The Truth About Forever (8 page)

It was his fishing shack, the place he took his buddies to catch red drum in October, mahimahi in April, bluefin tuna in December. My dad always came home with a hangover, a cool-erful of fish already cleaned, and a sunburn despite the SPF 45 my mom always packed for him. He loved every minute of it.

I wasn't allowed on these trips—they were, traditionally, estrogen-free—but he often took me down on other weekends, when he needed to work on the house or just felt like getting away. We'd cast off from the beach or take out his boat, play checkers by the fire, and go to this hole-in-the-wall place called the Last Chance, where the waitresses knew him by name and the hamburgers were the best I'd ever tasted. More than our old house, or our Wildflower Ridge place, the beach shack
was
my dad. I knew if he was haunting any place, it would be there, and for that reason I'd stayed away.

None of us had been down, in fact, since he died. His old Chevy truck was still there, locked in the garage, and the spare key it was always my job to fish out from the conch shell under the back porch had probably not been touched either. I knew my mom would probably sell the house and the truck eventually, but she hadn't yet.

So on Friday afternoon, I came home to find the house completely and totally quiet. This would be good, I told myself. I had a lot of stuff I wanted to get done over the weekend: emails to send out, research on colleges to do, and my closet had gotten really cluttered. Maybe this would be the perfect time to organize my winter sweaters and get some stuff to the thrift shop. Still, the silence was a bit much, so I walked over and turned on the TV, then went upstairs to my room to the radio, flipping past the music channels until I landed on a station where someone was blathering on about science innovations in our century. Even with all those voices going, though, I was acutely aware that I was alone.

Luckily, I got proof otherwise when I checked my email and there was one from Jason. By the second line, though, I knew a bad week had just gotten much, much worse.

Macy,

I've taken some time before writing back, because I wanted to be clear and sure of what I was going to say. It's been a concern of mine for awhile that we've been getting too serious, and since I've been gone I've been thinking hard about our respective needs and whether our relationship is capable of filling them. I care about you, but your increasing dependency on me
—
made evident from the closing of your last email
—
has forced me to really think about what level of commitment I can make to our relationship. I care about you very much, but this upcoming senior year is crucial in terms of my ideological and academic goals, and I cannot take on a more serious commitment. I will have to be very focused, as I'm sure you will be, as well. In view of all these things, I think it's best for us to take a break from our relationship, and each other, until I return at the end of the summer. It will give us both time to think, so that in August we'll know better whether we want the same things, or if it's best to sever our ties and make this separation permanent
.

I'm sure you can agree with what I've said here: it just makes sense. I think it's the best solution for both of us.

I read it through once, then, still in shock, again. This isn't happening, I thought.

But it was. The world was still turning: if I needed proof, there was the radio across the room, from which I could hear headlines. A war in some Baltic country. Stocks down. Some TV star arrested. And there I sat, staring at the flickering screen, at these words. Words that, like the first ones Jason had read to me from
Macbeth
, were slowly starting to make awful sense.

A break. I knew what that meant: it was what happened right before something was officially and finally broken. Finished. Regardless of the language, it was most likely I was out, all for saying
I love you
. I'd thought we'd said as much to each other in the last few months, even if we never said it aloud. Clearly I'd been wrong.

I could feel my sudden aloneness in my gut, like a punch, and I sat back in my chair, dropping my hands from the keyboard, now aware of how empty the room, the house, the neighborhood, the world, was all around me. It was like being on the other side of a frame and seeing the camera pull back, showing me growing smaller, smaller, smaller still until I was just a speck, a spot, gone.

I had to get out of there. So I got in my car and drove.

And it helped. I don't know why, but it did. I wound through Wildflower Ridge, cresting the hills and circling the ground that had just been broken for the newest phase, then ventured farther, onto the main road and toward the mall. I drove in silence, since every song on the radio was either someone shrieking (not good for my nerves) or someone wailing about lost love (not good, period). In the quiet I'd been able to calm down as I focused on the sound of the engine, of gears shifting, brakes slowing, all things that, at least for now, were working just as they were supposed to.

On my way back, traffic was thick, everyone out for their Friday night. At stoplights I looked at the cars around me, taking in families with kids in car seats, probably headed home from dinner, and college girls in club makeup, blasting the radio and dangling cigarettes out their open windows. In the middle lane, surrounded by all these strangers, it seemed even more awful that I was going back to an empty house, up to my room to face my computer screen and Jason's email. I could just see him typing it out at his laptop, so methodical, somewhere between condensing the notes he'd taken that day and logging on to his environmental action Listservs. To him, I was a commitment that had become more of a burden than an asset, and his time was just too precious to waste. Not that I had to worry about that. From now on, clearly, I would have plenty of time on my hands.

As I approached the next intersection, I saw the wishbone.

Same bold black strokes, same white van. It was passing in front of me now, and I could see Delia driving, someone else in the passenger seat. I watched them move across the intersection, bumping over the slight dip in the middle, wish, it said on the back, two letters on each door.

I am not a spontaneous person. But when you're alone in the world, really alone, you have no choice but to be open to suggestions. Those four letters, like the ones that I'd written to Jason, had many meanings and no guarantees. Still, as the van turned onto a side street, I read that wish again. It seemed as good a time as any to believe, so when my light dropped to green and I could go, I put myself in gear and followed them.

"So I say, I
know
that you're not insulting my outfit. I mean, I can take a lot—already have taken a lot—but I won't tolerate that. You're my sister. You know. A girl has got to draw the line somewhere, right?"

Okay, I thought. Maybe this was a bad idea.

After almost turning back three times, two drive-bys and one final burst of courage, I was standing in front of McKimmon House, a mansion in the historical district. In front of me was the Wish Catering van, now parked crookedly against the curb, the back doors flung open to reveal several racks of serving pans, blocks of packaged napkins, and a couple of dented rolling carts. Inside, I could hear a girl's voice.

"So I do it: I draw the line. Which means, in the end, that I have to walk, like, two miles in my new platform sandals, which gave me blisters you would not believe," she continued, her voice ringing out over the quiet of the street. "I mean, we're talking deserted roads, no cars passing, and all I could think was—grab those spoons, no, not those, the other ones, right there—that this has got to officially be the worst first date
ever
. You know?"

I took a step backwards, retreating. What had I been thinking, anyway? I started to turn back to my car, thinking at least it wasn't too late to change my mind.

Just then, though, a girl walked to the open doors of the van and saw me. She was small, with a mass of blonde ringlets spilling down her back, and with one look, I just knew it was she I'd heard. It was what she had on that made it obvious: a short, shiny black skirt, a white blouse with a plunging neck, tied at the waist, and thigh-high black boots with a thick heel. She had on bright red lipstick, and her skin, pale and white, was glittering in the glow of the streetlight behind me.

"Hey," she said, seeing me, then turned her back and grabbed a pile of dishtowels before hopping out of the van.

"Hi," I said. There was more I was going to say, entire words, maybe even a sentence. But for some reason I just froze, as if I'd gotten this far and now could go no further.

She didn't seem to notice, was too busy grabbing more stuff out of the van while humming under her breath. When she turned around and saw me still standing there, she said, "You lost or something?"

Again I was stuck for an answer. But this time, it was for a different reason. Her face, which before had been shadowed in the van, was now in the full light, and my eyes were immediately drawn to two scars: one, faint and curving along her jaw line, like an underscore of her mouth, and the other by her right temple, snaking down to her ear. She also had bright blue eyes and rings on every finger, and smelled like watermelon bubble-gum, but these were things I noticed later. The scars, at first, were all I could see.

Stop staring, I told myself, horrified at my behavior. The girl, for her part, didn't even seem to notice, or be bothered. She was just waiting, patiently, for an answer.

"Urn," I said finally, forcing the words out, "I was looking for Delia?"

The front door of the van slammed shut, and a second later Monica, the slow girl from my mother's party, appeared. She was carrying a cutting board, which, by the expression of weariness on her face, must have weighed about a hundred pounds. She blew her long bangs out of her face as she shuffled along the curb, taking her time.

The blonde girl glanced at her. "Serving forks, too, Monotone, okay?"

Monica stopped, then turned herself around slowly—a sort of human three-point turn—and disappeared back behind the van at the same snail's pace.

"Delia's up at the house, in the kitchen," the girl said to me now, shifting the towels to her other arm. "It's at the top of the drive, around back."

"Oh," I said, as Monica reappeared, now carrying the cutting board and a few large forks. "Thanks."

I started over to the driveway, getting about five feet before she called after me.

"If you're headed up there anyway," she said, "would you please please please take something with you? We're running late—and it's kind of my fault, if you want the whole truth—so you'd be really helping me out. If you don't mind."

"Sure," I said. I came back down the driveway, passing Monica, who was muttering to herself, along the way. At the back of the van, the blonde girl had pulled out two of the wheeled carts and was piling foil pans onto them, one right after another. When she was done she stuck the towels on top of one, then rolled the other over to me.