The Truth About Fragile Things (25 page)

I shuddered and turned away, feeling something between a jilted lover and a failed chaperon. Nothing that made sense. A moment later I heard Phillip stand and by the time I turned toward him he was walking away, stalking to the end of our campsite, but he didn’t stop at his hammock. He tromped on toward the next campsite until he disappeared.

“Phillip? Where are you going?” The words came out sounding almost bored, but inside I felt a razor blade of panic slicing the back of my stomach. He didn’t answer me and I stood, looking to Charlotte for an answer. “What happened? Where is he going?”

One hand covered her mouth and her wide eyes glowed beside the yellow of flames. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

“We better go get him. Phillip!” I couldn’t see him anymore but the sound of his footsteps in the underbrush was clear. “We can’t let him get lost out there.”

“He won’t,” she argued, her confusion making it sound like a question.

“What happened, Charlotte?” I bit down on the words, made them hard and unyielding.

“Nothing. He was just sitting next to me and then…he left.”

I’d wasted too much time. Phillip’s footsteps had grown quieter and seemed to come from two directions at one time. I would just be fumbling in the dark now and wouldn’t do him any good. If I yelled it would bring all the other campers investigating. I sighed and sat by the fire and dropped in a gnarled stick because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Charlotte curled up against a tree, pulled her legs into her chest, and looked away from me so that all I could see was her tangled hair and tennis shoes.

He came back after the longest and quietest fifteen minutes I’d ever known. Charlotte and I both stood, but he hurried past both of us and said, “Bedtime.” After he crawled into his hammock and pulled his sleeping bag over his head, Charlotte and I retired to our own hammocks. It was only ten o’clock and I listened for the sound of sleep, but I heard only restless breathing.

“Phillip?” I asked softly.

He grunted and left me alone with my unasked question. I copied him and pulled my bag over my head to protect myself from bugs, leaving only a slice of an opening for fresh air. I missed the flat rocks and the stars of last night, missed my shoulders pressed between Charlotte and Phillip while the sky fell to pieces around us. The sky makes breaking look easy and beautiful. I wondered if I was the only one trying not to cry.

W
e couldn’t help
waking up early the next morning because the cold made it impossible to sleep past dawn. Phillip was the brave one who ventured out and started the fire, but our food was dwindling. We loaded our supplies into his car, shivering, hungry, dirty, tired. The drive home felt unbearably long before I even buckled my seatbelt. We didn’t feel better until we stopped at a McDonalds and devoured some hot breakfast. Phillip passed straight through his obnoxious stage and got stuck in his sullen and sulky stage. He barely spoke, which is painfully obvious on someone who rarely shuts up.

I finished my food and tucked my trash into the McDonalds bag. “Are we going to talk about it?”

Charlotte had stuffed a pillow on one end of the backseat bench and was laid out, her eyes closed. “No.”

“No,” Phillip confirmed.

“And all last night you both got on my case about how I don’t talk. Well, now I’m talking because this will be a long six hours if we don’t speak. What exactly upset you last night, Phillip?”

Charlotte groaned. “Never mind. Don’t talk. You sound just like Doctor Dave whenever you get around to saying something.”

“Megan, you still look pretty after two days in the woods. Your hair is still smooth. Your face is still perfect. It is the weirdest thing.” Phillip’s stare had more accusation than admiration when he took his eyes off the road and studied me.

“You’re mad I don’t look ugly?”

“No. That is totally unrelated. I just had to point it out,” he mumbled.

“I’m mad you don’t look ugly,” Charlotte announced in a muffled voice because she had put the pillow over her face.

“Are you doing that thing where you think you are in love with me just because you’re bored and no other girl is around?” I asked him.

“Thank you very much,” Charlotte snapped.

“Charlotte excluded,” I amended.

Phillip didn’t even give me a smile. “No. Not at all. I just like that I can count on your face. It’s always the same. I’m mad because life sucks.”

“I am seriously still here,” Charlotte growled.

I waited for Phillip to gush over how beautiful she was, too. He never waits for a second invitation to flirt, but he clenched his teeth and didn’t even look in the rearview mirror.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked him.

“No,” he repeated.

I think Charlotte fell asleep after that because there was silence from the backseat for over an hour. Her head was turned away from me so I couldn’t see her eyes but her breathing looked slow and deep.

“Thank you for helping us this weekend,” I said softly to Phillip, breaking the silence. “We wouldn’t have been able to cross off four things without you.”

“No problem.” His clipped answer sounded more like ‘shut up.’

His short temper was too much. Especially since I knew I didn’t deserve it. “Phillip, what am I missing?”

His eyes flickered to Charlotte and then returned to the road. “Nothing.”

“Are you mad at her? Did she do something rude when you were sitting by her last night?”

He flinched. “No.”

“Then what?”

He met my eyes, something heavy and serious weighing down his pupils. “Megan, you know how I bug you sometimes and you still don’t tell me what you’re thinking?”

“Yes.”

“Payback.”

And since I couldn’t argue with that I watched the hills grow smaller until they smoothed into wide fields, and thought of the hot shower waiting for me at home.

When we reached the familiar outskirts of Kansas City I reminded Phillip he needed to drop Charlotte off at my house. “Her mom still doesn’t know about you. I better be the one to take her home.” We got to my driveway at two o’clock and untangled our possessions, pulling apart clothes and sleeping bags dumped hastily in the trunk. The smell of the last fire had hitchhiked inside my yellow hoodie, Charlotte’s pillow, and Phillip’s jeans. It was awkward standing in a tight, uncomfortable triangle outside my house, our hands full, our lips empty.

“See you tomorrow,” Phillip mumbled.

“Bye,” Charlotte whispered, the word and her eyes so full Phillip almost turned around. Almost.

“So, just throw it in,” I said, popping open my trunk after Phillip’s car rattled away. “I’ll have you home in five minutes.”

It was a short, slow drive with the sun playing off the windshield, the memories of the weekend already feeling artificial. As soon as I pulled into Charlotte’s driveway the front door opened and Melissa ran to us. She pulled Charlotte up from the front seat, rubbed down her rumpled hair, took in her shadowed eyes, her uneven complexion.

“Was it worth it?” Melissa asked. “You are completely grounded.”

I thought Charlotte would say something sarcastic, push her mother away. Instead she put her tired head against her mother’s neck. “It was amazing.”

That’s when Melissa looked to me. I wondered if she noticed the achy confusion in my chest lift slim wings and start to rise after hearing Charlotte’s three words. “We did fine,” I reassured her. “We took pictures.” For a moment I froze, forgetting that Phillip would be in almost all of them. “They’re on my phone. I’ll email them when I get home.”

“Thank you, Mom,” Charlotte said.

“You are grounded,” Melissa reminded her, but the sentence was yielding under the stern words. “And if you ever disappear like that again I will call the police and have them drag you home—list or no list, got it?” From the flash of her eyes I knew she was warning me just as much as Charlotte. She followed Charlotte to the trunk of my car and helped her get everything out. When she saw our two backpacks her face changed, narrowed. “You had a tent, didn’t you?”

Charlotte shook her head. “No tent, remember. It’s on the list.”

“I thought you were doing the meteor shower! You were out there with nothing?” She scanned Charlotte again, each bump and smudge more alarming now. I smiled, watching the panic set in despite her daughter standing safely in front of her.

“A twofer.” Charlotte shrugged. “Actually, a four-fer. We backpacked and I skinny dipped. Megan told me not to, but I did it.” Charlotte’s face was shining.

I put my hands up defensively, to ward off the blame. “Nobody saw her. And I tried to keep her safe,” I pleaded.

Melissa turned a speechless gaze on both of us before she stepped closer to me.

“She wanted to go at night when it was dark. I talked her out of that one. Well, I tried to talk her out of it altogether, but she didn’t listen.” My voice took on a frantic edge.

One of Melissa’s hands extended and I wondered if she wanted me to shake it. I made an awkward movement before she laid it on my arm, eased me in for a small, uncertain hug. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” I answered. Would she hear what I was really saying?
I owe you. Of course I will protect your daughter like Bryon protected me.

I gave Charlotte a stiff, uncertain goodbye and got back in my car. Before I closed my door I heard Melissa say she wanted to hear about everything on the list, one at a time. And I think I heard a tone of envy, an accent that made me think she regretted not being there. That’s when I understood that the list was a last gift. Not one we were giving him—one that he gave me. Gave Charlotte. Gave all of us. The debt would never be paid.