Chapter 8 #3
“Go to sleep,” Dean whispers, and I can’t get a good read on his reaction. I pretend to try for a few minutes, closing my eyes, and sitting still, but I feel too restless. I fuss with my coat, and I crumple my tote bag.
“I can’t,” I announce to no one in particular.
“You never answered my question from earlier,” Dean whispers.
“What question?” I ask, only vaguely knowing what he’s talking about. It’s tempting to fidget and change the topic to something else, but I don’t interrupt his train of thought.
“Do you think there’s someone else out there for you?
” He asks. Our eyes meet across the center console, and his are soft and warm, lit up by the light of the GPS.
He quickly turns his head back to the road, and I want to say no in response because that’s the easy answer, but I don’t give in. Does he think it could be him?
“I don’t know,” I whisper back. “I want to hope there is.”
“Hope can be a powerful thing.” He responds, his grip on the steering wheel tightening, his eyes focusing on the yellow lines and tire marks ahead of us.
“Sometimes it’s the only thing that kept me going,” I admit.
From the hope that I wasn’t rotten to the core with a mental illness that controlled my waking minutes to the hope that I’d one day recover from the loss of Andy and love again, hope fueled my every move.
“I…” Dean starts, but nothing else comes out of his mouth. His brow is furrowed, his concentration seemingly on the road, but there must be a million things going through his head. “I don’t know how you made it to the other side of this.”
“Have you ever swam across a pond?” I ask him.
“No. Have you?”
“I did once. The summer after Andy died. I was practically an antisocial hermit at that point, and I wasn’t feeling human, and I was desperate to feel something, anything.
” I look out the window, towards the darkness.
Thin, bone-like trees barrel past us at 70 miles per hour.
“I don’t know why I chose the pond. It was so cold, for late June. It was frigid, even.”
“Yeah?”
“I was floating on my back, in the middle of the water, surrounded only by water for a mile. And when it’s lapping at your face, it feels like you’ll never get across,” I take a breath.
I’ve never told this to anyone. “I wished the pond would’ve just swallowed me whole.
This was even before I knew what was wrong with me.
I wished that the water would just envelop me and take me away to somewhere I’d never have to deal with the perpetuity of loss.
The endlessness of losing someone again. I wished it was me who died.”
Dean nods his head.
“I was getting tired. And I wish I could say I saw, like, a dragonfly or a butterfly or some other symbolic bullshit that let me know Andy was still with me. But I didn’t.
I was out there for hours, and it never came.
The waves just kept coming. They didn’t care,” I sigh.
“I swam the rest of the way to shore, anyway. Because I needed to see what was on the other side. Feel the rocks on the shore and the sun on my face.”
Dean doesn’t say anything, but I know he’s listening.
“That’s how I kept going. Today might be bad, and tomorrow too. But at least tomorrow is not today. Because I deserve to see what’s coming next.”
“And here you are,” He says quietly.
“Here I am.”
I close my eyes, and try.
When I wake, we’re in a small neighborhood with dimly lit bungalows and ranch houses.
We see who must be Sierra sitting on the curb in front of a small house, illuminated only by the minivan’s headlights.
Her tiny outfit of a sparkle tube top and short shorts, and lack of a coat, suggests a house party, presumably where she got drunk.
“Get in the car!” Dean hollers out the window. She scrambles to get up, hair flying, picking up her backpack. She tumbles into the back seat with a bang.
“Turn the heat up, I’m fucking freezing!” She hollers at Dean, smacking the back of his head rest and seat.
“You’re such an idiot sometimes!” Dean hollers back. “Mom is going to kill you, if I don’t kill you first.”
I turn up the heat dial all the way, and then the fan all the way for Dean.
“Mom will never know. She won’t even wake up.
She doesn’t even know I’m gone. I’m totally sober now.
” I peek at her through the breaks in the headrest. Sierra sinks back into the seat, hugging her backpack, shivering.
Her dark hair is strewn all over her face and I see the sparkles of some eyeshadow, even in the dark.
“Yes, she will. Because I’m going to wake her up and tell her as soon as we get there.” Dean revs the car engine and puts the car back into drive. “You’re not sober.”
“Please, don’t. Cause she will kill me,” Sierra relents and pleads. “Sitting outside on the curb in this weather was punishment enough. I think I have frostbite.”
“You don’t have frostbite,” Dean remarks.
“How do you know that? I think I do!” Sierra laughs bitterly, clearly annoyed with her older brother, even though she called him for rescue.
“It’s 40 degrees here. You don’t have frostbite,” Dean merges back onto the highway.
“She could have hypothermia,” I suggest. “You can still get hypothermia in cool temperatures. She was out there for a while.”
“See, I could!” Sierra agrees with me. “Thanks! Who the fuck are you?” She cranes her head around the headrest.
“You—not helping.” Dean looks at me, and then turns back to look at Sierra briefly. “You—watch your language.”
“Who is your little friend?” Sierra says with a playful voice. “Is she your new girlfriend?”
“I’m Madeline,” I introduce myself, ignoring Dean’s watchful, evil eye.
“Are you his new girlfriend?” Sierra repeats, clearly fishing for information about Dean’s personal life, anything to get the conversation off of her and her obvious drunkenness.
“No,” I say at the same time as Dean says “No, none of your business,” I’m blushing, and I thank god it’s dark and neither of them can tell.
“Then why are you here?” Sierra asks, irritated with the lack of an answer.
“She’s my friend.” Dean gives her an answer.
“Does Eliza know she’s here?” Sierra pries for information.
“Yes, she does, actually,” Dean barks out a laugh. “Eliza and I aren’t dating anymore, anyway.”
“I even met Eliza,” I say, pouring gasoline into the fire.
“Wait, so, you guys broke up for real?” Sierra gasps excitedly. “Mom isn’t gonna be happy about that.”
“We were never—we weren’t really dating, Ro….” Dean tries to clarify.
“Tell Eliza that,” Sierra opens up her phone. “She’s been posting super depressing IG stories all week since you didn’t show up for dinner.” She shows me a photo with Taylor Swift lyrics as the caption.
I can’t help but giggle. “What a heartbreaker you are, Dean,”
“I know, right?” Sierra laughs.
“You two. Be quiet. I need to focus on driving and I can’t with you two jabbering,” Dean snaps.
“No,” Sierra says. “Tell me more about you, Madeline.”
“Well…” I start, thinking about what on earth I’m going to tell this young girl about myself that I don’t also want Dean to know. “I’m from York Falls.”
“Oh, that’s where Dean just moved.” She says. “Are you guys, like neighbors?”
“No,” Dean answers. “We are not.”
“How do you know each other then?”
Both of us pause. Are we going to stick with the story we planned on, re: reaching for the same cereal box? Or are we going to give the truth? “We met online,” Dean says after a tick of time, and this clearly tickles Sierra.
“Online? Like a dating app?” She asks, laughing like we’ve just told her the funniest thing on the planet, and I don’t know if it’s because it’s actually funny or because she’s just drunk. “You guys are just like, hooking up?”
“Not really—” I start as my face twists into confusion.
“No,” Dean grits his teeth. “Enough.”
“What app did you meet on?” She asks, turning back to me.
“Tinder?” I throw it out there, and this sends her into another fit of giggles, this was clearly the wrong answer because Dean groans.
“You guys!” Sierra laughs. “I’m not stupid. You’re totally hooking up. Mom is going to kill you, too. You dumped Eliza for a hookup.”
“I’m not just a hookup!” I defend myself. “I’m—”
“Be quiet. Both of you.” Dean says through clenched teeth. “Please.” He says exasperatedly.
I cross my arms, getting irritated the more Sierra laughs. “You don’t have to worry about me.” I say finally, smacking my head on the back of my headrest, closing my eyes again.
“It’s just funny how Dean and Eliza—” Sierra laughs again.
“Sierra. For the love of all that is holy, shut up,” Dean interrupts her, and this gets her to be quiet.
“Fine,” The back of the van is lit up by her phone. “But when Mom sees her, and hears that you brought a hookup to the house, I’ll say I told you so.”
Two hours later after fielding drunk questions from Sierra, who has since passed out, we pull down a long gravel driveway, up to a small two-story house.
It’s a quaint house, but it’s hard to see in the dark.
We’re surrounded by woods, and it’s terribly quiet.
I can hear an owl hoot somewhere and I can see so many more stars in the sky than usual.
Dean gets out of the car first, pulling the door open for Sierra. I get out next, and I follow Dean up the steps of the porch. While he’s digging for his key to open the front door, I turn to watch Sierra pull some icicles off the porch covering.
“Wait, Madeline,” Sierra grabs my shoulder, turning me side to side to get a better look at my face in the porch light. “Are you…Madeline McKinney?”