Yours to Keep (30 page)

She almost couldn’t say it. Only her need to make him go away and stay away drove her to force the words out. “You don’t belong in mine.”

She waited a moment longer, as if there was still a tiny hopeful part of her that thought he might contradict her, but when there was only silence behind her she walked away, toward the train station.

When she finally got home, Cara was the only one there. She was wiping down the kitchen counters. “Ricky took the kids to the football game,” Cara said, without turning to look at Ana. Then she looked, and said, “Oh, Ana.”

Ana allowed herself to be folded into Cara’s arms, and she let herself cry. Stormily,
shaking in her sister’s arms.

“Honey,” Cara said, over and over.

When Ana had calmed down, the sisters sat on the rust-colored velour couch, at opposite ends, legs curled up. Cara gave Ana the afghan their grandmother had knitted, even though it was well understood that that afghan was Cara’s and Cara’s alone. It smelled like Cara: shampoo and soap and tangy sweat and hair relaxer and perpetually bubble-gum-flavored breath and the hand lotion she used all the time in the winter. It was like an extension of Cara’s hug.

“I’m so sorry.”

Ana rested her cheek against the back of the couch. “Did Ricky tell you? We were going to get married. But I don’t think Ethan really knew what he was doing when he asked. He did it impulsively. Anyway, it’s over.”

“You really like him,” Cara said, gently.

I love him,
thought Ana, but there was no point in saying it, no longer even any point in thinking it. So she nodded at Cara’s understatement and brushed away her tears before they could soak the blanket.

“You know,” Cara said thoughtfully, as if she’d heard what Ana hadn’t said, “I don’t believe in love.”

Ana was shocked. “What do you mean, you don’t believe in love?” she demanded. “It’s not like Santa Claus or God—you can’t believe it or not believe it. You love the kids, don’t you?”

“I don’t believe in love between men and women,” Cara said. “I believe in sex.” She got a faraway look in her eye. “Although that’s a lot more like believing in Santa Claus for me these days. I think I’m more likely to fall in love than to get laid.”

Ana laughed—faintly, but it was a laugh.

“I don’t believe in happily ever after. I don’t believe in love that lasts beyond that first burst of horniness. So maybe you can comfort yourself by thinking that it wouldn’t have lasted anyway?”

Ana didn’t find that the least bit comforting. Her face must have said so, because Cara laughed. “Or not.”

“You’re wrong.”

Cara shrugged. “You believe what you want to believe. I’ll believe what I want to believe.”

“It maybe doesn’t always work out, but it does exist.” Of that Ana was certain. Because while it wasn’t working out for her, she sure as hell felt it. Tenderness and affection and physical longing and something else—something bigger, something deeper, something with a grip on her soul. If he’d given her the slightest sign earlier that he felt the same way—

She shut it down. That line of thinking wasn’t going to get her anywhere. “Are there any leftovers?”

“
Espaguetis.
In the fridge. Mind if I take the blanket back?”

Ana threw it over Cara’s head and went into the kitchen. She stowed her tutoring money in the freezer and opened the fridge. She pulled out the big Pyrex bowl full of her sister’s mushy spaghetti with salami and green peppers and capers. She heated up a plate of it in the microwave and sat down with her face over the steaming heap, letting the comforting childhood scent drift up to her until her tears fell onto her food.

Ethan drove to James’s apartment in Arlington, parked his car in the lot outside, and rang the bell. He hadn’t called ahead. He had no idea whether James would be home.

“Yes?” James’s familiar voice emerged, distorted by the call box.

“Are you alone?”

The call box buzzed and Ethan pushed his way into the lobby. He took the stairs several at a time and surfaced on his brother’s floor. James’s door was open, his head poking out.

“Do you have a lot of alcohol in there?” Ethan asked.

“Who do you think I am?” James demanded. Then he looked long and hard at Ethan. “Uh-oh. You’d better come in.”

He held the door open and Ethan followed him into the apartment. James’s apartment was the quintessential bachelor pad—stark, modern furnishings, huge television and expensive stereo equipment, poorly stocked refrigerator. Right now, it felt like a refuge from the clutter of Ethan’s mind.

“Beer? Or something harder?” He eyed Ethan speculatively. “Tequila,” he said decisively.

James poured tequila shots and lined them up on the glass-and-steel coffee table. Ethan followed him into the kitchen and watched him slice limes. He poured two tiny bowls of salt and carried the salt and limes back into the living room.

It took three shots before Ethan could even tell James the story.

James listened quietly. Once or twice, he interjected with choice descriptors for Ricky and Ernie. When Ethan was done, James said, “We’re totally out of our league. Upper-middle-class white boys are just not trained to deal with this kind of shit.” He handed Ethan another shot and a wedge of lime.

“I know.” Ethan licked his thumb, ground it into the salt, licked it again, tipped the shot back. The alcohol had dulled his senses but had done nothing to dislodge the thick lump of pain in his chest.

“You’re sure about not calling the cops. I mean, I hear you, but—”

He felt another stab of anger at Ricky, at the cleverness of his trap. “I can’t.”

The anger roared up for a moment, drowning out everything. He clenched his hands into fists, drove them into his thighs.

“Hey. You okay?”

“No, I’m not fucking okay!”

Another shot in James’s outstretched hand. Ethan took it.

“Let’s beat him up. You and me. Kick the crap outta him.”

Ethan shook his head.

“I’d participate in that with great pleasure. I may be out of my depth, but no one, no one, fucks with my brother—” James’s voice tightened down, as if he was fighting for self-control.

Ethan looked up and found James staring at him. James’s gaze stayed steady as Ethan searched his face. His brother wasn’t kidding. He meant it.

Ethan’s eyes burned and the lump in his chest rose to his throat.

He had to look away. “I should have refused to let her go. When she said we didn’t belong in each other’s lives? I should have told her that was bullshit.”

But her other words had rung in his head.
“It would be one thing if it were love.…”

He’d thought—he’d hoped—he’d begun to think that she loved him. Or might love him. Someday. And if she had, if she’d given him a sign, he might have found a way to weigh
his fear for Theo, his
love,
against this tender, vulnerable—fuck,
consuming
—new love he felt for her. But those words had stolen the last speck of his will to fight. You didn’t risk everything, put everything that mattered on the line, for a marriage of convenience.

James had been right. The distinction between marrying for love and marrying as a matter of charity or law or business was important.

That distinction meant
everything.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing. No one else would have done any differently, Eth. You have to believe me.”

Ethan clenched his fists against his thighs.

“You did what you needed to do for Theo. Ana, of all people, would understand.”

“I know.” Ethan’s voice was tight. “That’s the worst part.”

Chapter 27

Ana’s cell phone rang as she was walking home from Duarte on Monday morning. Joy blossomed in her heart. So few people called her. It had to be Ethan.

The weekend had been long, agonizing. She’d cried and then been numb and dehydrated. She’d hidden in the bedroom until she couldn’t stand herself anymore, then come out only to discover that she couldn’t stand anyone. Her mind had gone over and over the same territory, plummeting time after time into the darkness of grief when the ending was always, unrelentingly, the same.

She kept wanting to rewrite what had happened outside Starbucks. Make him reach for her. Make him try to soothe her, talk her down.

Make him tell her that he loved her and that she was not just an outlet for his impulse to do good.

Obviously he’d had second thoughts. Maybe the lawyer had planted them. Maybe what she’d told him about Ricky’s visit to her classroom had scared him. He’d realized he couldn’t marry her. He’d realized it was too complicated, too damn dangerous. Or just too alienating.

“Is it supposed to be this hard?”

Everything in my life is this hard,
she should have said.

Had his marriage proposal really been only an act of charity?

It seemed wild, incomprehensible, that he could have made love to her all those times and not experienced what she’d experienced—the intensity, the intimacy, the passion, the dissolution of self.

But if he’d felt it the way she’d felt it, how could he stand to walk away?

How could
she
live with having walked away?

She would have to. Somehow or other.

The ringing of the phone brought her temporarily out of the spiral of grief, but as soon as she pulled it from her pocket her joy evaporated. The call was from Beacon High, and the voice, when she answered, was Ed Branch’s.

“Yes.” Heaviness descended like a lead apron on her.

“Ana? Can you drop by the school sometime this week? Our new lawyer—”

She shut her eyes. Yes, she knew all about their new lawyer.

“—was reviewing the list of recommended tutors, and he noticed that you haven’t had a chance to come in yet to fill out your CORI.”

Ed’s voice gave no hint of the events of their last meeting. It was cool and steady.

“No. I haven’t.”

“So, he’s said that you need to come in this week—after this week, he’s going to have us drop people from the list who haven’t been CORI’d.”

“Thanks, Ed.” There was nothing else she could do. “I appreciate the heads-up.”

“So I’ll see you? Sometime this week?”

“I don’t think so.”

He was silent at the other end of the line. She kicked a clump of grass that had sprouted out of the sidewalk where she stood. Then he said, “I can help you with this, Ana.”

“Actually, you can’t.” There was nothing he could do, and that was part of her grief. But it was also a
fuck you
to Ed, and that felt good, a little surge of power when she had no control over anything else.

“I could help you find a lawyer. You know if you marry a U.S. citizen—”

She pushed the button to end the call, stood still where she’d stopped in the middle of Willow. She was cold all over, shivering. The sidewalk was buckled under her feet here, a familiar landmark that hadn’t changed since her childhood.

It had begun to drizzle, slightly, and the drizzle froze on the fleece surface of her jacket, on her hair. A car whizzed by, too fast, stereo thumping. Beneath its tires the now-wet pavement hissed, white noise like radio static, like the static in her head.

Lyme. Mary Freyer had Lyme. Not leukemia. Lyme.

Normally, Ethan’s relief would have been overwhelming, but this time he stared at the lab results as if they were written in a language he only barely understood.

He called into the hallway. “Julie!”

The nurse stuck her head inside his office.

“Call Nicole Freyer and tell her Mary has Lyme disease. Get her a prescription for
amox.”

Julie, a hundred years old and shriveled as a prune from smoking for ninety of them, asked, “Don’t you want to call her?”

“No.”

She looked at him as if he’d gone mad and ducked out again. He’d chosen her because he knew that—unlike the younger nurses—she wouldn’t try to figure out what was wrong with him.

What was wrong with him was that since Friday he’d been walking around in a daze. Stumbling into things. Making Theo repeat the simplest questions. Sleeping as much as he could, because it hurt, literally hurt, to be awake.

Theo, in his own daze, seemed not to notice. He’d gone over to Leah’s house on Saturday night, for dinner and a movie on the Abramses’ basement rec-room TV. Ethan had crossed his fingers that the “movie” wouldn’t result in Leah’s getting pregnant, because at the moment he didn’t have enough energy to do or say anything fatherly. After Theo had left, Ethan had opened a can of black-bean soup and microwaved it in a bowl, but he hadn’t been able to eat it.

On Sunday, Ethan had watched football from the 1
P.M.
kickoff until he’d fallen asleep on the couch near midnight. In the late afternoon, James had shown up and ordered pizza for the three of them. James chatted with Theo and helped him with his math homework. Ethan was grateful, but he couldn’t find the words to thank his brother.

James seemed to understand, though. When he left, sometime near the end of the third quarter, he said, “One foot in front of the other, Eth. Call me if you need me.” Then, screwing up his face sympathetically, “You haven’t told Theo yet, huh?” He clamped his hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “No rush. Take your time. When you’re ready.”

Now it was Monday afternoon, but the fog still hadn’t lifted. He should be ecstatic for the Freyers. He should be on the phone right now, his relief finding its echo in Nicole’s. He should be reassuring her that Mary would be fine in a few weeks, that they’d been lucky to solve the mystery as quickly as they had. That she could take a break from the dread and the fear.

Instead, he was numb.

No, not numb. Numb wouldn’t be so bad. Numb wouldn’t be so wrong.

What he felt was wrong. Just plain not okay. He wasn’t ecstatic for the Freyers. He wasn’t even relieved. He was jealous of their good luck.

He’d known his was too good to last.

The doorbell rang insistently, waking Ana from her nap on the couch. She pushed the buzzer and opened the apartment door. Ernie was there, a mountain of a man towering over her, frantic and exhausted, his eyes bloodshot and darting rapidly back and forth. He was panting heavily as if he’d run the whole distance from his apartment. “Is Ricky here?”