The Space Between Us (18 page)

“In
that
?”

I looked down at my sweater. Old Navy. $29.99.

He put down the books. Large print. “You can’t do that here.”

“W-w-w-what?”

“You can’t go wandering around outside in just a shirt and jeans. You’ll kill yourself. Look at you: You’re shivering uncontrollably, your lips are blue, and”—he leaned over the counter and squinted at me—“your pupils are dilated. You’ve got mild hypothermia. How long have you been outside?”

Hypothermia. Savannah was going to be so impressed. Way cooler than when I had mono. “Uhhh . . . ”

“Judgment is obviously impaired,” he muttered, “although I think that may have been an issue before.”

“M-m-my judgment is awesome.” Except, why couldn’t
I remember how long I’d been outside? And how had I gotten here?

“And you’re hard to understand, but that may just be the accent.”

That was mean. I wanted to be mad, but mad felt like a lot of work. Curling up into a ball in that velvety maroon chair seemed like a better idea.

Ezra came around the desk. He looked different than I’d remembered him. Maybe it was because he was in jeans and a T-shirt instead of ski pants and parka. Or the hair. Yeah. His hair was longer and shinier. It fell almost down to his jaw. How did he make his hair grow so fast? I wanted to reach out and touch it, but my arms wouldn’t move. He took a step closer. He smelled like candy. “You smell like c-c-candy.” Had I thought that, or said that?

He was trying not to smile, arms folded. A tattoo of some kind of animal with fangs stretched over the muscle in his forearm.

“B-b-but the tattoo is kind of scary.”

“You’re a lot nicer when you’re delusional,” he said, then reached out and touched my cheek. I couldn’t feel it, but I saw his thumb brushing the skin beneath my eye. It tingled, then stung. “Probably not frostbite, but it’s hard to tell. You’re lucky it isn’t that cold out there today. We need to warm you up. Your shirt isn’t wet, is it?”

“Um, no?”

“Good thing it isn’t snowing. Let me get you my coat.” He disappeared into a room behind the circulation desk and I stared at the fluorescent light panels. They looked warm. Ezra came out with a different parka from the red one I’d seen the other day. It was brown and looked like an entire grizzly bear encased in Gore-Tex. “I’d offer body heat, but I’m pretty sure you’d turn it down.”

I squinted at him. What was he saying?

He shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll just wait until you pass out for the emergency life-saving treatment.”

He slid the coat across the desk and I tried to pick it up, but my hands wouldn’t grip. It fell to the floor.
Bend down.
My brain sent the message, but I was sure I couldn’t, that I’d stumble if I tried.

“You’re worse off than you look,” Ezra said. He was back on my side of the desk picking up the jacket, holding it out in front of me and guiding my arms into the holes.

“My fingers are stinging.”

“That’s because your body cools your hands to keep your vital organs warm and it hurts when normal blood flow resumes. Why didn’t you go inside somewhere sooner? Are you suicidal? There are about a hundred shops you could’ve hung out in if you were lost.”

“N-n-no wallet.”

“Nobody would turn you out to freeze to death. And where’s your coat?” He was zipping up the jacket while
I stared at the
FREE TIBET
sun on his chest again.

“Bree’s. I like the D-d-dalai Lama.” He’d been in that old Brad Pitt movie about Tibet, hadn’t he?

“I’m sure you do. Come sit by the heat vent back here.” He dragged me by the sleeve back behind the counter and pointed to a rectangular grate in the floor. “Sit beside it, not on it. You’ll burn your butt before you can feel it. I’m going to go heat up some water bottles in the back room for you.”

I sat. The vent. The vent was heavenly. Beautiful. I was never leaving the vent. I closed my eyes and tried to will the shivering to stop. I couldn’t. Why
hadn’t
I gone in somewhere sooner? I wasn’t really suicidal. Not having a reason to live wasn’t the same as wanting to die.

Ezra reappeared with two pink hot water bottles, the same kind that Grandma used to put in our beds on January nights, nights when Dad draped sheets around his citrus trees and people brought their dogs inside. Forty-degree nights.

“Put one in each armpit,” he instructed.

I did as I was told. Angels sang. Heat—no, liquid gold—seeped through my body, and I shuddered.

“Feels good, eh?”

I couldn’t even answer.

The front door opened and Ezra left me. I could hear voices, something to do with picture books about
recycling, but all I could think about were beautiful water bottles and beautiful heat vents and what a beautiful world it was where they both existed together. And suddenly it didn’t matter that I was on the floor behind the circulation desk and semivisible to the public. I had to close my eyes. Then I had to lie down.

Dreaming or thinking, or something in between, warm waves pulsed through my brain, thoughts of Will with his arm around me, Charly laughing, Savannah brushing my hair.

When I opened my eyes Ezra was sitting on a stool staring down at me. “Good. You’re still alive.”

I blinked. “How long have I been here?”

“An hour-ish.”

My tongue felt fat and dry. “Can I have something to drink?”

“I’ve got coffee in the back room. You want that?”

“Please.”

He disappeared and reappeared with a steaming mug. “Here.”

I took a sip. It was black and bitter and too hot. I took another sip.

“You had me kind of scared when you started waxing poetic about the Dalai Lama.”

“What?” I’d said something about the Dalai Lama? “Oh. Yeah.” I took another sip of coffee and let the realization
that I’d been totally blathering on without a filter sink in. So this was what hangover regret felt like.

He was staring at me. I forced myself to hold his gaze for a minute, then let my eyes fall to his folded arms and the tattoo, dark blue ink sprawling over the right forearm. It was a bear.

“So what were you doing out there?”

I took another sip. Did I owe him answers? Maybe, what with the vent, the coat, the coffee. Or maybe I was just sick of lying. “I had a fight with my sister.”

“Must’ve been some fight to make you try to kill yourself.”

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I just forgot my jacket and didn’t want to go back.”

“Does Bree know where you are?”

“Bree’s not my mother.”

Ezra raised an eyebrow. My bitterness hung in the air between us for a few seconds before I spoke again. “Bree’s at work. Nobody’s out there looking for me, if that’s what you meant.”

He eyed the giant clock over the photocopy machine. It said 7:10. “I’m here until we close at nine. I can take you home then.”

I nodded. Two more hours away from the apartment. I could do that. I closed my eyes and tipped my head back against the wall.

“You really hate it here, don’t you,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. I didn’t answer.

The library door opened and two men entered with a blast of cold air. Ezra knew them. They chatted about ice fishing, while I stayed hidden behind the desk. It wasn’t a bad place to be. He went off to find them fishing guides or something or other.

I unzipped the parka and pulled the water bottles out of my armpits. My fingers felt stiff, so I curled and straightened them over and over. They weren’t cold anymore, but they were still white and achy. The ache felt better than no feeling at all. It meant I’d thawed. My body had actually frozen and unfrozen.

Ezra was right and wrong. I did hate it here, but it would be so much easier if it were just that, if my problems were just geographical. If things weren’t broken everywhere.

Ezra came back around the counter, talking with the men as he scanned their books. They laughed at something he said, but I didn’t hear what. I was too busy watching him handle the books, run their spines over the black surface beside the scanner, slide a glossy bookmark between them from a stack below the counter. The bear on his arm wasn’t realistic, wasn’t meant to be. The swirling patterns on its body reminded me of pictures of totem poles I’d seen. It was hard not to stare.

The men didn’t notice me on the floor beside the vent.
The taller one asked about Ezra’s brother or maybe his mother and Ezra smiled and shrugged and nodded. Then they left and an old woman in an Elmer Fudd hat came in and asked for help using the computer.

It went on like that for a while, Ezra helping a steady trickle of locals. He either forgot I was there or actively ignored me, which was fine.

When there was a lull, he pulled a box of books from under the counter. I watched him take each book, put a barcode sticker on its spine, scan it, and enter something into the computer.

Finally, he glanced over at me. “Skittle?” He pulled an open bag out of a drawer.

“Yes, please.” I leaned forward and took the bag from him.

“Careful. They may make you smell like candy.”

Oh. Crap. I’d actually said that. It was hazy, but definitely real, not some hypothermic hallucination, but an actual memory.

I looked up. He was staring at the computer screen, trying not to grin.

I poured myself a handful, then reached up and put the bag on the counter, something between fatigue and pain shooting up my arm. Apparently I only felt better if I didn’t move.

“Why the tattoo?” I asked.

“You don’t like tattoos?”

“I didn’t say that. I meant why the bear?”

“My dad’s mom was Shuswap.”

“Sorry, I . . . ” I wasn’t sure whether to feel like an idiot, or be annoyed that he was making me feel like an idiot. But was I supposed to know what that meant?

“Native. It’s tribal.”

I waited for more, some Indian legend or birthright tale, but he was silent. “When did you get it?”

“Last summer after graduation. Gift from my brother.”

“What’s the story with your brother and Bree?”

He put down the book he was holding and started rifling through the open drawer. Eventually, he gave up looking for whatever it was he was looking for and went back to rubbing stickers onto book spines. “They used to go out.”

“What happened?”

“They don’t anymore.”

“Does he live in Banff?”

“Not really. So you started school today?”

“Yeah.”

“How was it?”

“It was . . . fine.” I’d spent all day telling myself it was hell, but it wasn’t. I’d wanted it to be horrific. Being able to hate every person and teacher and class as much as I felt like would’ve been nice. But truthfully, the school day was only long and vaguely lonely. Nobody had been mean.
Indifferent was all. After lunch, after Charly had started telling people, I’d been waiting for comments and whispers, but none of it had happened. We weren’t important enough to gossip about.

“My sister told people she’s pregnant.” The words tumbled out like someone else was saying them. But it was me. I’d said it. I stared at the blinking red light on the copy machine and waited for the world around me to explode.

Ezra didn’t flinch, just poured a few more Skittles into his palm and passed me the bag. “Is that what you guys fought about?”

“No. Yes. Not directly. It’s complicated.”

He didn’t fish, just waited. Or maybe he wasn’t waiting. Maybe he was just sitting and eating Skittles and scanning books into the computer.

“She can’t think outside of herself. She doesn’t see what the pregnancy is doing to other people.”

“Like you.”

“Like me.”

“And the rest of your family?”

I snorted, watching him closely for any type of judgment, still not believing we were actually talking about this. “My dad doesn’t know.”

His face was like stone. He took the stack of books and placed them on a wheeled sorting shelf, then went back to the computer.

“My grandma sent us here so he wouldn’t find out. So nobody would find out.”

“Drastic measures.”

“My dad is a pastor and our town is small. Small and Southern and judgmental.”

“Still. Not telling him?”

“It would . . . I don’t know. Kill him, maybe.” I stuck my hand on the vent. The metal was hot, but I held it there. Lots of things could kill you. Fire. Ice. Why not sadness?

“But nobody made you come, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m guessing you weren’t forced onto the plane at gunpoint. You must’ve come because you wanted to.”

I pulled my hand off the grate. “I came for my sister. Everything is about her.” It was true. I knew it was, but Ezra’s total lack of expression almost made me doubt it. “It’s complicated,” I added.

“Yeah, you said that. What about the dad?”

“I already told you. We aren’t telling my dad.”

“No, the baby’s dad.”

I put my hand back on the grate. Him. After all this time, I’d almost forgotten there even was a him. But there had been one—somebody so meaningless, he wasn’t even worth tracking down, just some loser. “There is no dad.”

“You do know that’s impossible, right?”

I shook my head. I’d already aired enough dirty laundry. No way I was telling him it was a one-night stand. “You don’t believe in immaculate conception?”

“You’re saying your sister is the Virgin Mary? Take your hand off the vent. You’re going to burn yourself.”

I held it there. “No, I’m just pointing out that it’s not impossible.”

“So what’s happening with baby Jesus?”

I ignored the sacrilege and took my burning hand off the vent. “Adoption. I don’t know the details. My grandma is setting up some appointment with an agency here, I think, but I’m not exactly in the know now that Charly’s cutting me out. She seems to have forgotten she can’t even pick out her clothes in the morning without asking me what to wear.”

Ezra was silent again.

“I’m not bitter,” I said, not looking at him, but knowing he wasn’t looking at me. “I just miss my life. My friends and my house and Charly, or the
old
Charly. And then a couple of weeks ago I found out I didn’t get in to Columbia, and that was my big plan, you know? My way out of Tremonton.” Why was I telling him this? It was like the words were forcing their way out, like rising bubbles. “Instead I’m chained to my screwed-up sister so everyone doesn’t figure out how screwed up she really is.”