‘Are you kidding?’ He looked down at her, hoping he’d miss his turn. ‘Yes.’
Eleanor
‘It just makes more sense,’ she said. And then she bit her lip. The only way she was going to get through any of this was by force of will.
The houses were starting to look familiar – big gray and white clapboard houses set far back on their lawns. Eleanor’s whole family had come up here for Easter the year after her dad left. Her uncle and his wife were atheists, but it was still a really fun trip.
They didn’t have kids of their own – probably by choice, Eleanor thought. Probably because they knew cute kids grow up into ugly, problematic teenagers.
But Uncle Geoff had invited her here.
He wanted her to come, at least for a few months. Maybe she didn’t have to tell him everything right away, maybe he’d just think she was early.
‘Is that it?’ Park asked.
He stopped in front of a gray-blue house with a willow tree in the front yard.
‘Yeah,’ she said. She recognized the house. She recognized her uncle’s Volvo in the driveway.
Park stepped on the gas.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Just … around the block,’ he said.
Park
He drove around the block. For all the good it did him. Then he parked a few houses down from her uncle’s, so they could see the house from the car. Eleanor couldn’t look away from it.
Eleanor
She had to say goodbye to him. Now. And she didn’t know how.
Park
‘You remember my phone number right?’
‘867-5309.’
‘Seriously, Eleanor.’
‘Seriously, Park. I’m never going to forget your phone number.’
‘Call me as soon as you can, okay? Tonight. Collect. And give me your uncle’s number. Or, if he doesn’t want you to call, send the number to me in a letter – in one of the many, many letters you’re going to write me.’
‘He might send me home.’
‘No.’ Park let go of the gearshift and took her hand. ‘You’re not going back there. If your uncle sends you home, come to my house. My parents will help us figure it out. My dad already said that they would.’
Eleanor’s head fell forward.
‘He’s not going to send you home,’ Park said. ‘He’s going to help …’ She nodded deliberately at the floor. ‘And he’s going to let you accept frequent, private, long-distance phone calls …’
She was still.
‘Hey,’ Park said, trying to lift up her chin. ‘Eleanor.’
Eleanor
Stupid Asian kid.
Stupid, beautiful Asian kid.
Thank God she couldn’t make her mouth work right now, because if she could there’d be no end to the melodramatic garbage she’d say to him.
She was pretty sure she’d thank him for saving her life. Not just yesterday, but, like, practically every day since they’d met. Which made her feel like the dumbest, weakest girl. If you can’t save your own life, is it even worth saving?
There’s no such thing as handsome princes, she told herself.
There’s no such thing as happily ever after.
She looked up at Park. Into his golden green eyes.
You saved my life, she tried to tell him. Not forever, not for good. Probably just temporarily. But you saved my life, and now I’m yours. The me that’s me right now is yours. Always.
Park
‘I don’t know how to say goodbye to you,’ she said.
He smoothed her hair off her face. He’d never seen her so fair. ‘Then don’t.’
‘But I have to go …’
‘So go,’ he said, with his hands on her cheeks. ‘But don’t say goodbye. It’s not goodbye.’
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. ‘That’s so lame.’
‘Seriously? You can’t cut me five minutes of slack?’
‘That’s what people say – “It’s not goodbye” – when they’re too afraid to face what they’re really feeling. I’m not going to see you tomorrow, Park – I don’t know when I’ll see you again. That deserves more than “It’s not goodbye.”’
‘I’m not afraid to face what I’m feeling,’ he said.
‘Not you,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘Me.’
‘You,’ he said, putting his arms around her and promising himself that it wouldn’t be the last time, ‘are the bravest person I know.’
She shook her head again, like she was trying to shake off the tears.
‘Just kiss me goodbye,’ she whispered.
Only for today, he thought. Not ever.
Eleanor
You think that holding someone hard will bring them closer. You think that you can hold them so hard that you’ll still feel them, embossed on you, when you pull away.
Every time Eleanor pulled away from Park, she felt the gasping loss of him.
When she finally got out of the truck, it was because she didn’t think she could stand touching and untouching him again. The next time she ripped herself away, she’d lose some skin.
Park started to get out with her, but she stopped him.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay.’ She looked up anxiously at her uncle’s house.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ Park said.
She nodded. ‘Right.’
‘Because I love you.’
She laughed. ‘Is that why?’
‘It is, actually.’
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Park.’
‘Goodbye, Eleanor. You know, until tonight. When you’re going to call me.’
‘What if they’re not home? God, that would be anti-climactic.’
‘That would be great.’
‘Dork,’ she whispered with a leftover smile on her face. She stepped back and closed the door.
‘I love you,’ he mouthed. Maybe he was saying it out loud. She couldn’t hear him anymore.
CHAPTER 55
Park
He didn’t ride the bus anymore. He didn’t have to. His mom gave him the Impala when his dad bought her a new Taurus …
He didn’t ride the bus anymore because he’d have the whole seat to himself.
Not that the Impala wasn’t just as ruined with memories. Some mornings, if Park got to school early, he sat in the parking lot with his head on the steering wheel and let whatever was left of Eleanor wash over him until he ran out of air. Not that school was any better.
She wasn’t at her locker. Or in class. Mr Stessman said it was pointless to read Macbeth out loud without Eleanor. ‘Fie, my Lord, fie,’ he lamented.
She didn’t stay for dinner. She didn’t lean against him when he watched TV.
Park spent most nights lying on his bed because it was the only place she’d never been.
He lay on his bed and never turned on the stereo.
Eleanor
She didn’t ride the bus anymore. She rode to school with her uncle. He made her go, even though there were only four weeks left, and everybody was already studying for finals.
There weren’t any Asian kids at her new school. There weren’t even any black kids.
When her uncle went down to Omaha, he said she didn’t have to go. He was gone three days, and when he came back, he brought the black trash bag from her bedroom closet. Eleanor already had new clothes. And a new bookcase and a boombox. And a six-pack of blank cassette tapes.
Park
Eleanor didn’t call that first night.
She hadn’t said that she would, now that he thought about it. She hadn’t said that she’d write either, but Park thought that went unsaid. He’d thought that was a given.
After Eleanor got out of the truck, Park had waited in front of her uncle’s house.
He was supposed to drive away as soon as the door opened, as soon as it was clear that somebody was home. But he couldn’t just leave her like that.
He watched the woman who came to the door give Eleanor a big hug
, and then he watched the door close behind them. And then he waited, just in case Eleanor changed her mind. Just in case she decided after all that he should come in.
The door stayed closed. Park remembered his promise and drove away. The sooner I get home, he thought, the sooner I’ll hear from her again.
He sent Eleanor a postcard from the first truck stop. ‘Welcome to Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes.’
When he got home, his mom ran to the door to hug him.
‘All right?’ his dad asked.
‘Yeah,’ Park said.
‘How was the truck?’
‘Fine.’
His dad went outside to make sure.
‘You,’ his mom said, ‘I was so worried about you.’
‘I’m fine, Mom, just tired.’
‘How’s Eleanor?’ she asked. ‘She okay?’
‘I think so, has she called?’
‘No. Nobody called.’
As soon as his mom would let go of him, Park went to his room and wrote Eleanor a letter.
Eleanor
When Aunt Susan opened the door, Eleanor was already crying.
‘Eleanor,’ Aunt Susan kept saying. ‘Oh my goodness, Eleanor. What are you doing here?’
Eleanor tried to tell her that everything was okay. Which wasn’t true – she wouldn’t be there if everything was okay. But nobody was dead. ‘Nobody’s dead,’ she said.
‘Oh my God. Geoffrey!’ Aunt Susan called. ‘Wait here, sweetheart. Geoff …’
Left alone, Eleanor realized that she shouldn’t have told Park to leave right away.
She wasn’t ready for him to leave.
She opened the front door and ran out to the street. Park was already gone – she looked both ways for him.
When she turned around, her aunt and uncle were standing on the front porch watching her.
Phone calls. Peppermint tea. Her aunt and uncle talking in the kitchen long after she went to bed.
‘Sabrina …’
‘Five of them.’
‘We’ve got to get them out of there, Geoffrey …’
‘What if she isn’t telling the truth?’
Eleanor took Park’s photo out of her back pocket and smoothed it out on the bedspread. It didn’t look like him. October was already a lifetime away. And this afternoon was another lifetime. The world was spinning so fast, she didn’t know where she stood anymore.
Her aunt had lent her some pajamas – they wore about the same size – but Eleanor put Park’s shirt back on as soon as she got out of the shower.
It smelled like him. Like his house, like potpourri. Like soap, like boy, like happiness.
She fell forward onto the bed, holding the hole in her stomach.
No one would ever believe her.
She wrote her mom a letter.
She said everything she’d wanted to say in the last six months.
She said she was sorry.
She begged her to think of Ben and Mouse – and Maisie.
She threatened to call the police.
Her Aunt Susan gave her a stamp. ‘They’re in the junk drawer, Eleanor, take as many as you need.’
Park
When he got sick of his bedroom, when there was nothing left in his life that smelled like vanilla – Park walked by Eleanor’s house.
Sometimes the truck was there, sometimes it wasn’t, sometimes the Rottweiler was asleep on the porch. But the broken toys were gone, and there were never any strawberry-blond kids playing in the yard.
Josh said that Eleanor’s little brother had stopped coming to school. ‘Everybody says they’re gone. The whole family.’
‘That great news,’ their mother said. ‘Maybe that pretty mom wake up to bad situation, you know? Good for Eleanor.’
Park just nodded.
He wondered if his letters even got to wherever she was now.
Eleanor
There was a red rotary phone in the spare bedroom. Her bedroom. Whenever it rang, Eleanor felt like picking it up and saying, ‘What is it, Commissioner Gordon?’
Sometimes, when she was alone in the house, she took the phone over to her bed and listened to the dial tone.
She practiced Park’s number, her finger sliding across the dial. Sometimes, after the dial tone stopped, she pretended he was whispering in her ear.
‘Have you ever had a boyfriend?’ Dani asked. Dani was in theater camp, too. They ate lunch together, sitting on the stage with their legs dangling in the orchestra pit.
‘No,’ Eleanor said.
Park wasn’t a boyfriend, he was a champion.
And they weren’t going to break up. Or get bored. Or drift apart. (They weren’t going to become another stupid high school romance.)
They were just going to stop.
Eleanor had decided back in his dad’s truck. She’d decided in Albert Lea, Minnesota. If they weren’t going to get married – if it wasn’t forever – it was only a matter of time.
They were just going to stop.
Park was never going to love her more than he did on the day they said goodbye.
And she couldn’t bear to think of him loving her less.
Park
When he got sick of himself, Park went to her old house. Sometimes the truck was there. Sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes, Park stood at the end of the sidewalk and hated everything the house stood for.
CHAPTER 56
Eleanor
Letters, postcards, packages that rattled like loaded cassette tapes. None of them opened, none of them read.
‘Dear Park,’ she wrote on a clean sheet of stationery. ‘Dear Park,’ she tried to explain.
But the explanations fell apart in her hands. Everything true was too hard to write – he was too much to lose. Everything she felt for him was too hot to touch.
‘I’m sorry,’ she wrote, then crossed it out.
‘It’s just …’ she tried again.
She threw the half-written letters away. She threw the unopened envelopes in the bottom drawer.
‘Dear Park,’ she whispered, her forehead hanging over the dresser, ‘just stop.’
Park
His dad said Park needed a summer job to pay for gas.
Neither of them mentioned that Park never went anywhere. Or that he’d started putting eyeliner on with his thumb. Blacking out his own eyes.
He looked just wrecked enough to get a job at Drastic Plastic. The girl who hired him had two rows of holes in each ear.
His mom stopped bringing in the mail. He knew it was because she hated telling him that nothing had come for him. Park brought in the mail himself now every night when he got home from work. Every night praying for rain.
He had an endless supply and an insatiable appetite for punk music. ‘I can’t hear myself think in here,’ his dad said, coming into Park’s room for the third night in a row to turn down the stereo.
Duh, Eleanor would have said.
Eleanor didn’t start school in the fall. Not with Park anyway.
She didn’t celebrate the fact that juniors don’t have to take gym. She didn’t say, ‘Unholy union, Batman,’ when Steve and Tina eloped over Labor Day.
Park had written her a letter all about it. He’d told her everything that happened, and everything that didn’t, every day since she’d left.
He kept writing her letters months after he stopped sending them. On New Year’s Day, he wrote that he hoped she’d get everything she ever wished for. Then he tossed the letter into a box under his bed.
CHAPTER 57
Park
He’d stopped trying to bring her back.
She only came back when she felt like it anyway, in dreams and lies and broken-down déjà vu.
Like, Park would be driving to work and he’d see a girl with red hair standing on the street, and he’d swear for half an airless moment that it was her.
Or he’d wake up when it was still dark, sure that she was waiting for him outside. Sure that she needed him.
But he could
n’t summon her. Sometimes he couldn’t even remember what she looked like, even when he was looking at her picture. (Maybe he’d looked at it too much.)
He’d stopped trying to bring her back.
So why did he keep coming here? To this crappy little house …
Eleanor wasn’t here, she was never really here – and she’d been gone too long. Almost a year now.
Park turned to walk away from the house, but the little brown truck whipped too fast into the driveway, jumping the curb and nearly clipping him. Park stopped on the sidewalk and waited. The driver’s side door swung open.
Maybe, he thought. Maybe this is why I’m here.
Eleanor’s stepdad – Richie – leaned slowly out of the cab. Park recognized him from the one time he’d seen him before, when Park had brought Eleanor the second issue of Watchmen, and her stepdad had answered the door …
The final issue of Watchmen came out a few months after Eleanor left. He wondered if she’d read it, and whether she thought Ozymandias was a villain, and what she thought Dr Manhattan meant when he said, ‘Nothing ever ends’ at the end. Park still wondered what Eleanor thought about everything.
Her stepdad didn’t see Park at first. Richie was moving slowly, uncertainly. When he did notice Park, he looked at him like he wasn’t sure he was really there. ‘Who are you?’ Richie shouted.
Park didn’t answer. Richie turned jaggedly, jerking toward him. ‘What do you want?’ Even from a few feet away, he smelled sour. Like beer, like basements.
Park stood his ground.
I want to kill you, he thought. And I can, he realized. I should.
Richie wasn’t much bigger than Park, and he was drunk and disoriented. Plus, he could never want to hurt Park as much as Park wanted to hurt him.
Unless Richie was armed, unless he got lucky – Park could do this.
Richie shuffled closer. ‘What do you want?’ he shouted again. The force of his own voice knocked him off balance and he tipped forward, falling thickly to the ground. Park had to step back not to catch him.
‘Fuck,’ Richie said, raising himself up on his knees and holding himself not quite steady.
I want to kill you, Park thought.
And I can.