Since You've Been Gone (43 page)

“Oh,” my dad said. He didn’t look convinced, but he shrugged and said, “Well, I’m glad you’re up. Both your mom and I are heading out, and we wanted to talk to you first.”

I glanced down and realized that explained the third suitcase. “Mom’s going to Cooperstown too?”

“Nope,” my mother said as she came out of the house and down the steps, holding an overstuffed purse. “Thank god.” She smoothed my hair down with her hand. “You’re up early, hon. Everything okay?”

“Where are you going?” I asked as I watched, with increasing alarm, as my mother headed over to my car and slung her bag into the driver’s seat.

“New Haven,”  she said.  “I’m giving notes on a tech rehearsal for a friend today, and staying to watch the dress on Sunday.”

“And how long is Dad going to be gone?” I asked, as my father picked up his suitcase and Beckett’s duffel and headed for the car my parents used.

“He’ll be back Sunday night too,” my mom said as she rummaged in her purse, coming up with her sunglasses and pushing them through her hair like a headband.

“Wait,” I said, as I watched my dad shut the back of his car and yell at my brother to get a move on, feeling like things were moving far too quickly. “So you guys are leaving me for the weekend?”

“Did you want to come?” my mother asked, brightening. “I’m sure you could sleep on the couch.”

“Or you could come to Cooperstown,” my dad called cheerfully, walking away from his car and back to the house. “It’s the birthplace of baseball, you know.”

“No, thanks,” I said, looking between the two cars. It wasn’t so much that my parents were leaving me; it was that they were
leaving me with no transportation. “But what am I supposed to do about getting around?”

My mom raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t think it’d be a problem for the weekend,” she said. “I thought that Frank or Dawn could drive you if you needed to go somewhere. There’s food in the fridge, so you shouldn’t need to go out for that.”

“But—” I started, feeling panicky. I realized that if I’d confided in either of my parents, they would have known that Frank and Dawn weren’t options at the moment, but that didn’t change the fact that I was going to be stranded.

“If you really need to go somewhere, there’s money in the conch for a taxi,” my dad said, maybe seeing something of what I was feeling in my expression. “But if you’re not comfortable staying alone . . .”

“No, no,” I said quickly, trying to get in front of this before I found myself being hauled along to a baseball museum or stuck in some drafty theater watching lighting cues change. I made myself smile at them. “I’ll be fine.”

My parents headed out shortly after that, both of them trying to beat the traffic that they were convinced would grow exponentially by the hour. I watched my mother, driving my car, make the right turn out of the driveway, her hand waving out the window at me, then I walked back and sat down on the front steps in the sudden silence of the driveway, thinking.

All I had wanted to do, ever since I saw Laney Alden’s address on my phone, was get in my car and drive down there. It would
be a longer trip than I’d ever taken before, but it wasn’t undoable.

I pulled up the address again and called the number listed. It rang and rang, then a cheerful-sounding woman came on the machine, telling me I’d reached the Alden residence, asking me to please leave a message after the tone. I hung up before the beep, not even that disappointed. I hadn’t really expected to get Sloane—if she wasn’t answering her cell, she probably wasn’t answering her aunt’s landline.

I stared down at the address. I had finally found her and now I couldn’t even go? I had known my parents weren’t going to be thrilled with the idea of me driving down to South Carolina. Since they were gone, though, they’d given me a two-day window in which to do this. Unfortunately, they’d also taken away my means of transportation. In a well-ordered universe, you would have been able to rent a car at seventeen. But . . .

Just like that, a possible solution occurred to me. It was so scary, and so potentially awkward that it really seemed like it should have been number fourteen on Sloane’s list. I pulled out my phone and looked at the time. I had no idea if he was still running. But if he was, the timing would work out.

I stood up and walked down the porch steps. I was still in my flip-flops, and I kicked them off. I left them at the end of the driveway, took a breath, and started to run.

I reached his house and sat down at the end of his driveway to wait for him. If he was still running, he’d be coming home around now.

The birds were out in full force, and it was already really hot out, which didn’t seem like a good sign, considering how early it still was. I felt the warm breeze blow my hair forward, over my face, not sure what I was more scared of—that he would show up, or that he wouldn’t.

I heard the sound before I saw him, the sound of sneakers hitting pavement at a steady pace. And then there he was, coming around the curve of the road, headphones in and iPod strapped to his arm. He was staying far over to the inside of the road, like he was leaving room for me. I had a flash of pride as I took in his pace and the fact that he didn’t even look winded, realizing that he probably wouldn’t have been doing that well without me, without all our mornings together. I wondered what he was listening to, if it was a mix I knew.

He saw me, and even from twenty feet away, I saw his expression of surprise as he slowed to a jog, then a walk, pulling his earbuds out. It felt like my legs were shaking, but I made myself stand up, not letting myself look away from him, even though this became harder the closer he got. This was the most familiar Frank to me, the Frank I’d spent my summer running next to, trading stories and songs, pushing each other on. I felt a pang of missing him twist my stomach as I looked at his hair brushed back from his forehead, at his left shoelace that was threatening to come untied. We stood there, by the side of the road, just looking at each other.

“Hi,” I finally said, making myself speak, feeling like I
should start since I was the one who’d shown up unannounced in his driveway.

“Hey,” Frank said. His voice was cautious, and he seemed to be looking at me closely, searching my face like he was looking for an answer—to what, though, I had no idea. He broke eye contact and looked at the ground, and at my feet.

“It’s, um, that barefoot running trend I keep hearing about,” I said, and Frank gave me a half smile. “I found Sloane,” I said, all in a rush, to stop myself from saying anything else to him, things I really shouldn’t. “She’s living down in South Carolina.”

“Oh,” Frank said, and I could tell that this wasn’t what he’d expected me to say. He nodded. “That’s good, right?”

“I need to go there,” I said, still speaking fast, like I might be able to rush past whether this was actually a good idea or not. “I want to find her. But my parents are gone for the weekend and they took both of the cars.” Frank just looked at me, waiting for me to go on, and I knew I probably wasn’t making much sense. I took a breath before asking, realizing that he very probably would say no, and then not only would I not be going to find Sloane, but I would have made a fool of myself to boot. But I was standing barefoot in his driveway to ask him this—there was nothing to do but say it. “Would you be willing to drive me? I’d ask to borrow your car, but I can’t drive a stick shift.”

Frank just looked at me, his head tilted slightly to the side. He wasn’t jumping in to agree to this, but he also wasn’t saying no.

“I’ll pay for gas and everything,” I said quickly. “And it won’t be that long. I have to be back by tomorrow night.”

He just looked at me, still not speaking. He took a breath like he was about to say something, but then just let it out slowly, and I had a feeling I knew what his answer would be, could tell in that silence how ridiculous he thought this was.

“I know it’s stupid,” I said, breaking eye contact with him, and looking up to the tree above me as a bird alighted on the uppermost branch. “But I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“You want to drive to South Carolina and back by tomorrow night,” he said, finally breaking his silence. He didn’t phrase it like a question, more like he was just trying to get a grasp of the facts. I nodded and Frank looked away for a long moment.

When he looked back at me, though, he had a ghost of a smile on his face. “Then I guess we’d better get going.”

An hour later, we were on the road.

I had gone home to take a shower and try and get my head around the fact that we were actually going to do this.

I’d gotten dressed but hadn’t put on any more makeup than usual, or attempted to do anything special with my hair. The last thing I wanted, after kissing him in my car, was for Frank to think that this was some kind of plot to get him alone so I could seduce him or something. I thought for a moment of wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved shirt, but the fact was, it was simply too hot out. I’d looked at my pajamas for a long moment, doing the math. According to the directions I’d found, it seemed like the drive down there was going to take around ten hours, which
would also mean ten hours back. Which meant that, at some point, we’d have to get some sleep.

But I headed out of my room without packing my pajamas, or anything I would normally bring for an overnight stay. I couldn’t even begin to picture where we would be tonight, or what it would look like, so it was like I couldn’t make the leap to prepare for it. I somehow still couldn’t understand that I might be seeing Sloane in just a few hours.

I’d closed the blinds and poured some extra food in the cat’s bowl, despite the fact he hadn’t been inside for a week or so. And as I’d left the kitchen, I’d grabbed the emergency cash from the conch shell even though I was pretty sure my Paradise wages would cover all our food and gas. Then I’d locked up and headed outside just as Frank pulled his truck into the driveway.

I got in the passenger seat and buckled up while Frank turned around and headed down the driveway to the road. “Ninety-five South?” he asked, at the end of the driveway, and I nodded. I had directions on my phone, and I’d also printed them out, in case my phone died on the return trip. “Here we go,” he said quietly, turning right, in the direction that would take us to the highway.

We drove for maybe half an hour in silence before I fully grasped the impact of what I’d just gotten us into. Not the trip itself—though I was well aware that it was crazy in its own right. But I hadn’t thought through the fact I was putting myself in a
confined space with someone I hadn’t really spoken to in over a week. And we were going to have to be together for twenty hours, at least. This somehow hadn’t been factored in to my earlier decision to ask Frank, and as we crossed into New York, and then New Jersey, I started to regret not investigating how much it would have been to take a cab, or a bus. Because our conversation on this road trip so far had been limited to only the most basic driving talk—
Can I get over to that lane? How are we on gas? Take the left exit.
And I was realizing that it was pretty terrible to be sitting in silence with someone who you always used to have something to say to.

“Music?” I asked, after we’d been driving in New Jersey for a good twenty minutes and I just couldn’t stand the silence any longer. Frank glanced over at me and shrugged, nodding down at his iPod on the console.

“Sure,” he said, politely, like I was a stranger. “Whatever you want.”

I could feel myself getting mad at him, which wasn’t really fair, since he was currently in the middle of doing me a huge favor. I bit back saying something to him, and reached forward to the radio. I scrolled through until I found something not-terrible, a station that seemed to mostly be playing music that had been popular five years ago. “This okay?”

“Whatever you want,” Frank repeated, with the same inflection, irritating me even further.

“Fine,” I said, turning the volume up slightly, so that the
silence in the truck wouldn’t be quite so apparent. We’d only passed two exits, though, before I reached forward and turned it down again. “Thank you for doing this,” I said, when I realized I hadn’t told him this yet. “I really appreciate it.”

Frank looked away from the road and glanced at me, then turned back to the highway that still seemed pretty clear, despite my parents’ worries. “Sure,” he said, in the same overly polite and formal voice that was currently driving me crazy. “It’s what
friends
do, right?”

He put a spin on the word, like he was saying it sarcastically. I wasn’t even sure what to make of that, so I just gave him a tight smile, turned the volume back up, and looked out the window again.

Maybe Frank had been feeling as annoyed as me, because by the time we crossed into Pennsylvania—the Keystone State—the tension between us was palpable, and rising, like the shimmering heat coming off the asphalt in the distance. And in contrast to the occasional license plates I saw, it was becoming clear by the charged silence between us that neither of us currently had a friend in Pennsylvania.

We’d long since lost the somewhat decent radio station, and while I’d tried to scan through them to find something else, I kept getting commercials and what sounded like polka. So I’d finally just turned off the radio, but the quiet in the truck felt oppressive, and I couldn’t help but wonder if we would have been better off with the accordions.

“We need gas,” Frank announced four exits later, breaking what felt like hours of silence.

I leaned forward to look at the signs that were posted by every exit, letting you know what you could find at that turnoff—usually just food, gas, and lodging, but I had seen the occasional ones for camping and swimming. Once we had gotten out of the tangle of the tri-state area and cleared New Jersey, things had opened up, and now I could see across the horizon, as this stretch of the state was pretty flat—blue sky stretching out endlessly in front of us, and bright-green grass on either side of the highway. It wasn’t congested, and Frank had mostly been staying in the left lane, driving fast but always within shouting distance of the speed limit. “It looks like there will be some in three miles,” I said as we passed the sign, and he moved a lane over.