Everything You Want Me to Be(33)
“I liked how Jane took control of her life. She made her own fate.”
I stared out the window as I said it, unable to make eye contact with him. I was afraid he’d somehow see it in my eyes, that he’d guess the truth and our cyber affair would be over.
It was surprisingly easy to be in love with Peter—I thought of him as Peter in my head now even though I still called him LitGeek online and Mr. Lund in school. It felt like he was playing parts, just like me. I watched him at pep rallies and memorized his wardrobe and his class schedule. I even knew what car he drove—a beat-up blue Mitsubishi that some of the jocks made fun of because it was foreign and anyone who drove anything besides a GM or Ford around here was suspect. The only teacher I saw him talking to was Mr. Jacobs, who was totally lame. All he ever wanted to teach in his history classes were wars; he always went on about what country attacked who and drew endless diagrams of battlefields on the board. As far as friends went, pickings were pretty slim and it didn’t take long to realize Peter didn’t have anyone besides me.
But oh, how he had me.
I was restocking product one day at CVS when Mary Lund came in for her mother’s prescriptions. I didn’t recognize her. She’d grown up in Pine Valley, but was eight years older than me, so I’d never known her. It wasn’t until I heard her and the pharmacist talking about Elsa Reever, Peter’s mother-in-law, that I realized who she was. I froze for a minute, feeling flushed and guilty, even though I knew she had no idea her husband spent almost every night talking to me. I grabbed a carton of antihistamines and took them to the cough and cold section to get a better look at her.
She wasn’t too tall or too short, or too fat or too thin. She wasn’t too anything. Her hair was dishwater blond and pulled back into a ponytail. She was sunburned, dressed in old jeans and the kind of plain pullover hoodie that you bought at Fleet Farm for ten bucks. I couldn’t see anything special about her, any reason why Peter would have chosen her. The only distinctive thing about her was a couple of large moles in front of her right ear. From a distance it looked like a vampire had missed his mark and bitten her face.
I stood close enough to hear the whole conversation while stocking the shelves, and made my expression look bored so no one would think I was eavesdropping.
“How is she doing on the oxygen?” the pharmacist asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Her energy level isn’t any different, but she says it makes her feel better.”
“Sometimes that’s the most important thing.”
“I guess so. She still can’t move farther than one room at a time before she has to sit down and rest.”
“Elsa’s lucky to have you out there. Most folks in the same condition would be in a home by now.”
I could hear her sigh ten feet away. “Maybe she should be in a facility. I worry about leaving her, even for little trips like this.”
“But your husband’s with her.”
“Right.” There was a pause. “You’re right.”
They talked about the drugs for a few minutes, dosage and side effects stuff, and then she left.
Mom had already told me that Peter lived with his wife at the old Reever farm and now the story started to come together. I tried to remember the last time I saw Mrs. Reever. She went to the same church we did, but I hadn’t noticed her in the congregation lately. Maybe she was too weak to go, which meant she might be close to dead or maybe they’d put her in a nursing home like Peter’s wife just mentioned. Either way it meant Peter would leave town. That horrible thought created a bubble of panic in me that I couldn’t shake for the rest of the week.
The next Sunday, Mrs. Reever came to church. Peter and his wife helped her up the steps, one on each of her arms, and it looked like they were moving in slow motion. They finally got her settled in the last pew and she clutched the oxygen tube, breathing shallow little gasps that made the polyester flowers on her dress stir pathetically. Peter set the oxygen tank down and his wife looked briefly grateful, but he didn’t see it. After that, she spent the rest of the service helping her mother. He tried to talk to her once, but either she didn’t hear him or she was ignoring him. When it was time to sing the hymns, she was the only one of them who stood up. Mrs. Reever mouthed the words, apparently by heart since she had no hymnal, and Peter didn’t even bother to pick one up. He just stared at the pew in front of them, sometimes glancing up at the pulpit or around the church, and then he caught me watching him.
My heart jumped and even though I felt my cheeks start to color, I didn’t whip around to the front. That would have been a dead giveaway. While I tried to figure out what to do, he smiled. Not just the smile a teacher gives his student when they cross paths outside of school, but a genuine, I’m-happy-to-see-this-person smile. His eyes crinkled up and his teeth flashed and for the briefest second he looked exactly like I’d dreamed when I fantasized about telling him the truth. I couldn’t breathe, let alone keep singing the stupid hymn. I returned his smile and lifted my fingers in greeting, then swiveled back to the front slowly, hoping he was still watching me, that his eyes lingered on my silhouette and liked what they saw.
And that’s when I decided. With my heart thumping, feeling the secret words I prayed every week burning in my throat, I was flooded with a need more powerful than I’d ever felt before. The realization almost dropped me to my knees in the middle of the service. I wanted Peter to smile at me like that every day, to grab my hands and tell me everything he was thinking. I wanted to wrap my legs around him and feel him sink into me. I wanted to smell the sweat of his sleeping body in the summertime while the cicadas screamed in the night.