Chapter 30 #2
“Do you remember your going-away party? Before you left for Harvard?” I close my laptop before hugging it to my chest.
“I remember Henry had to drag you there.”
I flash Beau a heavy side-eye. “Not true. I wanted to see you off. But it was hard for me, and”—I hesitate—“I think that’s when it dawned on me that you were moving across the country with all this fanfare, and I hadn’t even signed up for community college classes.
And I realized how much I was going to miss you. ”
I feel his breath on my temple, a small press of his lips. “I didn’t know.”
It’s silly how much this memory still hurts. “And I asked you to write to me.”
“We talked about this. I was hurt about that stunt Cherry pulled.” He reaches for my laptop and puts it on the nightstand, as if disarming me, before wrapping an arm around my shoulders.
“I know, but you said our lives would be too different. You said it wasn’t worth pretending we’d be friends from across the country when we couldn’t be friends while living next door.
” I don’t know what I’m getting at, but I wonder if he thinks it will be worth staying in each other’s lives from across the state.
He squeezes my shoulders. “Well, I did write you. Every week.”
“What?” I turn my head, and his nose is an inch away from mine. He kisses it.
“That first semester.” He pulls back enough that his face comes into focus. “I missed home so much, and there were all these elitist traditions that I knew you’d find as absurd as I did. I told you all about them and imagined you laughing or sharing some witty barb back. But I never sent them.”
“Why not?” I whisper.
“I couldn’t let myself hold out hope that you’d write me back. I needed to get over you.”
I swallow, mesmerized by his perfect face—which is so familiar and yet all new. I remember being this close to him in the tree house before our first kiss—when we somehow got it all right before everything went wrong.
“Did it work?” I ask.
He hums, and the vibration sinks into my skin. “Not even a little bit.”
Maybe that’s all the reassurance I need for now.
I slide into his lap, and he settles his hands at my hips.
We hover, our faces mere inches apart as I slide his glasses off and place them on the nightstand.
And then his mouth is a promise on mine—warm, reverent, and patient.
We come together and apart, finding new ways to connect, my eyes flicking to his with each retreat, trying to understand what I see in his gaze.
It’s searching and a little desperate. His eyes are so dark that the iris bleeds into the pupil, a bottomless oil well.
It absorbs everything but reveals nothing.
But soon, there’s nothing to see or second-guess.
Our clothes fall away, and his mouth finds every sensitive spot on my skin, his hands untangle my patchwork of nerves until I’m one live wire arcing toward him.
Later, when we drift to sleep to the rhythm of each other’s breathing, all my worries fall to the back of my mind like sediment, and something close to happiness bubbles up.
It feels like my head has just hit the pillow when a shrill ringer pierces the silence.
“Hello?” I rasp into the phone after scrambling for it. The blinds of our hotel room are drawn, and I squint at the red analog clock on the nightstand. Five in the morning.
“Ophelia Day-hill?” The voice on the other end of the line is gravel crunching under tires. Beau tightens his grip around my waist, burying his face into my neck. He mumbles something into my hair, but I don’t make it out.
“Yes?” I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed, preparing for ... I don’t know. An emergency? A quick exit?
“This is Saul Perry. You left your number with my son.”
“Hi ... yes ... hi,” I say again, as my eyes adjust to the dark.
Beau shifts beside me, sitting up against the headboard.
“Oh, shoot,” Saul sighs. “I forgot about the time difference again. I’m in Florida.”
“It’s okay.” I clear the sleep out of my voice. “Thank you for calling.”
“My son left me a strange message last night with your number. And he wouldn’t pick up this morning.” He coughs a few times before recovering. “Is this some kind of paternity suit? Because I got snipped decades ago.”
I laugh. “No, Mr. Perry. I know who my father is, and I believe my mother met you long after I was born.”
He exhales as I give him the highlights, summarizing what I found, the minimal online footprint, my suspicion his ex-girlfriend was my mother. Beau slides out of bed, turns on a desk lamp, and slips into the bathroom. I’m grateful for the gesture of privacy.
“Well, sorry. I didn’t think my Mary had kids—a blessing, really.”
His words land like a dagger—there’s nothing like someone saying it’s a blessing you were abandoned, or that it would have been better if you hadn’t existed at all. But I’m not going to get anywhere if I react emotionally. I channel Beau during an interview. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, she ... I don’t like to speak ill of people, especially if she was your mom. But she had some issues. It caused a lot of conflict with my boys.”
“What kind of issues?” Anger issues, drugs, drinking, what?
He sighs. “I don’t know, really. But she was hard to live with. And we’d fight. I don’t blame her. She was who she was, and I, well, I wasn’t the right match. My boys suffered with all the drama. So I had to choose them, you know?”
A memory flashes in my vision. My mom sprawled on the green bathroom tile, my dad sitting beside her, coaxing her up, brushing her hair away from her face as she stared, unblinking, into the distance. I try to erase the image, but it slithers into my gut, some hybrid of memory and conjuring.
“Any idea where she might be?”
There’s static on his end of the line—the hollow whip of wind through a tunnel. “We didn’t part on good terms. She left town like she came into it a few years earlier, on fire and burning every bridge she passed.”
With that image, I envision my mom barely glancing in her rearview as she abandons her four-year-old daughter to spend Christmas in a hospital—burning her bridge to me forever.
Saul says he’ll call if he remembers anything else, but I don’t know whether more vague horror stories will be helpful. A few minutes after he excuses himself and hangs up, Beau emerges from the bathroom.
“Who was that?”
“That guy’s dad. The one who dated my mom. He has no idea where she is.”
The bed sinks under Beau’s weight as he climbs in, shifts toward me, and tugs on my hip until I collapse beside him. “Why did he call so early?”
“He hasn’t mastered time-zone math.”
This earns me a soft chuckle. I hear the fatigue in Beau’s voice. “Did he say anything helpful?” Beau nestles his mouth against my neck, the question coming through a soft burst of air that makes my skin prickle with goose bumps.
“Nothing that will help me find her. Another dead end.” And as dread seeps in, I wonder if perhaps it’s a sign that I should stop trying.