Chapter 27
JOEL
The hour Shay’s father died, she and Joel were running through the woods. It was a Sunday in April, and she’d slept in his bed, every inch of them touching, her nose resting in the dip of his collarbone, her ankle hooked around his calf.
In the dining hall, they drank coffee even though they didn’t need it, their hearts furiously pumping, as if their bodies had somehow been flooded with more blood.
He draped his arm across the back of her chair.
It had been three weeks since they first slept together, and they had not spent a single night apart.
Though he still went to class and rose for practice, everything was different.
The colors of the campus were blown out, the grass so verdant it overwhelmed him when they held hands on their way to his dorm.
He thought that maybe, once he’d been with her, he’d find some calm, but instead, he only wanted Shay more.
Her fingernail scraping away his loose eyelash was an electric shock.
She could destabilize him by pressing her hand against his thigh.
They made a rule that once they were in his room, they could not touch until they finished their coursework, and though perhaps Shay actually read, he absorbed nothing, simply waiting until she looked up at him and pulled a ribbon along her book’s spine.
“I bet I could beat you in a race,” she said after they left the dining hall.
They’d decided to walk through the curve of forest by the lake, buds tipping the tree branches.
Shay was grinning at him. Since they got together, she’d become more playful, and this made him happy. The air smelled like wet earth.
“You remember I’m on the track team, don’t you?” Joel said.
“Is that why you’re up so early during the week?” she joked.
“Did you think I just hated sleep?”
“I thought maybe you were getting tired of me.”
He laughed. “I don’t think that’s a risk.”
She bent over to lace up one of her sneakers, her hair hiding her profile.
She’d taken to borrowing one of his sweaters, the peat-green wool his grandmother had made for him the year before she died.
And how miraculous that was, he thought, that a sweater knit by a woman who was no longer of this earth could be worn on a warm day in spring by a girl he loved—and yes, he loved Shay; even though he had not said it aloud, he had said it every other way he could think of.
That he loved her, this girl who was suddenly sprinting away from him through the trees.
“Oh, come on!” he yelled, and then ran after her.
It took him longer than he’d thought it would to catch her. And as they lay on the forest floor, she said it was just because he was taller, and that if she could grow another six inches, she’d have him beat.
“I believe it,” he said, unbuttoning her jeans.
Hours later, when they returned to Shay’s dorm and she finally answered the call from her brother in the hallway, she told Joel how odd it was that she hadn’t felt anything earlier.
When something bad happened to William in the past—a femur broken while sledding behind their elementary school, a man attempting to lure him into the backseat of a Pontiac—she’d felt a stirring.
Her reflexes would come to attention as if she herself were in danger.
But when her father had left his body behind on the tracks of the Jarvis L stop, halting service for three hours, she had felt only the burn of her muscles as she ran through the forest, a laugh high in her throat as Joel approached, as if they were playing a game of tag, the only thing to fear the possibility of his hand reaching out and brushing her back.
“It’s okay,” Joel had said into her hair.
“Is it?” she’d asked, pulling away from him.
She did not cry, not when she told Joel what had happened, and not as she sat on the edge of her bed while he packed her bag.
When he looked up at her, her brow was slightly furrowed, as if she were trying to solve some equation, combing through a sequence of numbers and symbols that never quite added up.
The only time she appeared on the cusp of tears was when she couldn’t find her copy of Dubliners—the last book, he remembered later, that her father had given her.
She left that afternoon, finishing the semester’s coursework by mail.
None of her other friends from college were at the funeral.
Later, he’d learn she hadn’t told them what had happened.
At the service, Joel had not touched her, and afterward, she’d said she needed some time alone, but he hadn’t thought he’d lost her.
It took him until the fall to understand, when he had gone to her dorm room and found Andrew sitting at her desk.
Joel told Carmen none of this. Only that Shay’s father had been hit by a train, but somehow, as they walked back to the hotel, even that felt like a betrayal.