The Foreseeable Future Page 8

  I could have blurted it out. I could have forced Dad to come clean with my siblings, so I could stop wondering if keeping this secret from the two of them was right or unforgivably wrong.

  In night school, we had learned to never, under any circumstances, treat or assist a patient if we weren’t confident in our skills, sure the outcome would be favorable. The principle was “First, do no harm,” a line I remembered from the summer Sara and I watched five seasons of Grey’s Anatomy but also, evidently, a real thing. And I had no idea how to fix my parents’ marriage. I didn’t know if telling my siblings the truth would help or hurt. I didn’t have the skill set, the training, the experience.

  “That sounds good,” I conceded, and neither Jake nor Rosie seemed suspicious. One-on-one time with Iris had always been a coveted commodity in our house.

  Dad relaxed. “In the meantime, would you mind telling us more about what happened? For instance, every detail that you can remember?” His relief had reverted quickly to enthusiasm.

  Normally, Professor Nelson liked to be in control of all discussions. Your usual options were to ask him questions or to answer his, one after the other. As little kids, my siblings and I had learned that any unsolicited rambling about whatever had happened at school would cause Dad’s eyes to glaze over, maybe even his back to turn. Only now that we were all various stages of grown-up did Dad sometimes invite our stories.

  And when he did, none of us could ever resist.

  So I told him about Seth and Cameron tossing the football into the sky. Cameron’s knees buckling. Her lips turning blue. The ease with which a firefighter had flung me into the wet sand. The long hour in the waiting room, my bare feet, my impulse to ditch my friends the second I knew Cameron had made it. How everyone else, presumably, had stayed.

  As I was talking, the microwave dinged, and Jake delivered to my lap a plate of steaming pizza bagels. Hungrier than I’d realized, I let the first bite sear the roof of my mouth.

  “Well, Aud,” Dad said, “this will be quite the story to share at freshman orientation.”

  “Oh my God, don’t,” Rosie advised me, as urgently as if I was about to press send on a campus-wide e-mail. “Everyone will think you’re so much drama.”

  “No,” Jake corrected her. “They’ll think she’s unique. That’s the best thing about college. Everyone’s so different.”

  Dad went, “Mmhm,” which was the sound he made when he was unwilling to argue or agree.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it always did—how no matter what happened on a given day in our lives, the Nelsons were always exactly themselves.

  Keeping my eyes open had become an unrealistic goal. Rising from the couch, half stumbling out of the room, I told my family I was going to bed.

  * * *

  * * *

  My phone rang, hours after I’d slipped into a deep sleep—but there was a reason I’d left it charging on my nightstand, volume up high. Not an assumption so much as a hope that Seth would call, even just to say something meaningless, like, What a weird day.

  Instead, he said, “Hey. Audrey. I’m so sorry. You must be so tired. Please say no if you want to say no. But I’m still at the hospital. Everyone’s gone. I don’t have my Jeep, because—”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. On the top bunk, my sister rolled over. “I know.”

  “I called my dad, but he’s . . . he’s not feeling well. Do you think you could . . . ?”

  “I’ll be right there,” I told him.

  If Mom had been home she would have heard the front door creak open and click shut—would have confronted me in her striped pajama pants and Whedon College camisole before I’d even started the car—but the chances of Dad waking up were relatively slim. I left a note on the kitchen counter, just in case.

  My hands were damp and they stuck to the steering wheel as I retraced my route back up the hill. At Steeds Memorial, I pulled into a parking space and texted Seth. He emerged from the building faster than I’d expected.

  For a second he was outside of the car, his flannel midsection framed in the passenger-side window. A second later he was climbing inside, filling the MINI Cooper with his Seth-smell and his Seth-limbs.

  His eyes appeared painfully bloodshot.

  He said, “You didn’t have to drive all the way out here, you know.”

  I ran my thumb along the bottom of the steering wheel, where the vinyl was cracked. “I know. It’s cool, though. You can always call me for a ride.”

  “Always?”

  “Yeah. Like when you’re forty, and you get a flat tire, and you’re stranded on the side of the road with your six children. Look me up. I’ll come get you.”

  “We’ll appreciate that. Me and the boys.”

  “All six of your children are boys?”

  Seth sighed, like fatherhood had already taken its toll. “Boys run in my family.”

  “Your poor wife.”

  “Hey.” Seth’s tone veered toward serious. “You were amazing today. The whole thing was surreal. I’m sorry I wasn’t any help.”

  He really did look sorry. I understood that being helpful was one of Seth’s things, and that in his mind he hadn’t just failed me and Cameron; he’d failed at being Seth.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.

  “I was in your way.”

  “For, like, two seconds.”

  Seth blinked, and I could tell he was having trouble remembering the two seconds in question. For a long time after Cameron had collapsed, every second had been infinite.

  “I didn’t know that she . . . that you guys used to go out,” I offered.

  Seth raised his shoulders. “How could you have known?”

  “Haven’t most people in this town memorized your roster of ex-girlfriends?”

  “No idea. I’m glad you haven’t. Not that it’s such an endless list.”

  I was certain that Seth’s list would dwarf mine, but I felt no need to point this out. “You and Cameron are still friends?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Cameron’s great.”

  I waited for him to provide some kind of explanation—of how they got together, or why they broke up—but Seth presented Cameron’s greatness as an isolated fact.

  “She is,” I agreed, because it seemed appropriate, and because part of me was glad to learn that Seth wasn’t the kind of guy who would diminish a girl he’d once liked, calling her unhinged or unreasonable, just to make his current crush feel less threatened.

  Not that I was his current crush.

  I needed to think of something more to say to him. Otherwise, there was nothing left to do but drive him home.

  Seth beat me to it. “I have a question.” With his head pressed back against the window, his long neck exposed, he looked so unguarded.

  “Okay,” I said, swallowing.

  “Are you really going to Whedon?”

  “Um.” I was enrolled. I had attended my twenty-four hour preview and dutifully texted Vanessa a thank-you message. I had no intention of going to any other school. “Yes?”

  “So you’ll be here. In Crescent Bay. For the foreseeable future.”

  It wasn’t the answer I wanted to give him, but it seemed like a safe answer—the probable truth. “Yup.”

  Seth went on. “So if I kissed you, is there a chance I could keep kissing you for a while? Say, into September and beyond?”

  His last question took a moment to sink in. I stared through the windshield at the bright EMERGENCY sign outside the hospital entrance. Seth wanted to kiss me. And not just once, in this parking lot, or a few times post–night shift, but indefinitely.

  I turned and met his eyes. He was watching me, hopeful and curious, as if he still thought I might do something other than reach for him.

  My hands found his face, and we were finally kissing.
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br />   I had wondered if kissing Seth O’Malley would be weird. If, with the collision of our mouths, I would remember who he’d always been to me—some guy hugging some girl, their bodies fused together and blocking the hallway. Some cowboy. Some jock. No one I wanted to know.

  It wasn’t weird. Seth’s lips were warm and eager, surrounded by a scruffy beard he’d most likely grown to hide what was, really, a minor amount of acne. His kisses weren’t localized to the nerve endings in my lips and tongue; they only started there, before radiating through my belly, my thighs, my toes. Somehow, my whole body got involved, even as Seth’s fingers stayed tangled in my hair.

  It seemed as if the best course of action would be never coming up for air, never starting the car, never breathing a word of doubt or disbelief.

  Time could pass as slowly as it wanted.

  * * *

  * * *

  Around four in the morning I drove Seth back to his house. Behind the curtains in the front window, a bluish TV light flickered.

  “Will you be at work?” I asked him.

  I thought he might be planning to call in sick. If he wanted to spend another evening at Cameron’s bedside, I wouldn’t hold it against him. Kissing Seth didn’t make him mine. Kissing Seth didn’t change the fact that he had watched a girl whom he’d once liked—maybe loved, probably slept with—almost die.

  But Seth just said, “That’s where you’ll be, right?”

  “Obviously.”

  With his hand on the door, he flashed me a sleepy half smile. “From now on, my preference is to be where you are.”

  I was sure he had used that line before.

  Probably because it worked.

  TEN

  The next afternoon, without getting out of bed, I called my mother. It was late at night in Italy, but Iris Cox Nelson answered on the first ring. I wasn’t surprised. Answering on the first ring was one of her policies as a mother—along with memorizing our class schedules, meeting our friends’ parents, and randomly pressing down on the tops of our shoes to see if they fit.

  Her greeting was drowned out by a lot of background noise—people laughing, dishes clattering.

  “Where are you?” I was aware of my tone, almost accusatory, like I expected her to stay locked inside her sublet, listing the pros and cons of remaining married to my father. If she was going to second-guess her entire life, the least she could do was focus.

  “Just a faculty party. I’m dying to talk to you, though. Give me a second?” The noise of the party swelled as she, presumably, navigated a crowded room. I heard her say something to someone in upbeat Italian. It caught me off guard, how easily I recognized her voice in another language.

  The din subsided. I heard a door clicking shut and Mom saying, “I understand you have a story to share.”

  “Jake told you already?” I asked, verging on crushed.

  “Just the headline,” she assured me. “Not the details.”

  I took a breath and, rapidly, as if someone might interrupt, began to describe the preceding day of my life. I stopped short of my first kiss with Seth, even though part of me was dying to tell her about it. Remembering the minutes I’d spent in the car with Seth was almost as good as the minutes themselves. But instead I included other details I hadn’t divulged to Dad. How none of the boys at the scene had known what to do. How badly my arms had burned. How my mind had zeroed in on the technical procedure of pumping blood to Cameron’s heart and I’d hardly registered the crowd forming around us.

  I tried to avoid embellishments, but because I was talking to my mom and no one else, I said, “I think I might actually have saved her life.”

  “Wow,” Mom exhaled. “Is it all over social media?”

  “Haven’t you checked Facebook?”

  “You know I try to avoid the Internet.”

  For a second, I was speechless. It was almost like she knew I was Sprung Free in Italy!’s most loyal reader and was baiting me into admitting it. But there was no way Iris was savvy enough to track visitors to her blog. There was no way she knew the meaning of an IP address.

  The truth was that the Internet was not as impressed by my life-saving skills as I had expected when I woke up and promptly Googled my name with Cameron’s name. The only result was an old calendar of student birthdays, preserved in the archives of our fourth-grade teacher’s website. Next I’d searched “heart attack” and “Crescent Bay” and set Google to show me only results from the last twenty-four hours. I tapped a link for Word on the Beach, a blog run by the long-time receptionist at our town’s microscopic City Hall, who liked to keep everyone informed of small crimes and random rumors. Today, the word was that a recent graduate of the high school had suffered cardiac arrest at the Fourth of July festival. It was a close call, wrote the receptionist, but witnesses say she will make a full recovery.

  That was it. My search had yielded no actual news stories.

  It wasn’t like I wanted a medal. But now that the shock had worn off, now that I knew the emergency had not nullified things between Seth and me, my mind was opening to the possibility that—even if I hadn’t saved Cameron’s life, exactly—I had probably helped. At least I’d kept her from slipping away before the firefighters and the paramedics got the chance to revive her.

  “Maybe I should get certified in CPR,” Mom said. “You never know. Weak hearts run in your father’s family.”

  Annoyance crept into my voice. “It’s not like it’s easy. You really have to know what you’re doing or you might make things worse.”

  My mother hummed her agreement. “True. They should teach basic First Aid in school. I don’t think Whedon offers anything close.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Speaking of Whedon . . . are you getting excited? Only two more months.”

  School starting in two months meant Mom would be home even sooner. Her return flight was booked for the second week of August. Would she and Dad act like they were thrilled to be reunited? Would they immediately file for divorce?

  The future had never been closer, and I had never been less sure what it looked like.

  “Do you think it’s, like, a problem that I have no idea what I want to study?” I asked her.

  “Not at all.”

  I tried to picture her in some coat closet or spare bedroom. I couldn’t imagine a University of Naples faculty party. Whedon College faculty parties were deafening, drunken affairs, often taking place in our own house. My mother always bought a surplus of cheap red wine and not enough vegetable trays or frozen pot stickers to go around—a formula, she assured me, followed by all the best parties. As a kid, elbowing my way through the professors crowding our kitchen, Whedon hadn’t seemed to me like such a terrible place. More of a concept, synonymous with home, family, safety.

  Now I tried to envision the school as something other than the manicured campus I’d toured a thousand times. Not the emblem of my parents’ obsession with academics, but just a school. A series of classrooms in which I might learn something about the world, or about myself.

  Mom was saying, “Honestly, I think it’s best to approach your college years with an open mind. The whole point of a school like Whedon is that you can take courses across so many disciplines. You can figure out what you like. You don’t even have to declare a major until the end of your sophomore year. Isn’t that neat?”

  “I really like nursing,” I said.

  Seamlessly, as if she’d prepared for this, my mother said, “Maybe you should study psychology.”

  If we were arguing, I had run out of counterpoints. “Maybe,” I said.

  We sank into the silence that usually precedes one person deciding to get off the phone. Not ready to let her go, I asked, “Are you excited to come home?”

  She hesitated before saying, “Of course I am.”

  Her hesitation had neutralized her answer. “Rea
lly?”

  “Absolutely. It’s just . . .” I could hear her deliberating, trying to decide what she should tell me and what she should keep secret, oblivious to how much I already knew. “It’s been a refreshing change of scenery. You know, a part of me still can’t believe how many years I’ve spent in Crescent Bay. I know it probably sounds strange to you, but when the college hired Nelson and me, I never thought we’d stay there forever.”

  I could have pointed out that she’d been granted plenty of scenery changes over the years; she had traveled a ton. We all had. I could have asked her why, if Crescent Bay was such a drag, she had convinced me to apply early decision to Whedon. But I dismissed these obvious responses, pretty sure she was speaking in code.

  Marriage was the thing she’d never imagined lasting forever.

  Playing along, I said, “Then why’d you take the job?”

  “It was an amazing offer to receive, fresh out of grad school. I figured Nelson and I would eventually move on to other opportunities. Your dad, though . . . He’s very comfortable where he is.”

  “The kitchen,” I said.

  “Pardon?”

  “He’s in the kitchen. Working on his book.” A minute earlier, I had heard him grinding beans for a second pot of coffee.

  Mom laughed. “Of course he is.”

  “I thought you loved Crescent Bay,” I said, although I had little evidence to support this assumption. Mom loved her job, and had the Whedon College logo-emblazoned wardrobe to prove it. She loved us with an intensity that verged on suffocating. But unlike Dad, she had never been openly enamored with the panoramic views from the highway. When we picnicked by the water, she winced each time she bit into her sandwich and crunched sand between her teeth.

  “I do. But, Aud, do you remember how much you liked Seattle?”

  “Yes.” Just the word Seattle satisfied something in me, like when a friend, unprompted, mentions the name of your crush.

  “Do you remember what you said?”

  “Not really,” I lied. “It was over two years ago.”