The Accidentals(79)

It is, hands down, the longest speech Frederick has ever given me. “You’re, like, a double negative. Everything wrong goes right.”

“Eventually, anyway. And what’s the trouble with double negatives?”

“They’re confusing.”

“Absofuckinglutely. There were plenty of tears over Norah’s pregnancy, and that’s between two people with good jobs, and enough money, who love each other. So if you want to avoid a lot of heartache, keep doing things your way. Have a plan.”





Chapter Twenty-Seven





Two days later, I come home from class to find a paper bag leaning against our door. “Rachel” is penned on the outside. I open it to find a big box of condoms inside—a variety pack. There’s a note. Rachel—These expire four years from now. So no hurry. Dad.

“Oh my God!” I yelp, blushing in the empty stairwell. Then I go inside to find a good hiding place for them.

Since our confrontation on his bed, Jake and I haven’t shared more than polite conversation. And today I’d spied him in the dining hall, surrounded by a laughing cluster of junior-year girls.

I’d felt it like a kick to my gut.

“Where’s Jake?” Aurora asks from the window seat, as if reading my mind. She glances around our messy room, as if she might have misplaced him. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“I guess he’s busy,” I say, trying to keep the pain out of my voice.

Aurora eyes me over the top edge of her computer screen. “Too busy for you? Never.”

I’d been meaning to plunge into my Spanish homework. But my mind is too cluttered right now. “I’m going to clean up a little bit. I can’t think.”

“Digame, Rachel. What’s the problem with Jake?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I begin stacking the papers on my desk, where things have gotten out of hand.

“That boy loves you. It can’t be all that bad. Tell me.”

“I’ll tell you,” I snap. “Just as soon as you introduce me to your secret boyfriend.”

Aurora gives me a look of anguish. Then she puts her eyes back onto her computer screen, and doesn’t say another word to me.

Feeling guilty, I go into our bedroom and begin to clean up, hoping it will clear my head. I ferry a big stack of last semester’s notes into the recycling bin. I stack up Aurora’s magazines, where they’ve slid all over the floor of our bedroom. It feels good to do something productive.

Missing Jake makes me crabby. I don’t like thinking of myself as someone who needs a boy’s attention. “The trouble with so many women,” my mother used to say, “is that they think they need a man to define them. But the man, on the other hand, he wants only one thing.”

Dropping another armload of old paper into the bin, I get stuck on a very uncharitable thought. My mother had a lot of things to say about men. But no man ever set foot over the threshold of our house, unless he was there to fix an appliance or read our water meter.

Why was that? Fear? It’s like Frederick giving up driving after hitting a single tree.

And no matter what Mom might say, right this second I’d give anything to be able to call her up and pour out my heart. Anything.

Tidying up my dresser gives me something to do with my hands. I banish all the hair bands and brushes into the top drawer. I change the sheets on my bed, knotting all of my dirty laundry inside them.

Plugging in the old vacuum we’d bought at the second-hand store, I attack the dust bunnies in the corners of our bedroom. The place is starting to look better. Using an old T-shirt, I even dust the things on my bureau. My mother’s jewelry box is there, with a dust-free rectangle underneath it. I set it down on the bed while I work.

The jewelry box is the last thing I wipe clean. Opening the top, I set the tray of my mother’s jewelry aside and turn my attention to the pictures underneath. There I am on Santa’s knee, smiling. I’d been six or seven. My mother told me that when I was littler, we’d wait in the line to see Santa, only to have me chicken out at the last minute.

Mom had loved that story. “One year we waited in line twice, because you swore you were ready to talk to him. But no dice.”

I drop that photo on the bed and look at the next one. It’s a picture of me onstage at my last spring concert. I haven’t seen this picture before and didn’t know my mother had taken it.

That night was only a month before she died.

I dig deeper into the pile. There are several school pictures—those hideously posed shots against a gray mottled background. And a picture of me and Haze smiling from behind one of my birthday cakes. I count thirteen candles on it. That would have been two years after Haze’s father killed himself.

I study Haze’s smile in the photograph, and decide that it isn’t marked by disaster. Maybe a year or so from now I’ll feel lighter too.

In the bottom of the box is a glossy yellow envelope. I lift it out. It’s sealed with a brittle adhesive that gives way when I put my fingernail under the edge. Inside I find a stack of photographs, all the same size, probably the same batch.

The very first one takes my breath away.

Looking out at me from the photo are young versions of Mom and Frederick. He has his arm around her, his free hand on her knee. My mother looks sideways at him and laughs. They’re wearing shorts and sneakers, and sitting on the porch of a little house somewhere. But it isn’t the smooth faces or the too long hair that surprise me. It’s the look on my mother’s face. She wears a smile so loving, so unguarded that it shocks me.