Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [71]
“Oh.”
“I’d have lied to anyone else if they’d asked me, you know,” Claire says. “Lies are a lot easier than the truth. Simpler.”
Like Tess, who picked what she knew over stepping into the unknown with Claire for everyone to see.
Like me, because I want Eli but said, “I don’t know what to do,” because it was easier than saying “I’ve wanted to kiss you too.”
“Do you want—the pictures that Tess has, do you want them?”
“No,” Claire says. “I remember them, and that’s enough.” She nudges me with her foot. “Go home so I can sleep.”
“I feel like—I want to fix things for you,” I say. “This isn’t … something should happen for you now. Something good, I mean.”
“I’m responsible for me,” Claire says. “You be responsible for you.”
“That’s it?”
Claire smiles at me again, a little sadly this time. “That’s it. See you tomorrow, okay?” And then she lets herself inside her house and shuts the door.
I look at it for a moment, and then I walk home.
forty-two
In the morning, my parents tell me I don’t have to go to school.
“Why?” I say, because my parents never let me miss school unless I’ve woken up covered with spots (chicken pox, third grade) or thrown up in front of them (sixth grade). “Is it—did the phone ring when I was in the shower? What’s happened to Tess?”
Mom puts down the cup of coffee she’s drinking.
“Nothing’s happened,” she says, and, when she catches my eyes, repeats it again, gently. “Abby, nothing’s happened.”
“But you never let me miss school.”
“After last night,” Dad says, “and with Tess being moved so soon, your mother and I thought—we thought you might want to see her. Spend time with her.”
“All day?” I wish the thought of spending a whole day with Tess filled me with joy, but it doesn’t. I just—not only do I not know who Tess really was anymore, I don’t think I can spend an entire day watching her lie there. Watching her live with her eyes wide shut.
“No,” Mom says. “Your father and I—we need to see her this afternoon. We need to talk to the doctor, and we also have to start making a list of things we need to get for her new … for her new room.”
Dad puts his coffee cup down and gets up from the table then, goes and looks out the kitchen window. His shoulders are slumped, defeated-looking. Sad.
“She could still wake up,” I say, not because I feel like I have to, but because I still think she could.
I just don’t know if she will.
“Yes,” my mother says, her voice tight and as sad as the slump of my father’s shoulders, but Dad turns around and gives me a small half smile. Not of thanks, but of shared hope.
I smile back.
“Last night, you went out,” he says. “Your mother and I assumed—”
“Claire,” I say, and he nods. “Is she … how is she?”
I look at my parents. What do I say? That Tess really hurt her, broke her in ways even they don’t know about? That she saw Tess’s need to be who everyone wanted her to be more clearly than me, and I thought I’d seen her true self—the way she was capable of being cruel, the way she could be understanding without having to say a word—but that I had no idea who Tess really was? That I’m not sure even Tess did?
“She’s busy,” I say. “Working a lot.”
“And what happened with Tess?”
“She said—” I pause, looking closely at my parents, and realize that it’s not that they couldn’t handle me telling them what Tess did. It’s that they don’t need to know. They are carrying so much now, paying for a life for Tess that none of us could have ever seen, and then having to watch her live it. Watch her live life still, and silent.
“It was a long time ago,” I say. “Claire’s—she’s got Cole now. She says … she says that and work are her life.”
Mom looks at me, and I can tell she knows there are things I’m not saying. I can also tell she won’t ask what they are. That