Chapter Twenty-One #3
“Oh hey, beautiful. I was just about to come see if you were around,” he said. He leaned against the door frame, wearing a
soft blue T-shirt and some faded jeans. He had some stubble on his face and was very tan.
How dare he smell so good? How dare his muscles look so taught and perfect, at a time like this?
But I still felt the deep shame of rejection in my gut and didn’t react to the way he’d called me beautiful, the smell, the sight of his collarbone.
“Our stove is broken,” I deadpanned. I didn’t smile, though it broke me not to.
“Is something wrong?”
“Yeah, my shrimp is going to go bad.”
“No, I mean.” He leaned in toward me, but I stepped back out onto the porch. “Are you mad at me?”
Obviously. I let my silence answer as he followed me back to my cabin.
“Hey, Arlene,” Dave said, as I stomped inside. I was aware I was acting like a two-year-old, but I could not stop myself from
behaving this way.
“Oh, hey, David,” she said, looking up from the puzzle on the kitchen table over her reading glasses. “How was your camping
trip?”
“You were camping?”
Dave looked at me curiously, like I wasn’t speaking English.
“Yeah, I took Finn to Algonquin Park. Didn’t you get my note?”
“No, I didn’t get a note.”
“I gave it to your mom,” he said.
“Mom?”
“Oh shit, I must’ve forgotten to give it to you.” She looked around and found it inside her novel on the nightstand. It was
a small white envelope. “Ah, here it is.”
The rage I felt was so strong, it was only matched by my embarrassment to be feeling that kind of anger in front of Dave.
I grabbed the note from her hand and went outside to read it. It was written in black ink on a scrap of birchbark, the same
way we used to write to each other at camp. My hands shook as I read it.
Dear Goldy,
Last night was so meaningful to me. I can’t stop thinking of your lips, of the way you smirk when you tease me, the sounds
you made. It’s enough to throw me over the edge. I’m going camping with Finn for a few days, out of cell range. I will miss
you. I forgot to tell you that whenever I would miss you, which was a lot, I would watch Gilmore Girls because I remembered how much you loved it. It’s not my kind of show, but it made me happy to know I was watching it and
that you might be, too. To paraphrase one of the better moments of dialogue, I am all in.
Love, Buckeye
All in was underlined three times. I started to cry. I wandered up to the barn and climbed the fence and sat there, trying to calm
down. Snow approached me, nudging her nose at my legs. I petted her beautiful neck as I calmed my breathing. Eventually I
felt the humiliating presence of Dave behind me. My whole face grew hot. I turned to look at him and it was so hard to meet
his eyes. I spoke to the tufts of dry grass at his feet.
“I thought you’d left me. Again. With no explanation. And I’ve been going crazy.”
“Oh shit, no wonder you were pissed,” he said, looking at me like he might a seven-year-old with a skinned knee.
“Have you not heard of a thing called text messages?”
He laughed. “I try not to use my phone at all when I’m with Finn. I kept it in the car when we were camping, and the battery
died. I’m just charging it now, actually.”
“I’m so embarrassed,” I said, wiping my tears away.
“I told your mom. Did you ask her if she knew where I was?”
“My mom and I aren’t that close, despite being physically proximate right now. I don’t share anything . . . private with her,” I admitted. “She thinks Ben is my boyfriend.”
He put a hand on my leg, petting my knee the way I’d been petting Snow’s mane. It was both awkward and kind of nice. Snow
put her nose over the fence, so he started petting both of us. He looked at me, still straddling the high wooden fence, and
furrowed his brow.
“I really hurt you back then,” he said, in a surprised tone. “I think I didn’t really realize how much until right now. I
thought you were so beautiful, so talented, that the loss of me wouldn’t matter all that much, and my mind was so fuzzy from
grief, I was so mad at myself. I think, ironically, it made me self-centred,” he said.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “I was a mess. I barely passed any of my classes the semester after camp. I had to go on Zoloft.”
I closed my eyes, attempting to blink away the memories. I tried to never think about that year. The way I hardly ever left
my dorm room, how hard it was to eat. Then I thought about how awful I had just behaved, how I allowed this misunderstanding
to ruin me for days, from the instant heartbreak at the thought of him leaving me. That wasn’t a solid place to stand on.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“This wasn’t just a hookup for me, it felt significant, me and you. You feel significant.”
He put both hands on my legs. “I feel that way about you, too.” I was relieved to hear him say that, but the humiliation factor
made me feel like my skin was burning up.
“But maybe we made a mistake,” I said, still reeling with embarrassment about my behaviour. I didn’t want him to agree with
me, though; that wasn’t what I really feeling. Those were just my fears. His face fell.
“I can back off, if you want me to. We don’t have to rush anything. But I would not call the other night a mistake.”
I felt so wounded, I heard myself saying all the opposite things to what I was feeling. I tried to make my words sound nonchalant, confident, to overcompensate for how vulnerable I’d just been with him, when, let’s face it, he was basically a stranger still.
“Well, I mean, there’s a bit of a time limit. I’m not here much longer. Then what happens?”
“I don’t know,” he said, as though realizing the summer had a time limit only in that moment. “My life has been so stressful
lately, trying to parent from a distance, deal with my ex. Seeing you is the best part of my day lately, and I suppose I never
wanted to think about the fact that it’s temporary.”
“But what do you want? What would it look like, if you got to decide?”
He furrowed his brow. I wanted him to say, I don’t care, as long as we get to be together. We can make it work. People do all sorts of crazy things when they’re in love!
“I don’t know,” he said. His face evened out to utter blankness.
This infuriated me further. I felt like I was being rejected again. Though he was probably just being logical. Our lives were quite different. How would they look together? I wanted him to be curious, to use that imagination I admired so much. But his face continued to be blank.
Then he turned away from me, looked up at the sky. The moment felt unbearable. I hopped off the fence, stumbled a little as
I landed. If Dave and I were going to make a go of it, I needed to know exactly what he felt about me, more than just a scrawled
quote from a TV show on some tree bark.
“You know, dating a dad, it’s not the same as dating someone like Ben,” he said. “And it’s fun out here in the summer, it’s
romantic, with lots to do, but winter is a whole different story. Small-town life is small. Your life is bigger than this.”
I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to reply. That I could handle anything he threw my way? I didn’t want to throw all my cards down unless I knew he was feeling just as strongly as I was. “It sounds like you’re making excuses, that maybe you don’t really want this, or feel . . .”
“No, that’s not it. It’s just, I’m not him anymore, the guy in the canoe.”
“I’m not that girl, either. This isn’t just nostalgia for me.”
He gave me a skeptical look. I felt suddenly as though I had said too much. I was out in the open, no armour.
“So, maybe let’s cool it down,” I said, “while we’re here. Spend the rest of the summer contemplating what we really want,
you know?”
He nodded. Gripped the top plank of the fence with both hands and looked down. “OK,” he whispered.
“So we’ll revisit our feelings, before we leave the cabins.”
“Yeah. I mean, we can just be friends while we’re here,” he said, his voice brightening as he spoke. “Get our lives together,
I mean, both of us, we’re in a kind of transitional time and place.”
“It would be good to, you know, figure out what we want on our own, and then decide if that works, like, together.”
I felt like we were brokering a deal, being logical. It made no emotional sense, but we had to be mature about it, didn’t
we?
“Hug?”
“Yeah.”
We embraced. I started to cry a little into his chest, and then pulled back.
“This is the mature thing to do, right?” I said.
“Right.” But he didn’t sound convinced.
“I guess I should go back and make dinner.”
“Yeah, look, I’m sorry I’m not being articulate, it’s just a lot to process.”
I nodded, wanting him to reach for me, draw me close, make all the tension go away. I wanted him to parrot what he’d said
in his birchbark note, that he was all in. All in implies one has thought about the future, or at least, thought about the next few weeks. Instead, he crossed his arms. His face looked like he was doing a math problem.
“I fixed the pilot light.”
“You’re a man of many talents,” I said, and then started to cry again. What was happening to me?
He reached out and squeezed my hand, refusing to let go until I pulled it away.
“You OK, Goldy?” Whenever he called my Goldy, I felt alight from within. Just a sparkly bug in an expanding sky. Insane. But
what were romantic nicknames and birchbark love notes if they didn’t come with being able to talk about real life? We could
not continue to act as if we were still those two young kids in a canoe; the future was already here. We were in it.
“I have no idea,” I said, as I walked away. I felt my body move toward the cabin before I’d consciously decided to. I turned
briefly, watching as he unlatched the fence to join Snow.
My mom acted like I was insane for being mad at her, which only compounded my fury. I couldn’t explain what had happened with
Dave and the reason for being so mad, but it didn’t stop me from launching into all the reasons I’d ever been mad at her.