There’s something like an apology in her eyes, her hands hovering like she might lunge over and hug me, and for some reason, it’s the thing that does me in. I clench my jaw, try to think of ways to reabsorb tears as the selfish truth I’ve been burying shoots to the surface: I haven’t told Stevie what happened between me and Ren because I’m ashamed.Of how I ran. Of how I couldn’t bring myself to fix it.
“I’m—” I feel it in my head, everything tilting around me like it has before, in a way that feels like the end of something.
“Honey,” my mom says, reaching toward my shoulder.
I slide her arm away. “I’m okay,” I say, my eyes on Ren. All I want is to extract him, the pieces of him I got back this week, from this mess, and run off with them into the night. But I can’t get him to look at me. “We’ll talk about it later,” I tell him. We have to. He doesn’t even know all the details of why I left him the night of Sasha’s wedding.
But later, it turns out, doesn’t come. The whole ugly argument effectively ends the night, and we make our way back to the cars, all the seats in Ren’s already taken. At the house, people go to their separate rooms or sit around the firepit, conversation gradually returning to the realm of celebration.
I go inside and check Thad’s room, thinking Ren might have gone to talk with his brother, but it’s empty. In the kitchen, Hannah is putting a kettle on the stove. As I round into the hallway I almost collide with Alex again. Everywhere, there’s someone else, but Ren isn’t among them.
When I check the living room one last time, my dad is sitting on the couch with his phone.
“Slow down a minute,” he says as I walk past him.
I pause, turn to him. “Have you seen Ren?”
He sits forward, sets his phone on the coffee table, pats the cushion next to him. I perch on the edge and he reaches over, stills my hands as I wring them in front of me. I glance down, the lump in my throat twisting ever tighter.
“You know who’s a great person to talk to about this kind of thing?” he asks. I shoot him a beleaguered look. I know what he’s going to say. “Your mom.”
“Mom doesn’t want to talk to me right now,” I say.
“She always wants to talk to you, sweetie.”
But there’s only one personIwant to talk to right now, and the only way I know how to handle a crisis like this is one anxious step at a time. My mom is an issue for a later date. My dad seems to recognize this, hand sliding off mine.
“He’s somewhere,” he says. “Give him some time.”
But Ren and I don’t have time, we only have one day. I keep searching, checking and rechecking every spot, always getting some approximation of the same reaction from everyone I run into: an expression somewhere between avoidance and pity. No one knows what to say, and no matter what corner I turn, I still can’t find him.
Eventually, I go back to the screen porch to wait for him. I sit at the foot of my bed in my dress, teeth working at my lower lip until it hurts.
I wait until the house is silent, and the breeze coming in through the windows is cold. Until my mind goes from blank to frantic to blank again.
Ren doesn’t come back.
two and a half years ago
Sasha and Alex
Portland, Oregon
chapter twenty-six
“Sister’s back in Portland!” Stevie shrieks from the window of her car when I walk out of PDX, bags in tow.
I race toward her, the hood of my down coat jostling off my head. She pops her trunk and I throw my things in before diving into her passenger seat, leaning across the console to hug her to me.
“Welcome back to Oregon!” she says as she pulls out of the pickup area, reaching forward to crank up the music so loud we have to shout over it.
Ren would have picked me up at the airport, but Stevie insisted she be the one to get me, andIinsisted to Ren that we don’t let on that anything is happening between us until we see each other in person again, so we couldn’t push back too much. Some part of me is still scared of the enormity of this, still reeling from realizing my feelings for Ren existed at all, from how all-consuming they’d become, how quickly I’d been willing to put our history, our entire friendship at risk to satisfy my own curiosity. Not onlyourfriendship, but our families’. What ties us all together began long before Ren or me. What if we told everyone, and then Ren changed his mind about us?What if he woke up and decided hedidlove Amanda? Where would that leave our families? The house? Would things be able to just go back to normal?
My knee starts to bounce the closer we get to Sublimity. For the past four months it’s felt like we’ve been inching toward some kind of finish line that kept moving ever farther away. First, Ren was going to come to New York in September, but then his dad had a minor health scare, and he had to cancel last minute. Greg was fine, he assured me every time we talked, but it had still frightened us, made me feel even more distant from everyone. My parents, Stevie, and I spent Thanksgiving with Charlene and Mavis, assuming we would all be in Oregon for Christmas, but then I got promoted to lead fabricator and the movie was approved in early December, so I stayed in the city with a coworker to get ahead on the principal characters.
But now, Sasha’s New Year’s Eve wedding the day after tomorrow, that finish line is in sight. I try to grab on to it, this moment I’ve been anticipating for so many months, but by the time we’re parking on Mississippi, my knee’s movement is almost violent, knocking against the car door. I trail Stevie inside, my heart feeling like it might rattle my teeth right out of my jaw at the prospect of seeing Ren. We had to say goodbye so quickly after Willow and Martin’s wedding that I’m not sure what this looks like: us, together, more than friends.
The band is still setting up, but Ren’s preshow playlist is playing over the speakers, people already bobbing their heads at the high tops and up by the stage. Sublimity seems almost new to me, a reminder of how long it’s been since I’ve been here.
