Everything You Want (13 page)

Seventeen

Then there he is, leaning on my Jeep, when I come out of the lodge. Lani’s lying beside him, her head between her stretched-out paws, and she lumbers up and comes toward me, tail wagging. When I ruffle her neck she leans toward me for more, so I drop to my knees in the snow, put my arms around her and nuzzle against her big face.

“We’re going for a walk,” he says. “Night’s good. I don’t have to keep her on a leash.” He smiles. “She gets twice the walk I do that way. Anyway, I thought maybe you might want to walk with us.”

I glance back toward the lodge, and there’s Jimmy, the night guy, standing at the door.

“If you’re too tired, that’s okay,” Harp says. “We can do it another time.”

“No.” I stand up. “I’m fine. I’m not tired.”

We walk out to the end of the road, Lani disappearing into the woods—sometimes reappearing ahead of us, sometimes loping to catch up with us from behind. She stops and barks now and then. Once, she throws herself into an untouched patch of snow and rolls around on her back, her big front paws limp with pleasure. She looks so sweet I can’t resist falling backwards beside her, waving my arms and legs in an arc to make a snow angel. I lie there a long time, looking up at the full moon, feeling like—if I wanted to—I could float right up into the stars.

I don’t want to, though. I want to stay right here on earth, breathe in the cold, crisp air, hear the snow crunch beneath my feet as Harp and I walk back toward the lodge together. Halfway there, he stops, puts his hand on my arm to stop me, too. He points, and I see three deer, caught in moonlight, at the edge of the forest. They seem frozen there, not quite real. Then Lani makes a funny little sound in her throat, not quite a bark, and the deer bolt, leaping across the meadow on their impossibly thin legs, graceful as dancers.

I suddenly think of Jules in the middle of New York City, and, at least right now, I wouldn’t trade places with her. I’m happy to be who I am, where I am. I’m over being mad at Craig, who was just trying to be helpful. Grateful for the happiness bubbling up inside me again, allowing me to believe that last night with Harp was real. He
is
my friend, because here he is beside me. I don’t want or need him to be anything more than that.

And, over the next few weeks, being with him, things begin to seem possible. We spend every night after work hanging out at his house, playing pool, watching movies, talking about everything under the sun. At the restaurant, I hang out at the bar between customers, continuing whatever conversation we started hours before. I tell him funny stories about my awful semester at college. My Friday night dates with Freud, Matt and Tiffany constantly making out in our dorm room, and how Tiffany was determined to jump-start my love life. The mortifying coffee date with Gabe Parker.

“You liked him, though, didn’t you?” Harp says.

I shrug, blushing.

He laughs, but doesn’t press me, which only makes me like him more. I’m happy when I’m with him. I never worry about what or what not to say, or feel embarrassed by what I just said; it’s exactly the way I used to feel when I was with Josh.

I even tell Harp about Josh. Everything. Even seeing him with Heather right before I bolted for Michigan and how bad it hurt, even though I knew Josh and I would never be anything but friends. I was happy to be friends with him again. It was enough. I thought I’d accepted that. But maybe not. Maybe I never could.

“Well,” Harp says. “The way I figure it, you never fall out of love with that first person. It’s like a scar, you know? It heals over after a while. You can live with it, cover it up if you don’t want someone to see it. But it never goes away.

“Things end,” he says. “It’s the way life is. The guy’s nuts for not loving you, Emma. But it’s nothing
you
did. Most guys never know who the really cool girls are. You need to quit running that trip on yourself and move on.”

“But
how
?” I ask.

“Tell me one thing you want,” he says. “Don’t think. Say the first thing that comes to mind.”

“A dog,” I say. “A big, slobbery yellow dog that loves me.”

“Then get one,” Harp says. “That’s moving forward.”

“But I can’t get a dog. My mom’s totally not a dog person. If the idea of
any
kind of pet comes up she always says she can’t stand the idea of being responsible for one more living being. There’s no way she’ll—”

“So?” Harp says. “Get your own life, then. Put a dog in it. What’s so hard about that?”

I’d never thought about life that way before, like it’s a big box into which you put everything you want. I could start small, I guess. Get an apartment, get a big yellow dog to live there with me. I imagine running with it, playing Frisbee, rolling around in the grass. I see it in the passenger seat of my Jeep, its big head stuck out the window to catch the wind.

“There’s that girl with the great dog,” people would say as I drove past.

Who knows? Maybe getting a life really is that simple: making a place of your own, living day-to-day in it surrounded by what you love. Maybe it’s also true that I’m cool, like Harp assures me I am. Also pretty, funny, and smart. The day we road-trip to Traverse City to buy me a pool cue, I actually begin to believe it. To believe that, in time, I might even be happy.

And, duh. It occurs to me for the first time that I don’t have to be happy at IU before I can be happy somewhere else. Getting it together
there
is not some kind of test. It didn’t work: so move on. As for the Gabe thing,
whatever
it was. Yeah, I liked him. So what. It only matters in that place, and if I’m not
in
that place, ever again, eventually it will just be one small thing that happened to me along the path of becoming who I am. I mean, what’s
wrong
with not going back? Staying in Michigan—maybe forever?

Harp helps me pick out the cue and a tooled leather case to carry it in. After we try it out in a bar for a couple of hours, he says, “Hey, let’s go to the beach.” It’s a gorgeous day, cold and crisp, blue sky and sunshine. He says, “Why think of the beach as a place to go to only in the summer?”

“Really!” I say, though until that second I had.

We drive over to Sleeping Bear Dunes, a place I love. Mom called it “Ocean Michigan” when we were little, and I still think of it that way. Lake Michigan
is
like an ocean: so big you can’t see across it, and those wonderful white sand beaches. Today, there’s nobody but Harp and me. All I hear is the sound of the waves breaking and receding and the sound our boots make cracking the thin crust of ice. I love the way the snow is swirled in patterns on the sand, making the beach all tan and white, like a huge animal hide. In some places the wind’s blown the sand into ridges, and where the snow’s crusted on them, cracking and melting here and there, the sand beneath shows through in mysterious, stick-like patterns. Hieroglyphs, I think. Secrets left here for me to decipher.

It’s freezing cold, and windy; my face burns. But I never want to leave. Harp and I stand at the edge of the water for a long time, watching some ice balls caught in a scoop of shoreline. They’re all sizes, from snowball size to the size of a snowman’s torso, but none of them quite round—which is probably why they roll in the water so crazily, bobbing like drunks, bumping against the thick curve of ice that stops a few yards short of the beach. I’m hypnotized by them. A wave comes in and soaks them brown. Then it recedes, sucking the water away with it, and the ice balls are white again. It makes me think of sucking all the juice from a snow cone.

I can’t help it. I throw my arms around Harp and say, “This is so wonderful. In my whole, whole life I’ve never seen anything like this. Thank you so much for bringing me.”

And he hugs me back a long time. We just stand there in the freezing cold, the two of us, like lovers. It feels strange when I have that thought. Sure, I’ve had some fantasies about Harp. But because he’s older, because he knows so much more than I do, because he’s been such a help to me, it’s never occurred to me that Harp might think of me as someone he could love. The more I think of it, though, the more it seems to me that these past few weeks together have been moving toward this moment. And I feel my heart open to what might happen next between us.

Eighteen

I wake up early the next morning, full of energy. There’s new snow on the ground, and when I open the window I can hear the distant rumble of the big ski cats already out grooming the slopes. I pop in a can of cinnamon rolls, put on my ski clothes while they bake. I smile at myself in the mirror, thinking about how I’ll drag Harp out of bed, feed him breakfast, and make him go skiing with me.

But when I get to his house, he’s gone.
Gone
. I know because the door is locked; Harp never locks the door. I sit down on the porch steps, as if the wind’s been knocked out of me, the stupid cinnamon rolls cooling in my lap.

“Fuck!” I say, over and over. “Fuck, fuck,
fuck
.” Going back and forth between feeling furious, mortified, and heartbroken. How could he
do
this? What’s the matter with me that guys can’t even stand to be my
friend
?

I don’t know how long I sit there before throwing the cinnamon rolls into the woods and heading back to my Jeep. I’m freezing by the time I get home, though. Shaking from the cold. I can’t cry. I can’t do anything but make a fire in the wood stove and huddle up to it, shivering.

All I can think of is that in a few hours I’m going to have to go to work, where everyone will feel sorry for me. I can’t wimp out, I have to go. I’ll just have act like Harp leaving is no surprise to me. No big deal. Like I knew he was going all along.

Right. As soon as I see Craig standing at the door, looking as worried about me as if I’m one of his own daughters, I start crying. “I’m really sorry about this, Emma,” he says, ushering me into his office, closing the door.

“Really, we were just friends,” I say.

Craig nods.

“Well, I thought we were friends, anyhow. I guess I should have listened to you.”

He gives a little shrug. “Hey, you live and learn. Thing is, the guy’s FUBAR, Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. You’re a nice girl, Emma,” he says kindly. “You’ll find someone a lot better than that.”

Out on the floor, the other waitresses hover over me. Like Craig, they all assume there was more going on between Harp and me than there actually was. Sex, that is. God. Would they feel more or less sorry for me if they knew that the idea of having sex with me is probably what made Harp bolt?

I get through the weekend okay; then Monday and Tuesday nights I call in sick. I
am
sick by then. Sick at heart. I lie in bed for three days straight, just lie there. I don’t read or even listen to music. It’s a bad kind of nothing, though. Not
shunyata,
because I can’t stop thinking.
Isn’t there one person in the entire world who wants to be with me
?

Then, after three days of feeling like I want to die, I wake up and a voice inside my head says, clear as anything, “Simplify your life.”

I don’t know why I do what I do next. It’s not exactly like I decide. But I get up and shower, gather every stitch of clothing I brought with me from home except the jeans and sweatshirt I’m wearing, put them in plastic trash bags, and haul them out to my Jeep. Then I drive to Traverse City, dump the bags at Good Will, and go shopping. I buy black jeans, black combat boots, black turtlenecks and sweaters, a black ski jacket and pants, a black-and-white gypsy-looking dress, all new socks and underwear—everything black or white.

I can’t give myself full credit for the idea to do the black-and-white thing. I got it from reading a book about Georgia O’Keeffe, whose clothes were all either black or white because she didn’t like to have to think about what to wear. I thought it was cool when it read it, and it seems like a good plan to me now. I go one step further than Georgia, though. I walk into a beauty shop and say, “Anyone have time to buzz my hair?”

Every single person in the shop turns to look at me. Even the ladies under the dryers lift up the hoods and offer their opinions. “But, honey, your long hair is so pretty,” they say. “Are you sure you want to do something that drastic?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “I’m tired of thinking about hair. I’m tired of thinking about anything.”

I love the chop, chop, chop of the scissors. I love watching long strands of my hair fall to the floor, I love watching my face—a whole new face—appear. Why didn’t I do this sooner, I wonder? Hair is stupid. What’s the point in having hair? For whom? I feel light and free when I leave the beauty shop. For days afterwards I glance in the mirror, totally shocked to realize that the person I see there is myself.

Once again, I am a human dynamo. This time it’s different, I tell myself. This time it’s real. I get up early, cross-country ski so fast that, ten minutes onto the trail, I’m soaked through with sweat. All dressed in black, I feel sleek and dangerous, like a James Bond girl. Then pretty soon, it gets even better than that and I feel nothing at all.

After skiing, I go inside and study my French the rest of the morning—a promise to myself that, in time, I will live in a world wider than the one I’m living in now. I make myself think in French all day, which turns out to be a stroke of genius because, to translate my thoughts, I have to make myself think slowly. I can’t indulge myself in that awful spiraling of dark thoughts that always lead me to the same place:
I’m so lonely. Will there ever be a time I won’t be lonely?

Sometimes those thoughts come anyway; and when that happens, I make my mind take a right-angle turn into something simple. A childhood memory, clear as a snapshot:
La petite jeune fille en skis descende la montagne très rapidement.
Or I run through the various steps to do something I’ve done a hundred times, like tuning my skis. If controlling my thoughts doesn’t work, I just start naming the things all around me.
Le table, le livre, la lampe, la fenêtre. La porte, la neige, le ciel, les arbres.

Le restaurant.
There, I’m usually too busy to think. If there’s dead time, I concentrate on describing the customers.
La famille bonheur avec deux enfants charmante. La grosse femme avec la lipstick très rouge. Les yuppie skiers d’enfer.

I carry a little French dictionary in the pocket of my apron so I can look up words I don’t know. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and say things like, “
Les sheeseboorgeres sont très, très sublime
!” The other waitresses think it’s hilarious. We all get to saying, “
Sacre bleu
!” when something goes wrong. And “
Au revoir, mes amis
,” every night when we leave.

Je vais bien
, I tell myself.
J’ai une vie
.

I’m doing fine. I have a life.

Then Mom calls and says, “Emma, Mary Clark called and said there’s a beige Honda Civic in our driveway at home. Do you know anything about that?”

At which point, everything comes crashing in on me, and I burst into tears and tell her everything.

“You’re
where
?” she says. “You’re
what
?”

Before I know it, she’s made arrangements for me to fly to Steamboat Springs the next day. I feel horrible giving zero notice, just like Harp did. It’s an awful thing to do, and I apologize to Craig about a million times when I go over to tell him.

“It’s okay, Emma,” he says. “Really. It’ll be good for you to be with your parents.”

He’s so nice about my going that he even takes me into town the next morning so I can catch the limo to Traverse City instead of parking my Jeep for who-knows-how-long in the airport parking lot. In fact, he says, if I pay his expenses, he’ll drive it to Indy for me and come back on the Greyhound; he has a friend there he’d like to see.

“Yes!” I say, and hug him hard. Then I get on the bus and promptly start to cry
again
. I cry the whole way to the airport. Then I cry again when the plane lifts off and I look out the window and see the snowy forests and meadows I loved so much as a little girl. The plane banks and turns westward. The shoreline of Lake Michigan with its long white stripe of beach seems like the shoreline of my childhood. We’re flying away from it so fast. In moments, it’s no more than a pencil line along the horizon. Then it’s gone completely. Everywhere I look there’s either cold blue water or hard blue winter sky.