Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [38]
“So do you think—do you think that if you’d drove that night, you might—?”
“No,” I say. “It was an accident. A terrible, tragic accident. If I could have driven the car, I would. I don’t—I’m not crazy about my bike.” My bike that I used to ride around the summer I fell for Jack. My bike that I put away only to take out when Tess’s accident took away my car. My life as I knew it.
“Oh,” Eli says, as the ferry blows its horn, signaling that passengers will be loading soon. I get out and motion for him to pop the trunk before I shut the door.
There aren’t any cars behind him, but he doesn’t start to back up as I move up along beside him, doesn’t start to turn and drive away. Instead, he rolls his window down.
“Abby,” he says, and I look over at him, breath catching even though I was just in the car with him, even though I have spent all night near him.
“What?” I say, and I’m off-kilter, breathless, because I’ve spent all this time with him and he keeps talking to me, keeps acting like I’m actually interesting, and it keeps throwing me off. Keeps making me think stupid things like how I could ask him to come on the ferry with me. Come home with me.
I shake my head, but it’s too late. I’m shaking.
“Is there anything you’re afraid of?” Eli says.
You, I think. I am terrified of you. Of how your kindness makes me like you in spite of myself. Of how you make me dream things I haven’t dreamed in forever.
You, I think. But I don’t say it.
twenty-seven
My family has breakfast together every Sunday morning. My father makes pancakes, and my mother makes bacon and usually scrambles a few eggs too.
When Tess was younger, she would get out cookie cutters and turn Dad’s pancakes into hearts and stars. Sometimes, if she was upset about something, she wouldn’t, and a few times, right after she stopped talking to Claire, and then again when she started worrying about college so much she’d basically stopped sleeping, she’d refuse to come down for breakfast at all.
She’d lie in splendid, solitary misery in her room, Mom trying to tempt her downstairs and my father eventually carrying a tray up to her. I’d pick it up later, the food untouched and Tess lying in bed watching the ceiling. She could be poisonous then, responding to my footsteps with icy glares or worse, acting like I wasn’t there at all. Looking through me like she looked through Claire.
We kept up the breakfasts after Tess went away to college, although Dad started experimenting with his pancake recipe (the gingerbread ones were a hit, the cornmeal ones—not so much) and Mom switched to turkey bacon and “egg product” after her last doctor’s visit.
We kept them up after the accident too, after we knew Tess wasn’t coming home right away, though the pancakes had bits of eggshells in them for the first few weeks and Mom tended to forget the bacon until it started to burn.
This morning, Dad’s made peanut butter pancakes, and I get out the strawberry jelly and smear it on one, watching it thin and ooze, trickling across my plate.
“You should come see Tess with us today,” Mom says, depositing two pieces of turkey bacon on my plate.
“Is this because of what happened last night?”
“What?” Mom says.
“Never mind,” I mutter, but it’s too late. Mom sits down across from me and says, “Abby,” in her tell-me-everything voice.
I tell her, and she glances at Dad as I finish talking, then looks back at me. “We know you want Tess to wake up, and we want that too. But there hasn’t been any indication—”
“I know what I saw.”
“We—” Dad says, and Mom looks at him, shaking her head slightly.
“She has a right to know, Katie,” he says, sitting down with his own plate of pancakes. “We sometimes see—sometimes we see things that look like movement too,” Dad says. “I—we saw them more before, back when—back when she was first hurt. But the doctor says she isn’t responding, not like you think. Her brain activity is … minimal.”
“Minimal,” I