Glass Girl (A Young Adult Novel) (3 page)

“Tell her I would really appreciate it if she’d leave him alone.”

Harris laughed. “You don’t have a lot of bite behind those words, though.” He called me on being too sweet all the time. “Listen, Meg, I’ve been thinking. I probably shouldn’t call you everyday.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll be trying to settle in at Penn and figuring out how to get along with a jerk roommate from Ohio who will never be Wyatt. And you need to make a break and start over without all this—”

“I
want
you to call me everyday.”

“Well, I can’t,” he murmured. “I can’t.”

I hated leaving Harris. He’d stuck with me through the darkest days. And I wasn’t the only one who needed this relationship. Harris had lost his best friend. They’d had plans for the future. They were going to take over the University of Pennsylvania, make names for themselves, and date the hottest girls. Probably not, but together they could make anyone believe anything.

“Promise me you’ll text me sometimes, though.” I didn’t want to beg, but I would, if necessary.

“I promise. God, little sis.”

“I know.”

“This is so hard,” he said. “It feels like I’m losing him again.”

Harris took a shaky breath that sounded exaggerated through the Jeep’s speakers. “I know what Wyatt would say to you. He’d say, ‘Meggie, I want you to move on and be smart and make friends. Ride a horse or date a cowboy or something. It’s Wyoming, right? Or don’t date a cowboy, ’cause I’d probably have to hurt him. And quit wearing miniskirts, for crying out loud.’”

I giggled and cried at the same time. Harris had always done a spot-on Wyatt impression.

“And I love you,” Harris said, his voice growing impossibly soft. “He’d say, ‘I love you.’”

“I know,” I whispered. “He loved you, too.”

Harris ended the call quietly. I couldn’t think of how to say goodbye, either.

I wasn’t good at saying goodbye. I still talked to Wyatt every day—and not his ghost exactly. It was my secret. He felt very flesh and blood to me. He warmed the space that I occupied. I could hear his voice. At night I wrote him letters, which I believed he read.

I knew he was in the Jeep with me on the highway headed west. His voice startled me out of the dazed, tunnel vision that I was feeling. There was silence…and then there was his voice, deep, gentle, and quiet.

“Don’t be afraid, Meg
,
” he said.

“But I am afraid.”

“You’ll be fine, and I’m here if you need me
.
” His warmth lapped against the windshield, and made my eyes close for a second.

I tried to ignore the other sound—the sound that was not Wyatt’s voice, the one sound I dreaded most—the ringing that glass makes just before it bursts. The tinny warning you get, if you’re sensitive enough, that somewhere something is getting ready to shatter. Maybe I’m the only one tuned in enough to the vibrations of breakable things…maybe it was just because my body resonated with the same frequency.

I was pretty young when I came to what I thought was a perfectly logical conclusion:

1. All glass will break.
   
2. I am made of glass.
   
3. Therefore, I will break.
   

W
e spent the first night of our haul to Wyoming in St. Louis. We were asleep by ten and back on the road by six in the morning. Our second night, we stopped in Hays, Kansas and checked into a generic highway motel. We’d stayed at a lot of these and I used to love them. People who are running from something stay at highway motels. And that’s something I could get behind even now.

We picked through our luggage for the few things we needed for the night. My mom slowed down as we walked toward the stairs, so I waited for her. Her face was free of makeup and open in a way that looked like she expected the universe to answer her questions at any time. She was beautiful.

“You feeling okay?” I said. I hadn’t figured out the new check-in phrase to use with her. Before, instead of, “Hi, how are you?” we’d said, “You okay?” when we saw each other. That seemed like a stupid question with no good answer these days. I’d tried other variations, but each simple greeting felt like cotton in my mouth.

“I don’t know. Tell me how you’re feeling, Meg.” She caught up and gave me a one-armed hug and then left her hand on my arm. If you didn’t know she was an artist, you would wonder what such delicate hands could do. These hands could create new worlds on canvas.

“Just tired,” I said, shrugging. “I’m feeling every one of those eleven hundred miles.”

She stopped walking and glanced around, her features melting. “Are we that far from Pittsburgh?”

“Yes.”

She looked like a trapped animal. “Do you feel like a rubber band being stretched?”

I swallowed hard and stared at the enormous Kansas sky. I did feel like a rubber band. One that Wyatt was pinching between his fingers in Pittsburgh and Dad was stretching to Wyoming.

“I do,” I said.

“It may be too far.” Her eyes looked wild. “I told Jack that Wyoming is too far!” She squared her shoulders and followed Dad to the room, leaving me behind to consider whether her rubber band would snap back before we crossed the next state line. There was nothing stopping her from making a U-turn on the highway and heading home.

After she showered, she took her nightly cocktail of pills and climbed into bed, refusing to answer any of my dad’s questions. Just before she dozed off, she picked up her head and searched the room until her gaze landed on my face. I smiled at her, unable to tamp down my hope that she would be herself again. But the moment passed quickly and within seconds she was drooling on the scratchy hotel pillowcase.

My dad got lost in his laptop so I snuck away from the room and found a chair next to the pool. Our motel shared a parking lot with a country bar where the cowboys lined up around the building smoking and laughing.

Do Wyoming cowboys look like these—sort of like grown-ups in cowboy costumes?

“
I’ve died and this is cowboy hell
,
” I whispered to no one but Wyatt.

In the darkness behind me, someone chuckled. I jumped and turned to look. My dad made his way toward me, walking barefooted on the cracked concrete. He pulled a chair next to mine and sank into it, edging lower and lower until his chin touched his chest.

“Cowboy hell,” he said, laughing. “Did you see the guy in the white hat?”

“Yeah, he’s all ‘Hi-yo Silver, away!’
”

Dad snorted. “Tonto told him to go sleep it off.”

We laughed quietly, enjoying a moment that felt like all the nice moments before.

“Is Mom still asleep?”

“Yes.” He sighed. “I was worried about you. So here I am, kid. Now we talk.”

“Did you take the comforters off the beds? You know they’re disgusting, right?”

“Yes and yes.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, always patient for whatever came next in life.

“Why do cheap hotels give you stationery?” I tried out a topic that felt safe. Our family had always been comfortable with comedy. “Is it so you can write your loved ones a nice little note before you slit your wrists?”

“Meg.” He released a slow breath that meant he was disappointed with me. “Let’s not waste any more time. Let’s talk about how grateful I am that you’re here, willing to change your life so we can be together.”

What was the message behind those words? That I had a choice? That there had been a possibility we wouldn’t be together? That my old life was gone? I reached over and squeezed his hand. “You’re welcome.”

“What’s on your mind tonight, honey? Wyatt? Your mom? Chapin?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too,” he said. “All of the above. Your mom is okay tonight, though.”

“That’s the medication, Dad.”

She’d been surviving on anxiety meds for so long now that I wondered if she knew where she was half the time.

The depression fairy reached down to touch members of my mom’s family—full of artist types—often. Something about the creative brain seemed prone to too much ruminating on life. They were a danger to themselves. Add something awful to their lives, like, say, the death of an only son, and all bets were off.

“Actually, I was thinking about Aunt Leslie,” I said. “Do you think Mom—”

“
No.”
Dad couldn’t bear for me to finish that thought. He swiveled in his chair to face me, straining the cracked plastic. He shocked me with the force of the word. “No, I don’t think your mom would
ever
in a million years make the same choice. Leslie had a complicated existence. You were too young. You don’t remember.”

Before Wyatt’s death, the most tragic happening in my family was when my mom’s sister Leslie committed suicide because she had untreated postpartum depression. She hung herself with one of those baby bouncy swings mounted in a doorframe. She wrapped the canvas straps around her neck and sat down on the floor.

“Your mom will fight harder.” Dad always leaned into generosity when he talked about my mom’s character, like he was leaning into a mountain so he wouldn’t fall off. To hear it from him, she was superhuman in her capacity to walk through fire unscathed. “She’ll come back to us.”

I stared at the honky-tonk’s neon signs burning through the dark and thought about what Robin would say right now. She’d tell me that I couldn’t expect more from either of my parents than they were able to give. She’d remind me that we were tired.

“Do you think Wyatt’s grieving, too?”

My dad bit his bottom lip. I could barely see his front teeth holding on while he considered the question. “No, I don’t. I think Wyatt is at peace.” He reached over and took my hand.

“Hard to be at peace when your last moment on earth was violent,” I said.

He traced the bumps of my knuckles with his thumb. “That’s just it, though. Moments on earth probably don’t matter much anymore to him.”

I tried not to let that hurt my feelings because those moments were real. We were real. And the moments we’d had mattered.

“He had some pretty good moments,” I whispered.

My dad chuckled. “He did, didn’t he? He sure did like Hannah. For years.”

“He had girls clawing each other’s eyes out to get to him,” I said. “But he only really wanted her.”

One of my most vivid memories of Wyatt was the night he finally worked up the nerve to call Hannah. Because of the layout of our house, I could stand at the top of the staircase that led to the basement and secretly watch all the activity in that room by looking at the reflection in the windows. It worked best at night when the basement lights were on and the glass lit up like a movie screen.

One night, I sat on the top step and watched Wyatt pace back and forth holding the phone and talking to himself, waving his hand around frenetically. He practiced the words he would say to Hannah once he’d worked up his nerve to dial her number. He made me so nervous that I felt like puking.

I could tell when Hannah answered because he got very still and sat down on the floor. His voice changed…no more wryness, just gentleness. I think if he’d lived, he would’ve tried to marry her one day. I told her that at the funeral and she cried.

“So what do you think it was about Hannah that Wyatt liked?” my dad said.

“She was sweet. He liked the way she smiled at people and how she was kind to everyone. He said he liked how she didn’t mess up ‘significant silence with a bunch of useless words.’”

“You’re sweet, too, Meg. Wyatt said that kids at school didn’t know what to do with you because you were so nice to everyone. He felt like he was becoming known as Meg Kavanagh’s big brother for once, and he liked it.”

“Liar,” I said, but I hoped he meant it. I wanted to believe Wyatt had talked about me like that. It made me feel like my brother had studied me like I had him.

“Nope. True story. It’s written in the
Book of Kavanagh
.” He clapped once, his usual signal that it was time to move on. “And we need to get some sleep. Long day tomorrow.”

He stood and held a hand out to me, just like he’d done all my life.

***

After three long days on the road, we were weary. Driving into our new town, my nerves started rebelling. The drive through the mountain range had felt life threatening to me even though every curve had a protective guardrail and we had inched along at forty miles an hour.

Chapin looked like a cool little town, in a Wild West postcard sort of way.

Dad stopped at a sign and slowly turned left. He had to brake hard to keep from running into a moose standing in the road. He rolled down his window and waved his arms until the moose moved on. A few blocks later, Dad tapped his brakes twice, and pointed his hand out the window. I glanced in the direction he pointed and saw the Hotel Wyoming sitting on a hill.

I expected to see swinging doors and hitching posts downtown but really it was just like any small town, simple and straightforward. The wide Main Street was lined with shops and an old sidewalk. The important businesses—a bank, a clothing store, and a pharmacy—stood proudly on Main. The lesser shops like an old boot repair store called “John Wayne’s Repair,” sat like afterthoughts in small wooden buildings directly behind the central businesses.

We took a left onto Pine Ridge Drive, drove another three blocks and turned down a narrow stone driveway. The house, surrounded by trees, sat far enough back from the road that you wouldn’t know it was there. Dad parked the truck off to the right under a carport. Mom followed and I pulled in behind them.

Dad knocked on my window and I rolled it down.

“We’re home.” He held up a keychain with a rectangular charm.

“Of course, Wyoming, the rectangle state.” I took the key and merged it with Wyatt’s Jeep keys.

“You’re going to like it here, I promise.” His brown eyes were tired but hopeful.

My mom walked toward the house. She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t crying, either. I took this as a good sign, or at least a neutral one.

It’s hard to explain the feeling that little house created in my heart at that moment. I loved it more than anything I’d ever seen. Wyatt would’ve given anything to live here. He was an archaeologist at heart and he would’ve dug through this yard until he’d unearthed every arrowhead and artifact.