34 Pieces of You (13 page)

Tires squeal. Meg dissolves into laughter. Mattie hops off Mom’s lap, wanders to the window, and peeks outside. Jess pushes away her plate and joins the others to silently view the world beyond. Through the window, I can see that this day is glorious. Later it might turn cold and damp, but for right now the sun shines brightly and there is the promise of spring in the way the light wraps around the tree’s bark. For the first time in months, I want to go outside, feel that sunshine on my face.

I move closer, but not too close, stopping to retrieve the picture frame. I stare at the happy family—a much glossier version of the one I know. When I set it back on the table, Mom catches my eye and nods toward the girls. “To be young,” she says with
a wistful smile, as if I am someone who has waged her own war with adulthood.

Now the room is absolutely muted—just the girls at the window and me staring at Mom.

Minutes pass, and the sounds begin to filter back in: Meg whispering to Jessie, and Mattie giggling.

Eventually, I go, “Mom . . .” And her head twitches in that mom way that means she’ll respond if my voice rises in panic; otherwise, the dimmer is on and she’s lost in her private thoughts. Still, the words continue forming slowly, first inside and then out: “Do you want to go for a walk—”

But my words are drowned out by Meg’s booming voice. “Oh my God! Oh my God! I love him! I do!” She spins on her heels; her dangling barrette drops defiantly to the floor. She pretends to faint onto the couch, her legs comically straight in the air. Mattie, sensing the opportunity to play, takes a running leap and lands with a thud on Meg’s body. Jess continues to stare out the window. Mom turns to me, her face preoccupied.

“Did you need something, Sarah?” she asks.

And it’s this word “need”—the act of taking from her, not giving to or sharing with—that makes the sentence fold into
some dark corner inside my body. I shake my head. She smiles kindly, the mom mask firmly in place.

On the couch, Meg tickles Mattie until she giggles uncontrollably.

And like that, the moment disappears.

* * *

That evening, I’m curled up in bed, watching Lifetime, when Tommy enters my room without knocking. I haven’t seen him since our incident three weeks ago. Not one word in twenty-one days, but suddenly, as if by magic, he’s back. And from the looks of it, all he wants is to examine my belongings.

He pauses beside my dresser, fingers the trinkets Mom’s placed there to make this room feel more like my own: my grandparents’ wedding picture, a tiny marble jewelry box she gave me when I turned seven, a hand-carved jade elephant my father brought back from a trip abroad. His hand stops when it reaches an unopened package. He runs his palm over the box’s hard brown edges. Looks at the label.
Jake.
Then looks at me.

He’s too far to touch—the edges of the area rug are barely beneath his Adidas—but I see his hand drift toward his mouth, the skin around his fingernails as raw today as three weeks before.

“Have you heard from him recently?” I ask.

He picks up the package, gives it a little shake. With it lying
flat on his palm, he appears to estimate its weight. “Yeah,” he says, “but he wasn’t really making any sense. I think this whole thing with Ellie has him torn up.” He sets the package back down. “When did this come?” he asks, too casually.

“I don’t know. Last week, I think.” I don’t add that it’s been sitting on my dresser ever since. That the thought of what’s inside fills me with dread.

“Why haven’t you opened it?” He taps the box. “Aren’t you curious?”

I’m painfully curious. But I’ve also examined the evidence—Ellie’s death, Jake’s absence even before the hospital, the fact that nothing good has existed or ever will exist between us—and drawn the conclusion that what’s in that box is another big fat piece of hell.

“Well?” Tommy prods.

I roll my eyes, poker-faced, but there’s something about the way Tommy looks at me, like he doesn’t believe my bravado, that makes the other words tumble out. “Did he tell you he’s never called? Not once since he left. He never even came to the hospital. He . . .” I continue on and on, fully aware that I sound like some whiny five-year-old chasing after an ice-cream truck. When I’m done, I wait for the inevitable: Tommy cracking a joke about how I must have my period or something. But he doesn’t. He just sits
on the edge of my bed and rests a comforting hand on my foot.

This is one of Tommy’s numerous complexities. It’s like when he knows you’ve been pushed too far, he’ll stop all the pushing and simply hold on to you.

Tommy slides closer. “Seeing you like this . . . I hate it.” He studies my face, all concerned-like. And it takes me back to eleventh-grade marine biology, when Ellie assigned our social circle aquatic identities.

“Jake’s a dolphin. Because like Flipper, he’ll rescue you. You’re a starfish—”

“Sea star,” I corrected. For the last twenty minutes Mr. Fox had explained the difference in detail, but Ellie had a habit of drifting off sometimes. “It’s an echinoderm, same as the sand dollar, not the same as a fish.”

“You’re a nerd,” Ellie said, a crooked smile on her face. “And a
sea star
.”

“Why sea star?” For some reason I’d thought she’d pick a turtle or a frog, something common and not quite as beautiful.

“Because you’re mutable,” she said, proving she had been listening. “That’s why you always do fine. And . . .” She scrutinized me. “You’re also really bony.” Which was a less flattering feature of a sea star.

“I’m a sea horse—”

At this I laughed. “Because you plan on being monogamous and mating for life?” Ellie had kissed at least two dozen guys during our spin-the-bottle phase, but unlike me, she had never longed for a real boyfriend.

“No,” she said, something unreadable moving across her face. “Because I can easily die of exhaustion.”

I should have asked her what she meant, but at the time, I only said, “And Tommy?”

“
Oh.
Obviously, a sea jelly.”

After some research, I discovered this
was
obvious. Like a sea jelly swimming blindly through the dark sea, Tommy was relatively harmless unless provoked. But if provoked . . .

With this in mind, I still whisper the dreaded question, because I just have to know. “Does Jake . . . does he hate me?”

“Fuck, Sarah . . .” Tommy averts his eyes, which seems to be an answer of sorts. “Does that matter? You just said he didn’t come to see you in the hospital. I’ve been here almost every week. Where the fuck has he been?”

Tommy stands, and all his warmth goes with him. He gets the package and brings it to me. “Open it.”

I look out the window. The sun is down now, the bare trees swaying fiercely in winter’s heavy wind. Even huddled against the cold, they are more alive than me.

“No,” I say, feeling slightly stung. “Right now I just don’t want to care.”

“Good.” He sounds relieved. “I’m pretty sick of you caring. All right?” He takes a few deep breaths; then he goes back to caressing my foot. “Let’s just watch a movie. Something funny. You want to do that?”

I nod, knowing he’s right. That I need to face the facts. Jake doesn’t care about me. And I shouldn’t care about him. But doing that isn’t as easy as Tommy would have it be.

I make room for him on the bed, and stop myself from protesting when he wraps me in his arms. The movie begins, and for the next two hours we are simply Sarah and Tommy. Friends. Almost lovers. The only two left in a set of four.

* * *

After Tommy leaves, my sisters return, bearing signs of leftover popcorn in the corners of their perfectly flossed teeth. Mom disconnects me from Lifetime TV and wonders aloud about the unique smell in my bedroom, the one that often follows Tommy and his red eyes around, and reminds me of my appointment with Concerned Therapist on Wednesday, and asks why don’t I get up and take a shower or something. Then she leaves me alone, and from the corner Jake’s package beckons to me.

Will it always be like this? Will I always be that lame girl
who loved that boy who never loved her back? Who can’t be happy with what she has because of what she wants? What I’ve always had is Tommy. What I’ve always wanted is Jake.

I reach for the package, and, like Tommy, I try to gauge its weight. Then I sit with it on my thighs and stare at it. I think about the sea jellies, swimming in darkness, stinging blindly. And about Ellie’s sea horse, fighting wave after wave of endless ocean.

And that bubble in my chest expands—waiting, threatening to suffocate me—but I control my panic by remembering what Ellie said. That I am a sea star. That I can change. Survive.

With shaking hands, I peel back one corner of the package and then the next. Soon the exterior wrapping lies on the floor. On my lap is a brown box. I open the box and peer at the contents inside. At first it looks like a jumbled mess, but I realize that’s because my vision is blurred. It’s blurred because I’m crying so hard. I take a few breaths to calm myself down, but it’s useless. I can’t control this.

Finally, I focus in on dozens of pictures—some Polaroids, others regular four-by-sixes—of me and Ellie over the last five years: at parties, at school, with different hairstyles and different clothes, glaring at each other and laughing, sleeping on sofas and floors and campsites, and dancing at proms and homecomings.

The box falls to the floor. Pictures scatter everywhere. I stumble to my bed. Bury my face in my pillow. Take that ball in my chest and suspend it in midair.

I repeat the word “stoic” for hours.

Finally I am calm enough to put the box back together. I take it to my walk-in closet and slide it so far into the darkness someone would have to build a tunnel to China to find it. Then I flick off the light and try to sleep.

Us hurtling t
o
ward that last mem
o
ry: a F
o
urth
o
f July squished t
o
gether
o
n a patchw
o
rk quilt, the sky expl
o
ding a
bo
ve y
o
ur
o
pen m
o
uth, Dad’s arm ar
o
und M
o
m’s sh
o
ulder, the edge
o
f y
o
ur t
o
es pressed against mine.

AFTER. FEBRUARY.

Less than a week after Amber’s visit, I’m called in to see Dean Schwartz. The office is dark, a grand display of masculinity, and there is a familiar smell, but I can’t place it right away. It’s only after Dean Schwartz has settled himself comfortably behind his mahogany desk that the smell links to a memory of another office similar to this.

In that memory I am twelve, and I sit beside my sister, who stares listlessly at the walls. My mother sits opposite us, closer to the shrink. His name was Bob, I believe, and he had gray hair and kind eyes. We went to see him for weeks. Mostly, Bob asked questions. Mom dabbed at her eyes, doing her best not to cry. Ellie stayed silent, and I tried to somehow make them both feel
better—a smile for Mom, a goofy face for Ellie—but nothing worked.

The memory is too disturbing. I close my eyes and rub my hand across my face, trying to shake it off, but it lingers, as clear and present as that pain that I get sometimes.

“Mr. Meyers,” Dean Schwartz says, clearing his throat, “it’s been brought to my attention that you’re struggling in your classes. I’m afraid your grades just aren’t up to par. And according to your professors, you’re barely in attendance.” He pauses, lowers his voice, because this is how you approach such a delicate subject. “I understand you experienced a huge loss last semester. But it says here that you’ve repeatedly refused school counseling. Why is that?”

Because it’s the most obvious and self-explanatory response, I say, “I don’t need counseling.”

He squints his eyes and nods his head, as if he understands yet respectfully disagrees. “Well, then . . . maybe what’s best for you and your future is that you take a break? Clear your head. Give yourself some time to heal.” He pauses to flip through pages in his manila folder. Then he stares at me from over the rim of his glasses. He’s nearly bald except for a few patches of thin gray hair that sprout from random spots on his head. This,
along with the grim expression on his face, makes him look like an unhappy owl.

“Well, what do you think?” He clicks his tongue, and I wonder if he’s put out by my silence. If he prefers standing in a classroom, lecturing students, rather than dealing with issues of academic probation and life crisis and someone’s sister dying. Someone’s sister maybe, possibly, committing suicide.

When he leans forward, I notice his golf-ball cuff links. I try to imagine him on some green, his bare arms slightly burned despite the careful application of sunblock. He seems like the kind of guy who takes his time lining up a shot. Like he has the available headspace for all that concentration. I don’t know why, but that fact alone says a lot to me about his life.

He lifts the stapler from his desk and clicks it absentmindedly. I fight the urge to pull it from his hand. That kind of behavior will get you suspended. “This is hard for you, isn’t it?” he asks.