How it Ends (4 page)

I don’t know if it’s the
waning daylight, the inevitable withering of all things green, or the relentless approach of hunting season, but I’ve been getting up early before Lon, tending the woodstove, and brewing strong, sweet cups of apple harvest tea to try and hurry the dawn. I sit by the window and, with Serepta curled up in Hanna’s empty chair, watch the pale sun top the trees, the cardinals and mourning doves picking at the cracked corn sprinkled beneath the feeders, the does and their yearlings drinking from the pond, and beyond that, at the greatest distance, Hanna heading down her driveway to wait for the bus.

“There she goes,” I murmur, and Serepta’s ears twitch but she doesn’t open her eyes, so there are no witnesses to the tears gathered in mine. I wave at Hanna’s back and it’s meant as a greeting but feels like a farewell.

I wish spring was melting into summer now, instead of autumn hardening into winter.

I said that once to Hanna when she was twelve and she took my hand and pulled me up out of my chair, led me outside and around the property, pointing out how pretty the sun was in the clear blue
sky, the vibrant scarlet of the sumac, and the fun of kicking up crunchy fallen leaves. We gathered pocketfuls of acorns and, like amateur Johnny Appleseeds, tossed them into the woods, picked catmint bouquets to hang dry in the pantry, and watched a monarch butterfly gliding on the breeze.

“It’s a female,” Hanna said as it swooped low and fluttered around the few remaining goldenrod in flower. “You can tell because she doesn’t have those two dots on the bottom of her wings. I wish we had more for her to eat. It’s such a long migration…” She stopped and looked up at me. “Hey, Gran…do you think she knows she’s not going to make it?”

“I don’t know,” I said after a moment.

Hanna nodded slightly and turned her gaze back to the butterfly still searching the fading goldenrod for nectar. “I think she does,” she said softly. “I think she can feel it, you know? Inside of her, I mean. Like instinct. I think she knows she’s not going to make it all the way to Mexico before winter hits but she’s trying to anyway.”

“Why do you say that?” I said.

“Because it’s fall instead of summer and the air is cool instead of hot, and it takes longer for her to warm up in the morning just so she can fly because the sun isn’t as strong,” Hanna said. “She has to use more energy to find food, and the days are shorter so she has to find a safe place to roost before dark, which means she can’t cover as many miles in a day as the monarchs who migrate in July and August can.” She glances at me. “You gave me that book on them last Christmas, remember?”

“Yes,” I said and tried to smile but couldn’t.

She looked back at the butterfly. “She’s brave.”

“Valiant,” I murmured and the word was bittersweet.

We watched in silence until the monarch finished feeding, and when she flew off, gliding to conserve energy, I heard Hanna whisper,
“
Vaya con Dios,
little one.” And then to me, “Do you think sending good wishes with butterflies is stupid, Gran?”

“No,” I said, shading my burning eyes and watching until the butterfly was almost out of sight. “I think it’s perfect.”

Dear God, I miss my times with her so much.

The school bus finally crawls to a stop in front of Hanna’s house.

I watch her board, then make my way back to the kitchen to coax a second cup of tea from the leaves in the filter. Open the kitchen curtains and set up the coffeepot so all Lon has to do when he wakes is come down and turn it on.

He surprised me with that small kindness back when we were first married and we’ve been doing it ever since.

Making coffee isn’t a difficult task—not a task at all, really, especially not for a part-time waitress—but this morning I go through the motions hating the way my hands shake, this weakness that comes and goes at will, the muscle cramps, and the way my feet have taken to twitching like those of a cat in the throes of a dream.

If it was earlier in the season, I would have gathered wild skullcap and experimented with brewing a tea, and if money wasn’t so tight, I would do as my natural-healing books suggest and buy blueberries for the antioxidants, pineapple for the enzymes, and cashew butter for the proteins and B vitamins. I would try supplements like glucosamine and chondroitin for my aching joints, grape seed extract to help circulation, and maybe even gingko to strip the fuzziness from my thoughts.

But money
is
tight, and while we’re not going to starve, for the first time ever I regret giving away all those tomatoes, peppers, and zucchinis this summer instead of making myself can or freeze them. I only preserved half of the crop this year because canning alone wasn’t nearly as fun as canning with Hanna for company, and so now I’m
grateful that we still have as much fresh, good food stocked in the pantry as we do.

I’m still not ready for winter; I hate driving to work in the snow, the slick roads and icy steps, hate having to walk the deer path alone in the cold, gray dusk, and the long, bleak days with no company but my own thoughts.

And I worry about the heat.

Lon can’t fell the dead trees or cut, split, and stack wood like he used to, but we need at least five cords to make it through, and I don’t know how we’re going to get them. The house has electric baseboards but the cost of running them has become too high and so the woodstove in the living room will be our only source of warmth.

We could buy a cord or two and maybe barter for the rest, find someone looking to make money selling firewood and offer him our dead trees providing he splits our half of the wood, too. I can probably stack it if I move slowly and don’t push too hard.

Or we could impose on Wes, Hanna’s father, to help, but I hate to do it. He works such long days and what little free time he has left should be spent with his family.

I don’t know.

I can’t find an answer.

I fix the second, weaker cup of tea and return to my chair by the window.

Serepta opens her limpid green eyes, stretches, yawns, and goes back to sleep.

The strays—I counted five of them out on the porch this morning—are curled up in the homemade cat condos on the back porch. Soon it will be cold enough to turn on the lamps set above their beds, as the clear plastic sheeting protects them from the snow and biting wind but offers no real warmth, and the single-bulb lamps help chase away the chill.

I’m so afraid of the day I can no longer afford to care for these castoffs and orphans and will have to make myself turn away and ignore them milling around out there, cold, skinny, and starving, begging and calling and never understanding why I’m not answering their pleas for help.

Never understanding at all why I am failing them.

Connor is all over me—I swear
he memorized my schedule like I memorized Seth’s—so I’m trying to avoid him without being mean, and at the same time, now that I don’t want to see Seth and the Rodent, all I ever do is run into them. There they are kissing, there they are getting high, there they are walking down the hall holding hands.

I give up.

Well, not really.

I just hate seeing her leaning against him with her bed hair swishing all over and her pointy little rodent face right there waiting to be kissed.

I wish I had bed head and a rat face, too.

No, no, no.

They sit at their own table in the cafeteria, chairs facing each other, her legs slid between his…ugh. It’s so bad that I can’t even go in there and eat anymore.

Love, I have decided, is hard.

I slept over Sammi’s last night. Her little brother wouldn’t leave us alone as we were getting dressed for Connor’s party and kept whining,
“Where are you going?” but luckily her mother had a date and believed us when we said we were walking down to the diner and maybe the strip mall.

Anyway, we walked to Connor’s since it was only like a mile away.

The love couple wasn’t there, but somehow that made the night even worse because Connor kept cornering me with this hopeful puppy-dog look, which made me feel bad because I just don’t like him back, so right before we left I ended up giving him a mercy kiss in the back hallway for like one minute. Then he tried to ask me something, but I checked my watch and was like, “Where’s Sammi? We’re past curfew!” and ran.

Why do the ones
I
like never like me? Why do I always get the ones I don’t want?

Seth, you jerk. You give me a giant pain.

Seth came up to me at school while I was heading for the bathroom and with this big cheery grin said, “Hey, I hear you’re going out with Connor.”

And I said,
“What?
I am not! Who told you that?”

He stopped smiling. “Connor.”

And I said, “Well, he’s wrong.”

Then Seth got this cold look and said, “Well, you better tell
him
that because he really likes you and he’s telling everybody you two are going out and now he’s going to look like a fool.”

And I was thinking,
How is that
my
fault? I never said I’d go out with him!
But I hated the way Seth was looking at me like I was some kind of user, so I just said, “Look, I was with him for
one minute
at his party but that’s it. No big deal.”

That was the wrong thing to say.

“Maybe not to you but it was to him,” he said snottily.

And I was like,
You know what, I don’t need this.
But only in my
head, of course. So I just gazed at him, dying inside, and he said, “Forget it. I’ll handle it,” and walked away like he couldn’t leave fast enough.

Now they’re both ignoring me, but so what? There are tons of other guys here who flirt, and to tell you the truth, I like that best because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s talk, words, a game, and everyone knows it and no one gets hurt.

Fuck you, Seth. You could have had me but you didn’t want me.

Why didn’t you want me?

“Well, that was fast,” Sammi murmured, nudging me and motioning with her chin to the cafeteria table where Connor and his new girlfriend Teresa sat snuggled together. “How long did it take him to get over you? Three days? A week?”

“Who cares,” I said absently because I had more important things on my mind, like what Seth and the Rodent had been arguing about when I passed them in the hall this morning. It had looked bad—the Rodent’s face was red and her tone hot and furious, and Seth had a distant look in his eyes like he wasn’t even there—and I was dying to know what was up.

Luckily, I didn’t have long to wait.

Sammi caught up with me between classes and, seizing my arm in a death grip, steered me into a cove between the lockers. “Nutria broke up with Seth because he cheated on her with that girl who broke his heart—”

“Bailey?” I said, wide-eyed.

“Yeah, I guess. Anyhow, he’s going back out with her now—”

The warning bell rang.

“Shit! I’ve got to go. I can’t be late to Brother Gary’s class or he throws a fit. I’ll call you later.” She released me, turned, and took off.

Well.

I stood there staring after her for a moment, then turned and headed to algebra with a giant smile on my face.

Seth had cheated with Bailey, the one girl who was bound to screw him over again, and when she did I was definitely going to be there to catch him.

My father got laid off today. He’s union, and work always slows in the winter, but it’s bad timing this year because of my school tuition and the heating bill and all. He told me if I needed money to buy Christmas presents, I’d better think about earning it, so I applied for a job at a pet store being a Santa’s helper to the pet photographer.

If they hire me, I’ll get an employee discount and can surprise Gran with all kinds of cat stuff for Christmas.

She’s been on my mind a lot lately, mostly at weird times (like in the middle of US history class or English) when I can’t do anything about it.

Like this morning: I dropped my scarf on the way down the driveway to wait for the bus, and when I turned back to pick it up, I got a clear view of Gran’s house through the bare trees in the little woods. There was a light on in the living room, right where our reading chairs were, and I got this awful pang in the pit of my stomach, almost like being homesick, and then this really strong flash of memory.

“You got here right in the nick of time,” Gran said cheerfully as I trudged up the back porch steps. “Here, I just finished making this for you.”

“What is it?” I asked, sniffling and wiping my damp cheeks on the back of my hand. It had been a bad Sunday so far—my parents had been picking at each other from the moment I’d woken up—and so I took the little red bag she offered without much enthusiasm. It was made of felt, the drawstring a thin white silk ribbon trailing from the top, and when I looked inside, it was empty.

“A talisman,” Gran said, pushing herself up off of the back porch step. “Come on, let’s go stroll the deer path and see if we can find anything to put in there.”

She explained more as we walked, told me how red was a power color for strength and confidence and that whatever I chose to put in the bag should mean something to me, make me feel safe and happy or stand for something important.

“Okay,” I said, crouching and picking up a smooth, round brown acorn. “Here, what does this stand for, Gran?”

“An acorn is the seed of the oak,” she said. “So I would say an acorn stands for potential, growth, new beginnings, and—”

“That’s good,” I said and dropped it in my talisman bag. “Let’s look some more.”

We wandered farther and before long the bag contained a piece of mica—fool’s gold, Gran called it, because the glittery outside made people think it was worth far more than it really was—a blue jay’s feather for plainspokenness, and a little stick from the catalpa because that tree was old and sturdy and weathered, a place of comfort and shelter, questions and truths.

Gran and I had spent a lot of time sitting under that tree.

I shook my head, smiling, and picked up my scarf. Straightened and, on impulse, not even knowing if she was actually even sitting in the window, raised my arm, waved, and then turned and hurried to the road to catch the bus.

Seth must really be in love with Bailey because he stopped me in the hall to supposedly just say hi but ended with showing me a picture of him and Bailey lounging out in her living room. She had on a really short, tight low-rise skirt and an ankle bracelet and was wearing this smug, totally cocky smile. I wanted to vomit on the picture but only said, “Oh, she’s cute,” when what I
really
wanted to say was, “She has
a nose like a bulldog and one helluva lazy eye.”

Not that she does, but anyway.

A senior named Wynn has been sitting with me and Sammi at lunch and walking with me between classes. We went out to the courtyard with me wearing his jacket, and Seth was there with Connor. Seth was sneaking glances over at us the whole time, too. I could tell from the corner of my eye.

I liked the idea of Seth seeing that somebody else might like me, so I flirted hard with Wynn whenever Seth was somewhere in the background and even went to the movies with him once to see if we could be more than friends.

Wynn must have been thinking that way, too, because at the end of the night he said I was cool but a little too young for him.

Uh,
okay,
but I wasn’t the one snickering through the movie’s love scene, was I?

Still, word got out that we went, and Seth sat with me at lunch today. He ate half my French fries and even fed me one.

I don’t understand him at all.

Oh my God, I can’t even believe this day happened.

It was beautiful out, one of those freak fifty-degree mornings, and me and Sammi were in the courtyard before the bell rang when Seth got off his bus, stretched, spotted me, and started over. Sammi stepped hard on my foot and hissed, “Stop staring!” and I managed to break the lock Seth had on my gaze.

I swear, with the sun on his hair and that smile on his face, there was nothing in the whole world but him.

“Hey, stranger,” he said, bumping his shoulder against mine.

“Hey,” I croaked.

“Hi,” Sammi said warily.

“God, it’s great out here,” he said, stretching. “Way too nice to
spend in this dump.”

“Mm,” I said but my heart was going crazy. “I know.”

He looked at me like he was searching for something, some kind of answer. He must have found it because he grinned and said, “Want to cut out?”

“No,” Sammi said, giving me a hard look.

“And go where?” I said, ignoring her because, oh my God, this was it.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, anywhere. Just hang out and enjoy.”

“We can’t,” Sammi said, bugging her eyes at me. “We have a history test third period, remember Hanna?”

“If we leave before the bell rings we’ll be marked absent,” Seth said.

“And how’re you gonna get home then?” Sammi said, elbowing me and scowling.

“We’ll come back last period and hang here for the buses,” Seth said. “No big deal.”

“Yeah, no big deal,” I said, giving Sammi my answer with one burning look.

She sighed, shook her head, and said, “Well, if you’re going to do it, you’d better go before one of the teachers sees you.” And to me, in a whisper, “Call me!”

So we went. We just turned around and cut across the side lawn to the road, which wasn’t real easy for me in heels, but Seth said, “Here, hold on to me,” and we picked our way across, with me expecting to have a nun snag us at any second…but no one did.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said when we got to the sidewalk and were out of sight of the school and could relax.

“You never cut out before?” Seth asked, taking off his suit jacket and slinging it over his shoulder.

“Nope,” I said.

“So I’m your first,” he said with a mischievous smile.

I blushed and gave him a hip bump. “Don’t advertise it.”

He laughed, slid an arm around my shoulders, and squeezed me to him. “Hanna, Hanna, Hanna, what am I ever going to do with you?” he said, and kissed the top of my head, right in my hair. “C’mon, let’s go to the diner. My treat.”

That alone would have been enough to make the whole day worth it. But there was more.

We got a booth in the back, ordered OJ and waffles, and while we were waiting for the food I got all kinds of shy and couldn’t even look at him because I was afraid I would start crying with happiness or something totally geeky like that.

“So are you still seeing Wynn?” he said.

I shrugged and, tracing the design on my place mat, said, “Are you still going out with Bailey?”

“Yup,” he said.

“This is so bizarre,” I said, shaking my head.

“What?” he said. “I think we should have done it a long time ago.”

“Really,” I drawled because he was flirting, and if that’s how he wanted to play it, then I could do that. “What else should we have done a long time ago?”

His smile widened like he was thinking something delightfully perverted, and suddenly the air in the diner got hot and close, and everything else receded and there was nothing but him and me.

“You should ask me over,” he said.

“You should ask to come,” I said, drowning.

He nodded, never breaking the gaze. “Yeah, I should.”

And then the food showed up, which was good because I had to breathe again but bad because it completely changed the mood.

He told me about his guitar and his music theory class and all these songs he was learning from the sixties on up, stuff I’d never even heard of but made a mental list to download as soon as I got home.

“So are you in a band?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said, coating his waffles in syrup. “I don’t know if I want to get into a band or the studio side of it, like maybe an audio engineer.”

“Right,” I said, wishing my stomach would stop jittering so I could eat, too, but all I could think about was where we would go after this and what would happen once we got there. Would he ask me out? Would he kiss me without asking me out? Would I let him? That would make me an affair girl, almost like a slut, and I didn’t want to be that, but what if kissing finally made him realize he really liked me and—

“Hey, cool, the Cowboy Junkies doing ‘Sweet Jane,’” he said, nodding up at the ceiling where the speakers were playing a slow, dark, heartbeat-sexy song. “This song never gets old.” The singer’s voice was sultry, summer-night hot, and Seth watched me, playing air guitar and murmuring the lyrics like he was singing them to me.

Is it possible to bloom and die of love at the same time? Yes, because I was doing it, especially when I felt his legs stretch out on either side of mine under the booth and rest against me. I sat spellbound, watching his fingers slide over invisible strings, his hair slipping forward into one eye and him flicking it back without taking his gaze off me.