Ask Again, Yes (29 page)

“I’m glad you wrote,” Kate said once they sat, as if she hadn’t already
said that very thing in the dozen letters and emails that had been exchanged between them. It was nearly spring break for both of them. Peter had already taken two midterms and had only two papers to hand in before he headed back to Queens for the week. Kate had her first midterm coming up.

“So.” She grinned. “How was high school?”

They visited each other often, and spoke on the phone almost every day. They tended not to discuss Gillam, or their parents, or anything that might brush up against what had happened between their families in May of eighth grade.

Although each of them had looked different back in eighth grade, there was a feeling of returning to the familiar, to what had always been theirs. Peter had always had a pair of freckles on his neck that looked like a vampire bite. The freckles were the same but the neck was different, thicker, stronger, rough with stubble. Each had long, lean torsos, though Kate’s dipped in at the waist while Peter’s was as straight and solid as the trunk of an oak. Kate had a splatter of freckles across her nose and her shoulders, but beneath her clothes she was milky white. Peter’s neck, face, and forearms were dark brown from running outside in a T-shirt. When she discovered he had chest hair under his shirt, and a soft, dark trail that ran down the center of his belly, she pulled back for a moment, embarrassed.

And then there were the things that surprised her in how moved she felt just by seeing them: the sight of his yogurt next to her orange juice in her mini-fridge. His boxers on the floor next to her bra. Once, she began to pull on his jeans because she thought they were hers, and when she realized, she wondered if she’d ever been so happy in her entire life.

They had only one disagreement that spring. Kate was talking about her father, how he’d hurt her mother by having an affair, how it was
the biggest mistake of his life, including the night he went up to the Stanhopes’ door. But Peter had no reaction.

“I hope you don’t feel guilty,” Kate asked, trying to account for his blankness.

“Guilty? No. I was just thinking that there were so many victims that night. Your father, your mother, my mother—”

Kate drew back to look at him sharply. “Your mother was a victim?”

“Well, yes,” Peter said slowly, deliberately.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, of course I’m serious.”

“Explain that to me,” Kate said, arms akimbo.

“She was obviously sick, Kate. As far as I know she’s still in the hospital. If she’d just gotten the right medicine from the beginning—”

Kate held up her hand like a stop sign. “Actually, don’t explain it to me. I think we’re going to have to be at peace with disagreeing about this.” But then, “She’s definitely still in the hospital. My father’s lawyer would have called us if she’d been released.”

“Oh,” Peter said, the information as sudden as a slap.

“Because of what she did to him, they’re responsible for letting him know if there’s a change in her status.”

“Yeah, I got that. Thanks.” He paused. “But it’s not like she did it to him. In the sense that she had a thing against him, in particular. He was just the person who came to the door. Why would they notify him of a change in her status? Like she might go after him again?”

“She shot him because she hated me. My mother told me that.”

“Ahh.” Peter was so incredulous he had to swallow back a laugh. “It’s quite a bit more complicated than that, Kate.”

“Do you want to see her? Is that it? I thought when you said you weren’t in touch that meant your relationship was over.”

“She’s my mother.”

“And?”

“No, I don’t want to see her.” He checked himself as he said it, but it
seemed true. Just thinking about walking into a room where she was felt like inviting chaos back into his life.

“Peter,” Kate said, bringing her fingers to her temples as if trying to block out static. “Can you imagine what it was like for us? When my father was in the hospital? When we worried about his brain? My mother cut up his food for him. She washed him and dressed him.”

“I’m sure it was awful. What are we arguing about?”

“And no word from you. Not a single word. I chose a college in New York City partly because that’s where I figured you’d gone. You mentioned Queens, that night, do you remember? But you could have found me whenever you wanted to. I was exactly where I’d always been. Why didn’t you?”

“But I did,” he said meekly.

“You scribbled a letter on a whim and mailed it to me four and a half years later.”

But Peter could no better explain that than he could explain his feelings for Kate to guys on the Dutch Kills track team. It made sense in his heart and in his gut, but to his brain the logic was incoherent. They were walking along Broadway and Kate had sped up, was standing with her arms around herself in front of a display window. Broadway Chocolatier. Tuesday night wine pairings. Thursday night truffle-making classes.

Her profile was made of stone.

“You’re right. I should have contacted you earlier. It’s like I said in my first letter. I kept thinking I would and then time passed and I was afraid you hated me. I thought about you all the time. I don’t know why I didn’t write sooner. I think . . .”

“What?”

“It was a lot. I was worried about my mom, then my dad left. Then I worried I was imposing on my uncle. I took each day as it came and didn’t look forward or back too often because it would have been too much. I kept thinking I’d write to you once I got settled but then I never got settled.”

She stood still, without looking at him, for a long time.

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said finally.

“Okay,” he said.

Neither of them felt like a normal college couple, or even like normal college students, but they acted the part.

Kate said, late one night, after smoking half a pack of cigarettes and vomiting all over the steps of Peter’s dorm, that they’d already gone through all the heavy stuff couples go through so why not enjoy the light stuff now? Peter agreed. It was time to have fun. And he’d figured out that the fun was often not the thing itself—the party, the keg stand, the naked running into the duck pond—but the endless talking about it after, the reliving and describing, and laughing about it in front of people who wished they’d been there. Used to be he was one of the kids listening, one of the kids who missed everything, but now, since college, since Kate, he was in the stories.

One day, he’d have to work. One day, he’d have to decide whether he ever wanted to see his parents again, but until college was over, he copied what everyone else did. When a central worry rose up in him—it was impossible to smother his nature entirely—he called up some friends and asked who was free, who wanted to meet up. They headed to football games and tailgates and dorm parties when Kate visited Elliott. When Peter went to NYU they went to bars and clubs with groups of other college students and ended every night out at the diner on St. Mark’s. Peter thought about how different high school would have been if he’d been able to look across a room and find her there. If he had her walking alongside him, everywhere he went. They drank like they were getting paid, as Kate always put it, everything from Bud Lights, to Zimas, to boxed wine, to whiskey, to vodka, to rum.

“I hate rum,” Peter observed one night as he was pouring some into his cup. Everyone laughed.

To anyone who asked where he and Kate met, they said only that they grew up together. High school sweethearts, people said, and they issued no corrections.

And then, almost no sooner than he felt he’d gotten the hang of college, had gotten the hang of navigating the lower intestines of the Port Authority bus tunnel to the subway that would bring him closest to Kate’s dorm, no sooner, or so it felt, than he had really started to like his life and feel like he was not living for the future or the past, people started asking him what he was going to do next, what he was going to be. He majored in history, and his advisor was the first to bring it up. Then George, who told Peter he was welcome to come back and live with him for as long as he needed. He’d gotten a new apartment with his girlfriend, Rosaleen, but it was a two bedroom, and there was plenty of room for Peter if he needed time to get on his feet. It was just around the corner from George’s old apartment. Peter had stayed there for several weeks over the summer before senior year. It was clean and beige and had knickknacks and potted plants and bore absolutely no traces of George, unless Peter counted the bits of stubble coating the sink every morning. George’s girlfriend called Peter separately one night to reiterate the offer, in case Peter thought it was just George being overly generous.

“You’ve been through a lot,” Rosaleen said, and Peter felt the slow burn of embarrassment push up from his throat to his cheeks. Of course George would have told her everything. Of course. He didn’t mind, it had just caught him up short.

“Oh, and, Peter?” Rosaleen said. “I’m throwing a birthday party for George. Would be fun if you could come. He said he thinks you might be seeing someone? That you’re being shy about it? Bring her, too, if you like. He’s turning thirty-seven and he’s depressed about it. We’re just going to have a little dinner at the Thai place he likes.”

“Sorry. Did you say thirty-seven?” Peter did a quick calculation. But that meant George had only been twenty-nine when he and his father moved in so suddenly. He knew George was a decade younger than his father, but Coach was forty and seemed younger than George. When Peter thought about it, most of his professors were probably older than forty, and all seemed younger than George.

“I know, right? He’s been through a lot, too.”

Peter majored in history, but majors didn’t seem to matter as much as he expected them to when it came to getting a job. English majors were going to law school. Philosophy majors were also pre-med. Going to med school was out for Peter because he hadn’t taken the prerequisites. Finance didn’t interest him, plus there was a towel-snapping vibe in any econ seminar he’d taken that reminded him of the locker room at Dutch Kills. Accounting was too boring. What else could a person be? A teacher, maybe. There was a job fair in December of senior year and Peter ambled through, looking at booths. Marketing, advertising, consulting, health care, hospitality, insurance, childcare, Department of Corrections, Department of Transportation. Starbucks had a booth. Sears. The local utility company. The Adventure Aquarium in Camden. They all had shiny posters and bowls of candy and smiling representatives. Every job was located in either New Jersey or New York and made him feel like a butterfly pinned to a board. There was a whole country to explore. He’d just finished a biography of Steve Prefontaine and had been wondering about Oregon. Also, Colorado. California.

Sometimes, in his dreams, he asked his mother questions that she refused to answer. Sometimes, also in his dreams, he brought her his college transcript, like a kindergartner eager to show off his gold stars, and she let it slide to the cold linoleum floor without even looking. Recently, in his waking life, on his way to a track meet in Syracuse, the van
had pulled off in Albany so the team could eat and pee and stretch, and Peter felt himself looking around, furtively, as if he might be spotted in the area. While the team finished eating, he went to the rest stop lobby to stare at a map of the city, all the broken lines that indicated routes in and out.

He didn’t tell Kate about George’s birthday party, and he told himself that was because he could only barely make it himself. He’d mentioned Kate to George, just once, telling him only that he’d met up with her for drinks, and George looked completely confounded, asked why in the world Peter had seen her, that it seemed like opening a whole can of worms. “Is she the type who stirs up old drama? Or maybe, do you think her father put her up to it? Maybe thinking of a civil suit?” George asked. He was still in the old apartment at the time and they were trying to fix the air conditioner. The condensation had leaked inside and warped the parquet floor. George was lying on his back, staring at the unit from underneath.

“No, she’s not a dramatic type,” Peter said, and let it go.

Kate cut off the dip-dyed ends of her hair, removed the polish from her nails, and interviewed for a criminalist position with the NYPD. She got an offer on the spot. She’d considered engineering. She thought about biochemistry. She even considered something in agriculture for a week or two before she realized how few of those jobs were in New York. The day she walked into the crime lab in Jamaica for her interview, wearing an ugly brown suit that had been handed down from Natalie, to Sara, and then to Kate, she told Peter it had felt like home. “It can be a culture shock,” Dr. Lehrer said when he invited her to sit down among the
microscopes and Bunsen burners. But she’d grown up in the culture; she spoke the language.

Peter felt a twinge of envy that she could be so sure. Even the choices she struggled with were in the same category. She knew what she wanted and had homed in on it. One day Peter thought he’d like to be a track coach, and the next day he thought he should go to graduate school and become a college professor.

“And I accepted. I start June first.”

“In New York.”

“Yes, the lab in Queens.”

“You already accepted?”

“Yes. Why? You don’t sound happy for me.”

“No, I am. But that means we’ll be staying in New York.”

“Well, yes. Were you thinking somewhere else?” They’d never discussed what would happen once college was over. They both assumed, correctly, that the other wanted to be nearer, that they would see each other more often.

“I don’t know. I was thinking of maybe you and me together in a place where we don’t know anyone.”

“Oh,” Kate said, confusion plain in her voice. “Why would we want to be in a place where we don’t know anyone?”

But Peter couldn’t say why, because he didn’t know. Sometimes he thought of himself hiking in unfamiliar terrain, reaching a summit and not recognizing any of the landmarks below. The feeling was exhilarating.