full of all kinds of nonsense, like he was going on a trip.” He sets the water glass back down on the table. “I didn’t know then that he was leaving, but I also never told you he came by.”
I sit there for a minute, recalibrating. I feel like I’ve been hit with a wrecking ball. I think of Sawyer outside my house the other night, of him asking:
“Well.” My father sits forward a bit, exhales like he’s sort of exhausted himself. “I just wanted to tell you, Reena, that I’m sorry that I’ve been so hard on you. I’ve sat in judgment, and that was a mistake. If there’s something—I’d like to try to make it up to you.”
I struggle for a moment, trying to fit all the pieces together—to come up with some cure-all, a plan for living our lives in a new way. I’m about to tell him to forget it, that both of us just need time—when all of a sudden it occurs to me, as clear and as terrifying as the Book of Revelation. “I need your blessing for something,” I tell him.
He hesitates for a moment: He thinks it’s Sawyer-related, I’m sure, but to his great credit, he comes through. “Name it.”
I raise my head, wipe my eyes, and stare at my father dead-on. “I’m going to take a trip.”
50
Before
Back at home after leaving Sawyer’s I shut the bedroom door and packed up all my guidebooks, threw my maps into the recycling. I ripped down my posters of Paris and Prague. I took the winter coat I’d gotten for Chicago—“I know it’s jumping the gun a little,” Soledad had said when she showed me the catalog, “but it’s good to be prepared”—and shoved it into my closet, deep in the back, past where Sawyer and I had fooled around the afternoon of Cade and Stef’s wedding. I imagined I could smell him, soapy and faint.
I had to take two breaks to throw up.
When I was finally done I sat in the middle of my bedroom floor for a while, looked around at my empty bookshelves and my naked walls. I leaned back and stared at the ceiling, two hands on my stomach. I cried for a while. I thought.
Eventually I wandered downstairs where Soledad was sweating onions, humming along to Dolly Parton under her breath. “Meat sauce,” she told me, instead of hello, then: “I didn’t know you were home.” She laid one cool hand on my cheek like she was checking for a fever, for something she sensed but couldn’t prove. “You feeling any better?”
I shrugged and then hugged her, impulsively and hard. She smelled clean and familiar, vanilla and home. “I’m okay,” I managed, breathing her in to try and keep it together. “I’m fine.”
“Well,” she said, kissing my temple. She sounded surprised, and it occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t let her hold me in a while. “Set the table, then.”
I stuck close to the house for a while after that, reading next to Soledad and shadowing my father in his garden, plucking tiny crimson strawberries from their vines. I wanted, a little bizarrely, to spend time with both of them while I still had the chance: I knew I was going to lose them anyway, sure as if I was moving clear across the world. I knew they were never going to look at me the same way again—and honestly wasn’t sure if I’d even want them to. Still, part of me missed them already, and I wanted to soak them up while I could.
So I pruned the tomatoes and helped Sol with dinner, got used to the way my life would be. I sat in the yard underneath the orange trees and tried to tell myself it could be enough, that I could be happy this way, that I wasn’t terrified and lonely, that the walls weren’t pressing in on all sides.
I thought he might call. I watched the phone like a sentry.
He didn’t.
Saturday night and my father was flipping through old movies on cable, tonic and lime on the table beside him. He looked at me a little curiously as I came in. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said and wrapped his heavy arm around my shoulders. He looked so glad to see me it almost broke my heart. “You’re not going out?”
“Nope,” I said, did my best to keep my voice even. “I’m staying right here.”
It took everybody but me more than a full week to realize Sawyer was gone.
I guess I couldn’t totally blame them. His attendance at work and family dinners was spotty, to put it mildly; he came and went from the dingy stucco house as he pleased. So when he didn’t turn up for his shifts for a couple of days, and then a couple of days after that—well. “Goddamnit, Sawyer,” I heard Roger mutter one night, manning the taps in the middle of the dinner rush. “Pain in my ass.”
If I suspected that Sawyer wasn’t coming back anytime soon—and it was more than a suspicion, honestly; it was something I knew in my bones—I certainly wasn’t telling. I wasn’t saying much of anything, really. I went to school and I worked at the restaurant and I kept my mind studiously, fastidiously blank; every time I tried to wrap my brain around what was happening or make some kind of a plan, my thoughts just kind of … slid away. It felt like I was shuffling through my days wrapped in a thick swaddle of blankets, everything muffled and coming from some far-off place.
I didn’t know how to deal with what was coming.
So I didn’t.
That worked, for a while. I flew under the radar as best I could. I knew somewhere in the darkest corner of my mind that I was going to have to speak up sometime, about Sawyer and about the rest of it, but as the days ticked by there was some small insane part of me that began to think maybe I’d made the whole thing up. Maybe I’d imagined taking the test in Shelby’s bathroom. Maybe I’d never been with Sawyer at all.
One afternoon at the end of May I came through the front door a bit later than usual, having spent a good fifteen minutes staring at the contents of my locker with absolutely no clue what books I might need to take with me, then managing to make two different wrong turns as I drove home from school. I was scaring myself a little. I was having trouble motivating myself enough to care.
I was going to head straight upstairs to my bedroom—I’d been spending an awful lot of time staring at the wall—but my father and Soledad were sitting on the couch side by side like a couple of tin soldiers, waiting. “Hi, Reena,” they said, when I came in.
I blinked. “Um,” I said, dropping my bag on the floor where I stood. I felt vaguely sick. “Hi.”
My first thought was that they knew about the baby somehow, that they’d intuited just by virtue of knowing me, and the wave of relief I felt in that moment was tidal and huge. Then I realized that wasn’t it at all.
“We need to talk about Sawyer,” Soledad told me. “Roger and Lydia need to know where he is.”
“Sawyer?” I repeated. I had a sharp, ridiculous urge to laugh. “I have no idea.”
“Reena,” my father snapped, “this is no time to play—”
“Leo,” Soledad interrupted; then, to me: “Have you heard from him? Did you kids have a fight?”
I shook my head once and sat down hard in the armchair, this feeling like a physical collapse. Suddenly I was so, so tired. “He took off,” I said, shrugging just a little. “I don’t know where. But I don’t think he’s coming back.”
That took them both by surprise; I don’t know what they’d been expecting me to tell them, but it wasn’t that. “When?” Soledad asked softly.
“Ten days ago?” I guessed. The days had started to seep together into a dark, endless river, whole weeks like an underwater blur. I couldn’t keep this secret a whole lot longer. “Two weeks?”
My father had been listening quietly, dark gaze fixed in my direction. “Reena, sweetheart,” he said, clearly baffled. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
I took a deep breath, raised my chin to face the music. “There are a lot of things I haven’t told you,” I began.
To say my father didn’t take my pregnancy well would be like calling a category five hurricane a little bit of
