Page 296 of Across His Line

I lie there and listen to the water run. I listen to him spit and tap his toothbrush against the sink and hum something tuneless I already know will be stuck in my head all week, and I tell myself to get up. Get up, find your shoes, stop it. It’s seven days, Tessa. You have gotten through entire years with less to hold on to than a circled date and a set of car keys, and you are lying here in damp sheets falling apart over a man going to hockey camp. I say it to myself in the voice I used to use when I was small, and for a second, it almost works. Then he shuts the water off, and the quiet comes into the room all at once, and the voice goes with it.

He comes out with a towel slung low on his hips, dripping onto my floor. He checks his phone and swears under his breath, the way he does when he isn’t actually worried. I tell him his shirt is on the chair before he asks. He dresses fast, and when he gets to the hoodie on the back of my desk chair he picks it up, holds it for a second, and tosses it onto the bed beside me instead of putting it on. “Keep that,” he says. “So you don’t forget what I smell like.”

“You smell like a locker room.”

He leans over and kisses me, smelling like toothpaste and the body wash of mine he keeps stealing. Then he pulls back an inch and looks at me properly. “You sure you’re okay?”

It’s so easy, the way he asks. Like whatever I say, he could carry it out the door with everything else. And I could tell him. I could say that I am so proud of him I can hardly look at him, and that I am also so scared I can’t feel my hands, and that both of those things are true at the same time in the same place and I don’t know how to separate them. But he has a flight, and this is the thing he has wanted forever, and I am not going to be the weight he carries onto that plane.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Go. If you’re late they’ll trade you somewhere awful.”

He laughs and picks up the bag.

“I’ll throw this in the car,” he says. “I have to make a call. Meet me down there?”

“Yeah.”

He goes, and for one second, I almost crumble as I watch him round the corner. There’s a girl underneath my walls who never got a return date from anyone, and she isn’t listening right now. She only knows what she’s watched happen at every door she’s ever stood near. Everyone leaves.

I pull his hoodie over my head. I find my shoes. And I go downstairs to ride with him to the airport like a girl who believes him, because I do, I do, and it doesn’t help at all.

He drives with one hand on the wheel and the other on my knee, and he talks the whole way there about the hotel they’re putting him in and whether the food will be any good and a kid from the draft he’s pretty sure is going to cry on the first day. I laugh in the right places. I watch the exits go by. At departures, he gets the duffel out of the back seat and swings it over his shoulder in the same motion as this morning, and then he comes around to my side because I’ve already climbed over into the driver’s seat, and leans in through the open window with his forearms on the door.

“Text me when you’re home.”

“I will.”

“Don’t let Koda borrow the car. He’ll leave fries in it.” He kisses me through the window, and then again, and then once more because a man in an orange vest is waving at us to move along. “Thirteenth,” he says against my mouth.

“Thirteenth.”

He backs up two steps, still looking at me, and then he turns and goes through the sliding doors, and they close behind him, and for a few seconds, I can see the back of his head through the glass, taller than everyone around him. Then I can’t.

I drive home with the radio off. His seat is still pushed all the way back and I don’t fix it. The car smells like him, like the rink and the pine tree hanging from the mirror, and for the whole hour I keep both hands on the wheel at ten and two like I’m taking a test. I park on Wren Street under the maple and turn off the engine and sit there. I should go upstairs. I have eleven packages to get to the post office before noon and a label already printed for every one of them, and I know exactly what the next hour of my life looks like. I get out of the car. I lock it. I make it as far as the curb, and then my legs fold, and I sit down on it with his keys in my fist.

There’s a crack in the pavement between my shoes.

The sun is coming up over the houses across the street like it would have over any morning. A bird in the maple is doing something cheerful. Somewhere down the block a car door shuts, and someone laughs, and a sprinkler starts ticking in a yard I can’t see. All of it is happening a little distance away from me, the way it always has, and I look at the crack until it stops being a crack.

I don’t cry. I thought I would. The whole drive home I kept waiting for it the way you wait for a sneeze, and it never came. What comes instead is quieter and worse. It’s the feeling of reaching for something and finding it farther down than I thought it was.

I don’t hear the screen door. I only know someone’s there when something settles over my shoulders, gray and coarse at the edges, smelling like a dryer sheet, and I don’t turn around. Turning around would mean having a face for whoever it is.

Behind me, a voice is talking, and another voice answers, small and tiny on speaker. I can tell from the shape of it that they’re deciding which parts to say out loud. I could tell you which one of them wants to come down here and which one thinks I should be left alone. Nothing would help.

I turn my wrist over in my lap and run my thumb across the four words, back and forth, the way I have on stairs and in parking lots and on every bad morning since I was seventeen. This too shall pass. It has never once worked when I needed it to, and it isn’t working now. He’s on a plane, or about to be. He’s coming back in seven days. And I’m sitting on a curb on Wren Street in July like somebody died.

And I’m in this moment. All the way in it.

The porch step creaks. Paige comes down and sits next to me on the curb, close enough that our shoulders touch through the blanket, and sets her phone face up on the pavement between our feet. She doesn’t ask what happened. She doesn’t remind me he’s coming back. She pulls her knees up and looks at the same houses I’m looking at.

“Tess?” Kylie’s voice comes up off the concrete. “You there?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” I can hear her moving around wherever she is, a door, a drawer. “Okay. I’m here too.”

Nobody says anything for a while. The bird keeps going. A man walks by with a dog and looks at us, two girls on a curb under one blanket in the middle of July, and keeps walking.