How to Love (31 page)

“The night she died.” It looks as if it’s physically painful for him to say it, as if the words taste like gravel or bone. “I had her keys. And I let her have them.”

I don’t—It feels like he’s speaking Mandarin. “But we
were together the night she died,” I say, still not understanding. “At the ice cream place.”

“Before that.” Sawyer exhales, rakes his hands through his hair. All of a sudden the tenor of this conversation has changed completely, like it’s about so much more than just him and me. “Before I came to the restaurant. We were at a party with some people. Lauren and all of them. We didn’t drive together, but she gave me her keys because she didn’t want to carry a purse. She had that big stupid purse, you know?” Sawyer shrugs and heads across the patio even though it’s still raining, leaves the safe harbor of the awning for the glider at the edge of the yard. After a minute I follow.

“We were there for like an hour,” he tells me, swinging just a little, picking reflexively at the seam of his work pants. “Maybe an hour and a half. And we started to argue.”

“Okay,” I say softly. I perch beside him on the glider, same as the night just after Allie’s funeral. It makes it easier, somehow, not to have to stare him in the eye. I can hear the restaurant sounds just like I could the last time we did this, the same underwater sensation. “I’m with you so far.”

Sawyer nods. “She said she was leaving,” he continues after a minute. My heart is thudding hard behind my ribs. “She yelled at me to give her the keys, and she wasn’t—she wasn’t sloppy, you know? It wasn’t like she was falling down. But she’d had a couple beers and there was that look in her eye, and—” He breaks off all of a sudden, shrugging
helplessly. He looks about ten years old. “I never, ever should have let her go. But I did. I threw her the keys and I told her to get the hell lost, if that’s how she felt about stuff, and I—”

“—and you came to the restaurant and found me.”

Sawyer nods like all the breath has gone out of him. The rain is slipping down the back of my neck. “So,” he says eventually, eyes on the other side of the courtyard;
Get the hell lost
, he told her, and she did. “Now you know.”

Now I know.

For a long time neither of us says anything, rain spritzing down on the pavement. I think of Sawyer carrying that secret across the country. I think of Allie dying before she ever got to live. I cry for a while, sitting there on the glider, remembering the purple ribbon I didn’t wear in the weeks after the accident, like no pretty length of grosgrain would stretch around whatever it was I’d lost. Sawyer’s arm is warm and damp against mine. “What was the fight about?” I ask him finally.

“You.” Just like that, no hesitation at all: Sawyer lifts his head to look at me, his expression wry and heartbroken and honest. “We were fighting about you.”

“Me?” My stomach lands somewhere around my shoes. I can’t believe this was true the entire time we were together. I can’t believe he hasn’t told me this until now. “
Why?
”

“She said you were in love with me.”

There’s a sound, this quiet gasping whimper, and it takes
me a minute to realize it’s coming from my mouth. “What?” I manage. “She said—
what?
”

Sawyer shrugs. “You heard me,” he says quietly, a simple matter-of-factness in his manner that leaves no doubt in my mind he’s telling the truth. “She said you were in love with me even though you’d never admit it, and you had been for a long time, and she thought—” He shakes his head. “She thought I loved you back.”

“What?” I say again, just the one word on repeat like a CD that’s gotten stuck. My first reaction is this totally irrational embarrassment on behalf of my fifteen-year-old self, although—what with our kid being big enough to walk and talk—it’s probably a little late to feel humiliated at the idea of Sawyer knowing I had a crush on him back then. Still, knowing that Allie sold me out like that, used my most private feelings for some kind of messed-up emotional currency in a drunk fight with her boyfriend—that stings. For the hundred thousandth time I wish she hadn’t crashed her car and disappeared forever, if only so I could tell her what a bitch move that was.

Then again: I betrayed her, too. I think of the very first time Sawyer ever kissed me, on the hood of the Jeep outside the ice cream place on the very last night of Allie’s life. There’s no limit to the ways that we managed to fail each other as best friends, Allie and I. It makes me feel so colossally sad.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think she meant to hurt you,” Sawyer says now, watching my face as if he’s trying
to read hieroglyphics carved there. “I think she was just … upset.” He shrugs one more time, honest and regretful. “And anyway, it’s not like she was wrong.”

I stare at him. I blink. “Meaning … ?”

“Are you kidding?” Sawyer looks at me like I’m deranged, like we’re still on two totally different sides of the river. “Why do you think I came looking for you that night, Reena? To see if it was true.
I left my drunk girlfriend with her car keys
and I came and I found you, do you understand that? Why the hell would I ever have done that if I didn’t care whether or not it was true?”

“Uh-uh.” I shake my head stubbornly, refusing to believe it. “You never paid one speck of attention to me before—”

“No,
you
never paid one speck of attention!” Sawyer’s voice rises. “You were so worried about making sure I never knew you felt one way or the other about me so that you wouldn’t have to be embarrassed or vulnerable or
whatever—
” He stops and gets up off the glider. Turns around to look me in the eye. “Well, guess what, Reena? I never knew you felt one way or the other about me.” He shrugs a little, elegant shoulders just barely moving. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen him do. “So I guess you won.”

We gaze at each other for a moment, the rain still hissing steadily all around us and my heart beating fast like moth wings, so small and whisper-quiet inside my chest. I know it’s my move here, that Sawyer’s told me the worst and most honest thing he can think of. I remember the fight I had
with Allie that night at the party:
You want to win this fight, Reena?
It doesn’t feel like I’ve won anything at all.

“It means woodcutter,” I tell him finally, wiping either rain or tears off my face with the back of one cold, damp hand. I don’t know why it suddenly feels like it matters.

Sawyer physically startles at the sound of my voice. He looks at me, blinking. “Huh?” he asks.

“Your name,” I manage after a moment. “One who saws.”

It’s not what he was hoping for; the sag of his body makes that much unmistakably clear. Still, Sawyer musters a smile. “Makes sense, I guess,” is all he tells me. Offers a hand to pull me to my feet.

I dropped Sawyer at home after our miserable night in South Beach, drove back to my house, and beelined directly into the downstairs bathroom. I threw up everything I’d eaten all day.

Everything.

I sat on the tile for a long time after that, head against the wall, waiting for my stomach to settle, for my breath to stop coming so quick. I sobbed for a while, feeling pathetic. I thought my insides were actually in revolt. In the morning, Soledad brought me toast and tea and sat at the edge of the mattress reading novels in Spanish, thumb stroking absently along the arch of my foot while she listened to me try not to cry.

“What happened?” she asked once, around lunchtime. I shrugged into the pillows on the bed.

I felt better by dinner, thought of calling him, decided against it.

I sat awake in bed till the sun came up.

*

The morning after that, I got sick again. Then a day of nothing.

Then again the day after that.

(That was when I started to freak.)

*

I drove all the way to a Walgreens in Pompano Beach to buy a pregnancy test, went over to Shelby’s to take it. I curled my arms around my knees on the carpet-covered lid of the toilet. Shelby sat cross-legged on the floor.

“Just look at it for me, okay?” I told her, watching the second hand creep along the face of my watch—slowly, slowly. I couldn’t get over the notion that this absolutely could not be happening to me. I almost wasn’t even nervous, that’s how sure I was that it wasn’t real. We’d been careful, hadn’t we? I’d made sure we were careful. “Just … look.”

“I’m looking,” she said, peering at the stick and frowning. She was wearing denim cutoffs and a T-shirt with the Mario Bros. on it. “But it’s not—it’s not doing anything yet.”

“How is it not doing anything?” I demanded, leaning forward to grab it out of her hand. “It’s got to be—”

Shelby pulled it back, looked more closely; she glanced again at the picture on the back of the box. “
Reena
,” she said then, and she looked so
sorry.
I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see.

There are complications following my father’s surgery, bleeding that requires a second operation. We spend a week’s worth of days and nights in that waiting room, Cade and Soledad and I, taking shifts, going home for showers, making dinners out of Diet Coke and Fritos from the vending machines. Shelby’s mom leaves casseroles on our doorstep. Lydia brings changes of clothes. Hannah comes down with a summer cold that keeps us up nights and turns me, for all intents and purposes, into an extra from a movie about the zombie apocalypse; Sawyer turns up at the hospital to take her off my hands for twenty-four hours, hands me a Tupperware container full of risotto I can tell he’s made himself.

“I owed you dinner,” he tells me, hitching the baby up on his hip.

“You owe me more than dinner,” I tell him, but there’s no real heat behind it. I grab his free hand, squeeze a little in spite of myself. “Thanks.”

Sawyer smiles. “You’re welcome.”

We don’t talk much, my family. Cade paces. I read magazines. Soledad prays. She’s stopped eating almost entirely; I think of Jesus in the desert, fighting his demons for forty days.

“About the thing,” she says suddenly, one night when I come to relieve her. She’s watching Leno with heavy-lidded eyes. “I shouldn’t have said that to you. I shouldn’t have told you to think. I know you think.”

“It’s fine.” I shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, though.”

“Yeah,” I say eventually. “I guess it does.” I hold up a bag of takeout and think of how Cade and I used to beat the crap out of each other as kids and then move on a minute later as soon as something more important came up, like nothing had even happened. Maybe that’s just how families work. “I brought you food. Drive-thru was the only place open.”

“Thanks, sweetheart.” She sighs. “Sawyer has the baby?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“He doesn’t do a bad job with her,” she says. “I have to hand him that.”

I think of Seattle, of rainy woods and coffee on cloudy mornings. I think of the desert and hot, arid air. I think of the middle of this country, the endless rolling green of it, and I want so badly, badly, badly to get out of this place.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “You really do.”

*

On the way home the next morning, I stop by Target and pick up a road atlas of the continental United States.

Just to see.

*

Hannah and I are splitting a PBJ in the kitchen when the bell rings—not once, but five or six times in a row, incessant. I pad barefoot through the living room with the baby on my hip and fling it open: There’s Shelby on the other side of the door, wearing a Ms. Pac-Man T-shirt and a scowl, holding a big glass tray of marbled brownies. “I made these,” she says curtly, thrusting them at me. “Eat them or don’t.”

I reach my free hand out like a reflex, barely catching the tray before it crashes to the tiles. With everything that’s been going on around here, our paths haven’t crossed in a couple of weeks. “Thanks,” I tell her, a little shocked; then, trying for a smile: “Did you poison them?”

Shelby’s eyes narrow. “I should have,” she huffs. She squares her shoulders, muscles past me into the house. “I told you I wasn’t going to be shitty as long as you weren’t shitty,” she announces, flouncing onto the couch. “Well, you
were
shitty. But I’m gonna be cool.”

I blink, not totally understanding, resting the tray of brownies on top of the TV. “Really?”

“Yes, really.” She still looks annoyed, but she holds her arms out for the baby, waits for me to hand her over and cuddles her in the crook of her freckly arm. Hannah babbles her giddy pleasure—she loves Shelby, always has. Shelby traces her thumb over Hannah’s downy ear. “I feel like maybe you haven’t had a whole lot of breaks. So I’m giving you one.”

Right away I feel a lump rise up in my throat. My hands flutter sort of helplessly at my sides. “You always give me breaks,” I manage, voice cracking a little bit—and I don’t deserve her, I don’t, somebody as fierce as Shelby to help me fight my wars. “You’re my best friend.”

Shelby cocks her head to the side, wrinkles up the edges of her mouth like maybe she’s worried I’m going to get her started, too. “Oh, stop it,” she orders gruffly, but then: “You’re my best friend, too.”

Well, that does it. I’m crying for real when I sit down on the sofa, everything so painfully close to the surface all the time. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, almost too far gone to get the words out. “I didn’t mean to mess with your brother. I didn’t mean to screw everything up.”

Shelby slides an arm around my shoulders so she’s holding me and Hannah both. “I know,” she tells me, her ginger temple bumping softly against mine. “I’m sorry, too. I should have come over here right away, when your dad got sick. That was really shitty of me.”

“I thought you were going to hate me forever,” I tell her, and realize that it’s true: I thought for sure our friendship had gone the way of mine and Allie’s, that I’d lost her for good and would never be able to find a way back. I’m so hugely relieved that she’s here.

Shelby smiles. “I could never hate you, dummy,” she tells me. “I love you too much for that.” She sighs a little, squeezes. Waits for me to quiet down. “Shh, Reena. You’re okay.” She says it again a minute later, just quiet: “You’re okay,” she promises softly, and there’s something in her voice to make me believe.