Chapter 42
Greta
“Get a bathing suit and a towel. We’ll buy something to eat on the way.” Those were Will’s exact words when he showed up at my door unexpectedly that Saturday morning.
“On the way to where?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about that. Come on, let’s go.”
After more than two hours driving, we now find ourselves in front of a crystal-clear river beneath a blue sky. Nature is all around us.
“You first,” I say.
“Maybe not.”
“You picked the place. It’s only fair.”
Will sighs with resignation. The water’s freezing. I already know because I’ve sunk my feet in and had to step back. So here we are, in a dumb argument about who should go in first.
“Fine,” he concedes.
“I love it when you’re reasonable.”
“But…”
“What?”
“I’m scared to do it alone.”
“What the…?” I can’t finish the phrase before he throws me over his left shoulder. “Will! WILL! No!”
It’s too late. He jumps. We’re flying, we almost seem to hang a few seconds in the air, and then we fall.
Sharp, intense, the cold takes my breath away.
I clutch his body as we rise to the surface.
I want to kiss him and hit him at the same time.
I tell him as much, and Will coughs, trying hard not to laugh.
I let him go and swim a few strokes against the current.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to warm myself up!” I say.
He follows me, grinning. “I can think of a more fun way to do that.”
I turn to him with my arms outstretched and the water flows around me downriver. Unlike me, unlike everyone, it knows where it’s going.
“You talk a big game, Will, but…”
He comes around behind me and pulls me into him, kissing my right shoulder, the nape of my neck, my ear, where he stops.
“Are you trying to say I’m all talk and no action?”
“Maybe.” I close my eyes.
“Do you still think that now?” He moves his hips, and I can feel behind me how excited he is.
Suddenly I’m warm despite the freezing water because there’s something in the way he moves, in his deep voice, that sets me on fire.
I imagine butter melting in a pan and I remember when I told him I liked him that night we shut down the bar.
I feel just as I did then. He’s the pan, he’s hot, burning, I always knew he would be, but there I am, melting inside him.
“Just a little,” I say to get under his skin.
“Are you for real?” His hand slips under my bikini bottom and touches the exact place that makes my legs tremble. “What about now?” He pulls me closer.
“Well…”
Then he stops. His fingers are still down there, but they’re not moving. He nibbles my earlobe. I could kill him.
“Think, Greta,” he murmurs.
“You’re an idiot.” I can feel the anticipation in my stomach, the yearning, the restrained emotion. “An idiot who can back up what he says.”
“Now that’s more like it.”
He kisses my neck, and again his fingers start moving in tiny circles.
I can’t believe I can feel all this burning when the water around me is so cold.
I lean my head against his chest as the pleasure turns sharp and pierces me.
I moan and feel his lips against my cheek.
Then I open my eyes. The sky is deep blue. With a grin, I turn.
“Now what am I supposed to do with you?”
“That’s your call. I’m yours to do with as you please.”
“Thanks, but I’ve got enough to deal with on my own. Imagine me taking care of both of us when we know how much I like to make things complicated. Still, though…”
“Keep going.” His eyes are glowing.
“It occurs to me that you could maybe take off your swimsuit. If you dare. Unless you’re scared some perfect family might show up wanting to picnic and you’d have to get out of the water naked as the day you were born.”
Will smiles and soon I’m watching him toss his bathing suit toward the bank. I laugh. I love it when he does things like that. I love feeling I need no one else just then. I love acting like an idiot with him.
“Screw those perfect families,” he says.
I can’t say for sure, but I doubt anyone’s going to interrupt us. This isn’t exactly a tourist spot, and there are trees everywhere. I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him.
“You’re still a bad boy.”
“No.” He pulls away. He’s being serious.
“Will, it was just a joke.”
He sinks his face in the hollow of my neck and stays there until I start stroking him under the water and feel every inch of him go tense.
He’s hard. I wrap my hands around him down there, he murmurs something I can’t hear, and soon he’s pulling the string of my bikini top and it falls into the water.
We edge toward the bank, kissing the whole time. There’s nothing like the way two people kiss when they first fall in love. The whole world seems to start and end on the other person’s lips. It’s such a simple act, so primitive, but it’s addictive, this need to have more, feel more, know more.
He slides my bottoms down and I wrap my legs around him. And we rock back and forth, naked, the water streams around us on its long, long path to the sea. The sun heats my back, and I feel good. So good that I’m terrified this could be a mirage.
We keep kissing, and I touch him, I touch him the way he touched me before, slow at first, then faster as his breathing speeds up, and when he finishes, he grunts into my ear, almost as if he were frustrated by how quickly this pleasure came and drained away.
We hold each other until the heat dissipates and the cold overtakes us again.
“We should get out.”
“Yeah, come on,” he responds.
He picks me up softly to help me out, then he climbs out himself. We look for our swimsuits, dress, and lie back on our towels. My skin is cool and tight as the sun dries me off. Next to me, Will’s breath alternates, now shallow, now deep.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“You’re breathing weird.”
“I’m breathing deep. This was just one of those moments, one of those moments when I’m grateful for the fact that I can breathe.” He turns and looks at me, amused. “Maybe it has something to do with you.”
“How so?”
“Let’s just say you make me happy.”
No one’s ever told me something so simple and yet so grand.
I should feel flattered, but instead there’s some other sensation in my stomach I can’t put a name to, as if a frightened fish were swimming around inside me.
Maybe it’s fear, maybe anxiety at the thought that someone else’s happiness depends on me.
“Happiness can be fleeting. It can even be an illusion. It can’t last, otherwise you’d never know it was there.
It’s like falling in love. Something so intense has to stabilize at some point. Otherwise, we’d go insane.”
“That makes sense,” he says.
“Happiness is an asymptote.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what it sounds like. I’ve always liked that word. Asymptote. Something you want, something you’re constantly approaching, but something you can never actually reach.”
Will nods, touches my hand, closes his eyes again.
I study him in silence and imagine him as an ancient Greek sculpture lying there in the sun, the perfect lines of his body carved in stone.
If I had to draw him, I’d start at his jawline because it defines his essence, so masculine.
Then I’d draw his cheeks, which still bear traces of the acne he had as a teenager, and his nose, clean and precise.
Then I’d stop at his brow, the center of all his worries.
I know they’re still there. I know. I can’t see them, but I can feel them.
Will’s problems won’t go away just because he decides to tell me about them.
I don’t know what he thinks of himself now, after walking away from his city, his love, his friendships, his family, his dreams, his yearnings.
I’d like to dig deeper, at least sometimes, but there are other moments when I prefer not to touch anything, to proceed with caution, to just hold him as though love really did conquer all, as if you could dose it out like medicine.
And I guess that’s what we’ve been doing over the past weeks.
Letting ourselves be carried along. Spending perfect days like these, perfect nights like when we celebrated his birthday looking at the Perseids and eating pasta.
Enjoying the present after burying the past and not thinking too much about the future.
“Happiness is traveling without a bag,” I whisper.
“Yeah.” He opens his eyes. “And feeling free.”
“And a giant cone of chocolate ice cream.”
Will yawns and stretches his arms out. “Happiness finally comes when you say to hell with being happy.”
“No doubt. I one hundred percent agree,” I say, but then I add after a few moments, “I do want to be happy, though.”
“Me too.”
We eat some food we bought at a gas station on the way over: chips, sandwiches, two cans of Coke.
Then we walk around for a while. We’re holding hands; it’s perfect, the way every simple thing in the world is perfect, the tiny flowers around us with their white and yellow petals, the cloudless sky.
We don’t talk—we don’t need to. I don’t even want to talk.
I don’t want to break the precious silence that surrounds us.
I don’t know what will become of Will and me, but I do know that, even years in the future, when I think of summer days, this will be the one I remember.
Night’s started falling when I look up later and see the road and realize I’ll be home soon. I spent half the ride asleep, being the worst traveling companion you could imagine.
“You were snoring,” Will says.
“Liar.”
“I’ll record you next time.”
His phone rings, high-pitched. I guess it’s the default ringtone. Will looks down, ignores it, seems even to pretend not to hear it. I see a name on the screen: Lena.
“You’re not going to pick it up?”
“Nope.”
“Let me repeat that: The woman you were going to marry is calling you and you’re not going to pick up?” Something about it makes me uncomfortable.
“No.”
“Try and be less communicative next time. I see you’ve decided to go back to the old Will who only seemed to know one-syllable answers.
” I hate that, him cutting off a part of himself.
I’m sure this is painful to him, but I can’t help it, and I can’t accept all parts of him if he can’t learn to accept all parts of himself.
“I know what she wants to say. She’s going to move in with her boyfriend because she’s pregnant and the apartment on the Upper East Side is a one-bedroom and it’s too small for her now.”
“Why should you care?”
“Because all my stuff’s there. I’ve never been back.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. Are you surprised?”
“I mean… How are you supposed to begin a new stage when you haven’t closed the old one?”
He shakes his head. “Trust me, that part of my life is over.”
“Is it really so hard to go to New York and get your things? I mean… It could even be nice, you know? Like saying your goodbye to the city.”
Disconcerted, he replies, “Are you serious? Oh, shit, you are serious. Fine, if it makes you feel better, I’ll answer the email she sent me last week and I’ll congratulate her and tell her she can throw all my shit out.”
After a minute’s silence, I respond: “Will, I think you’re scared. I don’t know whether you don’t want to face what you were or don’t want to reveal who you are now. But I have the sense that you’re hiding.”
He rolls his eyes, but I don’t care. I’m not going to change my mind. When we enter Ink Lake, he tells me something that makes me forget all that, something he knows I’ll find it impossible to resist.
“There’re two boxes left. Want to open one?”
I’m nervous, and that makes me feel guilty somehow.
What will life be like when there’s nothing left alive of Lucy in the world—nothing left to discover?
I remember the person I was when this started, stuck, monotonous, bored of my own existence, and it surprises me how, in one sense, nothing has changed, and in another, everything has.
Sure, I still don’t have a steady job, I still don’t have a clear sense of the future, I’m still dependent on my parents.
But when I look in the mirror, I see possibility, even if it’s off in the distance.
I can feel the cracks in myself, but they don’t go all the way to my core, and I’m starting to realize I can patch them over and start to grow.
“Sure. Let’s do it.”
Will turns off toward the RV park. We walk across the gravel, go inside, and pull the game out from under his bed.
I see the corner of a piece of shiny paper, almost like gift wrapping, but I ignore it when he opens the box and takes out a little note that tells him which letter to give me.
He passes it to me and sits down on the bed to wait.
I settle down next to him and open it. I can almost hear my sister’s charming, sweet voice in my ear:
Little Greta:
Remember when Christmas would come and our aunts and uncles and Grandpa would give us money?
You’d spend it a week later because you were always so impatient and I would always set it aside.
I don’t know for what, but material things just always seemed trivial to me and I never really needed much stuff.
Remember how I worked with Marge at the café that summer?
Well, I saved everything I made. So here’s the money.
It’s yours. You’ll find it under the loose board in my room, you know the one.
I won’t tell you what to spend it on, but I hope (I believe) you’ll choose something worthwhile.
The game’s close to over.
I wish I could see you now.
Love you,
Lucy
The ache in my heart remains there when Will hugs me and kisses my forehead. I stay there a moment, catch my breath, and let the knot in my throat dissipate. Or try to, because it’s still there, stubborn, hard as granite.
Will takes me home. I find my parents in the living room watching the news. Mom’s on the sofa, Dad’s in the armchair. It’s a typical family scene, and for that very reason, it surprises me. It doesn’t seem possible, but there they are, together.
I climb the stairs, but instead of going to my room, I go to Lucy’s.
I push the desk and crouch down. The first time, I pick the wrong board, but the second one, I hit the bull’s-eye and lift it.
Inside is a cloth bag. I smile, imagining her thinking up this game, making sure every detail is right.
There’s money inside. Lots. She must not have spent a single cent that summer, and everything else she scraped together over the years is there too.
And I know exactly what to do with it.