Chapter Twenty-Six
I press the accelerator dangerously close to the floor as I urge my car up Spyglass Beach Way. The motor groans and the wheels
almost spin out on the gravel three separate times, but I don’t care. I leave the car in the middle of the clearing and run
up the path past Dina’s house like some invisible force is sweeping me forward, pushing me faster and faster through the birch
trees.
My breath comes in ragged gasps as I crash through the front door of the cottage and head straight for the bathroom, flinging
the door open so hard it bounces off the wall.
Half bent over the sink, Jackson jumps. He’s shirtless, water dripping from his face, a towel clutched in one hand.
“Why are you here?” I yell it at him, my voice bouncing off the walls in the tiny room. “Why can’t you just fucking leave
me alone?”
For a moment, he stares at me in shock, droplets of water caught on his eyelashes glimmering in the late afternoon sun. Then
his eyebrows pull together. “Are you serious? We live together.”
“No, we don’t. We don’t live together, Jackson. This—this whole thing you’re stuck repeating, it doesn’t last. It’s not going to matter what couch we buy. We’re broken. We broke, Jackson, and you’re already playing house with someone new, so why won’t you leave me alone?”
“What are you talking about?” His voice rises to match mine. “I’m not playing house. We’re not broken. I’m just trying to
get you to have a simple conversation.”
“It’s not a conversation I need to have! This is ancient history. I don’t need to relive this moment. We broke up. And none
of this is real.”
“What’s not real?” There’s a cold glitter in his eyes now. “Our relationship? How much I care for you?”
I bite back the urge to scream. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to make me feel guilty.”
“I’m trying to get us a couch so we can have an apartment like the fucking adults we are!” he says. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Oh my god.” I rub my forehead. “Would you stop it with the couch? It doesn’t matter. This isn’t real. And I really don’t
need to remember just how much you hounded me about a piece of furniture, just like you hounded me about watching Jaws, because you never wanted to listen when I said I don’t know—”
“Because nobody says I don’t know for four fucking weeks about a couch!” Jackson shouts. “It’s a couch. You look at some options and you make a decision. But you keep saying I don’t know.”
“And you didn’t listen—”
“I listen when it’s important.” He runs the towel over his face and flings it down onto the counter. “Remember when you didn’t
want to move into that first apartment we looked at, with the really nice windows, because you got a weird vibe from the landlord?
I listened. I didn’t push. But this isn’t the same. This is you avoiding something because you don’t want to commit.”
“No.” I shake my head. “It was just a lot. A big decision. It was expensive.”
“We can afford it.”
“I wanted to make sure it was right—”
“Bullshit.” Jackson’s chest heaves, like he’s been running. “If that was true, you’d talk to me about it. We could have a
conversation. But we can’t. Because you can’t make yourself commit to being here. With me. Because if we buy a couch, then you’re really moving in with me, and that makes all of this”—he waves his arms
in the space between us—“something you actually chose, and you don’t fucking know how to choose anything.”
“That’s not true,” I say.
“Really?” He leans forward, eyebrows raised, eyes fixed on mine. “Tell me something you chose, Har. Tell me something you
didn’t just fall into. Because I feel like I’m the one who keeps choosing you, and you never seem to choose me back.”
I stare at him. I open my mouth, because I should have an answer. I’m sure I should have an answer.
But I don’t.
It was Jackson who offered me his umbrella. Jackson who gave me his phone number. Jackson who asked me out. Jackson who asked
me to move in.
And each time, I said yes. And none of the steps felt all that big when I took them. Just one at a time, easy to say yes to
because he was there, and he was asking, and he was choosing me. He was choosing me, and it was terrifying and wonderful to be chosen—to wake up and have someone there. To have someone who would answer the
phone when you called. Who would show up when you asked them to.
Jackson did all of that. Jackson remembered my birthday. He liked to cook. He didn’t need to be reminded how much I disliked
fish. He was ambitious and smart and so damn functional.
“You’re right,” I say. “I let you lead and I just . . . I kept going along. So maybe I was the one playing house. You were
everything I thought I wouldn’t get. Everything I thought if I had, then . . . I don’t know. It would mean I’d done something right. So I kept saying yes, and then somehow when it got to the couch . . . it all got real. And I started to feel like maybe this was it.”
Jackson runs a hand over his face. His broad shoulders have slumped, and he looks tired. Worn out. “So . . . what?” he says.
“You never actually loved me?”
“I did.” There’s a lump in my throat that’s hard to swallow. “Once. Or at least . . . I know I loved laughing at your stupid
jokes, and I loved how smart you thought I was, and I loved that you believed we could be this academic power couple. I loved
the vision of the future that you kept showing me, and I guess . . .” I let my breath out slowly. “I guess I told myself that
was the same as loving you.”
He grabs his T-shirt from the hook on the wall and pulls it over his head. “I love you,” he says, a little helplessly.
“Maybe. Or maybe you loved the idea of me. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the problem.” I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands.
“We both loved the idea of who we were together, and we just kept hanging on, hoping the other person would become who we
really wanted.” I lower my hands. “I guess that’s on me too.”
Jackson sighs. “I just wanted to talk about the couch.”
I glance up at him. “Yeah, I know.”
He picks up his toothbrush. The glow of the sunlight through the shower curtain lends a strange halo to his hair. “We can
talk about it tomorrow,” he says.
That makes me smile a little. “Do you think it was worth it?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Us. All of it.”
He leans against the vanity. The glow from the sunlight moves across his arms and his shirt, and I realize suddenly that it
isn’t just the light making him look hazy.
He is hazy. His edges have blurred. The darkness of his hair has faded. It’s like the color is slowly draining from him.
“Jackson?” I say.
But he doesn’t seem to hear me. He turns back to the bathroom sink as though I’m not even there, and now I can make out the
dim shapes of the sailboats on the shower curtain behind him, like his whole body is slowly evaporating into smoke.
“Jackson?” I say his name louder this time, reaching forward. “What’s going on?”
He still says nothing, and my hand passes straight through his arm, my fingers closing around empty air.
My throat closes, heart hammering against my ribs. “Wait. Jackson, wait. I need to know if . . . You can’t leave now. I need
to know if this was worth it.” I move my hand, but he’s barely a shimmer now.
“We can talk about the couch,” I say. “We can talk about the couch as much as you want . . .”
He leans forward, nothing more than a shadow, reaching for the faucet. Just before his fingers touch the tap, he melts into
the air like the rainy mists that disappear over the ocean, and then he’s gone.
I’m alone in the bathroom. There aren’t even any extra footprints left on the bathroom rug.
I wait. Counting to ten. And then twenty. Like maybe he’ll come back.
But he doesn’t.
I turn for the doorway. “What was the point of that?” I yell. At the room. At the house. “What are you trying to tell me?
What am I supposed to do with any of this?”
There’s no answer, because of course there isn’t. I’m yelling at a building.
I yank the front door open, pitch out onto the porch, and fold up on the steps.
And then, for the first time since Jackson and I broke up, I start to cry.
My throat closes. My chest tightens until I can’t breathe.
I wipe my face with my hands, over and over, but it’s like I’m drowning.
Like something inside me has cracked open, and there’s a wave pouring out, threatening to wash me away.
I cry until my eyelashes are caked with salt. Until my face burns. Until my lungs hurt.
And then I realize my phone is vibrating in my pocket.
I dig it out, blinking my eyes clear, trying to focus on the screen.
Sharon is calling me.
Why is Sharon calling me?
“Hello?”
“Harlowe?” There’s an anxious, scared note in her voice. “Have you seen Nathan?”
“Nathan?” I wipe my eyes again, and this time they stay clear. “No. Why?”
“He’s not answering his phone and we can’t find him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He took off after you did. He and Dina got into it, things got heated, and he left. Dina’s going to his apartment to see
if he’s there. I was kind of hoping he was with you.”
My stomach knots. “No, I’m . . . Is his car still there?”
“No.” Sharon sighs. “He drove off.”
I rub my temples. My head is throbbing. “What happened? I mean, with him and Dina?”
“She told him she was closing Queer Punx and selling the houses to go traveling and he got upset about it,” Sharon says irritably.
“I really don’t understand why he gives a damn about that store—not like he ever spends any time there. And anyway, it’s time,
even if it’s sad. The Fourth was thirty-five years since George died; it’s time to let it go.”
My thoughts skid to a stop. The world stills. The birch trees in front of me turn to a blur of gray and white. “George . . .
George died?”
“Yeah,” Sharon says. “Fourth of July, 1991. Who did you think that toast was for?”
“I . . .” But I don’t know what to say, because the truth is I never thought. I assumed. Assumed Dina and George had broken up and somehow Dina had ended up with the cottages, like hanging on to assets
in a messy divorce. That George had let her keep them the way I let Jackson keep our apartment, because for some reason it
was easier.
I assumed he’d moved away.
I assumed no one talked to him anymore.
I assumed some part of Dina still missed him, and that’s why she held on to Queer Punx and the pictures around the turntable.
And no, no one told me that the toast was for George, but also, it never even occurred to me to ask.
I feel suddenly ridiculous, and foolish, and incredibly sad. “What happened?” I ask.
“Complications from AIDS,” Sharon says, with a calm matter-of-factness. “He was the first person any of us really knew. There
were acquaintances, people we’d heard of. And then later, there were more people we knew. You just . . . lost people back
then.”
I close my eyes. “And that was what the toast was about.”
“Started the year after George died, to mark the occasion. We thought maybe it would help. Help us let him go, bit by bit.”
My mind snags on her words.
Let him go.
Bit by bit.
Another piece slowly fits into that puzzle in my head, and then another, and another, turning until their edges finally match
up. Professor MacAndrew. Jackson. My dad. The obituary for Nathan’s parents. The pictures by the turntable. The countless
times I’ve heard Dina hardly ever rents out that house. The Nathan I keep seeing in the bedroom. The real Nathan, who keeps pushing Dina to sell . . .
Bit by bit.
Let go.
My eyes fly open. “Sharon,” I say, “I think I know where Nathan is.”
“What?”
“I’ll call Dina if I find him.”
“Harlowe—”
“I have to go.” And I end the call before she can say anything else, and run for my car.