Never Coming Back(61)

She drove me to New Hampshire and she came back alone.





* * *





“Time speeds up in a situation like this,” Sunshine said. “You just have to keep trying, Clara.”

How would you know, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Because they did know. Sunshine’s cancer had sped everything up for the two of them, just as early-onset was speeding everything up for me. Sunshine had had to figure everything out with her parents, get everything said, everything settled, in case there was no time.

“Keep talking to her.”

That was their advice to me about everything these days. Keep talking. Keep asking. Keep at it. Do it anyway, all of it, no matter if it scared you. Whatever you could find out, find out. When I was younger I believed that the stories I didn’t want to remember could be pushed so far down inside me that they would stay there forever. But I knew now that I had been wrong.

The memory of Asa kept coming back to me, the day we broke up. The way he stood there, the way he kept shaking his head. It was the day after the night that something had happened between my mother and Asa. Had she told him to break up with me? No, that wouldn’t be possible. He was a grown man, nineteen years old, with a full-time job driving truck. Sometimes I tried to convince myself that they hadn’t argued at all. That they had just been sitting at the table chatting, waiting for me to return home. But that wasn’t the case. The way Asa brushed past me when I got home, the way my mother wouldn’t meet my eyes, the way the next day everything fell apart. Something had happened. But no one would talk to me about it.

It was after that day that my mother must have set the college plan in motion.

Reckon your losses.

That was what the bartender told me to do, when I told him about Asa. How he had helped me find my earring, how he loved The Velveteen Rabbit, how his father, Eli, used to read it to him. How Eli had come driving through the woods to retrieve his son on the day that he broke up with me, the day that Asa’s car wouldn’t start, how he had put his hand on Asa’s shoulder and guided him into the truck and how the curtain that Tamar was watching behind had dropped back down over the window. How I had not spoken to Asa again, much as I wanted to, and not to his father either, even after Asa died in Afghanistan.

The bartender listened in silence.

“It comes back to me,” I said. “I keep seeing the two of them. That day. I keep hearing my voice.”

“You haven’t talked to his father since?”

“No. At this point it’s too late. Nothing can be done.”

My voice wanted to speak in exclamation marks??—! ! !—but I would not let it. Nothing can be done! Nothing can be done! scrolled across the bottom of my brain.

“Something can always be done,” the bartender said.

Around and around and around the wineglass went the towel. He had been polishing that wineglass for ten minutes. Twenty minutes. A lifetime. Who was the bartender to tell me what to do? He had never known Asa and he didn’t know Eli and he could give me no advice because this was not his situation to deal with. Protests rose up inside me but behind them was Eli, guiding his son into the truck on that awful day. Behind them was that old velveteen rabbit, loved and abandoned. Behind them was my mother, looking up from her Neil Diamond album and crying. Behind them was Blue Mountain at the museum, cross-legged on the floor with the other children, their faces turned up like cups. The skinless walked among us.

“What would you do?” I said.

“I’m not a word person like you. I’d carve something out of wood, probably. A talisman of some kind.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged. “Something that felt right.” He reached up and put the wineglass in its overhead rack, sliding it into place with both hands. It gleamed and sparkled and shone. Bright and clear, unlike the fairy lights at the cabin, glimmering in their shadowy ways.

“I used to make stories,” I said. “Stories were my talismans. But I can’t do that right now. If I wrote about everything that’s happening right now, with my mother, with the past and the present, she would be trapped forever in those words. A bug in amber. And then I’d have to live forever with her like that.”

He put his hands on mine. They were warm. They were always warm.

“We all have to live forever with the things we’ve done,” he said. “We all have to reckon with our losses.”





* * *





“Adirondack Mountains That Could Also Be Children’s Names for twelve hundred, please,” Brown said, and I slammed my hand down on the table. We were playing Jeopardy! and I was far in the lead.

“What is Blue Mountain?” I said.

“What is a terrible answer?” Brown said. “You’re slipping, Winter. If you and your boyfriend ever choose to name your future child after an Adirondack mountain, promise us you’ll do far better than Blue.”

“I agree,” Sunshine said. “Choose your mountain carefully. Not Bald. Not Haystack. Not Whiteface. Geez, especially not Whiteface.”

“Or Dix,” Brown said. “That would ruin your kid’s life. Think about it.”

“I’ve got a worse one,” Sunshine said. “Nippletop. Who in God’s name would name a mountain Nippletop, let alone a child?”