You, Me, and Infinity

Chapter Twenty-One

The glug of a watercooler: Sounds of Mars

Connection—it was your word. Still, Mars, still…

It was one thing to be forced into it, and something else entirely to connect to anyone or anything on my own.

Because, no way. Almost literally, there was no way that I could see.

Because I tried that, okay? With you. I did.

I had gone down that road, tucking the protective force of my anxiety away, and look what happened.

I’d been brave, I reached out, I stepped out of my comfort zone.

I did all the things, looked straight at those maroon flags and went right ahead and loved you, loved you fully.

There was a flag I hadn’t even considered.

Your heart, betraying both of us. So, no, thank you.

Road closed. I was right, my anxiety taunted as it set up the barricade. I told you. You should have listened.

Even though I witnessed a glimmer of it during those deliveries—the world, you know, the people in it, the continuing, enduring life-force beauty of both—the glimmer felt so very small.

Because a party hat, a cookie, a dog, a friendly chat—they were nothing against the anxiety roar that had now wrapped around my sorrow and guilt and love and need like a fire wall.

I went back to school. Addy drove us in her new (old) Honda.

She said she wanted to show it off, but I think she wanted to keep an eye on me.

Liam drove his dad’s former BMW, so her Honda with almost a hundred thousand miles and worn cloth seats was maybe less of a show and more just hers.

Priya piled in the back. Maddie lived close to school and always walked, so it was just the three of us.

It reminded me of the days before Liam and Maddie and you.

When we were just us. We were never this quiet or careful, though.

I could feel them holding me with love, but also unease.

As if I were thin glass that might shatter at the slightest wrong touch.

That first week back, I felt like my mind and body were constantly walking in water, going the wrong way, pressing back against the force of the current.

Trying to get through classes in a weird haze of unreality.

My shock had turned to something else. Not an understanding, because who could understand this?

Maybe a truth, the truth, that was beginning to grow roots, but only new and fragile ones, because the shock never seemed to be gone for good.

I’d be doing something regular, unlocking my locker or checking my phone, and wham.

I’d be struck by the fact that you were no longer in the world, and there simply was no explanation for this.

Where are you? I’d ask you for the hundredth time.

Ms. Denali, my AP Lit teacher, pulled me aside to tell me she was there if I ever needed to talk.

She’d lost someone close to her very suddenly, too.

I looked in her eyes after she said it, and she looked in mine.

And it was like her eyes went back and back.

They were full of stories, and I had no idea.

I had never really seen her before, I realized, with her dark hair in that ponytail, the wisps around her face.

In her flowered tunics with the black leggings, her hands absent any rings.

I’d found someone who lived on my planet, anyway, and we recognized each other.

Mr. Chu, my AP Statistics teacher, also called me to stay behind after class.

He told me I could have all the time I needed to finish my work.

Grief is hard work, he said, let alone statistics.

He said it like he knew. And I hadn’t seen him, either, with his stylish haircut and large glasses, the smartwatch that showed he’d already exercised and exercised and exercised.

I wondered if he needed those loops for a different purpose, one that never had an end point.

The people who showed up for me—it wasn’t who I’d expected. When I saw Sujia again, I thought she’d be warm and comforting, but she seemed nervous and awkward with me.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “About your boyfriend.” She played with the tassel that hung from her backpack. “How are you doing?”

“Okay,” I said. I mean, how did she think I was doing?

“He’d want you to be happy,” she said.

I folded my eyebrows down. She’d never met you. And you’d want me to be whatever I needed to be.

Mrs. Swanson, our DECA advisor, stopped me in the hall. “Margaret! I heard about your friend. I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to answer this. Thanks sounded wrong.

“I know how you feel,” she said, but when I looked in her eyes, they didn’t go back and back. They stopped, right where I was looking. “But I hope you can remember, he’s in a better place.”

I kind of wanted to kick her. This made me so mad, even though she was trying to be nice. It sounded so smug and sure. She couldn’t know such a thing; no one could. And I wanted you in this place. We needed you here. This was a pretty fucking best place, thanks.

But then, at lunch, Severin Gyles’s friend Ramone came up to me.

Ever since that kiss, Severin had been ignoring me as if he didn’t know who I was, as if he’d never had his tongue in my mouth.

Maybe he didn’t know who I was. Yet there was Ramone, holding his lunch tray as I held mine, before we sat down.

“I just wanted to say…Me and my family, we’ve all been thinking about you and your boyfriend and your families.

” Ramone—he’d never really talked to me before.

I had no idea what his family was like, or where he even lived.

Yet there were these people, you know, who had me and you and all of us in their thoughts.

“It’s just fucked. It’s seriously fucked. ”

My eyes pricked with tears, as if eyes recognize truth even before the rest of you does. “It is,” I managed to say.

He moved down the table to eat with his friends, and I moved to our end.

I saw him down there, plucking the pickle from his cheeseburger, as you would on an ordinary day.

Oh, God, right then, his understanding made me want to set down my anxiety and just trust. It made me want to…

Okay, okay, connect. I couldn’t, though.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t. But what he’d said had mattered.

At the end of the day, I was exhausted. It had been a grief video game, dodging, weaving, hiding, plodding through a maze where snipers waited. I had the day off, because this was enough, making it through to the bell. Addy dropped me at Maurice’s.

“I’ll check on you later,” she said. She’d been sending texts throughout the days. Sometimes just an emoji—a whale, an ice cream cone.

Maurice was at work, but Sandrine was there. She opened the door, wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt stained with something purple. Grape juice, maybe. You loved grape juice, and we always gave you shit about it, because it was gross, and no one else liked it.

“Grape?” I pointed.

She shut her eyes so she wouldn’t cry. It was grape juice, all right. It took her a few seconds, but she opened them again. “Mario Kart?”

“Sure.”

The cords were in a jumble, not wrapped up all neat like before, and there was a cup of coffee on the table that looked like it had grown cold, the milk settled in a cosmic swirl on top. The couch cushions were bunched up like she’d been there awhile.

I was Baby Rosalina, as per usual, and she was Bowser, Arthur’s old favorite.

I didn’t ask her about the record deal, what was happening and when, or maybe even if.

Or how Janite was doing, or your aunt, or your friends.

And I didn’t talk to her about what still weighed on me most. I wanted to.

I wanted to keep talking and talking about it, about breaking up with you, sort of.

If we had or hadn’t. If you’d gotten that last text.

If I’d hurt you enough for your heart to break.

If this was my fault, because it felt like it.

No matter what anyone said, it did. If you were going to be gone like this, if I had no choice in the matter, the thing I needed, so badly needed, was for you to know I was sorry and that I loved you. Love you, always.

At one point, Sandrine said, “I missed his call because I was at Taco Time.” I could see it, how that weighed on her most, how she wanted to keep talking and talking about that.

And I understood something else—that nothing I said then would fix it, her certainty that she’d done something to harm you.

Sandrine and I were there together, in that place of deep need and the unfinished business of love.

I realized it: We were haunted. Not by you (I wish), but by ourselves, what we hadn’t done.

By those unanswered questions, too. What could we do now?

Was there even a what that existed? There had to be a way!

How do you send love to someone who is no longer here?

How do you resolve a mystery that only one missing person can explain?

It was you we needed to connect with, and that was impossible.

I held her hand.

“God,” she said. “He used to hide my phone just to annoy me, all the time, and I’d get so pissed at him. He’d do that high, piercing shriek-laugh, and I’d want to whack him. Now I’d give anything for him to be here hiding my phone.”

I didn’t answer. We just zoomed around in that cartoon land, not even racing or playing the game, circling as if we were lost.

“I told him to go,” I said to Winnifred Evans.

I’d told her this many times now, too. She was the one person who allowed me to repeat it again and again.

“I was angry at him. I told him to go, and he did.” I was trying and trying to give her all the evidence that this was my fault, but she just sat calmly in her leather swivel chair.

“You’ve heard of the stages of grief? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance?”

I nodded. Sure, I had. Health class, junior year. They just seemed like words. It was all that and more, all the time, all at once.

“I’m convinced there should be another one,” Winnifred Evans said. “Guilt.”

I scrunched my nose. I doubted this particular guilt was universal. This guilt was actually guilty, a hundred percent.

“I’m going to guess, Margaret, that every person in his life is feeling some version of that. Guilty and responsible. Full of regret. Worried they hadn’t been good enough, hadn’t done right by their beloved Mars. A hundred instances of If only I’d…”

“I just need him to know I love him.” My whole self wrenched. “Do you think he knew?”

“I have no doubt you showed him that while he was here.” Well, I had doubt. “And I think it’s an ongoing longing after a death, to somehow convey our love. To continue to do that.”

“But how do you?”

“Hmm,” she said, as she always did when she was taking something in.

“People have been struggling with that one forever. The Taj Mahal, way back in sixteen hundred something? That young woman recently, with her late father’s record collection?

” I shrugged. I hadn’t heard about it. “He left her his albums. Ten thousand of them. She began to play them online, to about half a million listeners now.”

I didn’t have ten thousand of your records to play.

I didn’t even have one record. I stared at my fingernails.

I wondered if those weird ridges meant I had some heart condition I didn’t know about.

Lately, in my chest, I’d felt the actual beating of it.

Too fast, maybe. Fluttering. A squeezing that meant something was badly wrong.

Just thinking about that squeezing made it hard to breathe. “I feel like I’m drowning,” I said.

“The wave comes in, but it goes back out again, remember?”

It’s what she always said about anxiety in general. “But this wave is huge. And I’m lost out here at sea! It’s too much.”

“The waves won’t always be this huge,” she said. She was wearing her glasses, which made it hard to see her eyes. I wanted to see if they went on and on, or if they just stopped. I guess I wanted to know if I could trust what she was telling me, because right now I didn’t believe her.

“Have you been through this?” I asked. She rarely talked about herself. She always steered my questions back toward me. But sometimes I needed to know that she wasn’t bigger and more, but that we were the same.

“Anyone who’s lived awhile has experienced loss. Been on that sea, right? The sea of grief? But your voyage is uniquely yours. And your lost voyager was one of a kind, too.”

I started to cry. Sob. Again, again. I remembered this fact I’d read once: That we have an ocean inside us. That, same as the Earth, we are 70 percent salt water.

Winnifred Evans just sat with me as my body experienced this unbearable pain.

She handed me the tissue box. I wondered how many times she’d handed over that box or one like it.

Before you left us, I never thought much about grief, how much a part of our lives it is.

Everyone’s life. That should have been on the Golden Record.

So much of what made us most us couldn’t be on it, could it?

I was struck again and again by that. Loss and love—it couldn’t be truly captured in photos or even in music.

I left Winnifred Evans’s office, but I couldn’t leave the building yet.

I lingered in the waiting room, sat in the chair I’d been in that first time we met.

No one else was in there. I looked over at your chair until you appeared, slouching down, wearing those jeans and your yellow sweatshirt.

I saw your black curls springing every direction.

The smile that went all the way to your eyes, without a doubt.

And then I saw you walking to the watercooler. The sag of your jeans on your butt. The tumbling cups, reaching for the one that had rolled under the love seat. The watercooler sending up its big, burping bubble.

Glug, you’d said, and I smiled, even now.

Your voyage is uniquely yours. And your lost voyager was one of a kind, too.

Voyage.

Voyager.

Maybe that’s why I did it. The girl with her dad’s albums, too—her with my same need, plus that word, record.

The hollow fact that I didn’t even have one record of yours, of you.

It wasn’t a plan, not yet. It was barely even an idea.

If I’d known what it would lead to, I’d have been shocked.

I probably wouldn’t have done it. But I got out my phone.

I covered the lens, because I only wanted the sound.

I put a little cup on the tray of the watercooler. I pressed the red record button, and pulled the lever.

Glug.

It wasn’t the first thing you said to me, but it was the first time I heard you laugh.