The People We Keep(104)
“I’m graduating,” he says. “I have a job lined up. I won’t let you ruin it. We used a condom. I always used a condom with you. It’s not mine.” His chest is getting red and splotchy from the cold.
“There wasn’t anyone else,” I say. “There wasn’t anyone it could have been.”
“Bullshit,” he says. “You drive around and sleep in other people’s houses and fuck anyone who looks at you the right way. You think I don’t know that?”
“You’re the only one it could be.” I don’t know why I thought Justin would somehow be thrilled that I’m telling him the truth. Like I expected a fucking parade for being honest.
“No,” he says, “I’m the one with a future to kill. With something you can steal.”
“Justin—”
“Don’t think I never noticed how you always took something. Money missing. Other stuff. I don’t owe you more.”
“That wasn’t what it was. I always—I always liked you.”
“You’re basically a prostitute,” he says, opening the door to the house, “and you need to leave.”
“It’s a boy,” I tell him. “Your baby.”
He shuts the door behind him and turns the porch light off.
* * *
I sit in my car across the street digging my fingernails into my palm. I can’t bring myself to drive away, just in case Justin will suddenly come running out and invite me in and put his hands on my belly and he’ll feel Max kick and everything will change for him. Everything will change for us. I would give up the road. I would give up my guitar. I would give up everything in a second if I could have a good home for me and Max. A real place with a floor that isn’t on wheels, where there aren’t any lies left to catch up with me. I fall asleep waiting and by the time I wake up, the cars in the driveway are gone and no one answers when I knock on the door.
— Chapter 67 —
Driving will fix things. Changing direction. Gaining distance, getting to the kind of numb where miles fill in for feelings. I like the way the road sounds. I like the rhythms that come from the tires and the windshield wipers, rain and the rush of wind, and how the sounds change when I raise or lower the window. My dad used to say that good folk music is etched with the rhythm of the road. I always listen for it in songs and I find it in the best ones. So when I’m driving, I pay attention to all the noise; I take in the smells and everything I see and everything I am and I start my song. It begins like a story in my head and then somewhere in the middle it isn’t about me anymore—my love songs aren’t about Adam or Robert, that song about leaving home isn’t about Ithaca or Little River, Missing You is about a made-up girl missing a made-up friend. It’s not about Carly.
I can make a better song when it’s less about the truth of what happened and more about making everything fit together in the most perfect way. Then when I sing my songs in front of an audience, it’s safer. I’m not giving everything I have, laid out for them like a flawless map of my insides. I’m singing songs about a parallel me, in some other voice, in code they don’t even know. And when I’m driving and the words are all coming together, I feel the most like myself and like someone else entirely at the very same time.
I drive to Ithaca. It’s my magnet. Every time I’m near, it pulls. It’s the place I’d stay if I could ever stay someplace. It’s the place I wish I’d never left. I’m tired of fighting it. I just need to go.
Carly is gone, I’m sure. Rosemary probably is too. So I walk through The Commons. It’s one of those weird days when it’s way warmer than it should be. It’s even sunny. Like the weather is trying to fool us into thinking it isn’t November and winter won’t be long and cold and cloudy.
I walk past Decadence. It’s called Juna’s now. It’s still a coffee place, but it’s not dark and moody and perfect anymore. It’s all yellow tile and big windows.
I get a cup of tea from the bakery across the way, from the little lady with the long white braids. She doesn’t recognize me. She sees kids come and go over and over. I’m just another face.
I sit outside on a bench and watch people, looking for faces I recognize. I see all the same types, but not the same people. It’s the next crop of college kids. The faces who fill in for the ones who have left. I know it’s ridiculous to look for who I’m looking for, but I have a flash of a perfect happy ending in my head. Of Adam and me raising Max together, making pancakes for him in the morning. And then the more I think of it, the less it feels like our ending. That’s not the life I want for Max, those lies I’d still have to tell.
Adam was my port in the storm and maybe I was his. It’s easy to fall in love with someone when you need them, but that doesn’t make it real or right. I don’t think how we were in our time together is how we’d always be. There’s a way you hold yourself in when love and need get tangled. It’s hard to know what would last and what would wear too thin to keep.
I hope the thing Adam remembers about me isn’t the part where I left. I hope what he remembers is that for a moment we shared a bright little corner of life. That’s how I will choose to remember him. But I want to believe that love can exist on its own. I want Max to believe that too.