What Happens Now Page 26

  “Then summer ended,” Mom continued. “We went off to start college in different states. But then the next summer we were both back at the camp. . . .” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “And the next—”

  I held up my hand. “I get the picture.” It was a gross picture.

  Mom laughed a little, shook her head. “After we graduated, we both found ourselves back home. And back with each other. We started dating for real.” Now she picked up the water glass and jiggled it so the ice clinked. “For real was different from a summer fling. We had our ups and downs but we stuck with it. Stayed on the track, you know? Moving in together, then marriage. Then we had you and I wanted so dearly to make it work.”

  “Why did you stop? Making it work, I mean.”

  “This stuff is really hard for me to talk about.”

  “You’re doing great,” I said.

  Mom laughed. “Gee, thanks.” Then she got serious. “Okay, it was this. I found out that he’d been having a relationship with another woman. For a long time. So I kicked him out.”

  “You always said he left.”

  “Well, the way I see it, he left the moment he cheated on me.”

  The waitress came back with a bowl of granola and a little metal container of milk. She hovered for a moment, but there must have been something about our energy that told her to get lost.

  Mom didn’t pour the milk. She picked up two pieces of granola in her fingers and popped them in her mouth.

  “I know you weren’t expecting to hear all this, but I do have a point and I’m getting to it.”

  “Take your time,” I said. Who knew when this portal would be open again. It felt both natural and unnatural that we were here, having this very grown-up conversation. I liked that feeling.

  Mom smiled at me, then her eyes traveled instinctively to the scars on my arm.

  “When your father left,” she continued, “I didn’t expect him to go so far. Certainly not all the way across the country. But he had a friend there who offered him a job and he wanted to make a fresh start. I think he did truly plan on being in your life. He was just going to take some time to regroup.”

  “So much for that,” I said.

  Mom didn’t seem to hear me. “Once he was gone and I was alone, a single parent of a two-year-old . . . I really thought I’d die.” She swallowed hard. “I mean, I really thought I wanted to. For a long time. Three years, give or take. I don’t remember much except thinking that maybe you’d be better off living with your grandmother.”

  I turned to look out the window, unable to meet her glance. “Then why are you here, alive, and I’m not sitting with Grandma watching soap operas right now?”

  Mom laughed a bit. “A friend convinced me to get help. Then one day, my boss at the bank sent me to an electronics store to buy a DVD player for the conference room. They’d just released the first two seasons of Silver Arrow.”

  I turned to look at her now. She was shaking her head.

  “Wait, wait. I need to backtrack,” she added. “The Silver Arrow thing. One year in college, there was a guy in my dorm. He was socially, you know, awkward and wanted to be popular. So when the show went on the air, he’d buy beer and snacks for anyone who wanted to drop in and watch with him. At first, only a few people came but eventually, the whole hallway would gather. I got addicted. It was so much fun to share something that way.”

  I wanted to jump in and say, Yes! Duh! That is called fandom and that is why there is cosplay. But my mother was now unreeling so much of herself, I didn’t want to risk tangling her up.

  “I could only watch it on and off after that year,” Mom continued, “but I always loved it. So the day I went into the store and saw this big display with life-size cutouts of the crew, it was like bumping into long-lost friends. I bought the DVDs and a player to go with them. But watching it again, with you . . . reminded me of that time in my life when I had everything in front of me. It seemed so safe to dream big back then. I hadn’t made any of my mistakes yet.”

  She picked up another piece of granola and held it between her fingers.

  “It’ll sound silly,” she said, “but Silver Arrow and Satina and all the rest helped me rewind and find that hopeful person again. It helped me start fresh.”

  We were silent for a few moments as I processed all that. Mom took this opportunity to eat.

  “So why don’t you watch it anymore?” I asked. “Why do we never even talk about it?”

  Mom shrugged sadly. “Those years were not a good time for me, Ari. It led me to a better time, yes, but it was so hard. Like I said in my letter, last year I was struggling, too, and couldn’t admit it. Staying busy and focused on moving forward is one of the things that helps me manage my . . . feelings.”

  You mean, depression. Why did she have trouble saying that word?

  “Why were you so against Camden?” I asked.

  “Ah, right. I’m sorry, this all made so much more sense in my head when I was driving.” She paused. “Those summers I spent with your father . . . I was too preoccupied with him. I missed out on other things.”

  I frowned. “You mean, other guys?”

  “Well, certainly that,” she said. “But also, opportunities. Even then I knew I wanted to work in medicine. Your grandmother begged me to apply for internships that would help me get into medical school, but I just wanted to work at the camp with this boy I loved.”

  Boy. It seemed absurd that my father had ever been some boy.

  Mom finally mustered up some courage now, because she reached for and took my hand. It was harder than I thought it would be to let her.

  “This is the thing, Ari. At exactly the moment where I’ve finally gotten back on the track I should have stayed on, I see you doing a little of what I did. At the exact moment in my own life where I felt I went astray. In light of your . . . that night . . . I was so scared of what would happen to you if things didn’t work out.”

  She let go of my hand and drew her own close to her, tucked it into her lap. We sat there in silence for a while.

  “And I didn’t realize this until today,” Mom continued, “but I think I was also a little jealous. Because, what I wouldn’t give for a chance to be back there. In that place where love seems simple and fresh.”

  There were tears in her eyes now. I realized she wasn’t talking about her past anymore.

  “Are you and Richard going to break up?” I asked.

  I expected her to say, What? God, no! Instead, she said softly, “I hope not.”

  “You’re always mad at each other. You barely speak sometimes.”

  “We’re not in a good place right now, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t mean we won’t figure it out.”

  “But you love him,” I prodded.

  Mom took a deep breath. “I do. It’s not the same kind of love it was before. It’s more complicated. But maybe that’s okay.”

  “Make it okay,” I said. “Please make it okay.”

  She nodded and searched my face.

  I reached into my bag and dug my hand into an inside pocket, where the box with the Silver Arrow pin was still tucked away.

  “I got something for you at the SuperCon.”

  I pulled it out and spread open my palm, put the box on it. Mom took it and when she saw the pin, she smiled.

  “This is fantastic,” she said.

  “You don’t have to wear it. I just thought it would be fun for you to have.”

  Mom nodded, then started to break down. “I’m sorry for everything, Ari. Bear with me while I try to fit it all together. I want my life. I have good days and bad days.”

  “There are these things called therapy and medication that I highly recommend,” I said.

  She laughed. “Thank you. I’ll look into it.” Then she got serious. “Watching you slowly come back from that night you hurt yourself . . . it’s made me so proud. Nervous and terrified, but proud.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered, not sure if that was the
right thing to say, and turned back to gaze out the window. This kind of intensity was blinding and it was hard to look straight at it for too long.

  All this time with Camden, I thought I had no good examples of love, nothing to give me a road map or even a basic flow chart. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe love was not always going to be something I recognized when I saw it. Maybe it was not the reward you got for working through something, but the working through itself.

  “Do you need to go back to the hospital?” I asked Mom.

  “No, I took the day off. I think you should, too.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Mom smiled. “I know the boss. I can pull some strings. We can do something fun.”

  “Don’t tell me: you want to go to Target.”

  “Actually, I noticed there’s a noon showing of some movie I’ve never heard of.” She pointed out the window to the theater across the street.

  I glanced at the marquee. “Oh, yeah. That’s supposed to be really silly.”

  My mother heaved a bone-deep, tired sigh. “Silly sounds like heaven.”

  It really did. She paid for the tickets, but I bought the popcorn.

  Late August.

  Still summer, officially, but now there were tiny sadnesses everywhere.

  The slightly stiff feeling of the weeds on the front steps under my bare feet, a sign they’d start dying soon. The night air stripped of a layer, revealing a new coolness that wasn’t there before. Three annoyingly overachieving red leaves on the tree in our front yard.

  Usually, this time of year was when I started savoring every morsel of summer. But now I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Summer being over meant being able to seal the whole messy thing up and move on. Start school. Have a great senior year. Finish strong.

  But first, I had to say good-bye to Kendall.

  “Hey,” said my best friend as she approached the Crapper at the lake, carrying the rolled-up towel I’d instructed her to bring.

  We hugged, and maybe it was my imagination, but she already looked changed.

  “Did you pay yet?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I thought we’d go this way first,” I said, then pointed toward the entrance to the trail to the creek.

  Kendall raised her eyebrows. I’d never told her what was back there.

  “Where exactly does this trail go?” she asked. “I thought it just went a little into the woods.”

  “You’ll see in a minute.”

  We walked the rest of the way in silence, and then she did see. The creek opened up before us and Kendall stopped dead in her tracks. I gave her some time to take it all in.

  “How can this be here without us knowing?” she wondered aloud.

  “I know, right? The nerve of it.” We both laughed a little.

  We went to the water’s edge and found a wide, flat rock. I didn’t want to go farther, out into the creek and possibly the rock where Max and Eliza had once ravished each other.

  “Camden brought you here, didn’t he?” said Kendall after we unrolled our towels and sat down.

  “Yes. If you keep going along the creek, you can actually see part of the lake.”

  She nodded, staring at a spot where the water fell sharply, landing in a froth of bubbles before flattening out again.

  After a minute Kendall said, “This summer has been . . . a summer.”

  “Did we have all the fun?”

  She gave me a puzzled look.

  “That night at the gas station,” I added. “You said we’d have a lot of fun before you left. That we’d try to have no regrets.”

  Kendall sighed. “It’s so easy to say that stuff at the beginning of something.”

  We were quiet. It would have been a creaky, awkward quiet anywhere else but here. Maybe that’s why I’d chosen this spot, because I knew the scenery would fill in the blank spaces between us.

  “But I did have fun,” she continued. “What about you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And the regrets?”

  I paused. “Only one, in the SuperCon parking lot.”

  “Me, too.” After a moment she added, “I’m sorry I screwed everything up for you.”

  “Eliza screwed everything up. Then I screwed it extra tight.”

  “But if I hadn’t—”

  “Please stop,” I said. I didn’t want to think about the what-ifs. “To be honest, part of me is glad I did what I did. Let that part of me come out. Because obviously, it needed to. Maybe I can really be okay now.”

  “Good. But I’m still worried about you, a little,” said Kendall. “One of the things that made it easy for me to leave was knowing you’d made some new friends. Thinking you’d be with Camden and probably wouldn’t be around much anyway.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, waving my hand, wishing I were really as certain as I sounded. “It’s only a few months.” I looked at her. “Although, you’ll be different when you come back.”

  “God, let’s hope so,” she said, and I must have seemed surprised because she added, “But in a good way. Otherwise, what would be the point of going?”

  “Or doing anything,” I added.

  “Exactly.”

  “I can’t stay much longer,” said Kendall. “My parents are driving me out to visit my grandmother at the nursing home. She doesn’t know I’m leaving. I’m kind of dreading telling her.”

  “Okay. I’m just glad you were able to see this. And me.”

  Kendall nodded and bit her lip, and I saw suddenly that she was scared. It was a big thing, what she was doing. I felt an overwhelming urge to give her something that would bolster her.

  Maybe I wanted to give her an extra reason to come back.

  “I have to tell you,” I heard myself saying. Kendall raised her eyebrows in curiosity and I continued. “When we dropped you off at your house that night of the SuperCon, you should have seen Jamie’s face. It wasn’t an I-feel-guilty face. It was more like an I-love-that-girl face. I think he really does have feelings for you.”

  Kendall sat completely still. She didn’t react. For a moment, I thought perhaps she hadn’t heard me.

  “Don’t,” she said sharply.

  “No, really. If you’d seen him, you’d believe me.”

  Now she doubled over as if I’d punched her in the solar plexus. “Why would you tell me this?” Her voice was high.

  “I thought it would make you feel better about the whole summer.”

  “Well, it does not.”

  She covered her head with her arms and took a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But if it were you who had information like that, wouldn’t you tell me?”

  She took another deep breath inside her little self-huddle. “Yes.”

  “So . . . ?”

  Kendall unrolled now and looked me straight in the eye. “A bad situation to cap off several other bad situations. On that note, I think I’d better go.”

  Crap, crap, crap she was angry. What had I done?

  “I can’t believe we’re saying good-bye like this,” I said.

  “You mean like this?” she asked, then pulled me into the tightest hug I’d ever felt in my life. It actually hurt.

  “See you at Christmas,” I said.

  “Check that blog link I sent you,” she said. “I’ll start posting stuff as soon as I can.”

  Kendall climbed off the rock and rolled up her towel.

  “Are you walking back with me?” she asked.

  “I’m going to stay for a bit.”

  She nodded and headed up the trail. She got a few feet away, then stopped to turn and wave. I waved back. We froze, neither of us wanting to be the one to lower our hand first. But then Kendall did. She started moving again and in seconds, she was around a curve and out of sight.

  I lay back on the rock, my hands behind my head, and stared up at the sky.

  In my mind, Camden came to lie on the rock next to me.

  Holy cow, how I missed him. This ache. Like the ache I’
d felt during the summer of watching and wanting, but in the core of me.

  I started to cry again. The only thing I could make of this agony was the truth: Camden had given me what he could, but it was not enough. What I needed, I could only give myself. He had gifted me the ability to do that. By falling in love with Camden, I’d been able to fall in love with Ari, and for that reason, I wasn’t lying to Kendall about having just one regret.

  So which Camden was with me now? The first Camden, or the one who’d let me down so terribly? Maybe it was neither. Maybe it was a parallel-universe Camden, a new Camden created by the things that could have happened but didn’t.

  Although, just because they could have happened didn’t mean they should have.

  I had to let that Camden next to me go.

  I had to let them all go.

  23

  “Help me!” Danielle squealed from the top of the wooden tower.

  I didn’t budge. She was laughing now, as I knew she would be, and my spot on the playground bench was so comfy in the shade.

  Labor Day.

  It always felt melancholy, even with the weather perfect like this. I usually spent every possible hour of the holiday at the lake before it closed for the season at sundown. But this year, I couldn’t bear to say an official farewell.

  “You said half-and-half, right?” asked Mom as she plunked down a to-go tray from the café across the street.

  “Thanks,” I said, picking up my iced coffee. She sat down next to me, took hers out of the tray, and tore open a pack of artificial sweetener.

  “Mom!”

  “What?”

  “You said that stuff is evil.”

  She shrugged. “I let myself have one a day at work. Sorry, it’s my guilty pleasure.”

  “If that’s your guilty pleasure, you have nothing to apologize for.”

  She laughed, and Dani raced past us, shrieking again. Then Richard came tearing after her. Roaring like a lion or a monster or some other terror she’d requested today.

  “I remember Richard doing that with you, when I first met him,” said Mom.

  “Yup. It was love at first chase.”

  Mom smiled. “For me, too.”

  I watched her as she took a long sip of her iced coffee. “What time are you guys going out later?”