Chapter 17
As Long as You Don’t Choose, Everything’s Still Possible
Will takes off, and we cross the night in silence.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“You want me to take you home?”
“No. Please. I think I’m still drunk. I don’t want my parents to see me,” I say, although they must be in bed. And even if they weren’t, they wouldn’t notice anything. But still, I’m dizzy, and plus I’m not ready to tell Will goodbye.
“There’s not much to do around here.”
“You’ve got a RV, right?”
He looks away from the road at me. And when he turns the car around, I can see he likes this idea as much as I do.
The RV park is on the edge of the city. The homes there are scattered around without much order. Will parks at the burger place and we walk over there slowly.
“Here it is,” he says when we arrive at a small white RV with a gray stripe down the middle. He opens the door. “Ladies first.”
It’s tiny, with a covered bench he uses as a couch, a door that must lead to the bathroom, and a folding bed, currently open. There are books all over, crammed into corners where you’d least expect them.
“Now I see why you use your car for storage.”
“You hit the nail on the head,” he laughs, then walks past me, telling me he’s going to change into something cooler.
I briefly see his shoulder blades as he takes off his shirt, and it feels like a shame when he covers them up again so soon.
I remember the first time I saw him, I thought he looked like a star football player, with his broad chest and narrow waist. The sight of his body lets me know that impression wasn’t wrong, but there’s so much more now: all I know about him, the little pieces I’ve been collecting.
“I don’t have much to offer you. A Coke?”
“No thanks. I’m good.”
“You sure? How about an herbal tea?”
“Okay, you’ve convinced me.”
“Get comfortable. You can take the couch or the bed.”
Worried about knocking over the piles of books on the bench and getting buried under the avalanche, I opt for the bed.
It’s unmade, the white sheet pushed aside, and I imagine him lying in it, receiving my messages.
The idea makes me salivate, and if I were capable of blushing, I’d probably be doing it right now.
Will puts a little pot of water on to boil.
“I don’t think I thanked you,” I say.
“You don’t need to.”
“This isn’t bad,” I say, looking around after a moment of silence. “Why’d you decide to live in an RV? I mean, I guess it’s cool if you want to go on an adventure someday.”
“Would you come with me if I did?” he asks as he pours the hot water into two glasses, offering me one and sitting down next to me.
The mattress sinks. It’s intimate, being with Will in a place this small.
And I know he knows it too, because he’s trying to keep his distance, as if he is afraid of what might happen if our bodies connected there in that tiny box.
I want to ask him, Are you scared to touch me, Will?
“I guess it would be interesting. Life shouldn’t have so many options, right? It’s scary when you start to think of all the things you leave behind.”
“Just think about the ones you do choose.”
“Exactly. That’s the problem.”
“How so?”
“There’s a line in the movie Mr. Nobody that’s like, ‘As long as you don’t choose, everything remains possible,’” I say.
Will takes a sip.
“For how long, though?”
“I don’t know.”
He rests his right elbow on his knee and leans forward, studying me attentively. I wonder what he sees. Or doesn’t see. “Did you ever think that maybe not deciding was also a way of deciding? And what if you spent your whole life just not deciding?”
I realize then that he’s not just asking me, he’s asking himself. We’re both at the same point, in the middle of the staircase, not knowing which direction to take. Up or down? Down or up? “I can’t answer.”
The silence returns. But it’s comfortable, light somehow.
It was so hard today, arguing with my parents, boxing up Lucy’s clothes, going to that party I should never have shown up at, and now at last I’m feeling restored, being in this caravan with Will.
I don’t want it to end, so I lean back into the pillow.
It smells like him: like waterfalls and cold and violets.
I watch him as he finishes his herbal tea, stands up, rinses the glass, and dries it off carefully.
He’s…methodical. It’s funny to think of us as opposites: chaos and order, reflection and impulsivity.
“Where did you live before?” I ask.
“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me what happened at the party.”
“It doesn’t matter. That guy you saw, Sebastian, he’s an idiot.”
“What were you arguing about?”
“Let’s say…we have unresolved issues. We kind of hooked up last summer. But I did it for a reason. It’s hard to explain. And then he started calling me a tease.”
“What about the other guy?”
“Who?”
“The one with the motorcycle.”
I remember they saw each other when Will dropped me off at my house a few weeks ago and Taylor was waiting for me. I curl up. I feel the soft sheets on my cheek and I know he must have changed them recently because underneath Will’s smell is the floral notes of the detergent. I breathe deep.
“His name’s Taylor. He’s a friend. Or something.”
“Something is pretty ambiguous.”
“We’ve hooked up on and off for a couple of years, but it’s nothing serious.”
Will seems to be thinking this over, then he remarks, “You’ve got a weird type.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“That nothing is really ambiguous.”
“Forget about it. Just let me see if I’ve got this straight: Sometimes you’re with Taylor, and sometimes you’re with Sebastian. Is that right?”
“No. I told you: I don’t like Sebastian. I did what I did with him for a reason, a good one. There was nothing there. I was just trying to…help out a friend.”
“Did it work?”
I lie down and take a breath. “It turned out bad, okay? Let’s leave it at that and move on to the next subject. You, I mean. Where’d you live before? I want details this time.”
He smiles and sits back down beside me. “What makes you think I’m not from Ink Lake?”
“You’re the same age as Taylor and you don’t know him. Plus, you’re just not. A person can tell these things. Even the way you move is different from people here.”
His smile turns wistful as he rubs his hands together and looks away.
He clears his throat, then he starts talking.
“I spent most of my life in Lincoln, in one of those cookie-cutter neighborhoods with the picket fence, the minivan, the dog in the yard. Then I went to school and I wound up in New York. I had a place on the Upper East Side.”
“And now you’re here.”
“I’m here,” he concludes.
“Why?” I murmur, drowsy from the alcohol and just plain tired after a tense day. “What are you running away from? And how is it possible that this tiny bed is so comfortable?”
He chuckles, but his expression is sad. What I don’t know yet is whether that sadness is coming from outside or if it’s already in him and is expanding outward. It’s like smoke, that I do know. Smoke that won’t stop spreading.
“Get some sleep, Greta.”
I can feel my eyelids closing.
“You’ll wake me up in ten, right? That’s all I need; then we’ll be good as new and we can go. Or keep talking. Whichever you prefer.” I’m almost babbling.
“Yeah, of course. Get some rest.”
The light coming through the window makes it hard for me to see.
I blink, needing a few seconds to realize I’m curled up in Will’s bed, not mine.
I feel the sheets to see if his arms are around me, but I’m alone there.
Then I turn and see him sitting on the bench, novel in hand.
There’s a serenity to him, and I’d like to snap a photo and save this moment, hang it on my bedroom wall next to the words that fly around in my head like birds in their cage.
“Have you been sitting there all night?”
“Yeah. Good morning.” He closes the book and sets it aside.
“You didn’t sleep?”
“Sleep’s overrated.”
“Will! You should have woken me up!”
“You want coffee?”
I nod and he sits up. I can’t believe he’s been up for that long.
The lights are off; he probably couldn’t even read until the sun came out.
And he could have just woken me and told me to make space for him.
There would have been room, I think as I smooth out the sheets, and I wouldn’t have minded.
Still groggy, I look around the RV in the daylight, noticing the little motes of dust glimmering in the sun, which I reach out and try to touch. “Will…”
“What?” He’s concentrating on the coffee, which has just begun to percolate.
“Can I see it? Can I see Lucy’s game? Please?”
He looks at me hesitantly, shakes his head, and turns off the coffeepot. He turns to the bed, reaches under it, and pulls out a golden box. “Yeah, I’ll show you.”
He opens it and takes out a big wooden box with little numbered compartments under its lid. “We’re on number five. In each compartment is a piece of paper. Sometimes it has instructions and sometimes it’s just a number that tells you a letter to pick.”
He shows me a bigger compartment with envelopes tied daintily with a red cord but quickly covers them up, noticing how badly I want to look at them.
We both know that patience and restraint aren’t among my virtues.
To distract me, maybe, he grabs a piece of paper and reads aloud from it: “These are the instructions: You have to follow each step. You can only leave one undone.”
“What does that mean?”
“We can keep playing even though we didn’t do the ice-skating thing, but that was our one pass. Now there’s no margin for error.”
“Tell me more.”
“The compartments have to be opened in order. The messenger will decide when this happens.” Will looks at me. “That’s me, I’m the messenger. It also says: The messenger cannot read the letters. If the player decides to quit, the last box must be opened first.”
I slide a finger along the wooden lid and imagine Grandpa carefully filing down the edges and Lucy thinking about what to put in each compartment.
“One night my sister and I talked about whether life was overrated. And she said that life is basically a game; you have to throw the dice and see what number comes up.” I leave out the other times that I struggle not to remember, when the end was near and Lucy was in so much pain that even games of chance were beyond her.
“She was right. More or less,” he says.
“What’s the meaning of that more or less?”
“Well, if you throw the dice too hard, maybe they’ll fall off the edge of the table and get lost under the couch and start gathering dust.”
I smile. So does he. Everything he says always has these surprising little twists.
They used to get on my nerves, but increasingly, I’m waiting to hear them.
He puts aside the game and serves us two cups of coffee.
I grab mine and stand, thinking maybe I should leave the bed open for him, since I hogged it the whole night in a deep sleep.
“Lucy used to enjoy games of luck, but she preferred strategy games. Her favorites were Risk, chess, and Clue, if she was having a bad day.”
“What about you?”
“Scrabble, no contest.”
The power of words has always fascinated me.
How a word can build or destroy, make you love or hate, bring happiness or sorrow.
And I wonder why we don’t have the words we need for certain things.
Is there a term for the little threads that stick out of old clothes?
Or the exact moment when two people are about to kiss?
Or that expresses the power of the last words a person says before dying?
“I feel like it could be the right time to check the next compartment,” Will says after taking a sip of coffee and biting his bottom lip. “You can do it yourself if you like. Just open it and I’ll do the rest.”
“Sure thing, Messenger,” I joke.
I carefully lift the little wooden lid. Inside is a rolled-up piece of paper and a crystal I know well because it used to be mine.
It’s an amethyst, and it glows bright because of all the iron in it.
My grandfather gave it to me, and years later, I gave it to Lucy.
I was eleven or twelve and I was convinced it was magical, a small little treasure that could cure her.
I pinch it between my thumb and forefinger.
“Do you know what it is?” he asks.
“Yeah. What does the paper say?”
“Hand Greta letter number 6.”
He turns, unties the string binding the envelopes together, and flips through them.
Most of them are violet; those are mine.
Others are dark purple, one’s red, and there are a couple of pale blue ones too.
Will hands me one and slides the box back under the bed.
He’s so gentle with my sister’s creation, it makes me want to cry.
I put the letter in my pocket to read later.
“I’ll take you home,” he says.
Home—what does that mean?