The Foreseeable Future Page 20

At some point between the motel and Seth’s house we’d come to another agreement, unspoken this time: We weren’t going to talk about my interview in Seattle. Not yet.

  When Tamora emerged from the shower, her hair wet and dripping onto the floor, I watched, anxious, as she took in the fresh additions to the room—the copper kettle on the stove, the mugs on the shelves, the wool blanket folded at the foot of her bed, and the photo albums stacked atop her nightstand. I’d already peeked at a random page and discovered the pictures had never been arranged in chronological order; a colorless portrait of Tamora as a gap-toothed little kid overlapped with a shot of her and Jackson, in full cowboy regalia, at the Country Music Awards. Guilt, followed by the sound of the shower shutting off, prevented me from snooping further.

  “He was here?” She sounded confused, hopeful, and hurt. All at the same time.

  “No,” I said carefully. “I met him at the storage unit.”

  “In Arcata?” She chewed her bottom lip as her gaze darted from the blanket to the kettle. From the leather-bound albums to the collection of mismatched mugs. One said Together we make beautiful music! and featured two cartoon raisins singing into microphones.

  She had planned to die without seeing that California Raisins mug again. I wondered if I had made a mistake, reuniting her with that mug.

  “He called you? He made you drive all that way?” She covered her mouth with her hand and looked at me. “Whose idea was this?”

  Tamora’s stare was so intense. She was willing me to give the right answer.

  “It was Jackson’s idea. Obviously.”

  “Good,” she said, moving toward the stove. Removing the lid, she peered inside the kettle and carried it to the sink.

  “You want some tea? Let me do that.”

  A frown creased her brow. Tamora ignored me. “He doesn’t want to visit me here. Not with all these old ladies roaming the halls. He’s afraid they’ll recognize him.”

  “Have you asked him to come?”

  “He knows he’s always welcome.”

  “But have you told him you need him to come?”

  She grimaced, heaving the full kettle from the sink to the stovetop. “I don’t need Jackson to do anything.”

  Except that her need had been all over her face, the moment she’d stepped out of the bathroom and seen the artifacts from their life together. “You never told me he was gay,” I said, sitting at the table by the window.

  “Oh.” With her back to me, she shrugged. “I guess I’m used to hiding it for him.”

  “That’s a pretty big thing to hide.”

  I couldn’t help thinking of my brother, who had always refused to be closeted. To anyone who veered toward homophobia—not remotely uncommon in this town—he would announce he was gay before the person could finish whatever joke or adjective their lips had started to form. It was exhausting, Jake admitted, to take a moment through which he could have smiled and nodded and instead make it awkward as hell. But the polite smiles would have been exhausting in a deeper way.

  “I suppose it’s a pretty big thing to hide,” Tamora said. The way she sank into her chair looked a little too sudden; I wondered if she was having one of her dizzy spells, and I waited for her to grip her head. She didn’t. “That’s not how I saw it, at the time. Everyone in Los Angeles was hiding something. Nobody hides things anymore. They go online and disclose their most banal thoughts, their deepest desires.”

  Between my parents and their crew of academic pals, I had been subjected to about one thousand speeches bemoaning my generation and our addiction to the Internet. The lecture was so boring, I always had to physically restrain myself from reaching for my phone.

  “We still hide things,” I said. The kettle began to whistle, and I jumped up before Tamora had a chance.

  “Not like we did,” she said with a hint of pride. “We knew how to keep a secret.”

  Reaching for two mugs—the one with the California Raisins and another celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee—I almost laughed at her. “I don’t know if you’re as mysterious as you think you are,” I said.

  “Oh? You think you can read my banal thoughts?”

  “And your deepest desires.”

  * * *

  * * *

  At the end of my shift I almost gave into my urge to find Seth and break our daylong vow of separateness. But then I thought about my bed—its twist of sheets and rumpled pillows—and I practically sprinted to the parking lot, worried Seth would renege on his own proposal, try to lure me into his Jeep Cherokee for another sleepless morning.

  The Jeep was still in its spot. The back window was covered in dirt from the O’Malleys’ unpaved driveway. I used my index finger to draw a heart on the glass, then made my escape.

  My house was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator, the click of the ceiling fan. For a minute I hovered over the kitchen sink, draining a glass of water. The dead silence of these mornings at home still felt weird to me, especially when contrasted against all the hectic weekday mornings of my previous life. Before school, Rosie and I had been prone to fighting over the last bowl of sugar-dusted cereal. Jake often needed to yell at whichever insomniac professor had embossed his term paper with coffee-cup rings. Mom had pushed nutritious brown-bagged lunches into our hands, and if any one of us peered inside and frowned at the bag’s organic contents, Dad would slip us each a few bucks. Enough for a soda, or a grease-streaked sleeve of Tater Tots from the school cafeteria.

  Abandoning the empty glass in the sink, I drifted toward my room. The top bunk was unoccupied. I didn’t like sleeping alone as much as I’d always thought I would, and sometimes found myself straining to hear Rosie across the hall, turning pages or creaking the springs of Jake’s bed.

  The moment I was horizontal, I remembered Seth’s lips against my throat. I remembered his dramatic reading of the motel’s evacuation instructions.

  When you hear the tsunami warning, get into your car and drive to higher ground, at least one hundred feet above sea level.

  If you do not have a car, run.

  In another moment, I was blissfully unconscious.

  * * *

  * * *

  Sara was mad at me. It was obvious when I entered the barn that afternoon and the sound of my footsteps on the long, sawdusted floorboards didn’t prompt her to look up. She kept her back turned as she brushed the neck of a gray mare whose name, I knew, was Isobel Stevens. In junior high Sara had gone through a phase of naming her pets after characters from whatever TV show she was binge-watching at the time.

  I’d meant to tell her about the interview first thing, but now I found myself asking, “How have you been?”

  I cringed as soon as the words had left my mouth. It was such an awkward question for one of us to ask the other, but I hadn’t seen Sara in over two weeks. In the scheme of our friendship, two weeks might as well have been two years.

  “Good,” she answered, no intention of divulging any details. Over the back of the horse, Sara finally met my eyes. “And you?”

  I crossed my arms, covering the CNA badge clipped to my scrubs. “Work’s been crazy. My parents are crazy, it turns out, but we already suspected that.”

  Her lips formed a distant smirk. She didn’t know anything about the professors’ trial separation or my mom’s affair; I had only told Seth.

  I tried again. “What’ve you been up to?”

  Sara shrugged. I held my hand up to the mare’s nostrils and she snorted, wetly. Isobel’s lead was secured to a wooden post, but she was patiently enduring the brushing, neither shaking her head nor stamping her hooves.

  “Just tell me one thing,” I said. “Anything.”

  “Elliot and I went to a party at Chelsea Hamilton’s two nights ago.”

  Chelsea Hamilton still worked the day shift at the nursi
ng home. The Sunday morning on which I’d caught her and Seth O’Malley flirting outside the main entrance felt like an eternity ago. I wondered if Seth had known about the party—if, as we’d fooled around in our room at the Paradise Cove Motel, he’d given any thought to the predictable summer we had both forfeited in favor of this summer with each other.

  “Have fun?” I asked.

  She shrugged again. “Elliot and I holed up in a corner and played that drinking game you invented sophomore year.”

  The game was simple. A group of people—or in our case, exactly three people—sat in a circle and passed around a bottle, or a can, or a commemorative stein of something alcoholic. When the beverage was in your possession, the person to your left tried to guess something that you wanted. The person might theorize that you wanted a puppy, or a McDonald’s milk shake, or to get into Berkeley, or to make out with the girl who sat beside you in physics, or for your phone to ring. If they were correct—if even a small part of you wanted it—you drank. If they were wrong, then the other person drank. Over the years, I had sniffed out Elliot’s crush on a ponytailed 4-H enthusiast named Jenny Kincaid; Elliot had guessed Sara’s desire to graduate first in our class; and once, Sara had said to me, “You secretly long for the Professors Nelson to praise you like they praise your brother.”

  Was it such a secret? Either way, I drank.

  “The two of you played alone?” I asked.

  “Yup. Elliot guessed that I want you to break up with Seth.”

  I blinked at Sara, stunned. If she loved me at all she wouldn’t want me to break up with Seth. He was the best thing Crescent Bay had going for it.

  “I told him he was wrong. I made him throw back a shot of Fireball just for having the audacity to suggest I’m such a coldhearted bitch.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “But later—” Sara paused with the brush halfway down Isobel’s velvety hip. “Later he guessed that I wish you would hang out with us as much as you used to, before you got an all-consuming job and boyfriend combo.”

  “And?”

  Sara took a step back and surveyed the horse, whose coat gleamed. “I think I’m still hungover.”

  “I’m sorry.” I took a breath, ready to offer an explanation, but Sara cut me off.

  “It’s okay. I kind of get it. For us, this summer is the end of everything. It’s fun for us to get wasted at Chelsea’s because we’re never going to see any of those people again. We’re never going to listen to Marcus Kramer talk about jacking up his rig or watch as Sloane Anderson finishes her third beer and announces that it would be completely hilarious if we all played strip poker. But for you . . . this summer must feel more like a beginning.”

  Even if Sara wasn’t aiming to offend me, she’d failed at hiding an undercurrent of judgment. The way her gaze dropped to the floor and landed on the waterproof sneakers I’d started wearing to work revealed exactly what she thought of my life’s new chapter. But I wasn’t really bothered by her judgment. What got to me was the way she had referred to us, including herself and Elliot but not including me.

  “I have an interview in Seattle,” I said.

  Sara’s eyes widened. “You do? When?”

  “Wednesday.”

  The interview felt real, now that I’d told her about it.

  “How are you going to get there? What are you going to tell your parents? Your boss?”

  “No idea.”

  I watched my best friend absorb my news. Maybe, in just a few weeks, I would move to Seattle. I would get my own studio apartment with a fire escape and a view. And maybe the view would be of a nondescript office building or a Laundromat’s neon sign, but during Sara’s reading week she would fly up from Davis and we’d explore the city together.

  “What’s in Seattle, anyway?” she asked.

  “Rain. Kurt Cobain’s ghost. A space needle.”

  “And you, maybe?”

  I smiled. “And me, maybe.”

  Sara unknotted the horse’s lead and walked Isobel back into her stall. “I’ll help you plan your trip,” she offered, as I’d hoped she would. Sara was the competent kind of person who had been ordering her own food in restaurants since she was four, scheduling her own dentist’s appointments since middle school.

  “Will you go with me?” I asked.

  “I could do that.” Sara sounded casual, but she was grinning as she secured the metal gate. “Elliot, too, or just us?”

  Officially, Sara and Elliot and I were a trio. Unofficially, there was a layer of my friendship with Sara to which a boy could never be granted access.

  “Just us,” I said, relieved that we’d restored the word to its rightful meaning.

  TWENTY-SIX

  On Monday morning I exited the nursing home and discovered Seth, as usual, leaning against the rear of his Jeep. Our promise to take a break from each other had outlasted its initial expiration date; I’d worked another busy shift without seeing him once, and now I was almost nervous, my heart thumping as we locked eyes. But as I approached, Seth nodded meaningfully at a fixed point across the lot. I followed his gaze to the rickety staircase leading down to the beach.

  My mother stood at the top—one hand on the hip of her yoga pants, the other thumbing through messages on her phone.

  It would have been easy enough to pretend I hadn’t seen her, to duck inside of the Jeep and ditch her, but I was helpless against whatever magnetic pull governed the airspace between us. As I moved toward my mother, Seth saluted me. He climbed behind the wheel of his car and started the engine.

  Mom looked up.

  “Hello, Audrey,” she called cheerfully. As if we often encountered each other in deserted parking lots at dawn.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  She frowned. “You know I’m always up by five.”

  “Yes. What I’m wondering is how you ended up outside my place of employment, with no car, by five.”

  “I walked on the beach,” she explained.

  I had forgotten about the beach access from her borrowed cottage. In Crescent Bay, certain places were connected by miles of inconveniently crooked roads, or, if you knew exactly where you were going, a much shorter stretch of sand.

  Mom and I watched as Seth’s taillights disappeared over the edge of the bluff. From his car we could hear the faint scratches of a country radio station, until we couldn’t anymore.

  “You wouldn’t answer my texts,” Mom said finally.

  “I’m always asleep when you text.”

  “I figured. That’s why I’m here now. On your schedule.”

  I wondered if, in fact, she was here to confront me about the flight I’d booked to Seattle without her permission, without even using her frequent flyer miles. There was no way for her to know about the trip; yesterday, Sara had shown me how to hack the airline’s advertised fare by buying a string of one-way tickets from Steeds County to Portland to Seattle and back again. We had charged the flights to Sara’s debit card. Still, part of me believed in my mother’s ability to intuit my plans. It was the same childish part of me that had always worried she could read my mind.

  I waited her out.

  “Do you want to walk back with me?” Mom asked, stalling.

  “I can’t.” I gestured to the MINI Cooper, the lone car left in the lot. Since my mother and brother had absconded to Professor Hale’s beach house with the minivan, Dad rarely had access to a vehicle—which suited his desire to spend each night anguishing over his manuscript, occasionally heating up a can of soup or asking Rosie to produce a good synonym for heartbreak.

  She tilted her face skyward. Abruptly, she said, “It was a mistake.”

  “What was?”

  “Italy.”

  I felt myself bristle. “You loved Italy.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “What makes yo
u say that?”

  “Um, your anonymous account of your trial separation from your husband of twenty-five years.”

  She cringed again. “Not a very catchy subheading, is it?”

  I was annoyed, almost offended. By going to Italy, my mother had—at least temporarily—gotten everything she wanted. To suddenly claim she’d been as upset by the distance as the rest of us seemed awfully convenient. “I thought you were living it up in Naples,” I said.

  “Not really. It was a story I was telling myself about an experience I wanted to be having.”

  I crossed my arms, challenging her. “So the sleazy Italian suitor wasn’t real?”

  Mom’s sigh was all remorse. “No. He was real.”

  If I was grateful for one thing, it was not knowing the guy’s name.

  “So which part was made up?” I asked.

  “The part where I got off the plane and spent a single moment thereafter thinking about anything aside from you, your brother, your sister, and your infuriating father.”

  And yet, she had reported making progress on her Machiavelli book. She had reported dreaming in Italian, falling in love with the Mediterranean. “You weren’t sprung free?”

  Mom looked me in the eye. She rarely wore makeup and never shaped her brows. Consequently, my mother’s face was never a surprise; she always looked exactly the same. “Audrey, I was miserable.”

  She was telling the truth.

  And I was glad to hear her say it, even as I knew how little it mattered, whether or not she had enjoyed her Italy experiment. That she had been willing to leave us, and willing to cheat on Dad, meant that everything I’d always taken for granted had already unraveled, a long time ago.

  “I’m going to Seattle,” I announced. Like a child, I added, “I don’t need your permission.”

  Mom frowned, but only slightly. The wind rearranged her no-nonsense haircut. “Seattle? What’s in Seattle?”

  “Potentially a job.”

  Her shoulders relaxed. “You have an interview?”