Say What You Will (21 page)

T
HAT NIGHT
M
ATTHEW WENT
home and cooked dinner for a strange pairing: his mother and Mr. Heffernan.

What’s up with that?
Sarah texted him.
Matchmaking much?

It had been Amy’s idea. After they finished laughing about it, they agreed it wasn’t a terrible one. Mr. Heffernan was very sweet, but socially awkward in ways that would cross him off many women’s lists. But his mother didn’t keep lists. She hadn’t dated in years. Instead of dating, she watched TV and told Matthew she was fine.

Maybe she was. The first time he’d seen her cry in months was three nights before Taylor’s birth, when no one knew what would happen and everyone was still so worried. “I’m so proud of you,” she said as she blew her nose. “I’m just so proud of you, that’s all.”

The dinner went surprisingly well. As he told Amy the next day, “Maybe Mr. H talked a little too much about his fascination with photosynthesis, but hey, he’s a science teacher, right?”

Amy smiled, though she didn’t respond.

“Afterward they watched TV, which might sound a little depressing, but I don’t think it was. She talked the whole time, filling him in on the story lines of her favorite shows.” Matthew hadn’t stayed with them through that part. Instead he sat in the kitchen, surprised by how much his mother made Mr. Heffernan laugh.

Now he looked down at Amy, whose head was turned away from him. “Is everything all right?” Matthew asked.

“NO TEMP,” she typed. “MEANS I CAN GO. TODAY OR TOMORROW.”

He sat down on her bed. He knew this news was a mixed blessing and was happening sooner than they expected. Leaving the hospital meant leaving Taylor. It also meant Amy had to go somewhere. Mr. Heffernan’s house no longer made any sense. She would have to go home, and—she didn’t need to tell him—that wasn’t what she wanted.

For a few days now, he’d been thinking of a plan, though he hadn’t readied any speech to go with it. “Listen, Aim,” he said. His heart began to hammer in his chest. “I’ve been thinking. Carlton, this guy I work with at the theater, has his own apartment. Granted, he’s twenty-six, which makes him a little pathetic to be working at a movie theater, but he’s a musician so whatever. But I keep thinking if he can do it with this movie-theater job, maybe we could, too. Maybe if I got a few extra shifts, we could afford an apartment. I know that sounds crazy, but maybe it’s not crazy. That’s what people do, right?” He was talking too quickly. Not giving her a chance to say anything. “If they don’t want to live with their parents for whatever reason, they move out. They live with their friends or their boyfriends. Right?”

“NO,” she finally said, over him.

He stopped talking. He waited for her to say something more. When she didn’t, he stood up. “Well, that’s nice, Aim. Just no. That’s it?”

“DON’T BE STUPID.”

Stupid? Is that what she just called him? He held up one hand and moved toward the door. “Okay, I’ll see you later.”

“DON’T LEAVE.”

He stopped at the door and spun around, furious now. “I make a nice offer. Not an easy offer, not one most people would expect, and you don’t even say thanks. You call me stupid.”

“I’M GOING BACK TO SCHOOL.”

What? For two weeks she’d done nothing but tell him horror stories from school. “No, Amy. Don’t do that. That’s a terrible idea—”

“NOT STANFORD. UC BERKELEY. SARAH’S HELPING ME ARRANGE IT.”

He sat down in a chair across the room. Another secret she hadn’t told him.

“DID YOU KNOW UCB WAS THE FIRST ACCESSIBLE CAMPUS IN THE US? FIRST WITH A DISABILITY STUDIES PROGRAM. THE ADA MOVEMENT STARTED THERE. IT’S GOOD. IT’S WHERE I BELONG.”

It took him a minute to remember what the ADA movement was—Americans with Disabilities Act. Amy spent last summer reading a book about the history of it. When he asked her about it once, she touched the cover and said, “MY PEOPLE,” which silenced him at the time. What he could say? In the span of five minutes she’d made him feel small and ridiculous. Hatching his little plan of impoverished domesticity. Thinking he would make them dinners while they waited for new pictures of Taylor in the mail. Assuming Amy would settle for the small life that sounded appealing to him. “Okay. Well, great. That sounds good.”

“I KNOW YOU’RE MAD.”

“I’m not mad. I’m happy for you.”

“NO, YOU’RE NOT.”

“You’re right, I’m not. Look at what you’re saying. It would be stupid to limit yourself to my pathetic prospects. I butter popcorn for a living. You’re better than that.”

“I AM. SO ARE YOU.”

Suddenly he realized what this really was. Enraging. It was beyond enraging. “You know what this feels like? I’m a great friend to get you through this little crisis. Where it was kind of about having Taylor and mostly about this face-off you needed to have with your mother. Because she didn’t really let you go and do college the way you wanted to, so you had to make this big statement, right? The baby is the statement, right?” His voice was shaking. He thought of Taylor’s little face in the bassinet and he hated what he was saying.

“NO—”

“Only you got sad and lonely and you needed me so you could feel better about yourself because all of this made you feel pretty terrible about yourself, right? You needed me so you could feel better about going back and trying again at a different school. I’m right, aren’t I? You’ve been planning this for a while, only you haven’t said anything.”

“YES—BUT—”

“And you didn’t tell me any of this because I’m so pathetic, I can’t deal with this idea of college. It’s all I can do to keep my shit together and show up for a four-o’clock shift selling candy to fat people.”

“THAT’S NOT WHAT I THINK.”

“Yes, it is. Just say it.” He was talking too loud now. Pacing around the end of her bed.

“ALL RIGHT. IT IS. A LITTLE.”

“Well, screw you, Amy!” he screamed. “Have you even wondered why I haven’t left here at four o’clock since you’ve been here? Are you curious why you haven’t seen my greasy polyester smock at all? I had to quit! I had to be here! I didn’t have a choice! So there you have it. I’m not even your sad friend with the loser job. I’m just your sad friend.”

He didn’t walk straight out of the hospital from there. He couldn’t bring himself to. Instead he went to the bathroom beside the NICU. He washed his hands and his face and he suited up with everything he needed to put on: paper booties, face mask, hair cap, smock. Then he shuffled over to the bassinet and asked to hold Taylor.

He hadn’t let himself hold her yet. He’d only stood outside the nursery and stared at others doing it. He was waiting for Amy’s fever to break so they could be together the first time they both held her. Never mind all that now. He showed the nurse the ID he’d gotten right after her birth. She nodded and said, “She’s right over here. Now’s a good time because she’s just about to try a little feeding. . . .” So far Sue and Jim had done all the bottle feeding, but surprisingly, now they weren’t around. “Why don’t you settle into the rocking chair and I’ll bring her to you.”

It only took a few minutes and suddenly Taylor was there, in his arms. She felt like a weightless bundle of blankets, hardly anything except for a tiny face peeking out of the swaddle and wide-open eyes, staring right at him. He didn’t panic or wait to hear the voice in his head. He just stared back and memorized the face he knew he might only see in photographs after this.

M
ATTHEW WAS RIGHT ABOUT
a lot of things, except for this: Amy
had
thought about staying here with him. She had even thought about living together. They could do it, she knew. If they’d gotten through the prom debacle and Taylor’s birth, they might be able to live together someday. The problem was this: she didn’t want a marriage like her parents had, with her mother so fixated on one thing she hardly looked up and noticed the man across the table making it happen. Amy didn’t want to become her mother, who quit her law practice the day Amy was born. She didn’t want to give up everything for a love that became too all-consuming. “You are my job,” her mother used to say. “You are my life’s work.” It always made Amy want to say,
You can’t turn a person into a job, Mom
.
People don’t pay enough. . . .
Then Matthew said something similar, and it scared her.
I feel like this is where I belong, and what I’m meant to be doing. Taking care of you
.

This was where Matthew was wrong. She
had
thought about all of this, and she knew the problems that lay ahead. Her body’s needs were boring; no one should have to take care of them exclusively. He could do so much more. So could she.

Amy knew what she’d wanted to say to him. She’d thought about it this whole week. It was the most important conversation they would ever have, and when the time came to have it, she’d said virtually nothing. She’d let Matthew walk out. She’d gone backward to the nonverbal girl she’d once been, the same one who got to college and never figured out how to speak in public.

She couldn’t remember having ever failed so badly at something. And then she thought of a letter Mr. Heffernan wrote to her mother, back in seventh grade.

Maybe he was right. She had to learn this. So did Matthew. Maybe it would mean they’d never find their way back to each other. Never be as close as they had been this week. Maybe she’d never feel the glorious comfort of him lying on top of her. She’d loved that moment so much. If it never happened again, it was hard to imagine feeling the same way with anyone else.

But she couldn’t stay here.

The best she could say was: if all this was a test of her ability to articulate herself clearly when it mattered most, then she was following Mr. Heffernan’s suggestion five years ago. She was learning how to fail.

For two weeks, Matthew didn’t leave the house. He couldn’t bear to. There were too many babies everywhere, which created a new fear—that if he looked at all of them, he’d forget Taylor’s face. It wasn’t a completely irrational fear. Newborn babies had more in common with one another than they did with the parents pushing them around in their elaborate car-seat strollers. They all had the same quizzical expressions on their face; they all had little hands curled into fists. It made no
sense
to feel the loss of one more than any other, so he felt it every time he passed any baby.

“It makes me
mad
,” he told Beth during his next session with her. “I wish I didn’t feel it. I don’t even get it. I only spent a week with her. I only knew about her for two weeks.”

“How do you think Amy’s dealing with all this?” Beth asked.

He wouldn’t know. She’d written to him once, but he deleted the message without reading it. If he read it, he feared he would lose the resolve of his anger, which was important to hold on to. He wanted make his point: that Amy couldn’t use him whenever she needed a friend. This was the problem with the way their friendship had started. There was an imbalance from the beginning. He loved being needed in some of the surprising ways she needed someone. He liked taking care of her, and later, after she started giving him “assignments,” he liked being her project. He tried to explain it to his mother once. “Our weaknesses aligned pretty well. We filled each other’s gaps.”

Then he discovered saying things like this didn’t help him hold on to his anger. Saying things like this made him cry for an embarrassing twenty minutes straight.

Days bled into one another without him doing much of anything. He didn’t go into work or try to get his job back. He didn’t say much when his mother asked what he was thinking about for next year. “Should we get some college applications? See what they look like?” she said once.

“I know what they look like, Mom. They look like forms online that you have to fill out.”

Christmas came and went and he remembered nothing that happened except a fleeting feeling of victory that he’d gotten through the day, made ten times worse by Jana, his father’s new wife, explaining to her sister and parents, “Matthew’s just had a falling out with a very good friend, so he’s feeling sad today.”

Nothing was a conversation stopper quite like that.

He got through it, and January rolled in with its white-gray skies and endless rain. On TV, he and his mom watched the news, which had footage of mudslides around Southern California, carrying houses down rocky embankments. It startled him, watching that. Houses could move these days and he couldn’t.

Or at least he hadn’t, in almost a month.

It made him feel terrible. Like if he wasn’t careful, this really could become the rest of his life. He’d be one of those strange sons who lives with his mother until they both become so old, they look like a couple shopping once a week and bickering in the grocery story about their purchases.

That could happen, he knew. She’d gone out to dinner once with Mr. Heffernan. When she came home, she said they’d had a lovely time but were probably better off thinking of each other as friends. “Good friends,” she said, which made Matthew think about Amy. He and Amy had never really been anything more than that, and look at how that much had destroyed him.
Good friends?
he wanted to say.
You’d better be careful.

His mother wanted him to move on with his life, but not so desperately that she’d force him. If he was still here five years from now, she would probably pass him the remote control and ask him what kind of soup he’d like for dinner. She didn’t want that for him, but if it happened, so be it. She wouldn’t push him out of this house or this life.

He’d have to do it for himself.

Finally in late January, he rode his bike to the La Tierra movie theater. It was four o’clock when he got there. Mr. Ilson stood outside wearing one of his stupid suits, holding his janitorial ring of keys. “Hi!” Matthew said, too loud.

It had been a few days since he talked to anyone besides his mother. They often talked too loud, because the TV was always on.

“Well, look who it is.” Mr. Ilson held a hand up to block the sun in his eyes. “Nice to see you again.” He didn’t step forward to shake Matthew’s hand (because Mr. Ilson never shook hands) but Matthew could tell he was happy to see him. “So we’ve missed you a little bit. I forgot how bad the nacho machine could get. Everyone else is pretty much a surface cleaner.”

“Not me.” Matthew nodded.

“Not you, Matthew. That’s right.” He unlocked the door and held it open. “You want to come in?”

Matthew assumed his job had been filled. He didn’t even have a job, really; he had a few shifts that anyone else could have done as well as he did. He’d come back to say hi to whoever was working. To see if anything had changed, to “visit” like he remembered other ex-employees doing over the summer when they were home from college. You knew they’d once worked there by the way they reached around and helped themselves to popcorn.

“You looking for some shifts again?” Mr. Ilson said. “I can go back to my office and see what I’ve got.”

Matthew wasn’t sure if he was saying this out of pity or not. Surely he knew if he had open shifts. Probably he would go back and say he was sorry; he had nothing open. He was just pretending to be nice. “Sure, thanks,” Matthew said. Standing alone in the lobby was strange. One of the last times he was here, he’d stayed late and played truth or dare with Hannah in the beanbag chairs behind the screen. It wasn’t a bad memory; it just felt like it happened a long time ago to a different person.

“Oh my God! Matthew!” It was Hannah, in the doorway, wearing a bike helmet. She looked good—friendly and sweaty and happy to see him.

“Hi, Hannah.”

“Are you back or just visiting?”

“Just visiting, I think. But we’ll see—he’s checking the schedule.”

She walked toward the employee changing room. “That means he wants you back!” She flashed a thumbs-up and disappeared. He remembered the rules and looked at his watch. They weren’t allowed to clock in before they had their smock on and their hair up. If they took too long changing, they got docked for being late. “Rules are rules,” Mr. Ilson always said. “I didn’t make them up.”

It would be nice to come back here. To have someone else make up rules that everyone was following, not just him. No jeans. No open sandals. White shirts only under smocks. No smoking. No eating. Some rules were “soft rules,” which meant no one paid attention to them, like the no-eating rule. Everyone ate. And the “no hanging around after work hours” could have been rewritten slightly to say, “no hanging around after work hours unless these people are your friends and you feel like it.”

Hannah came back out, dressed in her unflattering smock, hair pulled back. “Let me punch in,” she said. When she returned, she surprised him. She didn’t go behind the counter to start her shift inventory on drink cups and candy. She came over and hugged him. The longest hug he’d had in a while.

“I’m sorry about everything you’ve gone through. We’ve all been thinking about you and hoping you’d come back.” Finally it occurred to him:
Chloe must have told everyone
.
That’s why they’re all being so nice.

He smiled into Hannah’s hair. It was nice of her to say, though it couldn’t possibly be true. Unless they missed making fun of him behind his back.

“Carlton wrote a song about you,” Hannah said. “His band really likes it and they’re going to play it at their next gig. It’s called Mr. Careful. The chorus goes, ‘Mr. Careful takes care / Wherever he goes / He doesn’t leave traces / So nobody knows / What’s in his head or in his heart / He lives in this world and lives apart. But if you look close /There it is, you can see / His heart. His heart.”

She had a pretty voice, much nicer than he expected. She must have practiced a little, waiting to sing it to him.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s nice. I like it.”

“He wants everyone to know he’s not gay or anything. It’s not a love song.”

“Right, no.”

“It’s a story song. He made up some parts.”

“That’s fine. Do you want me to help you start inventory?”

“I guess. Sure.”

After they’d made six stacks of twenty cups, Mr. Ilson appeared. “Good news!” he said. “I can put you on two shifts a week to start. Not tonight, though. Renalda’s coming in tonight. She’s new. No comments, Hannah. We’re still not too sure about Renalda.” He held up a flat stop-sign hand. “Don’t push me on this, Hannah. I’ve got Matthew on Friday night with you, and Wednesday afternoon with Carlton. That’s the best I can do.”

For the first time in months, Matthew felt like he could understand what wasn’t being said directly. Hannah had pushed for this.

Maybe Carlton, too.

If he comes back, you have to give him another chance,
they must have said.

And why would they have done that unless they liked him a little? He didn’t want to start crying, so he forced himself not to think of something Amy had said in the hospital:
People like you, Matthew. They do. You have to start seeing that, sooner or later. It’s a waste if you don’t.

He wouldn’t waste this. Any of it.

He didn’t want to anymore. He wanted to help Hannah count her cups and her candy, and ask if she was closing tonight. If she was, he’d offer to give her a ride home. Midnight was too late for anyone to take a bus home in the dark, he was almost sure. He wasn’t being Mr. Crazy-Careful to offer to come back and give her a ride. He was being thoughtful. He was being a friend. And if she wanted to kiss him after he dropped her off, so be it.