Since You've Been Gone (44 page)

Frank nodded but didn’t say anything, and I just looked at him, long enough that he noticed as he shifted and glanced over at me with raised eyebrows. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, turning to look out the window. Frank took the exit—in addition to gas and food (no lodging) there was fishing at this location, as well. If we’d been talking, I had a feeling we would have been joking about the sign’s fish symbol, which was comically oversized and about to bite down on a tiny hook. I would have made some remark about how this exit apparently had giant mutant fish, in addition to a Chevron, or Frank would have. But instead, we just passed the sign in silence
and headed to the gas station, which happened to be part of an enormous travel mart.

“I’m happy to get the gas,” Frank said as he pulled up next to the pump, but I shook my head.

“I insist.” It was one thing I knew I wasn’t going to budge on. If Frank was driving me, in his car, down to South Carolina, I was not going to let him pay for gas as well.

He handed me the keys and said, “It takes regular. Do you need some help?” I just shook my head, and Frank headed inside to the travel mart. I used my debit card to fill up the tank—I didn’t want to use the conch money until we had to. As I watched the numbers go up—it appeared that the truck had a very large tank, which meant I was paying more for gas than I ever had in my life—I felt myself getting more and more frustrated. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with what Frank had said; it was the tone—so blandly polite. It occurred to me that maybe the only reason he’d agreed to come on this trip was because he was Frank Porter, ever the Boy Scout. And if that was the case, maybe he was fine with us just not talking for the next twenty hours. I suddenly thought back to Frank’s parents at the gala, standing next to each other but not speaking, not once throughout the course of the night. Frank might have been okay with it, but I wasn’t. The pump clicked off, and I winced at the amount and returned the nozzle. Not stopping to get my receipt, letting the wind take it and bear it away, I marched into the travel mart.

I found Frank by the cold drinks case, grabbing a water and a Coke.

“Hey,” I said. Frank looked over at me, letting the glass refrigerator door swing shut, giving me a little blast of cool air.

“All filled up?” he asked in that same bland, maddening tone.

“Listen, I don’t think it’s fair for you to be mad at me.” I was speaking without thinking about it first, not hesitating, just saying what I felt.

He just blinked at me for a moment, then looked down at the bottles in his hands, wiping the condensation off his water bottle’s label—Lancaster Blue, a brand I’d never heard of before. “Let’s not do this,” he said, his voice tight. “We have a long drive ahead.”

“So we’re just supposed to sit there in silence?”

Frank looked back at me, and I saw frustration pass over his features. “Look, I’m here, aren’t I? I’m helping you out. Let’s leave it at that.” He turned and headed to the chips aisle, and I followed, after grabbing myself a water and a Diet Coke.

“No,” I said, more loudly than I intended to, and a woman who’d been reaching for a bag of Fritos glanced up at me. I took a step closer to him and lowered my voice. “If you’re mad at me, just be mad at me. Don’t pretend you’re not.” Somewhere in all this was getting lost the fact that I was mad at
him
, but I was no longer sure who was in the right, since we’d both behaved badly—me by kissing him, him by ignoring me for a week.

The woman with the Fritos was still looking at us, and Frank must have seen this, because he retreated to the candy aisle, and I followed. “
If
I am mad at you?” he asked, stopping in front of the chocolate section, like it was a rhetorical question, like the answer was obvious. “You ran away from me, Emily. Literally.  You left me standing in the middle of the road because you wouldn’t even hear me out.”

I stared at him for a moment. I hadn’t realized he would be mad about this; I’d assumed it was because of the kiss. “Well,” I said, feeling a little off-balance, “maybe I didn’t want to listen to you tell me we couldn’t be friends anymore.”

Frank just looked at me. “And what if that’s not what I was going to say?”

“ ’Scuse me.” I turned around and saw what looked like a bleary-eyed trucker reaching for the Reese’s Pieces, which I was currently standing in front of.

I stepped aside, and Frank turned and walked up to the register. I followed, placing my items next to his on the counter, my thoughts spinning. I glanced over at him as I reached into my bag for my wallet. I was so sure I’d known what he’d come to my house to say; it was like I’d never allowed for another possibility.

“Um,” I said, as the woman behind the counter started to scan our items, “So what were—”

“Four eighty,” the woman said. Frank reached into his pocket, but I pushed a five across the counter to her before he could pay.

I took my change, and we picked up our respective drinks. Frank headed out of the mini-mart, into the sun, and I hurried to follow him. I realized, as we walked to the truck, that I had the keys, and could refuse to let him in until he told me, but I didn’t think this would be the best way to go about things. I handed him the keys and walked around to the passenger side. I made myself wait until we were back on the highway before asking him again.

“So,” I said, playing with the cap on my water bottle. “What was it that you were going to say?”

Frank let out a breath, and I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel. “This is why I’m mad,” he finally said, still looking straight ahead at the horizon. “I go to speak to you. I get my courage up, and you won’t even listen to me. But now, a week later, only when we’re stuck in a car together, you want to know.”

Just like that, I felt myself get mad again. “You disappeared for days. You weren’t texting me back.”

“But then I came to your house,” Frank said, as he changed lanes, his voice rising. “And you wouldn’t give me a chance to explain.”

“Well, I’m sorry if I’d had enough of people vanishing on me this summer!” I was yelling this before I knew I was going to say it, before I was really even aware it was what I felt.

“Oh,” Frank said after a moment. He glanced over at me, and I thought I saw something in his expression soften. “I guess I didn’t think about that.”

We drove in silence, and I kicked off my flip-flops and
curled my legs up under me. I noticed the silence didn’t feel quite so charged any longer. It wasn’t the easy quiet that had been between us before, but it no longer felt uncomfortable. “So do you want to tell me now?” I finally asked.

Frank shook his head, but then said, “Maybe later.” He reached forward and turned on the radio, starting to scan for a station, and I let it go for the moment, unrolling my window and letting the warm air whip my hair around my face.

I wasn’t sure if it was the heat, or the fact that we’d landed on a station that seemed to be mostly easy listening, all soft wailing saxophones, or the fact that I’d gotten almost no sleep the night before, but as we crossed into Virginia, I felt myself yawning, my eyes getting heavy. I rested my head against the window and felt my eyes close.

I half expected I would dream about Sloane, if I dreamed at all. But when I opened my eyes again, I realized that I’d been dreaming about Frank. We’d been back together in his tent, where it was warm and peaceful, and he wanted to tell me something, something important.

I sat up and looked around.  At first, all I could see was green. The truck was parked, I was alone in it, and all around me was green—brilliantly colored trees and grass. After a moment, I realized we were parked at a scenic overlook, and that Frank was standing a few feet away, taking pictures with his phone.

From the light, it looked like it was getting to be later in the afternoon, and when I pulled out my phone, I saw that it was
almost six. It no longer felt quite so oppressively hot out, though it was hard to tell inside the truck. I stretched my legs in front of me, and rolled my shoulders back. Even though I could see the highway, you couldn’t hear it here, just the low drone of cicadas and the occasional birdcall.

I wasn’t sure how long Frank was going to be, so mostly to occupy myself, I reached for his iPod and started scrolling through it. He never titled his playlists—this had been one of our bones of contention as we exchanged music, since I always titled mine, titles that he’d liked to make fun of—so I just went to “Mix 14,” which I assumed was the newest one, and scrolled through the songs.

At first I was just looking through them, noticing with a bittersweet satisfaction that there was Eric Carmen on the list, which I’d introduced him to, and that Frank had even allowed some country on his precious iPod. But as I looked at it a little longer, I realized there was something else.

There was a code.

I wondered if he’d even known he was doing it. But there was my name in the song titles, over and over again. I felt myself smile as I looked down at the tiny, glowing screen, wondering when he’d done this. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it felt like he’d just given me a present.

Frank lowered his phone and turned around, and I hurriedly
dropped the iPod back in the console where I’d found it. I smiled when I saw him coming toward me. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that things were strange between us at the moment; it was just my automatic reaction to seeing him. He smiled back at me, though this faded a moment later, like maybe he’d also forgotten for just a second.

“Where are we?” I asked, as he settled himself back behind the wheel.

“North Carolina,” he said. “We’re getting close.”

I nodded, expecting to feel nervous or anxious about seeing Sloane, but I didn’t. I just felt a kind of calm certainty, like we were heading in the right direction.

We got back onto the highway, and I’d only just managed to find a decent radio station before we were crossing into South Carolina. I looked at the state sign as we passed it, decorated with the palm tree and crescent moon that I now knew well. Even though it looked like we wouldn’t get to the exit for River Port for an hour, I found myself sitting up straight, not just letting the scenery and exit signs pass me by, but paying attention to them, to each mile that was bringing me closer to Sloane.

We’d been driving for about an hour after the rest stop when Frank turned the radio off and looked over at me, like he was going to say something. Then he reached over and turned it back on again, but only for a moment before he snapped it off, the silence filling the car.

“So,” he said.

I waited for more, but when nothing came after a few moments, just Frank looking straight ahead, at the highway, I prompted, “So?”

“The thing I was going to tell you,” he said slowly, like he was finding the words as he was speaking them. “You said you wanted to know what it was.”

“Yes,” I made myself say, even though I was now more scared of the answer than I had been when I was pushing Frank to tell me outside the travel mart.

He looked over at me, long enough that my heart started to beat harder. “Lissa and I broke up,” he said, then turned the radio back on again.

I stared him. We were still on the highway. I was holding the directions and looking for 14A, the exit that would take us to River Port. But nothing else was the same. It was like the very air in the truck had changed.

Frank was looking straight ahead, like he had no idea he’d just made it harder for me to breathe. “When,” I started, finally, realizing that I had to say something, and that I wasn’t up to asking him what I really wanted to know. “When did this happen?”

“A few days after the gala,” he said. “I drove down to Princeton to talk to her.”

I’d known that he’d gone to her, but I that thought it was to
be
with her—not to break up with her. A new, terrible fear crept in—was I responsible for this? Had Frank broken up
with his long-term girlfriend because I’d kissed him?

He let out a long breath, then went on, “Things hadn’t been right with us for months,” he said. “I was really trying, this summer. I didn’t think that it would matter, being apart. But it wasn’t just the distance. It was more than that. It had been going on for a while.”