The Sea of Tranquility (36 page)

I think I’m still smiling at my hands like an idiot, and when I look back up he’s watching me with something like respect and that look is definitely better than being called distractingly pretty.

“They used to be soft, but the sandpaper is killing them,” he says. “They’re turning into my hands.” I wonder if he thinks that’s an insult. His hands are miracles. I can watch them for hours, transforming wood into something it never dreamed of being.

“So I won’t touch you then and you won’t notice.”

“No need to be rash,” he jokes, picking them up again and running his thumb along one of the scars on my left hand. The plastic surgeons worked miracles, but they still couldn’t get it perfect. You can still see all the wrong about it when you look. “I just like your hands,” he continues, not taking his eyes off them. “Sometimes I think they’re the only real thing about you.”

He says things like that a lot. Like he’s reminding me that just because he doesn’t ask the questions, it doesn’t mean he forgets they exist.

“You want to test that theory?” I ask, smiling at him. He keeps his grip on my hands and pulls me back toward the wall.

“Not with the garage door open.”

***

I spend half of Saturday morning sitting cross-legged on a flatbed at Home Depot with Josh pushing me up and down the lumber aisles, telling me about how every kind of wood varies. I learn which to use for furniture, which are better for floors, which are the best for finishing and so on. Finally he kicks me off the flatbed and I have to walk because he needs it to actually put wood on. I might complain about having to get up if it didn’t mean that I get to spend the next twenty minutes watching him load up lumber, and complaining about that would be wrong on so many levels. It’s worth the standing any day.

When we get home, we plan to spend the afternoon finishing, but it starts to pour and we can’t work with the garage closed and the finish will get cloudy anyway from the humidity. At this point, I could tell you this myself without any prompting. Between Josh and shop class, I’m getting quite an education.

We spend the afternoon in the kitchen and I figure if he can teach me about lumber, I can teach him how to bake a decent cookie. I scold him for packing the flour into a measuring cup, and he keeps doing it just to annoy me until I take it away and do it myself.

“Why do I have to learn how to make them when I have you here to do it for me?”

“You know,” I say, pushing a bag of brown sugar and another measuring cup at him since he wants to pack things so badly, “one day I may not be here, and then you’ll be cookieless and sad.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. I mentally kick the thought in the groin, and when it doubles over, I knee it in the face so it will never rear its ugly head again. Unfortunately, it’s too late for that.

“It’s okay,” he says gently, with just a whisper of a smile. “I’m not that sensitive about it. Everyone just assumes I am. Don’t be everyone, okay?”

“Why aren’t you angry about it?”

“What’s the point?”

“So you’re just okay with it?”

“I said I wasn’t angry. I didn’t say I was okay with it. I understand all the crap people say. It’s natural. It’s inevitable. It’s a part of life. Still doesn’t make it okay that someone can just disappear like they never existed. But being pissed all the time doesn’t make it okay, either. I know. I used to be pissed all the time. It gets old.”

“If I were you I’d be the angriest person in the world.”

“I think you already are.”

There isn’t any point in arguing with that, so I step over to show him how hard to pack down the brown sugar, but I still feel shitty.

“After we’re done with this, maybe you can help me move the coffee table over from the wall. I think I’m going to get rid of the piece of crap in front of the couch,” he says, changing the subject and letting me off the hook.

“You’re going to move the love of your life into the middle of the room where Drew can violate it with his shoes any time he likes?” This is genuinely surprising because I know how Josh feels about that table.

“Since when did it become the love of my life?” He sounds bemused.

“You talk about it like it’s a girl.”

“What can I say?” He shrugs. “That table makes me want to be a better man. Jealous?”

“You know it’ll kill Drew not to be able to put his feet on it. Unless you’ve decided to allow that.”

He looks mildly horrified. I think he’s imagining it happening.

“Maybe it’s fine where it is.”

“Just so you know,” I inform him, “one day, I’m going to get tired of sharing your affection with that coffee table and I’m going to make you choose.”

“Just so you know,” he mimics me, “I would chop that table up and use it for firewood before I would ever choose anything over you.” It’s a ridiculous thing to say, but he nails me with those eyes, making sure I know he’s serious and I wish he wouldn’t do that.

“That would be a waste.” I take the bag of brown sugar he’s still holding and put it back so I can have an excuse to turn away, because I’m not in the mood for serious, and for some reason, this conversation keeps veering back toward places I don’t want to go. “You don’t even have a fireplace.”

“You make it impossible to say anything nice to you.”

“Not impossible. Just difficult,” I say lightly, hoping he’ll change his tone, too. I figure maybe I can distract him and I lift myself up on my tiptoes to kiss him. I can tell he knows what I’m doing and he hesitates just a second before lifting his hand to the back of my neck and leaning into me; his mouth moving against mine, soft and searching, coaxing out my secrets. I pull away and walk over to turn on the mixer, hoping the noise of it will effectively kill any conversation.

“Tell me where you got the scar.” It comes out of nowhere and from everywhere.

“No,” I whisper. He can’t hear it over the mixer, but he knows I said it. The worst thing is that there’s a part of me that’s starting to want to tell him, and that scares the living crap out of me. Josh makes me feel safe and safe is something I never thought I’d feel again.

He pulls me back against him and holds me there. I can feel the warmth of his fingers imprinting the skin at my waist. His mouth is next to my ear, and for just one second I expect him to call me a Russian whore.

“Please.”

“I don’t even know which one you’re asking about,” I say and I’m thankful not to have to see his face. There’s something in the way he says please that won’t let me laugh this off or lie to him. There’s a desperation in it that I don’t want to acknowledge.

“Any. Just one. Just something. Tell me something true.” His arms are solid, wrapping around me, pressing my back against his chest, and it feels more like truth than anything has in such a long time. But I still have nothing to give him.

“I don’t even know what that is anymore.”

***

“Do you live here anymore?” Margot asks me one afternoon when I get back from school. I wish I could say it’s not a valid question, but I’m at Josh’s more often than not. I come home in the mornings before she gets back from work just so I can shower and change for school. Sometimes not even that. Little by little, my clothes seem to be making it to his house, also.

I can shrug or shake my head or play dumb and act like I don’t know what she’s saying, but I owe her more than that. There’s a part of me that almost opens my mouth, but I just can’t make myself do it. If I say something, I’ll have to say everything and that isn’t happening today. I pull some notebook paper out of one of my school folders and write.

If I say no will you make me come back?

“Sit, Em.” She pulls out a chair at the kitchen table and I do the same, keeping the pencil and paper in my hand.

“I know you’re an adult now,” she puts the word adult in air quotes and I want to shake my head at her and beg her not to make me lose respect. “But you’re not all grown up,” she continues. She’s not telling me anything I don’t know.

Point?
I write and turn the paper towards her. I’m not trying to give her attitude, actually. I just want to know if I’m going to be fighting to keep the one thing that’s been keeping me sane. And, really, it’s not even as much Josh as it is that garage.

“Does it help? Being there?”

My instinct is to say that nothing helps, because that’s always my instinct, but it’s not true this time. Everything about being there helps. It’s a place to be and something to do and a person who doesn’t compare me to Emilia. I don’t just nod. I write
yes
on the paper.

“I won’t pretend to like it. But you’re alone here all the time and I don’t like that, either.” She hesitates and I don’t know if I should write something or just see if she says anything else. And she does. “Are you sleeping with him?”

Well, yes, I am, in fact, sleeping with him, but I’d put money on the fact that that’s not what she’s asking. I shake my head,
no
, because it’s true, even though I’m not sure for how long.

“Really?” she asks and I don’t know if she’s disappointed or relieved or just skeptical.

Really

“I still want to know where you are.”

I nod. I don’t blame her for that and it doesn’t matter anyway, because I know she can track my phone. It’s just courtesy and courtesy I can do.

“He’s really cute,” she smiles, her face full of mischief.

And I nod to that, too.

CHAPTER 42

Josh

“How many miles did you run?” I ask when she walks back into the garage just after ten and strips the can of pepper spray from her waist and the heart monitor off her wrist.

“Didn’t track it. Just ran,” she pants while the sweat drips down her face. She grabs a bottle of water and comes up next to me, looking over my shoulder. “How far did you get?”

“Almost done. I was about to quit. It’ll be ready to finish tomorrow, if it’s not raining.”

“I can help when I get done at Clay’s.” She’s been at Clay’s at least twice a week for a month. He’s doing some sort of freaky layered montage thing. I don’t get it. I like the ones where I can just see her face.

“Tell him he’s monopolizing you and I’m starting to get jealous.”

“I’ll let him know,” she smiles. “He’s got that competition next month and I can’t sit this weekend so I said I’d do it after school.” Between researching with Drew, sitting for Clay, running, school and building with me she never stops for a second. She just signed up for some Krav Maga class, too, whatever that is. She’s not good with down time.

“Is that the one you’re going to with him?”

She nods, tilting back the rest of the bottle of water. “It’s at some art gallery in Ridgemont. They use it every year for the state competition and they display all the finalists’ work.”

“Still going home this weekend?” I wish she wasn’t because I’m used to her now. I realized how much it sucks to cook alone and eat alone and watch TV alone and generally be alone.

“I said I would.”

She never sounds happy about going home and I have absolutely no clue why, except that it has something to do with all the scars she has and the stories she won’t tell me. Whenever she comes back from there, it’s like she’s out of focus for a few days, like a hologram that keeps blurring in and out. She’s always been like that, like music and lyrics to two different songs. It’s just worse after she’s been back to Brighton.

“You don’t talk to anyone in your family?”

“You know I don’t.” She’s getting the where-are-you-going-with-this tone in her voice that I’m so familiar with now.

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t tell them what they want to hear. If I talk to them, I’ll have to lie and I don’t want to.” It’s more information than she’s ever given me before and it’s still not enough. It doesn’t tell me crap.

“You stopped talking just so you wouldn’t have to lie?”

“I didn’t plan to. I just wanted a day and then I just wanted one more day and then one more after that and that turned into a week, which turned into a month and you get the idea.”

“They just let you stop? They didn’t care?”

“They cared, but it’s not like they could do anything about it. What were they going to do? Shake me? Yell at me and insist? Ground me? I never left the house anyway. They didn’t really have a lot of options. Plus, according to my impressive collection of therapists, it was a very
natural
response, whatever that means.”
Natural response to what, Sunshine?
Please keep talking
. But she doesn’t. Just another random piece in a puzzle made of all the wrong pieces.

“Wouldn’t lying have been easier than silence?”

“No. I’m crap at it. I don’t believe in doing something if you can’t excel at it.” She’s back to sarcasm and we’re effectively done with this conversation. I know how it works and I wonder how long I’ll let her get away with it.

I start cleaning up and she walks over to crash in the chair while she waits, finally noticing the bag I put there earlier.

“You don’t want my ass on your counters but you’re putting crap on my chair,” she jokes, picking it up to put it on the ground next to her.

“Open it.”

She looks in the bag and pulls out the shoe box, then narrows her eyes at me. I watch because I want to see her face when she opens the box. I know it’s a stupid present, probably not the thing girls want to get. I’m not really an expert on the whole thing.

And then maybe I am, because her face lights up when she sees them.

“You bought me boots?” she says, like I just gave her diamonds.

“I didn’t get to give you anything for your birthday. I hope they fit. I looked at your shoes one day and they said seven so that’s what I got.” I shove my hands in my pockets.

She’s already taking off her running shoes and trying them on.

“Steel-toed?” she asks.

I nod.

“And black.” She smiles and I love that smile more because I think I put it there.

“And black,” I confirm, though I don’t know why.

“You didn’t wrap them,” she scolds.