Phantom Limbs (29 page)

I didn’t know what to say. It was hard to deny.

“Maybe she’ll be the one.” She glanced up. “Do you like her?

“Sure.” I shrugged. “She’s a lot of fun,” I couldn’t resist adding.

“I guess. If you like that sort of thing.” She unfolded her legs and stood up.

“Seeing you and Jeff together makes me think having a girlfriend would be really nice. I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for.”

Unless I’d lost all ability to read that amazing face I used to know so well, my remark stung. And how fucked up was this? I was happy to see she looked hurt? Yes. But I was also flinching inside, because I had wielded the knife.

Noise trickled in from the kitchen — voices, drawers opening and closing, utensils clanging. My mom called to us that dinner was ready.

As we headed outside to eat, I tried to tamp down the irrational hope that filled me. Meg clearly seemed jealous about the possibility of other girls. But being jealous wasn’t the same thing as wanting me, as choosing me. She had made her choice. And her choice was running up to the patio to join us.

“That was a blast — you should have played,” he said to Meg. I averted my eyes as he kissed her. I just wanted it to be done — all of it. This vacation. Meg’s visit. It seemed clear that she was going to go back to California to stay, and I hated that I’d spent all this time thinking that maybe she’d come back. To Willow Grove. To me.

I tried not to let them kill my appetite. The grilling brats and onions smelled so good. My mom brought out the potato salad and a platter of grilled corn on the cob. I sat down close to her at the picnic table, feeling a childish inclination to stay near my protector. She buttered and salted my corn for me and set it on my plate, as if I were little. She gave me three brats and passed me the kind of mustard I prefer, all without a word. It was comforting. It made me wish Meg hadn’t come, hadn’t even been invited. Maybe I would have been happier, who knows. For me, happiness seemed to be as elusive as a shadow at night.

I astounded Football Guy by putting away four brats to his two, plus three ears of corn and a heap of potato salad — which he passed on, because he didn’t like blue cheese. Didn’t he drive Meg nuts with his picky eating?

As I was finishing eating, my parents wandered over to talk to the neighbors. Jeff wiped his mouth with a paper towel and said, “You know what would be fun? Watching the fireworks from the raft.”

“I don’t know,” Meg said, looking toward the lake, a forkful of potato salad suspended in front of her. “Might get too cold.”

“I’ll keep you warm,” he said softly, putting his arms around her and snuggling her neck.

I jumped up.

“Where are you going?” Meg asked me, pulling away from Jeff.

“I need to check something,” I said in desperation. What the hell would I be checking? A cake I had in the oven?

As I whirled to go into the house, my foot got caught in the leg of the picnic table. Unable to catch myself in time, I went crashing down on my knee. Hard.

“Otis!” Meg cried, running over. “Are you okay?”

So. Fucking. Humiliating.

“I’m fine! Jesus. It was nothing.” I untangled myself, got up, and went into the house, trying not to limp.

I went straight to the bathroom, yanked on the pull-chain light, closed the door, and lifted my foot up onto the toilet. Shit. My knee was scraped and red. It would probably swell. This vacation sucked. I would rather have been home with Dara, eating gritty seaweed bars and swimming eight thousand yards a day and lifting.

When I hobbled back into the kitchen, I found Meg there, packing ice into a Ziploc bag.

“I know that hurt,” she said, her expression daring me to challenge her. “Put your leg up.”

“Will you forget it?” I said, embarrassed and pissed off in equal measure. “Jesus, this guy follows you across the country, and you’re stuck to me like glue!”

She stood there, holding the ice pack, looking like she’d been slapped.

It was an idiot thing to say, especially because I loved it when she stuck to me like glue. I sat and put my leg up on a chair. She knelt beside me and held the ice pack on my knee, not meeting my eyes. I opened my mouth to apologize, but then the sliding door opened and there was Mr. Wonderful.

“Let me see,” he said, coming over to us.

“There’s nothing to see,” I said through clenched teeth.

But Meg moved the ice, and he sucked air in through his teeth. “You’re gonna be spending some quality time on the bench, son,” he said.

He so did
not
just call me “son.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It’s just a bruise. It’s no big deal.”

“You think?” he asked, looking amused. “Race you around the block in the morning.”

“Jeff,” Meg chastised him, getting up and leaving the ice balancing on my knee.

“There are no blocks,” I said. “Have you looked around?”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, fine, I’ll race you up and down the verdant country roads. Better?”

I ignored him. I was sort of bummed he knew a word like “verdant.”

“What are you doing?” I called to Meg. She stood at the sliding-glass doors, rubbing at a spot with a towel as if the survival of the planet depended on it.

Jeff heaved a sigh and walked over to her. He came up behind her, taking her arms gently in his hands, and whispered in her ear. She handed him the towel and snapped the rubber band on her wrist.

What the fuck?

My mom slid open the door, and Jeff and Meg stepped aside. “What happened, Otis?” She hurried over to me. “I heard you took a spill.”

“Jesus, it’s nothing!”

She gave me a look and picked up the ice to look underneath.

“I’ll get the arnica,” she said, turning and heading for the bathroom.

“I’ll find something to prop up your foot,” Meg said, and disappeared into the living room before I could protest.

Thankfully, my mom was back with a tube of arnica cream before Jeff and I had to make small talk. I tried not to wince as she rubbed the ointment into my knee. She winced for both of us.

Meg brought a throw pillow from the living room and lifted my foot to set it under. Then she knelt by my side, one hand on the ice pack.

“You really don’t have to —” I began, but she cut me off.

“I don’t mind.”

Jeff watched her for a minute and then wandered outside.

My mom gave me a Motrin and told me to sit still with the ice for a while, then she joined the others outside.

Meg didn’t talk — she just stayed. I felt like crap for being such a dick to her. “Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, about sticking to me —”

She shook her head. “You’re right. I need to get my head on straight, I know that.” She sighed. “This is just a weird place to be with Jeff. I mean, this is . . .” Her eyes met mine. “It’s our place. You know? And I go back to California in a few days. This was supposed to be our chance to talk and . . .” She gave a quick shrug. “I had a whole plan for this trip, for these three weeks. A list of things I needed to try to do. But it didn’t go so well.”

I took off the ice and stood up, because if she was working up to telling me she had made her decision and she wasn’t moving back, I kind of wanted to skip it. I could just see myself starting to cry, and then Football Guy walking in and seeing.

Meg rushed to put my arm around her so she could support me. “Let me help you,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“To take a leak.”

“Ah.” She smiled. “Hm.”

“I’m fine on my own,” I said, moving away from her.

“I should probably get out there, anyway.” She glanced outside. “The fireworks and everything . . .”

“Right. Well, don’t let me stop you.” I hobbled away quickly, wondering if she’d recognize the words she had flung at me that night at Dara’s party.

When I came back from the bathroom, I sat with my back to the windows and played games on my phone, ignoring the whistles of bottle rockets and the shouts of the kids next door. After a while, I got up and poked around in the freezer, finding an unmolested container of brownie fudge ice cream. Chocolate, good. I grabbed a spoon and limped outside.

It was almost dark now. The moonlight shimmered on the now-still lake. Mosquitoes buzzed around the yellow patio light by the door, and firecrackers popped in the distance like gunshots, their smoky sulfur smell hanging in the night air.

“Hey, Ot,” my dad said. He scrubbed the grill with a crumpled ball of aluminum foil. “How’s the knee?”

“Fine. Where is everyone?”

“Down by the pier. Waiting for the fireworks.”

I scraped a layer of ice cream onto my spoon and licked it off.

“You going?” my dad asked. “I think the Dunhams are doing a bonfire. Mom bought stuff for s’mores.”

I certainly didn’t want to sit there during the fireworks while Jeff and Meg made fireworks of their own. I wondered if he ate chocolate, or if he avoided it for Meg. I hoped he was addicted to the stuff. Suddenly I didn’t want the ice cream; now I just wanted to brush my teeth and gargle. “I think I’ll call it a night,” I said.

“Well, there’ll be plenty more fireworks over the next couple nights. You know how it goes here.” He came over and gave me a one-armed hug and, weirdly, a kiss on my head.

I limped back inside, tossed the container of ice cream back in the freezer, and went to get ready for bed. Maybe I’d try to sleep through the next two days. And then we’d go back home and then Meg would go back to California and then . . .

I didn’t know what then. I’d start over, I supposed. Again.

I sent Dara a message just to say hi, but I didn’t hear back, probably because of the lesbian sex, and then pulled out
Gatsby
. After reading for a while, I stared to doze, and it felt so good that I set down my book and went with it. But then the fireworks started in earnest, and there was no sleeping through that racket, especially with the Dunhams’ terrier barking back at it. So I lay there, tortured by thoughts of Meg kissing Football Guy during the fireworks, and waited for it all to be over. Finally, sometime after midnight, I fell asleep.

I was awakened by noises. From upstairs.
His
room.

My heart started to pound.
Please, don’t let me hear them. Anything but that.
But even over the rattling whir of the box fan by my bed, I heard them. I pulled my pillow over my head, but the noises were just echoing in my head now, and I was sure I was hearing Meg’s moans, headboards banging, all kinds of things. I considered getting up and going outside, putting as much distance between me and them as I could. But when I moved, my knee howled.
Fuck.

I grabbed the nearest thing to me — it happened to be an old alarm clock — and hurled it at the ceiling. It exploded, louder than I’d dreamed possible, breaking into pieces.

Silence. Total, utter silence.

A minute passed. My mom called softly from outside my door, “Otis?”

Shit.

She opened the door a crack. “Otis?” she asked again.

“I’m fine. It was nothing.”

“What was the noise?”

“I broke the clock.”

“What? How? Why?”

“I was having a bad dream and — I guess I threw it.”

She was quiet. For too long. Finally she said, “This is not passing my sniff test, Otis.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Are you alone in there?”

“Desperately. Come see.”

She sighed. “Okay. Good night. Love you.”

I lay there, wide awake, until after what felt like forever, my door creaked open again.

This time, it was Meg.

“OTIS?” SHE WHISPERED.

What the hell could she want with me? If she was coming to tell me that the spectacular fuck upstairs had clinched the decision to return to California, frankly I thought that could wait until morning.

“Otis? Can I come in?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t want her anywhere near me, especially if she was all covered in eau de Jeff and whatnot.

“No?” she repeated, like it had never occurred to her I would actually say that. Maybe because I’d never said no to her in all the years I’d known her. “I just — I really need to talk to you.”

“Well,” I whispered, “there’s broken glass in here and you’re barefoot, so . . .”

“How do you know I’m barefoot?”

“Because you’re always barefoot!”

She padded away, and I could hear the door next to mine creak open. I shifted in bed, trying to get comfortable again, but pain radiated from my knee. There was no way I’d be involved in any footraces with Football Guy. Fuck.

There was another tap. “I’m coming in,” Meg whispered. I hear the soft smacking of flip-flops across the floor, then the crunching of glass.

“What do you want, Meg?” I said. “It’s kind of late for a chat.”

“What time is it, anyway?”

“I don’t know — you’re walking over the pieces of the clock right now.”

“Is that what that racket was? What happened?”

“Bad dream,” I muttered. More like a nightmare.

“God, it’s pitch-dark.” She shuffled her way to the bed. “Can I sit? I don’t know where you are.”

I moved to the other side of the bed, heaving a mighty sigh. “Go ahead.”

I felt her sink onto the bed. A hand brushed my arm. “Where are you?” she asked.