by Marcy Blesy
After dinner and a wild game of Monopoly, Matt and I head up the stairs to get ready for bed. Although Matt’s Mom is more liberal than my mom, I won’t sleep in the same room as Matt in his childhood home. That feels too weird. Matt is going to sleep on the couch in the basement while I’ll stay in his old room.
“So, did you survive my crazy family okay?” asks Matt. He puts his arms around me and shuts his bedroom door behind us.
“I think I held my own,” I say. “I don’t care how much I want to make a good impression. I was not about to let that little brother of yours try and steal Park Place away from me.” Matt laughs.
“You fit right in, Mae.” He traces my lips with his fingers and bends down to kiss me. I press my body into his and kiss back. “You sure I can’t stay here tonight?”
“I’m sure. You cannot stay here tonight, but maybe you don’t have to go quite yet,” I say. “Close your eyes.” I slip out of my dress, letting it fall to the floor. Matt cracks open an eye as he sits on the edge of his bed. I shake my head no and put on a pair of running shorts and blue tank top I’d packed to sleep in. He reaches his hands out and pulls me to him.
“You are a very naughty girl, Mae Tatum. Why are you torturing me?”
“Why, whatever do you mean, Matt darling?” I say. He play spanks me on the butt and pretends to take a bite out of my neck. Then we hear footsteps on the landing outside his room. I pull away and open the bedroom door, so we don’t raise any suspicions. No sense tainting the minds of the teenagers in the house. When I open the door, I am startled to see an older man standing next to the bathroom door. He is surprised, too, and quickly enters the bathroom without speaking a word to me. By now, Matt is also standing in the landing. With a final kiss good night, he flies down the two flights of stairs and to the basement. I guess he’s not going to give me any explanations.
Alone in Matt’s room, I study the trophies on his dresser. Pictures of sports teams fill his bulletin boards: soccer, baseball, football, basketball, and track. Michael Jordan and Chicago Bears’ posters decorate the walls around his bed with one small picture of Heidi Klum taped to the back of his nightstand. It makes me smile seeing his teenage crush. Everything about this room tells me that Matt was an all-around good kid, every parent’s dream. So why isn’t he talking to his dad, for that must be who the man in the hallway was? I’m tempted to go through his desk drawers, but what kind of person does that? Only an insecure, needy girlfriend, and I’m trying so hard to not be that girl again.
As I curl up in Matt’s bed, I close my eyes as my thoughts drift back to the last year of my life. I thought Ty was the answer to my hope for the future then, but I’d been so wrong. Surely I can’t be wrong again, but the rising voices coming from across the hall give me reservations, for maybe Matt’s secret will be too big to handle. Could someone have a more messed up life than me when on the outside he appears perfect? Tomorrow will give the answers I need. It has to.
Chapter 16:
The next morning, the birds nesting outside my window announce an early wake-up call. I slip into the bathroom to shower before anyone else seems to be awake. I twist my hair into a French braid so I don’t have to worry about taking up too much time drying my hair. I put on my denim shorts with an orange t-shirt and gold sandals. Lanie, no doubt, will approve of my color scheme.
Mrs. Philips is flipping pancakes when I get downstairs.
“Good morning, Mae. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No. I’m not much for sleeping in lately, too much going on up there.” I point to my head and laugh.
“Matt told you?” She’s suddenly very serious.
“Uh…” I consider lying because then I might get some real answers, but I think about if someone else had told Matt my life story and how unfair that would have been. It’s his story to tell, when he’s ready, not his mom’s. “No, ma’am. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sorry.” She flips another set of pancakes onto a warming plate.
“Was that Mr. Philips who I saw upstairs last night?” She butters the pancakes and takes the syrup out of the pantry.
“Yes.”
“Will I get to meet him this morning before we leave?”
“He’s gone.”
“Oh. Does he work a lot?”
“Things are complicated between him and Matty.”
“You should have woken me,” says Matt, walking into the room in his plaid boxer shorts and no shirt. I swear the guy can grow a full five o’clock shadow overnight. He looks hot.
“Matty, put on some clothes, for goodness’ sake.”
“Good morning, Mom.” He kisses his mom on the cheek, and pats me on the butt.
Lanie and Zackery make it to breakfast as Mrs. Philips is putting away the leftovers, in typical teenage fashion.
“Nice of you to arrive for our send-off breakfast,” says Matt.
“Send-off?” says Lanie. “You’re leaving already?”
“Sorry, kid. I’ve got things to do. I’m a grown-up now.”
“Can I come visit this summer?” she asks. No one says anything, but the looks between the faces of the Philips’ family in the room give the answer away.
“I’ll come back to visit soon. I promise. Anyway, you’ve got your big brother Zack to drive you everywhere now.”
“He won’t take me anywhere,” she whines.
As I’m lugging my suitcase with mostly unused clothes down the hallway, Zackery motions for me to come to the backyard. I leave the suitcase in the hall and follow him outside.
“What’s up, Zack?” I ask.
“I just wanted to say thanks.”
“For what?” I ask. He shoves his hands in his pocket and shrugs his shoulders like he’s trying very hard to not say what he really wants to say.
“For being good to my brother. He’s had a shitty time the last couple of years, and I haven’t seen him this happy in a while.”
“Sure. He’s been good for me, too, Zack. I understand that shitty life feeling.”
“Yeah, your life sucks.” I start laughing hysterically because his honesty strikes me as hilarious.
“Oh, man. I am so sorry.”
“No, really, it’s all good. Look, I’d better get inside. Matt wants to leave soon.”
“In time, Matty,” I overhear Mrs. Philips telling her son, as he stands by the front door, my suitcase in hand. They don’t see me.
“How long, Mom?” he asks. “Isn’t there an expiration date on this sentence?”
“You don’t mean on her life, Matty. What a horrible thing to say.”
“No, Mom, that’s not what I mean. Why do you and dad continue to make me the scumbag here? What I mean is how long must I keep pretending? And how long before Dad forgives me for wanting to move on?”
“Mae, I didn’t hear you, dear.” She shifts her eyes back to Matt’s for a brief second. Their conversation ends with more questions than ever waiting to fly off the tip of my tongue. Waiting on someone else’s timeline is hard.
“Thanks again, Mrs. Philips. It was really nice meeting you all.”
“You are welcome any time.” She hugs me a little longer than usual, but I don’t mind. I understand the mom hugs when they’re really worried about their own child. Goodness knows I worried my mother enough with my poor choices.
Matt is quiet as we drive out of town. I put my hand on his knee, but he doesn’t seem to notice. I watch the houses disappear and turn to cornfields, a sight that is quite foreign to a city girl. There is something very peaceful, though, about being able to see land for as far as the eyes will allow without any steel or concrete imposing upon the simple view. I look at the time on the dashboard. We’ve been driving in the country longer than what I’d remembered on our way to Matt’s house. In the horizon I can see another town growing larger as we get closer.
“Are you taking me somewhere before we go home?” I am kind of excited because we haven’t explored Matt’s old stomping grounds n
ear as much as I had hoped for this trip. He shakes his head yes.
“Great. Where are we going?”
“To a nursing home.”
“Oh, okay.” Not exactly what I had in mind, but I’m sure there’s a good reason for this choice. “Have your grandparents been moved to Iowa? You know, Matt, it’s kind of ironic that I have to travel all the way to Iowa to meet them when we lived in the same town for months.”
“We’re not going to meet my grandparents.”
“Oh.” Matt pulls into the parking lot of a large three-story building. The grounds are beautifully landscaped. A large fountain bubbles from the middle of a manmade lake in front of the facility. A flower garden sits to the right of the building, and I can tell there is another fenced-in garden in the backyard. It doesn’t seem so bad, not that I’d ever want to live in a nursing home. Matt puts the car in park and turns to look at me.
“Can we take a walk?”
“Sure. It’s gorgeous out today.” We hold hands as we walk to the flower garden. The smell of the lilac bushes wafts through the air and reminds me of the bush we planted at the cemetery, but I am not sad.
“Mae, sit down.” Matt points to a bench in the middle of the garden surrounded by climbing vines in trellises around the bench, giving us plenty of privacy, something I’ve sorely been missing the last twenty-four hours with Matt. In fact, I have missed him so much that the minute I sit down I pull him next to me, grab his face, and kiss him hard. He pulls away.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No, gosh no, Mae. You’ve done everything right. Has it been hard for you to not give me the third degree about all the things you’ve observed this weekend?”
“Well, truth be told, there is a lot on my mind, but I know when you’re ready, you’ll tell me.”
“I love you so much.” He pulls me close for a hug, burying my head in his chest and kissing the top of my head. He holds me there for a few minutes until I pull away gently.
“I love you, too. I really do. And whatever you have to tell me, just do it.” He takes a deep breath.
“I need you to meet someone.”
“Okay.” He grabs my hand again and leads me out of the garden and into the nursing home. Some of the residents look up as we enter. I imagine Grandma having lived in such a place if she were still alive, and would she have been disappointed in her family for spending so much of their lives always being too busy to visit? I’d like to think that’s not what would have happened. Matt signs in at the front desk.
“Hello, Matt. It’s nice to have you back,” says an attendant at the desk. She glances my direction but doesn’t so much as crack a smile. I follow Matt down a long hallway past the dining room which smells like mashed potatoes and gravy and to a set of elevators in another hallway. When we get off the elevator, he hugs me. He is visibly terrified which seems so odd considering we’re just in a nursing home.
“It’s not too late to back out,” he says.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I can handle whatever you have to tell me.” He shakes his head like he’s full of doubts. At the end of the hall, we stop in front of room 310. Matt takes a deep breath and opens the door. I enter behind him. There is a television on in the corner of the room which is playing some reality show because people are screaming at each other. Posters of Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling are tacked to a bulletin board, and a net hanging from the ceiling holds tons of stuffed animals. A Jonas Brothers CD sits on a table by the front door. I feel like we’re in a pre-teen’s bedroom, not the home of a senior citizen. A young woman, no older than me, sits in a wheelchair by the window watching the television. She rests her head on a pillow that lies against the headrest that extends from her wheelchair. Matt walks over to the television and turns it off.
“Hi, Kelcy,” he says. Then he bends over the frail young woman and kisses her on the cheek. “Don’t cry, honey.” He twirls the ends of her shoulder length blonde hair, much like he does when comforting me. I try to process his tenderness.
“Matty,” she says. Matty?
“Kelcy, I’d like you to meet my friend Mae.” I step next to Matt. Kelcy has beautiful, big blue eyes that are that much more prominent because she seems so small.
“I’m Kelcy,” she says, with difficulty. She moves only her eyes, and her body remains stiff.
“Nice to meet you,” I say.
“Matty’s friend?” I shake my head yes.
“Me, too,” she says, and smiles. She looks at Matt. He brushes her hair with his fingers again. “His girlfriend.” She giggles like a little girl. I don’t know if this is some joke between the two of them, but Matt doesn’t laugh. I step away from Kelcy and bump into the table. The Jonas Brothers CD falls to the floor.
“Matty!”
“Shh…it’s okay, Kelcy.” He picks up the CD and puts it back on the table. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” He rubs his hand over her head, and she calms down. Tears stream down her face. He wipes them away. I feel like I’m in a movie, where everyone in the audience knows something that the heroine does not, and then it hits me, like a moth smacked against a headlight and attracted by the light. It’s the girl from the mug. Kelcy is the girl on Matt’s lap from the mug I found in his apartment.
“Kiss me,” she says. She looks at me. I feel like the third wheel, and my stomach hurts. What is happening? “Kiss me, Matty.” He looks up at me, too. Just as Kelcy’s eyes beg for his affection, his eyes beg for my forgiveness.
“Nice to meet you, Kelcy,” I say as I turn toward the door, not wanting her to see my emotions, a mixture of confusion and sadness swirling around inside. “I’ll wait for you in the garden, Matt.”
“Good-bye,” she says. The smells of the hallway, medical antiseptic mixed with horrible food, turn my stomach. Skipping the elevator, I walk down the three flights of stairs. The discovery of the last few minutes pounds against my head: Matt has a girlfriend? I’m his girlfriend. Nothing makes sense. I don’t know how long I have been in the flower garden, but Matt’s touch startles me.
“Mae,” he whispers. I lift my head from the bench where I’ve been laying. “Mae, forgive me.” I sit up and hug my arms around my knees.
“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to forgive you for except you have a girlfriend.” It’s more a statement than a question.
“I do.”
“Her name is Kelcy,”I say.
“It is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know.” He sits down next to me on the bench, drops his face into his hands, and cries, the full body sobbing kind I’ve never seen from a guy. I can’t help but pity him, for the torture that lives in his heart is so clearly evident. When he is done crying, he looks at me and takes a deep breath. “Let me explain.” He reaches out to touch my hair. I pull away.
“That’s what you did to Kelcy,” I say.
“She can’t feel anything below the neck.”
“Oh.”
“Kelcy was my girlfriend in high school. We actually started ‘going out,’ if you’d call it that, when we were in seventh grade. She moved to our school that year and kind of captured the attention of every boy in our class. She was beautiful—big blue eyes, and long blonde hair—but she was a tomboy, too, and when she found out I was the class jock, well, we just clicked. I’d never met a girl who liked to play sports and didn’t mind getting dirty. Anyway, we were pretty serious all through high school. I never thought about dating anyone else.” He stops to look at me. I feel like I’m in a state of shock, but I have to hear the truth. He continues. “My junior year I bought a motorcycle with the money I’d saved from caddying at the golf course and from savings. My parents were pissed. Dad said if I wrecked that bike I’d never get another penny from him. He’s certainly held to that. Anyway, the first week I had the bike, Kelcy and I went for a ride. It had rained earlier in the day. I knew that, but I didn’t care. I was seventeen. Who thinks about stuff like road conditions? But I knew what I was doing when I flo
ored the bike to 90 miles an hour. I thought I was invincible: All-American boy, super jock, etc. You can guess that I wrecked. By a sheer fluke of luck, I was thrown into a field the minute I hit that bump in the wet payment. I walked away with barely a scratch. It’s bad luck really. I should have died. I wish I had died.”
“Stop it, Matt! Don’t talk like that.”
“It’s true, Mae. You’ve seen the consequences of my actions.”
“Kelcy’s paralyzed,” I say.
“Yeah, but there’s more. She was in a coma for three months. They took her off the ventilator which was keeping her alive because her parents couldn’t bear to think of their daughter living with severe brain trauma. But I told you she was scrappy. You know what she did? She not only breathed on her own, but she woke up. She woke up a different Kelcy, though, full of a lot of the attitude from before, but different. She’ll never walk again or use her arms, but that’s not the hardest part. The hardest part is that sometimes she thinks she’s still a little kid, and sometimes what she says doesn’t even seem intelligible. She’s forgetful and gets confused easily. When she was in a coma, I’d visit her every day. My parents would have to drag me out of the hospital at night. When she woke up, I was convinced she’d get better. Sure, maybe she’d never walk again, but she’d still be my Kelcy and I’d be her…”
“Matty,” I say. He shakes his head.
“Then I started my senior year. I got busy with classes and sports. I started thinking about college. My parents suggested I go to a community college in a different town, get my head straight.”
“Where your grandparents live.”
“My grandparents live in Florida, Mae.”
“But you told me that they lived in Andersonville.”
“They don’t. Choosing Andersonville Community College over any other community college around the country was like throwing darts at a map. It was a completely random choice.”
