She shrugged. “I think I could get into it. It would prepare me for nursing or maybe even medical school. Some career where I could help people. And my father would be so proud of me.” She looked down at the bracelet again. “I’m going to give away all the jewelry I made.”
“Annie…”
“My father said you’re trying to pull yourself up in the world through me, but that you’ll only succeed in dragging me down with you.”
He wanted to throw something against the wall. “Do you believe that crap?”
“Of course not, but I feel like I’m killing him, Paul.”
“He’s trying to kill
She pressed her hands to her ears and he sat down next to her, pulling her close to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, when you see your father, you get under his spell or something. It’ll pass in a little while and you’ll feel okay about yourself again. And about me. We’ll be in New Hope again this summer and…”
She shook her head. “I’m not going to New Hope this summer.”
He froze. “What do you mean?”
“I need to be by myself for a while. I need to think everything through.”
“Will you stay with your parents?” He could not bear the thought of her spending two months with them. She would be entirely brainwashed by the end of the summer.
“No,” she said. “I thought I’d travel down the coast. From here to Florida.”
“What do you mean, from here to Florida? Who would you go with?”
“Myself.”
“You can’t do that. What if your car breaks down?”
“I’m going to hitchhike.”
Paul stood up. “You have this all planned out, don’t you? You’ve been thinking about this for a long time and haven’t said a word to me about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Annie, I can’t be apart from you for the entire summer.”
“Maybe it won’t be that long. Maybe the first week it’ll all come clear to me, and I’ll write to you every single day.”
He went to New Hope alone. He took a part in summer stock but was reviewed poorly, his first truly bad review ever. At first Annie sent him postcards daily from coastal towns in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. She’d write volumes in the little space on the cards, her handwriting squeezed together almost unintelligibly, telling him about the beaches, the water, the arcades. She was meeting lots of interesting people, she wrote, which disturbed him. How many of those people were men? She’d sign the cards,
Suddenly, though, the gifts stopped, along with the postcards. He was sick with worry. After five days without a word from her, he called her parents.
“She decided to stay in North Carolina awhile,” her mother told him.
“Well, I…I was hearing from her just about every day and then the cards stopped…and I just thought.” He grimaced. He could imagine Annie’s mother smiling with delight on the other end of the telephone. “Where in North Carolina is she?” he asked.
“The beach somewhere. I think they call it the Outer Banks down there.”
Two more weeks followed without a word from Annie. He was in pain. His body literally ached when he got out of bed in the morning. He couldn’t imagine she would leave him hanging this way, that she would cut herself off from him so completely. He read her last postcard over and over again, and the “I love you” at the end seemed just as sincere as it did in the first one. Maybe her mother was lying. Maybe Annie was in Boston. Maybe she wrote to him daily and her mother intercepted the letters.
Then the note came from Kitty Hawk.Dear Paul,I’ve written this letter in my mind a thousand times and it never comes out right, but I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve met someone down here. His name is Alec and I’ve fallen in love with him. I didn’t plan for this to happen, Paul, please believe me. I left B.C. with thoughts only of you, but also with the knowledge that things between us were not what they once were. I still love you—I think I always will. You’re the one who taught me that receiving could be just as much an act of love as giving. Oh God, Paul, you’re the last person in the world I would ever want to hurt. I doubt I’ll return to B.C. in the fall. It’s just as well we don’t ever see each other again. Please, please forgive me.Annie
He considered going to North Carolina to find her, claim her, but he didn’t want her on those terms. He became obsessed with thoughts of harming himself. He could no longer drive at night without being tempted to slip his car across the white line into oncoming traffic, and he’d sometimes sit for hours in his kitchen, staring at the blade of a steak knife, imagining how it would feel to draw it through the vein in his arm.
He quit the play and moved home for the rest of the summer, where his sisters clucked over him and his parents tried to force him to eat. They treated him like the sick, withdrawing addict that he was. Still, he could not stand it when his sisters called Annie a two-faced bitch.
He returned to Boston College a walking dead man. He tried out for the junior play, but Harry Saunders said he was “lifeless,” and cast someone else in the part Paul knew Harry had intended for him. He lost interest in acting altogether and switched his major to journalism. In November, one of Annie’s friends told him that Annie had married Alec O’Neill in North Carolina. O’Neill. He supposed an Irishman was preferable to an Italian in her parents’ eyes.
And in hers as well.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Alec was calling Olivia in the evenings. The first time he had an excuse. He remembered her saying that she’d appeared on talk shows after the publication of
