Dedication (21 page)

Our eyes meet. “You have to tell him.”

She reaches out, but I step from her. Her gaze flickers, swiveling me to where Jake leans in the doorway cloaked in a blanket, face tight with concern. “I’m not going back until you do,” I say, retreating to the cabin, my shoes retracing their tracks.

“Katie,” her voice is thick with tears.
“Katie.”

I push myself up the steps, buckling into Jake’s arms.

175

En route to Georgetown I reach into the McDonald’s bag lodged between my coat and the gearshift to feel around for any remaining french fries, folding them into my mouth and pretending they’re hot. Pretending I’m driving over to Jake’s. Pretending it’s Laura asleep next to me. I turn up the volume the tiniest notch on “Jake’s Tape for Katie” as the car rears onto the roaring grate meant to wake dozing truckers.

“Stop fiddling.” Mom opens one eye.
“Please.”

“Fine. But I can’t hear anything.”

“Just put on NPR,” she murmurs, her eyes drifting closed.

“There
is
no NPR. We’re in the middle of nowhere and it’s the middle of the night,” I mutter back, glaring at the black hills barely visible against the sky.

“NPR is everywhere. You just have to find it.” She pops her seat upright and rolls the volume, the Pogues blasting us.
“I love your breasts, I love your thighs, yeah, yeah—”

She shoves the eject button, sending the tape clattering to the floor. Shaking her head derisively, she begins to move the dial methodically through the fuzz.

“Mom.”
I feel around under my seat for the jilted cassette, my remaining link to sanity. The car swerves again onto the thunderous rail.

“Kathryn! Would you please! Focus! On your driving!”

“I can’t focus on my driving when you’re doing that!” The radio alternates between scratch and muffle until bursts of some guy talking break through.

“There.” She sits back and crosses her hands in her lap. The static continues to punctuate his every other word.

“This is not a station.”

“And then, when you have followed the directions as we have prescribed—”

“It’s a call-in show, it’ll be fun,” she says through clenched teeth.

“Jesus will appear and you will be taken in by the righteous. And you won’t have to worry about baking those pies in the kingdom of heaven.”

She switches it off. We pass a road sign, our headlights arcing across its green face. “Two more hours till Littleton. You going to be all right?”

“Yeah.” I rest my cheek in my free hand, my eyes aching. But anything’s better than just sitting there in the passenger seat, trusting her to steer us, thoughts chasing each other from whizzing mile marker to whizzing mile marker.

“So, Mount Holyoke,” she begins wearily.

“Yeah.”

“It was kind of…”

“Freaky?” I fill in.

“Yes!” She swivels to me. “No one was smiling. Not a single person, not a student, not a teacher. Even the woman in the gift shop was grim. So strange, it’s such a lovely campus.”

“It was really weird,” I concur, having already mentally scratched it off the list of the six schools vying for my attendance.

“God, I’m starving. Any fries left?”

“Sorry.”

She feels under her seat. “I think I dropped a juice box last week on the way to work.” She continues to root around. “Well, here’s your tape, at least.” She holds up a cassette.

“That’s not mine.” Mine has a lizard drawn on it by my boyfriend.

“Oh.” She holds the cream plastic to the green radio light. “Oh my God,
Chorus Line.
Remember how you used to love this?” I stiffen. Although we’ve come a long way in three months—Dad’s moving out not leaving me another option—still, I cannot reminisce with her. She pops it in and grins, singing along as she turns it up.
“I really need this job,”
she trills. “I bought this back when I was applying for my first teaching job. I used it to keep my spirits buoyed when I was finishing my degree. Burlington made me wait three months for the acceptance, you know.” She readjusts her tortoiseshell combs.

“I didn’t.”

“It was miserable. But you used to sit in the backseat and sing your little heart out with me.” She smiles in my peripheral vision. “That was great. You were great.”

“Thanks.”

“Really, Katie, you were.” I feel her study my face, the water in her eyes glittering off the dashboard lights as she relaxes into her seat. I turn the tape up, the words coming back to me—the memory of when all I had to do was belt it out from the backseat harder to locate.

“And we’re walking…and we’re walking…” We dutifully shuffle along in our third clump in as many days of applying juniors, accepted seniors, and potentially paying parents. The third alarmingly bubbly blonde strides brazenly backward across the third green. “And we’re stopping.” Heels and toes are trod as we freeze. “This is Rodin University’s main building. Also known as the Harte Center, after James Harte, who was chancellor of the college from 1817 to 1842. We like to say this building is the heart of the school, or the vena cava, if you will. The main artery, get it?” The parents of the applying attempt a laugh, in case they’re being secretly evaluated on how amusing they make our tour guide feel. But the rest of my, I’m now guessing, non-pre-med cohorts and I remain stony-faced.

“Okay! Let’s keep moving!” Stacey keeps barreling backward and we follow like an ungainly school of fish pulled in her wake. Grimacing, Mom stops to press the back of her new tan pump down with her foot.

“We could’ve just watched the videos from the comfort of our own home,” I remind her. “If you’d spring for a replacement VCR since Dad took the old one.”

“But then you’d miss out on the chance to be her friend.” Mom smiles that we’re coming and nudges me onward with her shoulder.

“Are you? Ever going to buy a new one?” I keep my eyes on our guide because the VCR is not what I’m talking about.

“I suppose. Why is no one outside?” she asks chummily, once again changing the subject from the three lives she’s ripped apart. “Why is no one playing on the grass? It’s strange. It’s a beautiful day. Where is everyone?”

“Excuse me?” a mother raises her hand, her purse, a full-size replica of a tabby cat, swinging as she keeps pace with our leader.

“Yes?” Stacey perks even further up.

“Sometimes my daughter, Jessica, forgets to take her vitamins. Is there anyone who can help her remember to do that?”

I follow Mom’s gaze to assess how such a daughter, might, in fact, have gained admission to this school. But, other than wearing Buster Browns, Jessica shows no sign of being in need of a personal vitamin assistant.

“That’s a great question! There are R.A.s in every freshman dorm, and I’m sure Jessica and her R.A. can work something out.”

Mom widens her eyes at me and we stare at the mother and her feline accessory. She does realize Jessica will be leaving home, right? That Jessica could, say, choose to blow the entire lacrosse team and her lack of B
₁₂
will be the least of this lady’s worries? Mom slackens her expression as the tabby cat turns in our direction.

“And here is the Pilgrim Building, where the bulk of freshman classes are held.”

“Woooow,” Mom whispers in awe,
“Ugly.”

“This building was a gift from the class of ’seventy-three,” Stacey announces.

“And no one kept the receipt.” Mom tries again, eliciting laughter only from the father-daughter team behind us. Stacey beams at the feedback.

“Yes! So, all freshmen are required to check in here at weekly meetings to share feel-ings and feel-outs. And here is our freshman dining hall!”

We peer in the yellow-tinted windows on what looks like a circa 1970s production of
Oliver.
The faux-wood mustard-yellow mirror-shard decor says “Brady den,” but the collective facial expression on the picking masses says “Inedible.”

“We have over twenty different kinds of cereals and toaster strudel available three meals a day!”

Jessica’s mother shudders.

I watch a student, a look of dismay on his face, raise his spoon high over his bowl and let the contents splash back down in beige clumps. I try to picture myself on the long line with my tray, eating below the sign for
VAGINA AWARENESS
or standing on the equally long line to heat my toaster strudel, and my throat tightens. Not a single Laura. I scan the greasy faces. Or Jake. No one close.

“Great! I’ll take you back to the Admissions Building where some of you are scheduled for the three o’clock group interview. Congratulations to those of you already accepted. Remember, I’m Stacey and my door’s always open!”

We plod in silence along the vast green, the spring wind whipping through my coat. I look at the faces of the kids readying for their three o’clock, one kid’s eye visibly twitching with nerves. In passing classrooms students sit staring at teachers obscured from my view, googly-eyed with witless intensity as they take dictation. To what end? More papers, more grades, more teachers, some stupid job, and then what? If Jake and I can even make it through all this together, then we just—what? Have some kids so we can start them on the whole stupid path all over again? Rip their hearts out filing for a trial separation along the way? It all just seems so, so—

“Your door won’t always be open, will it? That doesn’t sound safe.”

“Mom.”

She pushes into the gift shop, the buckle of her raincoat tapping the glass. “Katie, we need to have a discussion about how you’re going to protect yourself when you—”

“Moooooooom!” Several beats of inflection convey that I cannot even begin to discuss my safety at a school I cannot even begin to imagine myself at, when I can’t even begin to imagine myself anywhere else, including what
was
my own home, and I might be having a breakdown right here by the wall of purple Frisbees, coffee mugs, key chains, and visors, so please, please justbackoff.

“Okay,” she channels my frequency. She picks up a little mongoloid-looking bear and squeezes it in my face. I stifle the impulse to hurl it across the crowded shop.

“I need, like, five minutes.”

“To call Jake,” she strains for impartiality.

“No. To just…take a walk or something.”

“Kathryn, you have to be able to assess your own needs without constantly factoring in Jake’s.” She squeezes my forearm. “I’m grateful he’s been there over these hard few months, but I’m worried you’re getting too dependent on him and losing yourself in the process.”

“Oh my god! I’m just taking a walk!”

She studies my face. “Honestly?”

Fuck. You. “Yes.” I step back from her gaze. “I’m saying I
need
to be
by myself.
Not in a group of freaked-out kids and parents, not in a car with you.”

“Fine.” She hardens.

“Fine.” We walk out of the shop into the lobby of the Admissions Building, where we wordlessly part ways. She continues on to the parking lot and I’m left standing in the pavilion. Alone. I take a deep breath and let it out, not sure what to do next. Not wanting to go back out onto the prairie-size green. Not wanting to hang out in here. I walk obediently past the pay phones, continuing to assess my needs, and on to the bathroom as I check my watch. He’ll be practicing now anyway.

Coming out of the stall, I see Jessica in a new college sweatshirt bent over the sink counter, holding her hair out of her face with her left hand. Catching my eye in the mirror she straightens, holding a small straw in her right.

“You still have the tag.” I point to the nape of her neck, where the Champion logo dangles.

“Thanks.” She smiles, her Scottie dog earrings glinting in the reflection. “This place seems awesome,” she says as she runs her finger over her compact and then across her gums, catching the last particles of powder.

Stepping out of the UVA bookstore I squint in the strong sun, wishing I’d brought Jake’s Ray-Bans, but how could I have known it’d be spring here, real spring—full-bloom, sweet-air summer’s-around-the-corner spring, not the lame depressing April-shower spring of home? At the bottom of the steps I pause, undecided where to take myself next—a library, a cafeteria, another charming brick building—and suddenly the cloud of lung-stifling ache that has been lodged there since February surfaces. Here, under the hazy sun, surrounded by Technicolor grass and the fragrant blooms of stately gardens. It all reaches me through a web of tissue in my chest straining under the weight. Like I have just been beaten. Only it isn’t “just.” Without the noise of Mom trying to chatter over it or the warm drug of Jake to distract it, I am freshly, acutely inside the pain of what has transpired, what has been lost—the comfort of who we were together.

I emerge from the walkway to the stretch of green leading up to the Rotunda. It is, like everything else here, heartbreakingly beautiful. And dotted before it, in some
Alice in Wonderland
twist, are rocking chairs. I slip off my flats and collapse into the closest one, letting the ground cool my feet.

“Hey, do you know if the Treehouse’s open today?”

I squint up at an approaching guy, blond hair flopping as he jogs over. “Sorry, I’m just visiting.”

“You don’t go here?”

“Undecided.” I gesture down at the bookstore bag.

“Well, you seemed right at home.” He grins. I am unused to being grinned at by anyone but Jake. The guys at school know not to bother.

“Is that a good thing?”

“Could be.” He playfully taps my exposed shin with his flip-flop.

“Yo, Jay! Stop picking up the ladies and let’s go!” Jay looks over my head and I peer through the slats of the chair at a group of guys waving him back to the walkway.