99 Days (9 page)

I startle awake at four-thirty, heart pounding, and throw my messy covers off. The thrill of what’s happening with Gabe—and it
is
a thrill, how my body was still humming a full hour after he dropped me off at home, the ghost of his mouth on my stomach and ribs—didn’t exactly translate to a full night’s sleep. The opposite, in fact. Now, after three Patrick-themed nightmares, I give up and slip into my running shoes in the darkness, my mind churning with memories and regrets.

Eventually, my legs give like hair elastics, sweat dripping down my spine—I’m woozy with heat and dehydration, a sprint like something is chasing me, a dash like my life is in danger. When I quit it’s with my hands on my knees and my face red and blotchy, a stitch in my side that feels like someone’s grabbed my lungs and twisted,
hard
.

I can’t believe there was a time when they actually wanted me to come to Bristol specifically so I could run, but that’s what happened: the tan, athletic woman in the stands at my meet against Convent of the Sacred Heart in March of sophomore year, then again at practice the next morning. They called me into Guidance after lunch, sat me down in a plastic-y chair, and handed me a pamphlet.

“Think about it,” the recruiter urged me. Her hair was pulled into a neat little ponytail at the crown of her head, athletic sneakers on her feet like possibly she was planning to run on back to Arizona right after this meeting. “It’s just something to consider, for next year.”

I found Patrick in the parking lot after last period, waiting for me in the driver’s seat of the Bronco. There was an old county law on the books that said kids could get their licenses six months ahead of everyone else if their parents needed their help with farm work, and because of the way the Donnellys’ house was zoned, all three of them got to drive way before everyone else did. Gabe usually drove us anyway, ’cause he was oldest, but Gabe was getting a ride with his sort-of-girlfriend, Sophie, and Julia had cheer practice until quarter of five. Tuesdays always worked that way, me and Patrick alone for the ride. Tuesdays were my favorite.

He was listening to Mumford with his head tipped back against the worn leather seat when I opened the door, afternoon sun making patterns on his smooth, April-tanned face. He kissed me hello with two hands on my face, familiar and good. “Whatcha got?” he asked when I handed him the pamphlet, curious gray eyes flicking from it to me and back again. His expression clouded over as I explained.

“Wow,” he said when I was finished. He handed the pamphlet back to me, glancing briefly over his shoulder and shifting the Bronco into reverse. “I—wow.”

“It’s weird, right?”

“Uh-huh.” Patrick laughed a little. “It’s
really
weird.”

“It is?” I asked, stung even though I was the one who’d said it first. “Oh.”

“No, I don’t mean because you’re not a fast runner, I just mean—wait,” Patrick said, looking at me again before turning out of the student lot. The wrapper from Julia’s before-school granola bar crinkled under my feet. “Do you want to go?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged, wishing all of a sudden, and weirdly, that I hadn’t told him. I’d never felt like that before with Patrick. Every thought I had spilled out more or less constantly whenever he was around, practically since I knew how to talk. It was strange and disorienting, like stepping on a piece of broken curb. “No. I mean, I don’t think so. No.”

“What is it, like, a Hogwarts place? You live in the woods with a bunch of other girls, who make you do hazing rituals with virgin blood?”

“It’s not Hogwarts.” That chafed me a little, truthfully. It wasn’t like him to be so hugely dismissive—or okay, it
was
, but not when I was the person he was talking to. I was the one he listened to, who spoke his language. “We live in the woods anyway,” I pointed out, ignoring the bit about the hazing—and the bit about the virgins—and picking at a loose plastic seam on the interior door of the Bronco. It was rare for me to sit up in the front, since usually Julia called shottie and Patrick and I crowded into the back. “I think this place is in the desert. Whatever, I don’t know. You’re right; it’s dumb. Forget I said anything.”

We were stopped at a red light then—Patrick reached across the front seat, poked me gently in the thigh. “Mols,” he said, looking at me like I was yanking his chain, like he thought I was trying to shake his hand with a joy buzzer or get him to sit on a whoopee cushion, offering him one of those pieces of gum that turn your teeth black. “Hey, talk to me. Do you want to go?”

“No,” I repeated stubbornly. “I don’t, I just—I don’t like you talking like it’s not even a possibility, you know?”

“But it’s
not
a possibility,” Patrick countered, looking honestly confused. “Right?”

Right?

I’m only just thinking about it
,
I wanted to tell him.
It’s nice that somebody wants me for something. Sometimes I get afraid that you and me are too attached.

I looked at him across the car for a moment, laced my fingers through his, and squeezed. “Right,” I said. The light turned green, and Patrick went.

*

He turns up at the Lodge late that afternoon just as a blue-black thunderstorm is tumbling through the mountains in our direction, the low rumble of weather and a gust of cool, humid wind through the door. “Hi,” I say, blinking, my heart tripping like a reflex for one stupid second before I realize it’s not two years ago, when he used to come pick me up at the end of my shift every night. That was then, I remind myself, fingers curling around the edge of the reservation desk anyway, like I’m bracing for something physically painful. This is now. “You here for Tess?”

Patrick nods; he’s halfway across the lobby, the desk and two chairs and a leather ottoman between us, but he takes a step back anyway like I’m radioactive, like possibly he could catch what I have. “She texted,” he says, hardly any intonation in his voice at all. “She’s finishing up.”

I nod back slowly. “Okay.” The polite thing to do would be to leave him alone, but I find myself staring anyhow, rude like a little kid with no manners. He’s shorter than Gabe by a couple of inches, just shy of six feet now maybe. He’s got the faintest hint of stubble on his chin. He’s not close enough for me to see it right now, but I know he’s got an eye freckle, this dark fleck in the gray iris of his left eye; I used to look at him and concentrate on it when we were kissing, like I could see right into his heart that way.

“I heard my brother invited you to the party,” Patrick says now. I’m surprised he’s saying anything, how he’s still keeping a distance wide enough to prevent catching anything communicable. He’s wearing a baseball T-shirt with the sleeves pushed halfway to his elbows. I can see the bean-shaped birthmark on his wrist.

“He did,” I reply, tucking my hair behind my ears and wondering what else he’s heard, what the hell that conversation possibly looked like. “Yeah.” I can’t imagine Gabe would throw our barely started relationship in Patrick’s face—after all, he kept that night in his bedroom a secret for nearly a full year—but not for the first time I ask myself what on earth I think I’m doing, getting mixed up with the Donnellys again at all. “I told him I wouldn’t come, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Patrick shakes his head, just slightly. “I don’t care what you do, Mols. I thought I told you that.”

I feel my cheeks get hot. “Yup,” I agree, picking up the papers I came out here for to begin with, the list of reservations for this weekend coming up. Penn’s waiting for me back in the office, Desi cuddled in her lap afraid of the storm. “You did.”

I turn to go but look back at the very last second; Patrick’s staring right at me, the force of his gaze like a physical thing. Patrick and I never had sex—to this day, Gabe’s the only person I’ve ever done that with, and just the once—but still I know almost every inch of Patrick anyway, the kind of learn-by-doing familiarity you get when you spend every day with somebody for years on end, how stupid he sounded when his voice was changing and how in seventh grade he point-blank asked me if I was wearing a bra.

“I saw what my sister did to you at Crow Bar the other night,” he says, still looking. I miss him so stupidly, absurdly much. “You should tell her to go fuck herself.”

I cross my arms over my chest, instinctive and embarrassed:
You’re looking a little thick
, I remember, my limbs going hot and numb with shame. Of course he would hear that, of course he would. Of course he already thinks I’m gross. “I thought you didn’t care what I did,” I reply.

Patrick’s eyebrows shoot up, like he wasn’t expecting an argument from me. I don’t think I was expecting it from me, either. For one crazy second I think he’s about to smile and I actually hold my breath in anticipation, like waiting for a sneeze or for a butterfly to land on your finger. In the end he just shakes his head.

“I don’t,” he says, this expression on his face that I can’t read exactly. “You wanna come to the party, come to the party.”

I blink, unsure if he’s serious or if he isn’t. “Is that a dare?”

“Call it whatever you want,” Patrick tells me, turning and heading for the doorway, for the storm hissing and blowing outside. “I’ll see you, Mols. Tell Tess I’m waiting in the car.”

Gabe’s pretty sweetly happy about it when I text and tell him I’ll come to the party after all; he even picks me up at my mom’s house so I won’t have to turn up by myself like Hester Prynne facing the town scaffold. “Ready to go?” he asks as I buckle myself into the passenger seat of the station wagon. “Loins girded, et cetera?”

“Shut up.” I smile even as I clutch my potluck tomato-dip-and-bread-bowl so tightly it’s apt to be nothing but sludge and crumbs by the time we get to the farmhouse. I can tell Gabe knows how freaked out I am, and also that he thinks it’s kind of unnecessary, but I like that he’s humoring me anyway. “I’m cool, okay? This is me being cool.”

“Oh, is that what this is?” Gabe grins. “I’ll make sure to spread the word.”

I glower at him, exaggerated. “Don’t you dare.”

“I mean, I’m just saying,” he continues, in this even teasing voice, “if you’re being
cool
. People should know.”

“Uh-huh.” I nod at the road out the windshield. “Just drive, will you? Before I come to my senses and duck and roll out of your car.”

The Donnelly farmhouse is big and white and weathered, three crumbling chimneys and the listing brown barn. I haven’t dared come here since I got back at the beginning of the summer, but the familiarity of this place takes my breath away, the tangle of Connie’s rosebushes on either side of the porch and the cracked window way in the top right corner of the house where Patrick hit a baseball the autumn we were eleven. I used to curl myself into the crawl space in the stuffy, sloping attic, when all four of us would play hide-and-seek. I’m surprised at the clutch in my chest at the sight of the barn.

My plan is to avoid both Patrick and Julia as much as humanly possible, so of course, they’re the first two people I see when we pull up, sitting on the sagging side steps peeling the silky husks off ears of summer corn and tossing them into a brown paper bag at their feet. My heart takes a traitorous leap inside my chest. Everybody uses the side door at the Donnellys’, even the mailman. Only strangers ever ring the bell in front.

As Gabe parks the car I spy Tess opening the screen and coming out of the kitchen in a floaty white sundress holding one of Connie’s vintage Pyrex bowls, the blue ones with the weird little farm scenes on them. She passes her free hand through Patrick’s short dark curls, casual. He turns his head to plant a kiss against her palm.

I flinch once at the sight of them, then a second time at the unfairness of my own reaction. It’s like I’m some kind of jealousy demon, like I have any right to be even a tiny bit stung. I’m here with
Gabe
, aren’t I? I’m literally about to walk into this party with Patrick’s brother. I need to get my head on right.

Gabe doesn’t seem to be paying attention, thank God: “Come on,” he says now, taking the dip off my lap and opening the driver’s door to the heat and hum of the outside, sunlight trickling down through the ancient trees. I can hear the chat and jabber of the party drifting out of the yard. Patrick and Julia look up at the sound of the door slamming shut again, both of them practically double-taking with this vague, offended incredulity—it’s like they have just seen a moon landing, think it’s a hoax, and are pissed at whoever’s trying to get one over on them. It would be comical—Patrick and I would have thought it was comical, watching it happen to somebody else—if it didn’t ache so damn bad.

I raise my hand in a wave, sheepish. Tess is the only one who waves back.

“See?” Gabe says grandly, rolling his eyes at his siblings’ stony tableau and slipping his hand into mine, squeezing once as we cross the wide green expanse of the yard. “Tell me you’re not already having the time of your life.”

“Uh-huh,” I mutter back. “This is me, being cool.”

The backyard is already populated by a cavalcade of aunts and uncles and cousins and family friends, faces familiar to me from more than a decade’s worth of these summer parties—graduations and ski trips, the receiving line at Chuck’s funeral. Heading toward them feels like being advanced on by an army made up entirely of people who are slightly older than they are in my head. I swallow hard.

“You’re okay,” Gabe murmurs, head ducked down low so only I can hear him. “Stick with me.”

That sounds like the exact opposite of a good plan, actually—for a moment I glance back over my shoulder at Patrick, think wistfully of how good he’s always been at ducking a crowd—but it’s not like I’ve got another option, really, so I smile as wide and as humbly as I possibly can. “Hey, guys,” Gabe says over and over, weaving through the crush of people, the plates of macaroni salad and the beer bottles sweating wetly in people’s hands. The Donnellys’ arthritic mutt, Pilot, sniffs around the yard distractedly, and something twangy and festive, some band with
Whiskey
or
Alabama
in the name, pipes through Patrick’s big old speakers. “You know Molly, yeah?”

He does it over and over, reintroducing me around with a hand on my back and an easy smile, asking after his cousin Bryan’s baseball league and his aunt Noreen’s book club. He’s hugely, enormously, unremarkably casual about the whole thing.

And—hugely, enormously, unremarkably—so is everybody else.

“See?” Gabe asks once we’ve done a lap around the perimeter and settled in by one of the food tables, scooping some mayonnaise-y potato salad onto my plate. We’ve talked to Chuck’s old drinking buddies and Gabe’s cousin Jenna’s new fiancé; I’ve explained to no fewer than three different aunts that no, I don’t know what I want to major in yet. We steered clear of Julia and Elizabeth Reese, now piled in the hammock with their heads tipped close together—they’re wearing matching chambray shirts and, thank God, seem more interested in yakking with each other than in tormenting me on this particular day. Meanwhile, Patrick’s a ghost. I caught glances of him out of the corner of my eye like possibly he can walk through walls and disappear at will, like he’s full of magic tricks, here and gone again.

He and I used to do our own thing at this party—he and I used to do our own thing at every party, truth be told—creeping out into the barn to play Would You Rather or just hang out, legs crossed over each other’s and Patrick’s hand playing idly in my hair. I remember being here the summer after sophomore year, after I’d slept with Gabe but before he’d left for college; Patrick and I were back together by then, and we spent the whole day camped out on the couch in the barn by ourselves. Usually I would have tried to get him to hang out with everyone else, but that day I was grateful for Patrick’s penchant for solitude—after all, it made it easier to avoid his brother.

Gabe’s a social animal, though, and I knew coming in that being here with him would mean being
here
with him—digging in and being part of the party, the kind of person who shows up in the forefront of pictures instead of hiding somewhere in the background, cut off, face turned away.

Patrick and Julia aren’t the only Donnellys avoiding me—I haven’t seen Connie yet, either, only caught a glimpse of her disappearing into the kitchen out of the very corner of my eye. Still, save a couple of admittedly confused looks from Gabe’s uncles, for the most part this afternoon isn’t exactly the medieval gauntlet I was expecting. “Not that bad, right?” Gabe prods, nudging my shoulder with his solid one. “I told them all you were being cool and to play along.”

“Oh, funny guy.” I try to roll my eyes at him, but I can’t keep the smile off my face. It feels like a victory—a tiny one, maybe, but a real, tangible victory. I reach out and tug the belt loop of his shorts.

“Angel Gabriel!” That’s a shout from the driveway—here’s Ryan and a bunch of Gabe’s other friends from the lake party, a whole tribe with cases of beer and soda in hand.

“You have got to get them to stop calling you that,” I tell Gabe as we head over to meet them. That girl Kelsey is here, with the painful-looking earrings and a platinum-blond pixie cut, plus gladiator sandals that lace all the way up to her knees. There’s a long-haired kid whose name I think might be Scott or Steve, maybe, a couple other people I don’t know, all of them in sunglasses and smiles, like there’s no place besides Gabe’s family party they’d ever want to be.

Kelsey hugs me like we’re the oldest of friends when she spots me, then immediately launches into a long and complicated story about the designer of this artisan turquoise jewelry she just ordered for the shop. The big group of us decamp to a cluster of lawn chairs near the vegetable garden, where we drink hard lemonade and eat chips for a good portion of the afternoon. I feel protected and included, surrounded by the crowd of them. With Gabe’s friends, I realize, I feel safe.

The weird, sweet truth, though, is that nobody at this party seems particularly interested in me one way or the other. Nobody trips me and snickers; nobody blows a gum bubble into my hair. Around four, Kelsey gets up to track down some more pasta salad, and thanks to her—and also, okay, thanks to the margarita one of the boozy Ciavolella aunts poured me—I’m relaxed enough to risk a solo trip to pee. I’m just coming out of the tiny powder room underneath the stairs when I hear Connie around the corner in the living room: “Come outside and help me with the ice cream, will you, birthday girl?” she’s saying, familiar voice echoing off the high ceiling and shiny wide-plank floors. We used to love to slide around in there in our socks, all four of us. Then: “And maybe wipe the look off your face like you smell something bad, just for the company?”

“I
do
smell something bad, thanks,” Julia retorts immediately. “And her name is Molly—”

“Enough,” Connie interrupts, even as I feel myself blanch so hard I worry I’ve actually made a sound: It’s like a trapdoor has opened up underneath me. This used to happen a lot, before I left for Bristol, overhearing people talking about me whether they knew I was listening or not. I ought to be more used to it by now. The familiar wave of shame is physical as dizziness. “Can we not do this now, please?” Connie continues. “Just as long as the girl is, you know, in this house?” I wince at that,
the girl
—at the idea that that’s who I am to Connie now, after all the times she hugged me hello and put me to bed and generally mommed me. I used to be pretty sure she loved me like one of her own three kids. “There’s no point in getting yourself all worked up about it now, Jules, letting it ruin the day.”

Julia’s not convinced. “I
am
worked up about it,” she counters. I can picture her so clearly, her J.Crew clothes and her swan limbs, long and graceful. Julia’s a warrior, she always has been. I used to tell her that if I ever had to bury a body or wage a ground campaign in Tasmania, she was the one I would call. “I think it’s tacky. It’s tacky and gross of Gabe to bring her here to begin with, and it’s
doubly
gross of her to come when Patrick—”

“Patrick’s here with Tess,” Connie points out.

“Mom, that nice girl is a giant rebound, and everybody here knows it, so—”

“Can you give it a rest, Julia?” Connie sounds exasperated now, like there’s no way this is the first time they’re having this conversation—I remember, bizarrely, the summer we were eight and Julia decided she didn’t ever want to wear shoes, how adamant she was no matter how anybody argued with her. “Come on, we’re going to have cake. It’s your birthday, we’re all together, let’s not—”

“It’s not my birthday today,” Julia points out.

Connie sighs. “Liz, help me out with her, will you? Explain to her that Molly doesn’t matter?”

There’s a high, affable laugh—Elizabeth Reese, too, then, all three of them, shooting the breeze about me and my
tacky, gross
behavior—but all I can hear over and over are those last three words:

Molly doesn’t matter.

I can taste the metallic ticking of my heart at the back of my mouth. I know they’re not even wrong, that’s the worst part—it was
absurd
of me to come here, it was way out of line.

“Ugh, whatever, don’t bring Lizzie into it,” Julia’s saying now, disgust dripping from her voice like gasoline. “She isn’t worth it, blah blah, even if she is a filthy—”

“Are you guys serious right now?” an angry voice interrupts her—
Gabe’s
angry voice. I shrink farther back into the half darkness of the bathroom—heart pounding with even more force than it was a moment ago, if that’s possible, humiliated at the thought of him hearing what they said. “Sitting in here shit talking like a bunch of stray freaking cats?”

Julia snorts. “Like a bunch of
wha
—”

“I expect it from you, Jules, but, like—what the hell, Ma? Like, who even are you right now?”

There’s a beat before Connie answers, the silence hanging pregnant in the air. “Gabriel . . .”

“Molly was our
family
. Molly was here when Dad died. And I don’t—not to put too fine a point on it, but it takes two people to do what we did, okay? And Patrick’s my brother. I just, I’ve had it with this shit. I really have.”

“Easy, tiger,” Julia is saying, voice hard and brittle. Connie doesn’t say anything at all—or maybe she does and I just don’t hear it, how the back of my wrist is pressed hard to my mouth so I don’t sob outright and give myself away.

I slip out of the bathroom as I hear him stalking down the hallway, put a finger to my lips at the sight of his surprised, baffled face. I yank him around the corner into the kitchen, press him against the wall and plant a kiss against his startled mouth. “Thank you,” I keep it together enough to say.

Gabe just shakes his head and laces all ten of his fingers through mine, squeezes. “Come on,” he says, and nips at my bottom lip, friendly. “There’s a party outside, did you hear?”

*

Things start to wind down around midnight, citronella candles burning low and the after-dinner Stevie Wonder replaced with Ray LaMontagne crooning quietly about Hannah and Jolene. Tess waved good-bye a little while ago, her hair like a beacon in the blue-purple night. It’s chilly away from the fire pit, goose bumps rising on my arms and legs.

I find Gabe stretched out in a lawn chair, alone for maybe the first time all night, a mostly done bottle of Ommegang dangling from his fingers. I raise my eyebrows. The Donnellys were never strict, as parents go, and once Chuck died Connie basically gave up on discipline altogether—even if he’d lived, though, I think they still would have been
do-it-in-the-house-if-you’re-going-to-do-it
kind of parents. But as he sits up, I can tell Gabe’s drunker than is really toward at a family affair. “Hi,” I tell him, perching at the edge of the lawn chair, down by his tan ankles. “I should probably think about an alternate route home, huh?”