I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(25)

A few hours later, when I’d regained the ability to sit up like a normal person and speak in sentences, I begged him not to go away or at least to go somewhere in the United States, a place with phone service and Internet, a place he could fly home from at Christmas and that I could save up and fly out to once or twice, a place without black mamba snakes, dengue fever, unstable governments, and lions (it would take months for me to flush with shame at my stereotypical depiction of Africa, that’s how far gone I was). I expected Dev to agree to change his plans and was stunned when he didn’t. He said it was too late to cancel. He said the trip meant a lot to him. He talked about how privileged he was; when he used the phrase “giving back,” I covered my ears and considered screaming.

Which is when he took my face between his two hands, and in the most loving voice I’d ever heard, said this: “We’re us, remember? Even when we’re apart, we’re together. Quantum locality? Electron entanglement? Remember? We’re outside the space-time continuum, Clare, where distance just isn’t. Wherever I am, I’m yours. We’ll be okay. I’d never leave if I weren’t sure about that.”

They may have been the sweetest words he’d ever spoken to me. They may have been the sweetest—and also nerdiest—words anyone had ever, inside or outside the space-time continuum, spoken to anyone. But I didn’t care. All I wanted was for him to stay.

He left.

And I turned into a person I didn’t know. Sad. Disorganized. I stopped finishing books. Slept a lot. Got quiet. Lost too much weight. Quit tennis; played the most halfhearted field hockey in the history of the sport. Stopped going out on weekends with my friends. For the first time in my life, my grades slipped; that they didn’t fall to wrack and ruin was due to a combination of autopilot studying and sympathetic teachers. I believed what everyone around me believed, that I was in limbo, waiting for Dev to come home so our life together could start back up, but then an odd thing happened. When it came time to apply early action to UVA, I let the deadline pass by, and when I did apply to colleges, without discussing it with anyone or examining my motives, I found myself sending my application there but also to a lot of other, more far-flung places, big midwestern universities, two colleges in California.

Worried about my lackluster, weirdly un-Clare-like letters and the reports of my decline he’d been getting from his parents and Cornelia, Dev skipped the orphanage, came home early, three weeks into April, and drove down to Virginia to see me before he’d even unpacked his bags. Even though I could tell he was shocked by the changes in me—shocked and tender and heartbroken—our reunion was joyful, but when he saw the stack of acceptance letters on my desk, he breathed, “Oh, wow,” and looked like he’d just lost his best friend. Still, when I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that. Of course, I’m going to UVA,” he’s the one who said, “I really want you to, but I think you probably did this for a reason.”

So he went to Virginia, and I went to Michigan to figure out how to be a real person without him. Our plan was to stay together, but after two months, I understood that it wouldn’t work. Steady-hearted and ever at home in his own skin, Dev could keep the faith, love me outside of space and time, carry me around like a turtle’s shell, same as always, but I still didn’t know how, so at Thanksgiving break, on the worst day of my life and probably his, I broke it off for good. Eventually, because we couldn’t stand not to be, we became best friends, and Dev became a person who sent me perfectly timed, completely inappropriate wedding cake pictures, a person whose mere existence in the world made me happy.

So I didn’t call Zach after all. I walked downstairs, made coffee, took it outside, sat down on a white Adirondack chair under a blooming catalpa tree, tucked my legs under me, sipped, and watched a hummingbird stitch and hover among the columbine, doing some sipping of its own. Relief did not wash over me. I still felt like a low-down, selfish, disgusting scoundrel, but there, in my own backyard, I could envision a time when I might feel slightly less bad, slightly more like the old Clare, deserving of at least a little forgiveness.



The sense of almost-peace lasted all day. I took a long walk, followed by a short run; weeded the flower beds; played chess on my computer; and, in a breathtaking stroke of luck, found a shoeshine kit in the top of the odds-and-ends closet and shined every shinable shoe in the house, a task that will forever rank—even if I live to be a hundred—as one of the most bone-deep satisfying things I’ve ever done.

After sunset, I walked to a nearby, pocket-square-sized public park, lay down on a bench with a sweatshirt tucked beneath my head, and watched tiny bats careen against a sequined sky. Home again, I took a shower, put on my high school gym shorts and my oldest, softest T-shirt, dug up my set of Narnia books, plopped down on the family room sofa, and submersed myself up to my ears in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

I’d just gotten to the chapter where Eustace wakes up to discover he’s been turned into a dragon, when I heard a car come down the driveway. Or start down the driveway; it pulled in and then stopped, sliding a wedge of headlight light between the not-quite-shut curtains and onto the wall. Gordon and my mother weren’t due back until the next morning. Fear zipped through me, and I tried to wish the car back down the driveway and into the night, but the wedge stuck, unwavering, to the wall. Thirty seconds later, the back screen door creaked and someone began to bang out a slow, continuous doomsday rhythm with what sounded like the heel of his hand.