Chapter 16 Lindy
Lindy
David was in the hospital in Boston for three weeks. Lindy wasn’t allowed to go see him. Her parents and the Kauffmans agreed,
claiming his doctors agreed, too. Her father, with uncharacteristic sternness, added, “So, don’t you dare think you’re going
to hop a bus and go down there, young lady. They will not let you in.”
Lindy boycotted the piano. At first, out of sadness; then, out of protest. Her mother was onto her. The first three mornings,
Greta brought her cinnamon toast in bed. After that, she said Lindy needed to get up and at ’em. “No,” Lindy said. She didn’t
know why. She just felt like the sound of the piano, the feel of the keys under her fingers, would make her scream.
The weirder thing was, she couldn’t bring herself to draw, either.
She said almost nothing to her parents and came downstairs only when they insisted on it for meals, and then her mother got
angry when she would barely eat—but what did she expect? Finally, even Lindy’s father snapped, “Goddammit, we’re trying to
do what’s best for you!” As if that was supposed to be some consolation.
When the sun came out, she went to the beach and lay on the sand with her eyes closed for entire afternoons. Her mind felt blank. But on the other side of that blankness, she felt, would be a new Lindy.
“What are you going to do?” Kate asked tentatively, finding her there. In a floral pink bikini top and cutoffs, her curly,
dark hair twisted up in a straggling bun, Kate looked twenty, not fifteen. Sand grains frosted her knees. Lindy didn’t remember
her looking grown-up two weeks ago.
“I don’t know,” Lindy said, but within the range of possibilities circling her sun-drenched mind—she felt she was waiting
for a corresponding door to swing open, to let the right one inside—was not the thing that Kate thought she might do.
“When you go back to New York,” Kate said, “it would be easy for you just to forget all about him. If you wanted to?”
Lindy sensed a hopeful lilt in her old friend’s voice. Why did everyone seem to think that Lindy was bad for David? That Lindy
was the cause of David’s despair? (Or, in her parents’ case, vice versa.) Lindy knew the opposite was true.
She also knew that, as of that rainy day when she’d found him in the tent, she was the entire reason he was even still alive.
When David got back, there were only three days left in the summer, and Mrs. Kauffman wouldn’t let him out of her sight. Greta
spoke to Mrs. Kauffman on the phone, making her promise that she wouldn’t leave Lindy alone with David, then finally let Lindy
walk over to the yellow cottage to visit him. The late-August sun was shining, Greta’s garden was in full bloom, and the ocean
was a radiant deep blue. Lindy had ironed her hair and put on a new top her mother had bought her in town at Renys last week.
It was a cap-sleeved button-up made of thin cotton in an orange-and-purple plaid. She would never wear it in New York, but
today she wanted to look cheerful. Her toes felt numb with nerves as she walked the wooded gravel cut-through from Innisfree
toward the yellow cottage.
Approaching, she saw him sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch.
As she hurried toward him and up the steps, he stood, seeming taller and paler than ever, and she ran into his arms, burying her face in his black T-shirt.
She’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry, but it was hard work to swallow back the tears that welled.
The clean white cuff of a bandage encircling his wrist shouldn’t have been as shocking as it was, but seeing it made her realize she’d spent three whole weeks hoping that what she knew to be true would end up having been false, a joke, a gag, a nightmare—but it was all real.
At least the scents of laundry soap and maple syrup that she picked up from his T-shirt were a comfort, because these smells meant his mother was taking good care of him, and he was letting her.
David squeezed her arms to push her slightly away and smiled down like he felt sorry for her. “My mom said we can be out here
alone, but she’s going to check on us every five minutes.”
Lindy nodded, looking up at him, overcome with a swell of love not just for him but also for his mother, and for the fact
that Mrs. Kauffman was not following Greta’s instructions to the letter. David’s face looked angular, unfamiliar, and her
stomach lurched at the sight of a scratch on his face. She reached up and touched it before she could think.
“They still let me shave myself, but I have to be watched,” he said. “It’s weird.”
Lindy’s father had instructed her not to question or push David, just to demonstrate acceptance. Now she had to bite her tongue
to keep from asking why he’d hurt himself, if he was feeling better, if there was any chance he might do it again.
“I missed you,” she said instead.
David gave a rueful smile. “I figured you wouldn’t want anything to do with me ever again.”
“Don’t ever think that.” She’d promised herself she would be bold. “I love you.”
David pulled away and sat down in the rocker. He squinted out across the road at where the sun cast glitter across the cove.
“I’m a losing bet, Lindy. That’s one thing I’ve come to understand.”
She folded her arms. Again, it was hard not to cry. “I don’t believe that.”
“I have to go back to Chicago. We’re leaving day after tomorrow.”
Her stomach lurched; she’d thought they had one more day than that. She watched the toe of her beat-up sneaker digging into
the porch floorboard.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and when she looked up at him, she could see he meant for more than just having to leave.
Her father’s advice was drowned out by her desperation to make David see. “What if there was something to look forward to?”
she blurted, because, though she wasn’t sure she believed in God, she had to think there was some reason other than her stupid
wounded pride why she’d hurried into the woods that day in time to save David. If there was a God, it seemed clear to her
now, He had made her rush into the woods because He had big plans for David, who was obviously extraordinary.
David squinted out at the cove again, drumming his fingers on the arm of the rocking chair. Lindy thought of him punching
a hole in his bedroom wall back home. Had anyone patched it? Had his father? “Like what?” he said.
“Brown University! Epistem—whatever!”
David shook his head. “That’s out of reach.”
“It’s not! You would just have to apply! Don’t say it’s out of reach if you haven’t tried. And if it turns out to be out of
reach, then apply to a dozen more schools. In New York, preferably, so I can be near you! It’s your brain, David! You’re so
smart. It needs . . . it needs more out of life. It doesn’t want to give up. It wants the opposite!”
He narrowed his eyes, suspicious—enough of a sign that he wanted to believe in her to make a tiny hope flame in her heart.
“They say I’m really sick, Lindy,” he said.
She stomped her foot. She felt she had nearly gotten through to him; that she just needed to push the rest of the way. “You
can’t give up! Tell your father no about the job.”
He looked up at her. After a moment, he reached to take her hand. “Goddamn,” he said, his eyes soft, and suddenly he was like
the old David again, the David of last summer. “I really love you.”
She squeezed his hand hard. It was all she could do to keep from crying, hearing those words for the first time. And—he was still in there! She had gotten through. “Then you have to try! On days when you don’t feel like trying for you, try for me.”
He squeezed her hand in return, studying her, still looking as if he was trying to decide whether to trust her. Finally, he
gave a slow nod. “They said running is good. I’m supposed to keep running. They put me on some medication. They didn’t give
me a choice. Doesn’t it make you scared?”
“Of course it does!” she said. “But you’re . . . David, I don’t have a choice. My heart is yours. It always has been, and it always will be.”
Tears welled in his eyes then, and she felt him fully surrender, though the only signs were slight: A twitch of his mouth,
a tiny new slope to his shoulders, a soft exhale. “Mine’s yours, too,” he said, squeezing her hand a little tighter.