Authors: Katie O’Rourke
‘Fourteen months.’
‘Is she happy about it?’
‘Very.’
‘She’s going to have her hands full.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘Did you tell her about everything?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Did you tell her any of it?’
‘No.’
‘Riley.’
‘I wanted to. I just couldn’t. And we were sitting there, both of us pregnant, both of us experiencing the same thing, yet none of it being the same at all. It was surreal.’
‘You should let her be there for you. She’d want to be.’
‘I know.’ I shrugged. ‘She thinks I’m back in Tucson already.’
Jack sighed. ‘You’re such a stupid little girl,’ he said lovingly, wrapping his arm around my shoulders.
‘Hey.’ I scowled. ‘I didn’t lie to her. She just kind of assumed.’
‘Right. You never lie, but somehow you still manage to keep your secrets. You just tell us what you think we want to know.’
‘That’s not true,’ I protested.
‘You think you’ll scare us away with the truth? You’d be surprised. All we really want to know is you.’
That night I had a dream about Ben. We were sitting in a rowboat in the middle of the pond. I could see my parents’ house in the distance: a little white cottage with green shutters. Ben reached into the cooler at his feet, but instead of pulling out a beer, he pulled out a baby. The infant was wrapped in a white blanket. I couldn’t see its face. The sun went behind a cloud and the water became a deep navy. Thunder roared and we were sloshing about in the tiny boat, the shore no longer visible.
‘I’m scared,’ I said.
Ben just laughed.
The rain was painful against my flesh. The drops were big, like monsoon rain.
Ben fell out of the boat, still holding the baby. His body slipped noiselessly into the water. I leaned over the side, screaming his name, searching for him with my eyes.
Lightning lit up the sky. An ocean of blue waves rocked the boat. All I could hear was the sound of rain hitting the water.
I stayed in the boat.
He was grateful for the waiting room and the magazines filled with pictures of famous people. There were captions for a lot of the photos, but he couldn’t bring himself to read them. J-Lo wearing pink satin. Nicole Kidman, seeming six feet tall even now, without her little ex-husband. Britney Spears, in orange, looking like the Mad Hatter.
There were three women behind the reception desk. The partition window was closed, their mouths pressed wordlessly against telephone receivers, their fingers tapping noiselessly on computer keyboards. Making appointments for girls who needed Pap smears and diaphragms and abortions.
The walls were the colour of Pepto-Bismol. The carpets were turquoise. Jack thought it looked like the decorator had been a thirteen-year-old girl in 1983. A blonde woman sat across from him, filling out papers on a neon orange clipboard. Jack reached for a discarded section of newspaper, folded in thirds, crossword puzzle on top. Someone had already started completing it, in pen, and had stopped partway through. Seventeen, down. Summer in France. Three letters. Riley had taken French in high school; Jack had taken Spanish. He didn’t have a pen anyway. He picked up the
People
magazine he’d already skimmed.
The blonde woman got to her feet and handed in her clipboard. She returned to her seat and exchanged a look with the man beside her. Not quite a smile. Not a grimace. He took her hand and they both stared into their laps. Jack wondered about them. Wondered whether they were in the midst of a catastrophe or just arming themselves against one. Either way, they were holding hands.
Riley came back into the waiting room, looking pale. A nurse in a purple hospital shirt held her arm, talking to her so softly that Jack couldn’t hear what she was saying. Riley was searching the room, not listening. Her eyes were wide, scared. She was looking for Jack. Seemed to relax when he stood up, leaving the magazine on the seat behind him and bounding toward her in long strides.
He took her other arm. The nurse held out a piece of paper, a prescription for the pain. She spoke to them in a low voice, smiled, and said, ‘You take care, now.’ She released Riley’s arm and Jack walked her to the exit.
Outside, Riley’s shoulders started shaking. Jack stopped to hug her, but she pushed against his chest. ‘Get me out of here,’ she said, fat tears flying from her eyelashes. She tightened her grip on his arm and put her head down, heading to the car as though she was walking into a fierce wind.
When they were twelve, Riley and Jack used to walk to her house after school. They hated taking the bus and her house was within walking distance from the junior high. They had to cross one major street. Wait for the ‘Walk’ sign. Riley always liked to press the button. Jack let her.
Riley’s parents wouldn’t let her walk home by herself. They were more worried about that busy street than they were about strangers stealing little girls. That was before girls like Elizabeth Smart were dominating the evening news. Back then, people believed without a doubt that a quiet neighbourhood would keep their children safe.
All the way home, Riley talked about Josh Casey. He was in the grade ahead of them. The eighth-grade dance was three weeks away and Riley was trying to figure out how to get him to ask her. That afternoon they’d had lunch at his table. Jack’s elbow had bumped against his seven times during the half-hour. Riley sat across from Jack with her face flushed and her mouth perpetually full.
‘You didn’t even talk to him,’ Jack told her, sneering. Jack hadn’t been able to talk to him either. He’d listened while Josh told Bobby Nelson about the All Terrain Vehicle he wanted for his birthday. His mother didn’t think he should have it, but he was working on his father. He was pretty sure he was going to get it.
Riley’s shoulders slumped. ‘I know. Maybe you could talk to him,’ she suggested, her eyes brightening. ‘Find out if he likes me.’
‘Uh-uh, no way,’ Jack said, trying to shake off the feeling of that imagined conversation with a shake of his head.
Riley sighed. ‘He probably doesn’t even know I exist!’
‘Jeez, you’re so dramatic. We’ve been in school together since first and second grade.’
‘Well, do you think he’ll ask me?’ She looked up at Jack. Looked him in the eyes.
‘No,’ Jack said. It made him feel gross to be so mean to her but he couldn’t help himself. ‘Why would he?’
He turned away as her eyes moistened. He thought he’d seen her bottom lip tremble.
They walked in silence for a while. When they reached the ‘Walk’ sign, Riley shoved her hands into her pockets.
‘Go ahead,’ Jack said, wanting to pretend this was the same as every other day.
Riley shook her head. Turned away and acted as if she was looking down the street.
Jack pushed the button.
He kept trying to find ways to fill the silence. All he could think about were Josh Casey’s elbows. His green plaid button-up flannel shirt. His big hand gripping a red and white milk carton. Josh and Jack riding his ATV through the woods. Josh and Riley dancing to ‘Stairway To Heaven’.
Once they’d crossed the street, Riley found her voice. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t come over today,’ she said. ‘I have a lot of homework.’
They were in all the same classes. Had planned it that way on purpose.
‘But I already missed the bus,’ Jack said, pointing out the obvious.
Riley shrugged her backpack off her shoulder, put a hand on her hip and turned toward him. ‘You’re supposed to be my friend, Jack!’
‘I am your friend,’ he said softly, in one last-ditch effort to play oblivious.
‘Then why don’t you think he’d ask me?’ Her anger dissolved quickly to hurt. She flopped down into the grass. The world came to a stop at the side of the road. Their world.
Jack sat down opposite her, crossing his legs and pulling fistfuls of new grass out of the ground. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said weakly.
‘You think I’m not pretty enough?’
Jack thought Riley was the prettiest girl in their whole school. He was biased. ‘Of course you are.’
‘Then why?’ she yelled up at him, sticking out her chin and holding her face the way she did whenever she was about to cry.
Jack didn’t want her to cry. He didn’t want to make her cry. ‘I don’t want him to like you,’ he said, looking down.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I like Josh Casey,’ he said.
Riley tilted her head at him. Scrunched up her face.
Jack held his breath.
And then her face relaxed, as if she had just unravelled an impossibly tangled telephone cord. ‘Oh,’ she said finally. ‘Okay.’
Jack tried to let the air pass through his lips quietly.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve been talking about him for weeks,’ Riley said.
Because I thought you might laugh. Because I thought you might tell everyone at school. Because I was afraid you wouldn’t love me any more.
‘I don’t know.’
Riley put her hand over his and smiled. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, looking him in the eye to show that ‘it’ was everything. ‘Josh is probably too tall for me anyway. It would be hard for dancing. You’re more his height.’
Jack rubbed his eye against his shoulder, nodded.
‘Let’s go,’ she said, pulling him up with one hand, grabbing her book bag with the other. ‘My mom will think we got hit by a Mack truck.’ She slid her bag onto her right shoulder, hooked her left arm in his, and they hurried home together.
The night of the eighth-grade dance, Riley and Jack sat on the floor in her living room watching
Footloose
. She loved the part where Kevin Bacon gives his friend in overalls dancing lessons. Rewound it and made Jack watch it four times before he told her to knock it off and they watched the rest of the movie. Its soundtrack could still cure Jack of just about any funk he got into.
Years later, she’d joke that she’d been relieved when Jack had told her he liked Josh Casey: she’d been afraid he was about to confess a crush on her.
Riley shivered under her thick comforter. Jack wanted to take her temperature but she said she was fine.
‘I just need some sleep,’ she assured him, through chattering teeth. ‘This is just what I do.’
At first Jack wasn’t sure what she meant. Then, in a flash, he remembered the night they’d found out Mandy Spitzer had killed herself. Hanged herself in a closet when they were juniors in high school. Mandy sat behind them in American History. Riley had been over to her house once. They had been partners on a project about the Boston Tea Party. Mandy’s mother had been the one to find her. Riley had started shivering as soon as she’d got off the phone. Said she couldn’t stop picturing it, that it was the most horrible thing she could imagine.
Riley had her eyes tightly closed, deep crevices in her forehead. She looked so small. So breakable.
Broken. She looked broken.
Jack switched out the light and hoped she would sleep.
4 p.m.
I can hear Jack in the kitchen with Gracie. He’s feeding her dinner. I hear her bowl as it scrapes against the wood floor. She sucks it down quickly and he takes the bowl away. He says, ‘Good dog,’ in a low voice. He’s trying to be quiet.
4.55 p.m.
I hear his footsteps outside my bedroom. I keep my eyes closed as the door eases open. I feel him watching me. I want him to go away. The door clicks shut and suddenly I wish he would come back. I can’t bear to be alone any more, but I can’t find my voice to call to him.
My pillow is damp with tears I don’t remember crying.
6.20 p.m.
There’s half a glass of grapefruit juice on the nightstand. He’s told me to drink it all. I look for a potted plant to dump it in. I hate grapefruit juice. And I hate him for forgetting that. He touches my forehead and seems satisfied. I close my eyes and feel him rising from his perch on the mattress.
His hand brushes the light switch on his way out.
10.52 p.m.
Jack picks up the juice and replaces it with water. I hadn’t even heard him come in. Darkness outlines the window blinds. The ice cubes hiss, snap, and are silent. Jack tucks the blanket under my chin and his footsteps fall lightly on the carpet on his way to the door. I wait until he has left before I kick off the covers. He means well.
7.42 a.m.
I’ve been in bed for hours, neither fully awake nor asleep. I see my arm lying beside me but I can’t feel it. I half wonder whether it’s really attached to my body. Some part of me knows I’m being ridiculous. I think about moving my fingers, but my hand remains motionless.
8.15 a.m.
Jack comes into the room and sees that my eyes are partly opened. This seems to make him happy. His mouth is moving rapidly but I don’t catch all that he’s saying. He seems to be discussing the weather. I suppose that’s all you can talk about at times like this. He sits on the edge of the bed and takes my hand in his, and it’s only then that I can feel it’s actually a part of me.
In the morning, Jack brought me a bowl of oatmeal. He knew just how I liked it, without asking. He’d made a smiley face out of the maple syrup. I was curled up on the couch, wrapped in my mother’s purple afghan. The house was wrapped in early-morning fog. Beyond the glass doors, steps from the screen porch, the pond could not be seen.
‘So when are you going to call Laura?’ he asked, sitting next to me on the couch. He sat at an angle, looking right at me, trying to make eye contact.
I made a face.
‘She’s going to figure out that you’re home.’
‘No, she won’t.’ I stirred the oats, disfiguring the syrupy grin.
‘She’ll figure it out when I call her and tell her,’ he said, folding his arms across his chest.
That made me look at him. ‘Jack.’
‘Riley. You need to let your friends take care of you. I can’t do it from New York. You need her.’
‘No, Jack. I can’t face her.’
‘Laura? What are you talking about? Laura loves you.’
‘I just need some time to myself. Don’t call her. Promise.’
He groaned. ‘Fine. But you need to take care of yourself. Starting with, eat that. You haven’t eaten anything since I brought you home.’