Stay (40 page)

“This one is done,” I said, taking it out into the living room and putting it in the pile with the rest of the things I was taking.

“It’s weird that she didn’t say good-bye,” Janie said.

“I feel bad taking everything from her,” I said.

“It’s your stuff,” she said, shoving some extra newspaper in the box with the glasses. She wrote
Fragile
on the side with one of my old scented markers. “Don’t feel bad. If she had a problem with it, she wouldn’t have hired guys to help us move this stuff.”

Janie moved on to the bookshelves. I grabbed an empty box and went into the bathroom. I left the towels, except for the big ratty beach ones. I took the shower curtain with the purple embroidered fish and orange bubbles. I left the bath mat; I couldn’t remember it ever being ours anyway.

I’d taken almost everything from my room a little bit at a time over the years, so there wasn’t much left. I took the posters off the walls. The blue poster putty was dried out and it cracked off, leaving oily spots on the walls. I threw out the poster of a dolphin jumping over a rainbow into the ocean and the
Hang in There
kitty. I kept my U2 poster and the one of Basquiat and Andy Warhol in boxing gloves and shiny shorts, even though I knew I’d never hang them up again. I rolled them up and wrapped a hair elastic around them.

I packed the record player and the answering machine. I pulled the box of Christmas ornaments out of the crawl space. When Janie wasn’t looking, I snuck the sombrero magnet into her purse.

Janie finished packing the romance novels. We left the magazines in the baskets under the coffee table. Later, the movers took the coffee table and the couch, and the baskets were all that was left in the living room.

It looked so small. My mom and I had lived in this space with just three rooms and a bathroom, and it had never felt small until now.

When the movers had loaded up everything, Janie came over and hugged me. “It’ll never be the same again,” she said.

“It already wasn’t,” I said.

“What do you think Mom will do with it?” she said.

“Meditation room,” I said, laughing. I could picture Diane in a black leotard and high heels, sitting cross- legged on a pillow with her eyes closed, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“Yoga studio,” Janie said.

“What did she call it when my mom took that yoga class that time?” I asked.

“I believe she said it was ‘new age hippie communist bullshit,’ ” Janie said, laughing.

“How is yoga communist?”

“Who knows,” Janie said. “She just says things. They don’t always make sense.” She stepped out into the middle of the room. “You know what I would do here?”

“What?”

“I’d leave it just like this so I could come up here and do cartwheels.” She raised her arms and her right leg and jumped into a lopsided cartwheel.

I joined her. We did clumsy cartwheels until our wrists hurt and we were laughing so hard we couldn’t get up again.

We lay on the floor next to each other and stared up at the skylights. I remembered lying on the rug, coloring with Janie when we were kids. She always stayed in the lines, and I never did.

Janie kicked me lightly on the side of my leg. I looked at her. She said, “Don’t you ever, ever stay away from me.” She looked over at me. “No matter what, okay? If someone makes you an offer, I’ll double it.” She was laughing and crying at the same time.

“This could work out well for me,” I said, kicking her back.

“I need you,” she said.

“I know. Me too.”

“You need you, too?” she asked, leaning her head on my shoulder.

“Yes,” I said. “Desperately.” I leaned my head on top of her head. “And you.”

We lay there for a while longer without saying anything. I was soaking it all in, and I think she was too. I was trying to memorize the way the light looked on the floor, and the way the rug felt against my arms.

Janie got up and said she had to get something at the main house, but I think she was just trying to give me a little room to say my good-byes.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine that my mom was there too, but she just felt farther away. I thought about what Diane said about fire and independence. And I thought about all the nights my mom and I stayed up late with mugs of hot chocolate, blasting Boston and playing board games, all the inside jokes and the crazy craft days, and crawling into bed with her when there was a bad thunderstorm; none of that was here. It happened here, but it was gone. All I could do was take her stuff and the things she taught me and the things I remembered about her, and try to do my best with them. I’d lost Alex, but I had a life to go home to. It was small, and it was simple, but it was a start. I had my freelance work and my new house. I had Peter and Janie, and Agnes, and Louis, and, of course, I had Joe. My mom would have been happy for me. I think she would have been proud of the way I was finally learning to carry on without her. And she would have loved Joe.

I got up and walked around the carriage house apartment, running my hand along the bookcase, and looking out the window of my bedroom one last time.

I went into the kitchen and washed Diane’s glasses out by hand with lots of soap, rinsing all the cigarettes into the garbage disposal. I lined up the glasses upside down on a dish towel on the counter next to the sink.

I went into my mom’s closet and stepped up on the shoe rack to reach the back of the very top shelf. I pulled down the carton of cigarettes my mom kept in secret so Diane would never run out in a crisis. I grabbed the auxiliary bourbon from behind the dishwasher detergent under the kitchen sink. I left the bottle and the cigarettes next to the glasses on the counter.

I found my purse and got my keys out. Using another key, I pried the ring apart so I could get the carriage house key off. It was my first key; all the other keys on the ring had come after. I knew Diane would let me keep it, but I was ready to leave it behind. I placed it on the counter with the rest of my offering.

There were probably more things I could have packed up, but I was done. I closed the door without doing a final scan of things and went to find Janie.

J
anie wanted to drive back, and against my better judgment, I let her. She ground the gears and drove ten miles under the speed limit for the entire trip, but she was so excited to be driving a truck that I didn’t have the heart to tell her to pull over so we could switch.

I watched for frozen waterfalls striping the layers of rock on either side of the highway. Sometimes they ran directly down the grooves the dynamite left when they’d blasted to make the road.

There was a deer trail running alongside the highway. I watched it run up and down the hills we drove past until it disappeared into some shrubs.

We were about an hour and a half late getting back to the condo. Peter and Agnes were already there, ready to help load the rest of my things in the truck so we could take everything over to the new house.

Well, Peter was ready to help. Agnes said she was there to supervise, which for the most part involved telling us to be careful ten times in a row and saying, “Lift with your legs, dear,” any time anyone picked up something that looked even remotely heavy. Still, it was nice to have her there.

I thought when we got to my new house there would be a few papers to sign and then we’d start moving in, but the four of us walked into a crowd of strangers standing in my new living room. Louis had turned it into an event, inviting the whole neighborhood.

“Vannah!” Louis yelled when he saw us kicking off our shoes to add to the collection at the front door. “Welcome home!” He gave me a big hug and a kiss on both cheeks. “Who are your friends?”

I introduced him to Janie, Peter, and Agnes, and he hugged all three of them, one at a time. None of them knew what to make of him. Peter smirked, Janie stared at him wide-eyed, and Agnes fanned herself with her gloves.

“Come in! Come in! Eat!” Louis shooed us into the kitchen. His furniture was already packed up and moved out, so he’d laid out a full spread, buffet-style, in big foil trays on the kitchen counter. There were three different pasta dishes, lunch meat, rolls, and a huge bowl of roasted red peppers in oil.

“Where’s Joe?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s in the yard,” Louis said, smiling. “That is a dog who loves his yard.”

I went out through the garage and opened the door to the backyard. Joe was sitting in front of the toolshed, wagging his tail. His big pink tongue was hanging out of his mouth and his head was cocked to the side. I had planned to just let him in since I wasn’t wearing shoes, but I was so happy to see him that I ran out into the yard in my socks. He barked when he saw me, ran over at full speed, and knocked me on my ass. His whole body was wagging. He put his paws on my shoulders and licked my face until I was drenched. “I missed you, buddy!” I said, laughing and wiping my face with my sleeve.

When I looked up, Alex was walking out from behind the toolshed with a rake in one hand and a Frisbee in the other. “It was on the roof.” He gestured to the toolshed with the rake. He looked down at his boots and back at me. “Hi,” he said. Joe bounded over to Alex, grabbed the Frisbee from his hand, and ran to the far corner of the yard to chew it.

“Hi,” I said.

Alex leaned the rake against the house, offered me his hand, and helped me up.

He kept holding my hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. He took a deep breath and talked slowly. “I don’t want to live in a fucking bubble, and I know you’re worth it, and I’m sorry. And all of that sounded a lot better when I said it to myself on the way over.” He let go of my hand. “My ex-wife swore she didn’t, but really she left me for this other guy. And until it happened, I was oblivious. She hid it and I didn’t go looking. It wasn’t the cause, it was the symptom, I know, but it hurt. Badly.” He sighed. “I felt like I was in the dark with you, and it scared me. I should have just talked to you about it. I just didn’t think I could do this again, but that’s not fair because you’re not her. You’re amazing, and beautiful, and I can’t stop thinking about you, and I realized, I can’t not do this. I can’t walk away from you, because honestly, from the first time I met you- ” He paused and looked at me. His eyes were wide and his eyebrows made round arches. “I mean, I’ve never met anyone like you, Van.”

“You mean that in a good way, right?” I asked, smiling.

His face softened and his voice got quiet. “In a very good way,” he said.

I slid my arms around his neck and kissed him hard.

He wrapped his arms around my waist and picked me up so my feet weren’t touching the pavement. “You’re not wearing shoes,” he said.

“My feet are freezing,” I said, laughing.

Alex swung me around and carried me inside with my feet dangling just above the ground. Joe followed behind us.

Janie was standing in the kitchen next to Louis, who was spooning more food onto a paper plate than she probably ate in a week.

“You need to eat! There’s no meat on these bones! Peppers, do you like peppers?” he asked her, stopping with the spoon in midair when he saw Alex carrying me into the kitchen. “Oh, this is what I like to see!” His eyes filled with tears. “The people I love are in love,” he said to Janie, handing her the plate.

Alex put me down and Louis hugged both of us at the same time. “You make an old man happy,” Louis said, putting his hand over his heart.

After everyone ate, Louis and I signed the papers for the house. When we were done, Louis threw his hands up in the air. “That is that!” he said. Everyone clapped. A few of the women were crying. A tall man, about Louis’s age, wearing a tweed cap, shoved his fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Louis went into the cupboard and pulled out a jar that looked like it was filled with water. He strained for a minute before the lid twisted open and then poured it into tiny cordial glasses. He handed them out to me, Alex, and the bewildered attorney. It smelled like old socks.