Amelia Unabridged

by Ashley Schumacher

  “How do you want this to end?” I ask, an evasion.

  A slow smile. “You can’t answer a question with a question.”

  And even though the room is filled with wisps of tension, uncertainty floating between dust particles, I smile back.

  “Well, I just did.”

  I think of all the things he could say. He could (improbably) confess his undying love for me, or he could (most likely) tell me he’s not interested in more than a five-day fictionalized friendship that ends as soon as I step foot on the plane out of here.

  He doesn’t do any of that.

  “After she left, I wanted Jenna to stay,” he says slowly. “She didn’t care who I was but how I was, and that mattered. She mattered. She was only there for a few minutes, and she mattered to me. So what’s going to happen when you leave, after you’ve mattered to me for days?”

  Dear. Lord.

  It seems unfair that the world is often critical of finding meaning in another person. We’re allowed to find ourselves in places, books, music, nature, but not in another human. We aren’t allowed to mourn losing a piece of ourselves for too long—especially when young—because we must learn to stand on our own two feet.

  But if the world must be made of car crashes and unspeaking books, let there at least be no guilt in companionship, no matter how brief. To quote Valerie, everything is silly because everything is temporary.

  I know exactly what I want to do as I watch all of my own emotions play across Nolan’s face, an unfamiliar mirror. The urge is so strong, I don’t even need to summon the whales for the courage to do it.

  “In the interest of our years of friendship and maintaining what matters, I’m going to hug you,” I announce, leaning across our beanbags for a sloppy two-armed affair that leaves my nose pressed into his sharp collarbone.

  At first, he is as rigid as a board and as unforgiving as yesterday’s storm that struck our little patch of mattering. But his right arm comes around me and cradles my head to his shoulder, his left squishing down into the beanbag to rest against my back, and we’re locked in an embrace that heats me up from the inside with relief. In his arms, I can feel what he doesn’t say, the guilt that he could have saved them. He is a co-sufferer, a co-rememberer.

  When we break apart, Nolan looks at me like I’m the sun that can soak up all his puddles of grief.

  “I’ll tell you,” he says. “I’ll tell you what Jenna said … if you still want to know.”

  This is what I came for. The whole reason I flew to Michigan, leaving everything I know behind. And it’s being handed to me … by Nolan Endsley, no less.

  I can’t make words come out of my mouth, but Nolan must see the answer in my eyes because he nods, inhaling all the air in the room.

  “I was standing outside the Author Oasis,” he says on an exhale. “It was only a couple of conference rooms away from the public, but it had food and was mostly quiet, so that’s where I stayed while the other authors were on panels. Alex had gone to check on the sound system for my ‘big announcement’ session.”

  “Why weren’t you scheduled for any panels?” I ask when he pauses to breathe. I swallow down the strange déjà vu at hearing myself ask what I’d wondered aloud to Jenna when I’d first seen the schedule.

  “Alex made me do a panel once, at another event,” Nolan says. “At the end, all the audience questions were for me, about Orman.”

  “So?” I ask.

  “You say ‘So,’ until you remember there were five other very successful authors—all much older than me—on that same panel, who had to sit there and pretend not to mind.”

  We are quiet as I imagine Nolan’s unease at being the most sought-after person in the room. Looking at his downturned head and thoughtful eyes, I can’t imagine him speaking in front of a group of people.

  “So … Jenna?” It’s a question, a plea to continue the conversation to its inevitable end, and though my voice doesn’t shake, I fear the pit in my stomach will open and swallow me whole.

  Maybe Nolan can sense this, or maybe he feels the chill coming through the cracks of the boathouse, but he scoots closer to me so that our bent knees touch at the sides.

  “So Alex had left me alone, and I panicked. About the public speaking, about the ‘big announcement’ of the final Orman book’s publication date, about … about a lot of things.”

  “But you didn’t show up to the event,” I say.

  Nolan sighs. I think he has used more air sighing than breathing today.

  “No, I didn’t,” he says. “Mostly thanks to Jenna. She found me, looking, as you put it, troubled.”

  He pauses, waiting to see if I will push to know the reason for his distress. Every part of my body is burning with curiosity, but asking Nolan what made him freak out would be a betrayal of our infinitesimal relationship and kill it stone dead. I sneak a look at him from the corner of my eye; his face is unattractively scrunched up as if waiting for a blow, which I guess he is.

  “You were troubled, Jenna found you, and…” I prompt, trying to sound nonchalant as I ignore the question hanging between us.

  Nolan turns his head from the water to me, eyes wide with relief and something else I can’t identify.

  “Yes,” he echoes. “Jenna found me.”

  In a flash of movement, Nolan juts his arm out to mine and clasps our hands together. His grip is too forceful at first, inexperienced, but he loosens his fingers when he brings our joined hands to rest on his knee.

  “Is this okay?” he asks. He’s back to looking at the wall behind me, but keeps sneaking glances my way.

  “It’s okay,” I say, which isn’t true at all. Okay is far too blasé a word for the mix of elation and guilt that seeps through my veins. I didn’t answer Nolan’s question. I don’t know how this will end, but I can feel the ticking time bomb of my departure and its added shrapnel of hurting Nolan.

  I strain to hear Jenna’s voice floating from somewhere over the backs of the whales, from a distant land where death is a memory and the past is misplaced history, but she is silent.

  “She came out of nowhere,” Nolan says. His thumb brushes the top of my hand. “I didn’t see her come up to me; she was just there all of a sudden, with her hand on my arm. She pulled me to a window seat, told me her name, and started showing me pictures on her cell phone. I thought it was silly at first, but she was narrating each photo and I had no choice but to calm down and listen.”

  Jenna and her bloody plans have come full circle, and her snarky, know-it-all voice drifts across the spaces between us.

  See?

  My head swims with Nolan’s words from that night. “Because not so long ago somebody did the same thing I’m about to do for you. Sit.”

  It’s too much, too much, too much.

  Nolan’s thumb quickens, rubbing worried circles into my wrist.

  “She showed me pictures of her family, of high school dances, of bookstores she visited,” he continues. “She showed me lots of pictures, Amelia, but the one I remember best was the picture she showed me of you.”

  I’m crying, silent tears that don’t leave me gasping for breath or needing to rip books in half but that taste almost sweet in their saltiness. When did emotions start having emotions of their own, and how do I make it stop?

  “Me?” I ask, to distract myself from the too-muchness.

  Nolan is quiet again, this time for so long that I look to see if he heard me. He’s staring at me head-on, no corners of eyes or self-conscious glances.

  It suddenly occurs to me that the reason he stared so much my first night in the bookstore was because it was not, in fact, a one-sided knowing. He knew me, at least by sight, and he was probably just as shocked to see me as I was him.

  Oh, Jenna. What have you planned?

  “You were reading my first book,” Nolan says, our eyes still locked. His voice has dropped in reverence, and I lean closer to hear over the sound of my heartbeat pumping in my ears. “You had crammed yourself in
to a chair at the library and were wearing headphones. You looked completely oblivious to everyone and everything.”

  “I guess I must have been,” I say. My voice sounds far away, an echo in a cave that never quite settles in the ear. “I’ve never seen that picture. I didn’t even know she had taken one like it.”

  An avalanche of words tumbles out of Nolan, like he can’t stop. Like he, too, is still learning that his emotions are multifaceted and strange and that sometimes word-vomiting is the only acceptable catharsis. “She pulled up the picture on her phone and I asked her to stop scrolling. Your face was … I don’t know. Your face looked so at peace, but also—” He pauses, his eyes finally dropping from mine to scan the carpet for hidden words. “You were so alive without moving. It made me proud of Orman. It made me want to write something else that would make you look like that.”

  My heart is still sputtering along, trying to hold Jenna and N. E. Endsley and Orman and Nolan’s hand all at once.

  “But what did she say?” I ask, and when that doesn’t sound quite right, I try again. “How did she help you so much?”

  Nolan looks at me, and his eyes are glassy, as if in every other universe besides this one he is crying.

  “She told me that, right or wrong, I was allowed to make my own choices. That whatever was bothering me may not be completely in my control, but my reaction could be. She didn’t ask specifics, either. She just … she just helped.”

  Nolan breathes out, and it sounds like a release of so much more than air.

  “I’ve thought a lot about it since,” he says. “And it’s more what she showed me than what she said. With all those pictures, she showed me that the world still turns, with or without me. That other people have lives and they live independently of the people in my life. And that what I wrote mattered to an actual human being in a library in Texas. What I wrote made somebody light up from the inside and made her fearsome to behold without her having to move a muscle.”

  Nolan stops, breath spent from his frenzied explanation. I remain still, allowing him room to fill the silence.

  “She told me that I had to take care of myself first,” he says. “How I owe the world my best work, and the world would wait—eagerly, impatiently—but my readers, you included, would wait for me to finish what I started with Orman. The world would wait for me to be ready.”

  “God,” I whisper. “She told you all that in the span of a few minutes?”

  He laughs and says, “Yes. She left quite abruptly. She told me she had to go, that the girl in the photo would be returning soon and expect her to be there. She said, ‘If I don’t go now, Amelia will find us.’ I asked her if Amelia was the girl in the picture and Jenna said yes. She told me your name, she told me you loved my books and that you were the most infuriatingly persistent person she had ever known. Jenna told me she had to go, because if you found Jenna with me, you would ‘insist on being best friends, and with all due respect, Nolan, you have some decisions to make.’”

  “She was probably right,” I say, wiping tears from my cheeks. “You would have hated me.”

  “Probably,” Nolan says. I glare at him, but he is smiling ruefully, and I marvel again that the stern, no-nonsense author inhabits the same body as the boy with the writing fort and the beanbags.

  I’m trying to think what it all means, piecing together everything that has happened since Jenna’s death, making a new kind of road map that will show me where I ought to go, when my phone buzzes in my pocket.

  I know without looking that it’s Mark checking in on his lunch hour. Other than the occasional text message—I’m alive. I’m safe. I’m alive.—I haven’t spoken to him or Trisha since my arrival.

  “I have to take this,” I tell Nolan as I rise, my pants sticking to my legs after sitting in the beanbag for so long. “Sorry. I’m going to step outside for some air.”

  “I’ll be here,” Nolan says. His face is neutral when I glance at him, but his tone suggests something more than just being here in the boathouse.

  I answer my phone as I shut the front door behind me.

  “Hi, Mark. Sorry I haven’t called.”

  “Good to hear your voice, kiddo. How’s Michigan treatin’ ya?”

  “Oh…” I look over my shoulder at the boathouse as I walk toward the lake, kicking my shoes off in the sand. “It’s pretty cool, actually. Lots to do … lots to see.”

  “Glad to hear it. Have you figured out where that book came from?”

  The water swirls around my ankles as I walk into the lake, the hem of my jeans becoming damp. The 101st copy is the farthest thing from my mind in the wake of Nolan telling me about his meeting with Jenna.

  “I think so,” I say. “Maybe.”

  “Well, good. Listen, hon. I called you because I have some news.”

  My voice rushes out of me, and I almost slip on the slick rock floor of the lake. “Is everything okay? Is Mrs. Willi—Trisha okay?”

  “Oh, no, no, no. Nothing like that. This is good news! Trisha told me not to tell you yet, but the paperwork just came across my desk, and I can’t resist. Trisha and I are funding a college scholarship in Jenna’s name.”

  I trip on one of the larger rocks and almost fall into the water. His comment about school has come from the sky, a meteor given my exact coordinates so it can take me out. Is this Jenna’s way of making sure I go through with the original plan?

  “That’s a great idea,” my mouth says. I turn my head when I hear the boathouse door open. Nolan half raises his arm in an awkward wave and I can’t help but smile. I point at my phone and hold up my index finger in the universal signal for One more minute—also the universal signal for I’m hoping this will be over quickly, but it might last a millennium.

  “What do you think, Amelia?” Mr. Williams asks.

  I’ve tuned out a moment too long. I turn back to the lake, hoping to piece together enough information so it’s not totally obvious I haven’t been listening. “I’m not sure,” I say. “What do you think?”

  There’s a longish pause before he says, “Do you forget to think sometimes, too?”

  Metallic guilt seeps into my mouth and fills my nostrils with its brutish scent. I know exactly what Mark is talking about—the curtain of hurt that can block out the sounds of whales and anger and everything in between—except, in this moment, I’m not obsessing over Jenna’s absence. But Mark is, and I could at least pay attention.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Can you repeat that last bit?”

  “The scholarship in Jenna’s name? We would like you to be the first official recipient. We…” He pauses and I hear him blowing his nose. “This is what Jenna would want, for you to live out your dreams of pursuing a life in academia.”

  What Jenna would want.

  I search for the clever wind, but it’s nowhere to be found.

  It feels like everything in the world is pressing in on me. The air is heavy and immovable, the pebbles and water convening to strangle my feet as Nolan’s eyes burn holes into my back.

  “Thank you,” I tell Mark. “I don’t know what to say.”

  An acceptance. I’ve just implicitly accepted his offer. Another manacle ensnares my ankle. I tell myself it’s good. I should be thanking my lucky stars that the Williamses are going to fund it all in Jenna’s name.

  “You don’t have to say anything yet,” Mark says. “We’ll talk it over when you come home this weekend. Are you ready to come back? I don’t want you to feel any financial pressures. We’ll take care of it. We’re just excited for you to start school.”

  My heart is thumping in my throat again, each beat bringing me closer and closer to years of inescapable expectations that I can’t fully hate because the voice on the phone so desperately wants good things for me.

  And that voice is all I have left of Jenna in this world.

  “Mostly ready to come back,” I say. And to add an ounce of truth into this conversation, I add, “But I’m enjoying my time here, too.”
/>   “Well, have a great time, Amelia. Trish and I can’t wait to see your pictures!”

  I haven’t touched my camera since I got here, but I don’t tell Mark.

  When the call disconnects, my phone screen returns to its usual backdrop. I haven’t really looked at it in a while. It’s a picture I took of a tree bent over on itself, its long, thick branches scraping the ground near the trunk, forming a natural archway. I used to think it was beautiful, a portal to another world. But now I wonder if it can still be called a tree if it lives bent in two rather than stretching toward the sky. I shove the phone back into my pocket.

  “I just. Want. To be,” I say to the air.

  “I understand,” Nolan says, and I jump at his voice so close to my ear.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I saw you finish on the phone.”

  I nod, but I’m thinking about how whales will swim on and on through ice and blue and sky no matter what happens to me, but does that mean I should live how I want? Or does that mean it doesn’t matter what I want and I should live up to everyone’s expectations and make the best of it?

  “Is everything okay?” Nolan asks. “I know that’s a stupid question in general, but I meant for it to apply to this exact moment, to your call.”

  “Yeah,” I say, still staring over the lake and begging the whales to make decisions for me. “I mean, yeah, I know what you meant, and I’m not sure if everything’s okay or terrible. That was Jenna’s dad. He wanted to let me know that he and Jenna’s mom are going to pay my college tuition. With a scholarship. In her name.”

  “Wow,” Nolan says. That’s all he says.

  “Wow?” I ask.

  “That’s a lot to turn down.” Gentle, small waves lap at the silence. “You don’t sound happy about it.”

  I groan, leaning to pick up a rock from the shallow water. Up close, I can see strange little sunbursts imprinted on one side.

  “Coral fossils,” Nolan says absently. “They’re called Petoskey stones.”

  We both stare at the rock in my palm until my heart leaves my throat.

  “Jenna … She had everything mapped out for us, and her parents act like it’s their job to make sure the last one standing upholds the plan. It’s not like I can say no. I have no excuse to say no.”