How to Love (32 page)

I sat on the floor of Shelby’s bathroom for a long time, forehead on the edge of the tub, not talking. The porcelain felt cold and clean against my skin. Shelby leaned her back on the door, cross-legged and patient, dragging the edge of the cardboard box beneath her nail. I could hear her mother moving around in the kitchen, making dinner and singing along to the radio, the sound of life spinning on.

I was pregnant.

Me.

“Jesus Christ, Shelby,” I finally whispered, bracing my hands on the tub and looking up. My head, as I lifted it, felt heavy enough to snap off my neck entirely. I wished for a swamp to swallow me. I wished for my mom. “What am I going to
do?
”

I had to tell Soledad.

I had to tell my father.

I had to tell—

Oh
God.

I splashed some water on my face and drove south down 95, toward Sawyer and the crumbling stucco house. It was past twilight, palm trees silhouetted gray and graceful against the darkening sky. I sped. I sped a
lot
, actually, and also I was crying again, and when I made the left turn onto Powerline Road I came within centimeters of smashing into a canary-yellow pickup truck and very nearly killed myself.

I very nearly killed myself and my
kid.

The blaring horn faded in the distance and I pulled over as soon as I could, two hands shaking on the wheel. I thought of Allie and near misses, wondered why on earth things happen the way they do. I missed her more than I ever had, if that was possible. My breath came in crazy gulping sobs.

“Congratulations,” I said suddenly, talking to her like she was sitting in the passenger seat beside me, feet up on the dashboard and singing along to the radio, her head thrown back to laugh loud and hard. I’d never done that before, not in all the months she’d been gone. “You were right. I couldn’t handle it. I
can’t
handle it, and it just—it would have been great of you to stick the hell around and help me out.”

Cars whizzed by on the avenue. Allie didn’t reply.

Finally I pulled it together enough to make it the rest of the way to Sawyer’s, gliding silently up to the curb across the street. I shut off the engine and got out, flip-flops sinking into the dry, brittle grass. The remains of two broken beer bottles were scattered on the pavement, green and sharp.

I had a long stare at the low, sprawling house: It looked worse than I’d remembered, dirty aluminum awnings over the windows and a weird rusty stain creeping up the exterior near the door. A random orange traffic cone sat overturned on the lawn. I’d thought it was some exotic clubhouse, romantically shabby. Now it just looked bleak.

The windows were dark but Sawyer’s Jeep was in the driveway, and I was talking myself into crossing and ringing the bell when the front door opened and there he was: slouching and feline, angry and sad. I hardly even recognized his face. He’d lost a startling amount of weight, I realized. I hadn’t noticed that before. His shoulders jutted oddly beneath his T-shirt, fiberglass or shale.

Actually, I thought as I stood there: They looked sort of oddly like wings.

He didn’t see me. He wasn’t looking. He was holding a backpack, some ridiculous old camping number I happened to know was his father’s, because my father had one, too. They’d bought them together when they were teenagers, back when they used to do things like camp.

Sawyer crossed the lawn, threw the pack in the backseat
of his Jeep and slid into the driver’s seat. I stood there and watched him, struck dumb. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t know how long he’d be gone. I waited as the engine turned over, loud and cranky—Reena in the background, watching as usual. The taillights glowed like two red coals.

Wait
, I almost shouted, but didn’t, and that would be my burden to bear. Instead, I stood on the curb and I watched him disappear, lights fading in the distance like waking up from a dream.

I stood there for a long time, feet rooted to the sidewalk, and in my head the stillness began to make a sick kind of sense. I wasn’t going
anywhere
, I realized numbly—not college, not Chicago, not off into the sunset to see the great wide world. This was it. Sawyer was gone—
gone
gone, I knew already, the way you know you’re hungry or that it’s about to rain—and I was going to have to stay in Broward. I was going to have to do this—whatever
this
was—on my own.

I was crying again, silent and stupid, right there on the curb like the worst kind of fool. All that careful planning, all those maps and magazines, those nights I’d dreamed myself to sleep. The places I was going to explore, the stories I was going to write when I got there—and for what? I looked down at the damp, cracked pavement, felt the boundaries of my life constricting around me. The air was heavy and oppressive, pushing against the surface of my skin.

At long last, I pulled it together, wiped my eyes and scrubbed my palms against my jeans. I took a deep breath and headed for the only destination that made sense at this particular juncture:

I got back in the car and drove toward home.

My father gets released in the middle of August, twenty pounds lighter and considerably worse for wear. He spends most days in the living room or at physical therapy, groggy or annoyed, but he is alive, and that is good enough for now. We settle into a new routine, all of us Monteros, full of medicines and lists. I start cooking dinner. Silence descends like a shroud. A few times a week, Sawyer’s Jeep rumbles to the curb and he takes Hannah to the park or the zoo for a couple of hours.

“How are you?” he always asks, when I bring her outside.

“Fine,” I always tell him, and watch him disappear down the road.

During the day I am a dutiful daughter. I weed the
garden. I salt the soup. At night I read my atlas like a Bible, imagining my escape.

It goes on like this for a while, a steady drone and the hum of the central air, until one afternoon when I come downstairs after putting Hannah down for a nap and find my dad sitting on the couch, flipping the channels. “Do you need anything?” I ask automatically. “You hungry?”

“I’m all right,” he says. Then, clicking the TV off: “Come here for a minute, daughter of mine.”

I feel the nerves stir in my stomach—a warm prickly rush of guilt and anxiety, though I know there was a time when I felt safer with my father than with anyone else on earth. “What’s up?” I ask, trying not to sound afraid. My hands move in front of me like butterflies. My toes curl down against the rug.

“Sit down,” he tells me, and I do, perching on the edge of the sofa beside him, feet still planted on the carpet like at any second I might jump up and bolt.

“I want to talk to you about that night at dinner,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” I say immediately, trying to avoid the inevitable lecture: If he’s going to lay into me again, I’d rather just take the blame right off the bat and be done with it, preempt the whole affair. My textbooks are piled on the desk in my bedroom. I’ve got finals starting next week. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that.”

“It’s not that,” he says, which is surprising. He shakes his head, sighs a little. “I owe you an apology.”

“It’s just been a really difficult—” I stop. “You do?”

“I do.” There’s something stilted about his speech, like he’s been practicing. I wait. “You were right, Reena,” he begins after a moment, “about what you said at the table. I didn’t protect you after—” He breaks off, tries again. “Once the baby came. I was angry. You know that. I said rotten things to you, and I’m ashamed of myself for that. I’m sorry.” He swallows. “This isn’t the life I imagined for you.”

I shrug, hands still twisting in my lap. I tuck them between my knees to still them. “It’s not the life I imagined for me, either.”

“I know. But as your dad, I think it felt—it felt like a personal failure to me, to see you lose Northwestern. A baby at sixteen—it’s not the way I raised you. I’m sorry if that’s difficult for you to hear, but it’s true.”

My cheeks feel hot. “I
know.
”

“But that’s not an excuse.” My father sighs again; he looks so old lately, his face gone slightly slack. “I did a terrible job once you told me you were pregnant. I did a miserable, piss-poor job. You probably needed your parents more than you’d ever needed your parents in your entire life, and what did I do? I walked away.”

I start to deny it, an absurd reflex. It’s bizarre to hear him talk this way. Finally I nod. “Yeah,” I tell him, which is about all I can manage. “It’s been hard.”

“But look at you,” he says. “You’ve handled yourself
with a lot of grace. You’re responsible. You took up your cross. You do a good job with Hannah. You might think I don’t notice that, but I do.”

I feel my eyes start to well up, that familiar clog in my throat. I feel like I’ve been on the verge of crying for the last two years. “Thanks.”

“I know a lot of people have left you in your life,” he tells me, and that’s when the tears start for real. He gets a little closer, puts a heavy hand on my back. “Your mother, and Allie. Sawyer. And me, too.” His arm slides down around my shoulder, pulls me close; he smells like laundry detergent and limes. “But what I want to tell you, sweetheart, is that that’s not going to happen again, all right? I’m not going anywhere. No matter what happens, what you do or where you go—you’re not going to lose me again.”

Well, that rips it. All of a sudden it’s like he’s given me permission to let go of everything I’ve been holding on to so tightly—the guilt and fear I’ve walked around with since the night of his heart attack, the huge anger that’s burrowed in behind my ribs. I rest my head on his shoulder and let myself a cry a little, leave a wet splotch on his shirt the way I haven’t since I was a little girl. My father pets through my hair. I know this won’t fix everything between us—I know we have many, many miles to walk—but it feels, at the very least, like a start.

“There’s something else,” he tells me, once I’ve pulled it together a little bit, hiccups instead of sobs. His hand is still
on my back, familiar after all this time. “It’s about Sawyer.”

“Honestly?” I groan. “There’s nothing going on between me and Sawyer.”

“It’s not that.” My father shakes his head. “Although whatever decision you make about him is just that—it’s your decision.” He clears his throat again, straightens up. “There’s something I never told you about Sawyer, about the time right before he left.”

I feel my eyebrows shoot up; I can only imagine. “What?”

My father reaches for the glass of water on the table, takes a long sip before he goes on. “He came here, to the house. Looking for you.”

“Wait,” I say, blinking. “Before he left for good?”

He nods. “This was when things between us weren’t so friendly, and I didn’t invite him in, but his car was full of all kinds of nonsense, like he was going on a trip.” He sets the water glass back down on the table. “I didn’t know then that he was leaving, but I also never told you he came by.”

I sit there for a minute, recalibrating. I feel like I’ve been hit with a wrecking ball. I think of Sawyer outside my house the other night, of him asking:
If I’d asked you to come with me, would you have?
I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans. Maybe that’s not even what Sawyer wanted that day—maybe I’m understanding it wrong—but if there was a bunch of stuff in his car it means that the day I watched him pack up and leave the crummy stucco house forever, he came to say good-bye before he went.

“Well.” My father sits forward a bit, exhales like he’s sort of exhausted himself. “I just wanted to tell you, Reena, that I’m sorry that I’ve been so hard on you. I’ve sat in judgment, and that was a mistake. If there’s something—I’d like to try to make it up to you.”

I struggle for a moment, trying to fit all the pieces together—to come up with some cure-all, a plan for living our lives in a new way. I’m about to tell him to forget it, that both of us just need time—when all of a sudden it occurs to me, as clear and as terrifying as the Book of Revelation. “I need your blessing for something,” I tell him.

He hesitates for a moment: He thinks it’s Sawyer-related, I’m sure, but to his great credit, he comes through. “Name it.”

I raise my head, wipe my eyes, and stare at my father dead-on. “I’m going to take a trip.”

Back at home after leaving Sawyer’s I shut the bedroom door and packed up all my guidebooks, threw my maps into the recycling. I ripped down my posters of Paris and Prague. I took the winter coat I’d gotten for Chicago—“I know it’s jumping the gun a little,” Soledad had said when she showed me the catalog, “but it’s good to be prepared”—and shoved it into my closet, deep in the back, past where Sawyer and I had fooled around the afternoon of Cade and Stef’s wedding. I imagined I could smell him, soapy and faint.

I had to take two breaks to throw up.

When I was finally done I sat in the middle of my bedroom floor for a while, looked around at my empty bookshelves and my naked walls. I leaned back and stared
at the ceiling, two hands on my stomach. I cried for a while. I thought.

Eventually I wandered downstairs where Soledad was sweating onions, humming along to Dolly Parton under her breath. “Meat sauce,” she told me, instead of hello, then: “I didn’t know you were home.” She laid one cool hand on my cheek like she was checking for a fever, for something she sensed but couldn’t prove. “You feeling any better?”

I shrugged and then hugged her, impulsively and hard. She smelled clean and familiar, vanilla and home. “I’m okay,” I managed, breathing her in to try and keep it together. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” she said, kissing my temple. She sounded surprised, and it occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t let her hold me in a while. “Set the table, then.”

I stuck close to the house for a while after that, reading next to Soledad and shadowing my father in his garden, plucking tiny crimson strawberries from their vines. I wanted, a little bizarrely, to spend time with both of them while I still had the chance: I knew I was going to lose them anyway, sure as if I was moving clear across the world. I knew they were never going to look at me the same way again—and honestly wasn’t sure if I’d even want them to. Still, part of me missed them already, and I wanted to soak them up while I could.