Chapter 7 #2
He stared at her. Then, slowly, his face cracked, and he laughed too. Low, surprised, the real one.
It went on longer than it should have. When it stopped, they were both looking at the table.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know you didn’t.” She picked up the next file. “Next.”
* * *
She didn’t sleep much that night.
She lay in her plain bed in Cabbagetown and looked at the ceiling. The laugh stayed in her. She kept hearing it. His laugh, and hers under it, together, the way it used to sound.
And then the memory came.
She didn’t call it. It just came, the way they did now.
Their honeymoon. A week on Cumberland Island, in an old inn with no television and wild horses on the beach.
She had never learned to swim properly. Nobody in Macon had pools.
On the third day he took her out into the ocean past the breakers, into the calm green water, and held her flat on the surface with one hand under her back and one under her knees, and said, I’ve got you. I’m not letting go. Just breathe.
She had floated. For the first time in her life, she had floated, with the sun on her face and the water in her ears and his hands under her. She remembered thinking, This is it. This is what it feels like to be safe.
That was the end of August. Five years ago.
The bet said Christmas.
She sat up in bed.
It hadn’t been won yet. That week on Cumberland Island, with his hands under her back in the green water, the bet was still open. It was still waiting. There were four months to go before his mother would steer her to the family table and close it out.
She thought of him holding her in the water. I’ve got you. I’m not letting go. Had he thought of it then? Even once? Had he lain next to her that night in the old inn and thought, Four months?
He said he’d loved her by then. She believed him. That was the worst part. She believed he loved her in the water.
It didn’t matter. The bet had gotten into the memory anyway.
It had gone back in time and sat down in the middle of the best week of her life, and now it was there, forever.
She could never have that week clean again.
She could never float in that green water again without the bet floating right there next to her.
That was the thing she couldn’t forgive. Not the bar. Not even the proposal. This. That he had let it get into everything. Every good day. Every one. Backward, all the way to the beginning.
She couldn’t explain it to anyone. It sounded small out loud. He ruined my memories.
It wasn’t small. She lay back down and looked at the dark and knew it wasn’t small at all.
* * *
Sunday they finished.
They read through the last of the third pile in the afternoon, and at six they laid out the forty files on the long table in eight rows of five and stood and looked at them.
Forty kids. From Waycross and Macon and Albany and East Point and Dalton.
Marcus Hill was in the third row. Lily Nguyen was not.
“That’s a good forty,” Lucas said.
“It’s a good forty.”
They did the paperwork for the offer letters. It took until eleven. They didn’t talk much. At some point he got up and came back with two vending-machine coffees from downstairs and put one by her hand, and she drank it, and it was terrible, and she didn’t care.
Near the end, he was going through the last of the files to box them up, and he stopped on one. A girl from Albany. The one with the mother who worked nights at the poultry plant. I do my homework at the kitchen table so I can hear her keys in the door.
He read the line. He smiled a little.
“She writes like Deja,” he said. “Doesn’t she? Same thing. Says the big thing in one small sentence at the end, and hopes you catch it.”
He put the file in the box and reached for the next one.
Amelia didn’t move.
Deja.
Deja Williams had been the first. The very first student in the program.
Three years ago, the pilot year, twelve kids chosen by Amelia alone, before there was a committee, before there was anything but money from an anonymous donor and a lot of nerve.
Deja was from Columbus. She was at Georgia Tech now, studying engineering.
She wrote Amelia a card every Christmas.
Amelia had never said her name at home.
Not once. It was her one rule. She had made it the first day.
The kids’ stories were theirs, and the kids’ names were theirs, and she did not bring them home to dinner parties or to Lucas’s friends or to anybody.
She told Lucas about the kids. Of course she did.
A girl from Columbus who wants to build bridges.
A boy who raised his brothers. She never told him their names.
He had even teased her about it. He called it her witness protection program.
She had never, ever said Deja.
“Lucas,” she said.
“Hm?” He was taping a box.
She looked at him. At his head bent over the box, the gray at his temples, his hands on the tape. He didn’t know. He hadn’t noticed what he’d said. He was just taping a box.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s late.”
* * *
The parking deck across the street was nearly empty. Their footsteps echoed off the concrete. The lights overhead buzzed and flickered, and the air was warm and smelled like oil and dust.
He walked her to her car. It was a used silver Honda she had bought two weeks ago with her own money, with a dent in the back door and a hundred and forty thousand miles on it.
He had looked at it once when they came up, and she had seen him not say anything about it, and she had been grateful and furious about that in equal parts.
They stopped by the driver’s door.
It was midnight. Somewhere down below, a car door slammed and an engine started and faded away. Then it was just the buzz of the lights.
“Thank you,” she said. “For doing this. For the kids.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I know. I’m doing it anyway.”
He nodded. He was standing close. Not too close. Just close enough that she could smell his soap, the same soap, five years of the same soap. The laugh from last night was still in the air between them. And the handshake he hadn’t finished. And the green water off Cumberland Island.
He lifted his hand.
She watched it come up. Slowly. Toward her arm, just above the elbow, where he used to touch her when they were walking out of a party, a light touch, ready to go? His hand stopped an inch from her sleeve. It stayed there. He didn’t close the distance.
She didn’t step back.
Neither of them moved.
The warmth of his hand crossed the inch of nothing between his palm and her arm. Her whole body knew that hand. Her whole body was leaning toward it without moving at all, and she could not tell if she wanted him to close the inch or wanted him to take the hand away, and she was afraid of both.
And under all of it, under the warmth and the soap and the buzzing lights, a name sat in her chest like a stone.
Deja.
How did he know that name?