The Sweetheart Deal (26 page)

S
omething happened between Meredith and me after I'd told her about Garrett and my mom.

I'd known her for a really long time—since we started school together when we were five. You see a girl every day for that long, by the time you're in eighth grade, she's like your sister and she thinks of you like her brother, too. But then, after we started high school, even before we kissed that time, I could tell she started to think of me
that way,
like all our years together since naptime in kindergarten up to eighth grade graduation—nerves and mess-ups in school plays and Christmas programs, doing book report presentations and group projects on birds and bridges, Outdoor School, her bloody noses and me throwing up in third grade, goofy games in PE—boring things that made us know each other so well, hadn't happened. When she started to treat me like I was a foreign exchange student, someone mysterious and new. That's what drove me crazy. That's not who she was and that's not who I was. I was embarrassed for her.

But after I told her about Garrett and my mom, she kind of went back to the way she had been, the way I liked, the kind of girl you wanted on your dodgeball or kickball team, who didn't worry how her hair looked and didn't check out her own jeans and ass when she passed a plate-glass window. I was glad she didn't seem so into herself anymore.

We all still hung out until the school year ended, and afterward, but once it got nice and after summer started, we were outside all the time, and the girls played basketball with us when we let them, girls on boys, and they weren't bad—lethal with their elbows—but as much as they fouled, they made more free throws than we did, even though we had more chances. Meredith wanted to learn to skateboard but said her brother refused to teach her—he was only twelve but he was an ace and said he couldn't be bothered—so I did, and although it was painful to watch, she wasn't afraid to fall and she wasn't afraid to look bad trying. That's what I mean: a few months before she would have been all self-conscious and vain, and that summer she wasn't.
You're a trouper
,
I'd tell her.
You're getting there
. She laughed when I said that even though she was frustrated and once she said to me,
Will you shut up with that crap. I had to ask you to teach me because a
sixth-grader
blew me off
.

By August, when we went to the movies we held hands and sometimes I'd put my arm around her, but I mostly liked putting my hand on her knee and leaving it there for the whole time. I liked how my hand looked on her knee. And at parties or at night at the park we'd leave the group and go make out and when my jeans got tight and I couldn't help pushing myself against her, I wasn't embarrassed and she wasn't either. At least I didn't think so, because she pushed back pretty good.

She babysat a lot for this one family with two little boys, and I'd go over to their house the nights she was there. We'd play backgammon and Scrabble after the kids went to bed—we didn't make out there, it just wasn't a good idea.

I thought about having sex with Meredith pretty much all the time, and in the shower, in my room, and last thing in bed at night, where I didn't have to hurry. I played it out as many times as I could in one day. But I was afraid of doing it and I hoped she was too. As great as thinking about having sex with Meredith was when I was alone, if we did do it I was afraid one of two things would happen. I was afraid it would be so terrible that I'd never want to do it again and might even stop liking her as much as I did, or I'd want to do it all the time, like every second of every day, and not play Scrabble or backgammon or go to the movies, which I liked doing with her. And I worried she'd be disgusted by my boner if she saw it, that she wouldn't want to touch it and wouldn't even want it anywhere near her. And the condoms, that would be embarrassing as hell, like dressing my boner for where it was going. And the hair, there would be everyone's hair down there to deal with, who wanted to deal with that? I didn't even want to think about orgasms. The word sounded like something you'd fall into and keep falling forever without ever landing. Besides that, if Meredith had one, I didn't think I wanted to see her face while she did, and I for sure didn't want her to see mine. And the Catholic thing—I mean, Father John knew who I was, and what was I going to do? Go to confession every week, knowing Father would know it was me every time?
Me again
.
Had sex
again
this week with my girlfriend, forgive me,
again. Plus, I wanted to put off that talk with my mom as long as I could. I'd given her my word and I planned to keep it, but I wasn't in any hurry to have that conversation. It was just too complicated. When I was with Meredith, my body wanted more but my mind didn't.

So she was pretty much my girlfriend by the time we started junior year, but she wasn't dopey about it. It wasn't anything she had to try hard at—she just was and everyone knew it, and that felt pretty right to me.

A
fter Garrett left I had told Erin everything—everything except that we'd had sex in her house. She didn't need to know that.

“I thought so,” she said. “I knew you would tell me when you were ready.”

She surprised me because I thought I'd done a pretty good job of hiding it. But what surprised me more was what she said about Garrett and Leo.

“You know that's not the kind of thing Leo would have asked just anyone. Or would have asked because he'd had one too many. Knowing how crazy he was about you,” she said. “And what happened between you and Garrett, that isn't one of those things that could happen with just anyone either. I'm so sorry that it all came to a head the way it did. That could not have been good.”

I'd come clean, but I wasn't honest with her when I said I was okay, everything was okay, I was busy, and after what had been months of blundering, I was back on track, doing what I needed to, the way I needed to do it. I was grateful she let me leave it at that.

The last week in August, Erin and I took all the kids and went camping at Trillium Lake.

Fuck you,
I told the solitude inside my house before I locked the front door behind me.
You're staying
.

The last time we'd been there was the previous summer, when both our families had gone together. The last time I was there, Leo had been there with me. Mark's deciding to not come with us this time didn't make the absence of Leo any less significant. It was the closest I'd been to Mount Hood since the day Leo died, but I was in no hurry to get any closer. Seeing it from our site now, six months later, its splendor and majesty rising skyward and mirrored down onto the surface of the lake, I didn't feel the way I had when I'd seen it from the Pittock Mansion the day of his funeral. When I looked at it now I only thought,
There you are. Hello, love
. That I could see the place where Leo had spent the last day of his life, with his family, doing something he loved, sometimes every day from Portland when it was clear, neither comforted nor troubled me. It only gave me a chance to say hello.

Our first night at Trillium, after the kids were in their tents, reading by flashlight, then asleep, Erin and I sat together by the fire, adding logs to keep it going, and I brought Garrett up again.

“I
was
cheating,” I said. “I was looking for a shortcut. Turns out, there's no shortcut.”

Erin refilled both our cups with more wine. She went to the tents and came back with two blankets. She wrapped one around me, then sat down and draped the other one around herself.

“You know how many people go their whole lives and never know one great love?” she said. “Can you imagine how few get two?”

“I have to forgive them,” I said. “Right? That's what I have to do.”

“For what, sweetie?” Erin said. She pulled her blanket closer and crossed her legs.

“For being grown men but acting like children,” I said.

“I wouldn't say that.” She laughed. “That's nothing new. We've been forgiving them for that for years.”

“What, then?” I said.

“You know.” Wrapped in her blanket, she leaned toward the fire. “You know, but you don't want to say it. That's okay. You don't have to.”

“No, I don't know,” I said. “I don't know what you mean.”

She poked a stick into the burning logs. “No one loves someone because someone else says so,” she said. “It doesn't work that way.”

Between us the ashes floated up from the flames. I didn't say anything.

“So I'll say it,” she said. “You have to forgive them for loving you, Audrey. If they did it wrong, that's the only thing they're guilty of.”

I still didn't say anything.

“You'll get to that,” Erin said. “After you forgive yourself.”

We had no cell reception while we were away, and I was glad. I had turned my phone off. On our trip home Erin drove, and on 26 when I turned it back on, it beeped with a text. There was only one, and it was from Garrett.
Hi Audrey
,
I'm in Portland, I rented a place. I have a pullout couch so the boys can visit, I hope
.
Sorry if this comes as a shock. I was done with Boston. I hope you're well
. Then his address.

“Garrett's back,” I said. “He moved to Portland.”

The boys, having ignored everything else the first time I'd said it during the drive, suddenly heard me.

“He did?” Andrew said.

“Where?” said Brian.

“Cool,” Chris said.

“Imagine that,” said Erin. She put her hand on my knee and kept it there until she took it off when she changed lanes.

“Mom?” said Andrew.

“I'm sorry, Andrew,” I said. “That's all I know.”

I
t was rude and careless and unkind of me, but I didn't call or email or text Garrett back. I thought about it and wanted to, then didn't want to, so I did nothing. He had moved to Portland. I couldn't deal with anything beyond knowing that. I had enough trouble thinking about the strange triangle I'd been part of, and yet I didn't know who had been more in the middle, Garrett or me, though we both had been in our own ways. When I was capable of it, I knew it had to be him, agreeing to Leo's proposal first, then my advances, years apart. Caught between us as he had been, he must have reconciled the two things the best he could, but I couldn't imagine what he had thought every time we were together, beyond that he already had Leo's blessing but hadn't told me he did. He may have felt conflicted, but I was the one who'd been in the dark.

Besides that, I couldn't stop thinking about a curious story my mother had shared during her visit, the day before she left. I got her point, and I loved her for it, but it wasn't advice I was ready to act on.

“Do you remember my best pal, Winnie, from high school?” she said. She was slicing tomatoes in my kitchen, making a salad for dinner. “It's been years since you've seen her, I know, and I haven't in a long time either. Of course we send Christmas cards, but years ago, after her husband died, she moved to Chicago to be closer to her son and his family. She called me a few weeks ago out of the blue. I can't think of the last time we talked. And it's funny, after I got off the phone, I remembered something I hadn't thought about in such a long time. Did I ever tell you the story of the night I was afraid I was going to drown in my underwear?”

I was sitting at the table with a glass of wine, and laughed out loud, almost spilling it.

“No!” I said. “Are you kidding me? What's the story, Mom?”

She laughed too and kept slicing. “The summer after we graduated from college, I spent a week with Winnie and her family in Sag Harbor. What a time we had.” She looked at me from where she worked at the counter. “I know you know this already, but I wasn't born your mother. I had my own wild youth.”

“I'm sure you did,” I said. “I'm guessing the underwear story is part of that youth. Come on.”

“There was one night that week, six of us, or seven—who knows, it was Winnie's summer gang—we'd been at a bar, having drinks, and someone thought it would be a good idea to go out on the bay. Then we all thought it was a good idea. One fellow had a boat and he motored out—he knew what he was doing—and we were all having such a good time. We got to a place far from the dock. I don't know how far from land we were, three miles or one, but we were out there and we all decided to swim. It was a hot night, even on the water—you expected it to be cooler than it was. So we went swimming. Everyone stripped down to their underwear and jumped in. The fellow whose boat it was, he didn't swim, he stayed on the boat, with the lights on and the engine idling. There we were, a bunch of supposed adults, our clothes thrown all about the boat, swimming in boxers and bras and panties.” She shook her head. “It's funny now, but we were all terrified when the engine died. It was so black and dark, we couldn't see a thing. It was like being buried or drifting in space. I could hear Winnie and our friends, but I couldn't see them, or the boat. The guy on the boat yelled to us all to stay put—if any of us had started swimming, even trying to find one other person, we could have so easily gone in the wrong direction. We were in the open, but even so, I felt exactly the opposite—closed in, claustrophobic. I was a good swimmer but that wasn't going to help, as far out as we were. I treaded water, trying not to panic more. I wondered what happened: Had we run out of gas? Had the engine broken? How would it get fixed? Who would find us? No cell phones then, of course. All I could think of was after I drowned in my underwear, how disappointed my parents were going to be after how proud I'd just made them, graduating from college. I knew I was going to die out there and I wasn't scared of dying—I was mortified at the way it was going to happen. So I did what I always did and still do: I prayed. The boy on the boat couldn't see anything either, so it took him a while, but he finally found a flashlight, of course there was a flashlight on the boat, and we all made it back to the boat and climbed in, scared and sober and sopping, all hugging each other. We got the boat started again—the engine had flooded—and that was the end of the night.”

“My God, Mom,” I said. “What a story. I can't believe you never told me that before.”

“I guess it never came up,” she said. “It certainly wasn't something I meant to keep a secret. But you know what?” She sat down at the table with me, the salad made. “I was so scared out there, that after everything turned out all right, I remembered how scared I was and I promised myself that I would live in a way, or at least try, so that if I was ever in the same kind of situation again, or when I was, if the next time I was I did die, I wouldn't have any regrets. And you know, Audrey, I've done exactly that. God knows I've made mistakes, things I'm sorry about, but that wasn't part of my promise. After surviving that night out on the water, I really don't have any regrets. About anything I've done or haven't done. I don't wish harm on anyone, but I think such a night wouldn't be a bad thing for everyone to have once in their life.”

After the boys were back in school, the loneliness tightened its grip, and the only way I could go on was to surrender and accept its presence. I thought of ghastly and inappropriate visuals: a useless and withered limb, and worse, a stinking, severed one that I was unable to part with.
Come on, you bitch
,
I would say to the burden I couldn't cut off.
We're doing this
. And I'd stride outside and work in the yard, clean windows, do laundry, make food, help with homework, read, sleep. When it would lead me back to gaze at the addition, frozen in time, I'd stand only as long as it took to satisfy her before I'd think,
Fuck you, we're done here,
and I'd run or go to yoga or leave the house and drive, not knowing where I was going until I was there.

With no expectations, I browsed the Death and Dying section on the second floor of Powell's one morning, tilting my head to scan the understanding, comforting, and inspiring titles on the spines, without removing a single one. Shelved as they were, with only limited covers face out, the title was the first impression to make a shopper a taker, and maybe a buyer. The section was in a big, bright corner of the store, framed by large windows overlooking the Starbucks across the street. I watched all the shiny, happy people outside and below me—professionals dressed for work, mothers with strollers or children old enough to walk and hold a hand, hip singles checking their phones. Whether coming or going from the coffee shop, or waiting at the curb to cross, where they stood, they were only feet away from a panhandler with his pit bull and cardboard sign. But as long as I stood there watching the foot traffic, none of the people acknowledged him. Maybe it was intentional to put these books here, I thought, where shoppers observed the blinders of the human condition at work outside.
La, la, la, just keep moving.
I went back to the shelves and after scanning enough to orient myself to the options, I closed my eyes and picked three separate areas of the alphabet, reached out my hand, and pulled out and bought the first three books my fingers touched.

Another day I drove to the Goodwill on Broadway and spent two hours picking over the clothes there, searching for something of Leo's I'd donated. A year ago, I had forced him to purge his closets and he had, reluctantly. And after he had, I'd gone through them and picked out what he hadn't—items he had no business hanging on to—then when he saw what I'd put in the bag to donate, we ended up arguing over a terrible Western shirt that he insisted on keeping.

He'd pulled it out, furious, like I'd sold his mother for a dollar.

“You're not giving this away,” he'd said.

“Leo, it's an ugly shirt,” I'd told him. “It's teal. It doesn't do you any favors. Take my word for it.”

We'd engaged in a bit of a battle over it, which was unexpected. It was, after all, only an ugly Western shirt.

“I look good in it,” he'd said. “I know what I look good in and I'm keeping it. I'm a grown man and I'm going to wear what I want when I want.”

Of all the things he looked good in, that shirt wasn't one of them, and nothing I could say would convince him of that.

So I didn't argue, I didn't fight, and he wore the shirt proudly, as he'd said, whenever he'd wanted to. And the fucking thing still hung in his closet among the things I still hadn't touched. Every time he'd worn it after our standoff I kept a straight face as best I could and he'd said, seeing through me,
Hate the shirt, not the man
. He didn't give a shit what I thought. And God damn it, why had I even? It meant nothing. If that was what we had to argue about, a Western shirt and its fashion merit, we were in good shape.

Of course I didn't find anything at Goodwill. Surely anything I had brought here a year ago was long gone. And would I have recognized anything of his anyway? Late one weekday morning I drove downtown to the art museum.
This is what we're doing today, bitch
.
People go to the museum every day
. But I didn't go in right away. Instead I crossed the street and sat down in the park and pretended to look at my phone. Parked two blocks from the museum were four huge white vans with the guide dog school logo on them. The same guide dog school we always passed the sign for when we drove to Mount Hood. It was way out there. I watched what all the trainers were doing. Some of them wore bright blue jackets, also bearing the school's logo, and they each got a dog out of the van and put a harness on it, like they were saddling up. Two other people, a man and a woman, who didn't get dogs, stood waiting. Then one woman put on an enormous black eyeshade and started walking with her dog, and one of the people who had been waiting, the man, followed behind them. I wanted to follow them too. I wanted to see what happened. The woman walked so confidently, and quickly, too. The dog wasn't walking slowly either; it had a bouncy little trot, like it was being walked on a leash by someone who could see. But the dog wasn't the one being walked, the woman was. I didn't know how she could surrender and follow so easily without being able to see anything, walking around downtown in complete darkness. I tried to imagine it. I would never have been able to do such a thing. If I'd had to put on that huge thing that covered my eyes and most of my face, there's no way I could have walked a step. I think the only thing I would have been able to do was crawl. I felt like a creep but I didn't care. I left the park and followed the woman and her dog and the man behind her from the other side of the street. If the man following them was doing his job, keeping an eye on the blindfolded woman, he wouldn't even notice me.

I waited for something bad to happen, although I didn't want to see it if it did. I waited for the blindfolded woman to fall, to trip and go right down on her face. Or for the dog to screw up at the same instant the man following them made a mistake and looked away. The three of them crossed a street and turned a corner and I kept following. How did those trainers pretend all the dangers they couldn't see weren't there? They still existed. It was an odd threesome to be watching. No one looked worried or scared, not even the dog. I could tell the woman in the blindfold and the man following her were talking as they all continued down the block and crossed another street. Once or twice they both laughed. I stayed with them until Pioneer Square and turned around and went back to the museum. They didn't look like they were going to do anything except keep going.

I remembered on Mother's Day how the boys had blindfolded me before giving me the tree. How afraid I'd been to walk—my arms flailing—and stumbled forward the mere ten or so steps from my own house to the yard. If I ever went blind, I could never trust a dog the way those trainers did. But if I closed my eyes, who would I trust enough to follow and keep me safe? The boys, I guessed, but very slowly, two feet at a time maybe. I would trust Erin, no question, but I'd be bossing her the whole time, I knew. Backseat driving from my darkness. I'd have trusted Leo—even now, as mad at him as I was, I knew he never would have let anything happen to me. Which was of course why he'd trusted Garrett. And Garrett, without knowing it at the time, had kept me safe when I'd walked through the dark, at least for a while. Until we both had fallen.