habit now. In three years and seven months he would run away with Mason. He promised himself it would happen, and he refused to think about all the reasons why it was impossible because he knew that if he did not have me to give his life meaning, the emptiness in my wake would be unbearable. It was the one thing about me of which he was absolutely certain.
So he sent me more messages and longer messages and asked to meet with me more often. To counter this boldness, I talked incessantly about Ryan, about how much I loved him, how much I missed him when he was not around, how we had amazing sex, how I gave him a blow job for scoring a touchdown. This stuff killed him, and I could tell it did, but he would not tell me to stop, he would not ask me what I wanted with him, he would not ask why I wanted to spend time with him. Someday he would be with me, but that was an impossibly distant future. For now, it was enough that nothing change. If I were to come on to him and kiss him and that led to sex, maybe it would be hot and exciting and amazing, but next would come guilt and drama and perhaps jail, and he didn’t want any of that. He didn’t want to cheat on his wife and he didn’t want to be the sort of person who would sleep with a fourteen-year-old girl. What he wanted was for things to be exactly the way they were, and maybe hearing about Ryan was the price he had to pay for that to happen. Maybe as long as I was in love with Ryan, and having sex with Ryan and talking about Ryan, Pete would be safe inside his insane and happy bubble.
One day, after three beers and over the remains of pad thai, I began the next phase. “How come you never invite me over to dinner anymore?” I asked.
He looked at me, and then away, and then at his food. Then he looked at me again. I was wearing a black summer dress with spaghetti straps, and it was less like clothing than a wrapping to conceal my nudity. Pete tried not to let it distract him and to focus on the task at hand. He had become used to regarding everything I said as a puzzle or a test, and he considered the best way to tackle this one. “I thought you and Neil weren’t friends anymore.”
“But you and I are,” I said.
“So, you want to have dinner at my house? With my family?”
“Are you ashamed of me?”
It occurred to Pete that they’d never discussed what they did as secret. They never talked about it as sneaking around. Did Mason not see it that way? Did she have no idea that adults were not supposed to do things like this? While his heart hammered with the thrill of the illicit and the daring, did she regard this as just another lunch with just another friend? He did not know. He did not fucking know, and he could not stand not knowing.
“I just don’t know how comfortable Roberta is around ghouls,” he said.
He was trying to keep it light, and I knew it, but I chose not to take it that way. I slammed down my beer. “Why do you want to make my life into a joke?”
“Why do you want your life to be a joke? You are a bright, beautiful girl, so why do you need to pretend you are some kind of monster?”
“I was honest with you from the beginning,” I said. “This is what I am. I never pretended otherwise. I am this way because of my own actions, but I don’t have a choice. You are either my friend and accept me or you aren’t and don’t. There’s no other way to see it.”
“Mason, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Too late,” I said, finishing my beer. “I think of my friends as people who would do anything for me.”
“I would do anything for you,” he said.
I snorted.
“No, really,” he said, and he was pleading now, desperate that I believe him. “I would do anything for you.”
“Would you kill someone for me?”
“If necessary, yes,” he said.
“And if it weren’t necessary?” I asked.
“This is silly,” he answered.
“You’re right, it is silly,” I agreed. “Take me home, please.”
We talked about it over a series of e-mails and texts. I apologized to him, told him I’d been tired and moody and on the rag, that he had done nothing wrong, but that was the moment things changed. I slowed it all down. I didn’t respond to all his messages, and when I did respond, I waited longer than usual. I would make dates for lunch and then cancel. I left him hanging.
For Pete, these were not easy days. Things with me were not what they had been. There was no comfort to take in Roberta, who grew older and cold and remote. Neil was isolated and broken — a complete failure as a child and a monument to Pete’s complete failure as a parent. All the miseries of his life began to come back into focus, now more vivid than ever for having been briefly occulted.
The more I withdrew, the more he thought about me, until he reached the point where he realized that he was thinking about me every moment of his day that he was not specifically thinking about something that required his attention. I was his default mode, his anger, his resentment, his confusion, his rage toward himself for his own inaction and hesitation and refusal to walk away from something so impossible and destructive. He would vacillate between confusion, hope, and despair, unable to make sense of anything I had ever done, anything I had ever said. Nothing in his life had given him the tools to sort out the mystery of Mason. His internal compass was like that of a plane lost in the Bermuda Triangle, the needle spinning endlessly, north every direction and none at all.
In was in this period when Pete, moping and hollow, ran into Cindy at the grocery store. Maybe he might have avoided her in the past, but now he was desperate. He would take any contact with me he could manufacture, even if it was secondhand and through my mother. She was at the deli counter as he pushed his way past, and she looked away, hoping to avoid him. Normally he would have pretended not to see her pretend not to see him and wheeled his cart right on past, but not now, now when he stood to possibly learn something about me, so he put on his best smile and pushed his cart over to her.
“Cindy, hi. It’s Pete. Neil’s father.”
She met his false smile with one of her own. “Of course. How are you? How’s Neil?”
“Oh, we’re good.” Pete was already tiring of the small talk, feeling it gum up his brain. “How’s Mason?”
Cindy stared at him. “Oh, you know.”
“No, I don’t. How is she?”
“You know how it is with kids their age. It’s a challenge. Especially Mason. She just hasn’t been the same since her father.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know anything about this. Her father — died?”
Cindy nodded, and her eyes were moist. Pete wanted to get the hell out of there. He hated making this woman cry, but he also felt certain he was on the verge of something important. “That’s when it all started, you know, with her look and everything. They were never close, but I was out of town when it happened. I wished she’d called the police right away or called me or something. But she didn’t. That’s what happened to her, you know.”
“What happened to her?” Pete demanded. He didn’t raise his voice, but he could feel himself getting intense.
“She was alone with the body too long and she tried — ” Cindy turned away.
“She tried what?”
Cindy shook her head. “It was hard. That’s all I meant. Don’t tell her I told you about her father, but if it comes up, please don’t let her think I told you more.” She pushed her cart away.
Pete stared after her, resisting the urge to chase her, to make her tell him what she did not want to say because Pete thought he knew. He was certain he knew what I had tried to do with my father’s body. What I had done with it. Pete thought he knew, and he was right.
After leaving him in this state for almost a month, I called him. “Hey, Pete.”
“Hi, Mason.” He tried to sound neutral, not bitter and delighted and angry and hopeful. It was just after noon on a weekday, and I heard the slur in his voice. He’d been drinking. On his own. Every day he waited for me to call or text or e-mail, and some of those days he drank.
“It’s so good to hear your voice,” I said. “I’ve missed you so much!”
He didn’t want to say it. “I miss you, too.” He said it anyhow.
“How have you been?”
“Okay,” he said. “You?”
