The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2017 by Anna Pitoniak

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover art by Fotog / Getty Images

  Author photograph by Andrew Bartholomew

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-35418-9

  E3-20161212-DA-PC

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Julia

  Part 1 Chapter 1: Evan

  Chapter 2: Julia

  Chapter 3: Evan

  Chapter 4: Julia

  Chapter 5: Evan

  Chapter 6: Julia

  Part 2 Chapter 7: Evan

  Chapter 8: Julia

  Chapter 9: Evan

  Chapter 10: Julia

  Chapter 11: Evan

  Chapter 12: Julia

  Chapter 13: Evan

  Part 3 Chapter 14: Julia

  Chapter 15: Evan

  Chapter 16: Julia

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Newsletters

  For Andrew

  Prologue

  Julia

  It was a story that made sense. An old story, but one that felt truer for it. Young love goes stale and slackens. You change, and you shed what you no longer need. It’s just part of growing up.

  I thought I had understood. It seemed so simple at the time.

  We moved in on a humid morning in June. Our suitcases bumped and scuffed the walls as we climbed three flights of stairs, the rest of the boxes and furniture waiting unguarded in the foyer. The locks were clunky and finicky, resistant on the first few attempts. Sunlight streamed through the smudged windows, and the floorboards creaked beneath our weight. The apartment looked smaller than it had before, on the day we signed our lease. “I’m going down for some boxes,” Evan said, holding the door open with one foot. “You coming?”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” I said. I stood in the center of the room, alone, finding that I couldn’t breathe.

  What else was I going to do? He had a job and a place to be. I didn’t, but I had him. I could feel the tremors of change even before we graduated, growing more pronounced as the date approached: time to get serious. We’d been dating for more than three years, and we loved each other, and my friends already had roommates, and I couldn’t afford to live by myself. So we signed a lease. We packed our things in shared boxes. It felt sensible and grown-up. And maybe taking this plunge would repair whatever hairline crack had already appeared between us, in the late months of senior year. Double or nothing.

  In New York, we settled into a routine along with our friends, accruing habit fast. We all endured the same things: shoe-box apartments, crowded subways, overpriced groceries, indifferent bosses. What kept everyone going was the dream: store windows on Madison Avenue, brownstones lit golden in the night, town cars gliding across the park. Imagining what it would be like when you got there, someday. Manhattan was like a dazzling life-size diorama. A motivation to work harder, stay later, wake earlier. Fantasy is the only escape valve—what’s all the pain worth without it? But not for me. I’d screw my eyes shut and try to imagine it, what the future would look like, what alchemy might transform our current situation. But nothing came. There was no thread of hope. Who was this man next to me, his body curled up against mine? What was this feeling of vertigo that sometimes came with the blurry edge before sleep? I realized that I had made a mistake. Evan wasn’t the one. We weren’t meant to be.

  And so my life in New York grew smaller and smaller, a thorny tangle of dead ends. I rattled around in the tiny apartment. I hated my job. Evan was too busy. My friends were too busy. I was lonelier than ever. The problem was obvious. I was trapped in an airless bubble, with no plan to get out. My life lacked any escape.

  Until, against my better instincts, I went looking for it in the wrong place.

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Evan

  I could hear footsteps and murmurs from the other room. The creak of the door opening finally dissolved the last shards of sleep. When I opened my eyes, there was a pale face peering through the crack.

  “Who is that?” somebody whispered.

  The door slammed shut. The alarm clock said it was a little past 9:00 a.m. It took me a minute to remember where I was: on the third floor of an old stone building in New Haven, still wearing my clothes from the night before. I found a half-melted stick of gum in the back pocket of my shorts, tugged my T-shirt straight, and pressed my palms against my hair. When I opened the door to the common room, a plump woman was surveying the scene with a look of dismay. Empty Bud Light cans were scattered across the floor, and dirty clothes were heaped in one corner. She started fanning the stale air toward an open window. It was move-in day, late August, the first real day of college. This had to be my assigned roommate, Arthur Ziegler, and his family. I’d meant to clean up that morning, but I’d forgotten to set the alarm last night when I stumbled into bed.

  Arthur was crouched in the corner, fiddling with a nest of wires. Arthur’s father, a bald man in a polo shirt and khakis, was humming to himself as he peered down at the street. Arthur’s mother was sniffing the air, her frown deepening. The room was quiet except for the car honks and shouts from outside. I cleared my throat. The three of them turned in unison.

  Arthur’s mother forced a smile. “Well—hello,” she said, stepping over. She was small, round and doll-like, with a tartan headband and sensible shoes. “I’m Elaine Ziegler, Arthur’s mother. This is Gary.” Gary waved. “And this is Arthur. Arthur, what—what are you doing?”

  “Hang on,” he said, peering at a plastic box. A row of green lights blinked to life. “Got it.” He stood up, dusting his hands on his jeans, then he followed my gaze. “Oh. The router. Setting up the wireless connection. Figured it was the most important thing to start with, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s, uh, nice to meet you all.”

  Elaine Ziegler kept staring. Maybe she was trying to reconcile it, the polite young man suddenly emerging from the shell of a passed-out lunk. Then she clapped her hands together. “Well, let’s get to work. Gary, you make the bed. Arthur, why don’t you start unpacking those suitcases? And I’m just going to…here we go.”

  She shook open a black garbage bag and bent
over, reaching for the empty beer cans on the floor, crinkling her nose at the smell. I felt a hot bubble of guilt.

  “Mrs. Ziegler, I’m sorry. Let me…” I hurried to start gathering the cans.

  “Well…” She paused, then handed me the bag. “All right. Thank you, dear.”

  When I was done, I announced that I was taking out the trash. Elaine and Gary were absorbed in a discussion with Arthur about where to hang a poster. The door creaked on its hinges when I opened it, but they didn’t notice.

  The captains had given us the morning off from practice. There was a diner on Broadway that I’d passed before, a place that served breakfast all day. The room was packed and buzzing, new students chattering excitedly with their families, utensils ringing against china while waiters wove through the crowds with plates aloft. I was about to give up when the hostess finally caught my eye and led me to an empty stool at the counter.

  After, while I was waiting to pay at the register, a girl walked in. Other heads turned too, taking in her tanned legs, her cutoff shorts, her scoop-neck T-shirt. She had a blond ponytail sticking out from a faded Red Sox cap and a freckled nose. She leaned into the counter and said something inaudible in the din, and even that—the shape of her mouth forming silent words—carried some kind of promise. I tried to edge closer, but it was too crowded. A waiter handed her two cups of coffee. She pushed the door open with her shoulder. I craned my neck but lost sight of her on the sidewalk.

  I wandered for a while, only returning to the dorm when I knew Arthur and his parents would be at lunch. I changed and jogged up to the rink for afternoon practice. I was the first to arrive, which was what I’d been hoping for. The burn of the laces against my fingertips as I tightened my skates, the smell of the locker room, the wet reflection left behind by the Zamboni, the sound of the blade carving into the ice, the wind and echo of the empty rink—it was like slipping back into a native tongue. This was the best part. It only took a second, in that first push away from the boards, to feel the transformation. From a bulky heaviness to a lighter kind of motion. The friction of the blade melted the ice just enough, sending me flying forward on threads of invisible water. I was in a different country, a different side of the continent, but in those moments at the rink, home came with me. The ice was a reminder of the world I had left behind just a week earlier: long winters, frozen ponds, snowbanks, pine trees. It had always seemed like a decent enough reward for life in a cold, forbidding land: the gift of speed, as close as a person like me could come to flight.

  I grew up in the kind of small town that isn’t easy to get to and isn’t easy to leave. It started as a gold-rush settlement, and while no one got rich from the land, a handful of prospectors liked it enough to stay. It’s in a mountain valley in the interior of British Columbia, surrounded by wilderness, defined mostly by its distance from other places: seven hours to Vancouver, two hours to the border, an hour to the nearest hospital.

  In a small town like ours, where there is only one of everything—one school, one grocery store, one restaurant—it’s expected that there is only one of you. People aren’t allowed to change much. I was held back in kindergarten—I’d had some trouble with reading comprehension—and it marked me well into the next decade. I was big for my age, always a year older, and I think people liked me more because of it. It made the picture snap into focus: I was a hockey player; I was a born-and-bred local; I was a hard worker even if I wasn’t the brightest. An image easily understood, one as solid and reliable as the mountains in the distance. I grew up with boys like me, most of us hockey players. We were friends, but I sometimes wondered how alike we really were. The things they loved most, the things that made them whoop and holler with glee—keg parties and bonfires, shooting at cans on a mossy log, drunken joyrides in a souped-up F-150—only gave me a vague, itchy desire for more. I could imitate easily enough, like following an outline through tracing paper, but it never felt like the thing I was meant to be doing. I got good at faking laughter.

  Maybe the girls at school sensed this difference. It happened fast: one day puberty arrived, and they all started paying attention to me. From then on, there was always someone waiting at my locker when the last bell rang, twirling her hair, holding her textbooks tight to her chest. I genuinely loved those girls, loved that they banished the loneliness, but it was a generalized feeling; it didn’t matter who was next to me, whose bed or musty basement carpet we were lying on. I had sex for the first time with a girl a year older than I was, eleventh grade to my ninth. After she had coached me through our first short but glorious session, she started telling me her plan. She was going to drop out at the end of the year and move to the Yukon, where she’d work as a chef at a logging camp. The pay was good, and the setting was wild. She propped herself up on one elbow, resting a hand on my bare chest. She hadn’t told anyone, but she was telling me. She kissed me in conclusion. “You’re a good listener, Evan,” she said, then she moved lower beneath the duvet.

  A pattern emerged from the filmstrip of tanned faces and soft bodies. All the girls liked to talk dreamy—about the jobs they’d get, what they’d name their kids someday. We became blank screens for each other, desire reflected into a hall of mirrors. It solved a problem for me, but sometimes it left me wondering if that was it—if love was always so easily caught and released. I realized after a while that I gave these girls something very specific. They knew it even before I did, that I would be gone someday. I wouldn’t be there to hold them accountable when their dreams eventually fell short. I wasn’t like everyone else, wasn’t meant to stay in this town.

  Not that people didn’t attempt to leave. They’d go for a few years of community college or university, but a small town like ours possesses a strange gravity, and they always came back. A few of my teammates were going to escape by leaving school early to play hockey in the Major Juniors, a path that would lead some of them to the NHL. I might have done the same. But I’d heard about someone from town, a decade ago, who’d played for an American college instead. He was rich and successful and living in New York by that time. He came back occasionally to visit, and I glimpsed him once at the gas station, filling the tank of a shiny high-end rental car. Even in that split second, I saw that he carried himself in a different way, and something within me latched on. I’d known that the world was bigger than Carlton, British Columbia, but I’d never really thought about just how big it was. I was fourteen years old, and I made up my mind. I played in Junior A and kept my college eligibility. Despite my reputation, I was smart, or at least I wanted to be smart, and I studied hard in school. In spare hours I shot tennis balls into the street hockey net, did squats and flipped tires and jogged the dirt roads around our house. On a Saturday morning, I drove two hours to take the SATs at a town on the border. In the fall of senior year, I finally got the call. The one I’d been hoping for. A new door, swinging wide open.

  On the afternoon before my flight east, I stood with my parents in the driveway as the sun slipped behind the mountains, casting an early twilight over the yard. My parents owned the town’s grocery store, and they couldn’t afford the vacation time or the cost of the plane tickets. My mom would drive me to Vancouver, where we’d spend the night in an airport motel before my flight the following morning. My dad was staying at home to work. I’d said good-bye to my friends at a party the night before, truck headlights illuminating the clearing in the woods where we always gathered, squat kegs and foamy cups of beer clutched in the semidarkness.

  It was quiet during the car ride out of town. “Music?” my mom asked, and I shook my head. The trees along the highway blurred together.

  “Evan,” she said after a long silence. “It’s okay to be nervous.” She looked over at me, her face tanned from the summer. A long salt-and-pepper braid fell down her back. Her bare arms were lean from years of carrying boxes from delivery trucks to the loading dock. It was her hands on the steering wheel, their familiar age spots and creases, her thin gold wedding band, that mad
e me understand that I was really leaving.

  But I shook my head again. “I’m fine.”

  “Well,” she said. “I guess you’re probably pretty excited about it.”

  I was. I still was. But the anticipation had been building up for so long, and now that it was actually here, the moment felt disappointingly ordinary. We could have been driving anywhere, on a family trip, or en route to some hockey tournament. I had the feeling that eventually we’d turn back in the other direction, toward home. It seemed impossible that this was how life transformed itself: a drive down a road you’d driven so many times before.

  “Only a hundred more kilometers,” she said an hour later, as we whizzed past another road marker. I felt like I should make conversation—it was the last time I’d see her for months—but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Checking in?” the clerk at the motel asked.

  “The reservation is under Peck. Two rooms,” my mom said, digging through her wallet. I raised my eyebrows at her, my eternally frugal mother. Only when we were wheeling our bags down the hallway, away from the lobby, did she lean over and whisper: “You’re a grown-up now, honey. I think you deserve your own room, don’t you?”

  I was on campus early. Every year a rich alum from the hockey team paid for the team to have use of the rink for one week in late August. The captains would run the practice, skirting the NCAA rules that prevented us from officially beginning practice until October. Most of the players lived off campus and could move in early. After my flight—the longest I’d ever taken, the first one out of the country—I caught a shuttle bus to New Haven. I was going to crash at the hockey house for the week, along with the other freshmen. The door was unlocked when I arrived.