When I Am Through with You Read online

  Where had she been going without me?

  3.

  ROSE WAS RIGHT, by the way. Things were different when she got back. At first I thought it was me. I got food poisoning the night before she returned and missed her texts when she landed at San Francisco International the following morning. I saw them when I crawled out of bed to call in sick to work around noon. Figuring the last thing she’d want to hear about was how I’d spent the last twelve hours unable to eat, writhing in pain, running to the bathroom, and praying I got my pants down in time, I texted back: Can’t wait to see you.

  Her response: Dinner tonight at ERI. 8 pm. Dress nice.

  I felt like trash, but ERI was the Eel River Inn and dress nice meant we’d be eating in the inn’s restaurant with her parents. So I wrote: I’ll be there.

  —

  There’s this mood I can get into sometimes. It’s hard to explain, but it can strike after a bout of sickness or hours spent dozing in the heat; after jacking off too many times in one day or staying up too late to watch the sunrise. I don’t know how to describe it other than to say I feel sort of dead—faded, really, or reduced, like there’s less of me or I’m not as much of myself. It’s as if I’ve forgotten who I am or who I’m meant to be or if I’m really even anything or anyone at all.

  That was the way I felt walking across town that August night. It was ten to eight, the bottoms of my feet hurt, and I was sweating like crazy in my dress shirt and tie. The air was dog-day hot—it reeked of far-off fires—but the corners of the sky had begun to darken. A betrayal of sorts: summer days growing shorter as if they’d lost their will.

  It’s Rose, I told myself, trying to snap out of my apathy. You’re going to see her. Finally. And I wanted to see her, I did. But something was wrong. Despite six weeks of loneliness, there was no spark of desire. Not in my gut, my heart. Not anywhere. It was as if that part of me had vanished, and now I was going through the motions of seeing my girlfriend because that’s what I was supposed to do.

  I chalked it up to illness, my mood, the god-awful heat, and fingered the box rattling around in the pocket of my pants. It was a gift I’d gotten for Rose while she was gone—a vintage pair of pink-stone earrings I’d found in one of the local antique shops. The store owner had traded them for an old driftwood side table my lost artist father had made and left behind.

  I really had missed her.

  That’s what I told myself, anyway.

  I reached the inn at last—a rambling three-story Victorian on the outskirts of town and set on eight acres of redwood groves and fern-lined trails. The renowned on-site restaurant resided in what had originally been the carriage house. Apparently it had even earned a Michelin star back in the eighties, but like most good things in Teyber, that star was long gone.

  Shoulders hunched, I made my way down the pea-gravel drive toward the dining entrance. My legs were tired and everything smelled like lilies. I was late already—I should’ve left earlier—and that meant everyone would be waiting for me, and that meant Rose would be disappointed before she even laid eyes on my sweat stains. But there was nothing I could do to fix any of that.

  The front porch light was on. I walked up the steps and opened the door.

  —

  After cruising the length of the half-empty restaurant, I found Rose seated at a table by the fireplace, which roared and crackled every night of the year, no matter the season. No matter the heat. Her hair was longer, prettier, and she wore a black tank top and jeans. My stomach started hurting again at the sight of her, although I couldn’t have said why.

  “You look pale,” she said after I kissed her cheek.

  “I’ve been sick,” I told her.

  “Migraine?”

  “Food poisoning, I think.”

  “That happens,” she said.

  I nodded. It did, didn’t it? I wanted to say something about her, something good. But the truth was, if I looked pale, she looked . . . exhausted? That wasn’t the word, not quite, but she didn’t look how I remembered her. She didn’t look like Rose.

  “Where’s your family?” I asked, sliding into the chair across from her. The table was set for two.

  “It’s just us tonight.”

  “It is?” I glanced down at my clothes. The ones I’d dressed nice in.

  Rose lifted an eyebrow. “Isn’t it better this way?”

  “I missed you,” I said quickly.

  She stared at me. She stared for a long time without saying anything. Rose had returned tan, despite the whole winter thing, but she had raccoon rings around her eyes from her sunglasses. Or something. I loosened my tie and shifted around under the weight of her gaze. Calculated the distance to the bathroom.

  “That color looks good on you,” Rose offered, nodding at my shirt, right as I reached to unbutton my collar.

  I paused mid-fumble, trying to discern what it was she wanted from me. When no further commentary came, I left the button alone.

  “I missed you, too,” she said finally, like she’d just figured it out. “Tell me about your summer.”

  We spent the next hour engaged in the type of stilted conversation that happens between old acquaintances or new strangers. I told Rose about my mother’s car accident and how I’d picked up extra hours at the market in order to get it fixed. Rose told me about Peru, but it was clear she didn’t want to. Her descriptions were superficial: what food she ate and the weight she gained and how much she hated spending time with her two teenage cousins. She didn’t once mention her brother.

  “But I thought you liked them,” I said, referring to the cousins.

  Rose waved a hand. “Those idiots want to come here for college. Have you ever heard anything so stupid?”

  “You mean to the States?” I was confused. “Aren’t you going to college here?”

  “But I have to. It’s not like I have a choice.”

  I took a sip of ice water. Rose had always been excited about college. Had her heart set on Stanford, in all its Left Coast glory. She also knew my choice was not getting to go at all. “I’m going to be working with the orienteering club this fall,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Working how?”

  “Don’t know exactly, but Mr. Howe asked if I’d be interested in being his assistant for the year. It pays. Not a lot, but you know. Better than bagging groceries.”

  “What do you know about orienteering?”

  My cheeks warmed. The fact was, I’d been reading all I could on the topic, because what I actually knew was nothing. “I’m learning.”

  “And your mom’s letting you do this?”

  “Yeah, well, we need the money. She can’t exactly say no.”

  Rose nodded but looked bored. I was sweating again and asked if we could go outside for some fresh air. She brought her coffee with her, and we stood on the back porch that cantilevered over the river. Our shoulders touched, but I didn’t feel any closer to her than I had when she’d been in a different hemisphere.

  “Don’t you ever wonder what the point of all this is?” she asked me.

  I stared at the water below, at the way it went around some of the rocks but ran over the tops of others. “The point of what?”

  “Our lives. The things we do.”

  “You and me?”

  “No. I mean everything. All the things we’re meant to accomplish. Going to school. Finding a job. Falling in love. I mean, we’re supposed to do these things just because some other people did them first, but what if they’re not the things that will make us happy?”

  “Well, what would make you happy?” I asked, although what I wanted to say was, haven’t you already fallen in love?

  “That’s just it,” Rose said. “I don’t know. But I don’t want to close any doors before I’ve had a chance to walk through them.”

  I flashed a smile. “You can’t walk throug
h them all, you know. Not everything’s a choice.”

  “That’s depressing, Ben.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s more than depressing. Thinking like that makes me want to die already and get it over with.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been spending too much time with Tomás,” I said, which was an attempt to make her laugh. Rose’s brother had been in my English class the year prior, and he was the dreariest thing, prone to idolizing all those soppy dead poets, like Thomas Chatterton, who’d killed himself when he was seventeen by swilling arsenic. I had no clue what Tomás saw in him, whether he felt a kinship with the guy’s name or his morbid gloom or the fact that he was a fraud, but on more than one occasion, I’d caught him scribbling down some of Chatterton’s worst lines in his notebook. I mean, just awful stuff, like “the sickness of my soul declare.”

  Rose turned then and grabbed for my tie, pulling me closer in the process, which seemed to catch her off guard. Her fingers stroked silk before letting me go. “You know, Ben,” she said. “If anything happened between you and anyone else while I was gone, it’s fine. You can tell me. I’ll forgive you.”

  This startled me, to say the least. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Yeah, well, nothing happened,” I said, and that was the truth. Nothing had even come close to happening. My summer had been one long drift of dissocial malaise; endless nights spent streaming porn, reading Murakami; days spent oversleeping, forgetting to eat, and doing my best to lose my mother’s Vicodin prescription. I mean, I hadn’t even talked to any girls my age, much less hooked up with one.

  Rose sighed at my response, a sad sigh, and perhaps I was meant to tell her that if she’d done anything while she’d been in Peru, I’d forgive her, too. But I didn’t.

  We kept standing there. The sun abandoned the sky, leaving behind nothing but a glimmer of blue and purple, a hint of bruising along the tree line, and I wanted to hold Rose or kiss her or make her laugh, but it was like I’d forgotten how.

  The earrings, I remembered. I should give her those. I reached in my pocket just as Rose knocked her coffee mug off the deck railing. It shattered at her feet. I bent to pick up the ceramic shards, and when I stood again, Rose pointed at my hand. I looked; blood was dripping everywhere—I’d sliced myself good on a piece of the mug—and I stared wide-eyed at the wound, unable to tear my gaze from the way my skin was just kind of hanging open, letting everything inside slip out.

  The strangest thing happened then: The longer I stared at the blood rushing to leave my body, the more I grew light-headed and hot all over. It felt like I was melting or on the verge of bursting into flames. But before I could say anything or find a place to sit my melting ass down, my ears began to buzz, my vision went grainy, and I guess I passed out cold.

  I woke to quite the scene. People were crowded around me. My tie was off, my shirt open, my bare chest exposed for all to see. A waiter was trying to pour water down my throat, and another wrapped a towel around my cut hand. Annoyed, I pushed them away and sat up. Rose had managed to drag a doctor she knew out of the dining room, although thank God no one called an ambulance or anything.

  The doctor crouched beside me. She insisted on listening to my heart, feeling my pulse, and asking me questions about what medications I was taking and if I was prone to panic attacks. I answered honestly but must’ve been too much of a dick to deal with because as soon as she figured out I wasn’t dying, she stood again, started talking to Rose.

  “I see this a lot, you know,” the doctor said. “People fainting at the sight of blood. It’s very common.”

  “Hmm,” Rose said.

  “Does your boyfriend have any underlying medical conditions?”

  “He gets migraines from an accident he had as a kid. They’re pretty bad. And he said he was sick last night. Food poisoning.”

  “All the more reason for resting. And water. If he’s not feeling better in a day or two, he should see someone.”

  “Hmm,” Rose said again.

  They talked more, but I tuned them out. The crowd drifted away, and I sat on that porch beneath the glowing late summer moon, and worked to regain my bearings. I’d been sick, yes, and was probably dehydrated. It was also true I got migraines and blood could make me queasy. But I knew for a fact those weren’t the reasons I’d lost consciousness. Because while I was sure there were plenty of guys out there eager for their girlfriends to absolve them of their sins, there was nothing in Rose’s offer of forgiveness that had felt anything like a gift.

  Not at all.

  Not to me.

  4.

  BACK IN TENTH grade, Mr. Howe had been my U.S. History teacher. That was the year we studied the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and probably a whole bunch of other wars I can’t be bothered to remember. I do know we ended the year learning about the start of the First World War, which, as far as my understanding of it went, had begun for pretty much no reason at all.

  Mr. Howe had been easygoing with us then, funny, laid-back, and I liked him a lot, even though history was the one subject I’d never taken to. In my mind, the past was something we were destined to repeat whether we learned about it or not. But I’d always liked the way Mr. Howe could go from smiling and joking to intense and focused when he lectured. And if I didn’t care all that much for the things he was talking about, it was still kind of neat that he did.

  Caring about his job, by the way, was a good thing, seeing as Mr. Howe had been teaching at Teyber Union for forever. He was also married, owned a nice house in the country, but as far as everyone knew, Mr. Howe’s true passion was mountain climbing. Built like a Saint Bernard, which was to say barrel-chested, red-cheeked, and with a massive beard, he always managed to return from each spring, summer, and winter break having reached some new height or achieved some personal accomplishment. It was a world I knew nothing about, but the walls of his classroom were covered in photographs of peaks he’d mastered: Mount Whitney, Mount Hood, Pikes Peak. Even Denali. Everest and Kilimanjaro were on his bucket list, and I was sure he’d conquer them in his lifetime. Or else die trying.

  I guess what I want to say is that I always respected Mr. Howe’s ambition, even if I didn’t understand it. That was a big part of the reason I accepted his offer to help with the school’s orienteering club in the first place, although it wasn’t the only reason. There was also the money I knew he knew I needed. And the way I craved almost anything that would help me feel in control of my life.

  Beyond that, though, there was something in the way Mr. Howe asked that made it seem as if I were being offered more than mere employment. He didn’t just call me up on the phone. Instead, sometime near the start of summer, he invited me over to his place for lunch. Obedient, as always, I’d ridden my bike across town to his sprawling farmhouse, not knowing what he wanted, only to be greeted at the door by his wife.

  Her, I’d never met, but it turned out Mrs. Howe, who was elegant and bare-shouldered and had black hair that fell to her waist, was the sort of person who could look you in the eye and make you feel as if she’d give you everything she had, if that’s what was needed. I was smitten. Heart pounding, I followed her through the house to their giant kitchen, where she waved for me to sit at this fancy marble island that looked as if it could seat ten people. And that wasn’t even the dining room. That was somewhere else. “Kyle had to run to the store,” she told me. “He’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “I’m Lucia,” she said. “But you can call me Lucy.”

  “I’m Ben.”

  “Would you like some tea, Ben? It’s herbal.”

  “Uh, sure,” I said, wiping my hands on my shorts. I didn’t care to be in strange homes, much less alone with my teacher’s pretty, bare-shouldered wife. All I knew about her was that she traveled a lot and that she wasn’t from Teyber origina
lly.

  Lucy set about making the tea. She was quiet while she worked, which I liked. So different from my mom and her constant, frenetic need to ask questions and demand answers. Moments later a glazed ceramic mug appeared in front of me. Steam wafted from it, smelling of ginger and honey.

  “Thank you.”

  She sat across from me with her own mug. “My pleasure.”

  “So do you work in, like, sales or something?” I asked.

  Lucy’s brows knitted. “Sales?”

  “Is that why you travel?”

  “Oh,” she said. “No. Thank God. I don’t think I’d be very good at that.”

  “Then what do you do?”

  “I’m a psychologist.”

  At this, I perked up. “Oh, yeah? I read a lot about psychology.”

  She smiled. “What do you like to read about?

  “Lots of things. Theories about how our personalities are developed. Or why people say one thing and do another.”

  “Where does this interest come from?”

  “I don’t know. My mom, I guess. She’s not a very happy person.”

  Lucy watched while I blew at my tea. “That’s sad.”

  “It’s weak.” I felt guilty the minute the words left my mouth, so I added, “But I’m weak, too.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I can’t make people happy. I keep trying, but I’m always screwing up.”

  “Does your mom tell you this?”

  “My girlfriend mostly. She gets embarrassed for me a lot. I don’t blame her. I mean, I do a lot of dumb stuff.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I looked up at her. “Your clients must like you, huh? You listen really well.”

  Lucy reached to pat my arm. “That’s nice of you. But I don’t have any clients. My work is in public policy and research around mental health. It’s why I’m away in DC so often. I’ve been gone for the past two weeks. Just got back yesterday, in fact.”