The Sea of Tranquility (20 page)

The quiet out here is strange. It shouldn’t be. I’m used to the quiet, but it only took me two days without her, to feel it. It’s unsettling. Years of working out here by myself undone by less than two months of her company. And now she hasn’t been here for days. Maybe it’s a good thing, because I obviously need a reality check. I try to work with the garage door down as much as possible, just so I know that I can. I’m not going to let myself get used to anyone again. She can come here. She can sit in my garage, hand me tools, ask me questions. She can use me to get the talking out of her system. I can handle the company as long as I don’t come to expect it too much. And I won’t. I don’t know when she’s coming back but I wonder how long I can keep the garage closed before I start to suffocate.

***

Nastya

I’ve been clocking more miles this week than I have for the past several. A lot of my running time has been being spent in a certain garage and I’m trying to rein it in. But I miss him. It’s not like going without seeing a friend for a few days. He’s the be all and end all of my friends right now. I have Drew, and I seem to have acquired Clay somewhere along the way, but Josh is my escape. He’s my hiding place.

It’s been days since I’ve been to Josh’s house. I’ve spent the whole week sitting in a chair at Clay’s, feeling antsy and ridiculous and just wanting to get up and move. I hate the sitting still. When you spend months in a bed, letting your body heal and then sitting in a chair, trying to make your hand work, you get sick of it fast and you want to run away. So every day when I get done at Clay’s, I have to run. It’s the only thing that keeps the frayed edges of my sanity intact. And since Margot caved a few weeks back and let me get a portable punching bag, I have something to hit now and I spend a good amount of time doing that, too.

By Friday night, I can’t help it. I don’t even know if he’ll be home, but my feet take me there anyway. I wonder if he missed me, too. I slow myself down before I reach the driveway. He’s in the back, adjusting one of his saws and he’s turned away from me. I look around for someplace to climb up on the counter, but there isn’t one. Every inch of space on the workbench is occupied. Piles of wood scraps, random tools and boxes covering the whole thing. It’s never this overrun in here. Josh is meticulous, which means this is on purpose and I wonder if it’s a message. Maybe he realized how much he enjoyed not having me all over his space. He got reacquainted with his solitude and found that he’d missed it.

I’m not ready to walk out yet. If I’m going to be rejected, I’d like it to come complete with humiliation. I’m hoping he’ll come out from behind that stupid saw and say something to me, but he doesn’t look like he’s rushing to do so. Out of the corner of my eye, in front of the side door where the workbench ends, is the chair I’d seen him working on last week. I recognize the legs on it, the design he had painstakingly routed on all four of them. He must have finished it this week and I wonder if he made it on order or if he did it for himself. It’s exquisite, and every time I see something he’s made, I hate him a little more for it. My jealousy is a living thing. Shifting, changing, growing. Like my rage and my mother’s regret.

I run my hands along the arc of the backrest and kneel down to examine the legs. The armrests are wide and curved to match the lines of the back. I wonder if he’s started another one yet, because it should be part of a matching set. My fingers are still tracing their way down the other side, and before I’ve thought better of it, I slide into the seat, and that’s when the perfection of it strikes me. Because this chair should not be comfortable, but I may never want to leave it. My arms are resting on the sides and I lean back and look up to find Josh watching me. It’s unnerving the way he’s staring, no matter how much I may have gotten used to him and I kind of wish he wasn’t so damn good-looking because it makes it hard to look away.

The expression on his face is almost anxious but there’s something like mischief in it as well. It’s the same look Clay had when he showed me the picture he’d drawn of me. He’s waiting for a reaction, for approval. I look down at the chair I’m sitting in and back up at him, but he’s not looking at me anymore. He’s gone back to adjusting the saw as if everything has returned to the way it should be and that’s when it hits me. That he had done all of this on purpose. He made sure there was no place for me to sit on the counter so I’d be forced to notice it. Because the chair was meant for me.

The realization is enough to propel my ass straight up and out of that chair. He looks up, jarred by the sudden movement and for a moment we just stare at one other. I must look like a crazed animal, ready to bolt like the first night I walked in here. I can say what I’m thinking but I don’t need to. He already knows.

“It’s only a chair.” He’s talking me down off a ledge.

“I can’t take it.” I try to make it sound like he’s the unreasonable one for giving it to me.

“Why not?”

“You should sell it.”

“I don’t need to.”

“I won’t take it. Give it to someone else.”

“You need someplace to sit. I’m tired of you moving everything around and getting in my way whenever I’m working. Now you have a place to sit. So sit.” He motions me down into the chair with a tilt of his head and I sit and it feels more perfect than it did a few moments ago. He leans over me and places his hands on top of mine on the armrests and looks straight into my eyes, which flays me a little bit.

“It’s a chair. Stop overanalyzing it. I’m not selling it and I’m not giving it to someone else. I made it for you. It’s yours.” He pulls away and stands up straight. When his hands are gone from mine, I realize that it’s the first time he’s ever really touched me, and I wish he’d put them back. “Besides, it already has your name on it.”

“Where?”

“Look underneath. I was going to put it on the back where you could actually see it but it didn’t work.”

I slide down out of the chair and get as low as I can to the ground so I can twist my head around and see what he’s talking about. And I do and it’s unmistakable. There, on the underside of the seat, is an engraving of the sun.

I know at that moment what he’s given me and it’s not a chair. It’s an invitation, a welcome, the knowledge that I am accepted here. He hasn’t given me a place to sit. He’s given me a place to belong.

CHAPTER 22

Nastya

It amazes me how people are so afraid of what can happen in the dark, but they don’t give a second thought about their safety during the day; as if the sun offers some sort of ultimate protection from all the evil in the world. It doesn’t. All it does is whisper to you, lulling you with its warmth before it shoves you face down into the dirt. Daylight won’t protect you from anything. Bad things happen all the time; they don’t wait until after dinner.

***

I’ve never been to Josh’s house during the day. It looks different in the afternoon. I wouldn’t be here now if my car battery hadn’t been unjumpably dead when I left school today. I live close enough to the campus to walk, but I don’t walk anywhere in the afternoon. Mornings I can deal with, but there’s a period of hours in the afternoon when I hate being outside. Even nighttime doesn’t bother me so much. The dark doesn’t breed fear in me the way the daytime does. The afternoon sun has a way of following me, burning memories onto my back. Josh always offers me rides home from his house. He thinks it should make me nervous, running alone at night, and it does. I’m not stupid enough to think I’m ever safe outside, anywhere, at any time of day. It’s just that I’m more nervous during the daytime.

So now I’m here, on Josh Bennett’s couch at 3:15 in the afternoon, watching General Hospital. Josh spent the last commercial break patiently filling me in on as much of the past decade’s worth of storylines as he could in three and a half minutes while I ate as many Twizzlers as I could. When the commercials were over, he stopped abruptly and told me he’d tell me the rest during the next break. I don’t think I’ve spent much time actually watching the television. Mostly I’ve been looking at Josh and trying to figure out who the hell he is. I’ve developed a theory that, perhaps, Josh is really twins and there are two of him, because I’m convinced, from day to day, that he’s not the same person. It’s like that Christian Bale movie where the twin brothers share the same life and you never know which one you’re with. That’s how I feel with him.

I crumple up the empty cellophane wrapper and walk into the kitchen. “Where’s your trash?” With as much time as I spend at this house, I never actually come inside. We pretty much live in the garage.

“Under the sink,” he says, not looking away from the TV. “Do you ever eat anything other than sugar?”

I mentally tally what I’ve eaten today: two protein bars, two bags of peanut M&Ms (but they were the small bags so it’s really like eating only one), plus the recently consumed Twizzlers. “Sometimes,” I answer. Really, I wouldn’t even bother with the protein bars if I didn’t need them after working out. When I lived with my parents, we actually sat down and ate meals, real ones, like the way we eat at Drew’s on Sundays. Margot doesn’t cook, plus we always have to eat early so she can get to work and I’m usually not in the mood. Maybe when I’m eighty I’ll like eating dinner at four o’clock in the afternoon, but now, not so much.

I sit back down on the couch next to him and we watch the rest of the show. By four o’clock I know more than I ever cared to know about Quartermaines and Spencers. I shouldn’t mock. While I was stuck recovering all those months, I watched my share of bad soap operas. And bad game shows. And bad talk shows. I was an expert in all things daytime television. I just didn’t watch General Hospital. After today, I know enough that I can pretend like I did.

When it’s over, we climb into Josh’s truck so he can take me to buy a car battery. We have to stop back at the school parking lot on the way, because I know the make and model of my car but that’s the extent of my knowledge. Apparently that’s not enough information to tell me what kind of battery I need, so we have to detour back to campus. Josh looks at my car, writes something down and then takes my keys and pops the hood. I’m still holding onto my backpack with all my books, so I jump out to throw it in my car so I won’t have to keep carrying it. As soon as I do, I wish I wasn’t so lazy, because that’s when I see Tierney Lowell walking towards us in the parking lot. She’s not the only one. There are quite a few students exiting the building and I realize that it’s just after four and most of the practices and club meetings are finishing up. She’s the one I notice though, because for some reason she seems to hate me. OK, most of the girls don’t like me and I’m an easy target because of the clothes. I get that. But she shoots daggers at me like she just caught me feeding chocolate to her dog. Normally, that’s cool, because it’s all easily ignorable and I can avoid her without much effort. However, right now, I’m jumping out of Josh Bennett’s truck and he’s standing next to my car and in a minute we’ll be leaving together and that’s an act of exhibitionism I wasn’t planning to put on just yet.

We get back in the truck immediately, with the shared, unspoken need to get out of there as quickly as possible. Once we’ve driven away, I look out the window, scanning the cars around us. Josh’s windows are tinted, but I still won’t take any chances. When I feel safe enough that we’re not being watched, I ask the question I’ve been holding onto since we left his house.

“You watch General Hospital?” I don’t really need confirmation. I know for a fact that he watches it. He doesn’t look at me but I see his lips turn up in the half-smile he gets when he’s embarrassed about something, which is really just a real smile he’s trying to drown.

“Yes,” he says. OK, he did answer my question, but what I really wanted to know was why or how or something that will explain it to me because
come on
. But if there’s anything more surprising to me than the newfound knowledge that he’s a closet soap opera addict, it’s the fact that he actually keeps talking and offers me an explanation; one I didn’t have to ask for. “My mom used to watch it. Religiously. Never missed an episode. My dad and I made fun of her all the time. When she died, I kept thinking that maybe she’d come back, and when she did, I wanted to be able to tell her everything that had happened so she wouldn’t have missed anything. So I watched it. Every day. After a while I realized she wasn’t coming back but I was pot vested by that point. I just never stopped.” He shrugs like he’s accepted this fact; only I’m not sure if it’s the fact that his mother isn’t coming back or that he watches General Hospital that he’s accepting. Maybe he’s not sure either.

“How old were you?”

“I was eight which I guess is old enough to get it. I just didn’t really want to… I don’t know… My dad tried to make it make sense for me, but there really isn’t a way to explain how a person you’ve seen every day of your life just
isn’t
anymore. Someone just hit delete and she’s gone. I had a hard time grasping that I could come home one night and find that the person who was laughing and hugging me that morning just stopped existing. I didn’t believe it was possible. I didn’t want to believe it was possible… so, yeah, General Hospital.”

I didn’t look away from him once while he was telling that story. It’s the first real thing he’s ever told me. It makes me feel ashamed because I’ve never told him anything real. Not even my name.

He turns and looks at me for a second with what is almost a look of apology on his face. Resignation, maybe? Then he shifts his attention back to the road and we pull into the mall parking lot a minute later. I have one of Josh Bennett’s secrets now. He gave it to me. I wish I could give it back.

CHAPTER 23

Josh

Whenever someone knocks on my door, there’s a part of me that still kind of expects them to be carrying some sort of food. In the days and weeks after my mom and my sister died, I got a crash course in grieving. I learned the way it works; some of it was about how I was expected to react, but most of it was about how other people were expected to react. I don’t think there’s a written set of rules, but there might as well be, because everyone seems to do the same things. A lot of it has to do with food. My grandmother explained the psychology of this to me at one point but I didn’t really listen because I didn’t really care. People must know that just because you need to eat doesn’t mean you want them coming by your house non-stop, using casserole dishes and coffee cakes as an excuse to eavesdrop on your grief.