Move the Stars_Something in the Way

by Jessica Hawkins

  Manning took it all in, though there wasn’t much to see—a bedroom, bathroom, and a kitchenette separated by a breakfast counter. Pictures of Val, Corbin and me with our friends hung on the fridge next to takeout menus under magnets. His eyes landed on the disheveled futon in the living room. “That’s Val’s,” I said. “She’s my roommate.”

  “Your mom mentioned.”

  With Corbin and I both on the east coast, my best friend Val had lasted one semester in California by herself before she’d transferred to New York Film Academy. This city suited her best of the three of us—she fit with New York the way I did with Newport Beach. Or used to, anyway. Val had loads of friends, events to attend, and an on-again, off-again boyfriend who gave her nothing but grief. Currently, they were on again, which meant she was at his place most of the time, leaving me the apartment’s tiny bedroom.

  Manning walked over to the laminate coffee table that held pink bottles of Victoria’s Secret lotion and perfume, loose change, and paycheck stubs. On the floor underneath, Val had stacked Vogue magazines and videotapes hand-labeled “Buffy” and “Empire Records.” None of our furniture matched, but Val and I had gotten every piece on our own, and that was important to me. I knew Manning wouldn’t see it that way, though. His eyes stopped on a lighter and half-smoked joint forgotten on the folding table where we sometimes ate.

  His examination slid under the surface of things, the way it always had with me, reading not just my body language but my most intimate thoughts. Taking in not just the mess around us, but the details of my seemingly little life.

  “What is this?” he asked about all of it and nothing in particular.

  “You told me to soar.” I opened my arms to indicate the things around me. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  Since the gray day darkened the room, he reached up to switch on an overhead lamp and my eyes went right to the spot his wedding ring should’ve been. The realization that he wasn’t wearing it caught me off guard and I looked away quickly, hoping he wouldn’t see that I’d noticed.

  His eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead. “It’s a fucking dump, Lake.”

  Even though I knew he’d say it, my face heated. “At least it’s my dump.” The phone rang, piercing the stillness of the room. I ignored it. “I didn’t run to Daddy for help. I didn’t latch onto the first man who came my way.”

  “Is that what you think your sister did?”

  “Go to hell.” How fucking dare he bring her into this apartment? This was my home. My dump. My shitty city. I loved it here because it was mine, not theirs. Trying to hide the way I shook, I went to the phone, picked it up, and slammed it back down to stop the ringing.

  “Lake—”

  “I don’t need your pity,” I said, turning back to him.

  “I wasn’t going to give it to you.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I was just going to ask which closet the tools are in.”

  “Forget the heater,” I said. “We can fix it ourselves.”

  “Then why haven’t you?”

  Because I couldn’t do it myself, and Corbin wasn’t all that great with handiwork, and the landlord did nothing for us unless Val distracted him into agreeing to help. That usually involved her pulling down her top until her boobs were nearly out.

  “Tell me where the tools are for my sake,” Manning said. “I spent all of yesterday in airports and on planes, and I need to do something with my hands.”

  The thought of him doing anything with his enormous bear hands made my stomach tighten, but so what? He had some nerve coming in here like this, telling me what he needed. “Don’t fix my heater. Don’t check on me. Just go.”

  “I’m not here to check on you.”

  “Yes you are. You want me to be exactly what I was, the way you used to know me. Well, I’m not, but I’ve got all my fingers and toes.” I held up my palms. “So what more do you want?”

  His chest rose and fell as we stared at each other, his ears reddening. Seeing the way I still got under his skin gave me great pleasure.

  “There’s nothing for you here,” I continued. “You wanted me to move on, so I did, and I no longer need you. You can’t have it both ways.”

  “You didn’t need me,” he said through his teeth. “That was the whole point. Or so I thought.” The apartment was so small, he only had to turn around to see into my bedroom. “You had the world at your fingertips.” He stared at my unmade bed a few moments too long. “You were supposed to go to USC and excel, meet someone worthy of you, lead a fulfilling life, but this? This is—”

  “This is my life,” I said, my throat thickening. Fuck, who was I kidding? He was the one getting under my skin. Fifteen minutes alone with him and this was what he did to me. I was losing my cool. “What makes you think I’m not fulfilled? What makes you think I haven’t met someone worthy?”

  Working his jaw back and forth, he muttered something.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “You didn’t spend the night here.”

  “Obviously not. As if that’s any of your b—”

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “You know where.”

  “I won’t believe it unless—”

  “Corbin’s. I was with Corbin.”

  The air in the room thinned. Manning had spent so much time hiding his emotions from me that it was unsettling to watch pain cross his face. He looked as though he didn’t quite believe what he was hearing, even though my mom must’ve mentioned Corbin some time over the past few years.

  “Whose sweats do you think I’m wearing?” I asked. It wouldn’t help anything, but I wanted to inflict the same brand of pain on him that he had on me.

  He curled his hands into two fists, as if he was physically holding words inside—the warnings he obviously wanted to give me, the demands he had no right to make. I took satisfaction in his obvious jealousy. “I didn’t know it would turn out this way, Lake. Your life, and mine, nothing is how I thought it would be.”

  Surprised by the rawness in his voice and his confession, my confidence wavered. He wasn’t holding back like he normally did, and that was new territory for us. Four years apart had changed me—had it changed him, too? I had to turn away so he wouldn’t see my weakness. If he was trying to say he’d made a mistake, I didn’t trust how I might respond to that. For all the times I’d fantasized about hearing it, I realized now that it wouldn’t matter. I couldn’t just forgive him. It wouldn’t erase anything. Nothing could be done with an apology. So it was all better left unsaid. “I have somewhere to be, and I’m sure you do, too, so let’s leave it at that. You can show yourself out.”

  The bathroom was five steps forward, and each one away from him was more difficult to take than the last—but it had to be done. Inside, I wrenched the handle to latch the door so it wouldn’t swing open. I leaned my hands on the sink and looked at my sloppy hair. Mascara clumped on my lashes, jet-black like a bottomless hole. The hollow of my neck quivered with my pulse. I didn’t want him to leave. Not ever. I wanted nothing more than to go to him. To ask him to stay. Sometimes, late at night, I could smell the briny, sawdust sweat I’d come to love on the construction site. I’d convince myself it was on my pillow, as if Manning and I had recently made love. It was one of many demented fantasies I’d had since moving here. Did Manning have a single clue how alone I’d felt since the day I’d met him and couldn’t touch him? Did he understand the agony of knowing I’d never call him mine?

  He’d never realize how badly he’d hurt me when he’d walked down the aisle with Tiffany. I couldn’t move past that betrayal. I couldn’t pretend he hadn’t chosen her over me.

  I took my hair down and brushed it out, then got makeup remover from a shelf behind the mirror. As I erased a night of good times with friends that had now been tarnished by Manning’s presence, I heard the click of a door outside the bathroom. I paused, concentrating on the rusty ring around the sink drain. I couldn’t go after him. I couldn’t …

  It w
as true that I’d thought of him every day, wished to see him just once, even from afar, wished for a phone call to tell me it’d all been an elaborate nightmare, wished for him. Now that he’d come, I’d sent him away. Any way I sliced it, it hurt.

  I couldn’t let him stay after what he’d done, and I couldn’t bear to see him go, so I stayed right where I was, listening to the deafening silence of an empty apartment.

  2

  Lake

  In my bathroom, a space I could barely do the splits in, the aftershocks of Manning’s visit reverberated through me. I was sixteen again, so giddy I was sick to my stomach, unsure of anything but my reaction to him. How could so many years of progress evaporate in under half an hour?

  I finished fixing myself up. Corbin and I had breakfast plans, and I’d only come home from his place to change. I was supposed to be at the restaurant already.

  I opened the bathroom door to throw on some jeans, but when I stepped out, I nearly tripped over a body. Manning was splayed on his back, a wrench in his hand as he worked under the radiator. “Hall closet,” he muttered. “I found the tools.”

  The floor was as clean as it could get—I’d vacuumed and mopped the day before, all six-hundred square feet of it—but he was still on the ground of a New York City apartment. “You’ll get dirty.” Why did I care? I didn’t. I shouldn’t. “Why are you wearing that anyway?”

  “What? A suit?” His eyebrows cinched together as he either tightened or loosened something, I couldn’t tell. He flicked his tongue over his lower lip. “I work for your dad now, out of the Costa Mesa office, selling pharmaceuticals.”

  I let the information sink in. I hadn’t spoken to my father since I’d told him I wasn’t going to USC and he’d exploded with enough force to shift tectonic plates. It was a wonder he hadn’t caused the state of California an earthquake. Mom rarely mentioned Manning to me, but then again, that would’ve been hard to do in conversations that didn’t even last ten minutes. Tiffany had called me more in the beginning, but we were always interrupted before things could get too deep. I made sure of that. I’d assumed Manning was still doing some form of construction for my dad. Instead, he was pushing drugs at doctors’ offices on behalf of Ainsley-Bushner, a company my father had worked his way to the top of. “You’re … a salesman?”

  “Pretty much.” His muscles strained his dress shirt as he worked. “You didn’t know?”

  “No.” A tiny bit of my resentment fizzled. The job was all wrong for him. Manning needed to build things, if not literally, then in the sense that he was creating something to improve lives. He’d wanted to be a cop to help others, but since he could no longer do that with a record, I would’ve thought he’d have stayed in construction or tried some kind of social work. Even I could admit that despite how Manning had hurt me, his intentions had been good. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d suffered the past few years. “Why?” I asked. “That suit … it’s … I hate it.”

  “Yeah?” he asked. “Doesn’t Corbin wear one?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Your mom.” I rarely talked to my mom about Corbin, and because of that, she seemed to have fabricated some vision of our lives here. Or maybe it was Corbin who’d exaggerated things to his parents. He was always trying to convince me to visit home, to call or write, as if it was his duty. Our dads worked together, and although I doubted my father gave much thought to me or Corbin, it occurred to me that Manning might know Mr. Swenson from the office. “You work with Corbin’s dad,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I don’t see him much.”

  “Do you see my dad a lot?”

  “Some days of the week. And Sundays for dinner.”

  So they still had family dinner. Why shouldn’t they, just because I wasn’t there? “Oh.”

  “He misses you,” Manning added.

  Instinctively, I tensed, but I tried to calm my voice before answering. “He said that?”

  “No, but I can tell.”

  Of course Dad hadn’t said that. If he missed me, he had a funny way of showing it. He’d never once reached out. He’d probably removed all traces of me from the house. I assumed he’d taken down anything that reminded him of USC and turned my room into a gym or entertainment room or something.

  “Do they know you’re here?” I asked. By they, I really meant Tiffany, but I didn’t want to talk about her at all.

  “In New York?” Metal clinked against metal. “Yes.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  I waited while he continued to do whatever the hell he was doing. His silence said everything. Tiffany didn’t know he’d come to my apartment. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Neither was I for that matter—now I was really late for breakfast—but I had so many more questions for Manning. Why had he come? What would he tell them when he got home? How long was he in town for? Asking meant I cared, and Manning already held enough power over me. I couldn’t go back to that time in my life, when I thought I’d never move past him. When I’d spent what should’ve been my first semester of college trying to pick up the pieces of my life. The times Val had held me on the couch in the middle of the day, Ricki Lake in the background, a box of Kleenex clutched in her hand. She’d since banned any mention of Manning’s name in this apartment. If she were to walk in and find him here, she’d dropkick him all the way back to California, which was probably what I should’ve done by now.

  “Your mom knows I’m seeing you,” he said finally. “But she’s the only one. She wanted me to take you to a show.”

  “A show?” I asked.

  “Broadway.”

  Oh, how I loved my theater. It was a safe topic for conversation and one of the only things my mom knew about my life here—I went to the theater whenever I got the chance. Sometimes that meant skipping a few meals or letting Corbin spend money on me even though I hated to let him. For musicals and bright, flashing lights and once-in-a-lifetime performances, I tended to let my excitement get the best of me.

  Not now, though. I made myself stand there not asking which show, waiting for him to finish.

  Eventually Manning got up and brushed off his slacks. My eyes rose with him. “The whole unit really needs to be replaced,” he said as he fixed his tie in the reflection of the window.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll tell the super.” We’d told him plenty of times that our heat was broken, but I needed Manning to leave or I’d revert back to one of two people—the child I was before the wedding, or the shell of myself I’d been right afterward.

  “What else—” He turned and stopped as his eyes landed on my hair, which was no longer pulled back. Aside from a trim and some highlights, I hadn’t changed it much since I’d left, even though Val always threatened to shave it off while I was sleeping to get me to shed my beachy image. I blushed a little as Manning followed the length of it, down to my breasts. “I …”

  I had to tilt my head back to see him. It reminded me of all the times I’d looked up at him, hoping for any sign that he’d noticed me, salivating for breadcrumbs, convincing myself our secret glances and touches meant something. I wasn’t that girl anymore, but in only half an hour, that was what he’d turned me into.

  He cleared his throat, blinking back up to my face. “What else around here needs repairing?”

  “Nothing. Just leave it, Manning. Please.”

  He flinched as I said his name, then reached behind me to check the lock to the bathroom—which was also busted. “I guess the question is, what isn’t broken?” he said.

  A flush worked its way up my chest. My apartment wasn’t much, but it was mine. I’d flown across the country, despite a fear of airplanes, all by myself. I hadn’t even had Corbin to hold my hand since he’d returned to New York ahead of me. I’d done everything on my own—gotten jobs, apartments, student loans, and I’d enrolled in NYU with nothing but a couple hundred dollars I’d saved from a part-time summer job back home. I’d become a pro at keeping plants and goldfish alive an
d sometimes Val, too. “I’m sorry things aren’t up to your standards,” I said, letting the sarcasm drip.

  “My standards?” he asked. “This place isn’t fit for the mice it definitely has. This neighborhood—no, this city isn’t you.”

  “You might find it hard to believe, but I like my life. I’m free now. Nobody tells me how to live. Nobody puts me in a box. I drink, I smoke, I-I have s—” I stopped as his knuckles whitened around the wrench. As much as I wanted to rub sex in his face, I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “I’m not the golden child here, and my friends don’t expect me to be. Corbin doesn’t put me on a fucking pedestal and expect me to stay there to keep him happy.”

  “That’s not fair,” Manning said. “All I ever wanted was to see you happy, to see you become everything you were supposed to, even if it meant shutting off my own wants … and needs.”

  “Oh, right,” I said wryly, stepping back and nearly stumbling over Val’s rollerblades. I kicked them away with the heel of my boot. “Safe, cared for, happy. You wanted me to stay the sixteen-year-old girl you knew. You wanted me to go on living the life you thought was right—to stay close to my family. To be the prodigal child and live a sunny life in sunny California, and huh, that worked out well for you, didn’t it?”

  He stared hard at me. “This isn’t what was supposed to happen.” He ran his hand over his face. “I didn’t … the choices I made … I never thought you’d end up worse off, that you’d leave home—”

  “That isn’t my home. It hasn’t been for a long time. You made sure of that. You chose her, and you took that life away from me.”

  “I didn’t choose her.”

  “Then you chose yourself,” I said, my voice rising. “Either way, you didn’t choose me. You’ve lost any right to care or have an opinion. So don’t come in here and judge my life and say I’m worse off. How dare you talk about wants and needs when you went to someone else to satisfy them.”

  He set the tool on my windowsill, his movements measured, his response slow, as if he were picking his words carefully. “My wants and needs were taken care of but never satisfied.”