“God, I’m so sorry,” I say, bending to pick them up for her.
I don’t even realize I’m crying until I stand up to hand her the books and she looks at me and says, “Hey, are you okay?”
I bolt then, clearly not okay at all. Because I bolt in the direction of Josh and Heather, instead of away from them. I nearly crash into them as I go past.
“Emma,” Josh yells. “Emma.”
I keep going. I hear him pounding after me, at least for a little while. But I don’t look back. I run like my life depends on it, my books clutched to my chest, my lungs burning. I’m done, I think. Done. Done. I knew Josh didn’t love me. Not that way. I knew he never would. It’s just—
I simply cannot deal with him being with someone else. Not someone like that: a fucking Heather. I just can’t. I can’t be in the same … world he’s in if he’s going to do that—and not tell me. Not now, anyway.
I’m going to Michigan, I decide. I’m dropping my classes, dropping everything, and going up there where I can be alone and figure out who I can be without him. Fine, if it’s melodramatic. Fine, if I have to forfeit most of my tuition and my room is already paid for through the end of the semester. I don’t care.
I slow down to a walk once I’ve decided that and feel, suddenly, calm. Back at the dorm, I get on the Internet and withdraw from all my classes. I write a note: Tiff—Don’t freak out. Please. But I just can’t be here right now, so I’m going up to Michigan until I figure out what I want to do. This has nothing to do with you. I swear to God. You’re the best roomie anyone could ask for. Love, Emma.
Then I take down my posters, pack up my books and photographs, empty my drawers and my closet of clothes. It surprises me how little there is. Loading it in my Jeep, heading north, I think maybe something inside me knew all along that I never meant to stay.
I’m almost to Muncie when my cell phone rings. Tiff, crying.
I try to explain. I’m just not ready for college yet. I knew it last semester, but I thought I ought to try to stay. But I just can’t. I meant it when I said it was nothing to do with her. She is the best roommate, ever.
“It’s that fucking Josh Morgan,” she says, shocking the shit out of me.
“No,” I say.
“It is, too. He called over here, asking for you and I could tell he was upset.”
“He called?”
“Yes,” she says. “And if you don’t tell me what happened, I’m going to call him back and ask him. I am! Emma?”
“God, don’t do that,” I say. “Please.”
“All right, then. Pull over the next place you can and call me back. All you need is to get in an accident over it. But if you haven’t called back in fifteen minutes—”
“I’ll call,” I say. “Okay? I’ll call.”
When I do, she surprises me again. She’s calmed down, totally rational.
“I know you’re unhappy, Emma,” she says. “I knew it practically the first day. That’s why I was always trying, you know—well, anyway. After that day your grandpa came down in the Winnebago, and Josh appeared? I started figuring out why. Jeez, you were a wreck just looking at him. Anyone could see that—
“So, what happened? It’s something to do with Josh. Don’t try to tell me it’s not.”
“I saw him with this—Heather,” I say.
“That girl he was dating last semester? I thought they broke up.”
“They did,” I say. “Before Christmas break.”
She’s quiet a moment. “Was he your boyfriend in high school?” she asks.
“Boyfriend?” I say. “Are you out of your mind?”
“You don’t need to be crappy to me, Emma. Anyway, why is that such a stupid question?”
“It just is,” I say. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be an asshole. It’s just—I don’t really know how to talk about—”
“Josh,” she finishes for me. “Obviously, he’s important to you. Was.”
“Jesus,” I say. “Have you considered law school?”
“Just say how he was important to you, okay? How hard can that be?”
“He was my best friend in high school, till senior year—till I wrecked everything wanting more. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime. Honest, I will. But I can’t right now. I swear, though, Josh isn’t why I’m leaving. Not the real reason.”
“Is that true, Emma? Really?”
“Yes,” I say. “The thing with Josh just made me know it’s what I need to do. I need, I don’t know … space.”
Tiffany sighs. “Do your parents know you’re doing this?”
“No,” I say. “They’ll freak out if they find out. But they’re in Colorado, and they probably won’t figure it out, at least for a while, since they always call me on my cell.”
“You’re sure you need to do this?”
“Yeah. I am.”
“You’ll keep in touch with me, though. Promise?”
I agree, though right now I don’t want to be in touch with anyone.
It’s nearly midnight when I get to our little ski house. It’s so quiet here. The sky is black, black, black, sprinkled with stars, and standing beneath them, looking up, I feel lighthearted, full of good intentions. The next morning, I get right out of bed, do sit-ups till I can’t breathe, eat yogurt for breakfast. It’s a beautiful day, pristine snow twinkling in the sunlight, the beautiful curve of deep drifts. I glide across the meadow on my cross-country skis, then into the woods, where all I hear is the swish of my own skis and the occasional tiny plop of snow falling from the tree branches. I go more than an hour, until I’m soaked with sweat and my legs ache from the constant motion.
I eat a healthy lunch, then set out for the bookstore in Traverse City, where I buy all five of the Edith Wharton novels they have in stock, plus a collection of short stories and a biography. She was rich and spent all her life writing about it, so I figure that studying her will be food for thought. I buy some French tapes to brush up on my high school French—who knows when I might become a world traveler? I even buy a meditation tape, thinking that maybe if I can calm down, guys won’t find me so alarming.
I eat a Lean Cuisine for dinner, spend the evening lost in The Age of Innocence.
Yes, I think. This is where I’m supposed to be.
Those first days, I like being alone. I like the way I feel, pleasantly sore from so much exercise, my mind full of interesting thoughts. I like myself.
Pretty soon, though, I’m feeling guilty about deceiving Mom and Dad. Tiff calls a half-dozen times, and finally leaves a message saying, “I guess you don’t want to talk to me. It’s okay if you really need to be alone. I’m not mad. But I miss you.” Even then, I don’t call her back or answer any of the newsy e-mails she’s sent. Josh e-mails: “Emma, can we talk?” But I don’t answer that either. I don’t even listen to the message from Josh, just delete it when the number comes up on the screen of my phone. I put my laptop in the closet, and don’t check e-mails at all.
Within a week, I’m hitting the “snooze” button two, three, four times before getting up. Then I stop setting the alarm altogether and sleep till I wake up—never before eleven. I eat a donut, drag over to the ski area around one and eat lunch—anything with French fries. I downhill awhile, hang out at the lodge playing video games, then go home and zonk out for a couple of hours on the couch before fixing Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, or worse, and reading magazines or watching whatever stupid sitcoms are on the tube. I write in my journal, but all I do is complain:
Mom’s right: so what if you’re rich? This place is still a pit, clothes and dirty dishes everywhere. Nobody to clean it but me, unless I want to hire somebody and let them see that I’m a rich, spoiled brat who can’t even clean up after herself. Today I didn’t even take a shower or get dressed. Gave up on Edith Wharton:
the rich women in her books are even more screwed up than I am. Ate toast in bed and finished the stash of Elle and Cosmo magazines Jules left behind. Huge zit on side of nose. More fodder for Mom’s cosmic theory of wealth: zits happen. On the bright side: I have no friends here, nowhere to go, so nobody but me will see it.
Fifteen
I get a job waiting tables at the lodge, which helps some. I’m not always alone. And it’s good for me to be there with women whose lives are truly difficult, nothing like my own. I like to listen to their stories. Sometimes I have dreams about them. In one, I line them all up in the kitchen and hand out hundred-dollar bills; in another, I drive out to the double-wides they live in, knock on their doors, and give them checks like I’m the star of some kind of reality show.
They’re dirt poor, most of them. They wear cheap clothes from Wal-Mart. Most of them aren’t that much older than I am, and they have kids already. Their husbands, if they have them, are usually unemployed. They don’t know I’m rich. Well, they don’t know I’m fabulously rich. They know I’m not from here, they know my parents own a vacation house in the area, and to them that is rich, which I see is true, in a way. Even before we won the lottery, we had a whole lot more than any of those women will ever have.
I swore Jules to secrecy about my leaving Bloomington, and since then she’s reverted to her sensible big-sister mode. She calls a lot, usually late. It kind of reminds me of how Josh and I used to drive around at night, talking about everything under the sun. I don’t know. Maybe it was the enclosed space, the way when he was driving he had to look straight ahead and mostly couldn’t see my face when I was talking that made me feel like I could say anything. I feel that way now, talking to my sister. I tell her about Freud, the real story of spending whole evenings at the psych lab because there was nowhere else to go. I even tell her about Gabe Parker—just the embarrassing coffee interview, not that I haven’t been able to get him out of my mind ever since. Nothing about Josh, though. I can’t even stand to think about that. Still, it’s nice feeling close to her. We laugh a lot, puzzle over the sticky ethics of wealth.
“Will’s very weird about the money,” she confides. “He doesn’t like me to pay for show tickets or dinners out. But other people! It’s like, now they know I’m rich, they think I should pick up the check every single time. And should I? Even when it feels like someone’s sponging?”
“Beats me,” I say. “Up here in the north woods all alone, how to deal with the money hasn’t really been a problem. Though I keep having this weird impulse to give it away.”
“Why?” she asks.
I tell her about the women I work with, and how they make me feel.
She’s quiet a long moment, and I can almost hear the New York traffic going by outside her window: cars honking, that wheezing sound buses make. Then she says, “But isn’t it all relative? I mean, Bill Gates probably wouldn’t consider us rich at all.”
She’s most likely right. But I still feel bad having so much more than the women I work with have, and I’m constantly trying to think of ways to make it up to them—without being obvious. I help bus the tables, take the coffeepot around to everyone’s stations. Sometimes, when nobody’s looking, I even put extra tip money on a table.
The bartender at the lodge, Harp, is in his twenties, tall and lanky with a sparse goatee and black hair that he wears pulled back in a ponytail. He’s been pleasant to me at the restaurant and he always nods in a friendly way if I see him on the slopes or walking with his St. Bernard around the ski area. But we’ve never really talked. Then one night he follows me out of the restaurant, out the big front doors of the lodge into the freezing cold, and calls, “Emma?”
I turn. He’s standing there in just a V-neck sweater, a faded tie-dye T-shirt underneath, his hands in the pockets of his rumpled khakis. He doesn’t say anything more, just tilts his head and kind of half-smiles and looks at me. I have no idea how I know what he’s thinking, but I do. What were you doing with Marcy’s money?
“I wasn’t taking it,” I say. “I was leaving it. You know, so the tip would seem bigger.”
But he knows that, too. I can tell by the way he just keeps looking at me with that curious but detached expression. Now his eyes say, why?
“She needs it,” I say. “They all do. And I don’t need what I make at all. I’m only working here because I can’t think of anything else to do.” At which point, I start crying. And right there in the parking lot, snow starting to fall, I tell Harp about my parents winning the lottery and how I’ve ended up a complete and total screw-up because of it. When I finish, I’m shivering; my face, wet with tears, stings with the cold.
“So,” Harp says. “That’s what’s driving you to random acts of kindness.”
“Random acts of guilt, you mean.”
He shrugs. “Effect’s the same, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, big deal,” I say. “A dollar, two dollars. Like that’s going to make any big difference to anyone.”
“It can.” Harp glances toward the lighted restaurant. “Could even be there’s something you’re supposed to learn from all this. Or are you too into beating up on yourself to consider that?”
“I’m pretty into beating up on myself,” I say.
He laughs. “And does it make you feel better?”
I shake my head. My throat feels tight again. I can’t speak.
We stand there awhile longer, Harp still showing no effect at all from the cold. He’s so calm. I’ve never known anyone as calm as he appears to be. Who is this guy, anyway? He looks like he took a wrong turn after a Grateful Dead concert years ago and never found his way back. Still, he’s smart. I can see it in his eyes. I wonder if there’s something that tending bar in this nowhere place is teaching him.
“How’d you know what I was doing, anyhow?” I ask.
He smiles enigmatically. “Mirrors.” He pauses just long enough for me to think, okay, this guy is too weird for me, I’m out of here. Then he laughs. “I can see that section of the restaurant from the mirror behind the bar.”
I laugh, too.
“I live in the log house where the cross-country trails begin,” Harp says. “Got a pool table, great stereo, cold beer. Come over if you want. Any time.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Maybe I will.”
The next day, I dress for cross-country skiing, carry my skis to the wooden arch where the trails begins, and stand there pretending to study the map. You are here. A red arrow points to a cluster of triangles: the pine trees that shelter me. Broken lines that signify the dozen or so trails meander out from the arrow into the forest, which is marked by many more triangles and the lacy circles that are deciduous trees. There’s Harp’s house just to the side of the arrow: a small black square. The actual house, tucked into a stand of birches, looks like a child’s drawing of a log cabin. It’s the house that Jules and I used to call the Little House in the Big Woods. Sometimes we pretended that we were Laura and Mary Ingalls, skiing away from it toward school or church or to get something for Ma from Mr. Olsen’s general store. Or, even better, we were Laura and Mary lost in the great forest with night falling, trying desperately to find our way home.
The house is long and low, with a wide porch that wraps around it. The windows are hung with prisms winking in the morning sun. There’s firewood stacked neatly next to the front door, more—a whole winter’s worth—in a lean-to at the side. Smoke curls lazily out of the brick chimney into the blue sky.
I really want to visit Harp. I can’t stop thinking about what he said to me. I lay awake a long time last night, wondering if my being here might actually have a purpose, and if so, what purpose? I don’t have a clue. Now I stand under the arch, trying to work up the nerve to walk across the unspoiled snow in the clearing and shake the cowbells on Harp’s front door. What would I say? Hi, if you’re not too busy, could you please exp
lain to me what I’m doing here? It’s all I can think of to say and it seems totally stupid. Not to mention confusing. Even I don’t know exactly what I mean by it. “Here” as in the arrow on the map? In Michigan? In this life?
Anyway, he was probably only being nice when he invited me to come by, I think. He probably felt sorry for me. That’s the last thing I need. I’m dressed for skiing, and I brought my skis, thinking that I could pretend I was just stopping by at Harp’s on my way out to get my morning’s exercise. I hadn’t really meant to go out on the trails; why start doing something healthful and constructive now?
But I feel agitated about having nearly embarrassed myself by my own neediness, and I think maybe skiing will calm me down. It’s a perfect day for it: sunshine, blue sky. That nice, crisp kind of cold. So I set out in no particular direction, skiing right past the maps that are placed where various trails merge, allowing the challenges of each path to appear to me in a seemingly random way, as if part of a game.
I feel myself grow calmer, feel the ugly chatter in my mind loosen and drain out of me into the shadowy forest, until finally it seems that there’s nothing in the world but this forest and the blue sky above it. The clear, cold air and the warm sun on my face seem to be the same thing. I hear birds calling, the occasional rustle of deer. I look up at the trees. The sight of them, like gargantuan pussy willows because of the way the snow has caught in the crooks of their branches, makes me so purely happy I think I will die.
Stop, I think. Remember this. I bend over and brush the snow from a fallen tree, and the moment I sit down on it, a mosquito flies up, wobbles in the cold air for a moment, and settles on my glove. It can’t be real, I think. A mosquito can’t possibly have survived into the middle of the winter. I sit still and look at it a long time; it seems more like a quick line drawing of a mosquito than a mosquito itself. But when I raise my hand and blow gently, the mosquito lifts off, flies dizzily to the tree trunk and perches there, proof of its own existence. Proof of anything, everything—or so it seems to me at this moment.
Everything You Want Page 11
