Authors: Katie Cotugno
So I pruned the tomatoes and helped Sol with dinner, got used to the way my life would be. I sat in the yard
underneath the orange trees and tried to tell myself it could be enough, that I could be happy this way, that I wasn’t terrified and lonely, that the walls weren’t pressing in on all sides.
I thought he might call. I watched the phone like a sentry.
He didn’t.
Saturday night and my father was flipping through old movies on cable, tonic and lime on the table beside him. He looked at me a little curiously as I came in. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said and wrapped his heavy arm around my shoulders. He looked so glad to see me it almost broke my heart. “You’re not going out?”
“Nope,” I said, did my best to keep my voice even. “I’m staying right here.”
*
It took everybody but me more than a full week to realize Sawyer was gone.
I guess I couldn’t totally blame them. His attendance at work and family dinners was spotty, to put it mildly; he came and went from the dingy stucco house as he pleased. So when he didn’t turn up for his shifts for a couple of days, and then a couple of days after that—well. “Goddamnit, Sawyer,” I heard Roger mutter one night, manning the taps in the middle of the dinner rush. “Pain in my ass.”
If I suspected that Sawyer wasn’t coming back anytime soon—and it was more than a suspicion, honestly; it was
something I knew in my bones—I certainly wasn’t telling. I wasn’t saying much of anything, really. I went to school and I worked at the restaurant and I kept my mind studiously, fastidiously blank; every time I tried to wrap my brain around what was happening or make some kind of a plan, my thoughts just kind of … slid away. It felt like I was shuffling through my days wrapped in a thick swaddle of blankets, everything muffled and coming from some far-off place.
I didn’t know how to deal with what was coming.
So I didn’t.
That worked, for a while. I flew under the radar as best I could. I knew somewhere in the darkest corner of my mind that I was going to have to speak up sometime, about Sawyer and about the rest of it, but as the days ticked by there was some small insane part of me that began to think maybe I’d made the whole thing up. Maybe I’d imagined taking the test in Shelby’s bathroom. Maybe I’d never been with Sawyer at all.
One afternoon at the end of May I came through the front door a bit later than usual, having spent a good fifteen minutes staring at the contents of my locker with absolutely no clue what books I might need to take with me, then managing to make two different wrong turns as I drove home from school. I was scaring myself a little. I was having trouble motivating myself enough to care.
I was going to head straight upstairs to my bedroom—I’d been spending an awful lot of time staring at the wall—but
my father and Soledad were sitting on the couch side by side like a couple of tin soldiers, waiting. “Hi, Reena,” they said, when I came in.
I blinked. “Um,” I said, dropping my bag on the floor where I stood. I felt vaguely sick. “Hi.”
My first thought was that they knew about the baby somehow, that they’d intuited just by virtue of knowing me, and the wave of relief I felt in that moment was tidal and huge. Then I realized that wasn’t it at all.
“We need to talk about Sawyer,” Soledad told me. “Roger and Lydia need to know where he is.”
“Sawyer?” I repeated. I had a sharp, ridiculous urge to laugh. “I have no idea.”
“Reena,” my father snapped, “this is no time to play—”
“Leo,” Soledad interrupted; then, to me: “Have you heard from him? Did you kids have a fight?”
I shook my head once and sat down hard in the armchair, this feeling like a physical collapse. Suddenly I was so, so tired. “He took off,” I said, shrugging just a little. “I don’t know where. But I don’t think he’s coming back.”
That took them both by surprise; I don’t know what they’d been expecting me to tell them, but it wasn’t that. “When?” Soledad asked softly.
“Ten days ago?” I guessed. The days had started to seep together into a dark, endless river, whole weeks like an underwater blur. I couldn’t keep this secret a whole lot longer. “Two weeks?”
My father had been listening quietly, dark gaze fixed in my direction. “Reena, sweetheart,” he said, clearly baffled. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
I took a deep breath, raised my chin to face the music. “There are a lot of things I haven’t told you,” I began.
*
To say my father didn’t take my pregnancy well would be like calling a category five hurricane a little bit of inconvenient drizzle. He yelled—Jesus Christ, he
yelled
at me, all kinds of hateful accusations I would like never to think about again. I cried. Soledad cried. And my father cried, too.
Then the quiet came in.
Soledad crept into my bedroom some nights, rubbed my back and whispered prayers in my ears. Shelby held my hand and told me jokes. They did what they could to soothe me, to make me feel less alone; still, I spent those long foggy months sure of nothing so much as the feeling of standing on the edge of a canyon and screaming, waiting for an echo that refused to come.
And so it happens. They find a replacement for me at the restaurant; Cade gets me new tires for my van. I come home from my last day of finals—a multiple choice from Professor Orrin that, true to form, still had a URL printed across the bottom—and find Soledad and my father drinking tea in the kitchen. “Hannah napping?” I ask, dropping my schoolbag on the counter. We need to run errands for some last-minute supplies—sunscreen and notebooks, novels on tape. We’re scheduled to hit the road at the end of the week.
Soledad shakes her head, glances in my direction over her big ceramic mug. “She’s in the garden,” she tells me, once she’s swallowed. “With Sawyer.”
That is not what I’m expecting. I turn to my father, gaping a bit. He gazes back with an expression that isn’t quite a smile. “Things change,” he allows, eyebrows arcing with the barest hint of amusement. His color is much better, these days. “You of all people should know that.”
I smile back, I can’t help it, a disbelieving grin that pulls at the edges of my mouth. “I guess so,” I tell him, and head outside into the heat. Sawyer and Hannah are sitting in a lawn chair reading
The Runaway Bunny
, Hannah’s face flushed and sleepy and leaning back into Sawyer like she’s known him all her life. I think of the first day he held her, how starkly terrified he looked, and marvel for a moment at how fast he learned to swim. I sit on the patio to listen, pulling my feet up onto a lounge chair and waiting for the bunny to come home.
Normally by the time a book is finished, Hannah’s up and crowing for the next one, or otherwise she’s bored and wants to play; today, though, she stays where she is, like she’s waiting for something. Sawyer smoothes her dark hair back off her face. “Heard you’re going,” he says to me after a moment, eyes still on the baby—the delicate slope of her jawline, the birthmark on the side of her mouth. She looks a little bit like both of us, is the truth.
I nod and glance away myself, focus on the heavy, ripening tomato plants. It should feel more satisfying than it does that this time he’s the one who’ll be left behind. “Seems that way,” I reply.
“Thought it through?”
“Of course,” I tell him, a bit of heat behind it. I feel my shoulders straighten, think of the itinerary I’ve planned so carefully my entire life. “I’ve got money saved. I’m smart, and we’ll be safe.” I shrug. “Anything happens I don’t know how to handle, my family is a phone call away. I want Hannah to grow up seeing places, you know? I want her to always know what’s out there.”
“Easy, tiger.” Sawyer smiles, unconcerned. Hannah’s falling asleep before my very eyes. “That’s not what I meant. Of course I know you wouldn’t be going if you didn’t think it was a good idea for the baby.”
I blink, look at him for a minute. “So then …?”
“So then.” Sawyer shrugs a little himself. Still, he’s not looking at me. “I don’t know. I think I could have been a good dad.”
I close my eyes for a moment and lean back against the chaise. If you’d told me six weeks ago that this conversation even existed in the realm of human possibility, I would have laughed until my sides were sore and splitting. “I know,” is all I can think to say.
“I would never, ever ask you not to go, Reena,” he says softly. “Go. Do what you need to do. I already screwed up your plans once in this lifetime. I’m not going to do it again.” The baby’s asleep now, peaceful against his chest; Sawyer shifts her warm weight in a gesture I recognize as one I perform a hundred times a day, a series of small, necessary
readjustments. “But I guess I’m just telling you I’ll be here when and if you decide to come back.”
For a second I only just stare at him. He’s got to be kidding. He’s got to be
nuts.
“What are you going to do,
wait
for me?” I ask, laughing a little. “In Broward?”
Sawyer doesn’t smile. “That’s the plan,” is all he says.
“And do
what?
”
He considers it for a moment, that exaggerated thinking face he puts on to disguise the fact that he’s already thought. “Who knows?” he asks finally, and I know I won’t get another straight answer out of him this afternoon as surely as I know he’s already made up his mind. “Work on my tan.”
“You’re insane,” I tell him. Sawyer cocks his head like,
possibly
, and I roll my eyes at him, annoyed and stupidly fond of him at the same time. A warm, wet breeze shuffles the leaves of the coconut palms. “My father just told me,” I say eventually. “That you came by before you left. I never knew that until now.”
Sawyer raises his eyebrows, nods a bit. “Yeah, well,” he says, tipping his chin in my direction. “Probably for the best, right? You said yourself you wouldn’t have come.”
“I said hypothetically.”
“You wouldn’t have,” Sawyer tells me, then smiles. Around his neck is the silver half-moon pendant he gave to Allie years and years ago, tarnished and familiar. I wonder when and how he got it back. It’s strange to see it again after
all this time, pieces of our old lives slipping seamlessly into our new ones. “And you’d have been right.”
I don’t know what to say to that so I don’t say anything, picking a bit at the seam of the cushion and tilting my face up into the sun. Sawyer leans back and closes his eyes. Hannah just dozes, sweet and oblivious, secret dreams fluttering inside her baby head.
I graduated, at least.
I sleepwalked through the ceremony, sat in my big black robe in the air-conditioned auditorium listening to the valedictorian quote Dr. Seuss and trying not to barf. Shelby sat three rows in front of me, kept glancing over her shoulder and giving me the thumbs-up. My biggest accomplishment for the day was managing to cross the stage and pick up my useless diploma without bursting into tears.
Ms. Bowen came up to me afterward, threw her arms around me in congratulations and asked to meet my family. “You made a winner here, with Reena,” she told them happily; if she was at all baffled by the fact that their collective disposition on this most auspicious of days was somewhere
in the neighborhood of the Addams Family at Disneyland, she didn’t let on. “I can’t wait to hear all about how she does at Northwestern.”
There was a moment of silence then—probably only a second or two, although to me it felt like it lasted sometime between nine months and an entire lifetime. Soledad
hmmed
noncommitally. My father cleared his throat. I could feel them both watching me, baffled, but in the end I just smiled my widest and most artificial, told her she wasn’t the only one.
*
I tried to keep working my normal shifts at the restaurant, but in the end I called in so often that finally they went ahead and replaced me with someone new, a dishwater blonde with a pale, zitty complexion. She was nice enough and a decent worker, Shelby reported, but Lydia picked on her to no end. “Mama LeGrande is on the warpath,” Shelby warned me, having dropped by with a movie and a magazine and a generous side of gossip that, thankfully, wasn’t about me. “I’m thinking now is probably an awesome time to tell her that I’m gay.”
I grinned. “Lydia wouldn’t care that you’re gay,” I told her as I flipped through the glossy tabloid. The TV jabbered cheerfully in the background. “You could tell my parents if you wanted, though. Maybe take some of the heat off yours truly.”
Shelby didn’t smile. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” she said suddenly. She was painting her toenails
dark blue, window opened to the sticky heat outside because the fumes made me sick to my stomach. Her ripped-up jeans were rolled halfway up her calves. “Reena.”
I sighed a bit, rolling over on the bed so I was staring up at the ceiling. There were faint tape marks up there, left over from a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge Allie had helped me hang when we were in middle school. I’d pulled it down along with all the rest. “Yeah, I do.”
“No, I mean. Not to like, hit you over the head with a Planned Parenthood brochure or anything, but”—Shelby looked at me pointedly—“you really don’t.”
I laughed in spite of myself, a dark, hollow sound. “You think I haven’t thought about that?” I asked her, propping myself up on one elbow. “You think it just, like, hasn’t occurred to me? Of course I’ve thought about it, Shelby.”
Shelby put the cap back on the nail polish, feet resting on the windowsill. “So?” she asked.
“So, nothing.” I shrugged into the pillows, resigned. “My father would hate me, for starters.”
“I hear that,” Shelby said slowly, “but not wanting your dad to be mad at you is not a good enough reason to have a baby when you’re sixteen.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” I made a face. “I didn’t say he’d be mad at me. I said he’d
hate
me. I mean, he already hates me, but it’s the kind of hate I can maybe see mellowing out after a while. If I had an abortion, I might as well just pack my bags and forget I ever had a family.” I
picked at a loose thread on the quilt, watching it unravel. “Anyway, that’s not even really it.”