How to Love

exactly what I’m going to do.” I grab my shoulder bag off the table, brush past him. The smell of burning rice sticks to my T-shirt clear across town.

* * *

I get home and head upstairs to check on the baby, anger and exhaustion and that infinite embarrassment still rattling around like loose coins inside my head. The house is cool and silent, the hallway dark save for the glow of Hannah’s nightlight spilling dimly out the half-open door; I get in there and find her wide-awake and waiting, calm as the surface of a cool, placid lake. “Hi, Mama,” she says cheerfully, grinning like possibly she stayed up just to talk to me and is pleased with herself for being so clever. Her eyes are fathoms and fathoms deep.

“Hi, baby.” I drop my purse on the floor and cross the carpet, suddenly a hundred percent sure I’m about to cry. I’m just stupidly relieved to see her, is all, this twenty-pound miracle I thought for sure would make me a prisoner, hands and feet bound zip-tie secure. It does feel like that some days, to be honest, but right now I’m bone-grindingly glad.

I swallow the tears, smile back. “Hi, Hannah,” I say again, lifting her out of the crib and cuddling her against me, rubbing her warm downy head against my cheek. She’s getting heavy lately, more toddler than baby. It makes me feel weirdly nostalgic and bittersweet. “Whatcha still doing up, huh?”

Hannah doesn’t answer—she’s got words but not so much conversation yet—and instead she just snuggles into my body, surprisingly strong arms coming up around my neck. “Mama,” she murmurs again.

“I am your mama,” I tell her, sinking down into the rocking chair and smoothing patterns with my palm across her tiny baby back. “I’m the only one you’ve got, poor thing.”

26

Before

God help me, he didn’t call.

Like … ever.

The first couple of days after I slept over weren’t so bad. He was probably just busy, I reasoned, as I made a big show of not looking at my cell phone—of trying not to be that girl. I had homework to finish. I had articles to write. On Monday I worked a party at the restaurant, tucking the extra tips into my pocket at the end of the evening, telling myself it was seed money for whatever awesome adventures were waiting for me after graduation.

It was fine, I promised myself in the ladies’ room mirror. I was fine.

Two days turned into three, though, and then five—and soon a week had passed. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I skulked around near the Flea, where his band practiced. I called my own cell on the landline, on the off chance I’d somehow randomly stopped getting service in my house.

“Well,” I muttered out loud, when it rang just right as rain—thinking of my father, thinking of Allie, thinking of all the things I actually didn’t know. Well.

I didn’t cry. I planned instead. I dug out all my travel books and bought an armful of new ones, retracing my old routes and making notes: Macedonia and Mykonos, Joshua Tree and Big Sky. I priced tours of the Pyramids on Kayak and Expedia. I took virtual tours of hotels in Prague.

That worked okay, on occasion.

Other nights, not so much.

Tired of watching me pace the upstairs hallway like a zoo animal, Soledad sent me out on whatever errands she could think of: milk, Tylenol, bank deposits. I turned up the AC and drove. That didn’t always help, either, though: One night right around Valentine’s Day, I finally cracked and headed south down 95 toward Sawyer’s, my father’s plastic-covered dry cleaning hanging in the backseat. The windows were dark, driveway empty. I cruised by again to make sure.

* * *

“So, okay,” Shelby said, when I confessed over French fries in the cafeteria the following afternoon, head in my hands over my sad little cup of yogurt. She’d broken up with her soccer-star girlfriend over Christmas, had spent more or less the entire break sacked out on my bed watching all six seasons of Lost on DVD and muttering monosyllabic answers every time I asked if she was okay. It occurred to me that relationships basically sucked no matter where you fell on the Kinsey scale. “That was a low moment.”

I cleaned out my closet. I interviewed the couple playing Sandy and Danny in the winter musical for the paper. I dropped by Ms. Bowen’s office—again—to make sure Northwestern had gotten all my application materials.

“We’re all set, Reena,” she promised, smooth forehead creasing a little as she looked across the desk in my direction. She was wearing her dark hair pulled up into a topknot. Her short nails were painted a deep purplish red. “Nothing to do now but relax and wait.”

“I know,” I said, and even as I tried to tamp it down I could feel the edge creeping into my voice. Relax and wait was the story of my life lately; it was hard to take it from her on top of everyone else. “I just—” I shifted my backpack to my other shoulder, fidgeting. All of a sudden I felt weirdly close to tears. “It’s really important that I get in, is all.”

“Reena.” Now she really did look concerned, all her guidance counselor instincts coming online at once. “Are you okay?”

God, for a second I almost told her everything: Sawyer and Allie and how lonely I felt lately, how badly I needed to get out of this place. The way she was looking at me, her face open and intelligent—something about her made me think she’d listen. Something about her made me think she’d be able to help. Still, spilling my guts to my guidance counselor of all people? That was pathetic. That was absurd.

“Yeah,” I told her, smiling as hard and as brightly as I could manage. I probably looked deranged. “I’m great.”

I got A’s on all my midterms. I went into Lauderdale to go shopping with Shelby. I started working my way through Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, but that made Soledad really nervous, so I switched to Jane Austen so she could sleep without worrying I was going to put my head in the oven or something.

Which I wasn’t.

Probably.

I felt so incredibly, unforgivably stupid, was the worst part—the lamest kind of stereotype, the dumbest kind of fool. I remembered that night outside the party at Allie’s house, the pitying look on her sharp, familiar face: You definitely couldn’t handle having sex with Sawyer LeGrande. I’d had sex with Sawyer, all right—I’d given him something I couldn’t get back—and now he was done, game over, thanks for playing. It was gross. It was predictable.

It hurt like nothing else in my life.

Weeks passed. Life hummed on. At night I sighed and mapped out my future, staring at the moon outside my window and wondering where on earth I might go.

27

After

There’s a farmers’ market on Las Olas where I like to take the baby on weekends, buying heavy bagfuls of cheap yellow lemons and watching the spry retirees. I get Hannah a chocolate chip cookie from the organic bake sale and she lounges happily in the stroller while I shop: rosemary for Soledad, avocados for my father. I buy eleven kumquats, because I like the way they look.