Through to You (14 page)

“Cam, what are you doing?”

I hesitate. “This doesn’t feel like a place where people live, Mom.”

“What?”

I stare at her, letting the whole depressing picture sink in, and suddenly I’m so upset I can’t even talk. I walk over to the entertainment center. The shelf on the right side of the TV is full of DVDs; the left side is empty, like Dad scooped half of them off randomly and just kept on going without looking back. I have this horrible moment where I think I know how he felt—and I hate her for that. I pull some movies down and spread them out evenly across the shelves. Next is the big blank spot over the fireplace. A winter landscape painting used to fill that space. There’s a framed poster from a Picasso exhibit hanging in a dim corner. I grab it off the wall.

“What are you doing?” Her face has morphed from pinched and worried to red and upset.

“What we should have done right after he left,” I say.

“Stop this—”

I elbow past her on angry adrenaline. How can things be so
right
on one side of a weird green light, and still so fucked up here? I reach the hearth and scrape the poster along the wall until its wire snags the old nail stuck in the plaster. I stand back. The
Blue Nude
looks good above the mantel.

“Did you talk to your father?” she asks sharply. “Was all of this his idea?”

I glare at her. “Was it his idea to let this place become a dump?”

I move to the kitchen and cringe, seeing the mess and grime the way Nina must have. Was the
other
me’s house like this? I seriously doubt it. I open the cabinets, spreading the few clean dishes around to fill the half-empty shelves. I hear Mom come in behind me, but I refuse to look at her. I pull the overflowing trash bag out of the kitchen can and toss it outside. Then I turn on the water and start washing every plate, glass, and pan piled up in the sink. She gets quiet. There’s only the sound of glasses clinking in the water.

“She was so beautiful, baby....”

Steam rises from the tap running in front of me. I shut off the water.

Mom holds a lit cigarette in one hand, ash accumulating at the end. I’d set Viv’s pictures from the shrine down on the counter, and now they’re spread out everywhere in front of her. A tear runs down her cheek. She’s running her hands over a shot from a biology field trip we took right before I broke my leg. In it, Viv leans toward a bush full of pink flowers, staring down a butterfly. She’s got this half smile creeping over her face, waiting for the thing to notice her and take off. She liked doing things like that, finding the exact moment when close became
too
close. I fight an instinct of grief, but then I remember holding her today.

Mom looks up and surveys the less cluttered, if still filthy kitchen.

“When I didn’t know where you were, I called Dr. Summers. She wants to help—”

“She
has
helped me,” I say. “But I’m starting to think … I want to take a little break.”

She sets her cigarette down in an overflowing ashtray and looks at me.

“Your coach called.”

“Reed?” I exhale impatiently. “He’s not my coach.”

“He’s your vice principal. He’s worried about you, sweetie—we all are.” She looks around uncertainly at the neatened kitchen and her shoulders slump. “You’ve had to go through such hell these past few months.”

I watch the smoke curl up from her cigarette. This is Mom’s idea of parenting—making sure I know how worried everyone is. For a second, I really want to tell her. You can all stop worrying—
I have her back.
But since I can’t say that, it’s less hassle if I play along.

I sink into the chair next to her.

“It’s … been hard.”

She takes my hand. “I’ll get you anything you need to make it easier. Just tell me …”

I blink. She just said she’d do anything to make things easier. If I’m going to be with Viv, I need as few people breathing down my neck as possible.

“We can’t live this way anymore, Mom.”

She stares a long time at her cigarette, but doesn’t let go of my hand.

“I know.”

“I think …” I pull back so I can look her in the eye. “I just need a little space.... I
really
want to take a break from therapy.”

The worry reenters her eyes.

“Why?”

My gaze falls to the pictures scattered over the counter and my pulse picks up. I can’t get used to looking at them in this new way, where Viv isn’t gone. I feel like I’ve been shot out of a cannon. I start collecting them in a neat pile.

“All Dr. Summers wants to do is talk about the past. I have to start looking forward …” Viv’s face in the top picture makes my heart leap again. How could I even
pretend
to grieve when she’s alive? I gesture around the house. “I mean, look at us, Mom. Maybe we both should.”

The first rays of sunrise have started to brighten the kitchen.

“This is a different attitude,” she says, shaking her head. She takes a final drag or two off her cigarette and mashes the butt into a pile of others. She lifts her face and studies me more calmly than she has in months. My skin feels clammy.

She
can’t
say no....

“I need to speak to your dad,” she mutters. I cringe, but don’t say anything. She’s said stuff like that before. “We’ll talk more about this later.”

She slips off her stool and wraps me in a big, lingering hug. My arms come up automatically to hug her back. I pan over her shoulder at the half-clean kitchen. Anyone who walks in here would clearly see this family has problems. But when I study it more closely, I realize it looks different now. At first I think something’s missing by the fridge, until I remember it was the piled-up trash. I spilled water on the floor by the sink, and the white of the tile is showing through the grime. There are still more dishes in the sink than are clean, but I let myself think—this almost looks promising.

IT
’
S BARELY DARK WHEN I REACH VIV
’
S HOUSE AGAIN THAT EVENING
,
but I couldn’t force myself to wait any longer than necessary. There’s no light in her window when I cross the expanse of lawn, but that doesn’t mean anything. All I have to do is knock the right—

“Psssst!”

I halt in front of the weeping willow tree and listen. The air is heavy with silence.

“H—hello?” I whisper.

My eyes aren’t fully adjusted to the dark, so I startle when the hanging branches part before me like a curtain.

“You came back,” Viv says.

I drink her in slowly, letting my gaze come to rest on her deep brown eyes.

“I told you I would.”

She’s so like an apparition, I want to reach out and touch her again for reassurance. But I hesitate. The dark curls that frame her face instead of tumbling around her shoulders remind me—I must look different to her, too. I recall the big, confident, grinning guy in the yearbook, and wonder if there’s any resemblance of him left in me. I’ve probably lost thirty pounds since I played, but it’s not just the weight … he had something else. The look in his eyes isn’t one I’ve been able to find in the mirror. He was clearly a winner, and I’m—

I run a nervous hand through my hair, wishing I’d cut it recently. Maybe she
will
think I’m back from the dead.

I step under the canopy with her. The willow fronds fall almost to the ground, and it’s even darker beneath them. Viv steps aside to let me in, her movements slightly jumpy. She backs into the trunk of the tree and stares at me, her breathing shallow and uneven.

“Are you nervous?” I ask.

“No—” she says too quickly.

I reach a hand out to her.

“It’s okay.”

She hesitates.

I tilt my head. This isn’t the reaction she had last night.

“Viv, it’s
me
,” I say. “What are you afraid of?”

She holds on to the tree like it’s some sort of shield.

“Why are you really here? Have you come back to haunt me?”

Oh God, I
am
the undead boyfriend.

“No—no way, Viv, I’m not a ghost.” I reach for her again. She starts to pull back, but I twine my fingers through hers, and lean in. “I feel real, don’t I?”

Her lips are inches from my own. Our pulses beat a rhythm through the air. Her hand relaxes in mine, though we’re both still holding our breath. She closes her eyes and gasps when our lips meet. I press her body between me and the tree, memorizing her with my mouth. Our clothes seem bulky and in the way, suddenly. I open my eyes for a second, just to get a peek at her face. Her long lashes brush her cheek, fluttering the way they always did when she was scared.

I pull away.

She takes a second to let go, but her hands are shaky.

“This is wrong,” I say. “I need you to know who I am.”

She bites her lip, but it isn’t cute. She’s afraid.

“You’re … my Cam.”

I exhale. “I’m
not
your Cam. I told you, I’m not a ghost, Viv.”

“Well, of course not, but …” Her voice trails off.

Gently, I take her hand and place it over my heart.

“I’m alive, flesh and blood.”

I wish I’d thought how to explain this earlier, but I’ll have to improvise. She has to know—I need her to know.

I’m not
him
.

“I’m not from here. I mean, I come from a place exactly like this, only
you
died there.”

Her hand pushes slightly against my chest, holding me at arm’s length. I keep one hand over hers and do my best to fill her in while keeping things as simple as possible. I tell her about the accident, about coming through the green light, and finding
her
. I don’t mention Nina. I tell her about the differences between our worlds—how everything is so much the same, and yet different. By the time I get through my last fumbling explanation, we’re both sitting beneath the tree.

“Two worlds?” she says. “How does something like that even happen?”

I shrug, thinking over the impossibility of it for the hundredth time.

“Maybe there’s more than two,” I say. “It’s like this window just opened up between ours.”

She wrinkles her brow. “Why, do you think?”

“I don’t know. We both died in the same place …” The thought clicks in the back of my mind with something Nina said:
Two months ago—Sunday the fifth
. I sit forward. “If it happened in the same place, on the same day, at about the same time in both worlds—maybe that did something. Maybe
we
did something.”

“Like what?”

I shrug. “Maybe our grief, like, tore something open?”

I feel a change in the way she looks at me, but I stare down at my hands. She can’t have
him
back, after all. I can’t bring myself to face the disappointment in her eyes.

“So …
you
lost
me
in your world?” she says. “And you miss her as much as I miss him?”

“Yes—” I latch on to her words and blurt out, “I just thought since we missed each other so much, maybe this is the universe’s weird way of making things right.”

She takes my hands, startling me, then reaches up and brushes my too-long hair out of my eyes. Exactly the way she did at the hospital years ago, in another world. I look up to see her flashing a gorgeous, unfamiliar beauty-queen smile.

“I don’t
care
how it happened, Cam. I just can’t believe I have you back.”

Her lips linger warm and soft on mine until she sighs peacefully and lays her head in my lap. I lean against the tree trunk, afraid to move. I just run my fingers through her curls, listen to her breathing, and ask myself if any of this is real.

“What are you thinking about?” I say after a while. She’s quiet, but I’ve always been able to tell when Viv’s mind is busy.

She tilts her face up, and there’s a mixture of content curiosity in her eyes that startles me. She looks so much like—herself.

“Tell me more, about how things are different where you come from.”

“Oh, I don’t know …” I shift, comparing myself to Cam the big comeback football star in my head. I decide to focus on her. “You weren’t a cheerleader—well, you were, until you quit.”

“I did?” She sits up. “How come?”

“Uh …” I swallow. How can I explain without her realizing I’m a loser? “Well, you know, I hurt my leg pretty bad, and um—you quit to show your support.”

She looks at me, confused. “But why would I do that? You recovered.”

I stretch my leg out and touch my knee.

“It didn’t happen that way for me.”

A heavy silence settles over us, but then she places her hand over mine, on my thigh.

“You quit the team?” she says.

“I didn’t need football when I had you.” I touch her face with my other hand, tracing the arch of her eyebrow with my thumb. “You—
she
used to always say this thing, ‘Who needs them when we have each other?’”

Viv looks puzzled for a second, but nods slowly, and I wonder if she’ll accept her own words when things played out so differently here. A subtle grin creeps across her face. She leans in, her lips fast and tender against mine. Her hand slides up my leg, and suddenly my pants feel very confining.