Another Piece of My Heart (21 page)

“I think that’s a great idea.”

Ethan shrugs. “It’s small, but … anything that will remind her seems like it must be a good thing. I just feel my life slipping away from me, and I don’t know how to get it back.”

“Can I give you a ride home?” Drew says as Ethan nods, and they start walking toward the car.

“It’s a frightening time. But Emily’s seven months, right?” Ethan nods as Drew speaks. “I know Andi thinks she’s found a couple to adopt the baby, and Emily will get back on her feet. I think Andi’s just struggling with everything. It will pass. When the baby has gone, things will get back to normal.”

“You think so?”

“I think so,” Drew says.

Except he really isn’t sure at all.

*   *   *

By the time Ethan walks through his front door, he is feeling somewhat better. He has accepted the dinner invitation—Drew and Topher have always had an extraordinary amount of common sense, particularly Topher, to whom he has turned on numerous occasions when he has been pushed to the edge of sanity by Brooke—and Drew has filled him with hope that this is all temporary, that this will pass.

Standing in the hall, he realizes he has created a romantic fantasy of what will happen when he walks in. Andi will still be asleep, or in bed, at least, and her eyes will fill with the soft warmth of forgiveness when he walks in with breakfast on a tray and a rose plucked from Drew’s rosebush in a tiny vase.

She will tear up as she tells him she has thought about it for days and has realized he is right; will reach up, placing a hand behind his neck to pull him down for a kiss. They may or may not make love—Emily is in the house but likely asleep for many hours—but they will, at least, cuddle. They will talk softly, and smile, and hold each other.

They will reassure each other that the worst has passed, that whatever comes their way, they are strong enough to weather it together. And then, he supposes, they will live happily ever after.

Ethan organizes the tray, nervous suddenly, which feels ridiculous. This isn’t a date he is trying to impress; it is his wife, for God’s sake, and yet he is almost trembling, as if she were a stranger. Is this how far they have drifted? He shakes his head as if to dislodge the thought.

Upstairs, the bed is empty. He pauses, listening, but there seems to be no noise in the bathroom. He places the tray on the bed and walks over to open the bathroom door.

Andi is dabbing on lip balm, fully dressed, a scarf and light jacket to protect from the sudden chill in the late-summer air.

“You’re … going out?”

“Client meeting,” she says, not looking at him. “I’m late. Sorry. She wants to put her house on the market in two weeks and, apparently, it’s a disaster. She wants to move all her stuff out and have me stage the whole thing. In two weeks! Can you believe it?” She pauses. “Did you need me?”

“No,” he lies. “I thought maybe we could have breakfast together…”

“Not today,” she says, and her words feel hollow as she brushes past him in the doorway, not stopping to brush her lips quickly against his as she always,
always
does.

Did.

“I’ll see you later, okay?”

“We’re going to Drew and Topher’s for dinner tomorrow night,” he says. “Casual. I said yes, hope that’s okay.”

“Fine,” she calls from the hallway. “Bye.” And the front door slams.

“I love you, too,” he whispers, standing alone in the master bedroom as he listens to the car engine revving up and his wife pulling out of the drive.

Pulling ever farther away from him.

Twenty-two

This is what a wild animal must feel like. Trapped. I’m stuck in the tree house, and Michael and Jenna are getting closer, and there is nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide, and I already know what’s going to happen.

He’s going to look at me in shock, and she’s going to be right behind him, and she’s probably going to give me that disdainful, dismissive look they give all the girls who pass them in the cafeteria who aren’t in their clique; then she’s going to text everyone she knows and say they found me, the freak, hiding in Michael’s tree house.

It shouldn’t matter. I steel myself, thinking,
It doesn’t matter
. School is done. Everyone’s going off their separate ways, most to college far away from here. I’m probably going away myself, with Bean.

I missed Burning Man—Bean took care of that—but she and I could still go someplace else. Seattle maybe. Or Austin. Somewhere far away from the bitchy girls at school, from the people who instinctively knew what I thought was my secret: I wasn’t good enough.

So I prepare myself, hearing the steps on the ladder, the giggling from Jenna, and I realize she is flirting, and they may or may not be hooking up, but she is totally into him, and he tells her to wait until he is up because the ladder might even have rotted, it’s been so many years since he was up here, and I am tucked into a corner of the tree house, or as tucked as my ever-growing bulk can be, and my eyes are wide with fear, even as I try to talk myself into its not mattering.

It matters.

Michael is pushing open the doorway, but he’s looking back, encouraging Jenna, then he turns and sees me, and this time it is his eyes that grow wide. With shock.

He stares at me, then turns again; this time his voice quieter.

“Wait!” he commands Jenna. “Go back down.”

“What?” she says, her voice still giggly. “I want to see.”

“No. It’s … there’s something up here.”

I shake my head ever so slightly.
Don’t tell her,
I plead silently. Don’t tell her it’s me. Please God, I’ll do anything, I’ll never touch a drop of alcohol or smoke again, just don’t tell her I’m here.

“What!” The ladder is quiet; she has stopped climbing. “What do you mean? Like a dead animal or something?”

“Yes.” She has inspired him. “It’s gross.” He makes a face. “I think it’s a raccoon or something, but it’s hard to tell. There are maggots everywhere,” he adds. With flourish.

“Ew, gross,” I hear her say as she moves back down the ladder. Michael turns back to me and just stares. He can see I’ve been crying, and I think he’s just going to leave, but before he does he mouths, “Wait here,” then he is back down the ladder.

“I’ve got to clean this up,” I hear him say, back on the ground. “And it’s going to take a while. Why don’t I come over to your place when I’m done?”

“I can wait,” she says, her voice low and teasing, and there is silence for a while, and if I wasn’t scared of her seeing me, I’d move over to the wall in front where there are cracks between the planks, and I’d peer through, knowing I’d see them kissing.

“You go,” he says. “I’ll take a shower after.”

“I could wash your back,” she teases, low and sultry.

“Yeah, and my mom would chase you out of here with a giant skillet.” He laughs.

“Okay,” she grumbles. “Don’t be long.”

*   *   *

When she leaves, I do scooch over and peer out the crack, but Michael’s gone, too. I don’t know what to do, but I figure I’ll wait a bit, at least to make sure the coast is clear. And then I see Michael come back out of the house, and he’s got a bottle of Gatorade under one arm, and he’s holding a big Ziploc bag in the other hand.

He climbs up, dumps the Gatorade and the bag on the pillow, and I’m not nervous at all anymore, because it is just Michael, after all, and this is the tree house I know like the back of my hand, and I don’t feel seventeen and pregnant right now, I feel thirteen and filled with possibility; the feeling that anything is possible with my best friend by my side.

“You picked a good day,” Michael says. “My mom just baked a fresh batch of thin mints.” He opens the bag and hands me a bundle. “You still like them, right?”

I nod. They are still my favorites. I hadn’t expected him to remember. When we were … friends, his mom set a mission to re-create the perfect Thin Mint cookie because she was completely addicted to them and she could never find enough Girl Scout stands to buy them. She’d buy them in bulk whenever anyone was selling them, but she’d eat pretty much a box at a time, so she decided she had to figure out how to make them herself.

Michael and I were her guinea pigs. She’d bring trays and trays out to the tree house, where even her rejects would be hungrily devoured.

Finally, using a chocolate fudge cake mix instead of attempting to make them completely from scratch, she got it. I’ve never been able to eat a Thin Mint cookie without being transported straight back to the tree house, and even though we ate hundreds and hundreds, enough to put me off for life, they remain my favorites.

He remembers.

We don’t say anything for a while. It’s weird in that it isn’t weird. Michael shoves a handful of cookies in his mouth, then grins, looking so like the young boy he used to be I almost want to cry.

He swigs Gatorade, then passes it over to me.

“Great,” I sneer, although I accept it and swig. “Let’s follow a shitload of sugar with a shitload of sugar.”

“You want water? Go get it yourself,” he says, but his voice has no malice in it; it is teasing. Like it used to be. In the old days, I would have gotten it myself. I would have climbed down the ladder and gone through the back door, and Mrs. Flanagan would have insisted I take something else out there, or a blanket in case we got cold.

For years, this house felt more like home than my own. It was the one place I felt safe. No Mom being drunk and shouting. No women who weren’t my mother pretending to be my mother and stealing my dad.

Just a place where I was accepted for me.

I do want water, but I don’t want to get it myself. I don’t want to walk through the door and see Mrs. Flanagan, or have her see me. It has been too long, and I am pregnant, and even though this black cardigan kind of covers it up, she will either think I have put on tons of weight and gotten huge, or she will know that I am pregnant.

Honestly? I don’t know which would be worse.

Usually I love the way I dress. I take pride in the fact that I have a nose stud and several piercings in my ears, that my hair is blue-black and my makeup dramatic. I like getting stares. I ride up the escalator in the mall, staring people down. Sometimes, when girls whisper about me and giggle, I go over and raise my hands like a bat and whoop at them, just to freak them out.

Which it does.

This is not how Mrs. Flanagan knows me. She knows me as a slightly chubby and shy girl, with mousy brown hair, in jeans and sneakers. I don’t want to show her how I’ve grown and grown up. I don’t want to show her my deliberately provocative piercings and dye. I feel, suddenly, ashamed of the way I look.

I do not want Mrs. Flanagan to see my armor. If she has to see me, I want her to see me as the girl she used to know, and because that girl no longer exists, it is better she does not see me at all.

Michael’s eyes flicker to my stomach, and I wonder if he knows.

“I’ll get you water,” he says, and before I can stop him, he jumps up and climbs down the ladder. I wonder if he did it because he wanted to get away because he is uncomfortable with me, but I do not hold on to that thought because I am not uncomfortable in the slightest, and I cannot imagine he feels anything but normal.

When he comes back, I wait for him to ask why I am there, but he doesn’t, and I am grateful.

All those expressions:
What’s up? What’s going on? How you doing?
seem so trite. And yet I want to tell him, and I’m not sure how to start if he doesn’t ask me how I am.

“I heard you weren’t going to college,” he says eventually, grabbing some pillows and propping them up against the wall, leaning back. His T-shirt rides slightly above the waistband of his jeans. I am shocked to see a tanned, firm stomach, the slightest line of hair running down from his navel. I forget that he is waiting for an answer, and I just stare.

“You’re staring.” He grins.

“You grew up,” I say, but that isn’t what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about the boys I have been hooking up with, any one of who is potentially the father of Bean. They are as pale and stringy as strands of spaghetti. Their bodies skinny and ghostly, their pubic hair stark, dark shocks against the near transparency of their skin.

They are as uncomfortable in their skins as I am in mine. Our couplings are brief, in darkened corners of bedrooms, or in the backs of cars—sometimes outside in a park or on a beach.

The only clothes removed are the clothes necessary to facilitate sex. Or blow jobs. Or whatever it is you are doing. It is one of the things that makes it okay for me: I do not have to reveal my body. I do not have to risk anyone’s laughing at me, or noticing that one of my boobs is higher than the other, that my stomach is round, that my thighs rub together.

Sometimes, if I’m at the doctor’s office, or in a place where there are a stack of magazines, I will pick up something like
Cosmopolitan,
and when I read about sex, and orgasms, and positions, I am bemused at what it is they are talking about.

None of it is about me, that much I can tell you. Not that it feels bad. It feels great when they’re inside me, but better is when they hold me. Better is the feeling of being loved, even if only for a few minutes.

Even if they are these skinny, awkward, inexperienced boys, better is the feeling of being loved.

Michael doesn’t look like those boys. I am staring because he looks … like a man. The line of hair tracing down looks like an invitation, and I am startled, stunned, to feel a jolt of lust.

I look away, quickly, as Michael just grins.

“Would you just cover yourself up?” I mumble belligerently, to hide my … discomfort?
Lust? NO!
Not lust. Not with Michael. That wouldn’t be possible … Would it?

“What? It’s a stomach, for God’s sake.” He is still grinning.

“It’s just … inappropriate,” I say.

“Fine, Miss Prude.” He pulls the T-shirt down. “There. Happy?”

I shrug.

“So. College. You should go.”

“I will,” I say. “I’m just figuring out what I want to do. Also, remember, I’m the youngest in the grade. Really, I should be going into my senior year now.”