All the Things We Didn't Say (25 page)

I looked around to see where Kay had gone. I didn't understand what Big Bev the nurse was doing at Dairy Queen. ‘Bring Kay back,' I said.

‘Shhh,' Bev answered. ‘How about you have some water.'

‘Don't let Kay leave!' I said, frantic. ‘I haven't seen her in so long. I want to talk to her.'

Bev put the pitcher back down on my nightstand. ‘You've had a confusing morning.'

I tried to sit up, but Bev wouldn't let me. ‘I just saw her here,' I said. ‘She was looking at me. You
said
something to her.'

‘The only other person in here was Rosemary,' Bev answered.

Then I heard your voice in the hallway. ‘Bev? What? Do you need something?'

‘No, Rosemary, it's fine.'

You walked into the room anyway. And it was you, Rosemary, not Kay, with your stubby blonde ponytail and your-I'd never realized it, until right then-haunting gray eyes. I stared at you hard. I didn't quite believe it. ‘How are you feeling, Richard?' you asked.

Bev settled me back down and looked over her shoulder. ‘Can you watch him for a second?' she asked. ‘Make sure he doesn't try and get up again.' I knew she wanted a cigarette.

‘Of course,' you said.

Bev shut the door. You immediately started straightening my sheets. ‘Feeling better?'

‘What happened?' I asked, so groggy.

‘You…got up. Ran around a bit.' You looked at me curiously. ‘You don't remember?'

I shook my head. I looked at you and told you that, a few seconds ago, I swore you were my girlfriend from high school. You still looked like her, if I squinted.

You looked embarrassed, but then said, ‘Well. That's nice.'

You pulled a chair over and sat by my bed. ‘Do you want to talk about this girlfriend?' you asked. You probably weren't supposed to ask, being just an aide. ‘What was she like?'

‘It was so long ago,' I said. ‘And we hadn't told anyone we were together. It was wrong, really. She was with someone else. My best friend. They were engaged.' I glanced at you out of the corner of my eye. Your Kay essence hadn't fully worn off yet.

‘And what happened to her?'

I took a deep breath. ‘She was in a car accident,' I said. ‘She broke her neck, and was in a coma for four weeks, on life support. Then she died.'

‘Oh gosh,' you said quickly. ‘I'm sorry.'

My mouth felt electrified. There was a strange humming in my stomach. For the first time, I felt I could keep going. I felt I could talk about it and not stop.

We had been at a party. I had something to tell her, she had something to tell me. The thing that I had to tell her was that I had been awarded a college scholarship, a full ride. I would be leaving Cobalt, where we both lived.

I found Kay in the hallway. I knew she'd be happy for me-she was always so encouraging, saying I was so smart and that I had an amazing mother, for it was my mom who'd found out about the scholarship in the first place. But when I told her, Kay's face fell. She looked like I'd just punched her.

‘I'm pregnant,' Kay blurted out.

I didn't mean to burst out laughing, it just happened. ‘It's not a joke
,
' Kay said. ‘I'm really six months pregnant.'

‘Are you sure? How the hell can you be six months pregnant?' I stared at her stomach. At her boobs. At everything that changes in a pregnant woman's body. She was wearing a gauzy, flowing top, the same sort all her girlfriends wore. They hid a lot-only, I knew what her body felt like, and I hadn't felt anything. It was inconceivable.

‘I've gained twelve pounds,' Kay said. ‘It's low, but the doctor says I'm okay. He says that, sometimes, women gain a bunch of weight at the very end.'

I felt tricked. Bamboozled. I kept staring at her body and trying to figure it out. Where were the twelve pounds? ‘Why didn't you say anything before?'

‘Because I only found out last month,' she whispered. ‘I didn't get my period for a while, but I often skip a few months, so…I don't know. I thought it was normal. But then I went to the doctor.' She gave me this look that said
Please don't kill me. Please be happy.

‘Are you sure it's mine?' I asked.

Her mouth got very small. ‘I know how to read a calendar, Richard.'

People streamed around us, not paying any attention to what we were talking about. ‘It's an honest question,' I said quietly. ‘Six months ago…'

‘…we were together,' she answered quickly. ‘One of the first times.'

‘You've been with Mark, too.'

She smashed her mouth together. Her eyes began to water. I looked around fretfully for Mark, for Andy or Jeanie, someone who might notice. ‘I knew this would happen,' she whispered. ‘I knew I would tell you this and you would want to leave.'

‘Wait, did you
plan
this?' I asked.

‘Of course not!' Her eyes flickered back and forth, trying to meet mine. Have you ever noticed that, though, that your eyes can't completely meet someone else's? You have to look at one pupil or the other. We're never truly looking at one another at all. ‘What are we going to do?'

‘I don't know!' I blurted out. ‘Why do you think I would know?' I was getting angry now. This was
my
day,
my
big news. And I wanted to be having this conversation anywhere but the hallway of Jeff's parents' house-the sounds of Leonard Cohen drifted out of the stoner room, and people were dissecting ‘Suzanne' for its sexual implications. I wasn't ready for this to be real. I wasn't ready to have to deal with things like this.

‘I'm so scared,' Kay said. ‘You're going to go away. You're going to abandon me.'

‘I'm not going to abandon you,' I said. ‘But we have to think rationally. You're going to finish your senior year here. Break off your engagement. And then you're going to join me at Penn State. That's the way it's supposed to work.'

‘Well, I guess we'll have to rethink that.'

I let out a small whimper. ‘Those are our
plans
.'

She widened her wet, already-round eyes. ‘What are you saying?'

‘I'm just saying…I want things to be the way they were ten minutes ago.'

‘Well, they're not!'

More people rushed by. A few looked at us warily. Someone in the stoner room turned up ‘Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye'. ‘I want this scholarship,' I whispered.

‘I can't believe you,' Kay said quietly. It annoyed me. And it hurt. I didn't know what to say to her. This was how it happened to plenty of guys around here: they were bound for better things, but then they knocked someone up and did what was honorable. They married her. They got some job, any job, and they raised the kid that neither of them particularly wanted. When I thought about our future together, I had never factored in this. It had never entered my list of possibilities.

Kay turned away then, pressing her back along the wall. The pot smoke formed a thick, blue halo around her. ‘Maybe she's Mark's,' Kay said. She had given the baby a gender already-I never got to tell her, later, that she had guessed right.

Mark came up. ‘What are you two talking about?' he asked, clapping a hand on my shoulder and the other on Kay's. He touched Kay's boob and squeezed. She let him. Her eyes were on me the whole time, as if to say,
See, your chance is gone.

Jimi Hendrix came on the stereo. I stormed across the room into the kitchen. After a few minutes, I felt Kay's hand on my arm. ‘Mark wants to go,' she said, ‘but he's…'

We both watched as Mark tripped over the edge of a round braided rug. Beer sloshed over his cup. ‘Give me the
keys,' I said, cruelly sober. I hadn't even made it to the keg yet.

On the way out to the car, Kay said, ‘Mark? Why don't we get married this summer?'

‘Your parents would kill us,' Mark answered sloppily, wrapping his arm around hers. ‘We're supposed to wait until you're done with high school.'

‘Not if we had a giant wedding,' Kay cooed. ‘We could invite everyone. I want to be a married woman my last year of high school. It sounds so romantic.'

‘Sounds good to me,' Mark slurred.

I threw myself into the front seat. The shell around me grew thicker and thicker. Kay got into the passenger seat and looked at me, but I made a big deal out of putting the key in the ignition, shoving the car into drive. Kay looked at me for ten whole seconds, and then blew the air out of her cheeks and turned around to check on Mark, who'd lain down in the back.

I wove around the cars haphazardly parked on Jeff's lawn. Mark made a gagging noise, as though he might puke, but then rallied. He started talking about fixing up an old dirt bike with Andy Elkerson next weekend. ‘You want to help?' he asked me.

‘I don't know,' I said in monotone, my thoughts sloshing, my emotions tangled. ‘Maybe.'

‘Elkerson's so lucky, out of school and all that,' Mark said.

‘We only have a couple more weeks,' I told him.

‘I don't know if I can do it, man,' Mark said. ‘Fucking Mr Tole.' He turned to Kay. ‘Did I tell you how this guy bought dope off of that guy that works at the gas station? Barney something?'

‘You told me,' Kay said quietly.

I forked onto Wyndell, which is full of thick woods and
blind turns. ‘We should tell the PTA, don't you think?' Mark was saying. ‘How can these drugged-up bastards teach at our school and get a paycheck? I mean, at least hire someone who isn't shit-faced all the time. Like hire me.'

‘You're not done with school yet,' Kay pointed out.

‘I will be soon enough.'

‘You wouldn't want to teach here,' I said. ‘Teach somewhere else, if you want to teach. Just not here.'

‘There's nothing wrong with teaching here,' Kay said.

‘It's easy for you to say, Rich,' Mark talked over her. ‘You're getting out of here. You've got it all. Me and Kay, it's different.'

‘It's
better
,' Kay said, her voice gnarled and abrasive, like steel wool. ‘Real people stay in Cobalt. Honest people. They do what they have to and they stay.'

‘Shut the fuck up,' Mark said. He often thought people were making fun of him when they weren't.

But I knew better. ‘Shut up,' I said, too. I met her eyes, finally, right across from me. Then she faced forward, screamed. There was the deer, long legs, wide eyes, erect ears. A thick-antlered buck. He stared at the car, and I stared back at him. His eyes glowed blue. For a moment, right before we collided, the expression on the buck's face looked almost human, startlingly cognitive. It was like he understood what was happening-not just with the car in front of him, but also with me. He looked straight into me and saw what I'd said to Kay, what I'd given up.

Then there was the crunch, and a long few seconds of nothing.

When the noise stopped, it was so quiet. Like death. The wind brushed peacefully through the trees. There was a far-off swish of another car going by on a distant road. When I sat up, some of the window's glass had shattered into the
inside of the car. It was all over the seats, glittering in the moonlight.

I saw clearly, then. I realized I could defer the scholarship. I could go in a year or so. Kay and I could live in married students' housing with the baby. Maybe she could even go to school there, too. My life wasn't ending-it was just starting a little sooner than I'd planned.

I pushed out the car door. It crackled with more broken glass. I saw the deer lying on the ground, enormous and immobile. I turned back into the car and looked at Kay. I wanted to tell her. But then…

I told you this in a series of visits you made to my room. It was like I was a serial novel, or perhaps a soap opera. You were tuning in for the next episode of Richard Davis's tragic, young
denouement.
You knew nothing about me except for this-and, ironically, doctors knew everything
else
about me except for this, in this kind of detail. By the time I got to this part in the story, your eyes were very wide. ‘But then…what?' you asked.

I looked down. Kay was covered in blood. She wasn't scrunched up or cockeyed or bent in an unnatural angle or anything, though-it seemed more like she was just sleeping. When the ambulance came, I grabbed an EMT's arms and told him he should be very careful with Kay; she was pregnant. I heard a gasp behind me and turned-they had pulled Mark out of the car and laid him on the pavement. He had come to, and was staring right at me. In the back of my mind, I'd always wondered if he'd suspected what was going on between us. Maybe I'd hoped that, deep down, he had always known. But he hadn't, that was obvious. He hadn't known a thing. It was the last time Mark ever looked me in the eyes.

I told you about how, a few days after that, I had lain on the carpet in the living room, the TV blaring. I told my
mother I wouldn't be taking the scholarship for college. ‘But we worked so hard,' she said, astonished. And it was true, it was
we.
She'd pushed me into taking the accelerated courses, she'd bought me the encyclopedias, she had filled out the paperwork for the scholarship and ridden me until I finished the essays.
You need to get out of Cobalt
, she always said.
You're destined for better things.

‘I'm sorry,' I told her, sprawled out on the floor. ‘I can't do it. I can't go.'

My mother stood there for a long time. All I wanted was for her to lean down and tell me the right thing. She was so good at telling me the right thing, bolstering me up, making me feel like I was okay. But she just quivered at the edge of the room, her face growing redder and redder. ‘Fine,' she said finally. ‘Stay here, then. Ruin your life.'

‘I really need to talk about this with someone,' I said. ‘I feel like I'm coming apart.'