of her shoulders and upper back were resplendent with a rabble of tiny butterfly tattoos in the colors of a pastel rainbow. Meg often looked at her friend and was overwhelmed with a feeling of serenity, as if the girl was so gentle, so safe, she collected fragile, winged wonders around her.
Though Meg felt neither fragile nor winged, it seemed a gift to find herself rooming with a young woman who made her experience a sense of unexpectedly deep peace.
In addition to adoring her roommate with a wide-eyed awe that Meg had rarely known, she also liked the mindless simplicity of her job, the tiny apartment she shared with Katie, and the West Coast in general. In some ways her arrival felt like a homecoming, like she had finally found the place where she was always meant to be.
Only a few weeks after Meg arrived, she saw a poster advertising surfing lessons on the bulletin board in the back of the AT&T store, where she was, as her father had predicted, little more than a cashier. She didn’t hesitate to rip off one of the short tabs that broadcast the instructor’s name and cell phone number, and a few days later she found herself lying on a rented long board and paddling out into an ocean that seemed endless as she left the shore farther and farther behind. Turned out, she was quite possibly the world’s worst surfer. But she liked to ride the waves all the same, and a photo of her wet-suit-clad self being all but consumed by a white-capped wave was the first thing she sent to Jess when he called her and they started talking again.
“I miss you in my life,” he told her. “We’ve been friends for, what? Twenty years?”
Meg laughed. “I haven’t even been alive that long.”
“Ah,” he mused, dismissing her observation, “but we were friends when you were in utero. When you were little more than a wish. Though I had hoped you’d be a boy.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“I think it worked out better this way.”
Meg found herself looking forward to his calls, anticipating them as a tenuous but necessary connection to the life she had once led. A life that was so far behind her she wondered sometimes if it had existed at all. And while she had initially been skeptical about their interaction, Jess calmed her fears quickly and assured her that his intentions were completely platonic.
By the time the holidays rolled around, it seemed that everything between them was back to the way it had been before the garage kiss and the years of confusion that followed. They were back to being almost-siblings, close in a comfortable, familiar way that required little maintenance. And when they realized that Meg could only come home for Thanksgiving and Jess wouldn’t be able to make it back to Sutton until Christmas, they shrugged off the loss and continued their long-distance friendship without pause.
They shared phone calls, quick, one-line e-mails, and a haphazard assortment of postcards and letters that they both saved, but neither told the other that there was a growing stack of correspondence like collected evidence of their renewed affection.
Jess was in his third year of college, prepping to take his first stab at the LSAT and trying to boost his résumé and personal statement essay with an undergraduate internship at a recognized law firm in Minneapolis. And Meg was loafing in California, finding herself, though she hated to succumb to such unimaginative clichés. She sometimes wondered if Jess really had time for changeable lines of their undefined relationship, or if he was seriously interested in pursuing, even casually, a girl who was content for a season to take surf lessons and peddle cell phones. But just when she was ready to admit that their interlude was over, she’d pick up the phone and he’d be waiting on the ot
her end. Or she’d find a postcard in the mail, something strange and silly, like an image of the Mary Tyler Moore statue gracing the corner of Nicollet and Seventh in downtown Minneapolis. She immediately scrounged up a pair of go-go boots and a trench coat, and had Katie take her picture as she threw a borrowed hat into the air.
She never knew that Jess stuck the photograph to his wall with pushpins, right next to the glossy image of a tiny, drenched Meg smiling openmouthed at a wave as it towered over her.
More than a year after Meg left Iowa for the sunny balm of Central California, Jess talked her into a late-summer rendezvous in Sutton.
“The last week in August,” he announced one day when she picked up the phone.
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go home,” Jess suggested, a smile in his voice. “I haven’t seen you in . . . how long has it been?”
“Two years? Two and a half?” Meg guessed, trying not to remember too clearly the circumstances under which she had last seen him. The dining room. The porch. The good-bye as he slammed the door to his car. Her heart sunk a little at the memory. It still stung to know that she had hurt him.
“That’s too long. And I need a break. I haven’t been home since Christmas.”
“I haven’t been home since Thanksgiving.”
“You’ve always been independent,” Jess teased. “But your mom would love it if you’d schedule an unexpected trip home. What do you say?”
Meg hedged a little, humming into the phone as if it was a difficult decision to make. In reality, she had already made up her mind. “Only if I can find cheap tickets,” she finally acquiesced.
“I already checked. There’s a sale on.”
“I’m starting school the last week in August.”
“You are? Where? What are you studying?”
“Cal Poly,” Meg said, a smile in her voice. “I promised my parents I’d only take a year off, so I guess it’s time. And I have no idea what I’m studying. One thing at a time, thank you very much.”
Jess laughed. “Fine. We’ll meet in the middle. One last hurrah before you’re buried in books.”
Meg bit her lip and held the phone away from her ear, staring at it as if she could see Jess in the little screen if only she concentrated hard enough. But the LCD display offered no hints, no advice. It was black, asleep. She sighed and cradled it against her cheek.
“Okay,” she said.
“That’s my girl.”
Meg’s hand tightened on her phone in uncertainty, but his inflection was light, joking. He was being patronizing in a good-natured attempt to provoke her. She let it go.
They scheduled a long weekend, arranging it so that Meg could fly out early in the evening on a Thursday after work, and head back to California late the following Sunday night. That way she only had to take off one day of her nine-to-five, Monday-through-Friday routine at the AT&T store, where she had worked hard to earn such cushy hours. She ended up swapping her day for a couple of crummy evening shifts, but she figured the inconvenience was worth it for the chance to see Jess again.
“I thought you broke up with him,” Katie wondered out loud as Meg packed and repacked for her short trip.
“I did.”
“But now you want him back?”
“No. I want to know if I might want him back,” Meg tried to explain, but she only ended up confusing herself. “Maybe. Someday. I don’t know.”
Reaching over to take a pair of shorts that Meg had unceremoniously deposited in her carry-on and folding them along the seams, Katie filled in the blanks. “But you and Jess have been talking,”
“For a year now,” Meg admitted. “And I like it. He’s a good friend. Always has been.”
“A friend.”
“Yeah.”
“But he loves you?”
“He did.”
“Does he still?”
Meg contemplated the butterflies that seemed to be migrating down Katie’s arm. “Is that new?” she asked, pointing to a lavender beauty with saffron-tipped wings.
“No. You’re avoiding the question.”
Sighing, Meg turned back to the haphazard pile of clothes on her bed. “Does he still?” she repeated, almost to herself. “I don’t know. I guess that’s what I’d like to find out.”
“What about Dylan?”
The question stilled Meg’s hands. Although she had dated casually since coming to California, and she had hidden nothing about her past from Katie, his name still startled her a little. It was like stepping into the ocean before her surfing lessons—brisk and surprising, even though experience should have taught her what to expect. Now, hearing his name poured out so casually between them, Meg wished she’d been more tight-lipped. She didn’t feel like being interrogated. What about Dylan?
“I don’t know,” she confessed, hoping that her roommate couldn’t sense her irritation. “Dylan’s out of the picture. Has been for a long time.”
Katie didn’t press her further, but it was suddenly obvious to both of them that just because something was in the past didn’t mean it was buried.
But their conversation didn’t dampen Meg’s spirits too much. She tried to focus on what had been set before her, this gift of reconciliation that she hadn’t dared to hope for when Jess pulled out of her driveway more than two years before.
The plane ride halfway across the continent held a certain delicate anticipation, as if a world of possibility might unfold itself before her when she landed. It seemed inevitable to her, a wish that was sure to be granted, and try as she might to picture it otherwise, her life seemed poised to unfurl at her feet as she stepped from the airplane. The fact that Jess had promised to pick her up from the airport only heightened the sense of beginning, the strange feeling that this was a trip for second chances. For starting again.
When Meg finally crossed the threshold into Gate A7 of Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, she had to force herself to walk at a normal pace. It wouldn’t do to let Jess see her coming, face lit up as if she couldn’t wait another second to correct past mistakes, as if she couldn’t wait another second to see him. That was part of it, but Meg was more anxious to explore the life she had left behind, the future she had forfeited when her mistakes made her believe that away was the only option. Where Jess fit into all of that she didn’t yet know, and she didn’t want the weight of it all to rest on his shoulders before she even had a chance to make sense of how she felt. He wouldn’t understand.
In the end, Meg needn’t have expended such worry. Jess was nowhere to be seen, but Linda Painter stood grinning at the top of the gently sloped hallway when Meg stepped from behind the glass of the security station and out of the terminal.
“Hey,” Linda called when Meg was close enough to hear. The sound was a soft endearment that encompassed everything from “Hello” to “I love you” to “I miss you.” She folded Meg in a hug, and the girl could feel the intake as her mother breathed in the scent of her skin. Squeezing tight, Linda exhaled, then pushed away and held her daughter at arm’s length. “You cut your hair.”
Meg fingered the uneven fringe of her new pixie cut. It was tousled and messy, almost boy-short. Katie made her tuck it behind her ears to show the pretty line of her jaw, and she did that as her mother watched, smoothing the cropped tresses behind the new collection of tiny studs that arched along the top of her ear. If Linda noticed, she didn’t say anything. “My roommate did it,” Meg said, trying not to sound self-conscious though she meant both the haircut and the piercings. “Do you like it?”
Linda’s eyes sparkled. “It suits you. I’m glad I got to be the first to see it.” She reached for her daughter’s bag and Meg handed it over without complaint.
They walked in silence for a few moments, back to the escalators that would take them down to the short-term-parking garage. Meg used the opportunity to attempt to formulate a question that didn’t seem too disappointed, too forward, but Linda anticipated her daughter’s inquiry before she had a chance
to voice it.
“Jess’s stuck in Minneapolis,” the older woman said, crinkling the corner of her mouth in sympathetic disappointment. “Some legal thing that I don’t completely understand, but I do know that he’s in court when they were supposed to settle something quietly. People are greedy.” Linda clucked, unable to resist adding her own commentary. “They always want what they don’t have.”
Meg held her tongue. She doubted that Jess was stuck in court because of greed—the firm he interned for practiced mostly criminal law—but her mother’s uninformed assessment struck a chord all the same. Suddenly her high hopes for fresh starts and new beginnings felt avaricious. Wasn’t she happy? Wasn’t her life satisfying and simple and everything she could want? After all, she was only nineteen years old. In spite of what she had known, what she had felt or believed she felt for the two boys who had consumed so many years of her life, her days were so soft with green, she wondered for a moment if she had lived at all.
Shaking off her unwieldy thoughts, Meg linked her arm through her mother’s and grinned. She was thankful for Linda’s presence and the flash of wisdom it had inspired. The fence she had been sitting on abruptly felt unnecessary, pretentious, and contemplations of love lost and unrequited were unnecessarily solemn for a whirlwind retreat in the place she still considered home. It was better this way. Better to see Jess on less intense terms.
“I’ll see him tomorrow, right?” It wasn’t a question so much as a reassurance to her mom that she was happy to see her and far from heartbroken that Jess wasn’t able to keep their unconventional date.
“He was going to leave first thing in the morning,” Linda informed her.
“I’ll look forward to seeing him then.”
But Meg never did see Jess.
