Page 130 of On His Mind

And she goes.

I stand in the kitchen that was ours an hour ago and listen to her car start and pull away. I don’t move. I keep standing there long after the sound is gone, looking at the door, waiting for it to open, knowing it won’t.

I had two good things.

I just found out that I don’t get to keep both.

Chapter 44

Percy

Ihaven’tsleptupstairsin eleven days.

The room’s the same as it always was. Bed, milk crate, the lamp with no shade, the desk with the drawer that sticks. Nothing in it moved. That’s the problem with it — nothing moved, so everything’s still exactly where it was over the summer. I walk in to get a shirt and the light’s coming through the window at the wrong time of day on the bed, on the spot where she slept, and I have to get the shirt and get out.

She’s in all of it. The bed’s where she slept all summer, where the last time was, where she drew a floor plan on my chest with one finger half asleep. The window’s the one she looked out of. The chair by the desk is the one she sat in to draw, her feet up, in my hoodie. I can’t turn my head in that room without hitting something that used to have her in it, and now doesn’t, and thenot-having-her is louder in that room than anywhere else in the house.

I stand in the doorway of it on the eleventh morning, and I don’t go in.

I move downstairs that afternoon. There’s a room on the ground floor, near the back, off the hall by the kitchen — smaller, one window that looks at the side yard. I carry my stuff down in two trips. That’s all it takes. I set it all down in the bare little room, and it looks like every room I’ve ever been put in, unlived, waiting, mine only because they told me it was.

I go back up for the last of it, and then I shut the upstairs door. The drawing’s the last thing I carry down. I’ve had it in the top drawer since Christmas, flat, careful, between two pieces of cardboard so it wouldn’t bend. Us in the kitchen. Her against the counter, me in the doorway in my coat, the terrible backsplash, my hands the way she got them right. The first thing that was ever mine to keep. I stood in that room in December holding it and thought, clear as anything, that I’d have this when I had nothing else.

I’ve got nothing else now.

I carry it down between the cardboard, and I stand in the bare new room with it in my hands, and I don’t know what to do with it. There’s a wall right there. A nail already in it from Rowan who had the room last. I hold it up to the wall for a second, the two of us in her lines, and I can’t. It could never go on the wall. The guys would see it. And I can’t throw it out — my hands won’t do that either. I get as far as the trash in the kitchen and stop and stand there like an idiot and bring it back. It goes in the dresser. Top drawer, face down, between the cardboard where it’s mine and I don’t have to look at it. I shut the drawer.

The house is empty for another week, and it’s full of her the whole time.

The kitchen’s the worst. She cooked almost every day over the summer. I eat standing up. I don’t use the pan.

The porch is the other bad one. I don’t go out front anymore. That’s where she put her feet in my lap and asked me for the one thing, and I said no. I go in and out through the side door. It’s closer to my room anyway. That’s what I tell myself.

Nobody knows. That’s the ridiculous part that sits heaviest, the part I carry around the empty house all week — that I had the biggest thing in my life and lost it, and there’s not one person on earth who even knew I had it. No one to tell. No one who’d get it. Blue might, if I said it, but I won’t say it.

I skate at six the next morning in an empty rink. I let myself in with the code and turn the lights on over the sheet. I go, and I don’t stop. I can’t practice in the net, so I skate and hit the puck as hard as I can.

I chose this. So every time my chest aches, I get pissed. I stood on a porch and picked this — the net, the house, the season, all of it — over her, and if I picked it then it had better be worth picking, it had better be worth what it cost. If I gave her up for the net, then I have to become the net. I have to be the guy who was right to do it.

I’m actually not that bad at hitting a puck or skating with it across the sheet. But it doesn’t matter how confident I feel out here. It doesn’t fill the thing it’s supposed to fill. I keep going anyway.

By the time the first truck rumbles up the drive, I’m sick to death of my own company. I’m out the door before Benson’s even killed the engine, reaching over the side of his truck bed for whatever’s heaviest.

“Summer treat you well, Percy?” he asks, coming around to meet me.

“Yeah,” I say, looking at him. It isn’t the truth. This summer got its hands on me and took me apart at the seams.

“Good,” he says.

“You?”

He glances over, and something crosses his face — surprise, I think, that I’m asking. I’m not usually one to start a conversation.

“Yeah, man. It was good.” He swings a bag up onto his shoulder. “Happy to be back at Hawthorne, though. My mom drives me out of my mind.”

I carry his things up to his room and set them down inside the door.

“Thanks,” he says.