Put Me Back Together(66)

I hadn’t asked him where we were going and I didn’t ask now. Instead, I took his advice and let my mind go blank for the rest of the ride, staring out the window, watching spring come rolling in. Eventually, we took an exit and entered a small town, though I didn’t see the “Welcome To” sign, so I wasn’t sure where we were. I only clued in when Lucas slowed the car to a stop on a residential street in front of a neat bungalow.

“That’s my parents’ house,” he said, looking past me out the window.

“Oh, are we going in?” I said, taking off my seatbelt and immediately worrying about my choice of clothes. If I’d known I was going to meet his parents, I would never have worn yoga pants, my glasses, or this puffy face.


“Not today,” Lucas replied, and there was a heaviness in his voice that implied this statement was non-negotiable. Not that I was about to fight him on it.

We sat a little longer looking at the house with its brown-shingled roof and flower boxes that were empty now but would be filled with cheerful blooms in a month’s time, I was sure. There was a great climbing tree in the front yard. I wondered if little Lucas had ever sat in those branches. Through the front window’s sheer curtains I saw someone moving around inside, probably his mother. When I turned to Lucas again, he was putting the car back into drive.

“That’s Jenny’s house,” he said, pointing, as we passed a similar bungalow with a red door on our way down the street.

So Jenny was literally the girl next door. Yeah, that didn’t make me jealous. Not at all.

Lucas pulled the car into a lot beside a large park about two blocks from his house. We walked across the dead grass to an empty basketball court dotted with puddles from newly melted snow. I thought maybe we’d sit down on one of the benches that ran along the sides of the court, but Lucas passed those and sat down right on the centre circle on a patch of dry cement. I sat down beside him.

He was quiet for a while, thoughtful, and it began to dawn on me that this trip might not be about last night at all. There was something else making Lucas so serious and melancholy, something that I suspected had nothing to do with me. Not wanting to question him in this moment, I looked out at the little wood overlooking the court and felt a spark of recognition. These were the trees Lucas had painted when I’d told him to paint from the gut. He must have taken the photograph from the exact spot I was standing in. This was the place Lucas loved.

“I used to play ball here almost every day after school,” Lucas said finally. “Sometimes my dad and I would come by on the weekends and play together. He was better than me. He almost made it to the pros, but then…”

“But then?” I prompted gently.

“But then I came along,” he finished. There was so much sadness in his eyes as he gazed out at his beloved playground. I wanted so much to wipe that pain away, to make it better, even if I didn’t understand it. I wondered if this was how Lucas had felt all last night while I’d been alone in my room crying myself out, and I felt a hard tug of guilt in my chest. This was agony.

I took one of his hands in mine and kissed it, holding it tight.

When Lucas spoke again, he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking out at those trees. “Katie, I wish you would tell me what happened yesterday, who broke into your place, who this person is that you’re so afraid of that you don’t even want to call the police. I’m guessing it’s the same person you were referring to when you got so upset that I nearly beat up Buck Mullard.”

He glanced at me for confirmation, I could feel it, but I could only stare at my feet.

“But I also know it’s not fair of me to expect you to tell me all your secrets when I’m keeping so many myself,” he went on.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, Lucas,” I said, running my fingers over his hand. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“But I want to,” he said. “No, I have to. I need you to know this. I need to get it out of me.”

I looked up at him and nodded. I knew what it felt like to keep something inside of you for too long, to want desperately to tell someone, to be rid of it. I’d just never tried.

Lucas was braver than me.

“It was the end of last summer when my dad got sick, just a few weeks before the start of classes,” he began. “Stomach cancer, stage four. It came on all of a sudden. One day he was fine and the next he was confined to his bed, crippled by this disease he didn’t understand. He was so outraged about it. He kept working for a little while, but pretty soon he had to stay home. The money for my tuition had to go to pay for the drugs that weren’t covered by insurance, and to pay the mortgage because my mother had gone down to part-time so she could take care of him.”

“So that’s why you had to quit the team,” I said, thinking out loud. “So you could get a job to pay for your tuition.”

Lucas nodded. “But it wasn’t just that,” he said. “I didn’t really want to play anymore. It was like the love I had for the game just left me when he got sick. He was the one who’d wanted me to play in the first place. Basketball was the thing he loved, and I came to love it, too, but without him calling me to ask me how practice went and coming to all the games…there didn’t seem to be much point in playing anymore.”

I tried to think of giving up painting, of losing interest in it, but I couldn’t. My art was what got me through. Before Lucas, and especially in high school, I often felt like it was the only thing I had. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like if this thing I was so good at, the only thing I had to hold on to, were suddenly taken from me.