How Not To Fall (25 page)

Chapter 1

Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime

I've never driven a moving truck before, but I drive this one for twelve hours, Indiana to New York, sobbing off and on the whole way. I listen to Beck's version of “Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime” on repeat. The sky is gray and it spits rain all day, like there's a rain cloud following me east.

By the time I pull up in front of my parents' building on Fifth Avenue, opposite the park, the sky is thundery and dark, too dark for an evening in June. My parents meet me under the green awning and hug me in happy greeting. If they notice my blotchy, tear-stained face, they don't mention it. If they wonder why, when I say I'm so glad to be home, I instantly burst into tears, they don't ask.

The super finds a couple of guys to move my stuff into the library, and Mom and Dad feed me dinner while the guys bring it all in. I take a shower and wash away last night's sex, and then my parents and I sit on the living room couch and celebrate my homecoming by binge-watching
Gilmore Girls,
which was one of my favorite shows when I was little.

And then I go to bed alone. I lie there, wondering what Charles is doing, how he feels, how he felt when he woke up and I wasn't there.

The swamping shame of sneaking out like that is too much. I curl up in a ball, teeth gritted, and try to soothe myself by making lists in my head of the many valuable things I've learned recently:

I cry myself to sleep.

I wake up, cry a little more, go for a run, take a nap, eat dinner with my parents and watch a movie with them, and then cry myself to sleep again.

This is most of how I spend my month at home before I leave for medical school.

At my parents' suggestion, I start attending the drop-in ballet classes for adults at Joffrey a few times a week. They think the discipline and the community will do me good. They're right. I rip the shanks out of some old, dead pointe shoes and stop eating sugar and kick my own ass three nights a week, and it keeps my bleeding heart tethered to the rest of my body. I enjoy being in a group of “adults.” Which is apparently what I am now.

And every night, for a month, I lie in bed, staring at my Alan Turing poster—“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done”—and I make lists in my head, to remind myself of all the important things I'm learning:

I knew that last one already, but about ten days into my cry/ run/nap/ballet/dinner/cry/sleep routine, she follows me into my room after we watch
Groundhog Day,
sits on the bed, and pats the spot next to her. “Tell me what's going on, girl.”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah,” she says, rolling her eyes, and she pats the bed again.

So I sit beside her and bunch my lips together against the trembling that they've learned to associate with lying in this bed: If on bed, then cry until asleep. Ugh.

“Charles,” I say, suppressing my tears. I stare at my hands.

“What did he do?”

“He didn't—” I stop and hold my breath, and then whimper, “He just didn't love me.” I feel like a six-year-old confessing that another kid at school didn't want to be my friend.

She sighs heavily and brushes her hand softly over my hair. “Annabelle Frances Coffey.” She only uses my whole name when she's about to say something she feels self-conscious about saying.

“Yeah.” I sniff.

“I'm only going to say this once. Are you really listening?”

“Yeah,” I huff into my knees.

“Your heart. Is too wise. To love someone. Who doesn't deserve it. So either: He's a superb human being who has earned your friendship. Or else you will stop loving him altogether, and soon. I don't know which it is, but I know it's one or the other. This thing you're experiencing right now is the chaos as your heart decides whether to let go of the love or . . . hold on to it in a new way.”

I wipe my nose on my sleeve and try to breathe. I ask, “How do you know?”

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know my heart will figure out what to do?”

“That's what hearts do, when you let them.”

I sigh and sniff again, and I believe her. “Okay.”

And she's right. That's what mine does.

Slowly, painfully, like a hand uncurling from a fist to an open palm, my heart opens up, exploring ways to hold Charles differently.

But.

I'm not out of the chaos yet when Margaret calls me, barely three weeks after I left Indiana, and says in an urgent voice, “I know the answer is probably no, but you're my best friend and I have to ask: Can you fly to Indiana
tomorrow
to attend my wedding?”

“What?!”

“The district court overturned the ban on same-sex marriage today. We want to go get a license right away because you
know
that shit is going to be stopped within a matter of days.”

“Oh my god, yes! Oh my god!”

 

Margaret and Reshma pick me up at the airport the next morning and take me to Reshma's moms' house and we clean and decorate and cook and hug and laugh. I mow the lawn while Margaret and Reshma weed the flower beds, which seems to be mostly an excuse to roll around in the dirt, tickling each other. The moms are inside moving furniture around to create space and “flow.” They're getting married too—a double wedding in the backyard—and I feel so, so lucky to be here with these amazing people on this amazing day.

I also feel like I'm a one-hour drive away from Charles. I don't know if he's coming, and I can't bring myself to ask. I just do what I'm instructed to do, being as helpful as I can until it's my turn to take a shower and put on a dress, and then I start meeting guests at the back fence. My job is to let people in without letting the dog out. (The dog has no interest in getting out. He's a twelve-year-old bulldog with an underbite and casual attitude about licking his penis in public.)

Eventually Margaret's and my research supervisor, Professor Smith—“
Diana,
” she insists—arrives with her husband. I hug her hello. She's so pregnant I worry she might pop like a balloon if I squeeze her, but I hug her as hard as I dare.

“Hey, is Charles coming?” I ask casually. The impression I want to give is that this isn't something I've been obsessing about more or less nonstop since Margaret called.

Professor Smith—Diana—looks at me suspiciously, but only says, “He's here—we drove up together.”

“Oh.” Something cold drops into my stomach, even as my heart starts fluttering.

All of our heads turn back to the driveway, and there he is.

Chapter 2

Tell Me What to Do

I've hardly ever seen her in a dress. Mostly it's skinny jeans and novelty T-shirts; you'd mistake her for an awkward fourteen-year-old boy if it weren't for the way she moves—not awkward, not a boy. But she stands at the fence now in the same red silk thing she wore under her academic regalia at commencement and to dinner in Montreal. At commencement, she looked pretty and happy. In Montreal, she looked fucking gorgeous, tousled and pink-cheeked from sex. Now, though, she looks pale and sick and much too thin, with exhaustion in her eyes.

That's my fault.

There's a look of dread on her face as her eyes find mine.

That's my fault, too.

I wouldn't have come if I had known. When the e-mail from Margaret came yesterday, and Diana asked if I would drive her and her husband up, I said yes easily, thinking there was no chance Annie would fly back for one day. No chance.

But she is a better friend than I gave her credit for, and now I am imposing myself on her, at her best friend's wedding. Fuck. I am a waste of skin and oxygen, and she—god. Brilliant. Strong. Sane, so sane, I felt like an escaped convict with his face turned toward raw winter sunlight when I talked to her. Clear. Vivid. Luminescent and illuminating.

I made her cry. I made her hurt.

I tuck the crate of wine bottles and presents under my arm, put on my sunglasses, and go to the fence.

“Hey,” she says, not quite looking at me.

“Hey,” I answer.

“Need help with that?” she asks, squinting against the sun.

“Just point me to the food table.”

“In the house.” She closes the gate behind us and waves us to the back door. “Living room. It's easy to find.”

I make for the house, planning tactics for staying out of Annie's way for the next couple of hours.

Reshma and Margaret are married in the backyard, right after Reshma's parents. Annie cries becomingly through both ceremonies, standing beside Margaret and handing over the rings when it's her turn. I watch her the whole time; I can't take my eyes off her. She looks so obviously unwell—can anyone see her and not see the grief, the loss of appetite, the disrupted sleep? They're all my fault.

And at the same time . . . her feet are bare, her bare toes in the grass. Can anyone see Annie's long, bony bare feet in the grass and not imagine the dirty, cool soles pressing into the backs of their thighs as she laughs and wriggles under them? I want to make love with Annie outside. I've never done that.

I never will do that.

Just stay out of her way, you arse
.

During the reception, I occupy myself with noticing when Annie comes into the room so that I can leave it—trying to give her space, trying to do what she asked. The third time this happens, Diana comes over and asks me what the hell is going on, and I look at the floor and the wall and the furniture as I confess, “Er, it's awkward. Annie told you that she and I had, as she put it, ‘A Thing,' but it ended rather messily when she left Indiana and she asked for space. I'm trying to give her that space.”

Diana pats my arm and gives me a sympathetic smile. “We'll go,” she says. “I'm hot and tired, and my feet are swelling anyway. Let me just say good-bye to Margaret.”

I nod—then I notice Annie watching us, and I walk out the front door. I put on my sunglasses and sit on the porch swing to wait for Diana.

After just a minute the door opens and I look up, expecting Diana, but instead . . . there's Annie.