Here So Far Away(52)

“Are you . . . not wanting to do this anymore?”

“George—”

“Don’t make me worry about it for days.”

He looked over at Mr. Humphreys, who had appeared on the steps near Natalie and Doug, then met my eyes and said, “I think I have to make a decision, yes.”

He sounded so sober and grown-up.

“I thought you had.”

“Let’s talk about it on Saturday. I’ll come by the lighthouse in the afternoon.”

I turned to walk away.

“Don’t . . . don’t go slamming your bedroom door.”

“Slamming my bedroom door?”

“Storming off like a kid.”

“I’m just leaving,” I said. “I didn’t know there was a wrong way to do it.”

Mr. Humphreys’s big arms were folded across his chest. “Problem, Warren?” he said.

“No, sir. Forgot something in my locker.”

“You were talking to the RCMP officer.”

“Yeah, I work for him. Sort of.”

“Gone over to the other side, have we?”

“Gone over . . . Oh no, I’m not some druggie snitch.” I followed his eyes to Doug, who was standing up to leave. He and Nat weren’t quite out of hearing range. “Of course you aren’t,” he said.

“No, really, I clean his house. Do the laundry, make dinner. Feed the pig.”

“Feed the pig.” He rocked back on his heels, then began slowly trailing Doug down the steps. “I like that,” he said over his shoulder. “Feed the pig.”





Twenty-Five


Lisa got dumped once. Dumped hard.

It happened at a shack party in tenth grade. Lisa and Whatshisname disappeared soon after we got there, and the rest of us ended up hanging out with the skateboarders. (Who doesn’t love a skateboarder? They’re like the cheerfully demented love children of the Goths and the jocks.) The next morning, my mother said, “I think you’d better check the machine.”

Lisa: “Hi. Uh. Sorry. I . . .”

And then she lost it. It was the saddest, most wretched thing I’d heard in my life. It made me burst into tears all thirty-two times I heard it—thirty of them because I was testing a theory that I couldn’t not cry while listening to it—until my father yanked the plug from the wall, picked up the machine, and walked out of the house with it. We never saw it again.

When I let myself into Lisa’s bedroom, she was sobbing into her pillow. Every now and then, she would lift her head and move her mouth as though she was trying to form the word sorry, but her face would contort as the heaves welled up and she’d be down for the count again. Her mum came in and put a glass of water on the bedside table. “What do I do?” I whispered.

“Just make sure she doesn’t get dehydrated.”

As bad as I felt for Lisa, part of me—the bit that lived in that dark chamber of my heart—wasn’t totally buying it. Like when you see ladies in labor on TV and they’re wailing and clutching their husbands so hard the men fall to their knees. It seems like if someone has it in them to be that dramatic, it couldn’t really hurt-hurt, right?

Losing Francis hurt.

Watching my friends’ relationships bust up, even breaking up with Lisa, hadn’t prepared me for this. I had no idea how exhausting it would be. All the not-eating, imaginary confrontations, darting out of stores when the wrong songs came over the speakers. I’d always had a superimmunity against ballads, but now the first three bars of “Against All Odds” left me completely unhinged. I couldn’t get through the breakup scene in The Godfather Part III, which I put on the VCR to soothe an honest-to-goodness pining for Sid, who was always pretty good at making a person laugh when the going got rough. When Andy Garcia said, “Love somebody else,” I cried so hard that Dad made me turn it off before I could see Sofia Coppola get shot.

I couldn’t believe that Bill had gotten back together with Tracy so many times only to go through this all over again, and felt awful that we’d all told him he was better off without her. Who cared about “better off” when that person had decided that they were better off without you? Someone collects information on you for weeks or months or years, and after studying all the data, they drop you into a bin to become someone else’s sloppy seconds.

Something I learned about myself that week: I do not enjoy a wallow. If you like a wallow, no judgment, but I didn’t want to lie on the floor listening to Kate Bush and examining the nature of my pain. There were things to do: study, help my dear sainted mother, spend quality time with Bill. A large karmic deposit was due for all the times I’d said I was doing those things and was actually pressed up against the barn wall, fumbling under Francis’s winter clothes to find bare skin.

I drove out to the bay after school that Friday, after telling Rupert that I was too sick with a cold to go out to the farm. The wind was bitter through my jeans as I sat on Abe’s cooling hood and looked across the water at a distant island whose name escaped me. This was the horizon that I couldn’t see from the lighthouse. Maybe Francis had taken this route into town, hugging the shoreline en route to what he thought would be a simpler life. I put my hand in my pocket for a tissue and felt the lake stone he’d given me that first night at Long Fellows, which I carried around like a good-luck charm.