by Laura Miller
“What?”
“Daddy threatened him with a restraining order.”
“Get out!”
She roughly shoves my arm.
“Yeah,” I say, rubbing my bicep. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“And you never knew?”
I shake my head.
“Wow.” She sits back against the headboard, too.
“But I don’t know,” I say, “this last week, it was even better than I had imagined it could be. It was like old times but better. It’s as if ...” I pause, thinking about how I want to say my next sentence. “I know this sounds crazy, but it’s as if now we know it was real.”
Natalie gathers her legs to her chest and rests her cheek on her knee. “Iva, you know I’m not going to tell you to stay here. You can’t stay here. You had this dream since you were a little girl, even before you met Berlin, and now you have the opportunity of a lifetime.”
“I know,” I sigh. “I know.”
“Maybe he’ll go with you.”
I shake my head. “No, he can’t. He has a contract. Plus, he loves it. And it fits him.”
“But what if you fit him, too?”
I suck in a big breath and then slowly force it out. “Maybe it’s just not meant to be.”
Her eyes turn down to the sky-colored comforter we’re both sitting on.
“Well, how long’s his contract?”
“Two years,” I say.
“Oh,” she sighs. “Well, did you figure out how long you want to be in New Zealand?”
I manage a silent no with the shake of my head.
“Well, you could come back here after you’ve become famous.” She smiles a big smile. “Or ... maybe he could go there in two years.”
“Maybe,” I say, not feeling too optimistic about that last option.
She doesn’t say anything after that, and I follow her roaming eyes until they stop at a spot near the corner of the bed.
Maybe he could come to me in two years. But he’d still be leaving behind his career, his dream, his niece and nephew. And who knows how long—if ever—it will take me to make a name for myself.
“Natalie, this is crazy. It hasn’t even been a week, and I’m thinking about how to fit Berlin into my life.”
“It’s not crazy. You grew up with him. You probably know him better than anybody. And he’s a good catch.” She lazily shrugs her shoulders. “I would be trying to fit him into my life, too.”
I smile, but I don’t feel it.
“Nat.”
“Yeah?”
“I told him I’d go back to Sweet Home with him tomorrow.”
“Sweet Home?”
“Yeah, I know it’s our last, full day together, and I can always tell him I can’t ...”
“Uh-uh,” she interrupts, stopping me. “Go. You need to go.” She smiles softly, kind of like the way my momma always does. “I’ll just see you in the Land Down Under.”
I take a breath. “Well ... technically, it’s the Land of the Long White Cloud.”
“What?” She wrinkles her nose.
I just lift my shoulders.
“Anyway,” she goes on, “isn’t Sweet Home, like, quite a drive from here?”
I push my lips to one side and nod. “Yeah, it is.”
“All right. Well, have fun,” she says, patting me on the thigh.
“Thanks, Nat.”
She stretches out her legs again.
“He’s the boy from Sweet Home!” she shouts unexpectedly into the room, making me jump. She’s got a crazy look in her eyes now.
“I know,” I say, starting to laugh. “I feel like the luckiest ... and the unluckiest girl in the whole world—all at the same time.”
Natalie puts her arm around me and squeezes me tight. “Sometimes it’s just life’s way of keeping us balanced, Ives.” She pushes a strand of my hair away from my face. “But we make it. We always do.”
I force out a heavy sigh. I barely even realize I’m doing it.
“But what is it about Berlin that you like, out of curiosity?” she asks.
I meet her inquisitive stare. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, when I come to visit you, we go to coffee shops with these artsy bands playing in the corner or some wine bar in this cool, little renovated building downtown. But here, the best place, honestly, is a barn in the middle of nowhere.”
I laugh once. I didn’t realize I came off as having a type of place or a type of guy, for that matter.
“I don’t know,” I say. “When I think about Berlin, I just have so much love for him; I don’t even know what to do with it. And I’ve missed him so much. And now that I’ve found him, it’s as if all the world is right again. So, I don’t think it makes any difference really where we are or how different we might seem. In the end, we’re just two people from the same place who fell in love.”
I finish, and Natalie looks almost teary-eyed.
“Do you think you would pick him out of a crowd, if you didn’t grow up with him?” she asks.
My gaze briefly falls to the bed. “Yeah,” I say, “I think I would.” I feel my eyes lift and venture to the street outside the open window. “There’s just something about him that draws me to him. And I don’t know if it’s the way he looks at me or that he always knows the right thing to say to make me smile ... or that he remembers that banana is my favorite flavor.” I stop and laugh to myself. “Or maybe it’s just that when I look at him, I see the other piece of me—that piece that’s not afraid to drive the Harley or to dream about being a famous artist or even to fall in love. And in the end, no matter what I do or how far I go, my mind and my heart and my soul just always wander back to him. Even my daydreams can’t escape him. It’s as if everything just always leads back to him.
So, yeah, he could be in a crowd of a million people, and I think I’d still find him, and I’d pick him.”
Chapter Eighteen
I Can Do This
Fifteen Years Old
Iva
I come into the house crying. I normally don’t openly cry in front of anyone, but I’m too sad to care right now.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” my momma asks. The little wrinkles in her forehead let me know she’s worried.
“Nothing,” I say, roughly. I know I’m being short with her.
“It’s that boy, isn’t it?” my daddy chimes in. “I told your mother you shouldn’t be hanging out with that kid, with his dirt bike and his wild self.”
“He’s not wild! And they’re good people,” I shout, before looking down at the hall floor. “But it doesn’t even matter anymore; they’re moving.”
My daddy sits back in the living room chair and doesn’t say another word. But I can tell by his expression, he’s a little too pleased.
With that, I storm up the stairs and fly into my room, slamming the door behind me.
I don’t want Berlin to leave. He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me in this tiny town. If he goes, what will I do? There will never be anyone like him.
I bury my face into my pillow to muffle the sound of my sobs.
I love Berlin. He can’t leave.
“Honey.”
I hear my momma’s soft rap on the door. I want to ignore it. I just want to be left alone, and I really want to tell her that, but the words never come.
After only a few moments, I hear the door creak open, and then I feel her sit down next to me on the bed.
I shift onto my side, but I keep my eyes trained on my frilly, yellow pillowcase. “Berlin’s leaving.”
She rests her hand on my arm. “I know, honey.”
My eyes flicker up. “You knew? Did you know before I knew?”
“I only found out today, too,” she says. “I talked to Carol.”
A breath lifts my chest, and then a sigh quickly follows.
“It’s going to be okay, honey. There will be other people who will move in next door. Maybe it will even be a girl your age this time. And you guys wi
ll be best friends ... maybe even for the rest of your life.”
I press my face back into my pillow. She doesn’t understand. I don’t want anyone else. I want Berlin. He is my best friend. He will be my best friend for the rest of my life.
“Can Daddy give his daddy a job?” I ask. The thought just comes to me.
“Oh, sweetie,” she says, in her mom voice—the kind that lets you know she’s about to gently tell you bad news. “Daddy doesn’t have a job to give, and even if he did, it’s not the kind of job that Berlin’s dad would want.”
My heart sinks a little further in my chest. I didn’t even think it had any further to sink.
She soothingly rubs little circles into my tee shirt. “It really will be okay. I promise.”
I roll my face back into my pillow. She doesn’t understand. She’ll never understand.
“Momma, why does Daddy not like them?” My eyes are full of tears, and my voice sounds like sandpaper.
“Who?”
“Berlin’s family.”
“Oh, Iva, your daddy likes them just fine.”
I position myself so that I can see my momma’s face. And with a stern look, I let her know that I know she’s not telling the whole truth.
She gets it.
“Your father is just protective of you,” she says. “A boy moving across the street is a daddy’s worst nightmare. That’s all. He likes them just fine.” She stops and laughs softly to herself. “If your daddy had his way, he wouldn’t have you get married until you were old enough to get the senior discount at Victor’s.”
“But, Momma, nobody’s talking about getting married.”
“I know. I know. It’s just ... It’s how daddies think.”
I stare up at the ceiling and at my neon stars. “Well, maybe I could visit him, after he moves.”
My momma lets out a sigh, and in that long, unspoken breath, I can hear the words: That will never happen. But it doesn’t matter because as soon as I said it, I knew it, too. There’s no way that Daddy would let me go visit Berlin in some strange place if he doesn’t even like me playing basketball with him in the driveway right outside the door.
I’ll just have to wait until Berlin turns sixteen and he can drive here himself. Maybe, then, it will be as if he never left.
But that’s more than six months from now. That might as well be a lifetime away.
I turn over on my side, away from my momma.
“It really is gonna be okay, honey,” she says, standing back up. “You’ll see.”
She leaves the room and closes the door behind her, while I try to wipe the tears out of my eyes.
I have to wait a whole half of a year to see him. That thought in itself is enough to crush me, especially since I haven’t gone a day in the last three years without seeing his face.
It feels as if someone is sticking little needles into my heart. I’ve never felt this way before. I press my hand hard to my chest to try and stop the pain, but it doesn’t do much good.
I never knew you could love someone so much.
I squeeze my eyelids shut, and tears seep out of the corners of my eyes. How am I going to do this? I lie there and think about all the things we’re going to miss, like homecomings and prom and graduation. When I pictured those things, I pictured him beside me. And how am I going to be able to look out my window and not see him? Like, what if I look across the street one day, and no one is there? Or worse, what if I look across the street and someone else is there—in his room?
I stop my thoughts right there. I can’t even think about that. I just have to get through six months. That’s what I need to focus on. And until then, we can talk on the phone every day. And we can plan all the cool things we’re going to do when he can drive and we can go anywhere we want to go. And maybe by that time, I’ll have grown into my body and my hair won’t be so frizzy and my face will be just like those girls on the cover of Seventeen magazine. We’ll see each other for the first time in months, and it will be like a movie. It’ll be perfect.
I can do this.
Six months.
Just six, long months.
I miss him already.
I’m drawing at my desk. The title at the bottom of the sketch paper is Berlin’s House. I have a drawing that I did years ago. I titled it Angel’s House. You put them side-by-side, and they don’t look that much different from one another. There are just a few minor changes that most people probably wouldn’t even notice. For instance, Angel’s family had an American flag waving off the front porch. When Angel left, they took that flag with them, and Berlin’s family never replaced it. So, there’s not a flag in the second drawing. And Angel’s curtains were a pale blue. Berlin’s curtains are navy. In Angel’s driveway, there’s a maroon Mercury Cougar sedan. It was usually in the driveway. And it just so happened to be there the day I did the drawing. I was glad, but I would have drawn it there anyway because I always liked that car. It had a little cougar decal in its grille, and I always thought it made it look so expensive. But in Berlin’s driveway, I drew the old muscle car his daddy drives—and his motorcycle, too. And I drew one side of the unattached garage open, so that you could see Berlin’s cherry-red Chevelle. And I drew Berlin working under its hood.
If you were to ask me which drawing I like better, I’d give you a quick answer. But I’d feel bad about it because Angel was like a sister to me when she was here—and she did save my life that one time. But Berlin has my heart.
I look up from the drawing and see Berlin in the window across the street.
He smiles and gives me that same suggestive look he always gives me around this time at night.
I smile, too, and nod my head. And with that, he shuts off the lights to his room and disappears.
I look at the drawings one more time, and then I slide both into a folder and set the folder carefully into my desk drawer. Then, I go to my mirror and comb out my hair and then put it into a loose bun. And after I’m done with that, I go to my second window—the one that faces the side of our house—and I quietly let down the rope fire escape ladder.
“Hey,” he whispers up to me.
“Hey,” I whisper back.
He starts his climb, and I wait for him. And after a few seconds, his hands are gripping the wood of the windowsill.
“Hey,” he says again, his face now peeking through the frame.
I feel a wide smile edge across my face, as he climbs in, gathers the rope back up and drops it right inside the window. And before I know it, he’s pulling me close to him and passionately pressing his lips to mine.
I savor his kiss. I know I don’t have many more with him. I know our time is running out.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, pulling away. He uses the tips of his fingers to lift my chin. “Have you been crying? Your eyes are red.”
I lower my face, so that he can’t see my eyes.
“I don’t want you to leave.”
Immediately, I feel his arms engulf me, as he squeezes me into his chest. I breathe in the smell of toast. I’m going to miss his toast smell.
“I don’t want to leave, either,” he says softly into my ear.
“We’ll still talk, right?” I ask.
“Every day,” he says. “And as soon as I get my license, I’ll be here, all right?”
I nod into his chest.
“It’s only 186 more days,” he adds.
I lift my head so that I can see the feathery gold flakes in his eyes. “You counted?”
He nods. “I might have.”
I wrap my arms around his midsection, and after a few, long, silent moments, he walks me to the bed.
“Come on,” he says, “I’ve only got one more night with you under these neon stars.”
He sits down, and I smile and sit down next to him. And then we both fall back against the sheets, and he wraps me in his arms.
“You know I was thinking the other day,” he whispers in my ear, “how lucky we were to have found each other.”
<
br /> He pulls me closer, and our bodies meld together.
“I’ve never met anyone like you, Iva.”
I watch the moonlight filter into the room, wishing I could hold onto his words forever.
“You read girly magazines,” he says. His voice is raspy and barely over a whisper now. “But there’s oil on your fingertips.”
I look at my hand, and sure enough, there’s a stain from when I helped my daddy change a tractor tire earlier.
“You draw pictures of the ocean like someone who’s lived her whole life on the shore, but you’ve never once tasted its salty water,” he says.
I bring his hand up to my lips and kiss his tanned skin.
“And you’re beautiful,” he goes on. “And fearless. And you see something in me.
What do you see in me, Iva?”
I close my eyes and wrap his arm around my waist again. “I see ...” I stop to take a breath. “I see a piece of art—made of metal and rubber and wood. But the thing is, it’s one of those pieces that’s never really finished. It just keeps moving and changing. And every day, it looks like something new and beautiful. So, I just keep hanging around and staring at it, waiting to see what it’s going to be next.”
I pause, and for a few heartbeats, I can only hear that tree branch scraping across the roof.
“Metal, rubber and wood, huh?” he asks.
“Mm-hmm,” I hum.
“All right.” I can hear his smile, as his warm breaths graze my neck.
“And most of all,” I say, “I see love. I see love in your eyes—for this life, for your family, for Mr. Keeper and Claire Blanch—for people you don’t even know ...”
“And for you,” he whispers in my ear. “Most of all, for you.” He presses his lips to my neck. “Iva, I love you so much. I’ve never loved anyone like I’ve loved you. And I just know I’ll never love anyone like this again.” He grows quiet and swiftly intakes a breath. “I just know it.”
I turn around and still my lips against his, and then I gently rest a hand on either side of his face. “I won’t either,” I say. “I’ll never love anyone like I love you.” And as I say the words, I feel a weight, as if it’s an anchor, tugging at my heart, and I know that what I’ve just said is true.
